Something Snapped

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She seemed to have little in the way of personality, but actually she was simply hiding most of it beneath a thin veneer of bland niceness. Her lack of opinions hid a plethora of scorn, rage and shame. Her sweet smile had the power and delicacy of a blowtorch.

Fortunately for them, most people who could have become ensnared realized this at some gut level and steered away from entanglements. Only the sickest dove right in, but they were quickly consumed.

In the 1950’s she had been a member of a missionary order of nuns, the Maryknolls, who ran an orphanage and school in the part of China that borders Tibet. The Communist Chinese usually left them alone, but one day they arrived in force and it just happened to be the day a copy of Life magazine arrived, with a picture of Phil Silvers playing the role of Sargent Bilko on the cover. The Chinese assumed it was a picture of the Dali Lama, and arrested everyone. The school was closed, the nuns imprisoned and eventually sent back to the States, and the orphans were never heard of again.

After that, something in her snapped. She became a party girl, once sleeping with Peter Lawford and Robert Kennedy at the same time. She was with Jim Morrison the night he overdosed in Paris. And now, fate had brought her to Storm Lake, Iowa, where she was the children’s librarian. The parents assumed she was a kindly grandmother. The children were afraid of her.

True, her colorful past had left her with many stories, though she couldn’t share most of them. How could she use story-time to tell of her role in getting Che Guevara’s hands delivered to the FBI after his ambush and execution in Bolivia? Would she use her role as reference librarian to inform students writing term papers about the time she did acid with Tim Leary and Baba Ram Dass?

No, her life was a cipher, a closed book at best. After work, she went back to her furnished room at the senior center subsidized housing in the former Post Office and browsed social media until sleep overtook her.

Hidden Kingdom of Lamphun

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Well, it’s not really hidden, it’s just been overshadowed by the more dramatic mountains to the west. Usually I go down 108 to Chom Ton, then to either Doi Inthanon or Hot, on my way to do the four-day ride called the Mae Hong Son loop. This time I took my new “big bike” 500 cc Honda, straight south, down 106, through Lamphun city and then on my way to Tak.

 

I never made it to Tak. It’s too far. But the scenery down 106 is a delight. Spent the night in Li, then headed back up a smaller road, 1184, reconnecting with 106 just south of Pa Song. No traffic at all! Lumyai farms mostly, and rice. Some corn, but not as much as up north.

 

Actually, it’s more fun to ride a motorcycle on Lamphun’s winding two-lane blacktop roads in good repair than torturous hairpin turns up and down steep mountains. Reminds me of the Gold Country of Northern California where I first learned to ride 38 years ago.

 

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Acrid Smoke

 

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Nobody needs to know the truth about what happened here. They wouldn’t believe it even if we told them. Dead people were walking and talking and now they’re gone. That’s all we have to admit. Why they came back from the dead and what they were trying to accomplish is anybody’s guess. We don’t have to get all caught up in making sense of it, or explaining it to people who want to be argumentative. Lots of people get off on being contrary. That doesn’t mean we have a problem. It means they enjoy being difficult and pretending to be more intelligent than us. They aren’t.

The dead people smelled bad. It wasn’t that rotting flesh dead animal by the side of the road dumpster behind a fast food restaurant smell. It was an acrid, smoky odor that surrounded them even if the wind were blowing.

They also whined a lot. You found yourself just wanting to slap them, except you were afraid their head might fly off if you did, so you just tried to change the subject and hopefully they would forget their griping. They all seemed to want someone to fix them, to give them justice, to make them alive once more. Nobody could. They knew that, and knowing it just made them whine all the more.

A lot of us became unnerved by their sudden appearance. Now that they’re gone, we’re doing our best to get back to business as usual. Some people claim the smell hasn’t really vanished. On a humid day, you can still detect that acrid, smoky scent.

My brother is a scientist, and works at the nearby observatory the FBI closed last week. He says he can’t disclose what he knows, but insists that the dead being resurrected is somehow linked to solar flares. Beyond that he won’t say any more. He sold all his stocks and put the house on the market, even though he has no plans to move away. Even though he didn’t say so directly, I got the impression that no place is safe. Nowhere is better than here.

He’s not upset at all about the resurgence of the dead. He’s more worried about bubbles bursting, the stock market, housing prices, the value of the dollar itself. In fact, most people aren’t really that concerned about what happened. “Shit happens,” they say and move on with their lives. The thing most people found irritating was the condescending attitude the walking corpses had when they spoke to us.

It was like they were school teachers or snotty professors. Their leader was a very short woman, probably under four feet tall, who spoke as if we were all not very bright school children.

Around them we became dull and inattentive. In some ways they seemed to have more life in them than we had in us.

Fable

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We never spoke, not even once, but we had the best communication I’ve ever had with a woman. She could talk, I’ve seen her do it with other people, but she and I only conversed with touch. Her touch spoke volumes. That first year together we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

Then we stopped all physical contact, and merely communicated with our eyes. We gazed and understood what the other was thinking. Sight told us everything we needed to know, and with absolute certainty.

When she became blind, I still had my vision, although with her out of the picture it didn’t take long for me to join her in perpetual darkness. We were both surprised to find that we knew the other’s whereabouts, and what the other was thinking. By now, we seldom ventured from the house, so it was only a matter of keeping track of which room we were in.

When she died, I knew it within a few minutes. The air grew cold, there was a strange mechanical sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. I stumbled across her body at the bottom of the stairs. It was then that I began to tell her everything I hadn’t told her, and it took me days until I felt I could stop talking. Then my sight returned.

She appeared younger than I remembered her. Rigor mortis had come and gone, but her complexion had always been pale, so that wasn’t what I found shocking. It was her expression. Her face was frozen into a horrible scowl. The lips were drawn back, exposing her sharp incisors, which made her seem more like a vampire or a predatory cat than the sweet person I once knew so well.

Just Another Shmuck

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When you take a long view, it’s obvious that we are all in this together, though often we feel alone. Our concern is mainly centered on ourselves. “How am I feeling right now?” If we could change this, we could change everything. If we could ask “how are we doing?” we might actually engender good will and get somewhere.

When artists create, are they mainly motivated by a desire for self-expression, or a desire to make the world a better place for others? Hard to know. Maybe a little bit of both.

In the long run, those who are not self-obsessed have an easier time of it. They find they are propelled by the power of a group. Sometimes that group can be large and influential.

When you’re an egomaniac bent on self-promotion, you’re just another schmuck screaming “look at me!” Your voice is already drowned out by the cries of the hundred million people you’re standing with. It’s Day of the Locust. It’s the beach at Coney Island on a summer day in the forties. It’s Chinese tourists at the Louvre.

Sodomites with Attitude

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My older sister was not a nice person. Being mean earned her a certain amount of respect, and both men and women were afraid of crossing her. She would make you pay for any challenge or disrespect. Oddly enough, men found that alluring. She had more boyfriends than any one woman could use.

When she smiled, which was almost never, she could be attractive. When she looked at you like she wanted to dissect you, which was most of the time, she left an impression. She was without a doubt a featured player in nightmares all over town.

At first, no one would believe she was my sister. I am passive to a fault, meek and humble. My major failing is that I’m too nice a guy. But I have limits. I can snap, and have in the past. Those people in South America were threatening us. Even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I could sense their vehemence.

If she had been along on that trip, I probably could have restrained myself. But she wasn’t. It was just me and my niece and nephew, and somebody needed to protect them. Anyway, that’s the past. There were no consequences, at least for us. We have moved on.

I’ve been told that I’m quick to point out the flaws in others, but slow to do so in myself. That’s probably right. I can tell you that my sister is a player, a manipulator, but I probably do the same only in my own perhaps more subtle way. I could have been a salesman if I’d wanted to work, but I have never wanted to do so. Thank God our parents left us a substantial inheritance!

We are sodomites and proud of it. Although we don’t choose conflict, we are surrounded by those who want to judge us. Some want to save us, others merely choose to condemn. No matter how hard you try, you will never convince us to change. We don’t try to change you, so why do you try to change us? Are you so unsure of your convictions that you need us to agree with you?

Yesterday, a big man came to our house and began to pound on the front door. We watched him through the curtains and waited for him to go away. He pounded for ten minutes at least. Maybe fifteen. After he left we were nervous and whispered among ourselves. Would he come back? Would he bring others with him? We have a video surveillance camera that recorded him if we needed to give it to the police, but in our experience we are better off leaving the police out of our affairs. They do not favor Sodomites.

Our parents practiced an antique religion, full of oppressive ritual and pointless sacrifice. When I think of all the innocent birds and reptiles who shed blood to allow my parents and their friends to feel they were supplicating evil spirits I feel nothing but shame. Fortunately, when they passed their religion passed with them. They called themselves “The Old Believers of the Dolorous Path.” Somewhere on YouTube there is a low quality video of one of their ceremonies. You can clearly hear the howling of frightened animals and the weeping of children mixed with the gruff chanting of the elders. It is a dark video, with splashes of red illuminated by candlelight.

Whistling in the Dark

12764456_10154018288953993_5512391176604870963_oArrogance can be cute in children but appears decidedly less so in adults. Presumption born of inexperience is understandable. There are situations when humans are operating in the dark and forced to simply make stuff up in order to cope. These situations may be more common than we would care to admit.

The thirteen Thai boys who were trapped in the cave sat in the dark for over a week until suddenly, and from their perspective, unexpectedly an Englishman in a scuba outfit surfaced, shone a flashlight into their faces and asked “is everyone all right?” They assured him they were all OK. He said “Help is on the way” and went back where he came from.

Naturally the boys talked among themselves, and hatched a plan. The first boy they would send out would be the strongest of the group. He would be best able to quickly ride his bicycle from the cave entrance to his parent’s house and assure them they were OK. Little did these boys know that as each arrived to safety he would be conveyed by a personal helicopter to a hospital, assigned a personal physician, and that hundreds of millions of people in different parts of the world were watching the progress of their rescue with baited breath. They had no prior experience or current information to make them think their plan for the strongest boy to pedal home was not a sound one.

Another example of trying to make plans with limited data.

In the mid-1960’s, anthropologists discovered that people living on remote Pacific Islands had built replicas of radar towers, airplanes and army barracks out of bamboo. They were hoping these would once again attract “cargo.” The oldest members of their community remembered that over twenty years earlier, their peaceful island had suddenly swarmed with United States Army soldiers who built landing strips, barracks and then airplanes arrived with cargo. The islanders’ lives were changed in an instant. The army and all that equipment stayed for a while, then when the war ended they quickly packed up and hurriedly left. A few things were inadvertently left behind, and these things became sacred objects, deciphered only by priests. The chief of their tribe would don a pair of headphones that had been rescued from the burn pile in order to hear spirit voices tell when Cargo would return. He chanted “Roger Wilco” into a bamboo replica of a microphone. Young people begged their elders to recant once again the stories of that glorious time, when their island was awash in cargo, when chewing gum and snickers bars flowed like water.

We like to think we’re more sophisticated than either of these groups for we know what’s up. We’ve identified the causative factors at work in our lives, that we’re in control of our algorithms and hence our destiny. But there’s a good chance that we’re just little boys whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up. If we enjoy good fortune, we like to take credit for it. If not, we complain bitterly and try to blame the persons or forces we imagine have robbed us of our happy birthright.

Fierce Grace

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He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

-Aeschylus

If you spend a lot of time in school, you could easily form the impression that everything has already been cut and dried, labeled and codified, when actually the world is delightfully ambiguous and full of surprises. Too much schooling takes all the fun out of it, removes the element of surprise, and turns everything into a report that could be graded, evaluated and certified. If you’re willing to risk saying “no thanks” to schooling, life can be pretty exciting.

But wisdom comes at a cost. Real wisdom, the kind you experience directly, cannot be ordered up in transferable credit hours. It is a gift from God, via his awful grace.

What happens without my prior expectation or permission could be also considered “fierce grace.” There’s a documentary about Richard Alpert, aka Baba Ram Das, named that. He had a stroke and decided to experience it as a gift.

Fate has a way of not asking permission before it acts. Not asking permission beforehand is a form of mercy. How I feel about what is going to happen versus what actually happens is, in the long run, not important. If I want to be happy, I have to learn acceptance and to appreciate what is. I have to cultivate patience and gratitude. Otherwise I’ll always be somewhere between miffed and outraged.