I notice the stars. It’s not normal to see stars here. I've waited on the corner for the three blondes and the hairdresser for too long. When they arrive, drunker than I had left them, the gay fellow runs his hand front to back over the Mohawk he shaved on my head back in their hotel room. The girls grab me and cut a path through the crowd sloshing between the barricades, all the while complaining about a thirty block power outage due south. That explains the stars and I point them out but they didn’t seem to care. As I had predicted to myself hours ago, we're in a hip-hop club where the girls' presence causes immediate conflict. An angry woman smashes a bottle into a man’s head just for talking to one of them. Not long after this, a guy approaches me and says he sincerely thought I was Chuck Liddell. I cannot look like Chuck Liddell. Not in here. Not right now.
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Stoneman Douglas High School. Another disgusting attack on defenseless people, children. Another deranged individual living in a reality he felt compelled to share with the rest of us. It’s a shameful waste. The victims of these crimes inhabit my thoughts. I sympathize with them, empathize with them… I all the –ize with them but no more than I do with the thousands of people who die annually by handguns in this country. Over 2,000 children under the age of 12 died by guns, in general, between 2014 and 2017, according to The Week. All of it is tragic and horrifying and senseless and nearly unforgivable.
We have allowed this to continue far too long without addressing the actual problem. I am sorry to report to some of you that an “assault rifle” is not the actual problem. School shootings are not the actual problem. Delusional individuals are not the actual problem. Delusional political organizations are not the actual problem. I argue that the weapon—the GUN—is not quite the actual problem. These are miniscule strata compared to the actual problem. The bullets. The bullet is the physical menace and the only challenger up to the task (now that “thoughts and prayers” has finally suffered what I hope is the end of its fifteen minutes) is science. Laws—legislation, decrees, commandments—are in fact overrated deterrents. No law ever stopped murder. No law ever stopped rape. No law ever stopped thievery or swindling. As much as I love and trust Steven Pinker, laws bully the stats but they never summon enough strength to stop any crime of any kind. Maybe if legislators gave the innate futility of law a little more thought, they could use a little more common sense—but that’s neither here nor there. Within the borders of the USA, we have passed the event horizon with the amount of weapons and munitions. There is no legislating them out of public existence. They are here to stay and we ignore their ubiquity at our peril. This is an arms race the bullet has been winning for hundreds of years. Our creeping retreat to acquiescence is almost complete. One wonders if by some whipcrack in the fabric of time my grandfather’s generation—the Greatest Generation (minus all the steady-as-she-goes racism and misogyny)—faced this particular shift in American culture instead of us, could things be different? Raised amidst the demands of the Great Depression, they seemed capable of thinking through the most difficult problems with subdued glee. They won WWII by splitting an atom. They kick started NASA and the moon shots of the 60’s and 70’s. All of it by either outwitting their opponent or embracing some angular ingenuity. I suspect the folks of that generation would see the actual problem, weaponize the available technology, and find a way to beat the bullet. Maybe… I don’t know… What I do know is we should be thinking our way out of the problem. We have young, innovative tech available to us that if given the proper focus could make the bullet’s job exponentially more difficult. Graphene is shows promise. Engineered graphene could easily become a part of every article of clothing on the planet. There are other technologies. There are out of the box ideas yet to come. Comics and science fiction have been dreaming of ways to stop bullets since the first ball shot from a blunderbuss. There are ideas and technology out there ripe for weaponization. I find ultra-rich weirdoes like Elon Musk fascinating but compared to the bullet problem commercializing space travel is a piece of piss. Save some lives. Change this world before we go find another one. Eyes forward through the window, his shadow travelling more of the room than his feet. The enormous weight of calculation translated through posture and tilt, fingers thrumming the desk. The traffic sounded canned, arriving by pipe, maybe. Soon, his voice stirred betwixt his lips. A round dollop of sound at first until it became a vicious bark. Don’t I live in the future? Shouldn’t things I need materialize right before my eyes at my whim? It’s because it’s controlled by the government, you idiot, he scolded himself. They don’t make it easy. These things are precious. Probably made of the finest materials the You-Ass Government can procure. I hear the paper is a parchment from the original Declaration of Independence, marked with the blood of Civil War soldiers and dipped in the sweat of actual Grenada invaders. Grenada invaders have that real champion perspiration, right? The purest of all the veterans, I would imagine. The excretions of real winners.
“Ever think about it? Suicide?”
“Why do people ask that question? The answer is always yes. Like every time. The whole planet by age 10 answers yes. ” “That’s not a no.” “Tower, I am not currently considering taking my life.” “Okay. I believe you. I just worry about you.” “I believe you. And I worry about you.” “Do I seem depressed?" “Do you have to be depressed? I mean, you think there are some really happy people with everything going for them who just think, this it, I might as well jump?” “Pretty sure that’s a Van Halen song.” “Fuck those guys.” “They’ve lived too long.” “Let’s kill one of them.” “But who do you choose? It’s impossible.” “Easy. All of them except the bass player.” “Michael Anthony lives. Seriously, though, I’ve thought about it. I had my nihilistic moments out there when I was a baby. The one thing I always boiled it down to was the fact that regardless of all the variables and the chaos, something is going to happen in the next moment and then something else is going to happen in the very next moment. Even when the world is kicking me in the teeth, there’s always a certain gallows humor in challenging the chaos to throw something even more fucked up at me. ” “You are making me want to kill myself.” Quick post from the mobile. Forgive the lack of initial editing.
1. There’s almost no reason to describe it. We’ve all seen it in shaky phone video or the view from the belly of a helicopter. With a weapon or sometimes unarmed, disturbed people charge police in what we call “suicide by cop.” Even though we’ve all seen it, it is fairly rare. I don’t have stats but it’s certainly not something most cities experience daily. “Suicide by cop” cannot compete with the bloody realities of traffic stops or domestic disputes. That said, the demographic of such events is all over the map, a little heavy on the 35 to 50 crowd, but still diverse. Donald Trump wants to sow firearms among a group of people who are notorious for their underdeveloped frontal lobes. Teenagers. 2. Cops tread like ocean water the stress that comes with carrying a deadly weapon. Technology may advance in this field but as of today a weapon still belongs to whomever wields it. Imagine how stressful this fact in an environment where half the people you process will take the opportunity to relieve you of said weapon. Add to this the laughable amount of training in US law enforcement and the stress weighs still more. Yet, stress is a relative experience. I have worked for public schools. I spent 7 years immersed in the types of stress that cling to teaching like barnacles. Even with police training, teaching combined with the responsibility of a carrying a firearm seems too much to ask. Especially of a profession not known for Rambo-esque personalities. Donald Trump wants to mix all of this together in a structure inhabited by hundreds of people for whom the American Academy of Pediatrics just this week suggested sweeping new guidelines on detecting depression. Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world propped up by assholes like the Republicans and the NRA. Alot of people are probably going to die. PS. ...working on another blog over the whole gun debate again... I think it’s a tech issue. I think science can make guns (bullets) useless. Until then... There’s a place in the cove, a place with a view of the rocks that sit like unused material in the abandoned construction of the coarse cliff side. Sheltered from the sun by the overhung jungle, the crabs stagger this stone field, much of the surface a blanket of surgical edges. Old folks tell of a pirate movie filmed here in the forties. The stones made filming delicate and dangerous for the mermaids. The waves lap here at low tide, keeping time. The planetary chronograph. The sun sets between the towering stones during certain months. As things have gone, I find it impossible not to think of it. I am ruined by it. The red sea, breathing under the lust of the sun’s blinding egg yolk. Dolphin fins cut tracks on the surface. The salt breeze. It is all I see. No matter how much effort I waste to change it.
White gleam oppressed the sky, forcing one eye shut while the other surveyed the rock wall ahead of him. Five hundred feet of scrub and cactus curved the talus to the three hundred feet of jagged wall. He knew the fastest ascent. He knew the location of the hidden crack where very few before him had climbed the natural steps to the top, shortening the trek to town by a day. By now, his pursuers moved at a far greater speed behind him, somewhere in the valley. Probably on the old mining road. One of their three choices. Not the fastest choice but the easiest. Confident they had him out flanked. He imagined the dust they must have kicked up near the flatland breaks by the river. He imagined the children from the state home in awe of their numbers, their uniforms, their weapons. He hadn’t yet calculated his move a full fledged hoodwink but if they were to mistake his absence on the other side of the mountain tomorrow as anything but their own mistake, his strategy will have reaped a reward he had not considered until now.
I’m standing on the marble floor of the station, her tears falling into sparkling shatter below me. She has stopped herself from walking away to tell me this is all she has, all she knows. If she loses me, she might disappear. In too many ways to count I have described the scale of importance here. Bigger things rule our lives. Bigger things call me to the edge. I can save lives. I cannot resist the siren. Blood colored light pierces our world as the wall monitor cycles to another ad. She says, once more, that there are ten other people who can take my place. She reaches out for me. The train approaches. The other feet on the floor move in singular sound and direction. My will to touch her again withers in the subsequent rotation of advertising, the blood transmuted to some home with some family eating something, or drinking something. Maybe they’re smiling. Maybe they’re ribbed in embrace. For a very brief moment, I find her reflection in the jagged shaped of her tears on the floor but as I sit down and close my eyes, I admit to myself that I made that part up.
Welcome to another costly spin around the sun! 2018 has arrived. I thought I’d talk about mystery today since both 2016 and 2017 did a number on us. I doubt 2018 will be much different. In my unfinished definition of struggle, mystery performs a lion’s share of the labor. That may not compute right away but let me rearrange some things. Our only physical experience of time is bound to the present, the now. The now is the only place where we touch time and time touches us. Yet without the ability to recall the past, the now means little. This recall develops between the ages of two and four and from that murky moment on, we ride the spearhead of time with a reasonable level of cognizance. Granted, we alone construct our reality whether it be the present, the past, or the future but dark, pregnant futures make assembly treacherous. We rarely do it well. Hindsight boosts our precision with the past—not by much but it’s enough to make our gambles on the future seem psychotic in comparison. This mystery in the projectile of time holds individual struggle in fixed gaze, catatonic. Every passing second, we convince ourselves there will be a succeeding second and another and another and so on. Our only evidence for this conviction: the flimsy memories of a miniscule amount of seconds that came before the next. The whole order of operation grows shaky. As always, my response follows the Camus rationale. What else is there to do but continue? Kill yourself or point your nose into the wind. With full acceptance of the relativity of emotions and experience, reacting to my fear of the vacancy at the razor’s edge of time seems a waste. A waste of what? The possibility of the next second. Possibility creates value in the now. The now, not the spearhead, is the exhilarating vehicle into the possibilities, even if those possibilities are slim. It’s sometimes difficult to quantify the constraint mysteries place on us. It pervades our existence. At times the fear these mysteries instill in us becomes debilitating. Many of us use religion as bulwark against the mysteries of death, for instance. Unfortunately most religions fail to account for the ubiquitous nature of mystery. One could even make an Occam’s Razor case for mystery itself more deserving the title of deity than some ambiguous personality clothed in a thundercloud. One can argue any classic deity into a corner where they too face the awesome void of mystery. Once deities acquire personalities and weigh decisions, their realities appear not unlike our own, subject to the unknown, equally under threat. No religion I’ve ever seen makes a deep enough dive to explain itself without invoking the limited capacities of our minds or our knowledge—which is acceptable. In fact, it’s a baby step in correct direction. There is a simple reason for this veiled confession. The mystery still stands. Neither personal saviors nor reincarnation have delivered any corporeal answers. Even cyclical cosmologies, the oldest and sometimes most coherent cosmologies, cannot answer with evidence why the cycle exists only that we should trust that this is all there is for eternity. There is no end to mystery. It will always be there. There is no final puzzle piece. There is always another level of reality. This is one of the penultimate facts about the Universe and it does wonders when we accept it as such. Stop pining for an answer. Start asking different questions. Back in November, a chap—I’ll call him a chap—named Jeremiah J. Johnston wrote strange albeit typical piece that came across my media feed. Fox News. The heart that beats the veins of ‘boomer fear. He’s titled it “What mainstream media, cultural elites just don’t get: If there’s no God, then there really is no humanity.” There is a lot wrong with this piece. Obviously. The part I will address in a different context is the irony of legislating old fashioned values. Until then let’s nibble on this morsel. “Indeed, one wonders when people will learn. In today’s subjective, post-modern world truth is fast disappearing. Some elites and social engineers deride concepts like right and wrong.” Jeremiah J. Johnston Aside the comedy of suggesting that evangelism is bolted into the bedrock of truth, he whips out right and wrong as if he’s discovered it in some 2,000 year old, over edited, over analyzed text. How many times must one point out the failures of right and wrong in the Abrahamic texts to provide logical versions of either right or wrong?
One of my favorite messy moments for Gospel ethics occurs when the Pharisees and Jesus have a dispute over washing hands before meals, part of Jewish law. Jesus Christ—the literal big G God—instead of handing the human race a radical tool for fighting disease, he uses this moment to peddle his parables and theology at the expense of billions of lives. Think about it. By random chance, a method for minimizing the transference of germs from our hands to our mouths actually exists in Jewish law. Jesus—all knowing, all seeing, big G God—could have endorsed the practice in a monumental act of compassion but instead he tells his followers that washing their hands is a false practice that denies his very purpose. Instead of compassion, Jesus doles selfishness. Is this the right and wrong Mr. Johnston is convinced lives in a battered, mistreated collection of stories from a culture grown on spooky traditions and blind authority? It’s the sort of right and wrong I find troubling throughout the Bible. If Jesus can’t get this right, it’s no shock his followers can’t get things like support for Roy Moore or Donald Trump right. |
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episodes post daily. Paperback editions are available. My newest novel River of Blood is available on Amazon or Apple Books. Unless noted, all pics credited to Skitz O'Fuel.
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