Student Discipline Report

Student: Joyce, James – Sophomore class



Offense: Plagiarism



Remarks:



Having just turned in his cumulative piece of creative fiction for the term, I was immediately struck by the similarities between James’ work and a novel we read earlier in the term. His work, which he titles Ulysses, seems markedly similar in thematic form and structure to Homer’s The Odyssey, which we finished reading several weeks ago. Upon deeper investigation, I uncovered a multitude of thematic ideas, apparently lifted, wholesale, from Homer’s work. After reviewing several chapters of James’ lengthy piece I had already accumulated enough evidence to find him guilty of plagiarism. Such evidence includes the use of names and chapter titles identical to those that Homer uses. Nowhere is this content cited as Homer’s own. Furthermore, the tale finds James’ characters on quests virtually identical to those that Homer sends his characters on, such as Stephen Dedalus, a character that James seems to parallel with Homer’s Telemachus, who, just like Telemachus, heads out to try and find his father, or father figure. Chapter two brings no end to this uncited use of Homer’s ideas as James, brazenly titling it “Nestor”, recalls Homer’s Nestor in the figure of Mr. Deasy, both of whom are wreathed in images of shells and horses, not to mention their mutual inability to offer Dedalus (Telemachus) any decent advice. Though the incidents of plagiarism continue at length, the case against Mr. Joyce seems well defined by these few examples.



Based on the description of plagiarism given by the American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition [“Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer’s language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own.” (465)], it would seem clear that such an offense has been committed.



Recommendation:



I cannot petition for anything less than the expulsion of Mr. James Joyce from the school. Despite having had plagiarism policy explained to him countless times, during myriad school and class meetings, he seems to wantonly flaunt his copying of Homer’s ideas in his final class project. If for no other reason, an example should be made to the student body that such theft of literary ideas will bring neither profit nor fame to a writer and, in fact, is a corruption of the integrity of the writing profession. It has also come to my attention that, based on the seminal nature of Homer’s work in regard to the development of western literature, it may be in our best interests to much more rigorously examine all student papers, and perhaps even accepted parts of the English literature canon, for similar attacks of plagiarism.





"You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable!--mon frère!"

Summers And Sunsets

What a terrible power is bestowed upon he who can, and does, smash a smile that is untethered by the foolish concerns of a stringent society. It is a power derived from the self-righteous inspiration of self-discipline, so sharp in contrast to the airy smile whose only discipline is desire. The jealousy of such an undisciplined freedom is that which drives the hard word and the judgmental gaze. Cruel ironies rise from the attacker's seething surface when he realizes that the very thing that his self-imposed rigidity had hoped to cultivate was that which was, instead, banished from his presence.



There's a sunny bench in front of a convenience store that holds a girl in a light dress, barely covering her legs, that is, yet, heavier than the spirit it contains. Just heavy enough to keep her from floating off on the breeze in a laugh. The bounce with which she moves reveals her ethereal composition and the resulting, airy frame is so free of sharp angles that nothing undesired, nothing not willingly adhered to, can stick. Her ungrounded appearance sets her apart from the downtrodden eyes of all the others who pass in and out of the drugstore, all checking off items on their list of errands. Without a definable purpose, she is more purposefully driven than any of these people who vainly scribble personal functions onto a list in lieu of truly understanding what they need.



She is wondering how to react to the boy in the car who's pulled up alongside. She's wondering what brought him around for a second hello. He's still trying to figure out what sort of emotional entity he's going to see this time. Is it the cautious personality that quietly divulged secret drink contents on a red trolley? Is it the lonely and heartbroken character that cried on a curb in the midst of a post-festival throng? Or is it going to be the one he is hoping for, she whose eyes lit up, redirected, when a barely familiar face asked her what she was doing on the ground, so far below the faces of those passing around her? He's wondering how anyone can find redeeming happiness in something so small as himself, and how anyone can experience extremes of emotion in such rapid succession. He hasn't yet realized that, like all who dance even when there are no dance floors, she is the primal emotion that dismisses pure reason and all other constrictors of unbridled reactions to one's surroundings. It will be later that he will come to understand that he didn't just want her, he wanted her in him, to steal some of the spirit that his society taught him to wash himself of. For a second, her bubble of influence overwhelms the old thought process and he kisses her from the driver's seat, she in the passenger, without any of the courtship ritual that he has been taught is proper. The emotion takes over, impulsively and naturally, if but for the instant, while the bright San Diego sun bears down on the inside of the car.



Days pass and he can hide his darker influences in a shroud of worldly intellectuality, preaching about the ills of American society and its international influence, and she likes him because, on the outside, he seems like she is on the inside. He can hide it for the short time he has to and before she leaves he imbibes the essence of agenda-less exploration of new things, flitting from place to place, seeing things via her eyes in his hometown that, before, seemed never even to have been there at all. He can't connect the dots. Its all too close, too present, to understand. He can't comprehend how, on the brink of ecstasy, he can't perform, and years later he reflects on the subconscious fear of combining his structured self with another that is unchained from the rules by which he has led his life. Deep inside, some fear of losing an identity that has defined him sabotages the very thing that his structured personality has, via its rules and strictures, endeavored to aspire to. He takes her home on her last day in town and drives away as he sees her return to a curbside, watching, and waiting, it seems, for him to leave before she starts crying again. Its a scene he's seen, but he can't stop to pick her up and kiss her again from across the car cabin. Like some ill-gotten immune system, his internal self has hardened itself against this wonderful, emotional freedom that she has so readily put on display. His hand is a little shaky on the wheel, betraying the remainder of the struggle that is being ground into the past that each turn of the tires is creating, and the hand slowly steadies.



A year passes and the stage is, beyond his imagination, set again as it was. The play begins again and, as he sits in the car with her in a new lot, he fails to notice the darkness of night that has descended on their parking spot. The moonlight shines through the glass panes on the roof and it won't be long before both players realize that the play will unfold differently than it did before. A year has been spent in contemplation of and exile from his native women, all of whom seem devoid of freedom, and in the cruelest of ironic reactions, his rigidity has stiffened itself further, seeking to force upon itself the emotional freedom that was formerly in its grasp and slipped through its fingers. The year has been spent in fortification of this manner of thinking, and the walls are redoubled in strength. This time the subconscious is not satisfied with merely sabotaging the coupling of freedom and authority, and it now employs a hidden drive that is as surprising to he as it will be to she, who, unknowingly, approaches with a smile whose potency has diminished in no way since their first meeting. Weapons too long unused are shouldered and fired at a minor physical weakness in her, the most miniscule of unhappy byproducts of an otherwise joy-filled existence. Like well-trained soldiers under the thumb of their military taskmasters, the marksmen of his subconscious train their sights with unfailing accuracy, putting to use all of their linguistic training to hit their target with biting words. She's shocked and he realizes that the tears he alleviated at the fairgrounds have returned, now of his own making. She leaves for home again, crying, but not this time out of desire to stay, but rather to leave. The smile is smashed and the brightness of its reflection, once willingly shined on him, is turned instead away from him. The primacy of his rule-based existence is confirmed as it lords over the kiss of a year ago, reminding him that even then, she sat in her seat and he in his, divided by the console in between that is empty but for the imagined and constructed wall that he has embodied it with.



The fallout of the horrible, full circle that the play and its sequel have formed is the revelation of time to come, when the fallacy of the structured machine will be revealed in the self-replicating damnation that it is when the veil, so long carried to fool the host into thinking that happiness could be forged from within it, is torn free. In the extremity of hindsight it can be seen that the two actors in these dramas were complete in their internal opposition, and that regardless of his need to develop freedom out of structure, only by the utter breaking of that order could the smile that is bred of disorder be experienced, not only via another, externally, but also internally. Self-created, it seeks others like itself, not to keep its own fire burning, for freed of the opposing structure it is inextinguishable, but instead for the joy experienced by the exponential reflections of smiles that are created by the absence of a bereft and absorbing antithesis to them. Suddenly, the simple and intoxicating rhythm becomes understood, replacing the undanceable complexity of the overlaid rhythms and melodies that the cold, calculating, and structured mind demanded as intellectual entertainment. Suddenly, time spent lying in a sunstream is not unproductive, but, in fact, the productive requirement that puts the air in the dress and the breeze on the smile. Bucket seats are thrown out in favor of couches and division and isolation joins the change between the cracks of their cushions. How does one make up for having doused and denied the world, if even for a moment, the brightly burning smile that is the essence of that which our forlorn species finds desirable? Only in the erasure of the influence that drove her away is the real redemption found, for it gone, a thousand sources that once frowned begin too to smile and the multiplication of the effect, optimism born of pessimism, overrules all.

Me And You And Everyone We Know Should Take A Cue From The Movie And Be Sleeping Together Like Babies

I have friends who have friends who watch movies, and sometimes those movies land in my P.O. Box. Me And You And Everyone We Know is one of these.



The movie as a whole, encompassing the different, intertwining plot lines that make it up, endeavors to remedy the psychological and physical isolation that is pervasive for all of the characters. It is a purely sentimental movie, however, failing to address the modern, social causes of this isolation, even if it does expose them in the art museum which showcases representations of human interaction in the "digital age." The beauty of the art show is that it mirrors the relationships that exist throughout the majority of the film that are, in fact, merely representations of real interactions. Two people strolling down a sidewalk, for instance, create a scene that is, via their conversation, symbolic of the phases of a real relationship that may, or may not, come to pass. The happy ending, of course, is that it does come together, but only for the central couple of the film. The other characters are, for the most part, left disconnected, often with the realization that their personal, imagined representations of relationships were incongruous with reality.



In addition to this, there is a motif of age displacement running through the length of the film in which children attempt to act like adults and adults end up acting like children (occasionally even admitting this themselves in dialogue). The resulting blur of age distinction tends to lump the characters of the film together as a whole, contributing to its feel of social togetherness that is exemplified in the ASCII art that Peter produces in the scene where he speaks the movie's title. A sense of unity between the otherwise disparate characters is thus created from which the viewer is left to wonder what is causing the painful disconnections between the individuals, a question that the movie fails to deliver an answer to.



The film feels like it is on the fringe of grabbing at an answer, but sadly, it ends up being what I consider a "lament." These are the books and films, most especially of the artistic genre, that identify and illuminate ills in our society, most specifically emotional ones, and then simply seem to lay down and accept them. Often, they close with a suggestion that all you need is love, which, to anyone in touch with classical pop music, is a popular and readily digested tune. This is not to say that I disagree with it, because I think John was right when he penned those endearing words, as right as this film is when it puts human hand into hand in its next-to-final moments. What I feel forced to inquire about, however, is the fate of the others who aren’t as lucky as our aspiring artist and her confused shoe salesman. What about a middle-aged man who sits at home on his couch every night and is forced, in lieu of real human interaction, to put up sexual slogans on his window? What about a museum director whose only avenue of personal expression ends up being with a 5 year old? Where is the movie that protests the machine that causes the human disconnections that this film is awash in? Again, the film hints at the cause of the widespread social estrangement but seems unwilling to rebel against it (but for the personal moment between the couple at the end when such an act of defiance is condoned, and thus, is no longer a rebellion at all).



The moment where our outrage should be sparked occurs early on, where the teeth of the machine make themselves outwardly known, in the scene where the shoe salesman fails to put the outlandishly blue sneakers on the old man. He will not touch his feet. He may not, in fact, touch his feet. The man must put on the shoes himself. Company policy. What is company policy but social code? This is our society: Touch in private, but not in public. It is the world that Humbert Humbert already has exposed to us, where all of his perverse desires are bred from an unfulfilled TOUCH as a boy that, though harmless (and wonderful, really), was denied by the society that raised he and his first, his true, Lolita. The girl that he kidnaps, that he ruins, as she ruins him, is merely a representation, and here again, an erroneous one that fails to live up to the promises that it makes in its fantasy form.



What sort of a diseased society is this? What sort of world do we create where we build walkways of gravel and stone that are abhorrent to the naked, touching foot, forcing upon our feet sheaths to separate us from our most basic and daily form of sensation? Where cold, electronic chatrooms, filled with characters who state that they are touching themselves, substitute for the physical heat of bonfires and the psychological heat emanating from sexually charged movements of the eyes and hands? Where we are forced to live out the majority of our lives in work environments and taught that relationships with those whom we see the most must be left strictly "professional"? Where a coworker of mine, a school teacher during the academic year, felt guilty for taking a student kayaking during the summer, a trip taken at the student's request? What sort of society takes an act of genuine mentorship and personal, assembly-line-free interaction and imbues it with feelings of impropriety? Where is the challenge to this society that takes all of our native happiness, built of our most innate and simple physical desires, and pours isolation and unhappiness over it, setting in generational concrete a standard of physical and sexual condemnation? A limb could be hacked from a body, a bullet sent into a head, and such material would garner only an “R" rating; sex, touch, by the standards of our community, is the more forbidden fruit.



I have heard it said that artists are those among us who are the best able to represent our emotions and desires, and I agree with this, but what are representations? Are they not just images and sounds and words that substitute for the authentic sensation? Should we admire the person who writes about her smile, who paints her perfect lips into imperfect recreation, or should we burn our books and tear our canvases and have the kiss instead, back and forth, forever? Where is the art that asks why we need art, that asks why we suffer and are forced to create mere representations? We should do more than simply lament. We should smash the mirror. We should touch everything, everyone, we see.




Where are the prophets, where are the

visionaries, where are the poets

To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary?



Fish

“Fugazi” - Fugazi (1984)

Of Mice And Men, Part III: The Setting Stage

Continued from Part II

Taking a cue from my former mouse-friend, I settle my back into the deeply chiseled bark of a cottonwood tree. Having begun its downward slide, the sun seems now to take on a rapid pace, dismissing the long hours it had tenuously held to its blazing pinnacle in the sky. With the change in location, the brilliance of the sun begins to diminish and pitiless, white light gives way to a burnt, orange tone that seeps into the air and landscape. All things take on a softer feeling and scenery once outshined by the sheer strength of the sun now becomes highlighted, almost glowing in this moment of lighted revelry.

Facing the sun across the Missouri, my eyes begin to crease and half close as I watch the river. From my perspective it flows in bands, some moving swiftly, some moving slowly, aqueous layer stacked upon layer from shore to shore. Pockets of tanish bubbles float in the separate streams, along with various other flotsam, revealing the different paces at which each is moving. Some days, all I can feel are the quickly moving portions, but today the idle slipstreams have caught my gaze, and as my eyelids threaten further pressure, these slow rivulets seem to coalesce with the faster liquid highways, latching onto them and slowing everything down to a molasses. For a moment, the movie becomes a picture, and as if in agreement with the solemnity, even the robins cease (if ever so briefly) their infinite chatter. For all its stillness, though, the river is yet active. Reduced to a focusless stare, my eyes perceive what the sharp gaze did not. Ripples cut the water’s surface throughout its length, though nothing foreign appears to break the liquid plane. They rise from below, as if pebbles from a mirror-gravity world are being thrown up towards the river’s ceiling. Covered in such effusions, the river seems like it is boiling over, hinting at the turbulence that this now cohesive, opaque, and chocolately liquid sheen disguises.

Fluffs of cotton float through the air in myriad formations, seeds of the aptly named cottonwood tree flying off to new destinies, entirely out of their own control. Whipping through the air, their movements are erratic and unpredictable. Some get caught in the ferocious, upper breezes that assail the treetops and are whisked away instantly, never having had a chance to land in fertile soils beneath. Others bounce through the aerial rapids, careening along the river length in sidelong tornado spirals before unceremoniously being dumped into the water by an errant downdraft, ending their cottonwood experience before it has a chance to begin. A very few seem lucky beyond measure, for despite their inability to travel a chosen course, they are dropped softly into the moist, bank soil in a sunny spot, fortuitously landing in the most ideal of places to grow to full and lofty cottonwood heights.

Amidst them glide long, gossamer strands of silk, catching the same breeze. Attached to each is a minute silk worm, ballooning along the river in an act of extreme sportsmanship that would embarrass even the most athletic human. At first, I pity them for being fated, like the cottonwood spores, to a directionless destiny, drawn on by the careless whims of the changing breeze. My eyes sliver further, however, and I see that such is not the silkworm design. Different worms have cast silken parachutes of different lengths, those with longer ones getting pulled higher into the jet streams, those with shorter strands floating lower. Acting as wind-blown buffers, the silkworms’ threads absorb the violence of the breeze, making the worms’ flight gentle, even controlled, despite the catapulting cottonwood seeds about them. Soaring along the river line, they pick individual paths through the mindless, emotionless, fluffy asteroids that threaten to snag their lines and, tossing them from their lofty heights, drag them down into the consuming forces of the Missouri.

I spy a silkworm on the edge of a leaf, mere feet from my face. He is holding onto the leaf steadfastly with his powerful front limbs, seemingly unwilling to release the grasp on his cottonwood home. Behind him, however, flies a waving band of silk, neither long as the longest nor short as the shortest of the many already in flight. Over the course of what seems like an hour, I watch it slowly grow a half-inch longer. Perhaps forty inches in total length, I think of how long it must have taken him to prepare his aircraft. Surely, with reflection on the short lifespan he is granted, it must have been for him the consuming task of his adolescence. As I watch the sun glint off his lifeline, whipping furiously in the breeze, the silkworm seems suddenly to get his nerve, as if waking from slumber, and releases his clutch on the leaf. Like a bolt, almost instantaneously, he disappears into the wind, sending back sun-reflected glimmers from his silk until, finally, my eyes still unfocusedly dead forward, he travels beyond the periphery and from this world, from this view, is gone. My gaze thins further as my eyes taper to slivers embedded in prairie-tanned skin. The sun is going down, or perhaps it is merely my eyes finally closing. In spite of the encroaching darkness I feel none of the finality, none of the conclusion, normally attached to sunsets. In fact, my face is warm and I wonder if there is sunlight reflecting off the contours of my face, glimmering towards the river, waving in the breeze.

Of Mice And Men, Part II: The Antagonist

Continued from Part I

Lazy hours ticked away on an invisible clock, I having long ago shed my watch, without further rodent-related incidents, and the settled torpor brought me back to my summer reading. As the stage silently reset itself, however, a new player, like the previous, entered from stage up. A crashing sound in the canopy above, protracted and increasing in volume, as the sound of a boulder tumbling through underbrush towards us, roused Doug and I from our second bout of river-induced malaise. As suddenly as it had started, it ceased, and we caught each other staring idly at the ground in the space between us, empty as it had been before the ruckus. This, of course, led our gazes upward. Perhaps ten feet off the ground, the lowest hanging collection of light cottonwood branches was swaying rhythmically in a broad, two foot arc, entirely at odds with the lack of prevailing breeze. At first glance it seemed a simple anomaly, but between the twirling, serrated fringed leaves, the sunlight flashed off a foreign set of colors. Glimpses of yellow and black gave way to a new picture as our brains began to fill in the camouflaged gaps and an alternating pattern of stripes appeared, long and sinuous, coiled and clinging to the over burdened young offshoots of the cottonwood.

Above us was strung a nearly five foot long bull snake, holding on for dear life to the safety net he had discovered. As far as we could guess, he had been much further up in the tree (for bull snakes are know to be tree climbers) and, be it by wind or serpentine error, had slipped off a safer perch to land here, within our viewing range. A note of surprise escaped Doug’s lips in the form of another Biblical comment about snakes and trees, but it was I, ironically, that offered the more scientific solution. Clearly, here, was my mouse-friend’s antagonist, who minutes before had likely been rooting through the mouse homes of this cottonwood village in search of a helplessly infantile meal. How quickly, though, the tables had turned, and he who transformed mice into skydivers was now just such a performer himself.

Of all harsh mouse realities, surely a full grown and ravenous bull snake, untethered from the earth, must be the most in contrast to the soft-lined safety of the nest. The slow, almost imperceptible movements of the snake poking his head into a cottony den, followed by the abrupt speed of a strike on one’s sleeping sibling, is a rude awakening proven violent enough to send mice into aerial acrobatics. It is a lesson that, one way or another, every mouse learns, for the snake is ever present along the shore of the Missouri river. Silent and pervasive, a disturbed and waving line of tall grasses, or a ripple on the water’s surface as it skates across the water tension, is all that is often seen of the predator’s far reaching movements. The snake is unforgiving and audaciously capitalist, taking the easiest prey first, always finding the path of least resistance. His frozen smile, often mistaken for a grin, belies the emotionless, reptilian mind that hides behind the pitch black eyes of the bull snake. He neither cares for his young nor those of others, for he is the definition of cold blooded; unable to generate his own heat, he steals it from other sources. The reality of life, for mice and men, are these snakes in the grass who imbue pastoral scenes with worry, placing questions on the field fringes, wondering who is watching, who is entering, and who is already there. Happy mouse-homes and shelters from the cold grow eggshell thin in the face of this new order, this real order, that snake ambassadors prove to be the defining reality as they break down the cotton-laced barriers of smaller, more comfortable, more convenient manners of existing. Some mice, lulled into complacency by the comforts of the den, seem unable to sense the snake head at the door, their whole world ending at its frame. They are the ones that do not struggle when the snake strikes, as if they didn’t see it coming, or maybe that they did and have simply been waiting for it, even hoping for it, the thought of fending it off too much for their mouse-minds to contend with. If only these were the few rather than the multitude, but oh, how well fed the snakes are.

Non-venomous and non-threatening to humans, I envisioned the snake falling to the ground so I could pick him up and briefly unleash on him the fear he had struck in the mice, but this bull was no fledgling and, unlike the mice, was adept in the art of tree scaling. His balance regained, he began the process of winding his way into the upper limbs. Occasionally turning his head in our direction to test our scent with a vibrating, forked tongue, his gaze betrayed no hint of embarrassment over the fall, for surely, such a sensation was beyond his reckoning. Stretching up onto one of the low, sturdier arms of the cottonwood, he continued his endless mission of mammal hunting as the sun curled over the apex of its daily arch and too began to fall out of the sky it had climbed into.

Concluded in Part III

Of Mice And Men, Part I: The Protagonist

Though Montana is the setting for rivers that run through it, the Blackfoot is not the only waterway of note winding through the vast plains of the northern mid-west. The Missouri is famous for hosting Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental voyage, for overwhelming its banks and wreaking havoc on homesteaders, and, more recently, for driving me mad with its muddy, sinkhole-dotted shorelines and the biting insects that love them. There is something greater than my history or theirs’, though, at work on this river. Gazing down the river from its center, it appears to run into infinity as the banks move progressively closer and closer together. Turning around, the same view greets the eyes and one realizes that looking backward is really the same as looking forward on this river, filled with activity that registers only on the small scale, seemingly begging you to look into the water rather than past it. Lewis and Clark were on a mission to find the headwaters of the Missouri, a conclusion to their tale, the whole time forgetting that rivers neither begin nor end but rather flow cyclically through the waters of the world, telling always the same story through an infinity of different images, each reflection, each interaction, a reminder of that which is shared by the big, the small, the meek, and the mighty, that feel the endless waters lap upon the rivers’ shorelines.

Like a lot of good stories, this one starts on a lazy, Friday afternoon. Unlike those versions, however, this isn’t the beginning of my weekend; after all, weekends are when the most work gets done in a national monument park. Today, though, the fire pits have been cleaned, the bathrooms flushed, and the tents pitched, so laziness, even without the prospect of a weekend, has become the order of the day. Its also after 5:00 pm, and as I’m sure you know, government employees don’t work overtime. Doug, my river partner, excels at downtime and quickly has a fold-out recliner dominating the center of our campsite. Slightly less prepared, my canvas, folding stool is forced to suffice. Our sitting postures accomplished, leisure commenced in earnest.

With relaxation in full swing, Doug and I both into our respective reading material, even the mosquitoes had little power to fend off the consuming lethargy, their own flight paths less erratic, more predictable, than usual. The riverbank maintained a breezeless, dead calm, as if the environment itself conspired to contribute to the apathetic state of things that I felt around, as well as inside, me. The overhanging limbs of a pair of cottonwood trees provided a shaded, decidedly pastoral setting that seemed to pervade the visible length of the river, itself swollen, yet placid, with the last of the winter run-off from the Rockies. Unaccustomed to the unmoving, solidified ether about me, I wondered if clouds lurked beyond the hillsides, hiding some storm that would alter what appeared to be a culminating state for the river. At its high point for the spring, the river would soon be under assault by summer heat, enlisted to initiate an inevitable change of seasons.

The usual river soundtrack of cliff swallows, horseflies, and splashing catfish played on loop, further enhancing the cyclically meditative ambiance until, with an echoed splat, the harmonious illusion was dispelled. Doug and I both looked up, having simultaneously perceived a sound like that of a ripe tomato landing on the dirt hard-pack that made up the floor of our campground. Standing up to investigate, I found that the echoed sound of a falling tomato had actually been two tomatoes, and what had sounded like tomatoes had actually been mice. Juvenile field mice, to be exact, and as I incredulously looked at the two tiny, writhing balls of fur, Doug reluctantly quit his recliner to join me. Each was about an inch and a half long, though fully-fledged, with a coating of classically gray hair and twitching and twirling white whiskers. Based on the sound, and their otherwise miraculous appearance, we guessed that they must have fallen from a treetop nest. Sadly, another thing tipped us off: one of the two was lying on his side, erratically pumping its rear legs in a series of spasms. It had likely broken its back in the fall and a minute later the legs stopped moving, once and for all. His brother, or perhaps sister, however, had been graced with a more cat-like fall. The mouse seemed to be dazed and I reached out to pick it up. I snatched him up and was immediately informed, in a high pitched, squeaky diatribe of surprisingly high volume that such an action was wholly intolerable. Performing another act of acrobatic faith, the mouse leapt from my hands, a full five feet in the air, landing with a tumble that found my eyes following a freshly kicked-up trail of dust into the nearest grass thicket.

The moment apparently past, Doug offered the dead mouse full natural burial rites with a toss into another thicket and, as if on cue, another splat sounded behind us. I looked at Doug with a sidelong grin, brow furrowed in humored confusion, before I turned around to greet the latest would-be aeronaut. Like his luckier companion, this mouse seemed well enough alive, though thoroughly dazed by his daredevil experience. I looked up into the cottonwood branches, half-expecting to hear another splat resonate off my face, but no more mice seemed to be falling, for the moment at least. Turning my attention to the new mouse, I decided not to offend as quickly as I had before, instead taking a seat on the dirt and keeping my eye on him. Doug, muttering something about Biblical plagues, resumed relaxation status with his book and recliner. I continued to watch the mouse and despite my initially positive prognosis, I soon realized that he wasn’t as well off as his flight-of-foot friend had been. In fact, as I watched him roll about in the dirt rather aimlessly, I realized that he probably wasn’t very well at all. I could understand his misgivings about our campground. It was disorganized and rather crudely thrown together, a stark place even for us, much less a mouse. I was sure, however, that something deeper ran through his unease as I observed him sniffing the air with a sense of encompassing uncertainty.

Those who have run across mouse nests know just how cozy they can be for their inhabitants. Mice household mothers seem to have no trouble finding the softest and finest materials for bedding, efficiently lining the inside of hollow or cracked tree trunks with cushioning that would make a mattress manufacturer jealous. Moreover, here, on the banks of the Missouri river, cottonwood seeds, newly weaned from their own mothers, were available. These trees derive their name wholly from the texture of their seed packs, comprised of a feathery down that gives flight to the precious contents and sends them on to start cottonwood families of their own. Of course, not all of them make it, with lurking mouse mothers around to corral them into warmth and luxury providing servitude. Needless to say, the adolescent mouse before me must certainly have enjoyed a pampered upbringing. That in mind, his stance seemed less unwarranted than it had before. He looked about with none of the quick and jagged motion normally seen in mice, the traditionally shifty and nervous head swivels replaced with an awe-eyed scanning of his surroundings. How far things must have seemed from the world he had perceived as complete, here, a speck on the vast, flat, hard-pack wasteland that was our campground. He moved his limbs cautiously and deliberately, as if questioning if everything worked correctly in this new environment. He rolled onto his side, pointlessly, and with all the powers of anthro-centrism at my command I felt sure that he was wondering why the cotton-laced walls of the nest he had known as the world were no longer there to lean against, their false promise dismissed in the heartbeat of a dive from that warm fantasy down to the hard reality that instead greeted his back. Unable to further resist the temptation to find a way to alleviate his agony, I reached out to pick him up. Unlike his predecessor, there was no audible protest and only a half-hearted physical one. In a moment he had cozied himself into my palm, seemingly quite content to follow Doug’s lead and fully utilize our relaxation hour.

After a minute or two of calmly sitting in my palm, I watched as the mouse’s eyes began to crease and close, though the rapid pace at which his ribcage convulsed informed me that he was still breathing at the pace of the living. The eyes slowly tapered from large, black orbs to gray-wrapped slivers, the mesmeric comfort of a warm hand dropping him into the subconscious. Another couple of minutes passed and he was on his side, out like a light, surely engaged in the kind of dreams only mice can dream: unguarded cheese slices, abandoned and torn open seat cushions, toothless, half-inch tall cats with no claws. Maybe, though, the sleep was not merely provoked by need for rest. Was it trauma induced? Was his mind hard at work, unraveling the foreign environment he found himself in, contemplating how to look at it through nest-taught eyes, or perhaps trying to forget what his younger days had taught him altogether? Was he so waylaid by this investigation that he had to retreat from things entirely to work them over in trance? Whatever the cause, he outwardly appeared serene, leaving me to wonder what turmoil might lie under the calm exterior.

Crouching down to set him in the grass, a tinge of guilt crossed my mind; I knew how many bull snakes there were in the campsite’s grasses, and I furthermore knew what their favorite food was. This sleeping innocent, thrust from his promised home, didn’t stand a chance in his current state. So there I was, a fistful of conscious and mouse at my side. I sat back down on my stool, hand out as if I was waiting for change in the checkout line, watching the incessant rise and fall of the mouse’s chest. Thoughts tacked onto thoughts, as they always do, and feeling myself a part of his mammalian social group, I began to worry about my mouse-friend. Was this kind of behavior normal for mice? His living brethren certainly hadn’t acted so. Was there something wrong with him? Wouldn’t it be better if he were more like the other mouse, who had excitedly bound into the wild without so much as a note of questioning his fate? Maybe this was unhealthy. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he just wasn’t fit, genetically, to hack what was thrown at him. Doug shot me an unsympathetic look. A high school teacher of natural sciences during the academic year, the mathematically scientific sentimentality in him was clearly brimming over. I, however, couldn’t bear to let things fall out in ill favor for my mouse-friend, so there I sat, sleeping mouse in hand, as an hour rolled by.

At this point I had basically accepted the fact that I was going to have to hold this sleeping mouse until I too passed out from exhaustion. Thankfully, however, I was about to be relieved of my duty. There was an itch in my hand and, looking down with a start, I saw that my mouse-friend was no longer asleep. Whatever ordeal he had been going through was over, and he now was eagerly cycling around the perimeter of my hand, peering over the edge with beady, black mouse eyes at the verdant grass fields below and beyond. There was a change, however, definite and complete, and though he seemed like any mouse now, fidgety as they always are, he was yet different from his long gone companion. Looking over the edge of my hand at the ground far below, he resisted what looked like an irresistible urge to jump. Despite his otherwise convincing behavior, there was something particularly un-mouse-like about him, captured in the different thought pattern that I imagined he had emerged from sleep with. My duties seemingly done, I lowered my palm to a less frightening height and, as he deposited a tiny mouse turd in my hand, watched him leap off and into the tall grasses, whatever new knowledge he possessed going with him. In a flash he was gone, off to face the world that he had momentarily shrunk from. I turned around to see if Doug would again frown at me, but he was asleep in his recliner, a mouse’s advice well heeded.

Continued in Part II

A Dis-Ode To The Prickly Pear

...or Its Raining And I'm Stuck In My Tent And My Foot Hurts

Prickly Pear
Oh Prickly Pear,
Why do you pop up everywhere
Upon this river wide and fair?

Prickly Pear
Cactus out there,
Despite my long and gazing stare
Your camouflage did bring to bear
Your thorn inside my foot.

Prickly Pear
Oh Prickly Pear,
Why did you prick without a care
My sandaled foot all pink and bare?

Prickly Pear
Cactus out there,
How river travelers must beware
Your angry thorns that bite and tear
The hiker’s wayward boot.

Prickly Pear
OH PRICKLY PEAR!
I long to shout and give you scare
Enough to make you quit your lair!

But I laugh, with glee within,
When instead you do prick Jim.

Food Fight!!

No, not THAT kind! Whether it is frustration-fueled tirades from a year ago or contemplation of health-related considerations today, it seems food is often on my mind. It was with some surprise, then, that the Delancyplace daily email that I got today was so tuned into what I was thinking about. Delancyplace is a daily email service that sends out thoughtful and intriguing quotations from different literary sources each day. Usually they are historically oriented, with the piece's respective authors whining about some historical nonsense, who did what wrong and when, in the vain hope of inciting some sort of social change that, in 4000 years of human history, has utterly failed to materialize. The entry I came upon, though, ran much deeper than the usual fare, though the implications of what was being said was well beyond the author's own realization. He was writing about the first human technology ever, fire, and its immediate impact on food.

J.M. Roberts, in his A Short History Of The World, states:

"Cooking became possible. As a result, eating became easier; marrow can be sucked out of cooked bones but getting it out raw is a laborious experience. Gibbons and gorillas have to spend much of their time simply chewing their raw food; cooking saved time, for food softened by it did not have to be chewed so long."

Well that is all fine and good, but cooking saves time? How does one reason so? Did we have to chew so long that we spent an extra 45-60 minutes per meal, just chewing? Cooking is an endeavor that is, itself, a significant time consumer. How much time, annually, if one disregards "free" cooking time managed through cooks and chefs at restaurants, does one lose to cooking meals? In a lifetime? Unless you're The Barefoot Contessa, who I think derives sexual satisfaction from cooking, you probably don't want to know the answer. But, ok, fine J.M. Roberts, I'll assume your roundabout logic is concrete and figure that "cooking saves time." So what?

"[Thus,] Time was made available to do other things."

Oh, you mean, like laboring in fields to produce all the cooking supplies? Like, um, time to invent work specializations that lead to complex social hierarchies that allow for subjugation, repression, and inter-tribal war activities? Let's just pretend I didn't read that last line of his. (Though I do highly recommend Bob Black's The Abolition Of Work and, of course, the indomitable "Thirty Theses" for further insight into how modern food production helps form the buffet line of our modern choose-your-own-slave-state.)

FINE, J.M., I'm with ya'. Keep filling me in about the value of cooked food.

"More important still, substances indigestible in their raw state could become sources of food; distasteful or bitter plants could be made edible."

At first glance this line seems difficult to refute. The ability to increase one's food supply is certainly an important thing, multiplying that individual's evolutionary fitness by decreasing his chances of starvation. But when you sit back and think about this from an unbiased perspective, isn't the idea of eating food that is naturally inedible a ludicrous thing for a species to go around doing? That food is considered inedible for a reason, after all. If you take a minute to look into any field guide for the harvesting of wild greens and other vegetables (which, I'm sad to admit, I have), you'll find that at least three quarters of the listed "edible" plants have taglines like "Indigestible prior to cooking" or, better yet, "Toxic and hazardous to health prior to sustained heat levels of 150 degrees Fahrenheit for a minimum of 10 minutes." Joy! Give me some of that! Nature has, over billions of years, built up complex, multi-celled organisms like ourselves, and with infinitesimally rare exceptions (such as certain ant colonies that chemically "cook" fungus that they grow), none of these myriad species cook their food. If a member of one of these species were to come across what they consider an inedible food source, they wouldn't sit down and contemplate different preparation methods to make it edible. They'd save themselves an amazing amount of time by spending two seconds to turn around and eat the plant (or unlucky mammal) behind them instead. Cooking saves time, indeed! Eating foods that one is not genetically adapted to eat is illogical and, in my opinion, one of the fundamental mistakes on which our entire civilization, pre-Biblical era to now, is based on. Show me a human being that was born with a microwave lodged in the side of his rib cage, and I'll consider changing my mind on this one. Of course, this line of thinking justifies my personal philosophy regarding the invalidity of all things that civilization has to offer, but I'll save that one for another time.

Further proof that nothing good ever came out of taking (a lack of) control over fire.

J.M. had another little tidbit, though, regarding the value of producing soft, easy to chew cooked foods:

"Finally, in the long run, eating cooked food helped to alter the shape of the face and the form of the teeth."

I find it inexpressibly odd that this line is delivered in what seems to be a positive manner. How have mouths changed? Well, if we look at our evolutionary ancestors, we find that our jaw lines have decreased in size and strength and that our teeth have become markedly smaller and less robust.

Before...

...and after.

Well thank goodness for that! Who wants a strong, muscled jaw line? Hardy, decay-resistant teeth? Nah, I'd much rather have a degenerating jaw line, glittering with metal-filled, rotten teeth, that is suited only for the consumption of Velveeta. Seriously, though, this is a good thing how? Is it any wonder that clean, shapely jaw lines are, in both men and women, almost universally considered physically attractive? Like almost all of the physical attributes that attract people to one another, this is the result of the desire to have a partner that has successful genetic traits. (In this case, that being a strong jaw that has the ability to chew up the tougher, raw foods that we are designed to eat.) For all of the human-instigated evolutionary processes that humanity has undergone, we still have yet to purge the animal. We still find human beings with genetic traits most beneficial to the uncivilized, primitive, and wild world, to be the most physically desirable. Do we listen to our internal urges? Should we heed Mother Nature's call, the real Godhead, and consider the fact that we are evolutionarily altering ourselves in ways that even WE find unappealing?

I once had a discussion with someone over the fact that I believed mankind would be significantly better off if it consumed more raw food products and less cooked, processed, shelved goods. He was almost offended by this, declaring that our modern food sources were perfectly adequate and were, in fact, a "progression." He continued, fully ensconced in human, self-righteous fervor, saying that we now control our own evolutionary destiny and are on our way to perfecting our species in a way that nature had long ago failed to. Right. Mankind currently has a higher percentage rate of cancer than it ever has before. Among these rates, the highest appear in what are considered the highly successful, first-world nations, who are fed, more than any other peoples, primarily by processed and packaged "food" products. Debilitating genetic diseases like autism are at all-time global highs, percentage-wise. Obesity in wealthy nations, especially the global processed-food capital of America, is quickly becoming a leading cause of illness for the population. But what does that matter in the face of our imminent "progression"? If, indeed, man has taken control of his evolutionary destiny (which, I have to agree, seems fairly accurate), to what destiny is he taking himself?

I once had another discussion with another individual about the nature of healthy eating, to which he responded, while cringing through a whiskey-induced hangover, "Who wants to live forever?" "I could care less about living longer," I replied, "I just want to live better."

Rants From Yesteryear

So, I actually wrote the following post many months ago, when I was still a San Diego resident. It was probably incited by some lack of sexual activity on my part, and I quickly decided to let it sit on my electronic desktop rather than risk posting such anti-social material. Now I'm in Montana, once again afflicted with a lack of sexual activity. That, however, only parallels the real reasons I'm posting it now: A) I actually think its kind of funny; and B) Women in Montana are almost invariably larger than me. Maybe it is the fact that the staple diet here is 75% cattle products (the last store I was in had more than 30 varieties of beef jerky in bulk container "fill a bag to your heart's (stomach's?) content" style. Also, I have never seen produce aisles so devoid of real produce. Since when does a wall of bagged spinach count as produce? Forgive the pre-rant and please sit back and enjoy the full one...

Circa early 2006

Time to piss everyone off. Or at least most of everyone. It is brought to my attention how American girls are the laziest, most overweight women on our fine planet. Really, its true. Even the gals who are “normal” are not in any healthy shape whatsoever. Want a test? When was the last time you could claim that you had muscle tone in your legs or your stomach? Hell, anywhere? Its not like you have to be insanely skinny, but your body naturally should have a ratio of fat that is not 40% of your body weight. I don’t care what the USRDA tells you. That was devised by a bunch of idiots that think you should eat more bread than anything else. Leave it to the government to declare a processed food that doesn’t exist on earth but by man’s invention to be the staple of our diet. And don’t give me the biblical “God said we should” reason either. Remember, religiophiles, that you are supposed to be created in God’s image. If our God really is a lazy, overweight, Zantac-addicted minivan driver, we all should sit down and have a good cry.

Anyway, I see your dilemma, my American darling. You and I are but monkeys let loose in the urban jungle, so our instincts now ruin us. You see, when you are a Yahoo running about in the forest and you see a cheeseburger, you damn well grab the thing. When there is food, you eat it, because you’re an animal and lucky to get food at all. This is human instinct and utterly impossible to purge from our psyche, which is where the problem lies, because now there are cheeseburgers everywhere. Now we have more food than we know what to do with, so we eat it all. We eat until we say “oohh, I ate too much” and feel ill. We can’t help it. That’s the way we’re made. So what is needed is a massive dose of willpower. And a bicycle. Why are eastern European girls so slim? Well, probably because they are hungry, honestly. Even when they do have enough food, though, there seems to be a sense of eating decorum that we as Americans lack. I recently met a girl from Israel who said that America is great because you can eat or drink anything you want and not get funny looks for going overboard. She further stated that it is cool because nobody worries about turning into a giant fat ass. Jesus! What a gluttonous catastrophe of a nation.

My suggestions on how to be less of a total pig are easily said, maybe not so easily done. How about trying to eat less, first? No, don’t take medications to make you thin. That is so fucking American. I mean, if one of your meals is a cheeseburger and you are going to walk a total of 50 steps for the rest of the day, do you really need to eat anything else at all until tomorrow? Probably not. In fact, most could easily manage their entire day on the caloric intake of one burger. Even more so since they’d be burning their voluminous fat stores for the first year of learning how to eat less. Next, try turning half your food into things that are good for you. Remember what your mother told to about eating fruit and vegetables? Well, she was right and McDonalds was wrong. Finally, and this one is really more key than any, try using your broken body. No, you don’t have to start running marathons. You don’t even have to run at all. But shit, do you have to drive across the street? Walk there! Seriously, if the store is a 20 minute walk, do it. Yeah, the journey is going to take you an hour round trip and you’ll have to carry a backpack full of goods back with you, but is America’s Top Model so important that you can’t miss it? Don’t answer that. I will have to cry and write another fuming blog entry. Try to think of your car as a last resort. For instance, I sometimes need to go to campus. Biking there would take, round trip, probably 6 hours, so I drive as to not spend my entire day shifting gears. But hell, the grocery store is only 20 minutes by bike, so off I go. Less car, more feet = happier person. Simple equation.

I’m just tired of looking at any given American lady and thinking “God you are a total slob of a human being.” The same applies, I’m sure, to American men, but since I’m straight I don’t think about it as much. Though I might have to turn gay if I expect to ever date again after this post.

Changing Times, Unchanging Ways

Regarding the alleged impact of global warming, I recently read the following statement:

"'Current crops are adapted to the current climate. Start changing that and you change everything,' Fowler said. 'Plant breeders will have to be designing totally new varieties.'"

This, in a nutshell, is the crux of the problem with humanity. Not the statement itself, but the philosophy that drives it. This statement reveals that the speaker, like most people, places himself on a pedestal that is outside the reach of the rest of the natural world and universe. The statement assumes that if climate changes, the natural world will not adapt with it. It assumes that only by the hand of human intervention will the world continue to move along its course. It posits man as God, subjugating the lesser forms about Him to His righteous and proper will. It displays the great falsity in human understanding of the universe: that humanity must and will exist forever. A statement could not be further from the truth.

Mankind does not like the idea of change. Think about it. Do you? People like stability and order in their lives. Alas, such is not the design of things. Change is the nature of the universe. Moreover, this little rock, floating about in the interstellar ether of a far greater drama, will do just fine without our oh-so-necessary intervention. Plants will adapt to changing conditions, as will animals. Will some species die? Sure. That's how evolution as a result of climate change works. Will humanity die? Probably not, but maybe. Humans are quite adaptable, even without greater technology than fire. However, the important thing to understand and be ok with is that if humanity died out, it really wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Said the human: "This stinks"; said the volcanic bacteria: "I like this weather."

Is your joyous, personal experience of life so goddamned important that the idea of not having a generation behind you to enjoy the same thing is heart-wrenching to you? If that's the case, than admit that your primary focus in life is simply to breed, drop monogamy, and start living like an animal. Otherwise, stop worrying about the planet. Sure, we'll jack it up (at least, for ourselves), but it won't whither and implode. It'll still be here, ripe for something else to propagate it. Maybe something that doesn't mind searing temperatures and water shortages. Maybe a hyper-intelligent race of horny toads. Man that would be so awesome.

"Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East - to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them - who were above such trifling." (Henry David Thoreau)

The Semantics of Legislative Representation

An occasional perusal of news sites can relay a lot of information to the reader about the state of affairs in the U.S. and beyond, but sometimes I think the most revealing information lies in tidbits that don’t get the benefit of headlines. For instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow recently spoke to the media regarding the massive troop increase President Bush has slated for Iraq, despite large scale public and government disapproval of the action. Snow said “"The president will not shape policy according to public opinion, but he does understand that it's important to bring the public back to this war, and restore public confidence and support for the mission." Interesting. Let’s break this one down a bit, shall we? So, according to the public relations officer for the executive branch of the U.S. government, the President of the United States is no longer willing to perform actions that are desired by the people that he was assigned to work for. Furthermore, the President is under the belief that the will of the public must, in fact, be altered in order to bring them in line with the international policies he chooses to implement. Interesting! Now, I’m no political science scholar, but doesn’t this seem like a substantial reversal in the roles that citizens and presidents are outlined as being privy to in the very documents that this country is supposedly based on? Cue up the Schoolhouse Rock music (We’re not going to talk about bills and laws. I just like the music.) as we go on a trip through the basics of U.S. governmental functions…



Ok, so we’ve got a President that believes it is his job to make the American public support the decisions he wants to make. What do U.S. documents have to say about all this? Well, the American Declaration of Independence, which I’ve heard was pretty important in the formation of this country, says that governments must be instituted among men for the purpose of defending their rights, and that these governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But wait. Didn’t Tony Snow just say….well, let’s hold up a minute before we pass judgment.

The Declaration goes on further to say that when the leaders of a nation enage in "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, [evincing] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." Well, what does that mean? I suppose one might argue that Mr. Bush does seem a bit obsessed with the "same Object," that is, oil in the middle east, but what is a despot, anyway? Well, despotism, is "a form of government by a single authority, either an individual or tightly knit group, which rules with absolute political power…The term now implies tyrannical rule." Hey! Are you calling my President a tyrant?! Um, what’s a tyrant again? "The term ‘tyrant’, used literally or metaphorically, now carries connotations of cruel despots who place their own interests or the interests of a small oligarchy over the ‘best’ interests of the general population which they govern or control." Well, Mr. Bush certainly isn’t a part of an oligarchy, whatever the hell that is, now is he? "Oligarchy is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small, elite segment of society (whether distinguished by wealth, family or military prowess)." No way. Not our leaders.

Vice President Dick Cheney is said to have been made immeasurably wealthy by awarding uncontested building contracts to Halliburton, his former company, in war-torn Iraq. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is said to have been made immeasurably wealthy by the use of tax dollars being used to support Tamiflu, a product made by a company he was formerly a chairman of. These dollars were diverted to support of this product due to a scare about an avian flu, much heralded by the Bush administration, that is so virulent that only Tamiflu, supposedly, can counter it. Less than 300 people have died since 2004 due to this flu. By comparison, the war in Iraq, which has raged in a roughly similar timeline, has killed over 3,000 U.S. citizens, and though some money has been spent on an antidote, since no government employees benefit from the remedy it has yet to be enacted.

U.S. President George W. Bush and family have been called, by Peter Schweitzer, author of one of their family biographies, "the most successful political dynasty in American history." Dynasty? Oops. Err, "a dynasty is a succession of rulers who belong to the same family for generations." (How poetically appropriate is it, though, that "Dynasty" was about a bunch of oil tycoons?)

The real reason Bush wants to stay in Iraq.

Well, now that you bring it up, the Bush administration does sort of seem like an oligarchy. What were we supposed to do about them again?

I don’t want people to get the idea that I’m terribly political. Despite my recent foray into U.S. political matters, I actually take no interest whatsoever in such banalities. What I do take interest in, however, are the subsurface social issues that are revealed by politics, and the political incidents of this day and age surely have revelatory value. At the heart of this matter is the fact that politicians can openly admit that they have no interest in serving the public that their occupational guidelines demand that they do, and that nobody really makes a big deal out of it. You see, if you keep digging, you start to come to the realization that this isn’t an American political problem. It’s a human one. Never once, in the history of humanity, has a country or any other large social organization gone out of its way to help another without a motive mired in a beneficiary outcome for itself. Altruism is not an attribute that exists in the space of interaction between human social organizations. Thus, the idea of halting a massively profitable war just because the public requests it is largely inconceivable. Revolution, you say? A nice idea, but such a thing is also infeasible in the current U.S. Revolutions don’t occur because of ethical outcries. Being that revolutions are a social activity, they too are therefore devoid of altruism. They occur for entirely selfish, “lack of profit” reasons. Like when the wealthy folks are forced under a wall of taxation without representation or something. Once people can no longer live lives with the comforts they are accustomed to living with, then such things as revolutionary action begin to manifest. U.S. global economic domination since the end of World War II has yet to allow such a thing to occur. Besides, revolutions really only reset the system that creates the very problems that are rebelled against.

So where do you go, what’s the conclusion, what do you do with this? Start making signs that say “Queue up here for Anarchy-land”? Since there isn’t a whole lot one can do to alter basic human nature and social reasoning, it is nice to at least try and understand what is really going on around oneself, behind the social veils everyone puts up. Actually, it isn’t that hard these days. Maybe just listen to what your leaders are saying. They aren’t even lying about their intentions anymore.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake...We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."  (George Orwell, 1949, 1984)

Karmic Transactions

Sometimes, things just seem to fall together correctly. Chance? Maybe, but maybe not. My day began, as usual, with a laundry list of things to get done. The first order of business was to pick up a few items at the grocery store so that I wouldn’t go hungry, food acquirement being one of the prime directives in my life. The store is close and I own a bicycle, so off I go, backpack strapped on. I’m about 40 feet from my front door, getting ready to leave the sidewalk and become a fearless member of the Pacific Beach driving community, when a curled up twenty dollar bill catches my eye. Needless to say, I stopped. I picked it up and quickly realized that it was actually three bills, all twenties, folded up together. The bills were crisp and clean. Clearly they had only recently fallen there. I looked around to see if anyone was walking away from the spot. Regardless of whether I am believed or not, if I had seen someone who might have dropped them I would have gone and asked them. The street was vacant, however, so I threw the $60 in my pocket and continued on my way.

The ride to the store takes about 10 minutes, and those 10 minutes are a lot of time to think about anything. I’m thinking, of course, about the money. I realize that at the moment that I picked up the money and put in my pocket, I had made a moderate withdrawal from my karma account. I know what some of you are thinking. Stupid luck, pure random chance, etc. The thing is, I just don’t agree with you. Nothing works that way. Every action causes reaction; every reaction an interaction; every interaction a part of a play. These thoughts flit through my mind as I’m pulling into the grocery store, as I’m locking up my bike, and as I’m buying my groceries. You can’t just take and not give, you understand, lest the domino chain be broken and fail to wrap back around to you. My brief shopping done, I’m in line to purchase my few items and behind me in line walks up your typical, older, Pacific Beach local. A quite tan fellow with a short cut, white beard, wearing shorts and an old t-shirt. Yeah, I know its January. January means shoes instead of sandals in San Diego. The guy unloads his items: Just a few produce items; more onions than I would have bought at one time. Maybe he’s like my Dad and freaks his kids out by biting into and eating them like apples. He has, I’m guessing, around six or seven dollars worth of goods, so I turn to him and say “Hey, let me buy your groceries. See, I just ran across $60 wadded up on the ground and if I don’t give some of it away it just won’t sit well. I’ll even spring for the onions,” I close, with slight grin. A new thought runs through my head: Many people would probably think I’m insane and not even want to talk to me about this. But not this guy. He lights up and tells me that if buying his groceries is going to make me feel better, then he’s entirely in favor of it. He goes on to tell me his own little karma story. Apparently, while New Orleans was in the grip of hurricane Katrina, his cat fell ill and required surgery that was going to cost $1000. Now, he wanted to save his cat, of course, but he felt wretched about spending that much money on an animal when there were so many newly destitute people in his country. Torn, he paid for the cat’s surgery, then cut another check for $1000 and gave it to the Red Cross branch that was serving New Orleans. True story? Who knows. Why would he make it up? What, really, are the chances that out of everyone in the store it would be this atypically acting, un-Pacific Beach character who would end up in line behind another local anomaly? Is the idea that good attracts good, that happiness breeds happiness, so ludicrous? Having made a deposit to balance my recent withdrawal, I felt pretty good about my account.

Groceries tended to, the two of us walk out of the market and I say goodbye, but we keep walking the same direction. A few seconds later, the two of us are at the bike rack, unlocking the only two bikes there, amidst a field of parked SUV’s and sports cars, warming up in the winter sun. I look at him as we are unlocking our bikes and say “Funny coincidence, huh?” He smiles and says “Not really.”

“The slightest movement affects the whole of nature; a stone cast into the sea changes the whole face of it. So, in the realm of Grace, the smallest act affects the whole by its results. Therefore everything has its importance.  In every action we must consider, besides the act itself, our present, past, and future conditions, and others whom it touches, and must see the connections of it all. And so we shall keep ourselves well in check.”  (Blaise Pascal)