Space, the final frontier. To boldy go where no one has been before. Or something like that. The news media is slobbering all over itself this morning, doing its best to replay the absolute wonder and awe that humans experienced when John Glenn first orbited the Earth in 1962. It was, literally, a concept out of this world back then. Escaping the confines of the planet has been a dream of many humans since well before then, and well after.

It’s a fantastic concept, the promise of freedom in the physical sense, floating beyond every rule and limitation that binds us here. We cannot escape gravity, despite it being theoretic, and we cannot fly without tremendous artificial propulsion. In space, I would imagine we can forget our human-ness, and dream without constriction…even the sky is not a limit.

The desire to be unfettered looms large with us, and I understand the attraction. There are sensory deprivation chambers on terra firma, where one can purchase a finite time span in a closed capsule filled with water and blocking the intrusion of all sensory stimulus. Many describe the experience as mystical, their spirits free to transcend what tethers it to the body. Or something like that.

Today, another billionaire and a trio of intrepid explorers will be ejected from the Earth’s gravity and experience a very few minutes in the sub-orbital atmosphere. I can only imagine the excitement and thrill of them all as they are propelled into history, in more ways than one. It’s a big deal, but it has implications and this is literally not a one-shot deal.

The archetype of the explorer is that of a restless dreamer, one who is never satisfied with status quo on levels transcending social constructs. Some are berating this effort, and the previous billionaire space effort, as simply evidence of the widening class divide. Others are denigrating the audacity of people with that much money choosing to spend it on what amounts to a thrill ride, rather than poverty and hunger or issues focused on alleviating suffering or more lofty goals. That merely brings us back to pesky issues of choice and collective responsibility, but that’s for another discussion.

I am very interested in these private efforts to go, quite literally, above and beyond the usual boundaries of our existence. The coverage of this latest jaunt into weightlessness began to get a little uncomfortable, however, when the news anchors began relating some of the proposals and possibilities for building on the success of these virginal efforts. Words like “colonization” and “permanent bases” were bandied about, and then “transportation of payloads” crept in. This makes for a bit of anxiety, at least for me.

To what end are we in such a fervor to travel beyond the planet’s physical boundaries? If this was simply about the curiosity to explore what lies beyond, and how we fit into the fabric of all that is, I would be at peace with it. However, we’re humans, and in this case products of Western capitalism and hubris and the need to fashion the world around us. In so many ways, it is all about us and what can space do for us. This is The New World, v2.0, and that’s a little frightening.

One of the more interesting speculations this morning involved the concept of hollowing out an asteroid, spinning it, and establishing a base of operations inside. From a technological aspect, that’s a fascinating thought experiment, but to what ends? What might we gain from such an effort? How might that be strategic for our species, our goals, our future? What might such an endeavor do for anyone, or anything, else in the Universe?

It occurs to me that such questions have already been asked and answered on levels far above my pay grade, but it would seem to me those answers constitute our very future. If they are formed by a small group of monied individuals who are making decisions that affect us all, that’s not a good thing. We’ll simply be carrying on the established order, the problematic status quo of the present day, and that doesn’t do anything for anyone, including us. What good could possibly come from moving forward with this troubling state of affairs, ignoring the need for improvements and solutions and bringing a dumpster fire into space? Seriously.

We’ve already left orbiting trash in the wake of our previous explorations and journeys. That doesn’t seem to be a good sign. Privatizing space travel is an interesting proposition, but can we be trusted? I’ve said many times that I believe wealthy white people, oligarchs and such, are trying to escape from the planet. Again, to what end? Is there a profit-making opportunity? I would imagine so, because that’s how they roll. If this was simply about exploration, I would be all for it. Maintaining the same old-same old status quo? Not so much.

What are the dreams for space exploration? Are the simply to make money and perpetuate the classism and social strata that we’ve got here on Earth? When the “space race” was in full bloom, the goal seemed to be more about beating the Soviets than about finding out what was out there. There was tragedy, and drama, and space garbage and increasing fodder for conspiracy theories (what WAS on the dark side of the moon, and is the moon really the Death Star from Star Wars?). I would imagine there’s been more than passing conversation and speculation about the militaristic possibilities of establishing a base on the moon, or Mars, or beyond.

Looking ahead to what space tourism and private space travel might yield for us is a great unknown, but perhaps not. If our first concepts of going beyond the Earth’s atmosphere are full of the colonial mindset, I find that absolutely horrifying. Our first official acts on the moon were to plant our flag, just like in the old days when we hit the shores of “The New World” and claimed land that was already occupied for God and the Queen. Is this the best we can do? It may be, since we’ve not seen any reason to come up with anything different.

In my lifetime, Europeans have continued to colonize Africa and other regions in the Southern Hemisphere, often with disastrous results. They utilized the same playbook as their colonization of America, occupying lands that were already occupied, disturbing existing cultures with their own intrusive conventions, and plundering the native geology for profit. This brought us the Rwandan massacre, apartheid, East Indian impoverishment and caste, and other atrocities on a hit parade of inhumanity. Will we never learn?

I suppose I believe we can’t be trusted to plow into the great beyond without having demonstrated substantial change in our mindset and orientation. For the most part, our human orientation is entirely pointed at ourselves – what can the planet do for us, rather than how can we live in harmony with the planet and the other beings that are here? We spend very little time contemplating how we might fit into the existing fabric of the planet, but inordinate amounts of time planning our optimization. I’ve always felt that we’re short timers here on Earth, plotting our departure once we’ve exhausted all benefit of our occupancy.

Perhaps I am too hard on us, but again, I just don’t know that we’ve provided a trustworthy track record. Our vision is small, and we haven’t reconsidered our goals for quite a while. Our goals are centuries old – expand, find stuff to use and sell in other places, quell any resistance, then on to the next one. We’re still fiddling with who gets the first ride on the space ship rather than how to behave responsibly once we get into space. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Lest I become so inordinately pessimistic about space exploration, or the general state of the human species, I must say that I believe we can do this responsibly, accountably, beneficently. I am thinking we need to be asking more questions like “What can this do for all of us? How might this move us into a better way, and not just a bigger way? What positive things cam we bring to the rest of the Universe? Having the first widening of possibilities be consumed with profit seems only limiting, so let’s really dream, and dream BIG. I have no doubt that we can do that – we always have. We just can’t stop at planting our flag and winning the race.

I wonder if I would be one of the new explorers. I wonder if I could bring my dog with me to the moon, or play my guitar in a weightless environment. I wonder if I would still be making observations about the greater scheme of my species once I found out we’re not the only species out there. I wonder if seeing the planet in its natural state, without battle lines and boundaries drawn would change my perspective about who I am and how I fit into the fabric of the Universe. I wonder if I would believe differently about how I got to be here, about life after death, about life after life, about living. I wonder. And wonder is the entire reason to do any of this exploration.

We have to wonder, we have to ask what might it be like if it wasn’t like this. We can’t continue doing the same thing over and over again. It’s boring and it doesn’t get us anywhere. We have to keep asking questions about what if, how if, what could it belike if…we have to imagine. There’s an old saying that tells us if we keep doing what we always did, we’re going to keep getting what we always got. That’s not good enough any longer. We’re ready to fledge, ready to fly from the nest, because we’ve seen that big wide open sky that makes us feel as though we have no limits. Being concerned with pieces of paper that are assigned arbitrary values in green ink doesn’t really get us anywhere. Dreaming of a better way gets us the stars and the space in between. Let’s not blow it.

I am not all that trustful, but then again I am. It makes no sense. If I think you like me, or even worse if I like you, I’m more likely to believe you. That non-strategy gets me kicked in the teeth, and lower regions, a lot. I’m a sucker for what appears to be understanding and bonding. I’m more or less a sucker, it would seem.

Somewhere along the line, though, I made a conscious decision to refrain from being embittered and paranoid, so I accept the consequences. It sucks at times, but I remain conscious of the choice I made. That and a couple of dollars will get me a canned drink from vending machine. So be it.

Sometimes my trust is misplaced, and I would rather have a bit more discretion about ferreting out truth, but I hear that I’m not required to be perfect. It’s frustrating, though, to feel as though I’ve been taken for a ride, taken advantage of, made a fool of. It may be life-defining if I’ve been taken advantage of regarding a health care decision.

I do not respond well to being made a fool of, and that’s an entirely different set of circumstances in my opinion. When I feel as though I have been played as a fool, I am definitely bitter and hostile. That implies to me that a perpetrator knew entirely what they were doing, and intended to harm me. All bets are off at that point, particularly when I’ve lost something other than my dignity, like cash or opportunity. That generally is a point of no return for me.

All that aside, I was reflecting on a discussion I had yesterday, with a guy who spoke onn skepticism, and them morality of decisions based on that perspective. Skepticism, by definition, is doubt. Doubting the truth as presented, regardless of evidence and facts. That’s an entirely self-absorbed and subjective posture, so debate is generally useless. Once someone has decided to reject the truth, and the conventional wisdom, there’s really no external persuasion that will change their stance.

The first thing I recall in considering skepticism is my recovery from alcoholism. I consider that a work in progress, but I have journeyed quite a way from the pervasive skepticism I had when starting the journey. I was convinced the suggesting program would not work for me, convinced that nothing would change, convinced that I was beyond hope of ditching misery. The only reason I stayed was that I had nowhere else to be, having alienated everything and everyone that had once been important.

Over time, the fog cleared and I saw a clearing in the distance, an oasis of sorts. The longer I stayed, the more the skepticism and distrust retreated, and I became less distrustful of the process. In reality, the only change was my willingness to believe, my willingness to take the suggestions and try. I continue to believe that willingness is the only transformative power in the journey, bringing an optimism that could not be imagined when there was no willingness to have it.

So, in these days of pandemic response, we are treated to varying levels of skepticism regarding the source of the virus, the remedies to combat it, and the messengers who impart information. Is the information credible? Are the messengers trustworthy? We don’t have to accept any message, any information or instructions whatsoever.

When dealing with commercial advertising, the choice to believe is reasonably inconsequential. Believing that a Mercedes-Benz automobile is of substantially higher quality than a Ford will not result result in loss of life or planetary destruction. The choice may prove to be financially inexpedient for the decision maker in the long run, but that’s as far as consequence will extend. Believing that COVID-19 is a hoax, and that recommended strategies for mitigation are unnecessary may have significantly more impactful results.

People make the decision to mistrust sources of information based on several factors, some more credible than others. Deciding to withhold trust in certain information may depend on the “sales job” that brings it forward. No matter how dubious the facts, a good sales person may prevail as much as not. In the final analysis, the same rules of betrayal hold true if the carney proves to be a liar.

The how and why of faith is entirely irrational. Believing that one sales pitch is more credible than another is entirely subjective and personal. In the presence of empirical data, a person is free to simply not believe if they suspect the information source is not credible. It’s as much a matter of faith as any religious tenet. When it comes to things like acceptance of empirical evidence regarding something like organic processes, there’s little room for argument. It’s entirely and simply a choice to be skeptical or not.

When confronted with something like COVID-19, the consequence of skepticism feel more significant than choosing the Mercedes over the Ford. To decide whether I’m going to align with the conventional wisdom regarding whether to believe what I’m hearing is not all that simple a process for me. I listen to a wide range of critique and rationale, then do my own research about what I’ve heard. I read everything I can find, and rely on my own limited knowledge of the subject. I’ve take a couple of courses that involve biology and epidemiology, and know the basics of how viruses function. When I volunteered for the AIDS hotline years ago, I became very well acquainted with viral progression, mutation, and herd immunity. The virus that causes AIDS was not identified immediately, and the morbidity was entirely misunderstood until the disease was framed as the result of viral infection. The CDC came to believe that symptomology and impact was best explained by viral response, and that eventually led to more sound treatment and prevention methodology, which impacted the morbidity rate.

In the case of COVID-19, scientists arrived at reasonable conclusions regarding the nature of the illness and the most effective manner of treatment and mitigation of propagation. What has complicated the public response to those conclusions, however, is nothing short of incredible. The public response has been affected not by evidence, not by experience, but the intentional manifestation of skepticism for a prescribed outcome. That outcome was designed to be a systemic mistrust of the conventional wisdom and denial of objective evidence, a.k.a. truth.

Most people agree that a cloudless sky on a sunny day is generally blue in color. When there are clouds, we agree the color is more grey, and much darker. There is more nuance, however, in the perception of either condition as pleasurable. That’s entirely subjective – some of us like sunny days, others like cloudy days. No harm in either case.

The nuance may have some consequence, however, if things like ultraviolet radiation content on a sunny day is denied. There is evidence that UV light causes sunburn, and potentially melanoma. Sunshine fuels photosynthesis in plants, which in turn completes a necessary cycle of returning oxygen to the air and soil. Human life cannot persist without that, and the validity of that explanation has been proven in science. There’s not a huge wealth of skepticism about that.

There is, however, a great deal of skepticism about other scientific explanations, like evolution and adaptive radiation. Religious faith has invaded the realm of science for things like the Darwinian theory of evolution, as well as the conventional scientific widsom of calculating the origin of the universe and this planet. Science calculates the physical and geologic evidence of the planet to estimate its age as billions of years, while some religious faiths believe the world was created at the birth of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. That puts existence at slightly more than 2,000 years. What’s believed is what is chosen, and the empirical data is irrelevant at that point.

I believe – or I choose to believe – that I can handle people making different choices with the data the choose to take in. What I’m struggling with, however, is where their right to believe differently – and contrary to established evidence – intersects with my rights. If a person does not believe in the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and does not believe that masking mitigates any chance of illness that may or may not exist, I don’t know how to navigate that intersection. If the best evidence at my disposal indicates that COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-2 coronavirus, and if groups of people who refuse to mask en masse demonstrate higher than average infection and morbidity rates from that virus, where do their rights to be skeptical of that data override my rights to believe seemingly good evidence?

This is but one of many such intersection points. We’ve been having them repeatedly for hundreds of years, possibly since the beginning of recorded history. When city states battled for what they assumed to be limited and finite resources, they went to war. There were resources, they were needed for survival, one group possessed them and the other group needed them, so may the best group win. Or die trying. I suppose we believed we’d progressed a bit farther than throwing boiling oil on each other from the parapets of stone castles, but perhaps not.

Do we simply think too much of ourselves? Have we not learned to live in actual community, where the value of “we” is more than the value of “I”? Sometimes I believe it’s that simple, and that seems to be a philosophical stance, a core value that elevates individuality above all else, even at peril of collective demise. If we venture to some other planet or galaxy, we’ll bring that with us. I’m not seeing that as a particularly attractive prospect.

We are often bridled by our wants, and sometimes ignore our needs. If I want to drink alcoholically, I am free to do that, but it actually does nothing to quench my thirst or satisfy the needs of my body. Only water will do that, but water has never provided the mood changing sensation that copious amounts of alcohol did. Drinkers have been known to become severely dehydrated while imbibing on hot days, no matter how many bottles of cold beer they drank. But water was not what they wanted, only what their bodies needed.

Perhaps it’s merely emotional immaturity that compels adult humans to continually strive to satisfy their wants, rather than needs. In times of true scarcity, the community must survive on a collective level; elevating the needs of select individuals will not guarantee survival of the species. I believe it may be nothing but hubris that drives us past the more practical solutions, believing that our wants or deserved or somehow of higher stature than needs. Sometimes I believe we simply have too many choices, but that’s just my opinion.

When I lose sight of my needs, and become distracted by wants, I’m likely to be in an endless cycle of unmet expectations and disappointments. That makes me very cranky, as though I can never “win”. If I have no humility and no gratitude for what I have, I’m doomed to seeing no value in what I accomplish, and life becomes drudgery. That’s where a lot of us find ourselves – life is drudgery, and we attempt to combat that by convincing ourselves that we deserve the new car, the bling, the vacation, the latest fashions. From my experience, providing what I believe I “deserve” is building a house of cards – easy come, easy go. As I was taught in recovery, if I truly got what I deserved, I would probably not be sitting here typing on a laptop and eating cupcakes in bed.

People who stormed the Capitol on January 6th wanted a specific outcome, because they chose to believe that a grievous wrong had been perpetrated upon them. There was no tangible evidence of the alleged crime they continue to espouse, that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from their preferred candidate. There’s still no such evidence, and not for lack of trying. Votes have been counted and recounted and recounted again, and there’s no evidence of significant voter fraud. Their narrative remains the same, and despite many of them having been arrested and incarcerated for their roles in the insurrection, they are staying that course. It’s a choice, and they have the right to make it, but I can’t believe it makes them happy.

Perhaps that’s the biggest decision point in our ability to choose. We have free will, but is the litmus test of correct and moral choice whether or not it makes us happy? Pursuit of happiness, that’s part of our agreement for our lives in this country. There’s a problem with that, however – the definition of happiness. I would contend that happiness in the collective sense is not what makes each of us individually giddy with pleasure and an endless smile. It would seem that on the grand scheme of things, involving millions of people, happiness is far more complicated. It has to do with norms and laws and our collective ability to rise above the dregs of simple necessity.

Political conservatives rail against anything that hints at what they deem to be socialism, but there are elements of socialism in every fiber of this nation. Socialism has become simply a pejorative for the argument that pits “big government” against “personal responsibility”. I’ve lost patience with debating that issue, because no matter which side of it one supports, we all have to admit that what’s happening is simply not working. I believe we need something new, born of creative compromise and humility. We’re not there, however, and I think we’re going to have to lose a great deal more before we’re willing to be there.

Recovery involves admitting there’s a problem, and that we can’t solve it. It also involves becoming willing to go to any lengths to get better. We’re not willing to got to any lengths – we still choose to believe that our existing solutions are valid, if only everyone else would straighten up and fly right. That’s not working for us, but still…we try. Still, we hold on to the notion that we’re the smartest people in the room, we’re the best nation on the planet, we have the right answers (in some cases, because we’ve talked to a supernatural deity who has given only us the correct answer). Truth be told, it’s simply not working. We’re angry, depressed, and tired. I’m thinking that’s not the goal of anybody’s life, no matter how much money you have.

So, I’ll keep looking for a job, if for nothing else to not have to move under a bridge and steal wi-fi from a public building, living in my truck with the $1800 worth of remanufactured air compressor and new valve cover gasket. Perhaps I can park in the lot of the sno-ball place, and walk to the sidewalk with a distressed look on my face and a hand-made sign that says I will work for sno-balls. I can hang a tin can on the dog’s collar for contributions from passing traffic and wonder how my life has come to this. I will write bad poetry and nonsensical essays (like this one) to be published upon my death. What price glory? It is merely the price of a sno-ball.

I was reading an old review of Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How To Be An Anti-Racist”, and find that I really need to read the damned book. I have no excuse for not having done so. Regardless, I am struck by some of the review’s citations of the book, such as Kendi’s departure from some of the conventional wisdom of anti-racism up to now, such as the notion that Black people cannot be racist because they do not have systemic power. He questions that notion based on examples of the power wielded by Black elected officials, for example.

Having worked for Black elected officials in the past, and Blacks with relative organizational power in the private sector, I understand his point about the relative power of individuals in the system. Elected officials have power, or our estimation of it, in the political and bureaucratic system. They have the impetus to have work done, to change circumstances, just like any other elected official.

The question of relative power within a system is largely individual, rather than collective, and so I would still question whether Blacks collectively possess the power to be racist. I believe racism is a systemic mechanism that fuels the survival of a capitalistic and supremacist-oriented status quo. In that system, Black people and people of color have no collective power, but white people do. In that system, individual Black people and people of color may have systemic power, as do white people. I feel those contexts are not equivalent, but if you are a person subordinated in the system, it may be an irrelevant point.

The review also noted that Kendi is a fan of results-oriented judgement about racist intent – if an act, or policy, or effort yields a result that brings disparate impact to Blacks and people of color, then it is a racist act, policy, or effort. If it brings equitable results, then it is an anti-racist element. That’s very simple, but the results are typically far more complicated and may bring disparate impact to the dominant culture (at least in their estimation).

So, my question in considering the results-oriented model of discerning racist vs. anti-racist action would be…that’s a win-lose scenario. At least in the short run, actions that favor one side of the equation would seem to necessarily disfavor the other side. That’s a zero-sum operation, and I’m not clear that we are capable of much else at this point. If political districts are reshaped, without gerrymandering, that would change the demographic makeup of the voting blocs involved. In our political reality, most GOP-leaning concerns would deem that favorable to the Democrats, and unfavorable to them. Neither side will concede that redistricting without gerrymandering would be a win-win for voters and democracy in general, so it’s merely a partisan argument rather than a governance argument.

This kind of knot is difficult to resolve, because we’re just not there yet. I don’t quite know what it would take for us to get there, save a catastrophe that serves to level the playing field, with no resistance from humans. COVID has come the closest to such an equalizer, but there is still massive resistance. Even in the face of rising infection rates, significant numbers of people still refuse to be vaccinated, or wear face coverings to avoid infecting others. The level of mistrust of the science, and the governmental response, is stunning. The instances of purposeful misinformation has transformed normally reasonable people into paranoid conspiracy theorists who confuse freedom with selfishness and patriotism with nationalism.

Remembering the insurrection of January 6th, I remain beyond disheartened by the egregious display of self-centered and malicious intention that was front and center. I continue to shiver at the stark realization that we dodged a cannon-sized projectile on that day, and that our nation was closer to losing its experimental democracy than ever before. Had the insurgents been only slightly more skilled, even better armed, and confronted by even less government resistance we’d be in a world of hurt right now. People arriving at the U.S. Capitol with fistfuls of zip-ties and bear spray had nothing else on their minds than taking over the government. I’m not sure enough people really understand that.

January 6th was a day of Americans behaving badly, but it followed four years of Americans behaving badly. Four years of sanctioned and openly hurled hate speech, four years of lies and clandestine governmental operations, four years of helter-skelter and chaotic governance. In all fairness, however, all of that was going on far prior to the four years of the previous Presidential administration. In many ways, I am grateful that it all became so visible and obvious during the past four years.

We’ve now seen the seamy underbelly of the land of the free and the home of the brave, but in all honesty, it’s always been there. It’s ramped up a bit because of instant media and communications, and because of better weaponry. But it’s the same mentality and the same thinking that resulted in the construction of this racist and intolerant house in which we reside. It’s the water we swim in, it’s the air we breathe. It’s who we are.

Can we change this, can we overcome the narcissitic and selfish perspective that we have at this point? I am sure it’s possible, but highly improbable until we can agree on how we got here. We aren’t going to get any closer to a solution until we cease to approach everything from a partisan standpoint. By partisan I don’t mean solely political, but I do mean solely polarized in terms of perspective and outlook, and the poles seem to be those of dominant culture and non-dominant culture. The demographics fall neatly into categories of class, wealth, and ability. It’s been that way for a very long time, and we don’t seem to be any closer to eradicating that caste system than at the start of this American experiment.

This is going to get worse before it gets better. The battle lines aren’t fully drawn, but we’re at war. We’re fighting ourselves, and the arena is fully engaged at this point. It’s very easy to distract the fighters from the goal, especially when fatigue has set in. We are definitely tired, but not so tired that we are willing to call a cease-fire and negotiate a win-win settlement. It’s all or nothing, and for all practical purposes, we have…nothing.

Because we don’t trust one another, everything is an argument, everything is a battle, and everything comes to no good end. Some of us refuse to be vaccinated against a killer virus at the level of a pandemic, because we don’t believe the science. Or we do believe the science, but we don’t like who’s wielding it. Or we don’t care. Or it’s just too much trouble to make the effort. We’ll fight to be “free” to refuse conformity.

It would not surprise me if some of the disinformation has the intentional goal of reducing the population. That’s a particularly Libertarian outlook, that world population must be reduced in order for comfortablity and survival of the human species. There are simply too many of us on the planet, so if we reduce the population there’s more for those who remain. Sort of like expendable casualties, I suppose. However that is intended, it doesn’t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy by any means, so…um…no.

Assuming people are not expendable, we’ve got to find some way of determining how everyone survives. Actually, we’ve got to figure out more than survival for the masses, we need to figure out how people actually live. Survival can be an interminable experience of having the bare minimum to continue bodily functions, and that may be miserable at best. Life is more than simply keeping a body in a minimal status. An existence without joy, without happiness, without a sense of well being and without choices is much less than life. We can do better. We can do SO much better.

Many people are expressing disapproval for the space aspirations of more than a couple of billionaires. Two of them have ventured into short flights beyond the planet’s orbital range, and a large outcry about the superfluous nature of their expenditures has been heard. I wish there was more money contributed to the cause of world hunger, and health care, but this is where we are. Who is to say that space exploration won’t bring us to ending world hunger and poverty and providing health care? Who is to say that space exploration isn’t actually flight into the imagination and departure into dreaming a new new world? Who’s to say that isn’t exactly what we need? Maybe not, but maybe so.

My bigger issue with billionaires funding space exploration isn’t so much with their choice of how to expend their bounty, but with how they came to have such incredible wealth in the first place. I don’t blame them – I don’t expect anyone to reject money coming toward them legally. But there’s something drastically wrong with a system that catapults a small number of people to an infinite level of income, while billions more remain in the dregs of the pay scale. But again, this is where we are, this is who we are, and that’s reality at the present time.

I’m sitting here reflecting on my own first-world problems – getting my vehicle air conditioning repaired, resolving the oil leak. I am fortunate to have the option to have the option of repair. I am fortunate to have a vehicle that needs repair. Even without those particular repairs, the vehicle will still get me from one place to another, only in slightly less comfort than before. So I don’t want to lose track of the gratitude. I don’t ever want to lose track of that, because without that I’m just another selfish and self-centered butt head that can’t see how fortunate I am to have choices, and can’t muster up compassion for anyone else that doesn’t have the same choices. That’s not a good place to be, and I know this. I have been there, and don’t want to ever feel that empty again.

Today is hot again. I have no intention of traveling anywhere…I have food to eat and liquids to drink and the air conditioner in the apartment is working just fine. I am grateful for that as well. I do, however, need to clean out some part of my truck so repair staff can even get inside it (yes, I remain a self-defined and generally hapless slob). I’ll do that, and then either late tonight or very early tomorrow morning, I will deliver the land barge to the repair facility and then wait for pronouncement of sentence. Either I’ll have a fully repaired vehicle with air conditioning and oil that remains inside the vehicle and not on the ground beneath it, or not. We’ll just have to wait and see, but one way or another, the drama will be over tomorrow at some point and I’ll know what solution looks like in this case.

If I am smart, I’ll start cleaning things up in the truck now, in small increments. I’m not quite that bright, so I’m sure I’ll procrastinate until it’s nuclear fusion level hot and then kvetch and moan about the heat. It’s how I roll. I accept that, but still hope for change. My dog is far more reasonable – she only frets to go out there when it becomes absolutely necessary for her anatomic functions, and then she’s ready to come back immediately, knowing she’ll get a dog treat and then retire to a comfortable bed (mine or hers) where it’s cold enough to hang meat. Smart beast, with a brain the size of a plum, but far more sensible than I.

I’ve been watching this bald eagle nest for a few weeks now. Mama (Liberty) and papa (Freedom) eagle are raising one eaglet (Kindness) at Glacier Gardeens park in Juneau, Alaska. It’s a fascinating process, these apex predators alternately hunting prey with razor-sharp precision then gently feeding their spoils to the young one, tearing small pieces of the kill and gently offering it to the eaglet with their beaks. It is an incredible juxtaposition of the hunt and parenting. Both parents will fiercely defend the nest, and the eaglet when the need arises.

Sometime last night, the web camera went dark. There was a power failure at the site, and the camera will need to be reset. The staff said they’ll work on it when the park opens today, but right now it’s not quite 5 a.m. there, so the cam watchers are going into withdrawal. Ah, well. First world problems.

I wonder when humans lost the singleness of purpose to propagate the species. Perhaps it was when there were other choices for survival, other than our own skills. When it became less and less necessary to be entirely self reliant, when communal activity began to allow sharing of resources. When parents were away from the nest for the greater part of the day, working at jobs that removed them from active participation in the raising of young. Who knows.

I am also watching an osprey nest, and there are three chicks who are nearly ready to fledge. There is sibling rivalry, and dominance challenges. One chick, possibly the first to hatch, is more or less a bully. That’s the one who gets first crack at food brought into the nest, and hoards it until they are satisfied. Such dynamics seem to be very typical of multiple hatchling broods, and they just deal with it. To my knowledge, there are no avian mental health professionals, and it appears to be a strategic method of species propagation – the strongest will survive, and there will be a viable offspring that will survive to carry on the species.

Nature is simultaneously brutal and gentle, fierce and tender. I suppose humans possess the same polarized diametric, but we seem to have far more choice about it. We can also be thrown off the path with outside influences, such as addiction. Interruption to the breeding paradigm seem to be introduced by chemical aberration, either naturally occurring or artificially introduced.

There are no instructional manuals for any organism, but there are certain instincts and characteristics that are common to breeds and even molecular life forms. I’m always fascinated with the aberrations, however. The small percentage of life forms that do not follow the common trend, the one albino that emerges from several generations of highly pigmented offspring. The one puppy in a litter that displays aberrant personality traits from the rest of the brood. There are exceptions to every rule.

In general, rules are problematic simply because they do not account for aberrations. But rules generally allow us to feel more in control of things we do not understand. If we can predict outcomes, it’s far more comfortable than being surprised by results that could go either way. I believe this is truly a root cause of racism, the need to feel that outcomes are predictable based on schema that we construct. Electricity is technically a theory, but we are quite comfortable in the expectation that light will be produced when a switch is flipped (providing of course other human-made contrivances are in working order, including transmission facilities and bill payment).

We have constructed a scheme to explain differences between the races that amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The entire delineation of human life forms based on the aspect of non-white skin is very nearly absurd, but we have based our entire societal construct on this. We then assigned value judgements based on that scheme – those with less melanin are more intelligent, more virtuous, closer to God. Those with higher melanin content are far less virtuous, far less intelligent, closer to Satan. Very interesting, but stupid. There are always exceptions.

When you’re an exception to some generally accepted norm, or rule, it’s a lonely place to be as a human. One of the most common examples is that of left-handed writers, who live in a right-handed world. Everything is made assuming right-handed operation – guitars, school desks, spiral notebooks. In fairly recent times, left-hand specific alternatives are made for many things, but in some cases they are more expensive options and they are often in short supply. We have the means to produce left-hand specific goods and materials, but those are generally seen as economically impractical since the demand will be less. Money itself is neither right-handed nor left-handed, but we have assigned a value to its derivatives.

Activism generally arises from minority populations because resource allotments favor the majority population. That’s fine when it comes to t-shirt sizes or guitars, both of which are voluntary acquisitions. When it comes to food, water, and shelter we’re in another world. In some cases, a left-hand dominant person can adapt and become ambidextrous, or modify their seated orientation to accommodate their dominant dexterity. A human without food resources cannot adapt to a status that requires less food, or no food at all. Without food, any human – of any height, color, or intellectual capability – will die.

Allowing human beings to struggle for survival without adequate food is, at best, immoral when there are enough food resources to alleviate hunger. Insisting that production of food is made possible only by capital expenditure is absurd. In times of food chain interruptions, namely labor shortage, farmers have been known to allow crops to rot in the fields rather than allow harvest by anyone able to do so. There is resistance to not being paid for the crop, so it is better to let it be wasted. While I understand it’s often not quite as simple as opening harvest to the general public, there are ways to implement public harvest but there’s more resistance than not.

So, here we are, literally in the fruited plain, only to find that we have interrupted the natural order of things in favor of our own “supply chains”. We’ve attempted to wrestle the natural supply chai out of Mother Nature’s hands and shape it into the shape of capitalism. We can grow things, in enormous quantities, but it’s available only if you can pay for it. How cruel is it for starving people to walk past shelves full of produce, meat, fish, and poultry and be forced to await a handout from a site miles away?

It’s mystifying how we exist with an expectation that a hungry person will not eventually steal, or beg, or filch enough food to survive by any means. After natural disasters, there were arbitrary valuations based on race that seemed almost comical – people of color were looting and stealing from abandoned grocery stores, but people of dominant culture were searching for food. For their families.

Every time a person of color was filmed stealing a large-screen television from a closed electronics store, that image was reproduced thousands of times a day and made to represent the behavior of ALL people of color. Only dominant culture is allowed to maintain individuality, while individual people of color represent the entire identity niche. That’s not natural occurrence, that’s a human construct that maintains value judgements that have persisted for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

We have a poorly constructed system. Because it works for the dominant culture, and small sub-groups of the marginalized body, it is maintained. We are in so deep we don’t know how to get out without pain. We don’t know what a world without supremacy and social caste will look like, so we feel safer clinging to status quo. The devil you know is better than the one you don’t, and we can’t conceive of a life without any devil. We have lost the ability to imagine a better way, one without demonic interference.

If we cannot imagine, we cannot dream. If we cannot dream, we cannot build. And if we cannot build, we are destined to continue living in this hodge podge and ramshackle hovel that exists in spite of itself. Every day is a struggle to coax the flimsy structure out of certain collapse, but we manage to pull things together time after time. The effort, however, is so taxing that we can enjoy none of the benefits of that which we’ve fought to maintain. It is essentially a futile effort, but we have no other solution. We’ve been wide awake far too long, eyes wide shut.

It’s a nightmare, and we have no way to awaken. We’re sleeping without resting, and without rest we’re bound to fail. There’s only so long an insomniac is able to function without standing down. We’re waiting for the onslaught, but it has already come. We’re in it. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and we’re our own worst enemy.

Until someone calls a cease fire, the dead will keep coming, the living will keep dying, and the cycle will keep repeating. Some days I wonder if there won’t be an intervention from some extraterrestrial entity, or some super-consciousness, that says … you’re done. This is futile, and you’re o the verge of destroying something that affects things you cannot comprehend. Some days I think such an unbelievable intervention may be our only hope.

Perhaps that flight of fancy signifies that I have lost faith in my fellow humans, in the so-called leaders of our collective reality. That may be very true. Daily our understanding of the machinery proves to be a falsehood, or a misunderstanding. Daily we discover more falsehoods that have been purposely handed to us. There are simply too many lies for me to have trust in just about anyone who tells me to trust them.

Truth telling is a lonely endeavor. Being an exception to standardization is a solitary existence. I am living there now, and I don’t consider myself some modern day prophet by any means. What I see of this world, though, doesn’t match what most people see. I am frequently in the position of providing memory, institutional or otherwise, for those who have forgotten. I ask uncomfortable questions, I recall uncomfortable facts. When people ask how we got here, I tell them, and they usually don’t like it.

There is no other way for me to be, there is no other me to be. I am who I am, and that’s not going to change. I can definitely grow and improve, but some days I would really like a break. I feel what many people feel, and it is not so much a burden as it is an unscratchable itch, a vague fluttering in my chest, a niggling pain in my temples. It’s being on the edge of something I can’t explain, of having the right answer but not being able to show how it came to be. I function more by intuition and right feeling than by intellect or stategy. Being misunderstood, or not understood at all, is a desolate wasteland.

But here I am, and here is right where I am supposed to be. I don’t need to know why, it seems, so I may as well stop asking that question. Perhaps the more productive question is why not. Why this? Why NOT this?

Today was a shitty day. It was hot. Nuclear fusion hot, with unbelievably high humidity that made everything feel like a heavy, soggy washcloth laying on top of you. I went to the chiropractor, and that went well. I left there, and decided to get a sno-ball from my new favorite place. On the way there, the air conditioner in my truck stopped working. The fan is working, but not the compressor, so I got a face full of warm air the entire way there. After procuring the icy treat, I got back in the hot truck and set out for home, which is less than 4 miles away. By the time I’d made the first turn, the entire cup of sno-ball landed on the floor of the truck, in a mushy heap or sticky dreamsickle flavoring.

Driving toward home, in an overheated and deflated heap of soggy sweatpants, I thought I should do something productive other than cuss and slam my fists into the steering wheel. I decided to be proactive and stopped off at Firestone to tell them about the oil leak and now the air conditioner, and make an appointment for bringing the old war wagon in for a diagnosis, and hopefully repair. They can’t take it until Saturday, which is not what I wanted to hear. But so be it. I told them that at this point, the air conditioner was the most important thing. They looked at me as though I had grown a second head. As if I cared. I will drop the land barge off Friday night so that it will be waiting for them on Saturday morning at 7 a.m. When I get back to the apartment, I will begin looking up bankruptcy attorneys because these repairs ought to just about clean me out of house and home.

Mama said there would be days like this, but damn. Did this one have to take my sno-ball before I could even consume it? That’s just cruel.

That’s what I always heard…there are days, and then there are DAYS. And some days it just be like this. Whatever this is. We were told so many things back in the old days, and some of those things were just wrong. Old wives tales they’re called. Things like putting the fear of death into us for going outside with your hair wet, lest you “catch your death of pneumonia”. I was over 40 when I found out that’s not true. It may be uncomfortable to go out with wet hair when temperatures are near freezing, but it won’t cause you to become ill. But we believed that story, and may was the time one of us would break our necks to avoid having wet hair when going out into the cold.

It does often amaze me that we survived those days. The 60s and the 70s were… odd. In the 60s, the country was still recoiling from the Viet Nam war, which threatened to never end. Guys were coming back with their bodies half shot off, and their brains hollowed out from the inside. They were still coming home to an ungrateful nation, if they came back at all. The tide was turning from a period of conformity to a span of rebelliousness, protest, anti-establishment. Down with the old ways, the ways of our parent. Conflict, but people still recognized each other. They just disagreed, didn’t see eye to eye, but nobody had strayed so far as to become entirely alien.

In these days, the tide is attempting to turn, as it always does but there is far more fear and resistance. We are so polarized now that we dont recognize each other, don’t see each other, even within the same family. Disagreement is not enough, there are ultimatums and lines drawn in the sand…relationships shattered, unusual alliances formed amongst strangers. New cultural identities are being forged, ones based on ideology rather than shared experiences and common history. It’s a time when everyone feels a bit shaky, as though the ground beneath us was unstable.

This morning, there was a guest minister at the Fellowship, and I wanted to hear what she had to say. I logged in for the first time in over a month, and was not disappointed. This minister was our intern while she was still in divinity school, and she is gifted. Origially from Cuba, she has the eye of an artist, a creative flair in both her speaking and her message. Her vision has a certain grace and flair, and attracts others to it seamlessly. She is one of those people who is like the sun, with everything gravitating toward her of its own accord.

She was speaking today about duende’, which is the breath of passion and fire that a person has, and that can be passed to another wordlessly. She spoke of it as blowing the breath of your life force into the face of someone else, as though you are in communion with them. I have felt that from only a few people over the years, people who were not simply passionate, but they emobodied their passion. The object of their passion was one with them, and they could not help but infuse that into the air around them. Accordingly, they were attractive in an esoteric way, in that people gravitated to them without knowing why. You just felt good being in their aura.

I understood what she was saying, and that is more of what I am looking for than anything else. That feeling of being in the presence of the fire of someone’s spirit, their creative force, the fire that moves them along the journey. I feel activated when I am in the presence of such people, like there is success afoot. They are not powered by ego, or grandiosity of vision, but they are powerful. Passion is attractive. At one time, ,I thought only competence was attractive in that sense, but I am just beginning to realize it is the passion, passion for some thing, some result, some vision of what has not yet become reality. That, to me, is the eye of the artist.

Many things I am wanting cannot be articulated, or I haven’t learned to articulate them. I think perhaps there are not words for them, but only some vision in my mind. How to communicate the vision to others is daunting, and frustrating. I can see things so clearly in my mind, but lack the ability to paint the picture well enough for others to witness it. I believe the witness is important, but I’m still not sure if it’s a requisite for manifestation. I will have to reflect on that a bit more.

My dream for my life is different than my dream for the world, I think. I’m not sure that’s entirely the way it should go, but for now that’s what I’ve got. The vision for me is the same one I’ve had for a very long time, before I had words for it, before it had crystallized as something even remotely possible. It’s the dream of being completely and fully at peace with myself, and in myself. Not longing for different circumstances, or wishing for a different reality, but being completely content with where I am at the given moment. I’ve had that for very brief periods of time, but it is fleeting. It’s the feeling of what recovery work has taught me is serenity, like the quiet and still surface of a clear lake alive but exactly right when and where it exists. It is the feeling of being unburdened, of not seeking but not finding, of breathing but not inhaling, of everything being exactly what it should be at this moment. It is … peace.

We are always seeking, which is not a bad thing. Maintaining a curious mind is a good thing, unless it becomes the sole purpose of existence. There has to be a time for rest, there has to be a time for just…being. A human being rather than a human doing. In the busy world that we’ve manifested, that time of simply being is hard to find. There is always something to do, some place to be, some thing to get, some task to complete. Just being is more daunting than we realize at times.

In my time in this place, I’ve found that when I am doing, doing, doing, and doing more I am running. Running from the monsters under the bed, running from the snatches of memory that I don’t want to see the light of day, running from the failure and the mistakes and the disappointments and the sadness. The overwhelming sadness. The sadness that has no start or finish, but is always there like a thin opaque film over my eyes. A filter for the joy and happiness that I might find, muting the colors just a little, dulling the senses just a bit.

It feels as though I’ve always had that, even as a child. Perhaps it wasn’t as well developed, or I didn’t have the receptors to allow it to fully manifest, but it’s definitely a healthy entity now. I accept it, but I do wonder how it would be to experience life without that filter, as though I’m wearing sunglasses in the bright light of day. Shading my eyes from what I’ve heard described as the sunlight of the spirit. In my mind, it’s the root of the duende’ that was spoken of this morning.

So, my vision for just being includes the absence of the ever present filter that I seem to have, the one that casts a vague shadow over everything and casts doubt and uncertainty on everything I experience. The vision is full of bright light and vivid color and laughter and uninhibited movement, body expression, singing and dancing and … freedom. That is what I see when I close my eyes. That is not what I get when I am moving about in the world. The disconnect makes me a bit crazy.

I keep trying, although some days I am very tired of the effort. Tired of feeling as though 8-year olds know how to live far better than I do. Tired of wrestling with myself and constantly analyzing, second-guessing, playing devil’s advocate as a game of solitaire. I need to be OK with me, but mostly I don’t think I am. I’m much more OK that I was 32 years ago, but damn, I’m getting a little pressed for time at this point. Whatever I’m supposed to be doing is expertly hidden in plain view, and that just seems like a snarky joke on me.

At this point, I am beginning to see that simply deciding what I want to do is not good enough. Or maybe it’s too good. I’m a little confused about that. I know a couple of people who say they only do what they want to do. They set their intention on something, and focus on it, and it eventually comes to fruition. When I look at them, it seems as though they have more of what they want than I do, so that outlook does intrigue me. Is it that simple to just decide that I want something – a partner, a job, material things – and then focus my energy in that direction and wait for it to manifest? Can it be that simple?

I am thinking it’s not QUITE that simple, but I do believe there is something to focusing one’s energy on manifesting things desired. What I struggle with, though, is that filter – it seems to poison the energy well a bit. The self-doubt mitigates the energy stream, and so it’s not a clear focus. It’s a little hazy, and a little blurry. That’s not good.

The other night, I was on a 12-step meeting on Zoom, and one of the other women mentioned to me that she had invited a newcomer to join. She told me to make sure the newcomer was muted, though, which I found a little strange. Well, a while later, this new participant shows up, and I admitted her to the meeting. Everyone comes in on mute, but I noticed right away that she had unmuted herself. I muted her again. Some time later, someone else was speaking, and the newcomer blurted out something loudly, and I hurriedly muted her again. The woman who had invited her looked at me as it to say, “See? Now you know why I said to keep her muted.”

The newcomer was a handful. I thought perhaps she was drunk, which happens. After the meeting, three of us hung around with her, trying to see if there was something she needed or how we might help on her journey. Well, talk about some out of focus energy. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk or if there’s a mental health issue. She kept repeating that she needed help, and to please help her, but then she wouldn’t shut up long enough for us to give her any suggestions. We talked back and forth with her for more than 45 minutes of trying to get her to call the help line, which she finally did but hung up on them 3 times. *sigh* we kept talking, and it was getting late, so one of us asked her where in town she was located, thinking maybe there was a meeting near her or something. She then let us know she was not even in town – she was located about 90 minutes East of us. She needed to be calling the help line there, not the one here. She finally hung up on us…accidentally or maybe not. Who knows. But we threw our hands up and bid each other a good night.

Looking back on that experience, I wonder if what I’m sending out to the Universe is that foggy, that unfocused. I hope not. There was a part of me that said this newcomer was playing games with us, that she just wanted us to give her attention and listen to her talk about all that was wrong in her life, but she wasn’t really willing to do what she needed to do in order to change anything. We’ve all seen that before, it’s not uncommon for newcomers. But I really have to ask myself if I’m doing likewise – saying that I want change but not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen. I suppose I have work to do.

There is a lot going through my head right now, about the clarity of my vision, about the clarity of my desire and passion. I don’t want to be thinking about that stuff. I want to be watching the eagles in Alaska (the eaglet is HUGE now and has all kinds of feathers). I want to be playing stupid computer games and sucking on lollipops. I want to not have a care in the world. I can hear that inner voice saying, “That’s nice. Good luck with that!”

Off to slumber. I will take another look at the eagles…they are such majestic birds. These are bald eagles, and they are breathtakingly beautiful, with their clear eyes and snowy whit heads. The little one won’t have the eyes and the white feathers until it’s about five years old, when it will be considered mature. Right now, it has solid brown or black eyes that resemble buttons. It’s damned cute, especially when it bits mama’s feet as she’s bringing food and feeding it.

I enjoy watching the eagles because they are such an interesting mix of apex predator and gentleness. They can snatch a fox or a badger or even larger animals, including snakes and fish, right off their feet. They will grip the unlucky prey in their claws and fly off with it still alive. When they land a distance away, sometimes in a tree, they’ll begin eating the hapless critter alive. It’s ferocious but there’s not a hint of hostility in the act, it’s just survival on Mother Nature’s terms.

When they have young, as in the case of this mama and papa eagle with their little (well, not so little anymore) eaglet, they will grab a fish or a rabbit or even a small rodent and carry it back to the nest. They begin eating it alive, but gently turn their heads to the side to offer the little one morsels directly from their beaks. The eaglet won’t be able to self-feed for a bit longer, when it’s more steady on its feet and is more coordinated with standing on the food and tearing at it. After they eat, mama or papa will usually brood the little one, letting the eaglet nuzzle in as close as possible, nearly underneath their bodies. Such an incredible contrast to killing and eating something alive. I find that astounding.

So, I’m going to take a look at them for a bit, then turn in. I’m tired, and it’s been so hot outside I feel drained form the short periods that I’m out with the dog. There was another dog in her yard the last time we went out, and she was none too pleased. But she seems to have gotten over it, because she is knocked out in a coma on her binkie. All is right with the world.

So. I am still reflecting on failure. It has occurred to me that my worst failures were those times where I failed myself. Or did I? Sometimes I guess I did, but there have been times when it wasn’t that simple.

Many years ago, when I was working in local government, I had one of the most horrific encounters with another human being that I have ever had. It was all the more horrific because it involved only virulent intent, abuse of power, and absolute callous hatred. All of that dark and light-engulfing malevolence was aimed at me, during a work day, and I didn’t deserve it.

I was the only person left in a department that was responsible for installing and maintaining all of the telephone services in City Hall, and outlying sites. It was a grossly underpaid position, as most civil service jobs are, but I had a fair amount of freedom. I also apprised incredible amounts of marketable skills while there, because I was free to learn and experiment with technology and vendor relationships. I enjoyed it, despite the low wages, and life was good.

There was a period of time when the work load was overwhelming, and even if I’d been the most organized and relentless worker on the planet, I couldn’t have kept up. There should have been at least six people working with me, but I was a solo act for quite a while. I didn’t complain, and managed to do quite a lot. My superiors understood more or less that it was an impossible situation, but as all managers are likely to do, when the feces hit the fan blades they saved themselves.

There came day when I came back to my office, to find a paper taped to the outside of the door. I removed it, and unfolded it to see what exactly it was. Expecting to see a note from a building worker with a telephone problem, I was entirely unprepared to see an official looking subpoena, from the criminal courthouse.

I read the document, and it seemed there was a criminal court judge who had become infuriated that phones in his courtroom remained in disrepair, or something like that. He was commanding me to appear, to explain why. I was frightened, and rageful. I was doing as much as I could possibly do with what I had to work with, and this arse felt that he was entitled to speedier service.

This guy had a reputation for chewing up civil servants and spitting them out whenever something happened that he didn’t like. He once verbally abused the manager of the parking enforcement bureau, for whom I worked at the time, in a packed courtroom because people on his staff had gotten parking tickets. The man stopped a murder trial to deliver a scathing soliloquy to her in front of more than 100 people. It was unnecessary and full of bravado. His intent was to embarrass her, and make a spectacle of her operation.

So, I already knew what I was in for with this jerk. I brought the whole thing to my boss, and said I wasn’t going to appear, because this was not even legal. Or something. My boss said I had to go, and she would go with me. I wasn’t terribly keen on her, but couldn’t say I’d rather go myself because your’e more of a liability, but I kept my mouth shut. When dealing with fragile political appointees and elected officials, you learn to keep your mouth shut quite a lot.

We appeared at the designated time, to find the surly judge waiting for us, fangs bared and drooling. We sat down, and he started in on a trivial problem with one phone in his clerk’s office, and how ridiculous it was that it would take so long for repairs to be completed. His face was red, neck bloated and spilling over the collar of his shirt. He was so angry that I could feel the heat form the other side of the desk.

He kept going, on and on, and on, and on about how it was unacceptable that he couldn’t get a sufficient response from me. My boss said, in an overly conciliatory tone, that I was the only person working in the department, and she had not been successful in hiring more staff. She was apologetic and would see that his problems were resolved and blah blah blah. He ranted and raved for a few minutes more, and I remained silent.

We got up to leave, and he walked along with us outside his office and into the courtroom. He was telling my boss something, and I was trying to hear because there were other people nearby conversing. At the same time, one of his back office workers – a particularly idiotic woman I had dealt with previously, and who gave me bad information on a frequent basis – started waving something toward me. I ignored it, because I needed to hear what other little gems he had to deliver to my boss.

Suddenly, he vaulted his fat arse over to within an inch of my nose, and started yelling in my face, “When someone on my staff gives you somthing, YOU TAKE IT! Do you understand me? YOU TAKE IT!” I said nothing, but I was fighting with every cell in my body to keep my mouth shut. I wanted to scream back at him, “You are spitting on me, and you will not talk to me that way!” But I knew he was crazy enough to throw me in jail or something. For a second, I thought he might slap me because he was that enraged.

Mercifully, he pivoted back to my boss, screaming and pointing at me, “You have an attitude problem here. I can see that You need to get someone else to do this, because there’s an attitude problem here.” And with that, he flounced off and back into his office, slamming the door. My boss looked at me, and I looked down. I was so angry, and I had no where to go with it.

On the ride back to our office, I looked out the window and said not a word. I did not trust myself to say anything. I was angry at him, angry at her, angry at the situation, angry at the price of gas. I felt that she could have intervened with him yelling and spitting in my face, but of course, she saved herself. Par for the course.

When we got inside the building, she told me I could go home if I wanted to relax after having been through such a difficult encounter. I said no, I have work to do, which was entirely true. I went back to my office, and she to hers. I stewed over the whole thing, and berated myself for not having stood up to him when he became abusive, whether he decided to abuse his power more and throw me into jail.

I had another boss, who was worked under the one who’d accompanied me to the courthouse, and I trusted him way more than her. She was the department head, and he was the assistant. He had not been there when the debacle occurred, but he was back. He asked me how it went, and I told him. He shook his head, and said nothing.

We both sat there in silence for a minute, and he said, “Look. Here’s what we’re going to do. Write a memo to me and to the department head, and recount exactly what happened. Tell me that you are doing the work of 5 people, and have been doing as much as you can do Then ask this question – as a classified civil service employee, where are my rights in a situation like this.?

I nodded, and he left. Immediately, I began furiously typing on the keyboard, and spat out a 2 page memo to him, with a copy to the Civil Service department and the Mayor’s Office. I asked where do my rights as an employee begin and end in this situation? Can any official subpoena me or subject me to their own disciplinary measures without consulting my department head? Am I expected to take abuse like this from an elected official with no recourse?

The memo was sent. There was no reply. He told me there wouldn’t be, because they wouldn’t know how to answer it. It would all just die, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. He suggested I get the idiot’s phones repaired, to which I acquiesced. But I never stopped worrying about it. And I never got over it. And I have never forgotten about having a bloated, sweaty, red-faced and misshapen white man spitting in my face in his rage that I dared appear insolent before him.

I count this as a failure because I felt that I failed myself. I wanted to stand up for myself and tell him that he was not going to speak to me that way. But I did not. I said nothing. I kept my mouth shut like a good girl who knows her place. I can still see the scene, still hear his shrill voice, still smell his putrid breath in my face and the spittle landing on my chin. And I said nothing. I had no power, I had no way out. For the millionth time in my life I was trapped, like a mouse in a mouse trap. And there was no cheese.

Was it important that he was white? Absolutely. The previous boss that he’d embarrassed so much, over parking tickets, was a black woman. The department head who accompanied me that day was a black woman. I am a black woman. I can’t say he would never, or has never, done that to a white person, but I have not seen it. He has a reputation for pulling of scenes like the one directed at me, so all I know is what I have seen.

When an unfair thing is happening, and you can’t say anything, some part of you shrivels and dies. A little tombstone pops up in its place, like one of the ones at Arlington, and marks the spot. I have a field of little head stones like that, marking all the times I didn’t stand up for myself, all the times I felt that I couldn’t stand up for myself. All the times I felt completely powerless, like something less than human, with no agency whatsoever.

That feeling of being trapped in a bottomless pit with no way out is devastating. You know that it’s not fair, that you’ve done nothing to deserve being there, but there you are. It’s a dark, cold, and empty place and if you are lucky enough to be released, the shadow of it remains. The ire I had for that pitiful excuse for a man got referred to other people, other situations, and ultimately to myself. Fortunately, I was no longer drinking at that time, but I found other ways to harm myself, with food and irresponsible purchases and bad decisions all around.

That is the legacy of inequity, and bias that has no name. You stay enraged about it for a long time, but no matter how angry you are, no matter how many affirmations of the wrongness of it you get, no matter what else happens, something died in you that day. I am fortunate that all my days were not spent like that, and that I don’t have more grave markers for parts of me that died under the heels of intolerance and hatred. For some people like me, though, it happens all the time. And they die a little bit more each time, until there’s very little left that passes for hope of a better world.

In the general scheme of my life, this was a relatively small thing. I feel as though I need waste no more time on that horrible man, and only hope that he picked on the wrong person at some point and got what HE deserved. Probably not, but I’ll hang on to the fantasy. What has kept the tombstone in place, though, is that I have spent a lot of time denying the hurt. That encounter was a repetition of a pattern in my life that I loathe – the pattern that says when the chips are down, when my spirit is on the chopping block of some foul smelling butcher, there is no one to stand by me, no one who will help me. It’s a dungeon, and I am trapped. And that sucks.

I’m working on trying to see my part in that pattern, and to turn it around in some way. When it happens, I most certainly do forget that I know how to fly. Everyone needs to remember they can fly, and that an escape can be fabricated in one way or another. I want to fly again, feel the wind in my hair (yes, even though I will look like a troll doll) and see the ground far, far below. I need to be able to see, and to feel as though nothing is holding me back, or down, or even up. I can fly, dammit, so what do I need with a cage? I can fucking fly.

This morning’s silliness:

Ryan Lochte spoke passionately in an interview about the importance of athletes being vaccinated against COVID-19. He was speaking in reference to the upcoming Olympic competition and nodded vociferously that it was a good idea for all athletes to be vaccinated, for their sake and the sake of their fellow athletes. When asked directly if he had been vaccinated, he took on a wide-eyed and slack-jawed stare for a full 3 seconds, and then said, “That’s a personal question. It’s a personal choice, but…”. Allllrighty then.

Speaking of the Olympics, I’m a little stupefied by what it will mean for athletes to compete without a crowd or an audience. That’s probably not a big deal for some competitions, but for other more performance-oriented endeavors, I wonder if that will negatively impact some performances. Seems like it would have been a good idea to cancel this Olympic gathering, but…well…the virus and everything…even though a ton of athletes and support teams from all points of the globe will still descend on the Olympic Village. Bringing all of their germs with them.

The ballot recount is continuing in Arizona. For all practical purposes, the recount…er, audit…has been so corrupted by chain of custody issues that it’s virtually useless. They have removed ballots from the secure locations that are in the custody of the State and recounted them multiple times in non-secure locations, and the chain of custody for the voting machines has been interrupted. This may render them useless for future election activity. There have been so many recounts of the same ballots the paper medium is likely entirely corrupted, if not tattered.

A Louisiana student won the National Spelling Bee. She correctly spelled “murraya”, which is a plant. She questioned the language origin of the word before attempting to spell it. She is also very good at math and is a champion basketball dribbler and juggler. She is good at just about everything she does and is very interested in playing basketball for Harvard and working for NASA. Gene editing is also somewhat interesting, particularly since a Nobel Prize could be in the offing.

I’ll just be back here with the remote control, watching the news with a cup of coffee and misspelling my own name on FaceBook. Some days I don’t have much ambition, particularly when it comes to physical exertion. I have already taken the dog out, and we did a little walk in addition to sitting in the activity area. She got to commune with her apartment husband for a bit, which made her grin like Cheshire Cat.

Today, I am wrestling just a bit with activism. I reflected the other day on the seeming futility of petitions and email campaigns and phone banking. I suppose those are not entirely useless, but my frustration level is growing. I wondered aloud if more direct action is necessary, e.g. crashing the party at legislative sessions that have refused to allow public comment. I got a lot of pushback on that, and many seasoned activists contend that direct action is not always a better strategy.

So, what do we do? I suppose the main issue is that doing nothing is unacceptable. Organizing is not as simple as many people think, and it takes a lot of energy. I don’t necessarily have the energy for doing marches in the middle of July, but I have the energy to write emails, amplify messaging, and update community messaging. I have to believe that’s not a cop-out, and that it has some value in the overall effort.

In working with my UU brethren, I’m frequently challenged by how we all show up for this work. Some of us show up fully cognizant of the inequity that our movement has to offer us. A predominantly white and entirely non-conformist group of brainiacs has its challenges. These are more my people, however than any other group I’ve been involved with. That’s still a blessing and a curse for me, but I’m handling it.

UUs are the people who show up in force to protest racial inequity but critique the grammar and content of all of the flyers and posters that are proffered. At best, this is annoying. At worst, this is inequitable in and of itself. It’s that perfection thing again, and I don’t have time for it any longer. Pointing out historical relevance and factual imperfection in a protest sign or a t-shirt doesn’t include everyone, and it separates the Ph.Ds in the group from the non-academics. That’s what sometimes makes people of color roll their eyes and say, “Bitch, please – can we get pick up our feet and get to marching already?”

I made a comment to a humor group this morning about something that had been posted, and my comment was, “Somebody obviously has too much time on their hands.” This was offered on a picture of “The Scream” reproduced entirely with paper clips. There was a long thread of comments that began with criticizing the “Puritanical origins” of the phrase “too much time on their hands” and explaining that art is never a waste of time, there is never too much time on one’s hands, and there should be more joy. OK, thanks. I responded a couple of times, but they wanted to remain in their superior posture of “I know more than you”, so I’m done. Just because something runs across your brain doesn’t mean you have to let it out.

Today is going to be another hot one, it seems – when I was walking the dog, it was in the lower 70s. A couple of hours later, the temperature has risen by almost 10 degrees. I’ll be in here, with the A/C running full force. I want to do some research about how to overcome a veto-proof vote in the NC legislature, or what veto-proof actually means. There is so much I don’t know about how my country’s government works, it’s embarrassing.

I want another snowball. Maybe I’ll go out and get one, if I do at least some of what I pledged to do in this apartment today. I have been doing the follow-up on my physical therapy exercise program, I have picked up a few things (not entirely my schedule of 3 15-minute blocks of clean up every day, but something). I have tried to be a little more active, trying to walk the dog and not just throw her into the activity area. Any improvement is good.

My writing prompts are a little out of order right now, but one of them I never finished has to do with past failures. Oh, boy – what joy. One of the bullet points talks about the phrase “the only way to succeed is to fail”. It asks what I think about that, and if it resonates with me.

That phrase doesn’t so much resonate with me as it annoys me. I know that it must be true because failure is somewhat a constant. The odds of every attempt being a success are low to none, so yes, to get to success you have to keep making the effort and some efforts will fail. It’s like buying lottery tickets – most of them will be duds, and the odds of choosing a winner are extremely high. But, like Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Cornel West has quoted that in some of his presentations, and I get it. Fail better. Don’t just fail in the way of despair, in the way of resigned acceptance, but fail better. Increase the energy put forth in the effort, and the failure will be a more cogent one. Don’t try harder, try better. Don’t fail more, or simply repeatedly, fail better.

I failed better at my last job. I did try better, and I risked more, but I failed. It was a better failure than I’ve had before, and the downside of that is that it hurt more. That’s why it’s such a difficult concept, I guess because it hurt better. We talk about some of that in recovery, telling newcomers they will feel better if they take the program’s suggested steps. We tell them you will feel pain better, you will feel happiness better, you will feel anger better, you will feel sadness better, but you will feel. Better. Many of us describe our pre-recovery days as days of emotional numbness, feeling nothing. So we are grateful to feel better. We will try again, and we will fail better.

This is a frustrating axiom of life, I believe, and I can take it or leave it. If I leave it, nothing changes. Things become mundane and constant, but not in a good way. Everything is just fine (F.I.N.E = Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional). But my emotional levels are flat. There’s no pulse, no ups, no downs, no highs, no lows. It feels as though I’m one step removed from a frontal lobotomy. That numbing flatness is anathema for the spirit, I believe. I can’t learn anything if I don’t move, and being flat doesn’t involve movement. I don’t like being flat – it’s like an itch I can’t scratch, and it makes me crazy.

Failure is a variance in the continuum. A rise and fall, a heartbeat, a sign of life. Life is variable. There’s nothing static about it, as hard as we try to make it so. Our efforts to make things level are just our efforts to control that heartbeat, that life force, and it is a futile endeavor. We can never control that, but still we try. We are not gods, no matter how high we fly or how low we sink.

So, yes – I have failed. This last job ended very badly for me because I shut down. There was too much going on in my life the last few years I was there, and I was working – or trying to survive – in a rigid and pedantic system of alleged productivity. I had enemies, it seemed, and that didn’t help. At the end, I gave up and waited for the guillotine to be released. When that finally happened, I was pretty numb about it. The only thing even vaguely giving me pause was the loss of health care, but I fully accepted that I couldn’t work there any longer. Not because they said so, because I said so.

I chastised myself for quite a while about my inability to just conform, about my obvious low performance and the reasons for it, and having been incredibly stupid about the entire situation. What I felt most defeated about was that so many people who are still working there were coming to me for help, could not do what I could do, but I didn’t play the game correctly. That’s not very bright. I tried again and I failed worse. Much worse.

After nearly three years, I’ve gotten some perspective on the work experience, and I am in a better place about it. I have changed my perspective dramatically, with the help of supportive friends and in spite of myself. One of my friends told me that her perspective on how I shut down and just dig my heels in when I can’t take anymore is not that I’m being childish and obstinate, but that I’m setting a conscious boundary and will not be moved to violate it. It may look awkward, it may seem plaintive, but it’s my boundary and I am entitled to it. Day-um.

So, I can take solace in knowing that I truly did fail better, and it was worth the learning. I moved forward in some bizarre way, and I rather like that. I’ve had to get my ego out of the way in some big ways concerning the whole situation, because it’s my natural instinct to chastise myself for not performing well, for not knowing better, for not being able to keep my emotions in check. But sometimes I guess I have to fake myself out, and some part of me just will not take anymore. Boundaries by any other name, however they work.

So, there’s a bit of a silver lining in the last job experience. Definitely not the one I imagined, or saw at first, but silver lining just the same. My only hope is that I don’t repeat the errant attempt. If I’m going to try again, I have to try again better. And I have to know that I may fail again, and fail better. I don’t particularly care for that realization, but it’s unconditional. Nobody has to ask my opinion, which I suppose is a good thing.

So, I can look forward to a lifetime of progressively better failures, and to have those I have to keep trying. My heart wants to give up, but I think that’s really not an option. If I give up, I imagine that will be the end of my life. What more could there be if not to expand, to stretch the limits and bounce off the walls of the container. I don’t want to be contained, so I have to continually try, continually reach for liberation in the only way there is – try better. Always try better, knowing that I will fail, and striving to fail better.

Get it? Got it. Good. I just wish it didn’t hurt so badly.

My writing prompts have been severely neglected for the past couple of weeks. I can’t say why, although my excuse is there has been too much going on in the world and that’s been garnering the lion’s share of my attention. I keep trying to solve all the problems in 5,000 words or less.

The world is still a mess this morning, but everyone needs a break right now I think. It’ll still be there in a few hours, and the messy affairs will not miss me during that time. I’ve got a couple of other things to do – clean up a bit, go to the chiropractor, pick up some prescriptions from the pharmacy. This is the stuff I get distracted from and find that it doesn’t work all that well for me to ignore this bit of self-care.

So, anyway, unconventional things I have done. The prompt specifically asked the unconventionality is a super power or a detriment. I reframed that to be superpower vs. impotence, because it felt more like what I am observing. The thing about superpowers is that you get to define them, or at least that’s what I think.

I have never felt that I had any superpowers. I barely had any power at all for a long time, or at least I didn’t use it. People would scream at me to stop giving up my power, but I had no idea what that meant. They assumed I was being manipulative, but that wasn’t the case. I truly did not understand how personal and inherent power works, and how one might surrender it. I feel as though I get it now, mostly, although some habits are harder than others to break. But I digress.

When have I been unconventional? When have I NOT been unconventional is the better question. Compared to my family of origin, I have done very little according to their example. I was raised in the Black community but left it – who does that? I was raised in a city that I love, and left that – who does that? I rode a motorcycle for a while, mainly because I was spending all my money drinking and couldn’t really afford a car. That was mostly comical. I might still ride one if I wasn’t up here in the land of bubba and his long haul Harley collection, and if people could actually drive up here.

But that’s little stuff. I didn’t do too much of what everyone assumed I would do. I learned how to talk proper by going to school with white folks, and found myself more comfortable in that community in certain respects than in the Black community. That’s not how my people did it, but I was having way more trouble relating to Black folks than white folks, so sue me why doncha?

The other unconventional thing is not really something I did, but something I was. Given how my family rolled, we didn’t have no queers. But here I was, even when I didn’t know what that was all about. I just knew that I never fit in with that Barbie and Ken lifestyle, and goodness knows my parents weren’t exactly giving me anything to pine away for in terms of marital bliss. So, my whole life is unconventional if I look at where I came from and the expectations/norms present there.

I no longer have any reqrets about my sexual orientation, although I did for quite some time when I was younger. I felt that I was letting the family down, my mother especially. I wasn’t going to give her grandchildren, or a husband who could do things like put up Christmas lights or cut the grass. I had offered to cut the grass when I was living there, but she told me I would probably cut off my foot with the lawnmower so hiring someone to do it was safer. Alrighty then.

To get past the guilt and regret of the sexual orientation, which for the record I don’t consider a choice, I also had to get past the religion of my childhood. Catholicism is rather insidious in constructing latticework that interconnects guilt and shame with natural behaviors. What I learned, without having words to articulate it, was that if I wanted something or something felt good to me, it was probably wrong in the eyes of God and I should deprive myself of it to be a better Catholic, a better child of God, something like that. All that got me was the deprivation part, which felt like crap. I don’t remember ever feeling that I was a better person for having been deprived; I was just pissed and wanting.

So, while I don’t think my membership in the GLBT community was a choice, but how I present in society is definitely a choice. I have never been a girly-girl, a femme with false eyelashes and makeup. When I tried to wear makeup in adolescence, it made my face itch and I felt like I was wearing a mask. I believed my skin was horrible, and no makeup would ever hide that, so why bother? So, I didn’t wear it and that was just that. I didn’t really know how to navigate that world anyway, and put on makeup all wrong; one day someone told me I looked like a clown because I had covered only certain parts of my face, like a clown’s mask would. So it was just not worth my effort.

I always wanted to be a tomboy. When I was in college I played soccer (badly) and wanted to hang out with the international guys who played around with dribbling and passing on the quad. When I wasn’t hungover. I enjoyed feeling as though I could do that stuff, and it was a great place to chase girls, so there was no down side. Except the hangovers.

Speaking of the hangovers, that’s another unconventional thing for how I was raised and what I believe the expectations were for me, especially as a girl child. I had one great aunt who was a lush, but she was a fun lush and she was pretty much kept undercover. I heard my grandmother and mother talk about her, and didn’t want her to babysit me much. “That Hazel could set the house on fire and kill that child with all that liquor in her!” my grandmother would say. But I rather liked Aunt Hazel, because she cussed and she was fun and talked in French a lot. She was an aunt by marriage; my Uncle Clarence was my grandmother’s brother. But for me to be more like Hazel was unconventional to say the least.

Other unconventional things…well, I had a grand old time in college with just about every illicit substance I could find. Blotter acid was a favorite, because I got to shed the mortal coil and go away for a bit. The only thing I never did was heroin, or any injectable drug, because I was terrified of needles. That was probably a good thing, because at 18 I was a cockroach and could not be killed. No matter what. The fear of needles probably deterred me from an overdose because I never know when to stop.

Like I said, though, how I presented in society has been unconventional. When I started working after college, my mother was very excited that I would be in an office. She took me shopping for suitable clothes. Unfortunately, they were suitable in her eyes and not mine. My feet are not made for 10-hour days in sensible pumps. I though I looked like a bubble-butt heiffer, and it just made me not want to leave the house every morning. You can put a business ensemble on a heiffer, but it’s not going to change much – it’s still a cow, and now it’s a bit irate because its hooves hurt.

The natural state of how I present is somewhat androgynous, no makeup, natural hairstyle that requires no preening, sweatpants and t-shirts. That’s my style. For about the past 20 years or so, my t-shirts are opportunities for public statement. They say all kinds of things. One of my favorites says, “I suck at apologies so unfuck you or whatever.” I also have silly ones saying “Nope. Not today” and “I have 3 things working for me – thick thigs, resting bitch face, and sarcasm”. These usually save me a lot of time when I have to navigate in the real world. That is definitely unique to my family, even now. None of my cousins would be caught dead in things like that.

So, unconventionality is something I generally pride myself on I enjoy having people think I’m some scruffy fat chick with not a brain cell in her head, only to find out I do have brain cells that can run them around the block backwards. I don’t think I’m brilliant or anything, but I can hold my own in an argument and debate. People inclined to write me off before they get to know me are generally not the sharpest tools in the shed anyway, and even if they are they’re not people I will generally be clamoring to befriend. I do not like to be seen as predictable, or easy to “figure out”. That’s where the superpower lves, and nobody gets into that part of me.

Related to that are my viewpoints. Nobody taught me or pushed me to think the way I do, or to believe the way I do. That has all come very naturally to me. Some call me a die-hard bleeding heart liberal queer whose very existence means death of this nation, or the world in general. I never thought I was that powerful. I just believe getting on in the world is more complicated than let’s just all remember that we’re part of the HUMAN race and sing the Coca-Cola song or Kumbaya or something while roasting marshmallow. That’s not how I see it.

I have polished a lot of my rougher edges, but I choose to keep some of them because I need them. The world can be indiscriminately cruel, and for those of us who take that to heart, holding back a bit is not a bad idea. I can’t go into the revolution defenseless. So, I still have a sword and battle armor, although I get so tired of feeling the need to use those artifacts.

My mother, in particular, was always ready for a fight, always sharpening her sabre. She would literally chop a person off at the knees if they offended her, which was not hard to do. She didn’t care who the eff you were, but you were going to call her “Mrs.” or you were gonna have your hat shoved up an orifice not even close to the customary position for a hat to be worn. She was always frustrated by my “it’s ok, let’s just move along” attitude, so I was really unconventional in that sense. I was constantly getting lectures from her that warned me not to be a “chump”, not to let people take advantage of me, stand up for myself. In her mind, I didn’t do that but…interestingly enough…she found me to be kind. I’ll take that.

So unconventional for me is boiling down to how I didn’t do what was so obviously expected of me, what was the norm for my family. By the time I was an adolescent, I knew what they were expecting, and took great delight in not coming through with the ordinary responses. But to do that, I was always at war. I was at war with them and with myself, because there was a part of me that felt as though I was crazy and had no good reason to not fit into that mold. But I just couldn’t squeeze myself into some fragile plastic design and call it my life. I am pretty much WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get. It pains me to think I’ve presented a good front to people, only to have them find out the truth about me later and be disappointed. Some of that is imposter syndrome, I guess, but it came from a healthy wellspring on ancestral lands.

I have no desire to be conventional, but I do have a desire to be accepted by people I’ve more or less chosen to be in community with. Those folks with societal norms who make me feel like the proverbial bull in a china shop function in the same fashion as my mother did when she was convinced I could be made into a competent career woman if I ony had the right suits and accessories. That was never me, and it’s never going to be me. So explaining to me in small words how people who cuss make other people uncomfortable, and I don’t need to do that because I’m so…articulate…is never going to change me into a middle-American woman with 2.3 children, a dog, and a Volvo. Just not happening.

All of that said, I suppose I am more or less a rebel at heart, just lacking the courage to carry of revolutionary acts on my own. I can be a team player, though, and that’s valid. I just really don’t want anybody’s values to intersect mine. If we disagree that’s fine, but don’t be making conditions on how we come together or work together that are based on my conformity to something I don’t even believe in. The older I get, the more I try to be intentional about standing in my integrity. I don’t ever want to go back to lying about everything because I felt if it was going well I had just failed to remember some way to screw it all up.

I roll in my own way, and often without a clearly defined path in mind. Meandering seems to work. The Mississippi River meanders, not because it’s a bad river, because it’s an old and wise river that has no need of rules and traditions for how rivers are supposed to be rivers. That’s more or less where I land as well. I may screw up, I may do some damage, but I try very hard to not inflict the screw ups and the damage on other people these days. I’m my own worst enemy, but making some progress about not shooting myself in the temple every chance I get.

My whole way of life deviates from my family’s quite a bit, and not intentionally. Once again, I do what seems right to me and what is natural to me. I can’t lie worth a damn, and when there are too many lies out there I forget which story I’ve told. It’s hell when you can’t keep your stories together. Sometimes I have to query myself about that, asking what’s so terrible about the truth that you feel the need to lie? That sometimes gets really sticky, and I usually don’t want to know the answers, but I keep trying.

Is my unconventionality a superpower? Some days it doesn’t feel that way. Some days it feels that I am comfortable being on the outside of everybody’s radar, that I have no right to be wearing a badge that says I’m an OK person. Most days it doesn’t feel as though I have any superpower, except sometimes when I’ve written something that hits the mark. That’s doesn’t happen a lot, because I am more self-critical than anyone else could ever be.

Be that as it may, I suppose conventionality is a necessary evil – I don’t really have any choice most of the time. As I said, I couldn’t present as a middle-America career woman if my life depended on it. It’s now me, and I can’t even carry of the lie for a a few hours out of the day. I see no point in trying to be someone else.

The only hang-up I have about being defiantly unconventional is that I have to accept the consequences of that choice from time to time. If someone is signing my paycheck and wants me to do something in a particular way or present in a particular way, conventional wisdom says I had best do that. But usually I can’t. I can’t swallow it, can’t stomach it. But I still have my integrity when I say no. It may cost me, but usually I am more than willing to foot that bill. I sleep better at night.

So, there’s unconventional, or maybe even anti-conventional. I’m not sure it’s supposed to make logical sense, anymore than an eaglet makes logical sense when it’s hopping up and down on one foot and flapping its wings arbitrarily. I have to just do my thing, as they used to say. And … it’s my thing, I do what I wanna do, because can’t nobody tell me who to sock it to. So there.

I have been watching the eaglet in Alaska a lot lately. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, and is starting to look something like a bird with clown shoes and wings that are two sizes too big. It has a lot more feathers, which is nice to see. It’s a Bald Eagle, so won’t have the trademark white head until it’s about 5 years old. For now, it’s just a somewhat chubby and hunched little gargoyle-like character that sleeps a lot after eating huge quantities of food.

I have found this little raptor fascinating to watch, along with its parents and the whole nest ambience. The parents return to the same nest each year, although I believe they skipped one year for some unknown reason. All kinds of stuff can befall even an apex predator out in the wild, I suppose.

As I’ve been studying this eaglet, I have been contemplating a lot about flying, and rising above, and trusting the process of growth. Today I was restless, and irritable. I feel as though I am doing nothing, and money is the only thing flying in my world right now. Real dollar bills are leaving my grasp at amazing speed these days, and I have not even begun to move toward getting that leak repaired. Just another day in a capitalist society.

Even though the eaglet in Alaska is nowhere near fledging, I looked up videos on Bald Eagles fledging. Some of them are hilarious, because the youn ‘uns are one click shy of terrified to step off the edge. They jump around on one foot, hop up and down, flap their wings furiously while standing in place, then more jumping and hopping while flapping. Finallly, they will take the final step and go up, up and away…awkwardly, hesitantly, clumsily. One of them flapped a short distance, seemed to catch the wind, but wound up hanging upside down by its claws in a nearby tree. Oh, well.

The process of fledging is one of courage and instinct, and trusting that both attributes will intersect at the point of success. A young eaglet is still a massive bird, and a raptor, but will have to hone its ability to use all of what it has available to survive. It will have to learn to fish, and tackle lesser birds, and defend itself. They are truly amazing creatures, but even this royalty of the heavens can srew up and find themselves upside down on a tree branch.

I would do well to learn from the young eaglet, which doesn’t have aspirations so to speak, or goals. It just does what its instincts prompt it to do. A couple of days ago, it began standing. Just a minute or so at a time, then I could see the legs wobble slightly just before it flopped to the ground butt first. No big whoop. A while later, it would try again, but in the meantime there was serious exploration of a deteriorating paper bag that had been left in the nest. Priorities, you see.

I am wondering if my restlessness is tantamount to having an instinct to fledge. I am not sure if I’m in a nest or not at the moment, but in a way I suppose I am. I have not left the apartment today, except for taking the dog out, so it’s rather like my nest. I have all manner of warm and comfortable things in here, my creature comforts, my guitars and my fuzzy red slippers and deteriorating paper bags that need exploration. Food arrives in some fashion, either because I go out and procure it from some retail establishment, or I have it schlepped over by a delivery person. Everything I need is here, and I don’t really have to navigate out in the world very much.

Even so, I am restless. I can see the wide open sky, feel the wind currents, observe others of my kind soaring and flying on the breeze. Somewhere a bell rings to remind me that I can do that as well, and I want to. I want to do that so badly. What is holding me here in the nest? I don’t even know if it’s fear per se, but I suppose I just don’t believe that I can do it. I don’t have the confidence that I have anything to contribute to the wide open panorama that is before me.

So. What would it take to take the plunge? I am a bit tired of jumping up and down on one foot, and thinking about the possibility of eventually gradually perhaps at some point maybe jumping off the ledge and using my wings. How long will I remain stuck here? There’s nobody that’s going to feed me any longer, and I’m actually too big for the nest on a long-term basis, soooooo…jump already, why don’t I?

This is really beginning to frustrate me. I don’t quite know what to do – should I stay or should I go? (with a nod to The Clash) I have to do something. I have to do something to change this energy, something to get me out of this rut. Yes, I can inventory that!

OK, let’s see…what’s eating at me? Well, at this very moment, what’s eating at me is that I’m eating ALL THE TIME. I have gained a good bit of weight in the past 60 days, and II don’t feel…good. (Yes, I wrote that.) I feel bloated and heavy, more like the Goodyear blimp than a human being. I am not saying that to beat up on myself, either. That’s just how it feels right now.

So, what can I do with that? I can go an take a walk tomorrow, maybe before it gets too hot. I can eat more responsibility tomorrow, and consume sweets in moderation. I can go back to my protein shakes for meal replacement. And I can drink a lot more water. That’s four separate things I can do tomorrow. Just tomorrow. I won’t plan for a week’s worth of that routine, because that usually sets me up for failure. So, just for tomorrow.

OK, what else is bugging me? Well, there’s the whole job thing, or rather the NO job thing. I’ll get back to that in a minute, because I need to stall for time.

What else? This apartment still looks like a crack house. I can pick up some stuff in 15-minute blocks of time, maybe 3 blocks tomorrow. Just pick up anything that need to be stored, or thrown away, or brought to Good Will or something. 15-minute increments is do-able.

So. There are three nagging issues that I have solutions for. That doesn’t seem terribly daunting.

It’s still rather interesting that I am feeling so restless, though. I wonder how much of that is ambient energy bubbling around me. I have talked to a few people lately who described feeling off their game, out of sorts, befuddled. (I love the word befuddled.)

When I was little, I had this book, about a kind of wise old woman who talked to kids. Her name was Mrs. Pigglewiggle. There were several books about dear Mrs. Pigglewiggle, each one featuring a different problem the kids were having, and how the kindly lady helped them out. I remember one of them was the “I thought you said” condition that suddenly befell all of the children. They were constantly hearing adults speak to them and getting the words all mixed up, punctuating each attempt with “I thought you said…”.

That’s kind of how this is starting to feel, like I thought you said get a job really quickly. I could swear that’s what I heard, but circumstances just don’t seem to be cooperating. I know that I can’t force it, but I wonder if that’s really what I heard. Did I maybe hear that because that’s what I’ve always done? No job – get a job. Any job. A person is supposed to work.

I need the money, but I’m not broke. Yet. And I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up! If I grow up. Maybe that’s what this is really about, that feeling of needing to fledge – I am trying to grow up? So tired of being alone, I’m so tired up on my own, won’t you help me girl, just as soon as you can? (another nod to Al Green). So yeah, I am tired of being on my own, but I’m not looking for any kind of romantic relationship. I am totally inept at that, and the last thing I need is a BAD relationship.

It feels as though I’m a puppy that needs socialization or something. I loathe ineptitude, and right now I’m not even doing my normal routine very well. I’ve been living in isolation, wearing a steady uniform of sweat pants and t-shirts, with a steady diet of internet surfing and pizza. Not good. Definitely not good. It’s no wonder I don’t sleep well and have weird dreams when I do sleep.

I’ve been here before, when nothing seems to make sense and I don’t seem to fit anywhere. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s damned uncomfortable, and not what I want. Resisting the urge to do a Spice Girls thing, I have got to figure out what it is that I really want. Specifically. I need to write up specifications for the Universe, and mean it. I’m not playing around here, either. It’s really time to live this life, or die trying.

What I want: I want to be healthy. I want to be free of diseases and conditions that say I’m unhealthy. I want to lose the compulsive eating gig – it doesn’t pay and the audience is pretty rude. I want to be unafraid to stay in my own body for long periods of time, for the duration actually. Things shouldn’t be so scary that I have to leave all the time. Maybe the biggest thing I want is peace. Peace between my ears, peace in my body, peace in my soul. In very early sobriety, I was asked what I wanted, and that was my answer then as well – peace.

I’ve been at war inside myself for so long I am not sure I would know how to call a cease-fire. Peace might be too quiet, and boring. I wouldn’t have anything to complain about, or need help with, or have to take medication for. How would that be? I cannot even imagine that, and that makes me a bit sad.

Where is my place? Who are my people? These are the big questions I want answered. Do I make a place for myself, or do I simply happen into one? Do I gather people to me, or do I present myself for admittance? That even sounds ridiculous, so I’m not going there. But, I need my people. I have a handful of them, actually, and that’s a good thing. I’m not sure what else I need, but I definitely feel as though something is missing.

As far as my place, that seems to be slightly loaded, as in do I know my place, the place society tells me I should occupy. But that’s not MY place. That’s somebody else’s place for me, not the place I feel that I belong. So what is the place where I belong? That’s a far more difficult question than simply contemplating a physical place. Belonging is another thing entirely.

I’ve got to think about this, because I’m not getting any younger sitting here and thinking about this. It’s not something I can figure out, or a mere problem that needs a solution. This is a matter of the spirit, and the answer depends on exactly who I am spiritually. I know my name, I know where I came from, but do I know who I am? I thought I did. I would say that I know a lot of things about myself, but do I really know who I am such that I could articulate it? I don’t quite know how to answer that. We’ll see.

Years ago, several people told me that I should write my memoir. I thought about it, but at the time didn’t have time for such a thing. Well, now I have time. But who the hell wants to know anything about my boring life? What the hell would that even be about? Maybe that’s the work I need to be doing, I suppose.

The other day I was on a call about some social justice thing or another, and one of the facilitators said if you want to know what to do, do the best you can, for as long as you can, nothing more and nothing less. So I’m going to do that. When I make my 15-minute cleaning sweeps through the apartment tomorrow, I will do the best I can, for as long as I can, nothing more and nothing less.

It occurs to me that I know all about doing less than my best. I want to leave that behind. It’s not who I want to be, and I don’t have to be someone I don’t want to be. I’ve re-created myself more than once, but now it’s time to treasure the creation. It’s been incubated for q while now, and it needs to be delivered. That feels right.

For some mysterious and bizarre reason, I have been preoccupied for the last few hours about past hurts, and betrayals. I don’t know where this mess comes from, but it needs to go back to wherever that might be. I think it’s passing a bit now, but I was greatly disturbed to be feeling that.

I’m not sure exactly what I was feeling – regret? Anger? Sadness? All of the above? That sounds about right – all together now, let’s ambush the human, just because. That’s fine. I didn’t have to act on the feelings I was having. I took the dog out instead and played some ridiculous 3-D matching game on my phone while she pranced up and down and barked at people.

It takes so little to make that little tiny-brained creature happy. Frantic and hysterical barking, for no apparent reason other than her vocal cords work, makes her happy. She was grinning like a fool, running back and forth and explaining to people that it’s her yard. I horsed around with her for a few minutes, and then we came back into the ice palace. It was still hot out there, and the sun had nearly set. I think it was 90 today, which does not make me happy.

Despite the heat, my meditation group had scheduled a day off from our regular meeting, and agreed to meet at a snowball stand. I was looking forward to it, because the snow ball stand advertised as being “New Orleans style”. I am always leery of edibles purporting to be “New Orleans style” because they are usually insanely hot, with no other spices but cayenne pepper in copious amounts that drown out the flavor of the food, or they have never eaten a New Orleans food item but figured “how hard could it be?” Well, those do not go well in my book, because it can be REALLY hard to duplicate the taste of New Orleans.

Anyway, this sno-ball place was the real deal. The sno-ball tasted just like the ones I get when I go home. They’re actually a chain – Pelican’s. I looked them up when we decided to go there, and had a very good feeling about them because they use the same ice shaving machine that people in New Orleans use. It’s called a SnoWizard, and it does obscene things with ice – shaves it and then puts some gris-gris on it and shaves incredibly fine. When the syrup is thrown in, the concoction is nearly creamy. It’s cold and sets me right on a hot day like today. I was a happy girl.

So, I’ll probably go there again tomorrow because I need to taste other flavors. And stuff. I will dream about that sno-ball – I had the Dreamsicle flavor today. Tomorrow might be something fruity, or they had a praline flavor which I’m curious about. Something to look forward to.

I’ve been watching the Alaska eagles more, and the young ‘un is huge now. It’s got a fair amount of feathers, and it’s wings are humongous. It still has the big yellow clown feet, though but was practicing standing earlier today. It hatched in May, so it’s fascinating how big this thing has grown in a short period of time. Mama Eagle, whose name is Liberty, is still doting on the baby bird, although she does leave it to its own devices more than when it was really small. She and Daddy still feed it by beak, although the little one is learning to tear apart fish that are brought in.

I must admit to having a bit of anxiety about what goes on in the eagles’ nest, though. The little critter is getting close to the edge of the nest, and that is 120 feet above the ground. I wish it would back away from the edge, and I’m yelling at the image on the screen, telling it to move. Oh, well. I guess I’ve become a little attached to the dang birds. Go figure.

I just watched a PBS documentary about New Orleans’ effort to remove Confederate monuments in the city, back in 2017-2018. I know all those places and those monuments, and the Mayor eventually prevailed and took down some of the largest and most visible – one to Robert E. Lee, one to P.G.T. Beauregard. Those momuments were commissioned and erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Apparently, the Daughters wanted to commemorate heroes of the Confederacy, but the film brought out that it was also to mourn their dead. An incredible number of men were killed in that war. An incredible number.

There was another monument that was erected by the White League, a KKK-like organization from days gone by. That monument commemorated a race riot that killed several white men, and they sought to memorialize that. This one had a totally different energy that made heroes out of several fighters, not a general or a battle, but a race riot. There were Black men killed, and white men, but the monument commemorated only the white men. Very weird, if you ask me.

That battle to remove Confederate monuments in New Orleans started well before the pandemic response, and long before the contentious Presidential election of 2020. This was before George Floyd, but the fire was already burning. The fire has been burning for so long I don’t think anyone alive today has ever lived without it. We’re going up in flames in very many respects, it seems.

The filmmaker discussed his story of making the film after it was over, and I related so much to him. He is multicultural, Black and Phillipino, and his father appeared at several points in the documentary. His father had wrestled with him a bit in past years about him claiming his identity as a Black man, and the filmmaker was not there yet. While making the film, he and his crew also travelled to Charlottesville during the Unite The Right rally, the one with “fine people on both sides”. After he saw the hatred and vitriol that night, and realized that a woman had been killed by one of the white supremacists, he was changed. He told his father later that he was angry, and he’d not felt like that before. Accepting himself as a Black man in this country was a different perspective for him, and he hadn’t realized what that meant before. To realize his identity, he had to give up feeling relatively safe in the world and navigating as not Black. I understand that.

This race crap is old and tired at this point, but apparently it’s here to stay. It’s been going on since Europeans first set foot in the New World. They brought racism and nonsensical concepts of race with them from Europe when they came, and it’s become a never-ending cycle of new and improved ever since. Their efforts have always been only temporarily successful, but they keep trying. I don’t know if they even know what exactly the prize would be. I sure as hell don’t get it – do they want to eradicate all Black people, and all non-white people just for lagniappe? And then what? I’m told they want to maintain superiority, but that’s a delusion in the first place, so I’m not sure what exactly they’re trying to accomplish.

These days, I have very little patience with bigots and intolerant people. Someone I know posted some homophobic nonsense on FaceBook earlier today, and it was hurtful. I chose not to respond to it or even acknowledge that I saw it, because the post doesn’t merit any of my attention or energy. I actually feel very sorry for her, because her world is so small and her life so flat that she has to focus on other people’s lives to know that she is not invisible. Bless her heart. She began her little poison pen diatribe with expressing how grateful she was that Pride month was over, because pride is a deadly sin anyway and nobody should have pride in a lifestyle that God has condemned. She went on for a while about Jesus’ dying to take away those sins and so on. Alrighty then. It’s not worth the argument.

People seem determined to force conformity on others. Conformity to their values, their religion, their ideas of right and wrong. Thanks for that, but I’m not having any, thanks. I’m not inviting anyone into my bedroom, or into my circle of friends, to approve or disapprove. I’m not in the least bit interested in how other people live their lives, unless they come into direct contact with me and deprive me of my inalienable rights. I’ve got other stuff to do, and I don’t give a flying fig what the hell these other people are doing for the most part.

We’re demolishing fallen condominiums and digging out more bodies from the debris. We’re trying to figure out what the hell we need to do with this pandemic and our response to it. The latest word is that even if you’re fully vaccinated, you should continue to wear a mask in public places indoors. I still wear mine to the grocery store and anytime I have to be inside with a horde of people I don’t know. Some people are doing that, but most not. So much for team work.

I’m a little hesitant to start meeting with people in-person, like say church or even restaurants if there’s a crowd. The reports about the Delta variant are frightening, and a guy I know let everybody know that he and his entire family have tested positive for COVID-19. The adults were fully vaccinated, but of course the kids were not. They’re going to be quarantining and following doctor’s orders. You just never know what the hell you’re dealing with at this point.

I wish there was some fairy tale sorcerer who would descend on this land, and magically melt down all the guns and then bonk people over the head with her wand so they’ll understand how futile their efforts have been. When people don’t even have – or make themselves open to – an inkling that something they say or do just MIGHT cause hurt or harm to someone else I have no patience with them. If someone tells you that you’ve caused harm, believe them. Own up to it, stand and deliver, make it right. Save the “I meant well” and the “I don’t understand why you are taking it that way.”

During these times, I’m not looking for miracles, even though it would be nice to have just a couple. I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, particularly not a mature racist that has their game on. Ultimately, I don’t care. Again, not wasting my energy on that. What I will spend time and energy on, though, is truth telling. It’s not my personal truth, but it’s what really exists, what really happened, with evidence. People can deny truth all they want, but that won’t change anything. Denial is not a river in Egypt – it’s a real thing. It’s a lie that gives birth to other lies, like a living organism. We build lies on top of lies on top of lies until we have a whole structure of lies, and that constitutes a system. A system of how we treat each other, how we live with each other, and everything else we build.

Denial is toxic, because lies are toxic. They are transformative, and we become the people we most don’t want to be. The system becomes self-aware and struggles to protect itself, and we have become its metabolic by-products. It is no wonder those of us in thrall to systems that work for us become unfeeling and uncaring, because we’re being consumes and digested by the very system we’ll kill to protect.

What then becomes of humanity? I believe we’re on a precipice of morality and integrity, and that which makes us human. Perhaps “The Matrix” and “Terminator” are prophetic visions that will indeed describe the late days of our humanity, that which separates us from other organic life. Doomed to a descent into inhumanity. We use our great attributes only to further our own ends and find new and creative ways to kill each other.

We are becoming more in tune with our self-interests, for better and worse. But I wonder, to what end is profit? To what end is the national economy? At this point, neither appears to serve our citizenry in its entirety. We fight to serve our individual self-interests, but who decides the benefits of that? Who among us can sit in judgement of others and decide the worth and value of a human life? We’ve seen glimpses of those people, and they look much like…us. But they are different, because their walk through this reality is very nearly unrecognizable to us, and there’s very little basis for authentic relationship. The crossroads, though, is that we can all be ended by the same things – microscopic organisms that we can’t even see, weapons that are manufactured on assembly lines, or the old-fashioned way. With our fists. Is this not suffering?

Billionaires of today are racing each other into space, all of them toying with their own private tourism mechanisms for space travel. I’ve been convinced for quite a long while that members of the dominant culture leisure class are trying to get the hell off this planet. They’ll leave it to the rest of us poor schlobs after it’s been pillaged and ruined. They’ll go to some other New World, and start this whole mess again, in a galaxy far, far away.

If at first you don’t succeed…try, try again – bash your head against the wall until it breaks. There, that’s better…except for that damned headache.