Imaginary Conversations, update

Precisely 12 years ago, I posted this:

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Man I hate the holidays. All these slimy lowlifes crawl out of their holes and want to have family get-togethers. Leave me the fuck alone. A hideous tragedy of bad luck put me into that madhouse when I had no choice. Involuntary commitment. Please, sir, may I have a choice now?

• Y'see, when words come out of your mouth, that's how people know what you think.

• No, dumbass, I'm not the one who tells you what you have to do to make it right. You need to figure it out. Fucking clueless retard.

• Is there anything that would make it better? Yes, I could travel back in time and beat you to death with a brick in your crib.

• Do not ever ever ever try to contact me again in any way. If you do, the first thing out of your mouth had better be an abject and perfect apology. Or I will burn your house to the ground.

• So let me get this straight. Explain it to me. Is it a dick up my ass that I like, or in my mouth? Or my dick in some guy's ass and/or mouth? Or both? Since you understand my love affair with shit so well, please explain myself to me.

Hate speech? I call it therapy.

Women women women. That is to say, sex. I don't believe I've ever confided my tastes to these pages. Is it a secret? I think it may be. It just seems like a vulnerability, letting anyone know what I like. I mentioned once that Queen Latifah was a handsome woman, and that provoked gales of laughter. No, Big Girls are not to my taste. (They tend to like me though.) There is a phenotype or two that I prefer, but always tending toward athletic. That's as much as I think I'll let you know. Something to do with honesty. Some emotions I'm open about. Rage. Some, desire, are private, in their details. Twisted, I know. All the more reason to judge and reject me.

The idea of friendship, trust, love, all bound up in each other -- very hard for me to come to terms with. I think people wonder about me. I think I'm someone for whom there is no mate.

So, I like athletic women of a certain type, and guys' dicks in my mouth, and assholes.

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Thus, 12 years ago.  I will have been thinking about certain details alluded to in the post just previous to this one, two weeks past.  I've been trolling through this blog, rediscovering who I have been and how I have remained exactly the same.  Maybe it's loyalty?  I won't, for this once, dwell on having been and remaining stuck.  I'm stretching and doing qi gong, and feeling a bit better.  The above was written a couple of years prior to my life-altering pain issue.  But the psychic life is about the same.  As I will have said, so many times -- what a waste.  

My father is dead now, and exactly as I predicted.  Those fragments of conversations above would have been my rage fantasies about him.  Very sick indeed. What can I say. 

Well, I suppose I answered that sort-of question, 'what can I say', in a post from 13 years ago:

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Ta det med ro.  A great old Norwegian idiom. Apparently my grandfather used it a lot. He was a depot master in Montana -- ran the train station. Ranchers and farmers would try to bribe him with thousands of dollars, so that they could get 4 boxcars instead of only 3 to move their grain come harvest time. He would not yield. Earned $1.85 an hour, and picked rocks on the weekends. Lived in relative poverty, with five kids, four daughters and my father in the middle. A bad marriage. Worked as a child from age nine to support his abandoned mother and three siblings. That would have been 1907. The pressure must have been overwhelming. He would not bend. He was proud of being Norwegian, for some reason. Surrounded by Germans and Poles. Made the kids say their prayers in the old language. Although he was born here.

Ta det med ro -- take it with ease. What a beautiful phrase. How wise. Was my grandfather wise? He lived into his nineties and died because he just stopped eating. I remember him as an old man, bald, not large but hard. He was probably reminding himself, the way we need to do, about how to stay alive. Take it with ease. Not take it easy, mind you. My grandfather did not take it easy. I picked rocks as a kid. Because they made me. My grandfather did it because he needed the money -- four daughters, a son and a nagging wife. This was in the 1930s, so there's that. There is a difference, more felt than spoken, between the two, with ease and easy.

I drove my father to some medical thing this morning, to one of his genius doctors. My father is a very strange man. He talked about a cousin of mine, again, dead now, a genius, law school at an early age, prosecutor in Dade County Florida. "He probably had an IQ 50 points higher than average." My IQ is higher than that. He must know that. I know it because it was in my school records. It was surprising. In those days they still measured IQs in schools. They must have talked to my father after they tested me. My brother said once, "Like, you're some kind of genius, right?" It was one of the few human things he ever said to me. It must have been a family rumor. Now boys, Jackie has a genius IQ, but nobody is ever to talk about it, and don't be jealous. "Well, I tested pretty well, they seem to think." So all this constant harping about genius, from my father, yet he is incapable of listening to me. Makes me doubt the sincerity of his admiration for genius.

He got to badmouthing that same brother, his choice of a bride. "All these women do is hunt for men online all day long -- they're basically prostitutes. Then they catch one and get pregnant and get alimony." He actually said something like this to my brother. "I tried to warn him after he got married." I just had to say it: "That is really, really bad advice. Good advice isn't just true -- you have to say it right. You married a slut and you're just a sucker -- not such a good thing to say. What man would stand by and have his wife slandered?" But my father wasn't listening. "People just don't like to take advice," he said. No indeed, they do not.

We're all driven. Even the ones who take it easy. It takes resolve to sit and watch TV all day long. The determination to waste time shouldn't be downgraded, just because it's passive. Self destruction takes a lot of energy -- or the energy is used to suppress who-knows-what horrors. That's why there's so little left to actually get things done.

I do love the weather in this time of year. It's just now feeling autumnal. Pretty good workout last night. Feel fine today. Isn't it odd, how excellence is so important? With me it's always been intellectual and to a lesser degree physical excellence. Jealous for my character and my integrity, profoundly untrusting but unwavering in my loyalty once I give it. I sound like a pretty great guy, don't I. There are, sadly, plenty of rocks left in the field that need to be picked. There's a part of my soul where I'm just watching TV.

I asked my father if it was an old-time saying, ta det med ro, from a hundred and thirty years ago, that got remembered in the US but had fallen into obscurity in the hustle and bustle of Oslo. Nope, he said, they still use it.

My father said about how he visited his father's grave, 15 years ago. He admitted to tearing up. I did not say that the only good that tears can do is to wash us from the inside. One of the best things I did as a father was to just keep my mouth shut, sometimes. Kids should be allowed to make mistakes without being corrected. Correct yourself. Take it with ease.

--

What can I say, then?  Sometimes the best thing you can do is just keep your mouth shut.  With people you love but who can't hear.  I reposted that first one because of the rage.  I don't remember writing it.  But it would have been a near-transcript of actual outloud solitary ranting I will have done.  Crazy?  That is the reason for this blog.  No one has to hear, but I need to speak.  As it were, and ignoring the contradictions.  

But here's another post, again from 15 years ago, earlier.  Seems like a more artful way to leave this.  

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 What the Sirens Sing

You will have seen my anger, implicit and, less often, expressed. You’ve seen hatred, very rarely. But no, never rage, I think. Well, I’m a pretty self-contained guy. But we’re the dangerous ones, eh? He seemed like such a pleasant fellow. Can’t imagine how he could have killed all those people, and so viciously. So I ran until I found jiu jitsu, then I did that. In 15 months I took two days off. That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even good for my training. But it wasn’t about the training.

Ah well. You’ll have noticed that I use different voices in these little efforts here. It’s not planned. I just start. Just singing in harmony with myself.

Here’s what it is to be human: something bad happens, and we get angry about it. Since we can’t have justice, we become angry with God. He’s big enough to take it, but that doesn’t do us any good. So when we get the chance, we grab hold of him and kill him. What, it didn’t happen? Why do you think people kill babies? I bet that some of them, Jews and Romans, knew who they had, and killed him anyway, Jesus. You think that you wouldn’t. But you would. Almost everyone dies damned. If I could get my hands on God, and get away with it, it wouldn’t be pretty. Unfortunately, that would be Jesus, and he doesn’t deserve it. Awkward.

I’m just talking. When faced with it, there is no getting away with it. There are people that I can’t think about -- or rather, that I simply do not think about, because there’s only one thing for me to think, and it would just make me crazy. Please, keep your advice to yourself. Such is the nature of addiction. And you don’t know these people anyway.

Once I talked to my son when he was far far away in a land of war and madness, and he was saying how he’d like to be able to be vegetarian, but it just was not possible. He said he’d get so hungry but didn’t want to eat all that fried grease. So he got hungry, then ate the fried grease. I told him he could sprout like we used to have to do back in the seventies. So he ordered a kit for that online. My point is that I said, “Yep, food and sex, the two appetites.” And he gave the instant agreement that comes at hearing a true thing you never noticed before.

Odysseus lashed himself to the ship mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song. It drove him mad for a time, with some appetite, but he could not jump overboard to swim to them. Save for his bonds he would have died. There is no swimming to sirens, and surviving.

A film project videoed the Golden Gate Bridge for a year. Caught thirty people jumping. Saved six. Twenty percent survival rate. Sounds about right. One fellow changed his mind just after he launched. Adjusted his angle and survived. In the icy water he tried to cry out for help. He could only gasp. He felt something brushing his legs. Great, I survived just to be eaten alive by sharks. But it was a seal, and only its circling kept him afloat.

The director got the idea for the film when he saw the planes crash into the Towers. People jumped rather than burn. Well? Some people leap to the sirens. Some stay and face the inferno.

There are true things that we don’t dare admit. Things about hatred. Things about love. What a horrible world, where appetites are poisonous and innocence is mocked. Sometimes we pass through fire. Sometimes we are consumed by it. Sometimes we are saved from the water. Sometimes we are saved in the water. Sometimes it swallows us whole, or in pieces. What choice, and what power do we have? We are what our natures make us.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Freedom is being able to dance like no one is watching. I don’t dance at all. But this is me, singing.

---

And that's where I'll end it, this stroll through the overgrowth.  I started with the rage that I had not previously shown.  It deserves instant agreement.  Frankly, I don't know anymore that I'll be fine.  I was having a conversation that touched on depression, some weeks ago.  I said that mine was four percent away from severe, which is institutionalizable, which is a real word.  He asked if I thought about suicide.  In the silence that followed, he said, "I don't mean that you have a plan ..." and went on from there.  

To respond to the question, no, I don't have a plan.  I have a son.

J

On Being a Faggot

Close to four years since my father died.  On his bedroom floor, alone, in pain, full of fear and regret.  Those words cling together.  It could have been no other way.  When I was young, a strange teenager, I identified as a poet (pronouns I and me) -- especially after I recognized that poems don't have to rhyme.  That's a dangerous discovery, for obvious reasons. Not everything that doesn't rhyme is poetry.  I expect it's completely lost now, but I do recall the last line of something I wrote, of him.  Don't even remember the title.  I was sixteen -- a most difficult age -- and it was, "So die alone, you who did not want, and did not need, our love."  When I used first person plural, it always stood for the singular.  When we were young.  

One of the most destructive things my father did was what my older siblings called the lectures.  I, being six or eight, would not have had that word, lectures.  Every few months or seasons he would arrange us on the living room couch and stand or sit and go on and on for what, truly, must have been hours.  How unhappy he was.  What a failure he was.  How horrific his childhood was.  Details and stories.  Always the same ones, across the years.  And always what I later understood to be the curse.  His parents had done it to him, he was doing it to us, and we would do it to our children.  Do what?  Some sort of ruination.  He wasn't specific.  As I recall.  

One of the stories was about Queenie, his pony.  He grew up in small-town Montana, in the '30s and '40s.  So no electricity, no paved roads, no indoor plumbing.  Probably a hand pump in the kitchen, and certainly an outhouse out back.  He always mentioned Queenie, how much he loved that horse.  And the story always ended with how the town boys had killed her, stoned her to death.  Tears.  "They were jealous."  

Years and years later the middle brother, who had been a sadistic monster as a child -- but evolved into a sloppy parasitical self-pitying sentimentalist -- added a detail I had never heard.  Before the town boys killed Queenie, they raped her.  I am pleased that my father had the decency to hold back that detail from his lectures. I was after all very young.  And sex was never a topic for discussion, from adult to child in that family.  But maybe he did include it, bestiality, and I was just too young to process and therefore to remember it.  The middle brother called the town of the town boys, 'the town from hell.'  Butte, a wide-open hard-drinking mining town.  That explains a lot.  It was Irish boys, attacking the Norwegian.

After the lectures we were excused and I would go down the stairs to my room.  I was two stories below the rest of them, in what had been the servants' quarters.  It was a Hollywood Hills Spanish castle, built in the late '20s by a silent movie star -- Bebe Daniels, a doe-eyed flapper.  A few years later Clark Gable lived there.  Seventy-two steps from street to front door.  Not practical, especially later, for an old man in his pain-filled and solitary 80s.  

I had been upstairs too, sharing -- no, "sharing" a room with the middle sibling.  Bunk beds, and he would spit down on me.  I look back now and realize I should have dropped a large potted plant two stories down onto his head.  That's the victim child speaking, not the adult.  But that child has a right to be heard.  Heart.

Dismissed, I walked down the dark narrow stairs, silent, barely breathing, to sit at my desk doing nothing.  I felt nothing at all.  Nothing nothing nothing.  I must have been 8 or 9 by then -- I don't remember when the move downstairs happened.  I am convinced that's the reason I'm alive, or at least as sane as I am.  

I did have the self-awareness to know how completely crazy I was feeling, or not feeling.  Internal screaming.  I absolutely knew that I should have been crying, inconsolably, or at best unconsoled.  I clearly remember thinking that I should cry, to let it out, and if I didn't, it would harm me, later.  But I was fierce with the cold self-hatred that does not care about future damage. I wanted future pain.  I was not going to feel it in the moment.  Of course I was wrong, but that's what neurosis is -- an adaptive behavior that outlives the situation -- a compromising solution that outlasts the specific problem.  

After my father died, the eldest, thieving sibling revealed that aspect of his character, and at the same time I became aware of the mental illness and flatly betraying character of my nice kind generous mother.  My theory now is that my father had appropriated the firstborn, into whom his hopes and demands were poured.  You know, love.  The middle one was claimed by my mother, and it became a truly sick codependency.  She is the reason that one was such a monster.  Spoiled, completely completely out of control.  

Then I came along, unwanted of course, three and four years later.  And poor little Jackie, who did not belong to anyone.  It was a middle-class household, so I was provided for, and the forms were nominally observed.  But I somehow learned to never ask for anything.  "It's okay, I don't want anything."  Want or need. "Oh that Jackie, such a little philosopher, so wise.  He has the IQ of a genius, you know."  That, plus happiness...

Blindness, then, is a survival mechanism, like a cave salamander, where the resources needed to preserve sight might make the difference between surviving and starving.  It's understandable that I didn't figure it out until this late age, that I was the least-favorite, the unfavorite child.  It was frankly unthinkable, given that I was the cute one, the smart one, the good one.  The little one.  It's just crazy.  But there it is.  

So I could never figure out why my father seemed to actively dislike me.  To repeat myself from not many posts ago, he actually said it, outloud, a number of times across the years.  When I was a teenager, and in my 20s, and 30s.  "I have to love you, because you're my son.  But I don't have to like you."  I was baffled.  

One Christmas we all three got little wooden boxes, for cufflinks and change, etc. 

And that summer I went looking for junk jewelry, strings of beads and bangles and so on.  I had the image in my mind of a Long John Silver treasure, jewels spilling out like Pirates of the Caribbean. 

 

A very kid thing.  One day my father came into my room in a rage.  Absolutely furious.  It seemed like hatred.  Why do you have these beads.  I don't even have words to describe it, but through my tears I attempted to explain about a treasure chest.  I suppose at the time I saw how silly it was, this childish pretending.  I intuit that I was ashamed.  I fill in the blanks of memory by supposing my father pulled back slightly, maybe even, well, not chastened, but mollified, his wrath appeased somehow by the tininess of the little boy in front of him. I don't know.  That's the most I can remember. 

Every summer we'd take the train -- pre Amtrak -- to the maternal grandparents' farm in North Dakota.  Dad stayed home.  There was what we called the Bunkhouse -- a cleaned out chicken coop with some furniture.  There were trunks of old clothes, and being kids we went through them.  I put on a dress and held a flower to my cheek and my mom took a picture.  It was hilarious.  Everyone laughed.  Some months later my father saw the picture and was absolutely enraged.  Very violently angry.  Very verbally abusive.  Dude was totally VVA.  I explained, between my sobs, that it was a joke.  I was completely confused.  

Well it should be obvious.  My father thought I was gay.  You know, because I listened to classical music, and read books, and didn't care about sportsball.  And whatever else he used as evidence, that I haven't thought of.  I was little and cute and had white hair.  I wore jewelry and dressed like a girl.  

Years later, as I have previously written, he argued with me, that I was gay.  I took the I'm not gay side of the debate.  After that discussion, I didn't see him for quite a few years.  It made me put together some of the details I've just related.  Recolored my whole childhood, even darker.  I really don't think there was anything feminine about me.  Now I have a hard ascetic face, like an angry Jesus with sad eyes, but I was a cute kid.  Was that my crime?  Being a cute little white-haired boy who tried to be funny?

My father talked about the niggers, and the jews, and faggots.  My siblings used constantly hateful language.  Kill you, faggot.  Hate you, faggot.  Bash your head in, faggot.  Albino.  Queerbait.  Daily and hourly and by the minute.  I attempted to defend myself as best I could, physically and verbally.  I may have a gift for invective, but I don't like it.  I had no idea at all what a faggot was.  I don't think I really understood what hatred was, covered though I was by its bukkake spray.  I understand, now.

(I just looked it up, to make sure about what bukkake is, and how to spell it.  What a world.  And -- just to be thorough, because you know but don't quite know –– queerbait: "Any male who attracts a considerable amount of gay lust wittingly or unwittingly.  The new boy on the cell block.  An unsuspecting alterboy."  This, to and about a little brother.  Sick hateful pervert scum.  This has made me angry.)

I don't know how unusual these stories are.  Everyone has stories.  A distinguisher with mine may be that it never stopped, and there was no protection and no safe place, other than solitude.  But when those teenagers where busy raping and killing Queenie, well, is that really what they did, or all that they did? Why stop at fucking a horse?  I think they raped my father.  A good-looking 14 year old boy, held down, turned over, flat or bent over something, maybe the body of a dead or dying pony. Fucked by four or five or more older boys, and maybe some classmates. 

Well, that would explain it, this hatred of sodomites.  This madness.  This cursing.  A secret he never could have told.  Silent, hardly breathing.  Able to express rage, though.  Feeling. 

So I knew the Queenie story, and I'd thought that he might have been raped as well.  But it was only yesterday that I put that together with his, well, it was a sort of hatred toward me.  

One of those older boys, I now choose to believe -- the ringleader, maybe -- had white hair.  

Not all Irish, then.

I don't expect he asked it, about me, but it was unspoken only because he hadn't put it together: If I was a faggot, what boy would I rape? 

All my rage, as I have said, toward my father died with him.  For not feeling or showing love toward him, I have guilt and regret.  In his solitary old age he felt the same way, I am certain.

J

What We Owe

A woman's eggs are in her forming-ovaries when she is a fetus. Her eggs start out inside her mother's womb.  Grandma's nutrition is what built the grandchild's egg.  A dad's sperm is practically instant.  But the Talmud recognizes a father's lasting contribution: When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

There's a supposed Chinese proverb -- I wouldn't know, being illiterate in Chinese: Giving your son a skill is better than giving him a thousand pieces of gold.  I do know, having read Plutarch, that Solon "made a law that no son should be obliged to relieve a father who had not bred him up to any calling."

 

My son was in town last week to take care of biz and to visit, etc. We took a day to empty out a storage unit full to the brim with very heavy stuff. Transferred it into my garage -- pretty full but a nice fit. Much much much easier to unload than to load. I took the job of stooping in the truck and sliding things to the edge for the offload. Not easy on the lower back -- like hoeing cabbages. 

My son suggested we switch places, and I said, "No. Your back is more important than mine." You know, just a throw-away dad line.    

A few minutes ago he texted me this: 

"Saw this and made me think of your comment."  I hadn't meant for it to be remembered.  

I texted back, "That's very true.  Except the heart is the first thing we give.   :-)"

It's not a quote from Shakespeare -- I've read all of Shakespeare quite a few times, and I would have noticed this; it's a Yiddish proverb: When a father gives to his son, both laugh.  When a son gives to his father, both cry. 

 J

April First

My peanuts. 

J

Dear Will Smith --

When Jada Pinkett Smith washes her face, how does she know where to stop? 

Can Jada Pinkett Smith see Aunty Em whenever she wants? Poppies ... poppies. 

How many Jada Pinkett Smiths does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

What's the difference between Jada Pinkett Smith and a rotisserie oven?

Sir, you took a bland joke about a fashion choice, and intensified it to make your wife an eternal punchline. Like the Dixie Chicks. Like Latoya Jackson. Like Monica Lewinsky. Well, no -- Jada Pinkett Smith will be a slapline. Giddit?  

It is appropriate and manly for a husband to defend his wife. Clearly, your wife's feelings were hurt -- her fashion choice involved a health element. She did not expect to be singled out as an object of humor -- only of glamor. But you could have defended her with a shout from your seat -- "Not cool, Chris", or somesuch; this would have been the first level of aggression -- verbal. You could have rushed the stage as you did, and whispered an admonition into his ear; a dramatic and perhaps riveting gesture (the second level, of physical intimidation). You could have taken the mike, if there was one, and made a speech about gentlemanly deportment.  You could have taken him by the lapel (third level, physical contact). You chose assault. "Bitchslap" in this case refers to the slapper.

Reportedly you have an "open" marriage. A public stance of chivalry, then, hangs limp. You have further soiled our already depraved culture. Assault against free speech has been further legitimized, to the already triggered-happy, cry-bully stormfront of the re-educational elite. The cowards and moral idiots attending the gala did not have the decency to boo you out of the auditorium. 

If it weren't Chris Rock, but The Rock, Dwayne Johnson who made the joke, you would have made no assault.  So it's a tradeoff: on the one hand, the left, you are a bully -- the worst thing it's possible to be; on the other hand, also the left, you are a coward -- the best and mandatory thing to be, of those who identify as binary.

Your penance is to donate the entirety of your earnings from your film to one or more charities of Chris Rock's choosing. I doubt that you have the emotional maturity to make a truly sincere, non-press-agent authored, apology. I hope I'm wrong about that. 

But the most important thing.  Chris Rock was the perfect professional.  He is exemplary.

J

Notes to my grandchild(ren), as yet unconceived

Every generation starts out not even knowing our right hand from our left.  We don't know how to speak.  We don't have teeth.  We have to learn how to eat.  Old people have the advantage of perspective, which if appreciated, like a grand vista overlooking a vast expanse, can be edifying.  We might identify the trends and find a pattern -- the repeated errors and learn their remedies or how to avoid them.  We might grow wise.  But none of us starts out that way.  We're born knowing nothing at all.  

I was quite an arrogant youth.  I wouldn't have agreed about that, but it's true.  I deduced it, correctly: it comes from "arrogate" -- to claim, without justification.  Arrogance has nothing to do with confidence, aside from a superficial likeness.  Confidence is content to accept disagreement.  Arrogance has to be seen to be right -- it is insecure, and fragile.  Confidence accepts, arrogance argues.  One is gracious, the other is tribal.  

That's a distinction I would have profited from knowing.  Someone should have told me.  

My father meant well, but he was crippled.  He thought somehow that forbidding emotions would transform them into happiness and competence.  Suppression however is not actually any kind of disciple at all.  By lecturing about what a man should be, he thought he was teaching some kind of success.  He did not mean the harm he did to us.  His intentions were undermined by narcissism -- immaturity and unhealed wounds.  His theories about fatherhood were never corrected by their invalidation.  Thus, not theories at all, open to refinement -- rather, ideology and dogma.  I hadn't really thought about it, but I grew up in a cult.  

I raised your father with that in mind.  In contrast, I liked my little boy.  I enjoyed him, and respected him.  I let him know this, first because it was true, and also because such things need to be shown.  Hugs, and kisses, and tickles -- physical stuff, because touch is our first human experience -- fetal skin against uterine walls.  Love is not a drug, not a medicine -- these are always poisons, hopefully healing.  Love is a nutrient.  

I've allowed your father, in recent years as I write this, to see much more of how damaged I am as a man.  He didn't know.  But he's in his thirties now, late thirties, and successful, and secure, and even though it will be a burden on him, there is such a large opportunity for him to grow, emotionally and in his insight into a deeper wisdom.  I have been willing to -- well, personally it feels like I've devalued, almost degraded myself -- but, reveal myself, as crippled and neurotic, fearful, unsuccessful -- futile and ashamed.  A harsh legacy, but there was never deceit -- just appropriate truth, the revelation of which evolves. 

Part of my reevaluation of my own fathering, of your father, is where I could have been better.  I've never been shy about proclaiming how awesome I was as a dad.  It was a combination of learning from my father's mistakes, and doing the opposite -- as, for example, actually liking my son -- and also of simply being intuitive and observant -- of not being theoretical at the expense of, oh, reality.  But I didn't have exceptional insight about puberty.  That went well because of the solid childhood he had.  But, while I gave him his teenage space, appropriately, there was something missing.  I know this, because of his own teenage arrogance.  Maybe it's an inevitable stage.  But I could have made the transition out of it easier, somehow.  I know there must be a way to do this.  I just didn't know.  

Fortunately, some of the hard lessons the Army taught him dealt with this. The outcome was fortunate.  The lessons were hard.  Why did it have to come to that? So hard?  That's on me.  But I did my best. As my own father did -- his best.  We only know what we learn, and we find our lessons where we may.  In savage and depriving childhoods, or in the silence of unrecognized ignorance.  Our response, in every case, is of love, or bitterness.  

So you, a grandchild who may never be born, well, that's how it always is -- each generation is produced and turned loose with hardly any guidance at all -- in this case, because there was a message but no one there to hear.  Or maybe I won't live to know you -- I may be just a name, an important if distant influence upon your life.  If I do know you, I do love you with all the capacity of my heart.  If I do not know you, I would have loved you that much.  

Papa

The Unified State of America

You know the line, "Ain't nobody here but us chickens"?  A hipster used it, and I asked if he knew the joke.  He did not.  My dad told it in the 60s, but it's from minstrel-show days, as far back as the 1830s.  Someone was stealing a Southern farmer's chickens, and one night he hears a big commotion in the coop.  Gets his shotgun, goes out and says, "Come on out or I'll blast you."  Silence.  Says it again, and again.  Maybe he shoots into the air.  And from inside the coop, in Amos and Andy dialect, "Ain't nobody here but us chickens, boss!"  A racial joke -- the thief being very stupid.  

Bill Cosby said of the TV show, Amos and Andy, "It was very funny.  And we knew we had to get it off the air."  It wasn't racist, in my opinion, at all.  But as with all dialect and ethnic humor, it exploited stereotypes.  That of course is what very much humor does, but this was and remains a sensitive topic, so the broad social interests were not to be ignored.  Along my ongoing journey toward maturity, I am coming to understand that not everything that can be said, even if true, needs to be said.  

Remember the line, "What you mean 'we', white man."  I looked it up, via the convenience of the Internet.  A Bill Cosby joke.  The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by redskins.  "Well Tonto, looks like we're done for."  "What you mean 'we', white man?"  Again, a racial joke, the humor of which hangs on the presumption and rejection of subservient identification.  

You understand and approve the conditions governing your presence in this State.  You must submit to all inspections of physical, emotional and verbal hygiene.  You must at all times carry on your person proof of responsible social and medical conformity -- your Cards, or in your device. You must follow all posted and non-posted regulations. You will contemn all proscribed epithets and attitudes.  Failure to comply will result in loss of employment, reputation, courtesy, and permission to participate in any public gathering of more than three subjects.  You will conform.  You will obey.  

Remember that old line?  Went something like, "Live free or die."  Remember that joke? -- don't quite recall it, but the punchline was, "give me liberty, or give me death."  Well, that's the kind of thoughtless humor we just don't accept anymore.  Its time has passed.  Inappropriate for our frankly superior sensibilities.  Not cool.  Anyway, it's 'live free and die'.  It's 'give me liberty and death'.

J

*MoveOn dot MeToo

YT

They're too young to remember it, mostly.  Or in fading early middle age, old people puberty, decline combined with self-righteousness.  They've always been self-righteous, entitled, empowered, esteemed.  Proud heirs to the participation trophy, the triumph of will, ascendant upon the mountain of the universe -- vast in the equality of poppies, their vaginas are powerful, their penises a handy leash.  The decline was from birth, born into twilight, and hell is murky.  

The Left wanted us to move along, forget about it, that clinton thing.  Get over it.  Move on.  So what if the male president groped a boob or grabbed a mons pubis.  Trump, clinton -- well it mattered with Trump, but that was different.  Vulgarian.  Cigars, blue dresses, semen stains, flowers, troopers. Who can remember.  Class. 

Like a glimpse of stocking.  Something shocking, from a long-ago generation.  Passé. We have evolved.  This is what maturity looks like.  Virtue signals and cancel culture.  Signal cancels -- a failure to communicate.  What you are allowed to do, say, think, feel.  

Best watch yourself.  

It's never been okay.  And if women finally get the courtesy they were, several generations ago, nominally due -- holding a door open, standing when she enters -- well such formalities didn't prevent scum from abusing the power of position.  

And abortionism had its price.  Women stopped being female.  They are men with breasts, as men are women with back hair.  What they are pleased to call 'gender' is all about, and nothing but, bulges.  Everything is entirely superficial and phenomenological.  Shave down an adams apple, remove breast tissue -- presto change-o.  Déclassé.  

It's an idea I may go into, sometime.  But transgenderism is an anti-abortion argument.  There is a spirit, they suppose, male or female, in the wrong body.  So, there is a spirit in a body.  A human spirit, in a human body. Thus, abortion is homicide.  

Don't blame me.  My position is consistent.  I've changed in hardly anything.  There is no longer an America -- that was hard to accept.  My brazen serpent, Nehushtan, a useful thing that became an idol.  Nun sheath -- ashen hunt.  Now it's not even useful, america.  Nothing but the richest slave.  A fun fact known from ancient Rome (and everywhere else): slaves make the cruelest masters.  It's all they know.

What is the first human emotion?  You'd think hunger, but that's just biology.  Hot or cold or itchy, or boredom, the same.  The first human emotion is the need for connection.  Intimacy.  It's why babies stare.  They look at everything.  They stare at mommy.  As I have said, it is the nature of a personality to want to be known -- to reveal itself.  Human life is about contact.  Sartre is mistranslated: hell is [needing] other people.

This explains it all.  

Move On.  Me Too.  They're almost anagrams.  Move onto me.  Like OJ, there's just too much love.  

J

Brother Uncle Son

                                                        Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, 

                                                        Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass. 

                                                        Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; 

                                                        Do not fret -- it only causes harm.

                                                                                                                                -- Ps 37:7-8 

 

After my father died, I found that I was completely done with the rage I had felt over his failures as a father.  Whatever the real reason, the reason I accept is that there's nothing I can do to change the past.  That pathetic, ultimately old man, rejected and abandoned in his monstrosity of a house, who finally died, alone on the floor of his bedroom, his last moments consumed with regret and futility and despair. 

No one in his family could tolerate him.  I couldn't stand to visit him, alone.  I always took my son, when he came to visit.  Triangulation, so I wouldn't be trapped alone with him and his judgments and blindness, his desperation and stuckness.  The only virtue in any of this is that my father was proud of my son -- so, a vindication.

 I've never made a secret about what a nightmare my birth-family was.  One of the ways I'm a fool is that I think I have to say what I think.  I stupidly think that's integrity.  It's adolescent -- the immaturity of improperly understood rule-keeping.  Honesty matters, but other people matter at least as much.  I doubt I will ever master that idea.  

Thinking about all this for the past few years -- trying to find my way out of the pit I was thrown into as an infant -- I have come to understand something that very much surprised me.  I was the least-favorite child.  This seems astounding.  I was the cute one. I wanted to be good.  I was little, and should have been protected.  None of that mattered.  Brenn, the narcissist crybaby, was my father's favorite.  It must be because he was the firstborn.  Kip was my mother's favorite -- as worthless, violent, and hateful as he was, he got every favor from her.  In that cultish family, I was the child sacrifice.  

I have always been betrayed.  Not self-pity -- but it's the reason I cannot trust.  My mother sacrificed me.  My father had no time for me.  He told me a number of times across the years, starting when I was a teenager, that he didn't like me.  He told me with those very words. "I have to love you, because you're my son.  But I don't have to like you."  That's the kind of stupid honesty I've been guilty of.  Because it was true, he thought it should be said.  Damaging to the spirit and to the relationship.  Unwise.  

Apparently from very early, my father had decided I was homosexual.  I had to figure that out.  Well, no -- eventually, in my thirties, he actually argued with me about it.  He took the "you are gay" side.  You know, because I listened to classical music and read books.  And other things he did not say but I put together ... one of them, truly vicious.

Nothing was left for me -- just middle-class duty on the positive side, and otherwise neglect and abuse.  I was an afterthought.  This is not a reason I pity myself.  By the time I was able to notice this, I was so completely alienated and isolated that it was too late.  It's only 50 years later, give or take, that I even realized it.  I pity myself because of the wasted time and potential.  Locusts have eaten the years -- a family of locusts.  That's true, but it's on me, the way addiction is on the addict.  

I've had two important ideas.  The first, I had not long after it was clear about Brenn's lies and cowardice and theft.   It's that he, and incidentally my other brother, would have to be forgiven.  It's the only way I can make up to my father for the not-good son I was.  Nothing I can do, to show him love now.  Only to love the worthless, selfish, abusing brothers of my childhood.  Well, maybe love is too much to ask -- love your rapists, love the people who used you like toilet paper.  But forgive, if there's a meaningful difference.  

The other idea is that both of them, but mostly the most-betraying brother, Brenn, Brenn Ko -- to me they were like the brothers of Joseph, in the Bible.  His brothers dropped him into a pit, to kill him, but ended up selling him into slavery.  They meant it for evil, because of jealousy and spite.  And Joseph suffered, but ultimately he prospered.  It's a nice story.  The lesson is that the evil, the envy and hatred of his brothers worked finally to a good purpose.  

Trapped in that crazy, frankly wicked family, I didn't understand.  I thought abuse was the order of things.  I didn't stop to wonder why my brothers were such scum.  To say they were jealous seems inadequate -- it's too cheap an answer.  I was just a white-haired little kid, in no way a favorite in that family.  I suppose it was that I was at the bottom of the pecking order -- the easy victim.  So, the convenience of corrupt human nature. 

Almost three years ago now, while Brenn was playing his waiting game, plotting his theft and flight, I made assurances to various family members that I thought he had integrity.  I remember saying he was not a thief. Obviously I was wrong. Years before I had pointed out to him a lack of integrity in his behavior, and he was very offended.   Time has proven that observation to be right.  

I had a conversation with him shortly after my father died, and he went on about how Kip's family, "the H's", were all greedy.  I corrected him, that they were ungrateful.  "No, greedy."  Regardless, Brenn is greedy.  I had not put that together.  

Hypocrisy, then, and a deep ignorance of self.

That's how Brenn justified cheating Kip.  He justified cheating his nephews and niece because he was greedy.  He justified cheating me because he manufactured an excuse that I was dishonest -- I was plotting, stupidly, to steal mom's house -- so Brenn imagined he could and should steal dad's house. I had to put that together.  So he is sleazy and shameful -- but there it is.  It's not stupidity and it's not craftiness.  It's willful evil.  

At that same conversation, Brenn was saying that the idea of giving my father's grandkids an inheritance was "ridiculous."  His reasoning was not sound -- dad was senile, and our grandfather had not left anything to the grandkids -- but I did not argue.  First, because I no longer like to argue, and second because I recognized a malevolent situation.  

The thing I am ashamed of, and philosophical about, is that I did the calculation.  Three sons, instead of  three sons and four grandkids -- my "share" would be about equal either way, so my own son was taken care of -- and what I would allot to my mother.  In other words, I wasn't looking out for my other brother's kids.  My instant calculation was that Kip had drained his mother's resources for so long, for so much, that it more than equaled out.  (I had planned on my mother's assets -- her house -- going to the grandkids -- but that's another story, possibly uglier.)  No harm done, except in the end to my self respect. 

All of us ended up cheated. None of us deserved to be robbed, but none of us deserved an inheritance -- least of all the betrayer. I'm philosophical about it, because none of us deserve anything, for all that our father wanted, ultimately, to be a blessing to us.  

That's Brenn's biggest betrayal.  He is of course a coward.  He ran away, and would never dare meet any of his family again.  Given the magnitude of his crime, fear is appropriate.  He is a thief, taking and keeping what is not his.  He is a betrayer, of his mother, his brothers, his nephews and niece -- most, of his father, who trusted him.  

His infantile sentimentality, his blackmail and threats, his need to control -- in his fifties he married a teenager -- in part that's a response to the harm my father did to him.  That he chose to harm others rather than examine himself -- well, my response to the abuse was to lose my ability to trust.  Of these two psychopathies, I'd take mine.  I've been hated, but only a few times with just cause.  

There is nothing to say against his wife.  She was just a little teenager who took the chance she was given -- get to live with money in America. Maybe she was complicit in the theft, but her debt would be to common decency, not to in-laws she met only a few times. Maybe she deserves what she got, and will never understand the cost. 

When you're that much given over to depravity -- what does it take to be redeemed from it?  Probably as much of a miracle as it would take for me to learn how to trust.  Like Kip -- how to repay what he owes?  So many cripples.  

And if Brenn Ko were not a thief?  And we got and divided the million dollars that he stole? Honestly, I have to suppose it would not be a blessing.  The work that I have yet to do, I would neglect.  The growth that this continuing betrayal has demanded would not have been spurred.  The self-examination would have remained superficial, and my self-righteousness would degenerate into delusion.  We've been talking about how that happens.

It must be obvious that I could say many crushing truths about my brother Brenn -- liar, pervert -- so true and so ugly that his response could be only hatred, more hatred.  I have nothing to fear from him.  He has done all the evil to most of his family that he can.  He is a bad son, and has only the power to further harm his mother, but if he does, he will die of pancreatic cancer within not many months.  Other than that, I don't know what deserved anguish is coming his way.   No, actually I do -- there will be a sexual element to it.

I have said it only to two people, but it is the explanation, other than his personal corruption: Brenn has a demon.  I saw it, years ago.  It's not possession -- affiliation.  He delved into that cheap sort of thing -- the fantasy of controlling others.  This is why hating him would be futile, as well as ungodly.  It would add to the evil his demon wants to flourish.  His demon loves to do harm, and if it cannot harm us, it will turn, even more, upon him. 

He will not believe he is evil because he thinks being sentimental is the same as being good.

It has to count for something, this idea of 'brother'.  It's always only meant bitterness to me. We can let hatred, resentment, obsession, unforgiveness, rule us.  The time has not arrived, but I have to trust that it will, when I can say in my heart, with honesty, that my abusive brothers have been forgiven. 

So there he is, my shameful and bizarre eldest brother, spending stolen money on travel and boats and toys and other such trash. Every time he buys something, he is a thief.  Every time he remembers the past, he is a coward. Every time he touches his wife, he is a betrayer. 

The appropriate response to this must be that of Joseph.  We can rule only ourselves, if we do.  The blessing that was stolen from my father, can be returned, by me.  The price of being good is giving up our craving for justice.    

J

Weeqs

Moonday

I Wislblohd U today.  They needed a name, and thheirs just came to mind.  Someone said I petted a cat and Wislblohd me for Inviyyurmenl Inuhsenxhulizm.  I said I was examining the cat’s collar for Qahrbn Misapluhqayxhun, so I could report it.

Then why hadn't I submitted an Eqspohzay?  I said it wasn't a collar after all, but a bit of noose -- some hyumins tried to hang the cat but the string broke.  It's a popular hyumins' game down by the Needl uv Fayrnus -- so I was believed.  And it really was a noose.  

But I did pet the cat.  Only hunger made it trust me.  I gave it a bit of Mahyqohtahmash.  The Wislr wasn't close enough to see.  I'd have said I was testing a hypothesis, using vermin to dispose of refuse -- for the Uhternul Hohpr.

I'd inconvenienced Thuh Stayt, though -- so I gave them U's name.  They will arrest thhem, if not already.  These things happen.  The Intrvyu won't be severe.  Like me, U will give up the first name that comes to thheir mind.  There’s no malice.  It'll only be bruises, not blood.  U is smart.

If they knew I petted the cat, it would be the end of me.  I'm too old to survive a Quhreqnus Qamp.  I know someone who was Beeyuhfendudbiyd for 7 years at Perfiqt Eluhqwns Tahwr.  Thhey'd been Thinqn Liyq Haydrz -- Biynayreeyizm.  Thhey never talks about it, but thhey fell asleep once in the waterline and mumbled about digging for worms to eat.

Once I gave U's name, I had to accuse thhem of something, and this was true at least -- thhey was humming an Intahlerunt song.  Sometimes I feel like a m*th*rless ch*ld.  I used to sing that to my baby hyumin, before it mattered.  

I’m not worried -- the cat mistake is the first I’ve made in many years.  Nobody's as careful as me.

Hequhday

I met a hyumun last week.  Thhey was sitting on the steps outside Yunuhvrsul Uhgreemnt Sentr.  Thhey was wearing a small gray locket, heartshaped like hearts used to be shaped.  Thhey had a Liysns for it clipped to thheir coat, but it was still a Selfush Ahbjeq -- not something safe like Bahdeemahd.  Thhey was much younger than me.  But everyone is.

I didn't mean to, but we made eye contact, and something in thheir look kept me from breaking away.  After the Weeqs Vrqhyu Uhsesmun, thhey was still there.  Thhey had a permit clipped to thheir hat, so the BayzhShrts wouldn't Beeyuhfendudbiy thhem.  I wondered what thhey was waiting for.  Thhey stood up just as I passed and we bumped.

Then we walked down the steps, side by side, and I don't know who was leading or following, but we walked in silence to the Ahbuhlisq uv Ahluhliyqnus.  I could hear thheir breathing.  It sounded like snowflakes.  We bumped shoulders.  I tilted my hand out and took thheirs.  It has been many years since I touched a hyumun.

It's late spring and Soon's up longer, so less cold.  I couldn't think of anything to say.  Thhey never let go of my hand.  Thheir hand was small through the gloves.  There were BeeEsuz on patrol, but we kept to the gravel paths and they don't like to scuff their boots.  

About Ayteen Ohqlahq thhey tugged me, but without any movement, toward the mainwalk and Grayt Speeqh Ahmnuhbus Serqul.  We stood until it came, and thhey got on, slipping through the Laytwerq crowd until I saw thhem at a window.  Thhey held my eyes again, expressionless.  Thheir face was tight but thheir lips were full and dark.  Like someone I once knew.

As I stood watching, I suddenly became aware, I was holding something.  In my hand, in my glove, I was holding thheir locket.  I felt dizzy.  I looked up and stared.  When the omnibus pulled away, my eyes burned.

I have not seen thhem again.  I return to the steps of the YUS after work everyday.

 

Veenuhsday   

Sometimes I wonder about the meaning of life.  The lesson for the Stoodunts today was how perfectly Q loves all hyumins.  They must love thhem perfectly too.  I drilled them on it.  Do you ever doubt how much thhey loves you?  No, they replied in chorus.  Never?  Never.  Do you doubt Soon when it shows?  No.  Do you doubt that gravity holds you to Thuh Planut Urth?  No.  Do you doubt the perfection of Q's love for all little hyumins?  No.  Very good, hyumins.  Always remember this lesson.  Always give these examples, Soon and Thuh Planut Urth and Q in the middle, when they ask about the love of Q, or the Iqwahluhty uvthuh Yuniytud Stayt, or the Prfeqxhun uv Qhaynj.

For the older Stoodunts I asked, Do you love Q perfectly?  Yes.  So you are as perfect as thhey is?  They didn't know how to answer that.  I fed it to them.  How can thheir perfect love not receive love just as perfect?  It is not our love, it is thheirs, reflected back to thhemself.  We are Moon to thheir Soon.  Yes, we love Q perfectly.  There is no imperfect love for Q.  Duhplohruhblz don't love thhem at all.  Everyone else loves thhem perfectly.  I drilled them until they learned it.  It may save their lives.

That’s the meaning of life.  Teaching hyumins to stay alive.  Never deny, I teach them.  Doubt means you think Thuh Qhaynj is Uhngud.  Agree, reframe, deflect, add a detail that Qhaynjuz the meaning.  If they Wislbloh a Playpahrtnr -- these things happen.   Always look at the bridge of the nose, and never smile.

I haven't read yet about U.  If thhey makes it, thhey'll be around by Soonday.

ThuhUrthday

U died today, or maybe yesterday.  I can't be sure.  I read it in the Fayrnus Rejustr.  I scan it for familiar names.  We all do.  Heart failure.  All deaths, of course, are heart failure.  Old joke.  Thhey must not have given up a name.  Or thhey made Uhn Uhnhyumrus Ruhmarq, or thhey held eye-contact with a Quhmyunuhty Ohrguhniyzr.  Or thheir heart failed.

I've saved enough Qreduts to trade for a bicycle almost.  There's always the risk of Insiytn Uhndrprivluhjizm.  Don't invite trouble.  But I have my eye on an old one, very rusted.  No rubber, but big wheels.  IU is a gray area under Q's Fayvrd Tahlerayxhun directive, but one weighted complaint and the Iqwahluhty Gahrd confiscates Thuh Trigr. 

I'm noticeable -- nobody's tall anymore.  But hyumuns are usually gray.  I'll vary the route.  Nobody uses Thuh Qahluhnayd uv Iqahlujy.  Just don't get noticed day after day -- that's the cause.  They brood -- leads to Sohxhul Juhstus.  Labeled a Haydr, you're through. 

It is risky.  

But it will save time.  And I have old knees.

Soonday

They announced they cancelled Hequhday.  Clashes with Veenuhsday and Moonday.  Back to a 9 day week. Next I think will be Qahntuhnuntsday.  The younger hyumins get confused.  Last year they added Qbr.  And they changed Raynbr to Raynbohwbr.  Don't like the name?  Wait a minute.  Old joke.

Satrnday 

I saw U's partner I today.  Thhey was standing by Thuh Mahnuhlith uv Inqloosuhvnus, coming from work.  Thheir breath did not steam.  Thheir nose looked wet.  It should warm up after Sohlstuhsbr for a few weeks -- but Qliymut Qhaynj is so unpredictable.  Q saved Thuh Planut though.  Thhey just stood, feet on the patchy salt, staring into the gray middle distance, still as ice.  I passed without stopping.

Hequhday  Veenuhsday

It's too dangerous.  I'm careful, but -- that cat thing.  Don't undo it all.  Isn't Sohxhul Werqr a funny title? Liynwerqr.  Agruhwerqr.  Sohxhulwerqr.  Once they notice you, it's just over.  No, nothing funny about it.  No.  No bike.  What was I thinking.

Moonday

Another hyumun was sitting on the steps today, with a permit in thheir hat.  I asked why thhey was sitting there.  Thhey didn't respond.  I ask if thhey knows the hyumun who was there the week before.  Thheir eyes flicker, and thhey glances up.  "What is it?" I ask.  "I'm waiting for a Mohrnun Liysns.  This is the line."  "Who died?"  "Everybody."

I left thhem there.  I will not return.

Stahrzday

I Qahrbn Traydud for another pair of gloves today.  The one that held thheir hand, I keep in a box.  When I hold it to my lips I smell newly washed hair.  In the locket when I pressed it open was a tiny picture from the old days.  Thhey must have switched it for another when thhey got thheir Induhljuns Liysns.  There was a name.

Qday

Q was Reeyuhleqdud again, because it's Qday.  Old joke.  Universal mandate -- it's been that way longer than most can remember.  People don't live as long as they used to though, mostly -- not Werqrz.  A generation flies by.  The usual Seluhbrayxhunz uv Duhmahqrusy.  Every few years, no pattern, thhey calls for thheir Reeyuhleqxhn.  Thhey always gives thheir Grayt Speeqh, with Legthuhril Spiyr and Thuh Pilr uv Tohtl Satuhsfaqshn framed in the background.  The same musty intonations from thhem, the same ritual frenzy from Thuh Pahpyulus.  I thought of a joke, but I can't say it.  Great is * of the *

The wristchips Voht automatically.  Some people started Vohtn the day they were born.  Saves Qahrbn, not going anywhere or doing anything.  As the Yuniytud Stayt motto says, "Prahgres iz ahlwayz gitn bedr!"

Q's motorcade sped by the school a few weeks ago.  I didn't go to the window.  I was alone, so no one could notice.  Afterwards I thought, what if a great pit opened and swallowed thheir limousine? Then I thought, how could somebody make that happen? 

Back when there used to be teevee with commercials, there was a show about a little hyumin who could make happen whatever thhey wanted.  I thought of that, and Thuh Urthqwayq, what it would be like to have that power.  Then I realized Q had it.  I'm one of the few left who remember thhem promising to Lohwr thuh Seez.  Indeed thhey did.  Froze them over to do it.  Too bad the moon's in the wrong place.  Moon.

ThuhUrthday 

Yesterday I went mad.  I read thheir name in the Rejustr and my heart has not beaten since.  My heartshaped heart.  Failure.  Words.  

Names.    Tears

ice     salt

I said once long ago that all bets are off.  When I lost my, I lost, my

I didn't mean it.

Sometimes I feel

I think I've come to a decision.

Qday

I have lived in fear and silence and cowardice and complicity and betrayal through all the recent generations.  I was never the hyumun I thought I was.  Such a hyumun is no longer possible.  No gene splicing of atavistic traits will reclaim that hyumunity.

There used to be a Resistance.  "Who does not doubt, does not know freedom."  We had a plan, the tenth plague. The firstborn virus.  But we didn't mean it.

All that remains is a memory of teevee shows and the skulking that sneaks an extra splat of mash in the commissaryline.  Their violence has met for too long with only bleeding and weeping.  We are broken and they have grown careless. 

Sunday

We.  As if there were a we.  The wrong people have been suffering.  I will remind them of fear.  I will show them their own blood.  I will work such obscenity on their corpses that all who see will face the cowardice of their own souls.  I will be as evil as Q.  I will burn down Thuh Planut and all its childless fathers.

A man cannot live, fearing the loss of his tyreless bicycle.  He cannot live, denouncing acquaintances who are beaten to death.  He cannot live staring at a tiny heartshaped picture of a little girl, clutching a glove because he thinks it smells of his baby daughter's hair.  I have forgotten God.  But no atheism promises an end more meaningless than life as it now is.

End

Shin

I've been regretting that I neglected to learn Hebrew in my youth.  For probably 2500 years (since Ezra, I'd suppose), very smart rabbis have been playing around with the words and letters of the Torah, finding real and merely clever subtleties of which the goyim must remain ignorant.  I of course am not among the goyim, the nations -- Christians are children of Abraham, through faith.  Thus, I'd suppose, brothers by adoption of Isaac (who was to be sacrificed) -- and uncles to Jacob.  That's pretty interesting -- Israel, my little nephew.   

Almost randomly, I found a talk by Rabbi Michael Skobac which is worthwhile.  We learn that Hebrew letters have a number of meanings in themselves, beyond mere phonics.  It's an extremely deep study -- vertiginous.  Thus, each of the 22 letters resonate to rabbis as the initial letter of a set of important words. Reb Skobac's ministry seems in part about Jews remaining talmudic Jews, rather than, oh, say messianic Jews.  And on that point, he has a story to tell (at 13:15), transcribed by me: 

There was once an apostate Jew who came to the great Elijah of Vilna, one of the greatest sages of rabbinic Judaism, lived about 300 years ago.  And he said to this great rabbi, "I'm going to prove to you the truth of Christianity from the very first word of the bible."  And he says to the rabbi, "Look at the first word in the Hebrew bible.  The word beresheet [be-r-a-sh-ee-t, בְּרֵאשִׁית‎].  The first three letters, bet resh alef [בְּרֵא], "Ben, Ruach, Ab" -- "Son, Spirit, Father".  The first three letters.  So the rabbi immediately said to him, "You know, you didn't read the rest of the word.  The rest of the word says, shin yud tov [שִׁית] -- spells out "torah Yeshu sheker" -- "the teachings of Jesus are falsehood".  

Well.  That seems disappointing.  Score one for the opposing team?  But being me, I had to check it out.  It would be that pesky shin, "falsehood."  Indeed, the "letter shin also represents the word שֶׁקֶר (sheker) lie, falsehood."  So it's true.  But, that "also" -- what else?  And there it is: "We all know that the first letter of the word שָׁלוֹם (shalom) peace is shin. The ש is also the first letter of the word שַׁדַי (shadai) which is one of the names of G-d."

So Rabbi Skobac didn't tell the rest of the story -- maybe he didn't know it.  In the rest of the story, the apostate Jew … but let's not call him that -- seems dismissive.  "And the faithful Jew immediately said to the rabbi, 'You read it backwards in the same way you have the meaning backwards.  The rest of the word says, shin yud tov [שִׁית] -- spells out "shalom Yeshu torah" -- "redemption is Jesus' law"'."

(For, "shalam is translated as 'make it good', 'shall surely pay', 'make full restitution' or to 'restore'. The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was 'to make something whole'.")

So.  Beresheet, the first word in the Hebrew bible, holds a talmudic rabbinical Jewish teaching of, Son, Spirit, Father: redemption is Jesus' law.

Thank you, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna.  And, Rabbi Skobac -- may I have another? 

J

Trans Tranny Trany Trannie Traney Tranie

"...these be her very C's, her U's, 'n' her T's, and thus makes she her great P's."

                                                      --Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 5        .

[Trigger Warning: for the triggerable, andor for those 

with old-fashioned andor obsolete sensibilities who 

wish not to see disturbing andor vulgar images.]

It's just impossible to make up my mind.  But spelling is about mere incidentals, like whether or not you dot an 'i', or a 'j'.  J is one of those questionable letters, not useless, like male nipples (except I'm given to understand that some men enjoy their nipples (I have found them utterly ignorable, except when very slightly irritating)) -- redundant, rather, like 'x' or 'q', or even 'c'.  

'W' is useful; how could one reasonably get that sound, otherwise? Oouman.  Oouhmuhn, Ooihmehn.  You can get the idea, but it doesn't really work.  And when it's 'w' 'h', where what why, but not who -- that blowing doubleyou sound.  The dialect of American English I was brought up in ... in which I was brought up ... up in which I was brought -- it didn't acknowledge this particular phoneme.  Not that it's difficult to produce, like that Arabic 'D' that we can't even hear, or the Japanese sound between 'r' and 'l' that makes them confuse our 'r' and 'l'.  But, really, there's the vexing and intractable question, what is a doubleyou?  Even the Supreme Court doesn't know.  Doubleyou is so binary.

You just have to understand that some folks expect words to be pronounced the way they like it.  Like 'often' -- there's no 't' sound, except if that's how you were raised.  It's a back-formation, from 'oft'.  It's how you deduce extinct words from the root and grammatical forms.  Listen fasten wastrel scalpel castle whistle wrestle.  Dullard, drunkard, coward, bastard. 

And this nipple thing -- I understand it, embryologically. Women, after all, have an analogue, a homologue of the prostate.  Whale pelvises are used during the birthing process.  These things have reasons.  I seem to recall that humans have the capacity for, say, eight nipples, two rows of four.  This explains the supernumerary expression that sometimes occurs.  My son had a third nipple.  It never grew.  I was almost proud of it, but I think he probably got tired of my mentioning it, when he got a bit older.  So I stopped.  I am capable of learning.  

If I use the search capacity of my smartphone it volunteers  a list of suggestions.  Completely irrelevant and random.  I suppose they're 'trending', as the kids say.  Elliot Page was showing his first shirtless picture. My mind boggled.  Who is Elliot Page, and why would this be of interest?  Is he beautiful and mysterious?  Well, no.

Low bodyfat, nice enough abs if you like that sort of thing, but an example of failed puberty, youngish but not aging well -- a wizened pixie. Wizard.  He managed to achieve armpit hair -- bucking the manscaping trend, rather daringly I should think.  Transgressive.  Except, looking as he does as of northerly European extraction, he should have at least some chest hair. So he is untrue to his most authentic hairitage.  

What is it with these last 20 years.  Men actually shave their pubic hair.  And women too.  You realize what this is, right?  Body hair is a tertiary sexual characteristic, indicating adulthood.  No such hair means hands off.  It is unattractive to the point of being grotesque -- not in even an aesthetic sense, but biologically.  It's a gateway behavior, into a perversion that is common historically and culturally -- just not in our history or culture.  

But these things are relative.  Who's to say what an age of consent is.  Yes after all means yes.  Two year olds like to say NO, but, well, I don't know how to finish this sentence.  Ancient Egyptian royalty married their siblings, Mohammad married a nine-year-old, PBUH.  The flow of actual human behavior is against us, and who can fight the tide?  

American men marry American men.  No, I'm sorry, I made a grave error.  American men marry american men.  There is no America -- those capitalized 'Americas' I just used, they are purely orthographical, upper case because that's how sentences start, unless that too is a custom to be phased out, by enlightened practice and the Supreme Court.   There is no 'America' -- just a geographical expression, like the holy roman empire, or Metternich's italy.

 

And I'm doubly wrong, at least -- there are no american "men".  Because there are no men.  I just learned this, just now, when I looked a bit further into Elliot Page.  He is a man, per assertion and common report.  But some few months ago he was a woman -- I should say, he "presented" as a woman, the way a female dog presents her posterior when in heat -- 'mount me'.  Presuming of course the case is different with dogs, than with humans.  Dogs have male and female, as far as the Supreme Court currently allows us to suppose.  And it goes without saying, we are told, our understanding re the existence of "marriage" was fatally flawed.  Exploded myths: america, manhood, marriage.

Ellen Page, then.  A talented former actress, now actor -- actress actrex actranz. Such obsolete terms, like Jewess or Negress.  My grandfather said 'coons' -- it's just how Montanans born in the 1800s spoke.  People should get reasonable courtesy about what they call themselves. But they do not have the right to eliminate capital letters at the start of proper nouns.  They don't have the right to require that someone else dot an 'i' with a pretty little heart.  When very small children are potty trained, they enjoy the power of holding back, or producing.  It's something to outgrow. 

She spent all those post-puberty years (that explains it: it was a female puberty) hating her breasts. My desultory search did not uncover any info regarding her pubic area -- it's all about the "top surgery" -- radical bilateral mastectomy.  Nothing about "bottom surgery" -- vagina, labia, clitoris.  A lesbian, she will have had no affinity for penises -- yet presumably a fascination, and (in a rare instance where Freud would be correct) envy.  

But the info is incomplete.  Like Caitlyn Jenner (we all have a right to change our names) -- does he still have his junk?  Unknown to all but a few.  This must be the difference between these neologisms, "transgender" and "transsexual" -- the -sexual, I'm supposing, would try to more convincingly effect the illusion, of metamorphosing, of, um, transmogrifying thheir sex.

I should have thought Eliot truly committed herself -- removing not just the "dangerous", deadly and disgusting breast tissue the very thought of which so tormented her.  I had thought she'd had a little penis constructed out of maybe tendons or cartilage, and thigh skin, and perhaps they repurposed her clitoris.  Gristle.  Hanging or flopping or bobbing about inside those "swimming trunks" she's wearing for the first time.  Maybe it was a big penis -- is that a choice?  Can they transplant some dead man's penis -- the "organ donor" box benevolently ticked on his drivers license?  But they don't always go more than skin deep.  Like that pregnant man from a few decades ago.  Another exploded myth: motherhood.

I have to admit, I'm curious.  Bi-curious, is that the term?  No, the internet informs me.  It must be trans-curious.  Is that a thing?  Everything is a thing.  LGBTTQQIAAP-curious (I looked it up -- Legbutt Kyap.  I am Yippee Kiyay Yellow Curious.  Why does thheir Q come before my A?  That's discrimination.).  

I have below-zero interest in a prurient or titillated way, in transsexual penises.  But that's not clear: no interest in the removed or repurposed actual penises of body-dysphoric men who have themselves castrated and mutilated to counterfeit the appearance, sometimes extremely convincing, of actual women.  And no interest in a neopenis, or the penis-like construct that is assembled for the type or direction of transsexualism that moves from dysmorphic female to plausibly presented "male".  

(I've found some images of the surgical artifact in question.  

From Wikipedia

Alien, and very sad.  That second one seems misproportioned, although I've never been good at that sort of trigonometry.  But, not plausible at all.  A baby's arm not holding an apple.  Flesh-tones are off.  Looks plastic, or like a koteka, the tribal penis sheath that preserves Amazonian modesty.  An inexperienced lesbian might be fooled, as from Renaissance art, or the bas reliefs of Khajuraho.)  

I hope that's clear: no interest in either women with a constructed penis-like anatomical modification, or in the amputated organs of men who opt for this elective surgery.  Rather, my interest is like that in a medical picture of a prolapsed anus -- this can happen.  My curiosity is operational ... maybe that's not the best word -- but, might the doctors provide one of these "penises" with a foreskin, or alternatively with a circumcision scar?  Can it achieve an actual nitric oxide-induced erection?  Does viagra work on it?  (Seeing those images, the non-functionality is clear.)  Would it retract, as when it's cold -- would the "scrotum"? -- would the "testicles" retract in a fear-response?  I'd assume they put two little surgical-grade rubber ovoids in a little manufactured sac, as they do with castrated German shepherds.  So many open queries, for the questing mind.

Sup, I'm Chaz.  I used to be a cute little girl,

but I hated that.  So now I'm a man. 

I got my insurance to pay surgeons to make some junk for me, and now I have this tube of skin between my legs, like a thumb with no bone in it, and sort of behind it there's this hairless skin sac that used to be my vulva or whatever, with two silicone balls I call my balls.  They're huge.  They're held in place with mesh so they haven't caused a fistula yet, and you could hardly tell the difference, if you were a dude, but I wouldn't let you, cuz I don't let dudes near my balls.  I'm straight, see, and I dig chicks. And chicks dig me, at least the ones I git with, who don't really know what balls are like -- I mean the balls of other dudes.  

It's not hatred.  Befuddlement to a degree.  But it's disgust not with her, them, thhem, but with a depraved society that so utterly encourages a mutilation that briefly ameliorates the catastrophic mental illness of gender dysphoria or sexual dysmorphia.  There are cases where it's not about genitals, but, say, an arm.  The tranz solution would be to amputate the arm at the shoulder.  For all that it cuts as deep as can be, it's such a superficial response.  But lobotomies are still practiced -- I'm guessing mostly in, say, North Korea. 

With or without a dot, it's a 'j'.

Elliot is pro-abortion ... I think that's their locution -- oh, poor-choice. No, a typo, pro-chaz, d'oh, chew, well that was spellcheck ... but I clearly have a glitch in my brain about this. What's the matter with me.  She loves abortion is my point.  No, dang, HE loves abortion.  Well, I've lost my train of thought.  Why was I talking about abortion?  Something about uteruses, maybe.  Yes, that's it.  

She thinks that scalpels are the solution to unwanted organs and organisms, and feelings.

J

Comments

I just found 4 years of unmoderated comments.  Sorry, if you've been waiting.  I like the excitement of a chaotic life.  Went through and posted what was postable.  Lots of "unknown"s there.  How rude.  

I looked at YESHUA BAR YOSEF from 13 years ago and found a comment I had not responded to.  That's not like me.  I started a response, but it was too much work to finish it.  You'll have to ask.  

J

Go cry, emo kitty

Unity, Freedom, Work

Finally:

Anodiwa stood still, staring silently, almost rudely.  She started to tremble.  Her mouth opened as in grief, her eyes wide, and she broke into sobs.  She stumbled toward the doctor, grabbed her in a desperate embrace.  Dr. Washington held the joyful mother, silently.

Since his birth the little boy was a humiliation for his mother.  Even at age six he rarely spoke, and when he cried he always covered his nose and mouth to stifle the sound, its difference.  Anodiwa was ashamed of her shame, but mother-love is a duty as much as a feeling -- something that the doctor relied on.  Anodiwa had confided, "My boy, he something God forgot to fix in my belly."  She said, "Sometime I wish the ground swallow my little boy up."  And she burst into tears.  

Of all the surgeries Dr. Washington performed, these sorts, cleft palate and the like, were the most satisfying.  She sometimes said that saving a face was like saving a life.  

The surgery had no complications.  The little boy's lip had been reshaped, and now he looked like an unremarkable child with a sticking plaster on his face.  The doctor had preserved enough of her funds to stay in the region long enough to monitor the healing of all her patients.  Parents always had to be trained, warned about clean bandages, and infection, and opening scars.  That was a bigger job than the surgeries.  Do no harm.  

Until almost living memory, doctors had killed more of their patients than the diseases did.  George Washington was killed by his doctors -- they bled him to death.  The doctor kept this fact in the forefront of her mind, not because they shared the name, but as a reminder about how the world is: people think they're right, when they're not.

Later that evening, alone in her makeshift office, gazing out the window past her mobile surgery parked outside, the doctor saw Anodiwa walking alone at the other side of the village center, carrying water to her young family.  Faintly, a crooning song about answered prayers hung on the cooling twilight air.  

====

Earlier:

Idai had turned off the paved road from Nkayi hours ago, into the rough hill country, slow going on the dirt track.  A bus came shambling toward them, passed, children waving like bon voyage passengers from an ocean liner.  Flat-topped trees, dry gold grass, roan antelope placid in the distance.  The road bucked and swayed beneath the large van, unrestful across the hypnotic landscape.

They finally came to the crossroads.  A truck blocked the way, five men standing, holding or leaning on bolt-action rifles, waiting.

Idai rolled to a stop.  The officer approached, casual, arrogant.  He wore mismatched military insignia.  “Lieutenant Captain,” Idai said quietly to the doctor.  "Not so good for us.  And Budya.  They should be Tauara.  Not so good.” 

“Get out,” the officer said.  His face was burnished copper, dull with the grime of dust and ash, streaked with dried sweat.  A necklace hung outside his shirt, the teeth and claws of some big cat.  Not deigning to use English, he spoke rapidly in a dialect the doctor could not follow. 

Idai replied, round vowels and rolled consonants.   The officer looked angry, lines dug hard into his face.  Idai gestured broadly, swept his hands eastward, encompassing all of Zimbabwe, into Mozambique, perhaps to the ocean.  He smiled, his tone deep and melodic.  He was being convincing.  

The lieutenant captain stared at the doctor as Idai spoke.  He growled a few words, turned abruptly and went to his men.  They argued among themselves.  "He did not care to see our permits," Idai whispered.  "He knows who you are.  I told him we have only a little money."  Idai wiped a palm across his brow.  "They always must have something.  They must have everything."

The officer returned, snapped what had to be commands.  Idai hurried to the cab, pulled out a bag from behind the driver's seat.  Handed it over.  Papers, notebooks, and several hundred British pounds.  The officer took the money, went back to his truck and laid it out on the bonnet.  One of the men started dividing it.  The officer returned, pointed at the watch on the doctor's wrist.  She pulled it off and handed it over.  

A few more sharp orders, dismissive, and Idai and the doctor got into their vehicle.  Far down the road, Idai let out a bark of a laugh.  "You know why he let us go?  You heard him say it, 'Doctor Martha'.  Fifteen years ago you did an operation on one of his cousins.  He said he will give her your watch."

====

Earlier:

The large wall clock clacked off another minute.  The customs agent glanced up, down again at the transit papers, grunted disapproval.  He looked up and stared unsmilingly at the doctor.  He looked at the papers again, unblinking, not reading -- thinking rather, planning.  He smiled tightly.

"Wait," he commanded, and disappeared behind a door on the far wall.  She waited, knowing the game.  Unusually long, this time -- more than ten minutes.  A siren whined through the open window.  The window blinds clattered in the morning breeze.  The door opened abruptly and the agent gestured.  "Come."

In the office, the agent's superior sat at his broad desk, pretending to be engrossed studying her permits.  She had been in this office before, six, no seven years ago.  The same neglect, peeled paint, coffee stains -- the same dust and indifference.

The official was surprisingly old -- perhaps her own age.  He raised his eyes, sighed, remained seated, shook his head solemnly.  "So Dr. Washington.  You come again to our beautiful country.  I am Under-Sub Minister Siziba.  I think I have not had the pleasure of a previous meeting."  He did not wait for a reply.  "But I should think you would know by now the importance of Zimbabwe law.  We are a very lawful people.  Civilization cannot work without rules.  It is very serious to smuggle technology and drugs into our country, as surely you must know.  There are many fees and costs."

They had not met before.  She supposed he was reciting his usual speech, varied only slightly for her particulars.  So many men like this, over the years -- decades, really.  Uniforms with incomprehensible decorations, or shiny suits more expensive than an official income could account for.  Corruption and money.  Disease and medicine.  

Siziba tapped the stack of papers on his desk.  "Not in order.  No proper stamp.  You did not pay the proper fees.  I cannot allow your -- what are you calling it? -- your 'mobile surgery' to enter.  So sorry, but no entry.  It is not possible.” 

She looked into his bored, shrewd eyes.  Games have rules -- agreed upon, but open to interpretation.  She smiled, nodded, and sat down uninvited.  They interpreted.  

Money, money, money.

====

Earlier:

[applause]  Good evening.  I'm Martha, as some of you know.  Let me tell a story, of sorts.  Many years ago, when I was young, I was, yes, believe it, a Flower Child.  That dates me.  I called myself … 'Titania'. [laughter]  We believed in flower power.  [singing:] "Love, love, love."  "All you need is love..."  We'd save the world by painting our faces and dressing like carnival people.  

We were a fad, like love beads. [laughter]  The world did not cooperate, red in tooth and claw as it is.  You've seen the picture of the girl putting a flower in the rifle barrel?  I knew her.  She died of a drug overdose.  We were just children with flowers -- babes in the woods.  And victims not just of our own foolishness.  There were wolves among the sheep.  As there still are criminals, and predators.  Lions after goats.  

When commercials started singing songs about solving global problems with a soft drink, well how perfectly human.  A flower, a smile, a cola, and everyone is young and beautiful. [laughter]

Go ahead and smile, at who we were.  If you do, we were right, a little -- honest laughter makes the world better.  But we weren't right.  Smiles don't save the world -- they brighten a mood.  Sometimes that has to be enough.  But it's better to do more, if you can.  

I grew up a little, finished college, lost my Afro and went into the Peace Corps, to Botswana, a landlocked African country.  In those days, the average income was 20 cents a day.  They didn't need flower power, they needed clean drinking water.  Water power.  I came home and became a surgeon.  Once a year I'd take a few weeks off and do surgeries in Central African villages -- of course I'd need to follow up the next year or two.  When I retired, I took it up full time.  

Let me show you.  I carry this notebook, my little black book of photos.  I have many older ones, and this one's just about full up too.  I started with polaroids, and now it's digital, but I like the physical connection of paper.  I'm like a grandma, with pictures of my hundreds and hundreds of grandkids, and I don't mind making a nuisance of myself.   

You can see on the screen behind me, this little boy, with a cyst the size of a fist on his lip.  Yes, it is hard to look at it, isn't it.  I removed the cyst.  Here he is now.  How very, very, very beautiful he is -- utterly transformed, by a procedure of mere minutes.  Saving a face is like saving a life.  His name is Boitumelo.  It means 'Joy'.  Pardon me.  His smile blinds me.  Tears for joy.

Let me make a nuisance of myself.  There is an unspeakable need in Zimbabwe.  Twenty thousand will cover the final and peculiar costs of this trip.  I don't expect it, but the very last thing that came out of Pandora's box was hope, otherwise full of pain.  American dollars, of course.  Twenty thousand Zimbabwe dollars are about fifty US.  It's among the very most corrupt countries.  

There's a breakdown of projected expenses on my website.  I doubt you'll ever find a budget that's so fascinating.  Twenty thousand is a lot of money.  It's like, twenty thousand soda pops. [laughter]  You and I, we can smile.  Not everyone can.  This is what money is for.

I don't want just my little shelf -- I want a bookcase, no, a library of these books, full of these beautiful people, my flower children.  I want a garden of children of all ages, that stretches farther than human vision can reach. [pause]

We weren't wrong.  We just didn't understand, that money is needed too.  Money power.  It really does help.  Because there's "No one you can save that can't be saved." [long pause]

 [singing:] "Love, love, love.  Love, love, love.  Love, love, love."  

Thank you. [applause]

End

*First Draft

YT

I say there are only two religions.  But there is only one, of works. "True religion is visiting the sick etc".  What then is false, or at least not-true, religion?  Selfishness?  Rituals?  Self-advancement, including meditation unto enlightenment?  These are certainly not "visiting the sick".  The other religion  is not of works, but grace, and isn't a religion.  It has nothing to do with psychology, psuche, soul, enlightenment, nirvana.

I say there are two religions, but there's really only one: the advancement of the soul (psuche, nephesh, animus, prana, chi -- not  exact cognates, but all referring to that perfectible essence that concerns mystics, ascetics, monks, religionists).  By this meaning, there are true and false religions, in that some methods advance and some  inhibit soulish growth: religion as an edification to the world, or as a means of power and selfishness.  Inward or outward, selfish or selfless.  It's still all pretty much the same -- all about gaining advantage in the world.  Moslem and Hindu and Buddhist -- well, fill in the list.  Shinto. Christian. Orthodox/Roman Catholic/Protestant.  Calvinism.  Methodism.   Just ways of acting or thinking that affect the soul.  Methods and beliefs that are personal to the individual, and which  differ only in efficaciousness.

Then there's the religion that is not a religion, because it is not about the advancement of the soul.  It's the only one that is not about works and goals, and self. It has nothing to do with the world.  It is entirely about a relationship with God, the only means of transcending, extending out of the universe.  That relationship is spiritual, not soulish.  Soulish enlightenment may come with the relationship, but it may not. 

Enlightenment -- a process, a goal, a relationship with the world -- is not the point; rather, reviving a dead spirit -- salvation, as Jesus taught it.  Saved not from a benighted soul, false ideas, an excess of desire,  bad breathing habits.  Saved from a cut-off, a dead spirit.  Separated not from the timeless sea of nonbeing, the eternal cloud of unknowing, but from the transcendent source of life, rather than the natural physics of life. 

So, there are only two religions, of soul, and of spirit.  Soul is about works and experience in the universe -- a process, and all religions are true.  Spirit is not about anything -- it's a relationship that reaches God, by grace.  No one saves themselves by believing and keeping the laws of Moses, the Pillars of Islam, the Paths of Buddhism, the credos of Christendom.  There is no way to save yourself.  Again, two religions, of saving yourself, or of not being able to save yourself. 

J

I seem to have forgotten

who I have been.


J