Twist Bone (experiment 2)

Tight-cudgels of leather-draped men  drew up set-jawed on their horses and fronted the house.   There was McCabe riding front, pressed on each side by Jim Winters and his brother Edgar.  Close behind followed a phalanx of locally drawed up men:  the Blacksmith Merlon and his Brother-in-law Stewarrt, , the three McCallister boys, and finally to the rear a group of itenirent cowboys who’d just happened to be in town that night looking for adventure.   Each man in the posse was a sinewey pocket of muscled consciousness:  each was a spitting and simmering block of flesh and dirt with violence in their hearts and a still inchoate plan to pummel the glow of life from a randomly pointed-out human being.   This was the 19^th century  apotheosis of the western edge of human expansion:  a ragtag collection of men  clever enough to anneal barrels of steel and projectiles of lead in the fires of their industry, but with still stone-age fingers simultaneously itching to pull-and-fire the annihilation of another man’s life—possessed of a  demon to split another man’s flesh and to obliterate his existence with the crack of a trigger-hammer.    In the galloped high energy  of their hoof-and-horse cabal they only knew they felt a hatred, a hatred that smelled like gin and soil, and that cored out their insides  with a relentless and ravening hunger for someone’s life.   

Inside the loose-tacked shack the mood was not as jaunty.  Tuck sat beneath timbers that drooped so low they touched his hat.  His close-torn nails tapped slowly on the open oak grain of the table, marking a random cadence.  His hat canted deeply forward, the shadow that filled his face was deep and  opaque, completely closing his expression to revelation.  Only the raspy sound of a light snorting  through nostrils emanated from the center of the shadow on that face, a sound that could barely be heard by the other man hunkered down at the other side of the same table.  Ernie was old—at least old for these parts—nothing more than a collapsed flesh-sack of knotted-joints and rutted hide:  small and almost inscrutable as a man beneath the folding cloak of his deep wrinkles.  He was bird-thin, and his old skin seemed to be in the process of swallowing him all the time, like a python on a chicken bone.     

A bullet  whistled through the six inch space between them, and the crack of a rifle seemed to arrive a half second later.   Splinters exploded in slow motion and hurled through the cabin, pattering like light rain on the floor and covering Tucks's hat.

“Listen Up!” came a surly voice unimpeded through the thin slat walls.  “You kin walk out on your own, with your hands in the air, or we kin rain the justice of hell down on you right through  these walls. “  There was a pause, “You got yourself exactly five seconds to re-cipro-cate.”    

  

Ernie peered towards Tuck, waiting for a move, but none came.  Tuck stared straight ahead, the only sound coming from the prairie wind susurring  around the corners of the cabin, and the intermittent  jangle or tinkle of a random metal piece on the fence or on a boot or stirrup in the group of men outside.      

Prologue

Jonathon Niedermeyer was exactly who you’d think he was—given his name of course.  And the fact that with a name like that he was pretty obviously human.  

Actually not so obviously in Los Angeles, where people name their dogs Richard Nixon and their cats Mr.Pritchard  and their cockatoos Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and sometimes even their  body parts after philosophers, scientists, famous Disney characters,  chewed-up child stars or even sober and perfectly constructed media intellectuals from one of the three cable news channels or their local affiliates.   Because living in Los Angeles is too much like living on the surface of a ball bearing, where you only stick if you compress your whole prone body around its smooth, hard circumference, and hold on for dear life, and then distract yourself from the existential terror of falling off by being ueber-not concerned.  

Ueber Not- concerned enough to pretend like naming your animals or your body parts or even your scat after famous people, or listening to the nothing-scatter of half-inch deep techno-punk-god-forbid-it-pretends-to-mean-anything music where disingenuously “loose” women with open cleavages and closed empathies construct a money gobbling machine of fame and name-recognition that is exactly shallow enough to make your ball-bearing clinging surface in Los Angeles seem as deep as it ever gets—ueber not concerned enough for pretending that.  

So you cling white-knuckled to the ball-bearing and pretend not to be scared by effulging your West coast Ueber-not concernedness that repels and repulses any god-forbid empathy real people might feel for you.  Because that would mean you are living an empty existence.  And that would mean it indeed all means nothing and Nietsche is dead and God didn’t have the last laugh because oh by the way.  Pause.  God IS dead.  

And you suspect it deep in your plastic cartoon-Christian hearts.  

Which makes every tablespoon of air you vacuum into the back of your throat a brutal act of terrorism because it keeps you and your existential nothingness alive just long enough to continually re-not-feel your existential nothingness.  Water-boarding in reverse.  But worse.  Life-boarding.

Only real option for human beings in the gulag of daily terrorism that is the West in the 21^st recorded century :  Ueber-not-concernedness.  

   

But Jonathon happened to have been born with a particular and elemental deficit in the spiraling loops of his 32^nd chromosome pair that left him with a curious and highly rare neurotype. 

The genetic defect had led during his embryogenesis to a iterative cascade of chemical interactions that ultimately resulted in an under-provisioning of his left sub-parietal-cortex with sufficient myelination and neurogenesis.  This weakened his propensity for self-absorption and denial, and simultaneously his ability to encode and solidify the relentless media-cavitated neuroprogramming of a 21^st century human upbringing.  In short, unlike others, he could not bludgeon back his empathy instinct.

This in turn made him feel the wanton brutality of the gleaming antisepsis of life in Los Angeles moment by moment and thought by thought.  It made him remain empathic even against the incessant alienating and desensitizing instructions of the tyrant of his culture.  In other words, it made him a singular example of archetypal  human genuineness in the fractured and atomized center of an Ayn-odized American fiduciary and financialized world. 

     

It turns out that Jon Niedermayer was destined from birth to become and remain a grotesque pariah in the world.

 War and the Primal Heart

“Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount where instinct is king” (John Keegan, The History of Warfare).

         Not a human being exists who would deny that warfare and aggression lodge deep in the seedbed of human history.  Traces of collusive violence strew like crash debris across the planet’s archaeological field; crushed bones, bent weapons, crumbling mortar ruins of cities belligerently pounded free of human life.  And even while the world effulges still with the echo of musket and cannon, we wheel in new weapons to shatter and smash the refuges of our enemies, to obliterate all the human lives that offend us  An embarrassing primordial immaturity still afflicts us even while we try to incandesce with our sentience.  Scrutiny of the human race inevitably leads to the horrified recognition of an elephant in the room, one that trumpets and ruts noisily against the sofa—it is the glaring disconnect between the posturing of our intellect and the overt reality of our brutalizing violence.  Why, after eons of evolution and centuries of civilization, do we still so easily slide into the decomposing bog of primal aggression? 

         The question naturally bifurcates its answer, as the monster of war bears two natural heads—a political head that swells with national warring anger and a military head that snaps when ordered into the real combatant flesh of war.  These are fundamentally different beasts attached to the same trunk, each writhes with its own mien and meter from the same muscled neck.  Volumes have been written on the spasmodic vagaries of the political head of war-- most war histories are in fact pathologically preoccupied with the political and strategic dynamics that feed and direct national belligerence.  John Keegan’s title-quote shifts focus back to the other monster-head of aggression, back to the deep psychological current of real combat and the propelling impetus of violence in the individual soldier.  It is an important distinction, as warfare needs both a political and military head to survive as corrosive incubus in the human experience—national pugnacity dissipates in its own vapor if no one can be found to implement its vulgar threat, a fact most elegantly expressed in the words of a bumper-sticker I saw in a still superpower-wedged Austria in the 1980’s: “Picture this-- there’s a war somewhere, and nobody goes” (Stell dir vor—es gibt krieg, und keiner geht hin). 

          So what exactly is John Keegan’s point?   His argument forms the concision of four analytical end-prongs: that warfare occludes reason in a para-rational epiphany of the self, that it feeds on the marrowbone of pride, that it expresses itself in arcs of uncorrupted emotion and that it taps into the sump-water of the primal, instinctive heart.  While the psychological truth of violence lies in its complexity outside the ambition of our understanding, Keegan’s statement circumscribes that truth in the rough focus of approxiamating comprehension.   

         One of the most frustrating concepts in warfare is that concerning the locus of the Self—where in the chaos of smoke and blood and shattered bone can the Self be found?  Does it disappear in the flood of relentless violence, in the primal movement of the human herd as it sweeps through the field in a stuttering ferocious pulse?  Or does it do the opposite, ballooning into its first real apotheosis, logarithmically magnified so that the soldier becomes in battle a monolith of self-expression and self-knowledge?  The complexity of the question peels into the complexity of its answer, because both intuitively antithetical possibilities seem to be simultaneously true—war seems to at times soaringly extrapolate the coherency of Self, and at others to perfunctorily consume it.  

History is filled with examples of self-glorification as abiding agent in a soldier’s impetus; from the swooning expostulations of bravery and the brave in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the modern  come-hither promises of heroism wrapped in the recruitment campaigns of the U.S. Marines, there is an organic understanding in human culture that war can chisel a soldier out from the tar of anonymity, can toggle him into fame, can transmute him from ephemeral, inchoate being into focused heft of Self and celebrity.  So pervasive is this phenomenon that it is accepted as understood, and is revealed in modern scholarship mostly as parenthetical aside.  In The Face of Battle for instance, Keegan anecdotally comments that in the Hundred Years War, “men-at-arms” were unwilling to “cross weapons with archers, their social inferiors, when the chance to win glory in combat with other men-at-arms presented itself” (98).  

In All Quiet on theWestern Front, Erich Maria Remarque lyrically expressed an even deeper evocation of self than that construed in the glory of battle, namely that prosecuted in the sharp, immediate and life-threatening aegis of the battlefield: “The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums.  My limbs move supply, I feel my joints strong. I breathe the air deeply.  The night lives, I live” (33). 

 The phenomenon of Self potently-evinced in the crucible of combat is an organic constituent of the human experience of war--half a century after Remarque’s meditation on the First World War, letters from Vietnam revealed an identical experience for soldiers both culturally and temporally disconnected from those described in Remarque’s book.  In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brian expounds on the burgeoning of Self wrought in the jungles of Southeast Asia in his temporally shifted memoirs:  “I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am” (111).

But the combat-self is a schizophrenic self—at times effulging in leviathan self-aware contrast against the world and at others disappearing into the summed beast of a unit’s human mass.  Remarque, in alternate pages of his novel, incorporated the diametric sense of both the construction of the self (as in the previous example) and its rabid disassembly in the masses of combatant men.   “I belong to them and they to me;” he wrote, “we all share the same fear and the same life” (212).  In his essay The War of Steel and Gold, Henry Noel Brailsford also elegantly encapsulated this self-annihilating dynamic of warfare: “Men can be got to shoot at other men with whom they have no quarrel, only because they have first been taught to lay aside their own personality, their own judgment, their free choice between good and evil. They become automata which shoot at other automata as little conscious of what they do as the rifles in their hands.”

Related to the dynamic of self exercised in the pulsing vagaries of war is the dynamic of pride, or more specifically of the potential loss of that pride in the abasement of shame.  Even a cursory dissection of warfare reveals shame to be a superlatively potent and persistent aspect of combat psychology—it seems that cowardice is the scarlet letter loathed and assiduously avoided in the social dynamic of militancy.  Even men fundamentally opposed to war have found themselves suddenly (and despite everything) caught up in combat, spewing guttural screams in the sweat-frothed forward rush of violence, because ultimately they could not bear the cultural suspicion of  cowardice.  

Shame is a powerful theme throughout the annals of war history, its avoidance cogently dissected as a war-motivator from Homer to Thucydides, Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz.  John Keegan describes it as the soldier’s fear of “losing the one thing he is likely to value more highly than life—his reputation as a man among men” (73).  Remarque described the relevance of shame in the call-to-arms of World War I, his protagonist Paul Bäumer commenting that “there was one of us who hesitated, and did not want to fall into line.  But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he would have been ostracized…at that time even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward’” (11).  Tim O’Brian elongates the theme, pulling it into our century in his expostulations on the Vietnam war: “In my head I could hear people screaming at me.  Traitor! They yelled.  Turncoat! I felt myself blush.  I couldn’t tolerate it.  I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to” (59). 

The third component of  flesh-and-blood warfare refracted through Keegan’s lens is the  emotion that phosphoresces in the molted heat of combat.  Rank, disorienting, blood-pungent feeling effervesces through nearly all first-hand accounts of war.  In Keegan’s analysis, “the soldier is vouchsafed no well-ordered and clear-cut vision.  Battle, for him, takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment…for minutes or for hours, he may feel in turn boredom, exultation, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, even that sublime emotion we call courage” (46).  

Remarque describes a First World War so brimming with emotions distilled in fear, soldiers swing wildly from elation to morose despair, gasp at the beauty of a smoke-reddened sunset, than double-over in vomitus extremis at the sight of a serrated corpse.  Following are just two examples of the extremes he lyrically illustrates: “Haie laughs so much that he dislocates his jaw, and suddenly stands there helpless with his mouth wide open.  Albert has to put it back again by giving it a blow with his fist” (83)…”The guns and the wagons float past the dim landscape of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting” (57).  

This emotional aspect, like the others drawn out in Keegan’s quote, is a constant concomitant of  war—the American experience in Vietnam revealed no less a combat-apotheosis of consuming, soul-singeing feeling.  Tim O’Brian’s “Carried“ condenses the phenomenon in the lyrical exegesis of his own Vietnam experience: “Any battle or bombing raid has…a powerful implacable beauty…after a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness…you feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self” (81).

Instinct is the final psychological aspect of war parsed by Keegan’s pen, saved until now because it encompasses a phenomenon that is simultaneously so fundamentally true and so ultimately unfathomable.  Instinct exists before consciousness, lodges in a brainstem unavailable to awareness and superordinate to language.  Any attempt to comprehend instinct, and its role in battle, is doomed to evaporate in frustration as layers can only be peeled back to recursively  reveal  their looping selves…what lies beneath lies also above and can never be adequately dissected.  

But historians and writers have to a degree managed to hedge it in; have, if not fully managing to pin-down instinct’s core, have managed to fence its understanding into the crude corral of linguistic approximation.  Keegan avers that the “sensations and emotions” of war, though dormant, are “part of every human being’s make-up…are the product of some of men’s deepest fears,” and that they “touch upon some of man’s most violent passions; hatred, rage and the urge to kill” (16).  He continues that “easy killing does seem to generate in human beings symptoms of pleasure…which zoologist Hans Kruuk has tried to relate to the compulsive behavior of certain predatory animals” (283).  

The Face of War extrapolates the point, burgeoning with examples--such as that from World War I, when “One Australian, about to bayonet a German, found that his own bayonet was not on his rifle.  While the wretched man implored him for mercy, he grimly fixed it and then bayoneted the man” (47).  Or another describing an event from the Battle of the Somme: “An officer came out of a dugout…he held his glasses out to S … and said ‘Here you are Sergeant, I surrender.’  S said ‘Thank you Sir,’ and took the glasses with his left hand.  At the same moment, he tucked the butt of his rifle under his arm, and shot the officer straight through the head” (48).      All Quiet on the Western Front reflects Remarque’s painful disillusionment with the civilizing pretension of modernity, persistently diagramming the vulgar operation of base instinct in the Great War:  “At the sound of the first of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years…We reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals” (56). “Some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own sawbayonets.  Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust” (103).  “We have become wild beasts” (113).  “The menace of death has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct” (275).  

We can also look through the lens of Vietnam to dissect the role of instinct in the belly of our own generation in war.  The constant undercurrent of primal aggressive instinct in the primordially-reminiscent sump of the rice-paddies, for instance, is illustrated in the following O’Brian anecdote: “Strunk’s nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a firecracker, but even then Jensen kept hitting him, over and over, quick punches that did not miss” (62).   Instinct seeps through the interstices of Vietnam, becomes an accepted para-rational component of the soldier’s psychological world: “Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something, as if he already knew” (71).  O’Brian even analyzes the compelling contagion of the dark impulses of instinct in someone like himself, who had fundamentally opposed the war before being drafted: “I’d turned mean inside.  Even a little cruel at times.  For all my education, for all my fine liberal values, I now feel a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason” (200). 

The complexities inherent in the psychological and political intersections of war may in fact exceed our ability to dissect and understand them.  While it may be impossible to completely detangle the intertwined knots of martial consciousness and aggressive instinct, we can excise some limited understanding of war in the delimited scrutiny of combat.  John Keegan’s statement embeds his ultimate comprehension of warfare--that theories on war mire and sink in the quick-loam of the battlefield, that the complex articulations of their hypothesis evaporate in the scalpel-sharp clarity of the soldier’s instinct, emotion and pride.  In battle, speeches fall short, trumpets go mute, the drum-beat of war concusses feebly back to silence.  There is sudden and breathtaking simplicity—only the raw intersecting arc of the primordial self remains to fight for glory and for survival.  In a word, the shell of civilization peels back and only the animal at the human core remains:  “In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden-the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 73).

     

Works Cited:

Brailsford, Henry N. “The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of Armed Peace.” 2006. BYU.edu.

         20 Nov 2006. 

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov.

Keegan, John. The History of Warfare. New York; Penguin, 1976.

O’Brian, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York; Broadway Books, 1990.

ReMarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.  New York; Ballantine, 1928.

4 feb 2000

Hello again Larry!

I finally actually had five minutes to sit down, and thought I'd fire off a quick missive while I was enjoying the sensation of being stationary. It's quite strange really...but in a nice way. Problem is I've been racing around nonstop for so long now I can't seem to adjust my eyes to this sitting down stuff, and the world feels like it is still spinning around me at a furious rate.

Quick summary of the day:

I first woke up when I heard Kathrin mumbling something, and looked over to see our new dog (Lucy) laying with it's paws on her face, so I jumped up and took the dog out of the room.
Lukas was waiting for me outside because he wanted to go to the beach, but it was only 6:30 a.m. and rainy so I told him we'd wait.
Made breakfast for the two boys, took a quick shower, threw them in the shower, yanked them out of the shower, dressed Eli, dressed myself.
Fed the dog, took her in because it was raining, got on all fours to clean the mud off the carpet that she had tracked in.
Stayed on all fours to clean the mud off the carpet that Eli tracked in after he went hunting for worms.
Put the worms I found on the kitchen table back outside. Washed the table and Eli. Consoled Lukas after he was accidentally bitten by Lucy during some rough play.
Grabbed the boys and drove to Home depot to get exactly one million different things we needed for the house. Finally gave in and bought Lukas another cactus (he always wants cactus). Spent five minutes picking up half a million parts that had fallen out of the holes in the bag that the cactus spines had made. Spent another ten minutes pulling cactus thorns out of my knuckles when I got home...(the cactus thorns had imbedded themselves when I'd shifted into fourth gear on the way home...turns out Lukas thought the console behind the stick shift would be a good place for his cactus.)
Spent an hour making homemade parts for the freestanding basketball hoop...the movers had lost most of them. Finally got the hoop up, only to watch it come crashing down on our car because I'd forgotten to put ballast in the stand.
Took Lukas, Eli and Lucy for a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains (right behind our house). Consoled Lukas after he was bitten by a potbellied pig he'd tried to pet through a fence. Kept tripping all over each other because Eli and Lukas both insisted on holding Lucy's leash, and Eli also insisted on simultaneously holding my pant-leg because of "mountain lions." Spent most of the hike untangling the leash from between our collective legs. Am sure the '"mountain lions" appreciated having their meal all tied together and prepackaged like that.
Made it home, and ran to the auto store to get headlamps for the third time this month. Also bought epoxy for the small hole I'd finally found in the headlight that had been allowing water in to short the lamps. Also bought new windshield wiper to replace the one that had come flying off during a late night drive through the mountains during our first rain. Also bought antihistamines to fight the cold I'd picked up while driving through the rain with my head stuck out the window. I told the auto parts dealer they should carry antihistamines, and should put them right next to the windshield wipers.
Fixed the car.
Shoveled all of the sand (four garbage cans full) out of Eli's sandbox so I could move the sandbox out of the way of the garage. Grumbled at Kathrin and Eli and Lukas after they sat down to drink lemonade and watch me shovel sand. Grumbled even louder when they laughed at me and told me I should sing "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." Moved the sandbox and refilled it with the sand.
Told Eli to stay away from the fungus and worms my moving of the sandbox had uncovered. Went inside to wash up and use the restroom. Went to the kitchen for a snack. Decided I wasn't really so hungry after spying the worms Eli had in the mean time put on the kitchen table.
Consoled Lukas after he was accidentally bitten by Eli, who'd just wanted a bite out of Lukas's quesadilla. Cleaned kitchen. Spent 20 minutes hunting Eli down, who had gone into deep camouflage when I mentioned it was bath time. Wrestled him into the bath. Wrestled him out of the bath when he decided he didn't want to come out.

As of now, they are all still awake, and it's almost 9:30.

Send reinforcements.

Charles

Letter written to my missionary son on August 25th of last year on the subject of pain, suffering and love:

Lukas the Firstborn:

About my feelings for the human race.......
There is often love...of that much I am certain. Boundless effusions of kindness, of joy in the being of another human child, of gratitude and solace in the knowledge that a consciousness like mine, and other consciousness, have shaken off the eerie circumstances of their birth, and courageously put a shoulder to the wheel and started turning. Through the slings and arrows of childhood, over the fears and worries of young adulthood, through the pestilences and injuries of old age. They all, humbly, and meekly, and bulging with the can-do ardor of their father, even God, stumbled and lurched and sometimes even crawled fitfully through their demon days on earth.

The pain I sense in any other is often an evisceration of my own hope--the loneliness that howls like a cold northern wind through the skeletal hollows of a fellow traveler can be too much to bear, And so many of them! How lord do we survive the agony of our own condition isolated from thy home .....no less bear the agony accrued as we walk through the rest of us and observe the sadness that is everywhere?. How, father, is the groaning planet of own epiphany of sin, of anger and resentment and missed opportunities, to be stayed from rolling back on us, grinding our bones to dust and puncturing our eyes from our sockets, where they come to rolling random stops staring blankly at thy creation,.

Love of course binds all things, Love heals all things, And most important of all, love vanquishes all devils, inner and outer. When some of the church fumble awkwardly at the pretense of love, they commit apostasy. It is that simple, Love is delivered as a fearless arrow or not at all: counterfeit love burns the lips as it crosses into audition. Love has no fear—not of foreigners, not of terrorists, and of course not of sinners. Love is antithetical to fear—all beings wash anew in the water of love., Even terrorists can be transformed like Paul the terrorist into the absolute energy current of all that is good in God.

Such is the sanctification of the members when we are truly ready for translation.....when love drives all determinations and fear drives none. When our humility beneath Gods ‘both quantum and behemoth wisdom lets us simply be.....and simply love.

Follow the mystical root of the Hindi, who never ridiculed the blind who were so adamantly insisting on performing the ghosts and reflections of nonsense in their daily lives.....for even the ignorant are holy, in that they so passionately engage in the distraction we were meant to have here, and they do it well. Like the rare actors who become exactly what they pretend to be, and do it for the sake of the drama that MUST be played out, in Hindu mysticism it is the playing out of the drama that is holy—and includes everything—the commiserating arm of a friend around the shoulder, the finger stiffened arrogantly out of the cabdrivers window, the inability to find that part you need at the hardware store: all of these things are vitally important in the god-inspired drama of our lives. We should only smile, and try and make people aware that by getting too enmeshed in the details, they never have time to stand back and marvel at the god damn wonder of the whole thing. Excuse my language....but I could find no other expression that even marginally transmits the awe-strike of it all—the downright holy-to-tears rightness of the whole thing.

In the words of Arthur C. Clarke's Dr David Bowan: My god it is beautiful!

Dad

ode to progeny

So here's the thing.... My firstborn son has extracted under oath a promise from me: I would venture into the blogosphere once more. In return he has promised to relent from badgering, cajoling, pleading or even telegraphing a shard of contempt towards me for as long as I abide by the agreement. Lukas...if you are reading this: I did get up at 6am to write. I did put this abbreviated post to the keyboard. I did intend to write more, but realized the alarm was about to wake your fitfully and poorly rested mother because she planned to take the car to the dealer. Out of love I did it instead. Out of love.... So you are only allowed one-half a disdain plus perhaps a single micro-smidgen of disappointment. Love, I think you would agree, is at least a passable excuse.......