Monsoon, by Catherine O’Sullivan

Chaos

The heavens open up and bring rain,

like a lover gone for too many seasons,

      struggling in the swirl of winds battling Titans.

Fury and dust, unimaginably, desperately charged.

Thunderheads thousands of stories tall

      boil and surge, scream and release the deluge

Until the nighttime stillness descends on the fields, joyously singing

      in the dark.

Nowhere Man Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                 

Animals and Aliens

Animals and Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anger Monkeys and Meditation

Anger Monkeys and Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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