Stop Separating Me

            I have this dog named Flower.  She’s a scruffy tan terrier, probably mixed with greyhound because she’s fast as hell.  And yes, she does look like something invented by Dr. Seuss.  She is also the best hunter, besides a cat, that I’ve ever seen.  I hate that.  Well, unless civilization crumples, then I’ll be happy because she can bring me dinner and I’m pretty sure she would share.  Aside from being lethal she’s very generous and maternal in her general attitude towards life.  She attempts to give me a slobber bath daily

            So, this morning as I head outside to pick up the dog shit, Flower’s got a woodpecker in her mouth.  When I yell, it frightens her and she lets it go, then grabs it again by the edge of the wing.  I throw my coffee cup at her, hey, you use what’s on hand in an emergency, she lets go and the bird makes a mad dash on foot, tangling itself in the two layered fence, half hogwire, half chain link.  As my dog tries frantically to regain her grip on the bird, I conk her on the head, taking her aback long enough so that I’m able to get a hand on the poor terrified bird.  As it screams and pecks my hand, I can see it’s gotten itself into quite a pickle and I can neither push it through the tangle of fence nor pull it back out.  Finally, I am able to get one of its wings into position and turn it so it can move forward. I midwife the bird through the fence. I watch it on the other side, worried that my dog broke a wing, but it manages to align them and shake them straight.  I’m about 70% sure it will recover.

            “Bad dog.  Bad dog.”  This said with limited conviction, exactly the same way as when she killed the ground squirrel, the tree squirrel, and the collared lizard.  She’s only doing what her breeding tells her to do.  Catch and kill small creatures.

           

            When I was a little kid we had a dog.  Shane was barrel bodied, with shortish legs, mostly black coloring but some brown around the muzzle so maybe there was a little Rottweiler in there.  He was my best friend, by far the most interesting and loving being in the family, and when my parents gave him away because my sister’s asthma doctor told them to—never mind the fact that my father continued smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, in the house, for another 3 years—I was decimated.  Our cat, Francis, got the heave ho too.  What I remember most about that time is that we kids were not allowed to talk about it.  Shane and Francis were gone, period.  Humans are more important than animals.  I was supposed to accept this as a given.

            At catechism on Saturday, thoroughly grief-stricken, I confided in a nun about what had happened, and told her I’d be happy when I died, that I was going to be very good so I could see Shane in Heaven.  She told me unequivocally that of course I wouldn’t.  Dogs don’t have souls and can’t go there.  When I asked her where they went she said, “nowhere.”  

            Something inside me started screaming that day and has never stopped.  I wanted my dog back so bad that I would have gladly followed him into Hell but “nowhere?”  I hadn’t any idea what to do with that.  I wondered how I was so different from Shane, and resolved that if someone like him, someone so playful, sweet and warm couldn’t go to Heaven, then I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place.  What was there to do there anyway?  Sit at the right hand of the Father?  For what?  How long did I have to sit?  Everything grown ups thought mattered was boring, and to hell with it all.  That was the beginning of the end of Catholicism for me.  Years later, at about the age of 14, I managed to avoid attending church by clinging to the leg of the bed harder than any limpet to any rock in all of human history.  I haven’t been back since.  If I am so different from Shane, if someone like him cannot be my brethren and kin, then I didn’t want to be me.  Being a human was just too much of a burden.

            Years later, schlepping through the first year in college, I took a logic class and was fortunate enough to have a wonderful teacher.  Bill was smart, completely in love with his subject, and along with his goofy grin, had long blond hair and didn’t seem to give one goddamn about what other people thought about him.  He’d dress weird, drag around found objects; I remember a long stuffed snake and a digereedoo, and when it came to making sure his students understood the material he’d do just about anything.  For instance, one day he did a miles long logic derivation and since it wouldn’t fit on a regular paper, he did it on a long roll of butcher paper, which he unfurled into the classroom.  By the end of the semester I could do long derivations just like that, and discovering my love for logic, decided to major in philosophy.  But it wasn’t all as much fun as logic.  No, no, no, far from it.

            As a matter of fact, Epistemology (the theory of knowledge) felt like a bad acid trip.  My professor styled himself an old southern gentleman, his bushy hair parted hard on the side like a confederate colonel, had a humongous belly and for some reason I never did figure out, loved to say the words “beef bourguignon.”  Either he thought he was neato because he could say it, or maybe at some point he’d succeeded at cooking it.  Maybe he could even spell it.  Anyway, he would use it in all his examples: “If a beef bourguignon falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a mess?”  That kind of thing.  But the real problem with Epistemology was that it was there that I first encountered Rene Descartes and his “cogito.”  Now, I’m no historian of philosophy and it is many years later, but the way I remember Descartes is a foppish, sulky French guy sitting by a Dutch oven, whatever that is, and wondering whether or not he existed.  I mean, on a purely physical level I’m guessing he knew it, otherwise why would he have bothered keeping warm by sitting next to an oven?   But he wanted to prove it so he could argue with other people.  After 3 days and having eliminated everything else…Let’s see, I shit therefore I am, I refuse to get out of my pajamas therefore I am, my earwax is thickening therefore I am… none of the answers he came up with really had the oomph he was looking for.  I suspect his underlying desire was the need to prove that Man is special and stands above and outside the animals in the “great chain of being.”  The great chain of being was a very popular idea back in those days.  It was hierarchical and went as follows: first you had God, then angels, then saints, then regular humans, then animals and loads of other stuff that Descartes didn’t think mattered.  It was a happy day when he came up with his cogito.  First, because he could leave the damn Dutch oven which had undoubtedly gotten cold by then, and second, he thought it was iron clad proof that he existed.  “Cogito ergo sum,” (everything sounds smarter if you say it in Latin) “I think therefore I am.”

I never did figure out whether or not he still existed while he was sleeping and presumably not thinking, but better minds than mine have had at that one.  The point is, back in those days if you were a philosopher who didn’t want to be tortured to death for heresy, everything you came up with had to be consistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church and Descartes’ cogito was so consistent with church teachings, with holy scripture, with Aristotle and Saint Augustine, that not a single clerical feather was ruffled.  God had made man in his image and of course the Almighty is a boffo thinker, so Man must be too.  Case closed.  Of course, an unfortunate corollary of the cogito is that anything that does not think, as defined by Man, lacks existence. So, were you for example, to throw a cat into the fire and it screamed, it wouldn’t be because it was actually in pain, since it didn’t exist in any real, meaningful way.  It would simply be due to a physical reaction, like the outgassing of a green log.  I’ve never read anything that made me believe Rene Descartes was a sadist; and I don’t imagine he made a habit of throwing cats into fires, but it does logically follow that if he wanted to he could have without transgressing any moral boundaries.

It’s interesting to note that Descartes “cogito” is entirely consistent with biblical teachings which dictate that Man is, fundamentally, a divine creature that stands apart from the rest of creation.  This seems to me an incredibly lonely place to be. But fortunately, it is also completely wrongheaded.  The fact is that my DNA is 99.9 percent the same as the bum who just knocked on my door looking for someone named “Frank,” but also as Lebron James.  It is 98.6% the same as a chimpanzee, 98.4% identical to a gorillas, 92% the same as a mouse (really!)  I share 84% of my DNA with my dog, 60% with my neighbor’s chicken, 80% with a cow, 90% with a cat, 61% with a fruit fly and 60% with a banana.  In other words, I am not “me.”  “You” are not you; and “they” are certainly not “other” and therefore inferior.  We are all DNA in seemingly infinite configurations inhabiting a planet called “Earth.” We are the same thing.

I remember a short story by Martin Amis.  In it, the aliens surveying Earth could not tell one thing from another.  They simply broadcast, “Hello DNA!” And when they got no answer, decided not to worry about wiping the planet clean of whatever this slimy stuff was, so they could take it for themselves.

I believe the Christian creation myth, elaborated on and reiterated by philosophers like Descartes, and the consequent internalizing of the “great chain of being,” is wholly responsible not just for the separation we feel from one another, but for the separation we feel from the natural world.  And in the name of this separation, and by giving ourselves permission to minimize the importance of every other creature on the planet by virtue of our specialness, we’ve all but guaranteed our passing from existence.  There have been many human cultures that did not understand human beings this way; many Native American peoples rightly view human beings as part of nature and other species not as inferiors but as other nations.  However, this sensibility is functionally extinct on Earth today.  Its absence has been described in many ways, but unfortunately the only thing that comes to mind at the moment is that or the masturbating comedian Louis C.K., who called it “the big sad.”  It’s always there, in everyone to greater or lesser degrees, like a spiritual sucking chest wound.  We try to fill it with stuff—electronics, cars, big houses, money, or substances--drugs, booze, massive amounts of food, but it never entirely goes away.  We are forever trying to fill a hole that our egoism, borne of our insistence that we are better and more important that every other creature on the planet, has created.  But we never will.  In amputating ourselves from our non-human brothers and sisters we have instead, cut off ourselves from ourselves.

We are not better that the fish of the seas, the whales, the dolphins, the deer in the forests, the tigers in the jungles, the koalas in the trees, the snakes in the desert.  What we call human intelligence is nothing more that a feedback loop born of opposible thumbs paired with large brains in order to manipulate our environments.  Hopefully, this will not be repeated again in the evolutionary future.  I’m not terribly worried about it, since it’s only happened once and while it’s impossible to calculate the odds, it seems unlikely.

As for the nun who told me I’d never see my dog again, fuck you, Sister.  You’re probably dead by now, sitting at the right hand of the Father, chained like Princess Leia to Jabba the Hutt, and I sincerely hope it’s every bit as boring as I imagined it would be when I was 6.  When I come around one day, with Shane and every other wonderful non-human friend I’ve had in all the years since I first gazed into your empty eyes, I hope every damn one of them lifts his leg, on you.  Then we’ll head off.  And live happily ever after.

Is my Neighbor Living with a Dead Dog?

Is my Neighbor living with a Dead Dog?

I’ve never liked my neighbor, but I have pretended to.  We all do that, don’t we?  You pass each other in the driveways, taking out the weekly garbage, all that.  Who wants animosity?  Certainly not me.  But sometimes animosity comes looking for you. 

She’s a type, former hippie, the real dumb kind who doesn’t believe in medicine unless it was taught to her by a salesperson in the vitamin aisle at Whole Foods.  Why spend time listening to people with actual degrees and at least nominal brain cell activity when you can rub some slop on that oozed out of a tree or was shat out of Albanian maggot’s ass? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for alternative medicine as long as no one is actually sick or injured.  It gives hypochondriacs and crackpots something to do and Lord knows those people need to be kept busy.  It’s all tailor made for my neighbor, whom I’ll call Rosemund for the simple reason that Rosemund is what she should have been named in the first place.   Rosemund is never sick.  She could never get sick because she never interacts with any other human beings and rarely leaves her shaded and shuttered apartment.  She used to, to visit her mother in the nursing home, only she got thrown out for screaming at the help for putting Desitin on her mother’s chapped ass instead of yogurt, the way she wanted.

When I first moved into this duplex, I would make friendly overtures, inviting Rosemund over for a glass of wine or a meal, but she was always on a “cleanse.”  I don’t understand these people and their cleanses or why they think they need them, nor do I accept their reasoning.  If the human intestine is such a vile thing that it needs to be cleansed they should just go get some of that stuff they give you before a colonoscopy; that stuff will clean out your gut for sure and within about 8 hours it will be so clean you can eat off it.  I know.  I’ve seen pictures.

            The other thing weird thing about my neighbor is that nobody, and I mean nobody, ever goes into her house.  The couple of times I’ve knocked on the door for one reason or another, she’s opened it just enough to squeeze out, closing it right behind her at the same rate she’s moving forward so you cannot catch a glimpse anything inside.  I’ve heard from the handyman that she’s got junk stacked from floor to ceiling in every room, with just a few paths to walk from one place to another.  He gets mad because every time he goes there to fix something, he has to move loads of crap to get to it.  The other day she wanted him to do something in the “spare” bedroom—these are 2 bedroom places—and she expected him to move all the shit out then put it back in.  He said, no thank you.  He’s very polite.

            But hey, people can do their things.  I’m a live and let live kind of gal.  If they want to be weirdass hoarders with stuff stacked to the ceiling that’s their business.  Think of the Collyer brothers, the greatest hoarders of all time.  In that haunted house mansion of theirs in New York City they didn’t bother anyone until eventually their tunnels amidst the rubbish collapsed and they suffocated under all the worthless shit they’d been collecting for 50 years and it started making a stink, or at least a stink that was worse than before.  It bothered the neighbors.

             But at this point, there’s not much of stink coming from Rosemund’s house, except for a cloying, old lady perfumy one when she’s been out on the porch watering her potted plants.  I have a feeling though, that pretty soon that is going to change.  In the four years I’ve lived here she has been threatening to get a dog, but I’ve never believed her.  How can she have a dog?  I’ve never seen her walk any place but from her house to the car, sometimes limping, sometimes with a cane although sometimes not, depending on whether anyone is watching.  As far as I can tell she’s one of those totally non-physical people who just sits home and watches TV all day, and dogs need to be exercised.  But about a month ago, the neighbor across the street, feeling sorry for her I guess because her mother without yogurt on her ass, died, took her to the pound and she got one.  I have not seen it or heard it.  The only reason I know it’s there is that the handyman told me and at my request took pictures with his phone. In the first picture you can see Rosemund’s legs, a shepherd mix dog on a leash, and a dog crate.  In the second picture, there’s a dog with a horribly swollen nose.

            I saw Rosemund out front, “Wow, what happened to your dog’s nose.”

            She was futzing around with her plants, watering them and pulling off dead leaves, got a real surprised look on her face that I knew about the dog, until she figured out that the handyman had been spying for me.  “Oh, she got in an ant hill,” she said.

            “Jeeze, are you going to take her to the vet?” 

            “Oh no, oh no.  Coconut oil,” she says.

            “What about coconut oil?”  I’ve got nothing against coconut oil.  I have some in my bathroom.  It’s lovely after you’ve shaved your legs.

            “I use coconut oil,” she said.

            “For what?”  I was really confused.  I’ve known some really brain dead hippies in my time, mostly during the seventies and I don’t think even the dumbest of them would have put coconut oil on a dog’s nose that was swollen to 3 times it’s normal size. 

            “I have some Benedryl,” says I.  “At least it will bring down the swelling.”  But she starts lecturing me on the dangers of “allopathic” medicine.

 “Ohh, I don’t want to make it worse!” she says.  “She’s also got a really bad case of dog flu.”  Again, I search my mind for what the heck she could be talking about.  I’ve adopted lots of animals from shelters and pounds and never heard of the of “dog flu.”

 Finally, I twigged. “You mean kennel cough?  They all get it.  That’s why they give you a free vet check.  If you take her in they’ll give her some antibiotics and it will be over in two or three days.”

She looks at me with massive superiority, almost as if I’m a particularly thick child, and explains that she took her to a vet who gave her “random” antibiotics and it made her worse.  What she is fighting now is a weak immune system, with herbs and lots of nutrients.  Thank you for your concern, (but fuck you.)

Okay, I added the last part. But it was there.  She’s one of those women who cultivates a “sweet” personality.  These people are usually as dangerous as fuck.  

A week or so later, I see her out front engaged in heated conversation with the neighbor who took her to the pound to get the dog in the first place.  She’s pleading and finally yelling at Rosemund to take the dog to the vet.  Seems the coconut oil she rubbed all over the ant-bitten swollen muzzle has cause a raging infection.  This I hear later from the neighbor who tells me that she not only offered to take the dog to the vet, but to pay for it.  Rosemund said no and the neighbor now says she’s “washed her hands of her.”

Well, that’s fine for her.  She’s across the street but I share a backyard fence and a wall with this psychotic throwback, and have not heard or seen any sign of a dog over there, at all.  I’ve called Animal Control and they say there’s nothing they can do unless I’ve seen the dog, which I haven’t.  I look through the fence.  I don’t think it’s even been in the back yard.  I’m surrounded by back yard fences on three sides.  On one side lives Zack, a friendly Shar Pei mix with whom my dogs visit regularly, and in the back there are a couple of I don’t know whats, but both my dogs run over to that fence when they go out and pee or bark at it, depending on what the moment requires.  They never go over to Rosemund’s fence.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure Rosemund has increased her hoarding to include a dead dog.  I imagine she talks to it every day, maybe even pets it; dead dogs stay soft for awhile.  I’ve tried intervention, but Animal Control says there’s nothing they can do unless I’ve seen it, and of course I haven’t.

I imagine one of these days I’ll start to smell it.

So, I really have no idea what is going on next door.  I only know that the only way a young dog would stay this quiet is if it was still deathly ill, or dead.  On some days I try to be optimistic; maybe she took it back to the pound, but realistically, there’s no way in hell.  That would mean Rosemund was wrong and if I’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that Rosemund is never wrong.

Monsoon, by Catherine O’Sullivan

Chaos

The heavens open up and bring rain,

like a lover gone for too many seasons,

      struggling in the swirl of winds battling Titans.

Fury and dust, unimaginably, desperately charged.

Thunderheads thousands of stories tall

      boil and surge, scream and release the deluge

Until the nighttime stillness descends on the fields, joyously singing

      in the dark.

Nowhere Man Syndrome

                I used to have an abusive boyfriend.  A real monster, he damaged me in ways emotionally and physically too numerous to count.  There were clues the size of tree trunks that beneath his jovial façade he was a hateful fuck, but I wouldn’t see them.  It was a hard time: menopause, divorce, my oldest son leaving home, the economy on the verge of collapse.  So I couldn’t afford to see this person for what he was not only because there were good parts, and I was hanging onto them for dear life, but because my being with him was inconsistent with who I believed I was.  I was educated, mature, sensible.  Not the sort of person at all who would be with such a person.  I was not that stupid.  Only I was.

                Once upon a time I sat down to a dinner table laden with marvelous food: salmon en croute, cream of asparagus soup, fine wine, all with people I did not know well.  The matriarch had been cooking all day long and when I had offered to help, she kindly yet forcibly chased me out of the kitchen.  I didn’t really think twice about the half empty bottle of wine on the kitchen counter even though it was only three in the afternoon.  I figured she was cooking with it.   Around seven in the evening when we sat down to dinner I noticed she was completely sloshed, eyes bleary, overly emotional, slurring her words.  No one at the table but me noticed.  These included her two sons and her husband.  As the night progressed and the cook passed out, I asked them how long their mother had been an alcoholic.  To a man they were shocked.  Sure she enjoyed her wine but to their way of thinking “an alcoholic” was something else, some filthy drunkard passed out in an alley clutching a bottle in a paper bag and pissing himself. 

                I came to understand that these people could not see their besotted mother for what she was because the cost was too high.  One of them was continually borrowing money from her, and so needed to see her as half “Mama” and half automated teller machine.  Her husband, a lovely man but a fairly recent acquisition, had been in love with her since his early twenties, which meant he could not see her at all.  Love really is blind.  Also deaf and dumb.

                Both of these little stories are examples of “The Nowhere Man” syndrome, although unlike the Beatles’s song, the people don’t just see what they want to see.  They see only what their emotional budgets can handle.  In the first instance, falling madly in love with a abusive male was so wholly inconsistent with my understanding of self that I couldn’t conceive of it; and in the second, the consequences of accepting the cook’s alcoholism where simply too great.  You can’t continually borrow money from someone drowning in addiction; that would make you a bad person.  You can’t have quiet evenings at home with your lifelong love, fulfilling a desire of decades, when she’s passed out and drooling on your knee.  We humans are storytellers and those are whoppingly bad stories.

                I’ve often thought that humankind would be a lot better off if we were to stop thinking of ourselves as marvelous, special beings and instead took stock of what we really are.  Contrary to what philosophy and religion would have us believe, we are not primarily moral creatures.  We are creatures with physical and psychological needs and granted, sometimes, very brave individuals come alone and take difficult moral stands--Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela come to mind--but these people are the exception that proves the rule.  Primarily, we are animals, and like all animals our major concern is prolonging our own existence. Abraham Maslow described a pyramid of human needs, making the point that until the basic needs are met, the need for food, water, love and belonging, it’s not worth talking about loftier ideas like self-actualization and moral principles.

                Americans are currently on a precipice below of which looms a presidential election.  If humanity’s continued existence is feasible at all, it’s imperative that we elect a sensible candidate and deliver ourselves from the nightmare we’ve been lost in for the past two plus years.  Currently, many liberals, progressives, and much of the Democratic party is wringing its hands about the overt racism of the current occupant of the White House.  But a recent poll, yesterday, indicates that since his despicable comments about 4 non-white congresswomen, his approval rating has actually gone up.  Trump and his moronic rhetoric taps into a vein of the American people so desperate, so scared, so angry, that they behave like a wounded animal and will lash out at anything.  Trump’s racism, in the form of his wholly invented “border crisis,” is giving them exactly what they need.  A target, something to focus on that’s a lot easier than facing real reasons for their misery.  Nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  They have no safety net and a serious illness can decimate entire families.  Public education is failing, yet they support know-nothings like Betsy DeVoss, appointed by a know nothing president so wrapped up in his psychopathology that he couldn’t cares less whether they all live or die.  But they can’t see it.  Their communities are drug addled by floods of prescription medication foisted on them specifically by political power behind Big Pharma.  Their jobs are vanishing but like me, with the abusive boyfriend and the family of the alcoholic mother, the truth is too big and too difficult to tackle.  If you combine this fact with the intense racism currently promulgated by the GOP and it reveals an aspect of human nature so ugly and so inconsistent with what we’d like to believe that many people refuse to even look it. 

And many of them are members of the Democratic party.  I am so tired of its moral outrage, at its answering to the Trumpian dog whistle whenever it blows, that it’s ruining my digestion.  Any successful Democratic presidential nominee is going to have to put forth policies that will improve the lives of the American people, even the real dumb ones, and stop tilting at the giant windmill that calls itself “Trump.”  She will need to craft ideas that the taxi driver who has lost his profession to Uber, can understand and embrace.  They need to come up with a solution for the father of 3 being worked to death at an Amazon warehouse for, big whoop, 15 dollars an hour while the CEO of that company holds the title of richest man in the world.  American citizens need to believe again, that their children can have better lives than they have, instead of worrying about financial ruin should a family member become sick.  They need to accept the science of climate change and help vote in someone who might give their children the chance of inheriting an inhabitable world.  These things must be assured before the millions of Americans sporting MAGA hats concealing desperation borne of utter hopelessness and metastasized into a wholly manufactured hatred of “the other,” can ever be induced to even think about moral principles.  The sputtering and indignant outrage currently being spewed by the twenty something presidential candidates, while morally worthy is, in reality, worth virtually nothing.

                 

Animals and Aliens

Animals and Aliens

            I’m hungry.  I’ve got a jar of peanut butter and some bread.  The problem is, the peanut butter has been in the fridge and is rock solid. There is no way I can spread it on the bread without tearing a hole in it, so I take the lid off, tear off the inner seal and stick it in the microwave set for 25 seconds.  That, I figure, should do the trick.  However, unbeknownst to me the inner seal has aluminum in it.  The microwave goes “zzzz, snap, crack” scaring the shit out of me and as I release the door to take the jar out, I scan the countertop for a knife.  I use the knife to scrape the remnants of the aluminum seal off, then microwave the peanut butter again.  All goes well.  I get to eat and the bread remains unholy.

            Using a tool to solve my problem is not second nature to me.  It is first nature, the place my human mind immediately goes when faced with adversity.  Throughout the day I will unconsciously utilize my nature to solve dozens if not hundreds of minor problems.  It will not occur to me, at the end of the day, that I am special because of all the clever things I’ve done.  I’ve just been a human being.  That’s how we be, us humans.  We manipulate our environments to further our goals whether they include making a sandwich or creating electricity using a nuclear reactor.  It ain’t no thang, not really.  We can’t help ourselves.  It’s what evolution has produced.

            I used to have this horse.  A beautiful bay mustang called Satch.  He was a jumpy guy, had had a hard life, rounded up off the reservation and sold to some chick high on meth , and left to stand in a dirt lot with a bunch of other horses for four years.  He’d been “greenbroke,” or accustomed to a halter and saddle but not much more than that, and when his drug addled owner had gotten over the fun of drugs and jumped on a one way bus to the dying part, I took possession of Satch rather than see him go the slaughter, where he would have been rendered for cash on the pound.  Satch accepted me only marginally throughout our entire 8 year relationship, but did the best he could.  I’ll never forget that first day he let me close enough to take the cholla cactus branches out of his mane and tail.  I’m sure they’d been irritating him terribly, but for a very long time they seemed preferable to letting someone like me actually touch him.  Eventually he did though, and became a good little trail horse.  But like I said, he was jumpy.

            And trying.  It vexed me daily that when we’d ride out from the boarding stable to the desert trails, a distance of about a quarter of a mile.  He was mostly fine, but there was one day a week in which he wasn’t.  Garbage day.  I’d get so angry at him, “it’s just a garbage bin, you big dummy!”  I must have said that a dozen times before it finally dawned on me that he wasn’t the dummy.  I was.  All locked up in my human “intelligence” I couldn’t understand that while what I saw was a big ugly metal box, Satch saw a likely predator.  Every day of the week these large, industrial sized bins were in the same places, but on garbage day, after they’d been picked up and emptied, they’d be moved.  While this was almost entirely below the radar for me, Satch was a horse and to a horse that has evolved over millions of years of traveling the plains and perceiving every single detail of its range, the moving of garbage bins was a huge deal.  Satch’s ancestral knowledge dictated that things that move are either other herbivores—you can identify them easily because of the way they smell and the fact that they’re almost always chewing, other horses, or predators.  In other words, to Satch those garbage bins may very well have been moving in to kill and eat him.

            It’s humiliating to admit that then and now I am so locked into my human way of thinking, to what I understand as logic based and fairly utilitarian, that it took me many months to “see” Satch.  The truth is, he was a careful and very smart horse.  Had he been doing what his DNA prepared him to do, roaming freely with his herd, his capacity to survive would have been much higher than other of his less attentive brethren.

            A long time ago I was fortunate enough to get to work with wild animals.  It was at a now defunct marine park called Marineland, located at the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California.  I started as summer intern, moved on to a lab technician position and eventually was hired as a keeper, the first such hire in the park’s history.  This was in the late 1970’s, the cusp of the time in which women were allowed to have real careers.  Back then I had a sort of romanticized idea of marine mammals, particularly cetaceans, since all kinds of nuts like John Lilly were, at the time, insisting that whales and dolphins were not just perhaps of superior intelligence to human beings, but some kind of cosmic.  Everybody was always looking for “cosmic” back then.  The 60’s and 70’s had been filled with a lot of drugs.  Whether or not cetaceans, whales and dolphins are “smarter” than human beings, that certainly doesn’t set the bar very high.  Marineland’s cetaceans earned their captive keep by jumping through hoops, racing their trainers around the tanks like jet skis, and sliding out of the water and smiling.  Interesting thing about Bottlenosed dolphins or Tursiops truncates, they can be in the most sublime agony and still look like they’re smiling.  A man named Bill Walker wrote a paper once, about what it must feel like for a sonic creature to live in a cement tank.  The devil himself could probably not come up with more exquisite torture.  But that’s another story.

            Mostly, during my time at Marineland, I worked with California Sea Lions at the Stranded Animal Center.  Every year, especially during breeding season, local animal control departments collected sick and injured animals from beaches and brought them to us.  We’d do our best to heal them, but their mortality rates were still about 60%.  I’m sure these days, people who do this kind of work have gotten better at it, I hope so, but in general, if a marine mammal is sick enough to haul out on a beach filled with drunken hominids and screaming kids, it’s sick enough to have already resigned itself to death.

            So, in the early summer I would be inundated with sea lions.  It was my job to feed and medicate them, clean up after them and generally take care of all their needs during rehabilitation.  I was never afraid of them; my instinctive reaction to any wild animal is awe, but maybe I should have been.  California Sea Lions are the most battling, posturing, roaring, whites of the eye threatening, mouth open display of big bear-like teeth, noisy and barking animals there are.  They’re constantly muscling up to each other, growling and lunging, complaining, objecting, and putting up with each other, but just barely, animals on earth. 

            And it’s almost all for show.  They rarely actually bite each other, or anyone.  Their entire way of being is based on the knowledge of their social hierarchy, respecting or not respecting, depending on what they’re up to on a given day, their positions within the larger group.  Social intelligence, for a sea lion, is everything.

            I read an article on the BBC news feed yesterday about human “intelligence,” in which the author proposes the idea that human beings have reached the pinnacle, that as a self-limiting quality, our brand of intelligence has left us nowhere to go.  The article itself (probably inspired by the ascendance of people like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro) mostly describes the physiology of feedback loops.  For instance, we’re taller now than we were in the 19^th century because of better nutrition, less debilitating jobs-- at least in the first world not many of us have to get up a 4am and go down the coal mine anymore—and of course advances in medical science.   I found the author’s argument sound, but the best part of the entire piece was the photo at the beginning.  It was of a man in a business suite sitting at the end of a tree limb and sawing it off, ensuring that when he is finished he will plummet to his death.

            It reminded me of Carl Sagan, the now deceased astronomer, and his question about the central problem in the search for extraterrestrial life.  A long time ago, astronomers and the public in general, were keen on this but at the time, the early 1980’s, there was a lot of fear about nuclear war.  The United States and the Soviet Union were in an arms race, defining which country could be the most lethal should war break out, and arriving eventually at a policy called M.A.D, or mutually assured destruction.  If anyone launched on anyone else, both nations would be destroyed.  This worked fairly well as a disincentive for starting the kinds of large scale wars of the past.  Of course it didn’t address the fact that China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Israel had all acquired or were in the process of acquiring The Bomb during these years and Sagan wondered if it is possible that every time a so called “intelligent” civilization reaches the level of technological sophistication required for space travel, it was fated to destroy itself.

            This is the crossroads at which we have arrived, now but oddly enough, not because we’re on the brink of nuclear war.  The destruction we’re facing is due to severe human overpopulation and an attitude towards our environment that can only be described as reckless.  Our trash is everywhere, in the oceans, on the land and in the air.  Earth’s atmosphere is heating up so rapidly because of carbon dioxide emissions, due almost entirely on our dependence on fossil fuels, that it’s probable we’ve already gone beyond the point of no return.  We’ve sawed through the branch.  Carl Sagan’s was right, just wrong about the tool of our destruction.  It’s not a bomb.  It’s us.

            As scientists send probes to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and search the heavens daily with giant radio telescopes looking for signs of technological sophistication or “intelligence,” were we to find it, it would be disastrous for contact to take place.  Human beings, with our manipulative, relentless mental activity and self-importance, cannot help themselves from destroying other species in the name of our imagined superiority.  Evolution has produced billions of species, only one of which has opposable thumbs and big brains.  This one evolutionary mistake is revealing itself to be a planetary disaster on the scale of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  Scientists say we’re in the Sixth Mass Extinction and anyone who argues this fact is simply and woefully uninformed.  Hopefully when we are gone, and the remnants of life left on earth resumes its evolutionary march, it will not make the same mistake again.

Anger Monkeys and Meditation

Anger Monkeys and Meditation

            There are a couple of things on my mind this morning: anger monkeys and meditation.  Occasionally I run into anger monkeys, and mostly these are men, with dogs they can’t control at the end leashes held tight as if strangling them is a reasonable training technique.  These dogs can never, under any circumstance, be off leash primarily because they would head for the hills and keep going forever.  Now before anybody goes wah wah, I do keep my dogs on leashes when I’m walking the neighborhood not so much to comply with social norms, but because I don’t want them to get hit by cars.  However, sometimes when I’m at the park, after spending some time in the off-leash area, I walk around the rest of the park and let Flower chase lizards and ground squirrels.  Fortunately, she’s a spaz and rarely catches them, but being a terrier it’s her raison d’ etre.   Barley, my other dog, has to stay on a leash because he tends to run off and then completely forget where he’s run from, where he ought to be running to, and everything else pertinent to his continued existence.  This is probably why when I adopted him he was all banged up from getting run over.  Anyway, off leash, Flower doesn’t really pay attention to anything but whatever she’s chasing, or imagines she’s chasing, beneath a dumpster or around a bush.  She couldn’t care less about other dogs; she pays attention to me and checks in often.  This activity, AKA, being allowed to do what she was bred to do, makes her incredibly happy.  As a result of letting my dogs have fun, they have very good mental health and anyone who knows me knows that they are well behaved and easy to be around.

            But this morning I ran into an anger monkey.  Everybody gets angry sometimes, but an anger monkey is a person for whom anger is the default state.  They’re always looking for something to be pissed off at and this guy was no exception.  White, bald, head kind of flat in the back, he had a female of the species and three or four muscular, boxer, pit bull looking dogs over which he had very little control, on leashes.   Well, the female of the species wasn’t on a leash, at that moment; anyway what they do in their free time matters naught to me. When the man saw Flower, at that second fully engaged trying to get a lizard on the other side of the chain link surrounding the baseball diamond, he started yelling at me about fucking leash laws; that he was going to call the cops along with a bunch of other anger monkey stuff I wasn’t really paying attention to.  Now, I love the word “fuck” as much as anyone, but many people use it as a catch all word because they don’t have enough words in their vocabularies to say anything meaningful or come anywhere near understanding or questioning their generally deranged states.  This is where the subject of meditation comes in.  (I know, finally, right?)

            I’ve been a meditator on and off since I was about 17.  The techniques I use are mostly a combination of California new age and Tibetan Buddhism, but daily meditation has nothing to do with religion.  Meditation is just the practice of training your mind to watch itself as an objective thing the way you might watch a river flow by.  Some days, my river is full of old tires, washing machines, garbage, mud, used condoms, and all kinds of other junk; some days it is pristine, gentle and cool, and generally it’s somewhere in between.  The point is not to analyze or judge; it’s not even to come to conclusions or sculpt opinions, but just to watch it go by without jumping onto some particular hunk of junk.  Such hunks generally come in the form of fears: fears about money, relationships, the plumbing, the government, etc.  I’ve had good discipline about meditation lately, mostly because I live in the desert and have been off work during the first summer session at the college where I work, and stuck inside, have few excuses not to meditate.  Nothing needs vacuuming, nobody needs me to bake them a pie.  What I’ve discovered is that daily meditation changes my mind.  Kind of in the way that, if you’re musically inclined, practice changes your ear.

            Now off hand, I can recall two times in which I reacted in anger monkey fashion myself, both the result of verbal assaults from strangers and to my way of thinking, unjustified.  Feeling   threatened, I screamed back.   This was visceral, born of a perceived need to defend myself, but lately, a change of perception has occurred and I no longer react that way.  Instead, when threatened, a kind of inverse calm comes over me.  The other day when someone rear ended my car, I genuinely felt more concern about her—she’d hit her head on her steering wheel—than distress over the fact that she’d plowed into me at speed and fucked my car all up.  Then today, when the anger monkey was yelling at me about Flower being off leash, instead of feeling angry, I just held up my hand in a “stop” gesture, asked him to cease his use of profanity, and to stop raging in front of his daughter.  Since “his daughter” was actually his girlfriend, which had become apparent to me about a quarter of the way into the altercation, this earned me a great big, “go fuck yourself,” and also some laughs from the Tai Chi class practicing under a tree, but I never got that gut fear/anger thing.  Not at all.  A welcome by product of reacting this way since my fight or flight reaction is not triggered and no adrenalin is produced, I’m not tired afterwards.

            The point is, in both these altercations, it wasn’t that I was feeling anger and suppressing it.  That’s not it at all.  It’s that I didn’t feel angry.  There was nothing to suppress.  I attribute this wholly to the practice of meditation.  In other words, the Buddhists are right.  Meditation really does change the human heart and I don’t think any religion that doesn’t include it is of much use.  You can tell people what they ought to do, or ought not do, claim all kinds of hellfire and damnation as consequence, but when no one is looking, or they think no one is, they’re going to do it anyway.  It makes much more sense to address the problem of wanting to sew chaos, violence, and revenge in the first place.

            As I walked away from this altercation, non-altercation or whatever it was, part of me wanted to turn around, go tell his female of the species that eventually, lacking any other target, her anger monkey was going to turn it all on her.  But some lessons people just have to learn for themselves.

           

High Heels

High Heels

            I’m sitting on the carpet, a sort of pre-historic berber installed in all cheapo San Fernando Valley houses in the late 1950s, built by a company called Alden and they all look exactly alike.  I’m watching my mother put on her makeup.  Though she doesn’t do anything but stay at home and take care of kids, she still performs this ritual daily just in case somebody comes over to judge her fitness as an early 60’s suburban housewife.  To my child’s mind makeup a complete waste of time, but another part of me knows that at the age of 4, 5 or whatever I am, I don’t know shit and I’m not going to stay this way forever.  Someday I’m going to have to be a grown up lady and do all kinds of ladylike things that don’t currently make sense to me.  One of these things is painting my face with loads of glop, cursing my lack of eyebrows, rummaging furiously through bathroom drawers, and having spikey curlers all over my head.

            To my left the linen closet is open and on the inside of the door hangs a full length compartmented pouch filled with shoes.  I have previously noted that for some reason, while boys and men have a pair or two of shoes, women, even penniless women like my mother, have dozens of them.  They come in all colors—some are shiny, some not; the shiny kind are called patent leather, though back in those days and up until just now when I’m thinking about it, I would think of them as “patton leather.”  Patton, like the general.  The point is, kids draw conclusions from the limited information they have, filling in the blanks with Captain Crunch crushed into the linoleum of the kitchen floor, bats, aqua-marine  colored crayons and Etch a Sketches.  As my little kid confused eyeballs wander back and forth from my mother and the pouches of shoes hanging from the inside of the linen closet door, I am, of a sudden, visited by a horror.   Someday I’m going to have to wear shoes like that.

            Technically, I’m not allowed to touch those shoes.  My mother is not the kind who enjoys her girls playing dress up with her stuff, primarily because most of the decent stuff she’s got was bought before she got married to a guy who as yet hasn’t been able to find a steady job, and had four kids.  She already has to give up too much these days for the sake of the mouths she must feed.  It’s the same principle throughout the natural world.  A mother bird with a nest full of gaping yellow beaks is not going to get to eat any worms herself and has to rely on fond memories of all the wonderful worms she got to enjoy before she got herself into this ridiculous predicament.  But I’ve just got to get ahold of one of those shoes and examine it for the simple reason that there must be something going on that I’m missing, because as far as I can tell, all these shoes are shaped exactly the opposite of the human foot.  Instead of being wide at the front, they’re pointy, and the heels?  The heels are all spikes and clumps or impossibly high platform type things that look like they’d make walking almost impossible.  I scooch my fanny over-- only see half of my mother now—and as I pull one of those shoes from its pouch, my worst nightmare is realized.  This shiny black leather thing looks like nothing less than a torture device.  If you tried to wear it, it would slide your foot down a hill, scrunch all your toes together and if you attempted to run you’d fall flat on your face and break your neck.  Shit!  Life would be almost as boring as what I’ve learned in church about all the dead people sitting at the right hand of God on clouds day and night and doing absolutely nothing.  Why is it that everything grownups do is so mindbogglingly boring?

            Have you ever noticed that grownups hardly ever run, not for fun anyway.  Oh, they may get up in the morning and after waiting a sufficient amount of time for their disgusting kale, carrot, flax seed oil, banana and more kale smoothie to digest, throw on their running shoes and go pound the pavement for 45 minutes so they won’t get fat and have a heart attack, but they rarely do it for fun.  While walking my dog at the park yesterday, I watched a couple of girls maybe 9 and 10 years old with their little dogs on leashes, burst into sprints any old which way whenever the mood struck them.  The joy of their motion, their little dogs’ tails and ears perked up delighting in the game, was unlike anything I see in adults, especially in my age group.  I can’t remember the last time I broke into a run for any reason.  Oh, wait, there was that one time.  It had something to do with sufficient amounts of alcohol at the USC faculty club and a rare getting-away-with telling reality to go fuck itself.  I ran from the college to the house in South L.A. where I was living, which takes about 15 minutes, and for just that time I felt 25 instead of 55.

The Physical Effects of Wearing High Heels

            According to a bunch of podiatrists on the Internet, (my research methods are exhaustive, consisting mainly of typing the question, “what are the effects of wearing high heels?” into the Google search engine), the habitual wearing of high heels are a nightmare for a human body.  Feet are the platform on which the “corpus woman-us” is built, and the wearing of high heels shifts the weight carried by this platform onto the balls of the feet.  This thrusts the knees and hips forward, requiring the spine to hyperextend backward to maintain balance, sticking the wearers’ butt out a little, which is why it is generally accepted that these shoes make a woman look sexier.  Scientists call this the “red-butted baboon presentation principal.”  This principle makes the male of the species eyes bulge out while it jumps up and down screaming and ordering another round beers for its bros and a sloe gin fizz for that little lady at the end of the bar, even though she’s had a hell of a day at work, is drinking Jameson’s neat, and wishes said male would drop dead, the sooner the better.  If that’s not enough, then comes a load of foot problems like hammertoe (don’t know what it is but it sounds awful), bunions, ingrown toenails, neuromas (a painful crushing of the nerve between the compressed joints at the front of the foot, and shortened Achilles’s tendon, which makes walking more difficult.  Then comes osteoarthritis in the knees, hips, neck, and lower back pain caused by chronic stress on the vertebrae.  This is all so the manarchy might notice your legs and sticky-outy butt.

            But there’s another, more sinister aspect to high heels that even I, as a pre-schooler, could figure out.  I’ve never heard grown women talk about it but we all know it’s there and it passes through our minds like a moth banging against a lightbulb every time we put the damn things on.  You cannot run in high heels.  It simply cannot be done, and if you’re forced to flee something or someone, you’ve got two choices.  Either kick them off or get caught.  Kicking them off is not much of an alternative.  Try running through streets covered in asphalt, cement debris, broken glass, and potholes or even a countryscape of grass, sticks, rocks and varying terrain.  How far are you going to make it before you trip or suffer a disabling injury?  Human beings wear shoes to protect their feet, always have always will, and because of this possess feet wholly unable to resist both man-made and natural obstacles.  They get cut, bruised, broken and damaged beyond usability in a shockingly short period of time.  In trading the usefulness of shoes for the demands of a fashion sensibility crafted by the manarchy, we give up a shocking degree of safety.    I wonder how many violent sexual assaults come down to the fact that the victim simply could not get away.

            Back when I was a kid, relatives used to come stay with us quite often.  There were a few reasons, not the least of which was that my parents had made it to the promised land.  It sounds ridiculous now to refer to Los Angeles, let alone the San Fernando Valley as “the promised land,” so choked with cars and half crazed residents paying half their income just for rent or the mortgage, but that’s what it was back in the day.  It had to be because for malcontents, crooks, queers, creative types and weirdos of all ilks stuck in backwaters of Tennessee or Missouri, tarred and feathered in tradition and boneheaded habitual behavior, the West Coast was as far as you could run to.  People rushed to Los Angeles and vicinity not just to be movie stars, though that was a big thing, but because they wanted to get away from whatever was driving them mad back home.  It’s why even today, God love it, the west coast is full of weirdos so tightly packed they’re literally falling into the sea.  One of the people who used to come visit us was Cousin Ruth.  Nobody was sure whose cousin she was, but she was from Missouri (pronounced “Missoura”) chain smoked Kool cigarettes, had a raspy voice and hairy face-- I recall petting it.  It was very soft.  Anyway, the day of my realization about women’s shoes I ran to her crying, told her I never, ever, wanted to wear those things, and was I going to have to when I grew up?  Was I?  Huh?  Wasn’t there any way I could get out of it?  If there wasn’t I never wanted to grow up, not ever.  She took a drag off her Kool, exhaled slowly while she was thinking and as I stared down at her feet, bulging out the tops of a pair of pumps which actually has quite sensible heels, she told me we were lucky because it was way worse in China.  In China, they wrapped little girls’ feet up in tight bandages to stunt their growth so that when they were adults they just had to stump around while everybody else did stuff for them.  I pictured these delicate and hobbled Chinese girls in their silky robes and chopsticks in their raven black hair, trying to serve tea but spilling it every time because they fell off their mangled feet.

            Somehow, it was small consolation.