Fire the First Time

Fifty years ago, as my first marriage began, both of us thought the likelihood of nuclear conflict so high that having children was immoral. We joined our lives in a time of falsehood and funk; of pointless, divisive war. Love, slim hopes, false illusions, distractions and mutual betrayals saw us through a decade. Somehow we escaped literal incineration.

Reception Reflections, Kylee and Daniel, August 2015

 setting: an LDS multi-purpose room, anywhere

Oh the brothers and sisters can celebrate! The women are magnificent, powerful, ethereal, their divine futures peeking through. Sandra glides, floats, shines. The men are solid, well-muscled, disciplined, sharp. Doug, polished, precise, in uniform. Doug has his station nailed, the liquid is handled. 

In Idaho, be nowhere in the heat without liquid. Dallas is surrounded by generations, beaming, holding court. Ashton is confidence itself, patiently waiting. All this is his oyster too, now to smile, soon to do. Jacob moves sharply, smoothly, glides and skitters through the crowd. Black, white, and vertical black suspenders, nothing gray or passive. Cassidy is fierce and focused, dancing, dancing, dancing some more. Turning circles, eyes up, drawn to the chandelier. Minette is perfect Minette, no detail unattended, in command, My eyes follow her around the room, waiting for my orders, waiting for her to tell me where I might be needed, how I can help, what to do. 

I'm a floater, no assignments, ready. I know how this works, each part. I stand still and the celebration flows around me. I have been in the thick of it. I have eaten cake, I have been fed cake. I imagine what people are feeling, at least generally, I read the faces watch them interact with each other. I look at each person, every table, hardly moving, not difficult if one is tall. The father, Adam, everywhere. I talk with the bride in occasional eddies, so much wonderful, so happy, so beautiful. The funnel through which the future flows. And then the mystery to me so far, Daniel. Oh dear Lord, he is an island of calm purpose at his own wedding, a man who does, a man for whatever season comes. I don't really need any more information. 

Some faces project easily into lives unlived. Times that do not exist but will exist. Unique lives discovering all of life's dimensions again for the very first time. Making it all up, passing it all on. Saying good-by. Stepping aside. Relearning everything we worked so hard to figure out. Sliding into holes, tripping over rocks we cannot tell them about. It's a game I play, seeing lives flowing out into the future, knowing the territory, knowing sorrow and grief, knowing love, first love, true love, having children, grandchildren. So what if I mix up people's futures in my imagination? All the roles get filled, all the time. i took my turn being responsible for the world, making things happen, moving, shaking, striking fear, taking things seriously. 

Now I play the grandfather's part I remember from childhood, another fun time, every bit as good as being twelve, on the good days anyway. On the bad days just keep moving, one foot and then the other, do what must be done. Twelve and knowing how it works. Twelve and dancing. Simply stay on my feet, keep moving, my entire plan. Work is good for you, relaxing kills you. The body responds as long as you keep shoveling. Do not slow down. 

Children of mine all, listen. God is always. He's fine. You are fine with Him. Nothing to do, necessarily. Smiling is good. God can make it all seem without effort, like He's doing nothing at all. A good quality to emulate, effortlessness. God is there for me, has been for all my people, as far back as time goes, will be there as long as it takes. We love you all so very much. Pay attention. The big decisions are the one's you hardly notice at the time. Things rarely appear without warning. Yes, everyone else is watching the jolly circus, focused on the clown in that impossibly tall hat. Pay attention.

Originally posted on Facebook where it will lie entombed for time unknowable.

A Gun for Defense

I must thank an ex-soldier buddy for teaching me why NOT to buy a gun in 1967.  During the last 50 years I have watched Americans load up on guns and ammo at a frantic pace.  Everything I have learned during that time only reinforces Tommy's advice. In the hands of amateurs, guns get you killed.  Tom Heib was an American military advisor in Indochina during the early 1960s.  Early, before my generation's blood was squandered so lavishly, pointlessly in Vietnam.   Who better to help me pick a gun?  Tommy, that marvelous, vain, sneaky bastard.

Is the US a more dangerous place today?  I walked or rode my bike everywhere.  My mom only told me to get back before dark.  She never even learned to drive.  No, this is not a more dangerous world.  Not any less hostile if you are Black.  It feels more dangerous though. Popular culture is scarier, predators and violence everywhere.  We are obsessed with watching, hiding, exposing and controlling female bodies. Parents now chauffeur their children.  Well of course you have no time, silly people.

Of course your kids have allergies.  Children are designed to be dirty, supposed to come in intimate contact with everything in their environment very early.  We are not "designed" to move far away from the place we grew up, the place where we are immune to everything.  We descend from very long lines of hunter-gatherers.  We hunted and ate animals.  Living with them is different.  Medicine is still fighting diseases that animals tolerate. Our dwellings were warmer when we started sharing them with animals, but not healthier.

The Islamic State is simply the latest in a long line of blow-up bogeymen.  Fear!  Fear!  But they will not kill you on the streets of Boise.  Only your jumpy, concealed-carrying neighbors might do that.  My advice: Keep your hands in sight around strangers.  It's not only the cops who will blast you fearing the imaginary gun in your pocket.  Toy guns now get children killed routinely by frightened adults.  Progress.

Where did Osama Bin Laden and the Islamic State come from?  We created them by demolishing their world on a whim, leaving them with nothing but hatred and weapons.  We Americans created these nihilists.  We did it personally, on the ground, in their faces, from their skies and with sneaky cluster bomb-lets when we finally exhausted our treasure, declared victory and retreated.  For nothing.  For George Bush's petulance.  Now we try to eliminate them by re-breaking what we had previously broken so effectively which is why they hate us so much.  How much more can they hate us?  We will see.  But they are there and we are here.  The only thing we must now fear is our young and clueless not-quite adults.  Which is what always drives us crazy.

Back to the absurdity of "defensive weapons."  Animals in the world can be classified as either predators or prey.  Predators have by far the worst of it.  Prey always vastly outnumber their predators.  Prey evade being caught so effectively that predators can only occasionally catch babies, the old, sick and stupid.  Being a predator is hard, get it?

Yes, we breed cows to be stupid and render them defenseless.  Those wicked old bulls do actually have value with their long, sharp horns, but we won't let them near our artificially inseminated ladies.  Big bulls keep a herd safe from predators.  Oh how terrible, my defenseless calf got picked off by a wolf.  Predators have the really difficult life, remember?  If they are eliminated the prey animals will have lots of babies, eat everything in sight and then starve.  Yeah. Shoot that wolf ignorant fool.  Only man is capable of ravaging his own world through ignorance and false bravado.

If a predator gets anywhere close to you, human or animal, the best thing to do is what prey always do.  Look big and scary, or blend into invisibility.  Flee quickly, scream, hide, lie still as death.  Get something weaker between you and the predator.  Outrun anyone at all.  You know how this is done because for most of human history we were prey.

A gun in your hand messes with your mind, which is how it gets you killed. This is what Tom Hieb taught me.  You suddenly imagine you are a predator too.  Hey, you have a gun.  You move toward the actual predator rather than running for your life. But you are only delusional prey ignoring every prey survival skill.  You are masquerading as a predator with stage claws and wax teeth.  As ineffective as predators really are, often they can get the crazy, stupid ones.

A gun messes with your mind, makes you forget how to live another day.  I know, you spent a few hours at the shooting range.  You are ready for the rapist-terrorist.  Sure you are, in your imagination.  Have you ever noticed that cats really like to play with mice that fight back?  A cat will only eat a mouse when the mouse isn't fun any more.  Prey that try to fight back are so much more interesting.  Strap on that gun, deluded fool.  More likely your angry wife will kill you with it.

Hidden False-sumptions

Every age shares characteristic foundational concepts which can seem barely credible to descendants after a few hundred years. Shared definitions make complex language possible. Most humans hold these assumptions unconsciously.  If you never think about it, chances are that's a hidden assumption.

So what is true and what is arbitrary? The older I get, the more things I once assumed to be true turn out to be false, arbitrary or merely fashionable.  Stuff everyone knows is usually wrong. My list follows:

1.  Soap.  You don't need soap in the shower.  All the stink and dirt just washes off.  Your skin will be healthier because it is not attacked by soap every day. The routine use of soap only enriches the soap maker.  You have to rub the dead skin cells away, like with a washcloth or some rough bark, or you might get pimples like an over-oily kid.

2.  Deodorant.  Your pits smell bad because bacteria have had some hours to generate compounds that offend noses.  Wash more often.  You will not stink for hours.

3. Oily or greasy contamination requires soap and water to remove.  Olive oil works just as well and is actually good for your skin.  If there is not enough water to wash, oiling up and then wiping or scraping off the oil, the practice in classic Rome, works very well.  Oiled skin both feels and looks good.

4. Being fat is unhealthy.  No, consistently eating more food than your body needs is bad for you.  Fat will see you through famine.  Being fat and sedentary will kill you. 

5. Never walk if you can ride.  Your body walks any distance superbly.  If you stop walking, you lose the ability to walk.  A healthy body moves.

6.  Food beyond the expiration date is unhealthy.  Your eyes, nose and taste will warn you if something is unhealthy to eat with one exception. Improperly preserved food can contain undetectable botulism toxin.

7. People need three meals a day.  If you do not do physically demanding work, three meals a day will make you fat.  Healthy adults can handle seasons of no food quite well.  The old, sickly and very young may die after some weeks.  Fasting is quite safe.  Famine is normal.  Continuous plenty is abnormal.

8. Some people are failures. No, some people give up.  How long did it take gravity to teach you how to walk?  Nothing ever works the first time or even the first hundred times.

9. Miracles happen.  No, miracles originate as fraud or false perception.  We use metal machines to transport ourselves through the air. They function reliably no matter what we think of science or how many scientific "theories" we deny.  Boarding an airliner is to deny miracles, to deny exceptions to scientific theories.  If God could make exceptions to natural laws, then airplanes would sometimes inexplicably fall out of the sky.  We live with dangerous machines that never kill us.  With a scientific education, people can design things that function in a predictable manner until they break or wear out.  With a religious education you can not make machines but you can control people.

10. You catch colds from being cold.  No, if you do not get enough sleep your immune system cannot fight off disease.  People have routinely lived in cold places without much clothing.  We live very pampered lives.

11. Bathe or shower every day.  As a kid I watched my grandfather "wash up" first thing in the morning and then before dinner.  You can stay clean enough for women with a washcloth and a quart of hot water before meals.

12. Modern is better.  No, modern stuff has been designed with so little wear margin that it breaks after a few years and must be regularly repurchased.  I will die years from now with my 1990 Maytag washer and Gas dryer. It was almost the last generation of appliances designed to be repaired.  Every five or ten years I have to fix something.   How long have you had this particular cell phone?

13.  Technology advances.  No. It oscillates from good to bad, back and forth.  We get more, then we get less more quickly.  Back and forth.  I grew up with inexpensive black and white film cameras.  Color was available but not practical in very low volumes.  My first camera made roughly two by three inch contact prints after the drug store sent them out for processing.  In high school I learned to use larger format cameras and how to make 8 by 10 inch enlargements.  Then Polaroid cameras became popular.  At first, they made tiny black and white positive images in a minute.  Much poorer quality than my childhood Brownie camera. 

When SX-70 color Polaroid cameras came out I bought the original model, convinced it would be a timeless classic. I do not have many pictures from those days because the camera was not particularly good in very many situations.  Then one day film was no longer sold and the camera was useless. 

I remember seeing a black and white video on a Macintosh computer.  Only an inch square, I was not impressed.  In the 1990s cellular phones became small and very good.  The sound was spectacular with digital.  You could literally hear a pin drop, as Sprint advertised.  Then phones got teeny cameras.  They were very popular but the pictures were so small I considered them a joke.  You could only get them out of the phone through the phone company.

I worked very hard in the late 1990s to take good color photos on 35 mm film.  I bought a film scanner to get the photos into my computer.  Then, around the millennium affordable 4k cameras arrived that produced images as good as 35mm film, but not much better.  I went digital.

Passable to good, good to really good, then back to tiny barely passable pictures again.  Forward to good color instant photos, then crappy tiny digital photos. 

Mothers, don't let your children go to Valpo.

           ===  in revision, incomplete ===

Mothers, don't let your children go to Valpo.

Learn critical thinking

mislay faith

deny that God exists and worse.

Pretend to live without illusion. 

relinquish peace

If your child trained in physics

and investment banking beckoned

now drowned in treasure.

Either way their soul is forfeit

proclaim that souls never were.


Reunions bring back children

for holiday, wedding, then funeral.

Children return to bury elders, surprised

that pain beyond

acquaintance stalks.

Generation slips away

revealing Christian zombies

berift of trade, retired

take their turn.


The appearance of faith is fine.

When they smile at paradox,

Perhaps they're simply batty.

Sailing beyond words and logic,

they won't cause trouble.

Zombies, on the other hand

will generate no end of grief.

They peek behind the curtains, seeking

how the past made sense of mystery

suppose variety that never was.

Those burned alive

or excommunicated posthumously

make the most noise.

Which solid beam will burn?

stones repurposed in walls where?

Unknown to God

the future

just appears.

The First-Time Success Illusion

Nothing, not a damned thing worth doing, ever works the first time.  Maybe not even the 100th time.  The faster you are proven wrong, the sooner what you are trying might just work.  This is taken as Gospel now.  Still, people fear failure.

I can say that there is no sense mourning those dessicated, half-baked ideas you kicked into the corner.  But you will not understand until failure grabs you by the throat and scares the shit out of you. 

There is a caveat: Mostly, the price for seeing your ideas come alive is that they get credited to someone else.  If you want credit, ideas will just shrivel up.  I'm just thrilled when someone picks up an idea I dropped and takes off like it was their idea all along.  You make life happen differently by giving it away.

I guess you can tell I'm not a college professor.  They have to take credit, even when someone else does the work.  Occupational hazard.  Let me tell you, re-inventing something is just as much fun and more likely to be successful.  You get to live the experience, but will not get the credit.  Your predecessors left plenty of seed around for you to plant.  Do not just sit on your parent's couch being frustrated.  The real failure is sitting out the game.


                                     "Dry Gardening Success"

Oh look, this stub of a post was a duplicate. I was clearing the "in-process" queue.  At some point publish what you have, no matter how poorly written.  I did complete this piece.  Check lower down.

Just trying not to kick the bucket with a full queue of unfinished stuff.  This is so unlike me.  I leave unfinished stuff everywhere.  In point of fact life is quite long enough.  We blink past decades in the mind.

A clean desk?  No, let the future sort things out.  When your memory releases the objects surrounding you, they will be seen as junk plus a keepsake or two.

I left a thriving Mediterranean garden behind in Southern California. The garden did so very well, thank you, on natural precipitation.  Why don't we plant the whole place that way?

Perhaps some day I will tell you how it works and how I learned to do it.

Not really that difficult.  But there are additional rules for people who learned to grow stuff elsewhere, in places where many plants can be raised happily.  Places we grew up in.

The Killer Application not Quite Thought Through

 

Now I Remember is a must-have application for older folks: Talk to yourself in the near future. Stay on schedule. Pretend to remember.  Memento for everyone.

Open the application. No, make a gesture. Apps are far too primitive, the result of making too few devices do too many things.  Gesture and mutter to yourself.  No, simply talk.  "Remind me to. . ."

Later, simply ask "why am I here?"  A limited sense is assumed. 

 Say a few words. Whatever minutes later you get a beep. If you've forgotten why you are in this place, on what errand you came, you ask the phone to replay your message to a future self. You are free to disregard, of course. The ap will not just start blurting out loud. Some things should be private.

Open the app. Say a few words. A tap on the glass ends recording. One keyboard tap selects the time for the alarm to go. The same tap, per display location, can select from a few pre-settable time delays. Keep it really effortless to use. I hate that I don't know how to increase the font size on my Droid. I can see the boxes, but I can't read what's written in them. I keep hitting "sleep" instead of "stop".

I should look to see how many versions are already, on the market. Then again, the utility of such an app isn't obvious to the youth who drive the app market.

Giving myself permission to write here today now. It's early in the day, only 12:35.

Can't keep correcting the previous sentence as Now slides along. 12:50 . . . 13:00 But I thought about it.

I have been so involved in our extraction operation. We're in the process of moving from Anaheim Hills to Nampa.

More than that. I haven't felt like blogging. Who cares why?

As I remind myself frequently, I do better thinking about where to steer the present. This trick of attitude produces results.

Prayer For Shooters who Mass-Murder Children

Hate and revulsion seem insufficient and too simple.

Dear Lord:

This day we plead for killers.  We plead mercy for shooters who stalk corridors, hunting innocence. We pray for the agents of random personal death. We pray for the planners, mechanics and pilots who rain death without notice.  We pray for victims, combatants and civilians,  both guilty and innocent.  We pray for the collaterally damaged, the burned and wounded

We pray for the tormented and for sound sleepers.  We pray for the self-righteous who embrace principles and deal tools that so easily transform suicide into slaughter. We pray for horror's enablers. 

We plead for those who transform specific horror into general fear, paranoia and trembling terror.  The immediacy of media changes five deaths at 1000 miles into killers lurking in shadows.  We pray that these indiscriminate killings, the natural flowering of a society saturated with death tools, sow seeds of understanding in our souls.  O Lord limit the casualties of this terrible plague to the necessary.  Particularly we plead for those of school age now traumatized by the sacrifice of their fellows. May they reach adulthood understanding that the idolatrous worship of weapons is truly an abomination.  May the great hoes of the law be brandished to check the flourishing of these fiery thorns.

We are not innocent, only ignorant.  Our parents firebombed entire cities that we might live and not others. Incandescent phosphorous melted into living flesh.  Surely there are enough burnt bodies, sufficient stench.  Surely we must inherit some consequences.  We get through each day like children walking in fog. Worlds of significance are erased with each death.  We  could not live without the systemic rebirth of ignorance.  We move forward uncomprehending.  Humans cannot live without faith.  Perhaps faith in some future better life. Even if our faith looks like no faith.  We wonder anew what life means precisely because those who knew are all gone.  Graves of meaning, dust of significance.

Plants and animals don't consider these questions.  Life just grows until it does not. The young are cruel out of ignorance.  The old are cruel out of disappointment.

As children we learned to sleep well because closet monsters are imaginary.  Now we aren't so sure.  That quiet kid two blocks over might be buying body armor.  Somewhere familiar, people will burn heretics and drown witches again. 

Perhaps the, O Lord, we will return to the sanity of earlier times that recognized these rapidly repeating tools of specific death have no place in human society.  Save us from the greed of firearms manufacturers and the machinations of their perfidious associations.  Let them forge guns into rolls of galvanized, corrugated steel so that we, your children, may have reliable roofing in future to shelter beneath.  If not roofing, may they manufacture some equally useful steel form.

O LORD, save us from this plague.  Knowing their own deaths are imminent,  but having tactical vests like the leather corsets of Gurkhas, killers draw out their last moments for more.

Safety in Numbers

                   This is unfinished, maybe not worth fixing,  . . . .

All of us live immersed in many layers of backup systems.  It appears that our bodies breathe and our heart pumps automatically regardless of our conscious state.  However, we do not survive very long without conscious attention, our own or someone else's.  Loved ones may depend on us or on someone else acting in our place.  One aspect of responsible living is structuring our own backup systems.  We need adequate shelter to sleep safely.  We keep water and food nearby.  We live within strong social systems mutually obligated to the open-ended welfare of the group.

Normal life today would have been incomprehensibly magical to people in deeply prehistoric times. Biologically we are identical.  Humans mediate interactions with their environment through tools.  We decide whether primate fossils are "human" through the physical evidence of human capability.  Did they walk on two legs?  Could they produce vocal sounds?  Did they use tools?

contemporaneous tools.  Our tools are orders of magnitude more powerful. 

Humans use tools to mediate interaction with their environment. Our present lives

 The largest single difference between human life now and that in deeply prehistoric times is the materials available to make tools.

Much in our modern lives is mediated by


We are surrounded by kin

Many aspects of our lives depend on our normal functioning or on the performance of some backup system.

 people we care about
Many vital aspects of our lives depend on our   attention. 


How can we responsibly minimize the bad consequences if we are plucked from our lives.

We may die or be mentally incapacitated without warning at any moment.

Serious consequences can result unless we pay regular attention to our ongoing commitments, especially finances. 

 and .   our regular attention. 

Faithless Paranoia

Andy Grove wrote "Only the Paranoid Survive."  I have not read it. Perhaps his meaning is more subtle.  With wolves nipping at his gem-encrusted slippers, Grove must banish sleep, keep moving across the boggy moor.

The paranoid are tortured and lonely. Paranoia quietly drives others away. You might have glimpsed another in the baleful light of false suspicion.  They may have overheard you ascribe intention to a rock.  So easy to see wicked agency.  So hard to realize the plotting is in your head.  As I write this piece, clues pop up pointing to the truth, I would prefer to be paranoid, probably am, I cannot let the question rest. I have mislaid Ockham's razor, the statistics of parsimony lie mute. I am without tools and lacking faith. 

                                                    -0-

Until this very moment it had not occurred to me that something slightly irregular may be going on with <nonprofit>’s finances.

It could be that people are busy or don't understand.  But normal places will fall all over themselves to help someone with responsibility to understand any detail that bears on their fiduciary duty.  They will at least try.  But this has gone on nearly a year and no one seems concerned.  We all gonna do the right thing and make the books look perfect.  It's like I'm not here.  Silence.

I understand that people get paid late to cover a cash shortage.  Who hasn't when there was no other choice.  But it must be a conspiracy and someone could leak.  I don't care about proof here, I just want to know how far I can trust everyone involved.

If you fool around with people's pay to cover lack of money you must do something technically illegal to cover your tracks.  Probably cut checks and then make pretty sure they don't get presented until you can cover them. We can all wink and say "no foul" if we choose.  This cannot be simply my fervent imagination.  How could I make up something like "late pay" when I'm sitting next to <knowledgeable person>?

If I'm going to misunderstand then I do not need the numbers.  I could make numbers up myself.  I could lie and accuse people, much scandal would result, and no one would ever know if I were correct or just making it up.  Like Joe McCarthy or Fox News. Beneath me, not worth my time.

I pray this is only a cluster-fuck.  I do not spell "clusterfuck" with a hyphen, but the computer likes the hyphen better.   Too few well intentioned people not paying really close attention.  You get that with a volunteer labor force.

So now I really want to know.  It is my responsibility.  No one on <governing body> gives evidence of understanding finance, any better than I do.  I do not need this to be a problem.  I want to be proven completely wrong, utterly paranoid.  Someone has to pony up and explain me.

The budget process last fall was so painful.  I have come to agree with the best assessment of <person>.  She may understand finances when she sees them, but she does not get completely what is supposed to add up to what well enough to create budgets without help.  Mercifully, some one must have helped, finally.

Not impressed by the "<income> did not get mailed" explanation for last Summer's liquidity crisis.  Very simply, when you bump along at the very bottom in finances, statistics says you will get caught fairly frequently.  Are we too stupid to have that explained to us?  Maybe someone did not send in their check, but that does not make it the cause.  It was going to happen anyway and it will happen again unless we look at the problem squarely and fix it.

Again, probably we are just doing the best we can.  But a few of the <people around> have claimed statistics expertise.  Oh well, statistics is not intuitive and everyone fucks up.  Being too hard, I know.  Probably nobody's fault, just collective ignorance.  We did have a tax problem a while back, so bad stuff has happened and could happen again.

Lord, let me be an old fool worked up over nothing.  I am willing to be a thorough public fool, but idiot not so much.  So much for my reasonable paranoia, my false suspicion.