Passivity

Why just lie there and take it?  Why is paralyzing fear women's dominant response to male aggression?  Why, so often, don't women fight back harder? Do our instincts value survival so highly that men mostly get away with rape? Ugh.  Men are violent.

Generally speaking, women will bear, love and raise any child that grows within them?   Is emotionally shattering submission the ugly price of propelling the species through pestilence, war and famine?  Is women's self-respect not genetically conserved? 


The classic pattern of conquest is to kill the men and children and impregnate the women.  Women tend to survive, to bear the children of their conquerors. Ghengis Kahn's genes are the most ubiquitous in populations today.

I don't like this idea. Misogyny is never excusable. Inter-gender violence is abhorrent.  Restricting women's roles in the 21st century is wrongheaded. But how did we arrived at society's wicked, perverse gender preferences?  Why is the problem so widespread?  Why are we in this unholy mess?

Surviving Dryness

Summer 2018

I have only recently experienced, on any consistent basis, complete physical hydration.  
Not only have I been consistently taking in less water than my body requires (for years), 
I have essentially denied the possibility that something as simple and obvious as drinking enough
fluid might alleviate a number of physical and mental symptoms I have been willing to brush off 
as collateral, age-related damage.  I have been operationally and conceptually clueless with all of 
the evidence and medical opinion staring me full in the face. The depth of my blinded dysfunctionality 
may take a while for you to fully appreciate. I feel completely poleaxed, but otherwise thrilled.

I can only describe how this feels using explicitly religious, supra-luminal imagery.  It feels miraculous, 
entire universes of unsuspected possibility unfurl before me. Which gives you a feel for the craziness 
lurking just out of sight.     

In retrospect, the exquisitely sensitive, completely automatic systems controlling water balance in 
my body started malfunctioning a decade ago. I have probably drifted along a liter or two short 
ever since.

Dehydration can be the perfect, slippery green sinkhole that swallows up your particular life. 
It is completely self-blinding; mental acuity goes first when hydration falls. Dehydration in the 
elderly is a matter of subtlety, of varying degree, of perception, opinion, mood, judgement; 
not an agreed-upon concretion from the peer-reviewed, double blind tested, evidence-based 
medicine world. I have talked over my more dramatic close calls with very competent, caring 
doctors for a long time and no effective prescriptions have been forthcoming. "Stay hydrated." 
How would I know what that means? Over the years I learned what I feel like just before I pass out, 
never what it feels like to be fully hydrated. Not until very recently.

Chronic dehydration masquerades as many of the age-related mileposts we come to accept 
during our return to dust. It's all there in my case: crankiness, constipation, mental lapse of every 
flavor, flash rages, loud talking, ADD, depression, bizarre incompetence, dry mouth, scratchy eyes, 
dizziness, whiteouts. Plenty enough to recognize if a miracle drops.

If escape was obvious or easy, if we could consciously re-achieve homoeostasis when the original 
systems wear out, perhaps I would have, given enough time. But no, not that.

One ordinary day for no special reason not long ago God decides to call my bluff, drops a scale 
from my eye, gives me a clue, and utterly demolishes every excuse. And the tears will not stop 
flowing, all that wetness in such dry places, tears of gratitude, of humiliation, of joy, of sheer 
nakedness, of promise where there are no promises, of time when time has run out.

Latter Day Saint

So now I'm going to go Mormon.  Surprising only if you have not been following along. 

7/3/17 Email:

Various family and loved ones.

I hold that all religious truth is subjective. We are judged by God alone.  No two people experience God in exactly the same way.  I am done with arguing creeds and doctrine except in the privacy of my heart.  I am open to people, not to ideology.

 If any live the Christian behavior James described. I will consider them "of God" as their lives proclaim.  The local LDS people I know are of God by this standard and by many others.  I am completely certain the Christ they worship is the very same Christ I was raised to worship and worship now.  It is, after all, The Church of Jesus Christ, really.  I expect to join the Saints as fully as I can for the love and sake of my nearest children and grandchildren.  This move would be impossible except for a very generous gift of faith from the Holy Spirit which bridges all contradiction.

On a daily basis we can only act locally and must choose from what is possible locally. I forsake none of my current Christian brothers and sisters, pastor or congregation.   This is a "both-and" choice, not an "either-or" choice.

I consider that no sect or religion has exclusive access to God.  Emnity for those we consider in error is simply hateful behavior no matter how anyone reaches that conclusion.  Hate is evidence for the existence of Satan.  I have not considered him real for many years but you are welcome to your experience.

I judge none of you and love all of you. I pray you not judge me and I know some have and others will.  I must act in my interest and as God permits me to do. Everyone must take responsibility for their own soul.

I do not love you all equally as might be the ideal, but I love you and can not lie about such matters.  I hope to set no example except for service.  This was not a competition and everyone of good will wins.

I will care for Julie because that is who I am.  That behavior was cemented as I watched my parents care for each other and for the dear ones they could care for.  I expect to spend what life remains caring for others as I am capable.  The LDS organization is particularly well organized in this regard, as in many other ways.  I expect my abilities will be fruitfully applied and I will serve as God would have me.

We will be fine.  This is not a call for help.   It is a prayer for peace.  You may forward this as your heart advises.

In the Risen Christ,

David

8/24/17  The more I learn the scarier converting to Mormonism becomes.

Edward and me.

Do I have the alpha male thing?  I have led, managed, administrated and inspired folks.  Blazing forward, earned my keep.  Don't follow well for very long.  Both loyal and occasionally not.  Very trustworthy.  Capable of serious betrayal and living with it.  I will die with plenty of secrets.  Very good at getting people to trust and teach me.  Can pick brains, which requires the full opposite of dominance.  Simultaneously firstborn and a younger brother, can switch modes instantly.  I would have been a good double agent.

Bought Julie a tiny Chih tzu pup purebred with papers.  Neither of us with much real dog experience.  Bought what the breeder showed us without seeing both parents.  Much later learned the trick to buying promising pound animals.  Good ones go fast.  Put in your name while the animal is still in isolation, waiting for an owner who may never show.  Takes persistence as does any good thing.  Never did that.  Too late smart.  We die with so much experience and capability.

Named the pup Edward after my father's older brother and not his favorite. An obscure trick on the dead.  I have a fondness for scrappy, independent animals.  A little like my first wife, Tweet.  I came by the skill sort of honestly.  Owned a toucan just like the fruit loops bird for half a dozen years.   Simultaneously had multiple sneaky cats.  The bird can defend himself during the day.  The cats attack at night when the bird is blind.  Panics the bird even in a big strong cage.  The bird needs its own room with a door.

That long beak is quite a weapon and the toucan knows how to attack anything it can see.  Wild birds are always feisty with each other unless they're mates.  You do not want to watch ducks breed if you don't enjoy violence.

If you're standing in a doorway with a big bird flying toward you, stop.  The bird can tuck in it's wings and fly through narrow gaps.  If you move, the bird cannot correct in time and collision results.  So I learned how to deal with animals generally, on their terms.  I understand how they think.

But babies, puppies, are different.  I have so little experience with babies.  Babies, and puppies, cannot be allowed to have their own way, must learn to be submissive.  I did not know that when Edward came along.  Julie was damaged in ways I did not appreciate.  So Edward never got potty trained.  Ignoring the problem always makes it worse.  In that way Edward became my problem.

Must finish this story another time.

Falling

First seemed my father's world eclipsed.
Even with my youthful protest,
merely tarnished late.
Those massive foundations,
the ground I built my life upon,
will surely pull through darkness back.

Where steel-bound solid rock had seemed,
now black and sulfurous sand revealed.
That meteoric world was never in our orbit.
Flush and bright,
so very far outside the mean
we dreamed ourselves.

Devouring illusions,
reversion's law reclaims us.

Casualties of War and Memorial Day 2017

Generations raised in peacetime never comprehend past carnage.  Freed from witnesses, belligerence always rises again.

My church hosted a silent prayer vigil on Memorial Day 2017, specifically for Casualties of War.  A slight expansion on the formal purpose of the day.

First arriving, I prepared the sanctuary.  Brought the last of the iris. Lit the candles.  Made impromptu welcome signs.  Propped open the main doors early.  A vase of nearly spent dark flowers graced the entrance table.

Yet nothing prompted purpose.  I found a broken pencil.  Carved a point with my box knife.  Roughly printed these words and placed them beside the vase. 


"That I may not go unmourned,

That some would plead my maker
mercy on this soul.

That some might grieve and say
I did not have to die so soon."


It's not a poem I remember, not much of a poem at all.  Scrawled in moments, perhaps some stranger's plea preserved. Did I read it somewhere? Does it matter?

Before others arrived, I prayed an hour.  Fittingly and properly, Memorial Day commemorates U.S. fallen soldiers. Sometimes we forget the wounded, the civilians, the horrific losses of our enemy (now our friend).  Casualties all.  Worthy of being remembered.  If only that memory were immunizing.

According to the Garden - 2017

The garden reveals plant lore continually.  I have been schooled by tomatoes (and many other plants), for several Idaho summers.  Prepare beds well.  Use supports, twine and tomato clips, for anything resting on the soil will be consumed by others.  Corrugated cardboard also works to isolate tomatoes from the ground if it stays dry. And on and on every season.

My grandmother had these problems figured out in some different but equivalent manner.  When we mostly ate from kitchen gardens many people knew how to grow their food.  Mostly they did not record that knowledge.  One learned as a child by doing chores, practiced as youth with your own plots.  Growing stuff was common knowledge, therefore without much market value.  Farmers know as much as anyone.  As much about the land, the crops, the animals. Where land is free, requiring only an army to drive off it's inhabitants, farms multiply, production increases until the market collapses. Forget the railroads, electrification and the rest. Common farming knowledge has no value without land.  City folks or more successful farmers are quite happy to buy that land, for very little if the farmer has had a few bad years.  Skip forward a few generations.  Can kids grow anything today?

So, an old man, I garden.  I learn.  Someday this knowledge might come in handy.  But that is the rationalization.  I grow stuff because that is what people have done for 5000 years.