Animals Anonymous – A Mother’s Day Mini Play

12 Sunday May 2013

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aa (Photo credit: vistavision)

Setting:  The small drab auditorium of an old elementary school or church.  Our hero stands at the podium addressing a sorry-looking bunch hunched in their metal folding chairs.

Hi, my name is Jim and I’m a recovering animal.

Chorus of Hello’s and Welcomes.

As most of you know, trying to function in a civilized society has always been a challenge.  I can’t help it…but…I’d still like to shove a box of donuts down my pie hole or drink beer with gusto, like I could when I was young, and chase after…well, what can I say…slowly, painstakingly, I’ve learned how to behave in what, as far as I can tell, is a relatively acceptable manner to those around me, even without the help of any stimulating substances, reducing me, frankly, to something as well-behaved and exciting as a toadstool, on most days.  But, I don’t think I bother anyone anymore, at least….To be honest, though, there’s hardly a day goes by I don’t want to chuck my clothes and run wildly through the streets yelling – I am nature, I am nature – until some willing female gets my gist and we spend our remaining days on an unhindered romp of uncontrollable wildness and bliss…(long pause)…I mean why on earth are we here if not to…sorry, sorry, one day at a time, I tell myself, one day at a time.

I hear ya, a man yells from the back of the crowd.

Tell it like it is, comes another voice.

I guess we all have our limits, I continue.  No one can run wild forever without consequences, though it sure was fun while it lasted.  I mean, there’s nothing like the feeling of absolute freedom, is there?  My god, when you’re running wild and unchecked you feel as if you’ll live forever and heaven exists on earth and…

That’s a fantasy, man…someone yells.

You’re right, you’re right, of course.  I mean we’re limited, whether we like it or not.  Our ultimate mother, the planet earth, gives us an abundance of food and sunshine and water, and yet we know that our supplies have limits, that we’re all on the same ship and must check our behavior accordingly.  I understand that.  If I ran wild continuously I wouldn’t last long, I know, I’d use myself up, I’d burn out, if I didn’t have a modicum of discipline to keep me under control.  Thanks to Mother Nature and her limits, and, well, that voice in the back of my head…

Go ahead, you can say it, someone says.

I know, I know, that voice in the back of my head, the one that keeps me relatively functional in a civilized society, that acts unknowingly as the natural servant of the earth and all of the cosmos, that brought me into this world and threatened to take me out if I didn’t behave, that has probably kept me alive to this point and out of jail or serious disease or from living in a brothel more than anything else, that voice, that voice of my mother.

Share it, man, share it.

I know, I have to acknowledge it, I have to accept it and be thankful for it, I owe my existence and everything else I have and…she encourages creativity and restrained freedom (gesticulating awkwardly, like a prisoner almost free of its chains)…as long as its socially acceptable behavior and…oh hell (knocking skull frantically with fists), you all know it!  You must feel the same frustration!  The same pain and anguish!  Because it’s like an annoying interminable song playing repeatedly and incessantly in the back of your minds and you want it to stop, then, maybe, we could find a way to go at least a little wildly animalistic – like for a few years, perhaps, stopping just short of death, accepting a quiet peaceful period down the final stretch…

I’m with you, someone yells, standing up and tearing at his clothes.

Me, too, comes another.

The crowd starts to stir and get restless as the desire for wild abandonment starts to overcome them and the old excitement arises within me and I’m about to shove my fist in the air and yell let’s go wild when…a woman’s voice rises from the back, above and beyond the rest.

Sit down and shut the hell up and behave yourselves.

Damn it…

Paragraph of the Day – Story Excerpt

05 Sunday May 2013

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Story of My life..

Story .. (Photo credit: xD3x)

After dinner I’d watch old Gunsmoke or Mash episodes and smoke joints until the wee hours, the only oxygen I breathed in limited to whatever came in with the smoke, and in the absence of Sally’s affection, I’d stay nestled away in that plume, that place where the gods of daydreamers made promises to those still too young to understand the limits of time.  Perhaps the next day, or the day after that, sugar and spice and everything nice would season my world.  During commercials, while Sally fed Patty in the kitchen, I’d imagine the life I wanted, the same kind of camaraderie I’d see in the shows.  Sally and I had experienced it once, before we were married, a day when everything felt right and we knew we were meant for each other.  For the first few months we dated I could tell she had been going through the motions, satisfied to have anyone present in her life, whereas I felt like the luckiest man alive to be dating someone so beautiful.  Then she made me dinner at her place and wouldn’t allow me to help.  I sat at the table and watched her every move, marveling at how content she was to cook and experiment with ingredients, laughing about adding something she’d never tried before, tantalizing me with a teaspoon containing undisclosed herbs or seductively giving me a sip of sauce or a small taste of meat from the blade of her chef’s knife.  “I dare you,” she’d tease, and I’d let her slip the blade into my mouth and ease it out sans food, something I’d learn to never allow.  Physical beatings I could handle; there was an element of intimacy in them, a hopefulness of want, of change, for eventual improvement; cutting was more sinister, a step towards an irreversible end.  At the time I think she felt good about us, too, at least for that day, and together we saw what was possible.  Sometimes I think our entire relationship was built on the success of that one day.  I kept hoping we’d eventually find our way back to that moment.  I just didn’t care to have as many sweets as she liked to bake and expected me to eat.  Sally wouldn’t touch them herself, so I was glad when Patty fulfilled that role.

Soulless Corpse

13 Saturday Apr 2013

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English: show the shallow breathing. Dansk: vi...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Book excerpt

It’s amazing how easily health can slip away, and all that you know, all the confidence you have to do something as simple as eat a piece of cake or have a cup of coffee, is lost.  Something wasn’t right.  My morning latte was literally taking my breath away.  I looked suspiciously at my coffee and milk mixture but refused to blame this old friend.  Around that same time, especially late at night, a feeling of impending doom often coiled in my chest and throat, like a tube tightening from within, which I eventually learned was acid reflux, and about one day per week I’d be completely wiped out with this debilitating, mysterious fatigue.  At first none of this concerned me.  I’d gained some weight by then and assumed the problems would go away on their own if I just shut my pie hole and lost the extra pounds.  It wasn’t long, however, before I felt as if I were at the precipice of death’s door after every meal, struggling to get air into my clogged lungs.

I woke up angry.

The gastroenterologist who shoved a camera-tipped tube down my throat to scope out my heavily sedated body waddled into my room.

“You’re awake,” he said.  He was built like a dishwasher, lethargic and sad, and moved with the swiftness of an insomniac.  He didn’t exactly instill confidence.  I wondered if he secretly suffered from fatigue, too, exhausted from having to deal with so many digestively-challenged patients, all sick from the Standard American Diet (SAD) and way of life.  Apparently there were limits to what you could do to your body.  With no natural predators or competition for food, nature still found a way to humble its inhabitants if self-discipline failed to come into play, proving the body was inseparable from the planet.

I tried to sit up and regain my senses.  I felt as if I’d been violated, my body treated like a soulless corpse.  I’d treated it that way myself, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to end up on the surgeon’s slab.  Now I knew how the planet was feeling, full of industrial byproducts it could no longer handle.  The only question was whether or not the planet or I could be repaired to once again hum along in a balanced state, or had we been too badly damaged?

Zombie

Zombie (Photo credit: Scabeater)

I remembered the endoscopic procedure like a bad dream, confused and unclear about what was real, like one of those nights I’d had as a teenager hallucinating on too much PCP, back when I’d treated my body as if it, too, were a planet I was disconnected from, but happened to temporarily reside in, and was good for experimenting with chemicals.

“You were a handful,” the doctor said, chuckling.

“How so?”

“Oh, we had to fight with you during the entire procedure.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep.  Everything looked good, though.”

“Seriously?  No issues?”

“A little irritation maybe, but no sign of Barrett’s esophagus.  So that’s good.”

“So what now?” I asked, still a little groggy.

“Well, let’s do the manometry and twenty-four hour pH test and go from there, but since the drugs aren’t working I think surgery is going to be your only option.”

The surgery involved twisting my stomach around my esophagus to add esophageal pressure, choking off any uprising of acidic gas.  How would this bring my body, I wondered, back into its naturally balanced state?  Wasn’t this similar, I feared, to the Corps of Engineers putting in a damn without understanding all of the ecological ramifications down the road, causing an unknown number of problems?

“So how would this operation end my fatigue?” I asked the surgeon.

“You must have something else going on.”

“Like what?”

I wondered how the two severe symptoms could be so disconnected within the same body.  Wasn’t everything connected and influencing each other?

Body Worlds 3: The Thinker | Art E. Rial

(Photo credit: ocean.flynn)

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Let’s worry about the reflux first.”  He patted my hand and was so calm and reassuring that it was tempting to believe him.

“What about changing to a whole foods diet?”

“Diet doesn’t matter,” he sighed, suppressing his exasperation from a frequently heard question.

By then I’d read enough articles from alternative medical publications to at least ask the question.  Certainly a man in his position, who had devoted his entire life to the digestive system and sliced people open, risking their lives, had thoroughly studied the option of diet to come to this conclusion, hadn’t he?

I balked.  Something wasn’t right.  I’d always been suspicious of the god-like reputation bequeathed to doctors, especially surgeons, wondering if they were so focused on their specialties that they’d become glorified mechanics for the human body, understanding the functionality of parts – which was great for serious trauma – but with closed eyes and minds to the whole.  They looked at symptoms like heartburn and shortness of breath and determined rising stomach acid was the cause – due to the failing esophageal valve – so they devised drugs to suppress the acid and surgery to tighten the muscle.  But had they failed to view the entire picture?

What caused the muscular valve to fail?

Had the surgeon given up too easily on holistic repair (or even considered it), such as simply changing ones diet, and dismissed the possibility of processed foods or allergies combined with stress to wreak havoc on the digestive system as a whole, or how the entire system could get stuck in a continuous loop of negative signals from an anxious brain and cause the entire digestive tract, which the valve was part of, to weaken from all the duress and the body to grow tired?  Maybe I just needed to cleanse the body in the same way our atmosphere needed to be cleansed of carbon dioxide (though hopefully my task would be easier).

I had to find out for myself if a lifestyle change was the answer before I let him so easily have control of my body.  I went to the grocery to stock up on real food.  I bought beans and rice from bulk bins, along with zucchini and carrots and apples, grass fed beef and naturally-raised chicken, all of it organic, and hoped they would act as a silver bullet solution, and not become a permanent lifestyle change, because I still wanted my old life back.  I wanted whole foods to heal my body in a week or two so that I could continue with all of those favorite addictive substances that had practically defined my identity.

I didn’t want to change my ways, despite nature’s warnings:  climate upheavals and the loss of species for the earth, trying to open our collective eyes, fatigue and loss of breath for my body, trying to open mine.  But no one wanted to hear the planetary message, especially me.  I’d never dealt with restrictions well.  I wanted more, even to the detriment of the planet.  I wanted the party to continue – the forces of growth rebelling against the desire for balance.

Hope for Reversing Climate Change

30 Saturday Mar 2013

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I’ve thought for sometime that it must be difficult to be young and growing up these days in such uncertain times about the fate of the planet.  Finally, the following video offers great hope in the possibility of reversing climate change, more proof that a holistic approach is needed in everything we do.

Sophistication Animalia, A Mini Play

11 Monday Mar 2013

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Taylor’s Truck.  Mal and Taylor dressed in hunting clothes while driving through the woods to their deer blinds.

Taylor:  There’s plenty of fish in the sea.

Mal, scoffing:  Haven’t heard that expression enough.

Taylor:  Cause it’s true, Mal.  You just have to keep breaking out new lures and trying different spots until you find a keeper.  Just make sure the ones you throw back are still in good shape.

Mal:  Nice.

Taylor:  What?

Mal:  I think you’ve spent too much time in these woods.

Taylor:  What makes you say that?

Mal:  After all these years you’re still an animal.

Taylor:  Bah, and proud of it.  It would do you some good to spend more time in these woods.  You’ve been in that city for too long.

Mal, pausing:  I doubt you can appreciate this, but it’s taken a long time to get over the years I spent up here.  Living in a cultured city compared to here is like going through rehab.   Slowly but surely I sweat out that toxic past.

Taylor:  Listen to you.  You’re trying to tell me that the city is better than nature?  The toxins are all there, my friend, not here, which is probably why you keep coming back.

Mal:  I’m not the one referring to women as fish.

Taylor:  We’re all fish, or apes, or whatever animal you want to pick.  This is why you keep losing all these women.  You try to be this sophisticated city man instead of the animal you are.  Women love animals, Mal, they just don’t want you to know it.  Sophistication may be a fun game they play along with, but in the end they want a man, not a game.  And a man, essentially, is an animal.

Mal:  If that’s true, why’d you bother getting married?  Seems like a sophisticated thing to do.

Taylor:  Hey, every animal needs to be checked and balanced.  None of us are truly another ballpoint pen sketchfree.  That’s what most people miss; that’s what’s wrong with mankind these days.  Without predators our behavior becomes chaotic.  My marriage is the perfect example.  If I was allowed to roam freely I’d never get a damn thing done.  Instead, all that I have has come to me from the limitations imposed on me by the sanctity of marriage.

Mal:  Is that right.

Taylor:  I’m telling you Mal, there’s no place for the absolute wild. At least not in a healthy way.  There’s no such thing as wildness in the wilderness, unless it’s some rogue animal that’s been kicked out of its structured life.  It’s all just a bunch of checks and balances making it work.

Mal: So, you’re saying your wife acts as a predator, keeping you in check.

Taylor:  Essentially, yes, she serves that purpose.  We all need something to keep us in check.  Look at the human race.  No predators except from our own, and as a result we fail to band together.  Nothing but chaos – self-abuse and violence.  Those of us who allow ourselves to be limited survive.  It’s the absolute wild or weak that get weeded out. You gotta control your behavior to stay fit, which usually means having someone else to hold you down; otherwise you just go off on your own until you go over the edge.  I’ve seen it too many times.  Hell, just a few weeks ago Becky Suttons was hitting on me down at Nubs.

Mal:  You’re kidding?  Did she get divorced again?

Taylor:  No, that’s my point.  If it wasn’t for being married to Kim I would’ve been all over Becky.  Wouldn’t have been able to help myself.  Then, chances are, her husband would’ve hunted me down and put a bullet through my skull.

Mal:  That’s what I would’ve done.

Taylor:  Damn straight.  We would have been nothing more than two rogue animals, a couple of scallywags needing to be put down.

Mal:  But what about Becky?  How come her marriage didn’t keep her in control?

Taylor:  Because she’s one of those rogue predators.  She’s never accepted the limits imposed on her, so she’s wild and out of control, and look how messed up her life is as a result.

Mal:  But she is fun.

Taylor:  That she is, but only because she’s dangerous.  Being on the edge can be exhilarating, until you go too far.  She took that leap a long time ago.  Luckily for you you’re still holding on, but you’ve been dangling for too long.  Time to step away and settle down.

Mal:  Maybe, but by accepting that you’re an animal and then forcing yourself to live within these limitations, well, it all sounds like a pretty sophisticated system to me.

Taylor:  Sure, to some degree.

Mal:  So we’re both living the same way, just going about it in different ways.  The city is just another kind of jungle, beset with its own rules and laws to limit our behavior.

Taylor:  You’ve been in the city for too long if you think it’s the same as these woods.

Mal:  Not the same, but wherever you are there’s no escape from nature.  We still live under its forces.

Taylor:  That’s true.  But without a wife you’ll always be unfocused.

Mal:  You mean I need someone to act as a predator, going by your standards.

Taylor:  Essentially, yes, you need someone to shoot you every day of your life, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote.

Mal:  Well, you’re probably right about that.

Flower Bombs

03 Sunday Feb 2013

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I got fired from a job once because of office politics.  Ironically I’d probably never worked harder or accomplished more for any other firm, but the man who engineered my departure had been against my hiring 13 months before.  He wanted to promote someone from within his team, and it took him a year to convince the higher-ups in New York that in our small satellite office in Ann Arbor, I didn’t belong.

In my mind, I’ve probably punched that man in the face a hundred times – shooting him would be too quick and easy of a death.  The number of creative ways that I could torture him is endless.  It’s been nearly twenty years and still I take pleasure in the thought of seeing him slowly flattened by a pavement roller, or dropped from a plane without a parachute, or painstakingly dismembered piece by piece while keeping himPunch! alive for as long as possible.  Luckily for him I don’t have any mob connections or powerful friends, and I’m too fearful of prison and too squeamish at the actual site of blood and gore, so his dismantling will have to remain locked up inside my obviously disturbed mind.

Maybe I should have taken out my vengeance by writing a script, revenge being a common theme in the movies.  Quentin Tarantino is making a career out of it, from Kill Bill to Inglorious Bastards and now Django Unchained, and has become a favorite target for those blaming Hollywood and its movies for the sickness within our society, and a reason for avoiding any discussion on controlling guns.  I don’t doubt that in the minds of maniacs, revenge is a highly motivating factor for letting their imaginations escape into a brutal reality.  They probably see themselves as heroic figures, as Rambo with an automatic rifle mowing down the bullying society that hasn’t accepted them.

Certainly movies and TV shows produce tons of fodder for the religious right and others to rail against and call for censorship, and movies like Django Unchained don’t help the cause.

It’s an entertaining film, if you don’t mind the gore.  But that’s all it is.  In the theatre I was in, the audience applauded at its conclusion, and I understand they were glad to see the hero get the girl and kill all the bad men, but haven’t we seen this formula before?  What makes it a candidate for the movie of the year?  Because it depicted the brutality of slavery?  It didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know.  It didn’t explore human nature and the inhumane things we do; it just displayed them in an almost cartoonish way.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, it is well made, and censorship only causes more problems (and it is so much better than the typical gun-slinging revenge movies by Stallone or others that deserve such harsh scrutiny), but for whatever Django teaches – that slavery was inhumane – it also feeds the soul’s lust for revenge.  For the right mind, it makes you feel sick about humankind and the things we have done, and hopefully makes you want to do better; in the wrong mind – one that feels wronged by the society it lives in – I have to wonder if it provides license for being the vengeful hero it thinks it is.

Zero Dark Thirty is a much better movie, forcing you to question the pros and cons of torture and revenge.  The man doing the torturing eventually can’t take it anymore and calls it quits, and detective work proves to be more vital in finding Bin Laden, but in the end, killing the man in front of children potentially provides more than just justice.  To those children, Americans will always be the terrorists.  When 9/11 happened, I remember having an absurd thought.  A part of me was chanting with everyone else about waking a sleeping giant, and now it’s our turn for payback.  Another part wanted to bomb them with tons of cut flowers in memory of our dead.  I wanted to make them change their minds about who we were, instead of feeding into our evil narrative with bombs from hell.  If I had been president and put that flower power plan into play, I would have been tarred and feathered – everyone would have been shocked and awed (or appalled), in one way or another.

Not that Bin Laden didn’t have to go, just that Zero Dark Thirty makes you think about the consequences of revenge, while Django Unchained seems to glorify it for the benefit of making a cool movie.  Censorship, however, does more harm than good, covering up what needs to be told, with no place to safely draw the line.  The only line that can be drawn is a judgmental one:  was it good or not.  We have no choice but to let the market decide, something the right-wing favors in almost everything except the arts.  Unfortunately the market (the masses), are going to flock to the shallow blockbuster more often than not if their minds have not been better prepared for what constitutes quality, preferably from an educational focus on the arts and music and a balanced life.  Instead we get fear-based movies and TV shows and newscasts, more cop shows and serial killers and rapists and zombies, so we shouldn’t be surprised that we have a fear-infected society clinging to their guns as a result.  I think gun enthusiasts have been watching too much TV.  Listen to them for too long and you’ll start to wonder if we all live within a Mad Max world.

On the south side of Chicago, maybe they feel that way, though it’s usually the few causing all the problems, not the majority.  We’re leading the pack in gun deaths Mad Max worlddespite our strict laws, a frequently used argument by gun enthusiasts who fail to understand that Chicago doesn’t live in a bubble – guns are easily purchased legally just outside the city and then resold to gangs on the inside.  So this argument against gun control is actually an argument for gun control, for stricter federal laws, though I’ve yet to hear a journalist point this out.  Despite where we live, we’re all on the same planet and must find a balance between how we live.  If it was up to me I’d eliminate all guns.  But I can’t have it my way.  I can’t expect hunters to relinquish all of their firearms when hunting is so much a part of their culture, and yet they can’t expect their toys – their assault rifles – to not find their way into the city or the hands of madmen.  We have to meet half way.  Improvement in our society, and the art it creates, can only come about through better education of all and a balanced approach to our problems.  Otherwise we end up letting the crazies – the extremists – run the show.

And we create the Mad Max society we fear, or become a country that’s lost its soul and resorts to torture.  Zero Dark Thirty is an excellent, intense drama that challenges our views, and it or Lincoln are better than the rest of the movies I’ve seen (sorry Les Miserable fans, but I just can’t get into musicals), but if I had a vote for picture of the year, I’d be tempted to give it to Silver Linings Playbook.  It isn’t perfect, it isn’t as well made as Zero or Lincoln or Argo; it has its flaws and over-the-top moments (sort of like Little Miss Sunshine), but it’s emotionally moving – beyond just situational scenes - and of the nominated films, it’s the one I’d want to see again.  It’s a movie without weaponry – though there is a fist fight and other skirmishes.  Mostly it’s about human relationships and overcoming the mental obstacles that many of us have struggled with, to one degree or another.  As someone who grew up a sports fan, thanks to my father, and struggled to relate to him through anything other than sports, I could easily identify with the father-son relationship depicted by Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper.  Cooper’s character, understandably, is more interested in the budding relationship with Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) than in watching another football game with his father.

Today I’ll watch the Super Bowl, almost out of habit, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the game as entertainment, but the older I get, the less interested I am in sports.  Life and the arts have so much more to offer to the mental and spiritual evolution of humankind.  And near his end, I believe my father felt the same way.  I could see it in his eyes whenever I brought up our Detroit teams.  Although he continued to watch the games up until his death, and might get excited about the outcome and enjoy the entertainment, he’d realized how meaningless it all was.  He wanted to connect to his son in a more meaningful way.  Whether our team wins the Super Bowl or World Series or not, it is not what we’ll be thankful for or care about when lying on our deathbeds.

Just ask the characters in Amour.  It isn’t an easy film to watch, unless you enjoy watching the indignities of old age, relentlessly and mercilessly leading to a slow A RELATIONSHIPdeath (balanced only by love), but nothing will stay with me longer, or make me question how I live more.  Today’s game can’t do that.  That is the power of quality work over relatively pointless, money-making endeavors such as revenge films and their cousins:  violence-based sports, in which the heroes take out their frustrations on their opponent.  If movies and television and other activities had offered me more of a life-affirming influence while growing up, maybe my mind would be a little better at letting go of those revenge-based thoughts directed towards the silly little man who refused to shake my hand when we first met so many years ago, because he was already planning my demise.

World War Me

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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Sometimes my brother built log cabins for others in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and when I was nineteen I gave him a hand.  It seemed like the manly thing to do, an opportunity to learn how to survive in the great outdoors and forgo the establishment and live off the grid.  It was one step closer towards the romanticized life I’d seen in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, minus grizzly bears and ticked off Native Americans.

Cover of "Jeremiah Johnson"

Cover of Jeremiah Johnson

Then fantasy met reality.  Before cutting notches into the logs and lifting them onto the steadily growing walls, I had to peel the bark from the fallen trees, which caused nature to release her hordes:  deer flies and horse flies and mosquitoes emerged from the depths of the forest.  They came from miles away, from every niche and nook and cranny, like the indigenous of the planet Pandora, to thrash the invasive human before he destroyed their Hometree.  The party was on, and I lacked an Avatar to hide in.  I was covered in sweat and sap and my bones ached from head to toe, as nature protested the unnatural death of one of its own.  The hair on my head became command central for the attacking flies, and with both hands occupied by tools and the tree’s corpse, I was completely at the mercy of their relentless attack.  I needed a tail, like a lion or horse, to snap them away.  Meanwhile all of my high school friends were spending their summer partying on the beach, and thoughts of them plagued my mind.  Finally I could take it no more and made an excuse to leave and escaped the woods to return to civilization and rejoin the post high school celebration.  Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the life of a woodsman.  Jeremiah Johnson I wasn’t.

The movies often depict the solitary man as heroic, riding off into the sunset after the great gunfight to be alone with his pain after vanquishing the helpless town-folk from the unforgiving evil of tyrannical bullies.  The effort takes a lot out of him, so he must be alone.  Overcoming evil comes with a price.  He knows too much; he’s seen what the innocent must be shaded from, and so he can’t join them.  He would have to cease being his heroic self and become something he knows needs his protection.  The fantasy of society holds nature and its wickedness at bay.  It dresses itself up in fine clothes and perfumes and sweeps the bugs away.  For the hero, it would be living a lie.  But like Superman, he lives to protect the vulnerable masses.

The Lone Horseman

The Lone Horseman (Photo credit: BrianTuchalskiPhotography)

Maybe this is why I’ve always been torn between the two worlds, loving the spiritual presence felt in nature as well as the romantic vision of the lone heroic figure, aware of the artificial façade of city life, and yet also pulled toward the culture and vitality and energy of the metropolis.  Even the hero, the hunter, the solitary man eventually wanders into town for a good time, finally giving into his true nature as social animal.

A few decades ago, when I first drove past Chicago on a distant highway, seeing the city skyline miles away, small-town me looked at all the urban sprawl and massive buildings and thought anyone living within that mess must be insane.  How could they live in such a rat’s nest?  Now I’m one of them, enjoying the madness.  Maybe it’s the steady creep towards old age and my appreciation for convenience, but after decades of indecision I’m finally embracing city life.  I’ve settled for Lake Michigan outside my window as my nature fix, its many moods and window-shaking wildness acting as a constant reminder that the thriving city on the other side of the building is a bit of a fantasy, protecting us from nature’s dark side, at least until the next damage-causing storm rips through, or a drought causes a rise in the cost of food.

Or the years continue to heat up and global fires keep raging and droughts parch the earth.  In Chicago, we have not seen an accumulation of at least an inch of snow in over 300 consecutive days.

Living in the city, I’ve come to appreciate it as just another form of nature.  It’s the greatest of ant colonies using stronger materials created by a sophisticated animal.  Whether you believe that or not, our dependence on nature cannot be denied.  So what are we waiting for – the movie hero to swoop in and save the day against theCity sketch - Shinjuku tyrannical bully of climate change?  How many films have we seen where the world waited for the American hero to come up with the solution to save the planet – Will Smith bringing down the aliens, Bruce Willis blowing up a meteor?  Unfortunately the subsequent result appears to be that we sit in the theater lost in the throes of fantasy while waiting for someone else to come along and fix the problem.  It isn’t going to happen.  This isn’t a fantasy.  There are no solitary heroes.  It’s a true world war, only it’s against ourselves.  We need to demand action, we need to change, because the bully isn’t some unseen wicked force, it’s how we live.

But this doesn’t have to be so difficult.

How about a government program where solar panels or windmills can be purchased through loans to be paid back through our utility bills, with the monthly increase of expenses partially offset by the lowered use of fossil fuels while continuing the tax breaks for the purchase of such equipment?  Between the manufacturing and subsequent installation, the demand would create the green jobs we’ve been waiting for.  The government already makes investments in green energy (Solyndra being the infamous example).  Why not financially support the retail industry instead so they can sell and install solar and wind panels on loan over a ten-year period?

Being a business moron, I’m no doubt being naïve.  Special interest money is always in the way.  And it’s not like there’s any pressing need or anything.  Maybe it’ll snow tomorrow, or maybe all of the carbon dioxide lingering in the atmosphere will get sucked out through a puncture wound created by the next satellite launch where it’ll get sipped up through the maw of a hungry black hole.  Anything is possible in the movies.

Guns vs Beauty

18 Tuesday Dec 2012

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Maybe for some it’s a tough question.  What is more important:  the right to bear arms, or the right to grow up and go to school without being shot?  What would we prefer:  the right to own a gun or the right to live in a peaceful, civilized society?

What’s the better vision:  the vision see filenameof the gun enthusiast – arming elementary teachers and principals so they can exchange gunfire with deranged intruders as the kids (hopefully), take cover from the hellfire of bullets, or the alternative vision of doing everything possible to avoid this scene?

Does the right to own a deadly toy – and that’s all it is, an adult toy with consequences – take precedence over the right to dwell in a nonviolent society?

It may just be me, but if you need an assault weapon to have a good time, or to make you feel manly, maybe something better is missing from your life.

Some claim that our societal decay is caused from a lack of god in the schools, or from too much violence in movies and video games, the latter being consumed by an increasingly disconnected audience.  But maybe what it comes down to is just a lack of appreciation (or education) for quality, with less attention or funding given to music or the arts or literature.  In other words, everything that leads to a better, more cultured, society.  Maybe part of the reason a movie or video game doesn’t succeed without graphic violence is simply a lack of a life-affirming alternative, as well as having minds that haven’t been prepared to appreciate something of higher quality.  Maybe guns would hold less interest if our society became obsessed with beauty.

Does this smack of elitism?  I think it just smacks of what is better.  As we age our taste buds mature.  We may still appreciate a hot dog or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but usually learn to prefer lobster or some other gourmet meal as we evolve beyond childhood – unless we never experienced higher quality meals, then we wouldn’t know superior alternatives existed.  The same goes for music (one must be exposed to classical or jazz to acquire a taste for it; and then pop tunes just aren’t enough), and literature (literary works being so much more satisfying once popular, page-turning genres are exposed for how meaningless they tend to be).  I’ve shot guns.  I’ve hunted in the woods and experienced the camaraderie between hunters, and found the enjoyment fleeting and the machismo shallow.  Shooting a gun has always felt like an expression of anger, and nothing more, as an amazingly creative world awaits exploration.

What’s more valuable:  an expression of anger or one of beauty?

Want to be a man?  Evolve.  Pick up a book and expand your mind.  It’ll mean so much more in the long run.  Or listen to Beethoven or Miles Davis and enjoy a sound that is so much more uplifting and powerful than the blast from a gun could ever hope to be; or go to a museum or art gallery and see what we are capable of – of what we can create over what we destroy; or cook a healthy, balanced, beautiful meal to make your body feel good; or refuse to see the next violent, blockbuster movie and spend your money on a foreign or independent film that challenges who you think you are; or leave your rifle behind for a camera as you hike through the woods and maybe see the world through a different lens.  Hell, be a man and go see a ballet, if you dare, if you are manly enough to enjoy what is beautiful.

American Hell

15 Saturday Dec 2012

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As I stood on the bank of the wide, slowly flowing, Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, just outside the city of Valentine, I practically melted into the ground from the river’s mesmerizing effect as it surged downstream to merge with larger waters.  Far from honking traffic and bus exhaust and an No Gunsunbalanced society, I momentarily forgot about my own issues and felt aligned with all of the energy around me.  A few gray clouds floated by in an otherwise bright blue sky – part of the cyclic movement of water with other water – and songbirds flitted amongst the trees along the river’s path.

The only thing missing from this scene were tepees or modest homes and peaceful people frolicking about like any other social creature, focused on living humbly on the earth in life-affirming activities, spiritually in tune with nature’s forces, instead of their gross domestic product and the fears that enveloped them.

The reality of our society, unfortunately, is crushingly depressing, and I am unable to write about balance today, so I guess what I’m about to say places me on the extreme end of the spectrum, far from a balanced approach to controlling guns, but I’ve listened to the other extreme, the gun enthusiasts and the sportsmen and their usual defense of firearms, and I can’t support them.

If the events in Connecticut don’t force us to ask what kind of society we want to live in, and take appropriate actions, then we are beyond hope.  Do we want a society focused on happiness and balanced living for all, teaching the concept to the young from early on, or an individualistic fear-based society armed to the teeth in order to feel secure?

We’re all dangerous animals.  We’re all capable of mayhem.  But when we focus on happiness and balance our true nature shines through:  the desire for peace, for love, for joy, which is why most of us get along just fine without stockpiles of weaponry.  It’s only the severely unbalanced that commit mass murder.  I would hope that a society focused on happiness and balance for all would be better at recognizing those that need preventative help.

So what do we do?  Pray to the heavens?  Frankly, if I believed in a religious god, I’d be inconsolable and beyond angry at his absence and abject apathy, but that would be me, and that would be a copout.  That would be projecting my anger to other powers instead of the real cause:  us.  If you want to believe a god watches over everything we do and pray to help get you through the day, more power to you. For me, I try to keep an open mind, I just don’t believe any spiritual presence ever acts in mysterious ways.   A plane falling out of the sky isn’t mysterious, nor is war or the massacre of children.

It is just us.

Gun enthusiasts will say that, because of our nature to kill, we need more guns to defend ourselves.  And people actually buy into this nonsense, into this infantile, selfish, insecure, and irresponsible reasoning that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  And they do, they kill them in massive numbers when they get their hands on guns.

What kind of society do we want?  Armed to the teeth because of human nature, or prevented from owning weapons because of human nature?

It’s a simple question.  We have speed limits and an armed police force and laws against possessing bombs because of our selfishness – because of what we are – and we are constantly creating new laws to keep us protected, from drunk drivers to wearing seat belts or motorcycle helmets to how fast an elevator door can close.  But we are not allowed to protect ourselves from guns except to counteract them with more guns.

Is that really the kind of society you want to raise your kids in?

Being brought up in a small town, I did my share of hunting and still have friends who love their rifles, and up until now I’ve supported their right to own them.  Just controlNO VIOLENCE - STOP THE WAR NOW handguns and assault weapons, I used to agree, and apply tougher background checks and waiting periods and enforce the laws that exist.  But I don’t support this anymore.  I don’t care about responsible gun ownership any longer.  Be a true hunter and use a bow and arrow, and get rid of your guns.  Have them melted down and made into children’s playgrounds, because even legally obtained guns can fall into the wrong hands and here we go again.  More mass murder.  Sure, only criminals would have them then, up until they don’t.  Make the penalty for possession stiff.  And get rid of the damn things while focusing on developing a balanced, healthier, happier society.  No doubt this is a naïve fantasy, some will say, as much as imagining that beautifully balanced society.

So maybe it is a fantasy, given our violent-obsessed culture, but the choice of what kind of society we want is ours.  The status quo doesn’t work.  There is no other solution than to get rid of them.  Guns don’t belong in a civilized society, and fixing society will always be a work in progress.  The imbalanced will forever be with us, continuously needing help, and will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction if they are around to be found.  Establish places for hunting, I say, and businesses that lease guns (preferably limited to shotguns), for the day’s use, by those who have the proper license to carry them temporarily into the woods, and then return them to their heavily regulated proper place.

Why would a responsible adult object to such a system?  If you want a safe society, that is what is necessary.

We should be embarrassed about the country we have created, and for giving into the NRA.  To hell with them.  Don’t embarrass yourself with arguments in favor of guns today, and don’t ever again tell me that America is number one in anything, unless you are talking about death.

These children deserved better.  Those remaining still do.

Magical Thinking

13 Thursday Dec 2012

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(Story excerpt) 

Even as I spoke I knew I could no longer communicate to them in any meaningful way.  It had become obvious that the English language was no longer sufficient for conveying what I had come to understand; it had severed its connection to the natural world, and instead of a sensuous convergence with the living earth (the source of its birth), all that was left were their ego-centric sounds from a limited perspective, the microscopic viewpoints incapable of seeing beyond their immediate experiences, lacking the necessary vision for a full understanding of my boundless world.  I needed to create a novel language, or fall back to an ancient one with pictographic symbols to express the full cinematic scope of my thoughts – every neuron aligned with movement and biological design, all other concepts being superfluous, which I knew they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.  (end excerpt)

The death of Santa Clause changed me.  Up until then I’d believed in magical thinking.  Afterwards there was nothing but the cold reality of a disenchanted world, inhabited and controlled by untrustworthy humanoids – lumpy, smelly, creatures in love with their own language.  The adults lied – they’d fooled me into believing – and Hurry up and get back in the box with the othe...the children wanted to become one of them.  For awhile I clung to cartoons for my fantasy fix – mostly Bugs and Friends, and after school shows like Batman and the Green Hornet – but they offered only temporary highs that faded quickly after the shows ended.  So I entered that long fantasy period of actually getting high, only to realize that highs always led to lows on the balance scale.  I could have found religion, of course, but couldn’t take the chance of being crushed again.  What was worse, the death of Santa or the death of God?  At least Santa brought material goods, and if I couldn’t have him, then maybe the categorical world of analytical thinking, of science, would provide something to hold on to.  At least science offered the possibility of cutting through the false mysteries and acquiring the truth, so I couldn’t be fooled by nonsense again, and it was responsible for the spoiled, and relatively convenient, modern life of luxury that was, in itself, a bit of a fantasy, which I’m not about to give up.  I like my luxuries and prefer them to living in a cave.

As I listened to a recent debate on the pros and cons of fracking, however, I once again recognized the loss of our spiritual connection to the planet, or anything else greater than ourselves, and wondered if there was a healthy balance to be found between secularism and spirituality – not that some wonderful old man is lovingly watching over us and needs to be recognized and worshipped  – but that the earth should be revered as a spiritual presence, because it, somehow, got lost in the fracking discussion of policies and politics and technological accomplishments, all of which fall under the watchful eye of what matters most:  the financial god we must bow down to and follow, blinding us from our ingrained true love, listening to our own language, which in turn inhibits us from being able to hear much of anything else.

Maybe I’m too sensitive.  Maybe, at heart, I’m still that naïve nine year-old boy who wants to believe in magic, and so I cringe at the sadistic abuse of our living planet, at even the felling of a tree, as if the earth is the forgotten mother who supported us for years and whom we now seldom call unless there’s some pressing need.  With fracking, millions of gallons of water and toxic solvent mixtures get pumped into the earth’s body because it has something we need, a usable gas, which is necessary to keep our fantasy lives going.  Even the name – fracking – sounds unbalanced and sick.  Is it any wonder that the earth, having its rocks fractured under high pressure, sometimes reacts to this treatment by quaking with fever?

Can we understand her language?

GoodMorning!

But it’s all okay if the science makes it possible, if the numbers add up, if all the processes can be properly engineered, if we only listen to ourselves and ignore, or remain deaf to, the origins of our own language – born from the planet to communicate basic survival (the whereabouts of food, water, shelter, predation, and other earth-based concerns, as natural as any other animal-created sound), from a time when living on this planet must have seemed like living on a giant whale, an enormous living creature that dominated every aspect of life, from its fruits to its harshness, for what it gave and what it took away.  It must have seemed like a loving but vengeful god.  No wonder rituals and sacrifices and religions were formed, which furthered the evolution of our language, and slowly moved it away from the realities of nature and directed it outwards toward the heavens, lofting us in the process, away from earthly sufferings to the faith of eternal bliss.

At least Santa was of the earth.  He could be seen; he had reindeer and lived up north, and his gifts were real, manifesting under a tree.

Santa was nature-based, aspiring to all that was good (even using the renewable energy of reindeer).  Now all we have is ourselves, so we act like gods and do whatever the hell we want.

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