Bad Dog

In the wake of the most recent weekly mass shooting, there has been a lot of heated conversations about gun ownership.  Having a talent for seeing all sides of any issue, I am usually skilled at keeping my emotions out of any argument.  I find that once emotions take control of the dialogue, rationality and intelligent discourse often flee the room.  Name calling usually commences shortly thereafter, although the name-calling of today is a baffling to me...take an ordinarily neutral and highly descriptive word, then spit it out of your mouth through curled up lips, and it magically becomes an insult of the highest caliber.  Liberal.  Feminist.  Intellectual.  Personally, I just cannot muster the inanity to apply vitriol to a word such as conservative, family-oriented, or Christian.  They are not bad words and I find the practice to be sub-standard and lazy.  When I am forced to resort to name calling to make a point, I generally prefer more colorful words like fucktard or asshat or Dickfart (I made that one up today and it is my new favorite).

I don't believe in an inherent sense of right and wrong.  I believe moral standards are dictated by what is best for society as a group.  Therefore "right" is what is best for the collective.  To my mind, keeping your emotions in check during an argument is a superior position.  Losing one's temper and one's perspective is a less advanced method of communication and therefore inferior.

Similarly, I believe that peaceful resolution of differences is a superior and more socially advanced position than violence.  Violence, in any form and regardless of the personal justification, is simply a less advanced method for human interaction.  Violence is primitive, unrefined, and inferior to respectful negotiation, which requires advanced processing skills.  Violence lives in the portion of the brain that is most closely related to animals and is reflexive - like coughing or sneezing.  Language and cognition reside in the portion of the brain that is uniquely human and which differentiates us from the beasts.  Talking is more advanced than fighting.

There was a scene in the movie American Sniper that hit me hard, one I have replayed and turned over and over in my mind trying to work it out.  It offends me deeply, yet I have had difficulty pinpointing the fault in the assumptions.  One point of contention is the assumption that sheep prefer to believe that evil doesn't exist in the world.  I know it does.  I know there are people who would hurt me - badly.  But to surrender my convictions against violence, to take up weapons in the guise of "pro-active defense" is a form of defeat.  I cannot choose to be an inferior human being as a matter of convenience.  Striving towards a higher ideal is the only worthwhile thing about being human and that does NOT make me a sheep (were his lips curled when he said it??).  I guess what offends me about this is the notion that surrendering to base instincts is a morally superior position.  I simply disagree with that premise.

However, I do like a good metaphor - so let's run with that for a second. One big problem with the human ego is that it is very capable of self-delusion, and America currently sees itself as an entire nation of sheepdogs and unfortunately, many of those sheepdogs are killing their OWN flock.  And the real sheepdogs are so busy defending the impostors, that they aren't looking after the flock properly.  They have come to believe that the perceived rights of the false sheepdogs are more important than the lives of flock they are protecting.  

Bad Dog. 

In Division

48.  Seems a nice strong number, rife with mathematical possibilities.  I like that it has so many possibilities for division into tidy subsets that naturally lend themselves to the reflection I always pause to take on this special day.

48/1 = 48 passages of the earth around the sun means I have had 48 cycles of the seasons, 48 Christmases, 48 first days of summer, 48 tidy little one year packages.

48/2 = 24.  That is twenty-four two year packages.  These aren't really that interesting.  The mind doesn't naturally catalog according to biennial rhythms.

48/3 = 16. By at least the most base biological definition, my own adulthood started at 16.  So as of today, 2/3 of my life has been spent in adulthood.  It occurs to me that the roughly 2/3 of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean.  But I think it is a mere coincidence that I feel so completely adrift and that land seems farther and farther away each year.

48/4 = 12. That is like having lived through 4 cycles of required education.  I wish that school, as an institution, did not exist. Anticipation of graduation creates a sense of completion, as if to say "learning is done, no go do". This couldn't be farther from the truth and I am only just now realizing how wonderful it is to devote a life to learning, to pursue knowledge and experience with the same passion and importance as one pursues food and sleep.  Not for the attainment of a certificate of completion, but because learning is a biological need of the brain.  Unfortunately, the horrors of institutionalized learning leave most students with no preparation to continue their lessons in the classroom of life.

48/6 = 8.  8, 16, 24, 32, 40...each of those was a landmark year, in a quiet way.  Nothing spectacular happened at those ages, but they stand out in my memory as years of strength.  Perhaps this year holds good fortune as well.

48/8 = 6.  Hmmm, this formula isn't really getting the juices flowing...perhaps, the magic of a 6 year cycle has yet to be revealed to me.

48/12 = 4.  That is like having lived through 12 college degrees...except mine took 5 and 1/2 years, so maybe it is more like having lived through 12 sets of high school...which is about the most hideous way of cataloging one's past that I can imagine.  Luckily, not every set of 4 years begin with wretched feelings of isolation and ends with the surety that one is a complete freak and social outcast.

48/24 = 2.  That is like 2 whole lifetimes...which naturally makes one think in terms of before and after.  And that thinking also does not lead to happy places.

48/1 = 48.  The whole of it.  The sum total of my entire existence, reduced to a single episode.. .

However, as a science geek, the number 48 is cemented in my psyche as merely being one-half of a 96 well plate...

Morgan Hill: Prologue

When I was a 9 years old, I was invited to go to Morgan Hill.  I think the family across the street felt sorry for my mom, who was heavily pregnant and grateful for a day of uninterrupted napping.  They didn't know that we felt sorry for them.

Sabrina was 2 years younger than I was, and Tammy was 2 years older, so I wasn't really in sync with either of them, but we hung out together by default of proximity.  Tammy had a claw, which pretty much made her a freak and a social outcast back then.  She said her umbilical cord had gotten wrapped around her arm and she was born with a stump below her elbow.  Her father Felix, seemed to resent her for it and treated her harshly - especially when he had been drinking -  as if she had really fucked something up for him.

The affection he with held from Tammy, he lavished on Sabrina, and she quickly perfected the art of feminine manipulation, usually at the expense of her older sister.  Tammy would try her hand - so to speak, but temper tantrums did not play well on her noble Aztec features.  Sabrina was more fair and her European nose and thin lips turned pouts into weapons that crippled her father.  At the time I had no comprehension of the complicated depths of human emotion, but it was clear that looking at Sabrina brought Felix great pleasure, whereas looking at Tammy caused him pain and angst and possibly regret.  There was something viscerally disgusting about it too.

Tammy was strong and kind hearted and gentle, but I also felt sorry for her.  However, I felt sorry for her because of her father, not because of her claw.  I made it a point not to feel sorry for her because of her disability, because it seemed the right way to face something that you can't do anything about - but the truth is, I did.  Kids were really, really mean to her in ways that adults forget are possible.  I know she felt inadequate, self-conscious, and unwhole.  Once, she qualified for a special research program and went away to some clinic for a week and came back with a new "pross-thee-sees" that looked like a real hand.  It had a skin-like texture and worked in the same magic way as her claw, except instead of opening and closing a hook, the thumb and first two fingers made a pinching motion, while the others just hung there, waxy and stiff.  I paid compliments to its subtlety, but I was more than a little spooked by it.  The claw seemed more honest, somehow.

I assumed that I liked Tammy well enough, but I also got very annoyed with her, especially when she was throwing a temper tantrum when she wasn't getting her way. It struck me as a revelation that I could have negative feelings towards someone with a handicap.  I assumed they got a pass.  That they were allowed to be dicks on account of all the inconveniences they have to suffer.  Yet, here I was disliking someone who ties her shoes with a hook.  I thought it might make me a bad person, but that it required more research, so I agreed to accompany them to Morgan Hill to visit some cousin or uncle or someone that had just moved onto a small ranch, and we chased chickens and milked a cow and looked at some kittens that had just been born and we chewed on some hay and climbed on a pick up truck and played hide-and-go-seek in the cool musty barn.