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.

           

High Heels

High Heels

            I’m sitting on the carpet, a sort of pre-historic berber installed in all cheapo San Fernando Valley houses in the late 1950s, built by a company called Alden and they all look exactly alike.  I’m watching my mother put on her makeup.  Though she doesn’t do anything but stay at home and take care of kids, she still performs this ritual daily just in case somebody comes over to judge her fitness as an early 60’s suburban housewife.  To my child’s mind makeup a complete waste of time, but another part of me knows that at the age of 4, 5 or whatever I am, I don’t know shit and I’m not going to stay this way forever.  Someday I’m going to have to be a grown up lady and do all kinds of ladylike things that don’t currently make sense to me.  One of these things is painting my face with loads of glop, cursing my lack of eyebrows, rummaging furiously through bathroom drawers, and having spikey curlers all over my head.

            To my left the linen closet is open and on the inside of the door hangs a full length compartmented pouch filled with shoes.  I have previously noted that for some reason, while boys and men have a pair or two of shoes, women, even penniless women like my mother, have dozens of them.  They come in all colors—some are shiny, some not; the shiny kind are called patent leather, though back in those days and up until just now when I’m thinking about it, I would think of them as “patton leather.”  Patton, like the general.  The point is, kids draw conclusions from the limited information they have, filling in the blanks with Captain Crunch crushed into the linoleum of the kitchen floor, bats, aqua-marine  colored crayons and Etch a Sketches.  As my little kid confused eyeballs wander back and forth from my mother and the pouches of shoes hanging from the inside of the linen closet door, I am, of a sudden, visited by a horror.   Someday I’m going to have to wear shoes like that.

            Technically, I’m not allowed to touch those shoes.  My mother is not the kind who enjoys her girls playing dress up with her stuff, primarily because most of the decent stuff she’s got was bought before she got married to a guy who as yet hasn’t been able to find a steady job, and had four kids.  She already has to give up too much these days for the sake of the mouths she must feed.  It’s the same principle throughout the natural world.  A mother bird with a nest full of gaping yellow beaks is not going to get to eat any worms herself and has to rely on fond memories of all the wonderful worms she got to enjoy before she got herself into this ridiculous predicament.  But I’ve just got to get ahold of one of those shoes and examine it for the simple reason that there must be something going on that I’m missing, because as far as I can tell, all these shoes are shaped exactly the opposite of the human foot.  Instead of being wide at the front, they’re pointy, and the heels?  The heels are all spikes and clumps or impossibly high platform type things that look like they’d make walking almost impossible.  I scooch my fanny over-- only see half of my mother now—and as I pull one of those shoes from its pouch, my worst nightmare is realized.  This shiny black leather thing looks like nothing less than a torture device.  If you tried to wear it, it would slide your foot down a hill, scrunch all your toes together and if you attempted to run you’d fall flat on your face and break your neck.  Shit!  Life would be almost as boring as what I’ve learned in church about all the dead people sitting at the right hand of God on clouds day and night and doing absolutely nothing.  Why is it that everything grownups do is so mindbogglingly boring?

            Have you ever noticed that grownups hardly ever run, not for fun anyway.  Oh, they may get up in the morning and after waiting a sufficient amount of time for their disgusting kale, carrot, flax seed oil, banana and more kale smoothie to digest, throw on their running shoes and go pound the pavement for 45 minutes so they won’t get fat and have a heart attack, but they rarely do it for fun.  While walking my dog at the park yesterday, I watched a couple of girls maybe 9 and 10 years old with their little dogs on leashes, burst into sprints any old which way whenever the mood struck them.  The joy of their motion, their little dogs’ tails and ears perked up delighting in the game, was unlike anything I see in adults, especially in my age group.  I can’t remember the last time I broke into a run for any reason.  Oh, wait, there was that one time.  It had something to do with sufficient amounts of alcohol at the USC faculty club and a rare getting-away-with telling reality to go fuck itself.  I ran from the college to the house in South L.A. where I was living, which takes about 15 minutes, and for just that time I felt 25 instead of 55.

The Physical Effects of Wearing High Heels

            According to a bunch of podiatrists on the Internet, (my research methods are exhaustive, consisting mainly of typing the question, “what are the effects of wearing high heels?” into the Google search engine), the habitual wearing of high heels are a nightmare for a human body.  Feet are the platform on which the “corpus woman-us” is built, and the wearing of high heels shifts the weight carried by this platform onto the balls of the feet.  This thrusts the knees and hips forward, requiring the spine to hyperextend backward to maintain balance, sticking the wearers’ butt out a little, which is why it is generally accepted that these shoes make a woman look sexier.  Scientists call this the “red-butted baboon presentation principal.”  This principle makes the male of the species eyes bulge out while it jumps up and down screaming and ordering another round beers for its bros and a sloe gin fizz for that little lady at the end of the bar, even though she’s had a hell of a day at work, is drinking Jameson’s neat, and wishes said male would drop dead, the sooner the better.  If that’s not enough, then comes a load of foot problems like hammertoe (don’t know what it is but it sounds awful), bunions, ingrown toenails, neuromas (a painful crushing of the nerve between the compressed joints at the front of the foot, and shortened Achilles’s tendon, which makes walking more difficult.  Then comes osteoarthritis in the knees, hips, neck, and lower back pain caused by chronic stress on the vertebrae.  This is all so the manarchy might notice your legs and sticky-outy butt.

            But there’s another, more sinister aspect to high heels that even I, as a pre-schooler, could figure out.  I’ve never heard grown women talk about it but we all know it’s there and it passes through our minds like a moth banging against a lightbulb every time we put the damn things on.  You cannot run in high heels.  It simply cannot be done, and if you’re forced to flee something or someone, you’ve got two choices.  Either kick them off or get caught.  Kicking them off is not much of an alternative.  Try running through streets covered in asphalt, cement debris, broken glass, and potholes or even a countryscape of grass, sticks, rocks and varying terrain.  How far are you going to make it before you trip or suffer a disabling injury?  Human beings wear shoes to protect their feet, always have always will, and because of this possess feet wholly unable to resist both man-made and natural obstacles.  They get cut, bruised, broken and damaged beyond usability in a shockingly short period of time.  In trading the usefulness of shoes for the demands of a fashion sensibility crafted by the manarchy, we give up a shocking degree of safety.    I wonder how many violent sexual assaults come down to the fact that the victim simply could not get away.

            Back when I was a kid, relatives used to come stay with us quite often.  There were a few reasons, not the least of which was that my parents had made it to the promised land.  It sounds ridiculous now to refer to Los Angeles, let alone the San Fernando Valley as “the promised land,” so choked with cars and half crazed residents paying half their income just for rent or the mortgage, but that’s what it was back in the day.  It had to be because for malcontents, crooks, queers, creative types and weirdos of all ilks stuck in backwaters of Tennessee or Missouri, tarred and feathered in tradition and boneheaded habitual behavior, the West Coast was as far as you could run to.  People rushed to Los Angeles and vicinity not just to be movie stars, though that was a big thing, but because they wanted to get away from whatever was driving them mad back home.  It’s why even today, God love it, the west coast is full of weirdos so tightly packed they’re literally falling into the sea.  One of the people who used to come visit us was Cousin Ruth.  Nobody was sure whose cousin she was, but she was from Missouri (pronounced “Missoura”) chain smoked Kool cigarettes, had a raspy voice and hairy face-- I recall petting it.  It was very soft.  Anyway, the day of my realization about women’s shoes I ran to her crying, told her I never, ever, wanted to wear those things, and was I going to have to when I grew up?  Was I?  Huh?  Wasn’t there any way I could get out of it?  If there wasn’t I never wanted to grow up, not ever.  She took a drag off her Kool, exhaled slowly while she was thinking and as I stared down at her feet, bulging out the tops of a pair of pumps which actually has quite sensible heels, she told me we were lucky because it was way worse in China.  In China, they wrapped little girls’ feet up in tight bandages to stunt their growth so that when they were adults they just had to stump around while everybody else did stuff for them.  I pictured these delicate and hobbled Chinese girls in their silky robes and chopsticks in their raven black hair, trying to serve tea but spilling it every time because they fell off their mangled feet.

            Somehow, it was small consolation.

Breasts and Titties

Two: Breasts and Titties

            Women’s breasts are wonderful things.  Soft and curved, they come in all sizes and shapes from flat to long to oblong to round, some gazing off to the side, some starward in indefinable yearning.  Sometimes, one is a little bigger than the other, which generally corresponds to the dominant side in the same way right-handed people usually have slightly larger right hands.

            Aside from being infinitely varied, women’s breasts, indeed all mammalian teats, are complex and intricate machines for the production of milk.  The minute a woman becomes pregnant her breasts start to change.  This is caused by four hormones called estrogen, progesterone, prolactin and oxytocin.  Estrogen and progesterone stimulate the development of extra milk ducts and keep her from producing milk until after the baby is born, prolactin signals her breasts to make milk, and oxytocin makes her feel calm and blissful while nursing her baby.  This fact, along with just about every other fact about using breasts the way they were intended, was never told to me by anyone before I had my first child.  In fact, I knew almost nothing about female breasts except that men were always trying to grope them or get a gander down my shirt when they thought I wasn’t looking.  In other words, what men deemed important about female breasts.  What a delight it was to find out how wonderful the things actually are and what a bonus it was to discover that once the baby latched on, my entire system would be flooded with something that caused an almost opiate-like high.  So much previously unknown became clear to me: the reason a cow, weighing 5 times as much as the farmer, allows him to milk her; and it’s also why some women choose to have baby after baby, or nurse the ones they have until they are ready to graduate from college.  Who of us hasn’t been shocked by the sight of some hippie at the “Mommy and Me” group letting her five year old come up, unbutton her blouse and have at her.  That woman is no earth mother; she’s just a bush league junkie.

            Speaking of good feelings associated with motherhood, when my kids were toddlers and I’d hold their hands to make sure I didn’t lose them, the feel of their tiny hands in mine caused a sensation similar to the oxytocin rush of breast feeding.  Oxytocin caused a positive feedback loop reinforcing me in the act of protecting my child.

            Biochemistry is a gas, man.  But back to breasts.  Remarkable things and I feel genuinely sorry for people who don’t have them.

            Unfortunately, most of the people who don’t have them are called “men,” and a lot of them are really pissed off about it.  I don’t like the word “patriarchy,” because it’s a little too soft for what I want to talk about here.  Patria means “father” in Latin, and “father” connotes a kind of cherishing or protective character, neither of which is necessarily there.  As far as I can tell the male of the human species is dominant due to denser musculature, greater physical strength and propensity for violence.  The “manarchy,” (Trademark) is so jealous of the fact that females have breasts and they do not, that they’ve created a whole culture bent on both minimizing the miraculous nature of the female breast and maximizing it as an object of sexual fetish. These things have caused womankind immeasurable grief.

            It’s important to mention here that you don’t have to be a man to be a member of the manarchy.  Well, maybe to be a Gold Star Member, but you can get a regular membership for the low low price of toadying up and forsaking yourself almost entirely.

            But back to breastfeeding.  According to Parenting Magazine, these days approximately 70 percent of American Women at least give it a try.  This is up from about 50% in the 1960’s and who-knows-what percent because no one ever talked about it, in the 1950’s.  Sometimes there are legitimate reasons a woman might not nurse her baby—perhaps due to poor nutrition or other disease processes she doesn’t make enough milk—but there are also cosmetic reasons.  Many women cherish the look of their breasts more than functionality, believing that breastfeeding will cause them to sag.  Sagging, so the argument goes, is the worst thing that can happen to a breast because men like them round and firm.

            I just thought of something funny.  During the mid-1980’s, when I began to get “broody,” radical feminist lesbians had a slogan.  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  What a dopey saying.  Unless you’re a radical feminist lesbian, women do sometimes need men and sometimes men need women.  There’s nothing wrong with that need unless it’s so powerful it makes you give up something important of yourself.  But back then there was a lot of weird thinking going around.  For example, we had Reagan and it was a time of extreme narcissism.  Everybody was walking around thinking that their core beliefs about the nature of all things, were the right ones.  So some gay men thought all men are really gay; the heteros were just faking it, and some radical feminist lesbians thought the same about straight women.  Later on, if you’d claim to be bisexual, the extremists on either side would insist you were lying to yourself and just too chicken to come out.

            These days many of the young’uns are embracing a fluid sexuality, which is great; I’m all for it.  I’m also totally lost.  But that’s okay.  Beyond the age of 55, you’re not only allowed to be totally lost, it’s expected.

            Right, preoccupation with how the manarchy wants female breasts to be.  The first time I ever saw surgically altered breasts was in the late 1970’s.  My neighbor had lost both breasts to cancer and though I barely knew her, she saw me in the backyard one day, came outside, lifted her shirt and said, “look!”  They weren’t perfect—she still had visible scars—but they looked okay, and she was a young woman; I was happy for her.  Several years later, it must have been the early 90’s, I was standing in the shower at the local gym.  The nozzles were all out in the open lined up on opposing walls and as I turned around to rinse the shampoo out of my hair I saw two half grapefruit shaped things with nipples looking as if they’d been aligned by the International Strategic Defense Committee, on the chest of a 40 something female.  My entire sensibility was jarred.  The breasts didn’t match the person behind them.  It was like seeing a hog with antlers.

            Since then, like most people, I’ve seen tons of fake breasts.  They always look the same: half grapefruit, melon, or in rare and Stormy Daniels cases, basketballs.  Nipples perfectly aligned.  But what I want to know, but can’t from these women is, “how do you feel about your breasts?”  This is because they don’t have their breasts.  They have someone else’s.  Someone else’s design, size, materials, projections, fantasies, preferences, and desires.  I want to ask them, “what does it feel like to you, when someone caresses those breasts?  Is it the sensual thrill it should be or is it simply good because the person who is doing the feeling is all puffed up because his girlfriend has breasts like a porn star?  How about breastfeeding?  Current studies find that only a third of women with implants successfully breastfeed.  I guess you can’t know what you’re missing if you are genuinely missing it, but what must it feel like after giving birth, when your milk supply lets down and it’s crowded out by a pound and a half of silicone.  I can’t imagine even trying to breastfeed if my chest contained huge wads of liquid plastic.  It makes me think of a newborn sucking on a tube of bathtub caulk.

            There’s a way of thinking about our bodies in western culture.  Most of it comes from Aristotle, Rene Descartes, and religionists of all stripes.  It is the belief that our bodies are something we inhabit, in the form of souls, in the way a person driving a large piece of machinery, a backhoe for example, inhabits the cab of the thing.  The operator in the “human being as backhoe” theory, lives in it for awhile telling it to do things like pet the dog, get a job, drive the car and eat the dinner.  Once the machine wears out—I mean, seriously, how many 1957 Carmen Gias do you see on the road?—the operator or soul, goes somewhere else.  Who knows where?  Christians say Heaven, Buddhists transmigrate into another incarnation.  Almost all religions have a story about where the “essential” self goes, that is, the part of you that is other than the physical body.  But let’s suppose, just for a minute, that there is no such self.  Suppose the complex arrangement of trillions of neurons existing not just inside the brain but including every single part of the body, ARE the essential you.  There is much more scientific evidence for this point of view than what any philosopher or religionist has ever come up with.  Any musician will tell you that sometimes fingers, for example, “learn.”  It’s why they must practice constantly to perform reliably.  The neurons in fingers do not have as complex connections among themselves as the network in brain, but with repetition they can be taught, that is, habitual neural pathways can be built.  Within this model the fact of the female breast as a part of who we are can be not just incorporated, but entailed.  If in fact we are our own individual bodies in all their marvelous unique complexity, what does it say about us to disown any of our parts for the sake of a cultural catastrophe invented by penis wielding bullies.

            I love my breasts.  When I was young they lent me soft beautiful curves.  When I became a mother they nourished my beloved babies.  These days they may not be as firm, perky, or of the same altitude they used to be—in fact they seem to be in a race to become one with my belly button—but they are a part of me no less than my feet, or hands typing, brain thinking, or eyes reading this, are.  I would no more forsake them nor accept the judgement of others, than I would cut off my hands.

Hillbilly Elegy: commentary, review

Commentary/Review:  Hillbilly Elegy

            Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance.  Vance, a former hillbilly and Yale Law School graduate's greatest claim to fame is that he got out.  Attention: he has not written a White Lives Matter book and the publisher, Harper, wants to make sure we know this.  There are 11 solid pages of "Praise For" blurbs right up front. With most books there are a few on the back cover and maybe a couple of pages in the beginning if it’s really good.  So when I picked up Elegy I figured it must be the best book ever written in the entire history of the world.

            It’s not, but it is an interesting account of the catastrophic combination of tribalism and traditions born of living in poverty.  Vance’s tribe springs from Scots-Irish immigrants that landed in Appalachia, mostly becoming coal miners, but moved to a small town of the so-called rust belt of Ohio when the coal mines began to shut down in the 1970’s and 80’s.  He gives an account of his life from his earliest memories to the present with kind of unflinching representations of the extended family he grew up with.  “Kind of,” because he’s stuck with the memoirist’s dilemma.  Some of the people he writes about are still alive and he doesn’t want to hurt them.  There is his mother, who winds up a homeless heroin addict, while his sister and aunts remain virtuous and stalwart to the end.  Vance himself, having survived a childhood full of domestic violence (though little of it directed at him), substance abuse, poverty, and an emotionally enmeshed extended family so dysfunctional that it doesn’t have time for anything but rescuing kids from abusive parents, divorce, bailing each other out of jail, going to rehab, battling obesity and diabetes, and dying early due to unhealthy habits and extreme stress, grows up, pulls himself up by his own bootstraps—U.S. Marine issued-- and attends an ivy league law school by virtue of extreme smarts and the fact that such institutions take a few poor people in to prove they’re not elitist, (which of course, they are.)  Unfortunately, Vance grows up to be a conservative Republican.  In the Afterward he claims he didn’t vote for Trump, but I don’t believe him.

            This book was published in 2016, which means it was written before the current shit storm of the Trump White House commenced.  But for all its virtues, and it has many, the greatest of Hillbilly Elegy is that it explains the mentality of the people who put Trump in the White House and continue to support him.  They are white and they are furious.  The latter is not necessarily directed at anyone in particular; it’s aimless.  It is simply the ambient emotional state of a particular segment of the population, and they like Trump because he is aimlessly furious too.  One day he is mad at the Democrats, then next woman, then Latinos, then Muslims.  Later he is enraged by the FBI, or Rex Tillerson, or Alec Baldwin.  Rosy O’Donnell.  Venezuela.  Then come educators, environmentalists, animals—especially that pesky eagle that attacked him while he filming a commercial.  After that you’ve got the EPA, all regulatory agencies, LGBTQ people, Californians, black people, the Pope and Elizabeth Warren.  This ranging, aimless anger is the most defining feature of Donald J. Trump, and as Vance describes succinctly, is the defining feature of every wife beater, mean drunk, dinner plate hurling, drug seeking, chain smoking, jailed or recently paroled member of his Hillbilly family.  This fact combined with their incredible clannishness—they are suspicious of virtually all outsiders and value family loyalty above all else-- successfully insulates them from every possibility of learning ways of life that might provide escape or an iota of happiness for any one of them.  In other words, Hillbilly Elegy is not so much an account of a segment of the population of the United States, but a roadmap describing how one person got out.  Most of the individuals he describes are “losers,” but he, by virtue of twists of fate, one of which is that he was genuinely loved by his grandparents, escaped.

            Books about anything are always products of a selection effect.  By definition, people who write books share several qualities in common.  One, they can read and write.  Two, they can think (usually), and three, they are alive.  Whenever I’ve read great tomes on the reasons for a world war, it is by necessity written by someone who survived it.  I’ve always wanted to hear the point of view of the guy hanging in shreds on the wire strung across the battlefield for the exact purpose of trapping him in that exact predicament.  Did he think the war was a good idea?  Serial killer books are always, and again by necessity, written about the psychologies of the perpetrators and not the person who is now a skeleton chained to a drainpipe in a moldy basement somewhere.  Analogously, Hillbilly Elegy is written by a survivor of cultural, socioeconomic, and familial chaos of a type rife in virtually all sectors of the American public in which clinging to destructive traditions is the only clear option presented.  It would have been a much more interesting book if penned by the heroin addicted, homeless mother.  But of course she can’t write, or think, or probably, remember her own name.