Emergency Panel Mountain Goat (Weird Stuff Around My Office)

I work in a fairly mundane place. It's a professional office environment where nothing much exciting ever happens. Since I'm an attorney, I believe some people tend to think that every day is either, (A) a reenactment of an episode of Law & Order, or (B) incredibly complex and yet arcane - all day spent with my torso hunched over a large conference table with big leather chairs scouring dusty legal tomes to find some obscure case with which to destroy my foes.

The truth is that my work is much more routine business-sort of stuff. Perhaps that's why when I first began here, I noticed the weird shit around this place.

I've noted five of the truly weird things around my office in this entry going from the least weird to the most bizarre. Let's begin.

No. 5: Looks Safe To Me.

I'm not sure what would possess someone to cover up the ventilation holes on a smoke detector, but they sure as hell have in one corridor of our building. This smoke detector is near the "secret bathrooms". I call them that because they're tucked away down an oddly-turning hallway that makes one feel as though one is running along tetris blocks. Anyway, unless you work here, you'd never know there were bathrooms tucked away back there like some hidden grotto of privacy to rid your body of waste products. Anyway, I suppose someone who uses one of them is an avid smoker because they didn't like the smoke detectors. Weirdness factor: If this were a plane, you'd be under arrest by now.

No. 4: The Cookout

Near the entrance to our office building is a verdant

landscaped area with park benches and tall live oaks where one can sit and enjoy a lunch break read. However, somone apparently at one time took the idea a little far and decided it'd be a prime location to have a barbeque here as well.

Why? Because there's charcoal on the ground near one of the benches. I've mentioned this to a few of my friend in the past and they always respond with, "Well, do you know what was there before? Maybe it was a park or something."

There's two problems with the park theory. First of all, the highrise where I work has been here since the late 60's. It's never been a park area. Secondly, even assuming it had been, that wouldn't justify leaving a smattering of charcoal out on the gravel or 50 years. What - in 50 years time someone just didn't decide to pick up their charcoal? Sure.

The only thing I can figure out on this is either someone spilled some charcoal there, or an "urban outdoorsman" decided to sleep on our benches one cool evening and wanted some flame grilled pidgeon to go with his bottle of Heavenly Hill Vodka. Weirdness factor: Liter fluid thankfully not included.

No. 3 and No. 2: The 8-Ball & The Terrible Lizard

This is a shelf assembly actually right next to my office door. When I first interviewed for my job here, I asked our admin, "What's the deal with the 8-Ball and the lizard?" She knew about the 8-Ball and said it'd just, "Always been there." (DAMN YOU, YOU EVIL PEICE OF SATANIC SORCERY!)

Anyway, when I asked about the lizard, she didn't know what I was talking about. While it can be hard to miss (ESPECIALLY WITH THE BLACK ROUND EYE OF SATAN ANSWERING YOUR EVERY QUESTION WITH HIGH DEMONIC POW-WERS-SAH!), the fact remains that a

toy lizard is setting in a basket, on a bookshelf, in your hallway.

That's just freaking weird.

My best guess is that someone brought their kid up one day and the little tyke was playing with his toy dinosaurs (WHICH WERE ALIVE JUST 6,000 YEARS AGO BECAUSE THAT'S HOW OLD THE EARTH IS! CAN I GET AN A-MEN-AH!) and left one in the basket of twig-ball-things.

Weirdness factor: It's like "Land of the Lost" meets the Eye of Sauron. (A-MEN-AH!)

No. 1: Emergency Panel Mountain Goat

This one takes the cake, and hence, it's Numero-Uno on the the list. When I first began here, I was in another department. Our offices at that time were in the basement of an adjoining building. The basement lets out to a corridor connecting several buildings. It's nice in the summertime when Dallas can get 30-degrees hotter than the surface of the sun, to go down there and be semi underground and get a cool breeze.

Anyway, near my former basement office, there's an emergency door that lets out to the space that connects all the buildings. My first first day there, I noticed the panel had this random picture of a moutain goat taped down to it.

Why a mountain goat? Is the mountain goat the international symbol for safety or something? Is that like a thing that has somehow just evaded my knowledge ALL these years? So that, if someone from, say, Uganda, were to walk up, see the panel, but not speak English, that person would instinctively know, "Hey, that panel has a mountain goat on it - that's an emergency panel!"

When I mentioned this to my coworkers they all thought I was insane. THEY WALKED BY IT EVERY DAY. I told them I'd take bets and show them - "THERE IS A MOUNTAIN GOAT ON THE BASEMENT CORRIDOR EMERGENCY PANEL WTF ARE YOU NOT UNDERSTANDING?!?!"

Is the mountain goat such a ferocious beast that the warning of, "Do Not Push" is going to get a second thought upon someone seeing it? Like, "OH DAMN, MAN! Don't press that! It's got a MOUNTAIN GOAT on it!" Because when think of shit out in the wild that wants to eat me (bear, aligator, anaconda, etc.) "Moutain Goat" just jumps to the front of the line.

Eventually, I did show my coworkers. Each of them only had, "huh" or "never noticed that before" or something along those lines. As if it was no big deal.

This makes me paranoid as shit. Is Emergency Panel Moutain Goat even real? Am I hallucinating and just schizophrenic and for some reason my diseased mind wants and yearns to desparetely believe that a basement emergency panel has a picture of a moutain goat taped to it? Perhaps there's not even a moutain goat in the picture of the emergency panel I've taken and posted on here.

And maybe I'm just nuts for thinking that there's something odd about taping a picture of a mountain goat to an emergency panel. Why not a panda? Why not an ocelot? Why not Jenna Jameson? (Because that'd require latex gloves! RIM SHOT!)

Weirdness Factor: If I ever write an album, I'm going to title it, "Emergency Panel Mountain Goat". Because it'll blow your mind THAT hard.

Orson Scott Card: Fascist Writer Douchbag-apalooza

Orson Scott Card is an award-winning fiction author. He’s also an amazingly ignorant homophobic bigot and unabashed nut case.

In a recent column titled, “What Right Is Really at Stake?” for the Greensboro, North Carolina, Rhino Times, Mr. Card states within the first 100 words, “I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples;” He then goes on a furious and illogical argument that gay marriage will enshrine leftist ideology into the public education system, destroy the moral foundation of our nation, and refers to anything outside of heterosexuality as being a, “reproductive dysfunction.”

So, it’s ok to refer to gay people as “dysfunctional” so long as you premise it upon the fact that you have a lot of gay friends? Good to know. Following that logic, I can toss around the words “nigger” and  “wet back” as casually as I like so long as I insulate it with the magical phrase, “I have a lot of black and Hispanic friends.” I’m sure this will go over really well with them at our next social function.

Also, Mr. Card volleys the assertion that sexual orientation is a choice. No credible scientific evidence for this has yet been shown. In fact, the opposite is true.

The reason for Mr. Card’s gay-bashing is the fact that North Carolina voters will go to the polls today to vote on a state constitutional amendment declaring opposite-gender marriage as the only domestic legal union recognized in the state. North Carolina already has a law saying as much, but certain members of the legislature are concerned that the law could be ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court and thus open the door for sodomites and sapphists alike to rush into your homes and spread their gayness all over your furniture.

He closes his rather unstructured piece saying that to vote for the amendment is to vote in favor of freedom of religion. You really have to go through some twisted rhetorical acrobatics to get to the conclusion made by Mr. Card: gay marriage will foreclose any debate on the matter and permanently stultify any scientific sexual research, educators (teachers unions, specifically) will indoctrinate our young that homosexuality is o.k. thereby violating their religious liberty to believe what they will. According to Mr. Card, any sign of gender nonconformity will be reinforced and cultivated in the fertile fields of our children’s minds by the morally depraved.

The undercurrent of this notion is perhaps the most disturbing point made by Mr. Card as he seems to truly believe that sexual orientation is a choice. It isn’t. No one chooses to be heterosexual just as no one chooses to be homosexual. By all means, let adults have this argument, couch it in research and science, and debate the topic. However, as a rational human being, I can spot nonsensical fear mongering a mile away and Mr. Card has it in spades (it’s ok for me to use the word “spade” – I have a lot of black friends.)

I am an independent conservative libertarian. Mr. Card also claims to be a conservative, however, I think the term “religious fascist crazy ass” would be a more apt description.

Go back to writing science fiction, Mr. Card. In the words of my hero Henry Rollins, “There’s nothing wrong with being gay and you know it.” 

STFU & Write

Sometimes I get this urge to write something – anything – but can’t properly spin a contextual cocoon in which to ferment some idea into a frothy brew intellectual drunken debauchery. In moments like that, I oftentimes find myself mixing multiple metaphors in order to create a surrealist picture in the mind of the reader (see the initial sentence of this paragraph for evidence of this feat.) And, as is common for me, these passages never make it beyond a graveyard file on my Mac so as to not embarrass myself in print.

Writing is perhaps the most necessary of the arts. For the bulk of human history it’s served as the most reliable method for passing along our information from one generation of Homo sapiens to the next. It is through the written word that we construct our laws, our governments, and our religions. It affects us every day, be it in the form of advertisements or adult erotic pleasures, but nevertheless, the written word hums along through and by us nearly every moment we are awake - and possibly while we're asleep if we've dozed off with a good book.

Part I. Good Writin’

I penned a short story about two years ago. The plot concerned a young woman in the rural south waiting on her fiancé to return from fighting the Nazi’s during World War II. The woman’s mother and  friend are concerned about her future as several young men they’ve encountered returning from the war have been abusive to their wives. As such, they give the young woman a castor bean plant and tell her that it will ensure her of a good future regardless of how her love returns from abroad. The name of the story is, “The Insurance Plant”. For myself, I must say that it was fairly well received. I had several people ask me for hard copies so that they could share the tale with their friends and family who didn’t have internet access or an e-reading device.

Writing well is an intoxicant as strong as any mountain man’s white lightning. The love of the word upon the page, of creation of other words and realities, is to play the part of a god in microcosm – to a point. For me at least, the story may begin based upon something innocuous, but the subject matter soon takes on a life all its own, breathing, shitting, laughing, and fucking of its own accord. It’s when this happens that I know the material has some decent quality to it. Characters do things on their own terms and independent of you. To put it another way, the well-crafted word is, for me, more like stenography of an alien landscape similar, but apart, from the universe we inhabit.

Part II. Bad Scibblin’

It can be no mistake that the matters upon which one write must be matters which one has the most experience and knowledge. Actually, forget all that because it’s bullshit. Writing poorly is like porn - I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but I know it when I see it. This would be the only similarity, though, as I enjoy porn immensely more than poor writing.

A few years ago, I wrote a story about a man who claimed to have the ability to fly. He went to an army base and turned himself in as he thought his powers should be investigated by the military and demanded that they use him in some capacity. When asked how he gained these powers, he told the commanding officer that they had been given to him by an older man when he was around twelve years old. As the story progresses, you figure out that the man is actually a delusional sexual predator; in fact, he had been raped and asphyxiated by his molester at the age of twelve. During the rape, he hallucinated that he could take wing to the sky and fly. This delusion, then, being stuck in his mind, made him believe that he wasn’t actually committing an act of sexual violence when he in turn began to prey upon the young; rather, he was gifting them with the ability to take to the air as well. As the story wraps up, it’s revealed that the man is now over the age of fifty and spending the rest of his life in a mental institution. The soldiers are nothing more than the hospital personnel and his “chauffer” is the orderly wheeling his chair around the hospital grounds.

Not a bad story, but not a great one. It seems to me that most people either love or loathe superhero stories. If they love them, they’ll probably begin reading this story and be pissed off at the end when they figure out it’s about a pedophile. If they hate the likes of Charles Xavier, they won’t continue with it anyway. In the end, I did manage to get something from the penning of this 5,000 word-or-so short story: sympathetic characters are great, so long as they don’t rape kids. Also, the “twist” of having someone in a mental unit is a little tiring – everyone, EVERYONE, has done it. My very least favorite episode of, “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer” was the one in which she finds herself in a mental unit and believes all her friends were figments of her imagination.

IT’S SO BEEN DONE.

And I knew this going in – so why’d I write it?

I don’t know, but it wasn’t a great story or even a good one. It wasn’t bad, per se, but no one’s literary panties were going to get wet reading it (and if they did, seeing as it was a story about a pedophile, they should probably kill themselves now.)

 Part III. Sketches

I’ve had to take some time away from the written word – to figure out what it meant to me, where I wanted to take it for myself, and how I wanted to explore some issues and themes that I’ve sketched out over the years. I’ve got a lot of ideas in my journals, but only a few have made it to the page.

The written word is like the soul, I think. It’s a precious thing and one is always worried (if one gives any thoughts to such matters) about losing it, selling it foolishly (is there any other sort?), or damaging it. The result, then, is to neglect the matter of the soul out of fear that it’s like some fine crystal which must sit upon a shelf for others to see and admire, but which must never be handled unless doing so is absolutely necessary. That’s not what this has been. And honestly, I’ve gotten a LOT of stuff worked out with me over the past couple of months and only now ready to step up to what I need to do with the words and my soul.

One can travel a lot of miles and not learn a damn thing until the end. I’m only thankful that at this still early stage of my journey that I’ve managed to figure out a great many things, not the least of which is that the soul must be used and exercised. Otherwise, you’ll kill it by atrophy.

Pastor Sean Harris and Smut



Le Douche Baguette



A lot of ink and outrage have been spilt this week concerning Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church in Fayettville, North Carolina. During a recent sermon, he claimed the spiritual authority to give his parishioners a special, “dispensation” to discipline their children if they found their precious little snowflakes to be acting outside of traditional gender norms. The quote has been copied all over the internet, but for honesty’s sake, I’m reprinting it again:

“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed….Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.”

Concerning young girls, Sean Harris goes on to say:

“And when your daughter starts acting too ‘butch,’ you rein her in. And you say, ‘Oh no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play ‘em, play ‘em to the glory of God, but sometimes you’re going to act like a girl and talk like a girl, and smell like a girl, and that means you’re going to be beautiful, you’re going to be attractive, you’re going to dress yourself up’.”

So at least your young female softball player won’t get her wrist broken or the shit kicked out of her. Good to know potential lesbians get off easier.

Mr. Harris has since apologized – sort of – and says that he was only joking and that his congregation knew. He’s also said that gay and lesbian people have taken what he said out of context. His defenders have taken to numerous comment threads online and offered up the same defense. Having listened to the nearly hour-long sermon myself, I can safely say that his comments were by no means taken out of context. Apparently Sean Harris not only believes that one can, “pray away the gay!” but, failing that, it’s perfectly acceptable to beat the Demons of Sodomy & Gaga out of a young boy. Presumably, girls possessed by the Demons of Flannel & Dog Rescues just get a stern talking to and a finger wag.

Let Sean Harris punch me, crack my wrist, and tell me to man up. I’ll put my size 12 boot up his ass and let him know what kind of pussy he really is.

The obvious issue here, and the one most touched upon, is the call for the abuse of very small children (aged 4 years!) who exhibit any gender nonconformity. This extreme belief in the pure duality of gender in humanity makes it way into his theology as well. Concerning Bible translations, Berean Baptist Church admonishes the faith on its page: “Believers should be cautious in purchasing any translation that does not diligently strive to maintain a word for word translation, gender distinctions and the supremacy of Christ's person and work.”

So, here are my questions for Pastor Sean Harris: What about children born intersexed, that is to say, with gender ambiguous genitalia? What about children born with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) whereby a chromosomal male fetus cannot respond to male androgen hormones and thus develops as a female? Those with AIS have the chromosomal make-up of a man, but develop breasts while at the same time, lack the uterus of a woman. A vagina is typically present but is often quite shallow. Menstruation never occurs for these people.

If all children are gifts from God, which I believe they are, how do those among our population who are not completely male or completely female fit within Sean Harris’s view of humanity? Simply put, I don’t think they do. Sure, I’d put money that he’d have some loving but vapid sound bite with which to impart the love of the Almighty, but I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t want his son dating one.

It’s also important here to remember that what we consider acceptable for gender norms is largely based on society and culture. I’ll freely say that I absolutely LOVE the fact that I was born a dude. Seriously, I love it. I completely understand female-to-male transgendered folks because, had I been born female, I’d want to be a dude as well. I love being 6’4, hairy, shooting guns, weight lifting, upright urination, not having to deal with all the crap women do (i.e., cosmetics, monthly period, jogging with tits jiggling on my chest, etc.), and all of it. At the same time, I love flower gardens, hot tea, and knitting (my grandmother was from northern England –  chalk it up to genetics) and apologize for exactly zero of any of these.

Does my ability with two knitting needles violate gender norms? Maybe a bit, but 60 years ago and in England it wouldn’t have as English sailors were given needles and yarn and told to make their own sweaters (the factories were busy making stuff to fight zee Nazis.)

The point of all of this is that when it comes down to gender, there’s a lot, LOT, of grey area. Some of us are born 100% dude (HELL YEAH TEAM HAIRY LEGS!) and some of us are born totally female. Me? I’m a total guy and happy for it, but at the same time, humans don’t fit into two neatly compartmentalized forms. It’s cruel and it’s shitty to ostracize those among us who were born somewhere between the two peaks of penis and vagina.

Sean Harris and those like him will soon either pass away or talk themselves into irrelevancy, but by all means, let’s have them keep talking. I like to know where my enemies reside.

Ritual

   “This is an idea - you need a ritual,” my therapist said to me. She’s an older woman in her early 50’s with dark blonde hair and while her smile is always warm and inviting, she has no qualms about calling me on bullshit or pushing me when I’ve done my best to avoid a question.

   “Is this some ceremony?” I replied. The tone of my voice undoubtedly dropped an octave from disbelief as to what she had just said to me. She wasn’t kidding. I asked what kind, what she might have in mind.

          

   “The point on this, Dustin, is that can’t tell you what it should be,” she said to me. I asked if it was some one-time event or… “I can’t tell you that either,” she replied, “but I think you need something to reinforce where you’ve been and where you’re going. Perhaps it’ll be a momentous single thing that you do symbolically, perhaps it’ll be some act you repeat to remind yourself of something, but whatever it is to you, I think it should be personal and maybe private.” She went on to say how perhaps I would find it soon, perhaps it would take a few weeks, but that I should be on the lookout for it and would know it when it arrived. My therapist is a deeply spiritual woman. I wouldn’t exactly call her religious, but she’s an enlightened being – I’m fairly well convinced of that.

   Year after year, humans engage in all sorts of rituals in an attempt to demarcate time. Weddings are one of the big ones, along with baptisms, and holidays. They bring us close to others like us and underscore some inherent thread running through vastly different people. Some of these, like the Super Bowl, ring in my mind more akin to tribalism (complete with insignia, colors, and mascots), but it seems to me that aside we as a culture seem to be turning away from the very idea of rituals.

   Of those secular ones we’ve installed, they seem rather paltry in comparison to those that carry some faith-based connotations. That is, perhaps, an argument for the need of religion. Indeed, one of the primary arguments against religion in the modern day is that it’s no longer useful, and can be even harmful, with our advanced knowledge in the arts and sciences. However, no other secular substitute seems to me to be quite as satiating to the human spirit as those contained within religious traditions. This makes no excuse for the misapplication of religion as a basis for war and other atrocities, but such acts are by the hands of humans and the dominion of mankind alone is responsible for them – not the beliefs themselves. For instance, I may choose to believe that the sun will not rise in the morning unless the heart of a virgin is ripped out and offered to the gods, but my belief in that idea only takes its gruesome reality if I follow through with such. Otherwise, it remains locked away in my mind.

   My therapist asked again the other day if I had discovered my ritual. I told her I had and that it had become a great source of inspiration. I asked if she wanted to know what it was. Her reply after a measured pause was, “No. Not because I don’t want to know, but because I think it’s something you should keep to you.” She did continue and asked as to the form. I told her it was simple and consisted of only seven words which I repeated to myself several times a day, but had somehow managed to finagle themselves into being the first words I spoke in the morning and the last thing I repeated before I went to bed. “It’s like they’re inherent within me,” I said to her, “I know that sounds a little weird – crazy even – but they’re real and they’re there.” Her response to this was, “No, it sounds as if they are part of you. Something that you’ve decided and now know.”

   Resurrection – the very idea carries with it a notion of the macabre, but perhaps it would do us all well to revisit the idea of ritual within our own lives for it’s grounding and reinforcing effects on the human psyche; to demarcate time in our own lives and remind oneself of where one has been and where one is going.

Saintly Animal Cruelty & Boring Bitches

There is a certain woman in my life that is, quite simply, unforgivably boring.

I don’t mean to imply that she is only unlearned (though she is presumably educated, you would never know it) or trite. No, the boredom one feels when communicating with her is rather much like the after effect of drinking too much of a bad scotch and then hoping the muse will come and entertain you in spite of your poor taste in liquors. In other words, the boredom around her is stultifying. It’s been my experience that while in her presence, I actually feel as though intellect and the desire for inquiry leave me; as if they’re siphoned off into some cosmic black hole of vapidity. She isn’t just dull, she is dulling.

Quixotically, it may be that her boring nature is the only thing interesting about her. I see the evidence of this on the page as I type these words. Take any casual moment, attempt to engage her in polite conversation about cinema, books, or even quality television, and the glassed over contemptuous look she intimates will be enough to chill the entire room to icebox temperatures. The talk will then take a hard left on the avenue of dialog and she’ll ask if you saw the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars or some other flippant program. Exactly on this subject, I once took an opportunity to try and swing the conversation back around to something I found idiotic, but which I hoped (in vain) would elevate the discourse. I mentioned the controversy at the time regarding Chaz Bono and remarked that I thought the whole thing silly. Perhaps, I wondered, the speech could be steered back to a discussion about our culture’s obsession with reality t.v.

That didn’t happen.

The response I received was, “That’s Cher’s kid, right?”

The flat tone of this response had all the splendor of watching a cow shit in a field on a cold day, but without the mesmerizing swirls of steam that will at least tell you where it lays. It’s an ailment from which Francis of Assisi should be glad he did not suffer. If he had, I’m rather certain that instead of preaching to the flocks of birds nesting in the bows of trees, they would have instead fallen stiff from the thermals, locked up in mind and body due to the drivel to which they were subjected; saintly animal cruelty, though efficient if you’re in the mood for game fowl.  

I have contempt for boring people – those for whom a pall conversation marks itself as the standard and have no interest in raising that bar.

With this finger pointed decidedly at the boring among us, I think about myself and wonder if my friends sometime see me in this light and the thought, once camouflaged, now springs to life from the backwaters of my imagination like some horrible swamp creature coming murder and rape me – in that order. And then, I relax from this solipsism and know that, if there is anything fascinating about me, it’s solely on account of those very same friends: the Mexican-American who’s promised to help me learn Spanish when I get round to studying it seriously, the Vietnamese-American who will only teach me the vulgarities of his second tongue (and only then after sufficient prodding), the debater with whom I still fight along side occasionally while on Facebook, the old friend who still has my mom’s phone number memorized, and though funny and true, I also count among the number a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick-maker – and knaves all three.

These people, and so many more for whom I do not have the space to compose, require no alcohol. By that, I mean to say that no spirits are needed in order for mine to be lifted while around them. No demographic or ideological components are required for this fraternity. The only requisite is that he or she not be boring; to be boring is a miserable thing and misery loves company, to such companions it will not be loyal. Thus, if you are loyal, you are already not boring.

And from such speech no doves shall dive to earth. 

Moss and Melancholia

While listening to Nick Drake and reading some Flannery O'Connor short stories:

Are words some horcux in time, some vapor of what we were before others began? Are we only shadows and dust, some moss on a cemetery headstone that descendants forgot or choose to forget because the time of life marches onward leaving us with nothing more than screams as we kick and fight against that inevitable common fate?


Is it the right of all men to merely die making way for the generations that proceed them, or is it the duty of those same creatures, human creatures, to build something more than their existence to make scaffolding for others that come thereafter? 


I spend a great deal of my time watching others and sit puzzled about their concerns in this hyper-connected yet emotionally diffused version of primate venality. As a culture, our concerns about the well-being of others extends itself to one another only so far as it will allow others a measure of control. Politicians rape our conscience with guilt over success while, at the same time, education is seen only as a proposition for monetary gain and not as an endeavor worthy for the enlightenment of the self. Once achieving this monetary gain, then the political whores guilt us into caring for the less fortunate and seek to supplant our innate sense of fairness with an artificial soul which is nothing more than moral turpitude in a mortal coil. 


Fame is the opiate. Fame and the accoutrements that seemingly follow are seen as justifiable causes in their own right. Reality television isn't reality. I'd be willing to wager that better than half of Americans cannot name five of the Canadian Provinces or even know how many there are (there are ten), but will have no problem, at all, naming at least two of the three Kardashian sisters. 


I'm not against making money or enjoying life - quite the opposite. I'm an American capitalist pig and proud of it. I also want to enjoy life and try as best as I can to do so. However, it's the quality of this enjoyment by others and the utter lack of sophistication thereto that irks the shit out of me. For instance, the other day I fell into a wonderful conversation with a coworker in another department. The woman is Jewish and was born in New York City. How she came to live in north Texas, her reflections on the disparity between people, and the dialog we shared made my day. While I have several Jewish friends that I treasure dearly, having  the chance to learn about her, her Jewish community in New York, and other various topics from her vantage point, was simply incredible. At some point the conversation drifted off to literature. We discussed our favorite authors and the entire thirty minutes we spent on the phone were enthralling. 


Today, such interactions seem to me to be an endangered species. By and large, most people don't read as much as they used to. Thanks to social media, we've replaced our personal interactions with bylines on what is little more than personalized forum boards. While these devices have their utility such as virtual communities around common ideas and the reconnection of family members and friends, the entire enterprise seems to me to lack the human element. 


Now, even as bodies approach room temperature, Facebook can be instructed to send out messages in a predetermined manner to our friends and loved ones. This is macabre. 


Will we be persons known for having advanced the human condition in our own small way or will the past few and fast-coming decades be looked upon by the remnant of humanity as those generations who sought to soak up all the predigested bits of farcical entertainment it could whilst laughing and splashing into the waves of anthropological decomposition?


When we are gone all that can remain of us will be our words. Will those words be thoughtful dialog regarding science, the humanities - thoughtful discussion on the prose of P.G. Wodehouse - or will more ink and pixels have been spilt on this season of The Apprentice than of advancing the art of the novel. We are crucifying our abilities as the most advanced form of life we currently know to exist to the gods of entertainment intoxication. 


And the liquor isn't that good. 

SunPower McDolphin-Love: The 2011 Year In Review

Thanks to Dade Duke for the
SunPower McDolphin-Love logo.

If you're on my Facebook friends list, you probably know who SunPower McDolphin-Love is to me. If not, here's a brief primer. 

SunPower McDolphin-Love, or SPMDL as she's anonymously known, is a coworker of mine. We have an unusual working relationship. A few months ago, I started copying our conversations to Facebook and a good number of my friends found them pretty funny. To me, they're infuriating. SPMDL is a good person and a hard worker, but there's a weird tension between us. I think it's because we have such vastly different personalities. SPMDL is basically a hippy that survived the 60's and never gave up her Haight-Ashbury roots and I'm about as far from a hippy as Yoko Ono is from becoming an opera singer. 

SPMDL is also a hardcore believer in reincarnation. A few months ago, I read the book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by Walter Evans-Wentz. It's a scholarly look at the very real belief in fairies as it existed just prior to the 20th Century in the British Isles. I suggested it to SPMDL thinking that the subject matter might interest her and she promptly told me she didn't need to read a book about fairies. Why? Because while in Ireland a few years ago, she heard several of them fluttering around her as she walked through the countryside and caught glimpses of their wings when she would turn her head to see them. 

Seriously. 

Once I began transcribing our conversations, I decided to protect her identity by referring to her with the most quintessentially flower-power name I could think of. Thus, "SunPower McDolphin-Love" was born. 

So, for those who may have missed one or come late to what is now known as the SunPower McDolphin-Love Chronicles, here are the transcripts from this prior year. 

June 23, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love keeps sneaking in my office and putting more work on my desk. I'm fiddin-a set some bear traps up in this bitch and snatch her in the act: "I said no plastic folders! And quit crying about your leg! It's just a flesh wound!"

August 8, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: Isn't Scott your cover buddy if one of you are out?
Me: Scott is my back-up if I'm out, yes. 
SPMDL: Cover buddy.
Me: Let's go with back-up, really.
SPMDL: Why not cover buddy?

Me: It's a little too, "Broke-Back-Moutainy" for me. We ain't going to snuggle in a tent any time soon.

August, 16, 2011:

A female coworker just produced a very loud, juicy, sounding fart. It must've been one of those "weaponized" ones because she's coughing and clearing her throat now like chemical warhead victim in a Japanese subway. I'm just holding out hope that the toxic cloud doesn't waft its way in my general direction.

September 14, 2011: 

SunPower McDolphin-Love just referred to me as a Metrosexual. I am as far from a Metrosexual as Chaz Bono is from appearing on the cover of Men's Health. I wear way too much plaid and flannel, drive a 4x4, barely shave anything, vote conservative, worship Steve McQueen, happen to be a card carrying NRA member, and become semi-erect when I enter the Off Road Accessories store in Richardson. I am not metro.

November 1, 2011: 

SunPower McDolphin-Love update: Apparently she's slingin attitude in erry direction this afternoon. One of my diva coworkers got wrangled in to help SPMDL on a department project due today. My boss was at my desk, SPMDL sits across from me. Diva walks up, looks at my boss, and says, outloud, "I just wanna know if she [points at SPMDL] took her crazy meds today. Because if she ain't medicated, this ain't gonna end pretty." 

November 8, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: What's your novel about? 

Me: It's a southern gothic horror twist on the story of Faust. It's called Faust County Fair. It's at the editors at the moment. It's really about struggling with who you are and how ambition and hatred can turn inward on a person or outward to infect everything around them.

SPMDL: That's what your novel is about? Oh I won't be reading that. I don't read fiction. I only read books about reincarnation.

November 11, 2011: 

The husband of SunPower McDolphin-Love, who I shall refer to as Moonbeam Koala Testicles, is a drum maker. Not like drum kits used in pop-country-rock music. Oh no. think conga drums and bongos. I can't imagine that he sells them for a profit, though. That'd be all "capitalistic" of him.

November 22, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: I think I might have been Dutch in a former life. I had a dream the other night where I was laying in a soft field looking up at a windmill!

Me: Or maybe you woke up in bed for a second and looked at your ceiling fan! No, no, no...you're right. A past life dream sounds WAY more reasonable.

November 23, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: I need you to sign this! I couldn't find you! 

Me: I was in the bathroom. 

SPMDL: Well, give me your cell phone number so I can call you if I need to.

Me: First of all, no, you can't have my cell phone number. Second, I don't answer the phone if I'm crankin out a colon baby - it's just creepy. Third, my bowel movements don't schedule themselves around you.

December 8, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: I think of myself as a peace-maker.
Me: I'm not. I'm a war-bringer.
SPMDL: You don't believe in peace!?! Even at this time of year?
Me: I believe in peace...through superior fire power.
SPMDL: Well, blessed are the peace-makers. Says so in the Bible.

Me: Yeah, blessed though they may be, their life expectancy is decidedly shorter.

December 20, 2011:

Me: This entry in the database is wrong. It's in here twice. I've only got one project on this. 
SunPower McDolphin-Love: No, it isn't wrong. 
Me: Yes, it is. We didn't do two contracts to the same company in 3 months time for the exact same six-figure amount. 
SPMDL: You keep talking back to me and you're going to get a time out, Buddy! Hehehe...

Me: Please try and give me a time out, please. I want you to see what I'll do if you try that. Please, please do it.

December 28, 2011:

SunPower McDolphin-Love: You've got European relatives right?
Me: I have family in England.
SPMDL: <smirking> Yeah, well, last I checked, England was part of Europe, so they're European. Anyway, I was wondering...
Me: Don't ever say that to someone who's English. Unless they're some pseudo-intellectual Londoner with a hard on for the continent. Certainly not if they're northern English and/or a Tory.
SPMDL: Tory? Well, their currency is called the Euro!
Me: No, that would be the Pound Sterling. You really have no cultural reference at all concerning what you're asking about, do you?

SPMDL: <sits down>

How It's Done: Standing Up To Bullies

With apologies to Ben Cohen, standing up to bullies doesn't mean wearing a shirt with a particular logo. It doesn't mean wearing purple on a certain day of the year. It doesn't mean re-tweeting some vapid apothegm by Lady Gaga, Madonna, or any other queer pop icon from the relative safety of one's iPhone and sofa cushions. What it means is having the testicular fortitude to say what is right even when inconvenient; to be willing to make oneself the potential target for ridicule and abuse, physical or verbal, in the defense of others. 


Jim Hardie, a veteran of the Iraq War, deserves more praise than any of the media whores who happily sell us their wares with hefty doses of validation like unctuous suburbanite merchants in a 21st century technological garage sale of emotional entitlement. Here is a man doing what is right simply because it is right. Who is unwilling to allow the continued mistreatment of others at the expense of his own comfort. Our culture and our society need more men willing to forgo their own comfort as Jim Hardie does in the video below. 


Courage doesn't mean overcoming one's fears; it means proceeding with an action in spite of them. 

Doughy Republicans & Cannibalistic Conservatives

The year was 1054. In Rome, Pope Leo IX, head of the Catholic Church, sent delegates to Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Catholic Church at this time stood divided along an East-West division. Various theological disputes raged between these two major divisions in the church, but chief among them was the issue of whether the bread used during communion should be leavened (the Eastern position) or unleavened, the Roman Church’s position.

Once the delegates from Rome arrived and tensions escalated, the leader of the Roman faction, Cardinal Humbert, excommunicated Cerularius and declared him and his parishioners as having fallen into heresy. Cerularius, not to be outdone, repaid the Cardinal in turn, excommunicated him, and declared the Roman Catholic Church the heretics. To this day, the division between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church persists. 

In short, the largest religious schism in the history of the Christianity came down to a question of yeast.

Fast forward to the 21st America. It’s been fashionable for quite some time now for conservatives to label liberals as “unpatriotic” or  “un-American” during political disputes. Not to be out classed, liberals have intoned the same rhetoric against conservatives. Recently, however, it’s become the rallying cry of conservatives to lambaste other conservatives as leftists or worse, “liberals in conservatives colors”.

For my part, I think the occasional use of this diatribe may be true. My problem, even when I agree with the notion, however, is that often no exact reason is given as to why it is so. It is evidence of a small mind that simply declaring a phrase somehow makes the substance thereof true. 

It is now the case that conservatives are eating themselves and declaring various candidates to not be conservative because he or she holds a particular view on a subject area. All one need do is follow two or more conservatives backing different Republican candidates on Twitter to see the vitriol hurled between their respective devotees. This in turn only creates a rod for the backs of conservatives. Between the tendrils of mud, the bulk of these conservatives will call a momentary time-out and declare that they will, in fact, vote for whomever eventually becomes the GOP nominee. The problem, then, necessarily creates a future wherein most will end up supporting a nominee who they have previously declared to not be conservative. The relative accusations are legion: Mitt Romney isn't a conservative because he signed RomneyCare into law as Governor of Massachusetts, Newt Gingrich worked as a consultant for Fannie Mae and cheated on his wife, Ron Paul favors the legalization of marijuana, and so it goes.

This is cognitive dissonance turned into mania. It isn't vetting - it's cannibalism. Or, to be more precise, it's the excommunication of one candidate from the church of conservatism by another over what oftentimes is the political equivalent of yeast. 

Do I feel as though some of the points are valid? You, dear reader, have a perfect right to ask and I have an obligation to answer. Yes, I do. For instance, I don't believe that compulsory prayer in school is a conservative principle. It violates the separation of church and state and is therefore not one of the federalist ideals. I believe mandating girls receive a vaccine like Gardasil to protect against disease that can only be caught through intercourse supplants the role of the family and creates a state in loco parentis for its young citizenry.

However, this is the trap door of the political right's mentality: either you agree with all our precepts or you are heretical and therefore not a conservative: "If you support gay marriage, you're not a conservative," or, "If you favor background checks for firearms, you're not a conservative," or, perhaps most damning of all, "If you wouldn't support overturning Roe vs. Wade, you're not a conservative." 

I am of the opinion that the ultimate perpetrator of this mentality is none other than the GOP itself. In 2010, the Republican National Committee issued a litmus test for candidates and declared that if a Republican candidate did not agree with at least 8 of the 10 principles contained therein, then that candidate would not receive funding from the RNC. One might call it a conservative inquisition. This conservative cancer has metastasized as well. A few months ago, organizers of CPAC announced that the gay conservative group, GOProud, would not be allowed to participate as sponsors of the 2012 conservative gathering. 

As it happens, I'm against compulsory prayer/religion in public schools and I'm also against the teaching of nonsense, such as "creation science" under its nom de guerre of "intelligent design", in any publicly funded academic setting other than a history or literature class. Also, while I find the act of abortion horrifying and believe the term "unborn child" to be a material truth, I find the idea of women dying on the tables of back-ally butchers equally repugnant if medically safe terminations of pregnancy were legally prohibited. Furthermore, I think civil marriage is (pardon the pun) completely divorced in a secular republic such as ours from any necessary ecclesiastical meditations and therefore no justifiable reason exists as to why two people of the same gender shouldn't be able to be wed. Likewise, any person willing to defend our nation, its principles, and voluntarily risk their lives should be free to do so irrespective of his or her romantic proclivities.

For the forgoing reasons, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups of two or more, I have been termed a "leftist" by some of my counterparts on the political right. It seems to me, however, that the following are not matters of a political right or left (east or west) schism; rather, they are based in common sense which William F. Buckley so famously intoned was relatively uncommon. With deference to the late, great, Mr. Buckley, I think he was on to something there.

What I find lacking (not absent) in the conservative thought of all the major pundits, the candidates, and much of the current, vocal, political right, is an abdication of the thoughtfulness of reason. To be fair, I find this even more sorely lacking on the side of the political left. Thus, I suppose the only logical course for me to take is to place a metaphorical "-R" at the end of my name, but with the disclaimer that the "R" stands for reason and not for any allegiance except to that.