THE TERMINATOR AKA THE GRAY LINE

The Mick watches Finnegan

Since I had taken an antihistamine pill at bedtime, I slept hard.  But I dreamt that I was living in a university town in an apartment on a high floor, very pleasant, but then acquired another small house “on the flats”, from a woman who was an artist and moving somewhere else.  The rest of the dream was about moving my collection of art work from one house to the next as she made wall space by moving out her own paintings.  Both of us had large bright works.

You can analyze and so can I.  Maybe it’s a novel.  As I was drifting off last night I was thinking about animals and insects that move into the structures built by others, like hermit crabs.  (I identify as a hermit.)

I was woken by Finnegan and the Mick, crusted with ice, diving down my neck to get under the covers where it was warm.  The whole outdoors is a white sheet of paper: snow.  Probably gone by the time night comes again.  I had turned on the floor furnace so when I accidentally stepped on the Mick’s paw while trying to get all our breakfasts, she staggered onto the hot grill over the furnace, and after a scream of indignation, she regards me as a great traitor and has reverted to feral.

So the first mark on the paper is a burning indignation and resentment.  Finnegan, however, has no sympathy for his little devoted buddy and leaps into my arms, climbing my shoulder as usual.  By the time I went out to the garage to feed the ferals, I was conditionally forgiven, but was surprised to see that the cat hole in the garage door had been drifted over so that they had had to dig their way out.  They’ve also dug multiple hole entrances under the back shop, acting more like foxes than cats.  Since they are under a floor made of 2X12’s, I can’t get at their nests of kittens.

The Terminator Line

The limber bushes are crushed under the weight of the snow, but the trees were so far barely generating catkins so they are "bearing up".  I hadn’t gotten around to checking the tarp on the garage yesterday as I intended, so it may leak.  Everything is under plastic sheets.  Yesterday had been very pleasant.  Squibbie, who sleeps all day next to the computer like the grannie she is, got a little overheated so I cracked the window.  She rearranged herself to plant her nose in the crack.  

My mother slept like that: warm body, nose out to the weather coming in through her north window.  She didn’t trust electric blankets and, truthfully, in Portland one wasn’t usually necessary.  As a child I would wake to her adjusting our kid-bedroom windows.  They rattled unless they were wedged with half a pinching clothespin.  I'm free-associating.  That's what writers do.

For a few days I’ve been thinking about the line between day and night as it travels around and around the planet.  It is so grown into our cells that we follow the rhythm even when we can’t see it, but I’d forgotten its two exceptionally suggestive names: the terminator and also the gray line.  On this planet the atmosphere fuzzes it up enough to make an ambiguous transitional twilight zone, but on the moon it is sharp.

“A terminator is defined as the locus of points on a Moon or planet where the line through a Sun is tangent.”  I barely remember that a tangent is sort of like a perpendicular except coming out of a circle from the center.  I had not realized that in the polar regions there are times when they are entirely night or entirely day, no line between.

The Terminator not quite touching the South Pole

“The terminator path varies by time of day due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. The terminator path also varies by time of year due to the revolution of the Earth around the sun: the plane of the terminator is nearly parallel to planes created by lines of longitude during the equinoxes, and at its maximum angle of approximately 23.5 degrees to the equator during the solstices.”

“The terminator moves at approximately 1668 kilometers per hour (1036 miles per hour).”  The fastest airplanes and the satellites can overtake and cross it repeatedly, but at the poles when the planet tips to its extreme, there is no terminator.  “It is possible to walk faster than the terminator at the poles, near to the equinoxes.”  How poetic all this is!  

“Amateur radio operators take advantage of conditions at the terminator (so-called "gray-line" propagation, or "grey-line" to the British) to perform long distance communications. Under good conditions, radio waves can travel along the terminator to antipodal points. This is primarily because the D layer, which absorbs high frequency signals, disappears rapidly on the dark side of the terminator line. This process is known as skywave propagation."

Mimas (left) and the Death Star (destroyed)

“Mimas” is a satellite, a moon, that has two  “terminators”— one for the light from the sun and the other for the reflected light of Saturn, its planet.  The facts get entangled in Greek mythology used as a naming resource.  In this case, Mimas was a giant son of Gaia, one of the seven Titans ruled by Saturn, whose other time was Chronus (Time).  The Wikipedia entry is worth reading.  (Wiki accounts seem to stay sane so long as they aren’t addressing people.)  Some call Mimas the Death Star because it’s about the same size and shape as the totally invented figure in “Star Wars IV: a New Hope.”  Los Angeles writers love their scifi as much as their Joe Campbell.  The satellite showed up in Star Trek as well.

Connectome before and after psilocybin, similar to LSD

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/lsd-research-brain-neuroscience-human-nature-psychedelic?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Version+CB+header&utm_term=167343&subid=10790770&CMP=ema_565

<sup>Today’s news cycle includes brain scans of people on LSD, which the scientists say show that the drug is able to change the process flow of the neurons.  Ordinarily they are in feedback loops with specific purposes that don’t interact loop-to-loop.  LSD temporarily erases the boundaries to let the loops communicate among themselves, allowing a reconfiguring of the separations.  The obsessions and conflicts disappear, at least for a time, setting the person free.

Now for the poem my subconscious has been working on.</sup>

Time and place are the great terminators.

I walk along the gray line

Looking for you

Hoping to walk faster than regret

So as to overtake the dawn.

Why were we antipodal 

When we seemed to have the radio

Frequency set to survive

International air flights,

But then the D layer

Disappeared in darkness.

Maybe it was the high frequency 

Of cognitive dissonance,

A snowstorm that erased the words.

THE GREAT SEA OF TIME IN WHICH WE LIVE

Cannon Beach

Much of Oregon’s coast is not sand but volcanic rock.  The exception is that the mouth of the Columbia River creates a very long shallow wash that makes the tide really work to come ashore, but which the Japanese current has bent north powerfully enough to create “Long Beach,” a seemingly stable island still attached to the continent on the Washington State side.  There’s a town that specializes in amusements like shooting galleries and salt water taffy.

To the south the volcanic rock is sharp and surf-pounded.  The animal life, which is abundant, is mostly equipped to hang on, as opposed to the clams over in the sand which are captured by digging and can dig away from you very quickly indeed.  On the rock, the creatures must be pried off.  If you’ve ever tried to collect a starfish, you know that you have to tear off their multitude of legs to get them.

When you walk on the rock, you must be wary, because the rock has holes worn in it that create water spouts when the surf hits hard.  Without warning you might be drenched by the marine equivalent of Old Faithful, roaring.

I’m raising these images to discuss print-talk on websites, specifically on Aeon which has resourcefully split itself into two venues: one is curated and edited articles of good quality on the announced topics of the group, which are all honorable disciplines like those one might encounter in academia.  That’s the beach, the result of aeons of depositions.  

The other one is a parallel environment, volcanic and stony, featuring a whole lot of mostly men clinging to their educations which are mostly out-dated from my point of view.  Their generalizations are limpets based on only the life they know in their circles, their margins of the landscape.

All these factors apply to me, of course, because I’m going up and down the coast while living on the prairie which hasn’t been a sea for a very long time. It's name is the Bearpaw Sea.  It's the name of something that's only evidence now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoRxn-7nWNg.   
Here’s a dated and amusing explanation given by two college-aged geeks.  They also discuss baculites, which are the “buffalo stones” (iniskim) of prairie tribal people.  These fossils, I will propose, are good religious icons.  Out-dated.  Which fascinate theologians in wet suits, carrying their own oxygen supply.  The devil arrives.  A very long and toothed serpent.  They eat Albertonectes.

Albertonectes

I consciously live in metaphor, which is why I’m able to step away from the “given” so easily.  When I read what the young ‘uns write, I see that they are much more easily metaphorical than their elders.  The people lamenting the corruption and overgrowth of the academic world want to return it to the way it was, with proper grammar and punctuation.  The younger thinkers are trying to disassemble the old Notre Dame (Alma Mater) schools into parts more suitable for an internet age.  

Which elements are skills, which are content, which are structuring systems?  What evidence is there?  What can anyone do alone, which require resources, and which can be accessed through older, different, more experienced people?  In the end everyone learns, no matter what.  

The autodidacts of the world are always with us, actively seeking, which means they don’t need expensive universities with pretty campuses.  But can they really get an education at a “mail order” institution that has sold its remaining assets, the ones originally provided by founders at great cost and effort?  Can there be an “auto-academy,” unattached from the kelp forest and washed up on the beach?

Seaside, OR

The popular conception is that an education will get one a better job, providing a filter and certification that will signal competence.  In fact, the advantage I see is that it gives access to bonding and relationships that form friendship communities.  This is how many people get high level jobs: they know someone with contacts.  This is how one gets published, how one gets to speak at the expensive fuel-using conferences where everyone flies in to attend, and how one finds a proper marriage partner.

This is not evil or wrong — it’s just how the world works.  I was surprised to see it demonstrated in the comments to Aeon issues.  Many of these people know each other, expose their ongoing friction, and tread around in the same old circles like oxen bound to stone grinding mills.  Immigrants with bad grammar must struggle.  Women are shooed away — few of them bother anyway.  Why be dashed on the rocks by the forces of sexism when the library is open?

I love mixed metaphors.  Even more lovable can be depictions, like maybe an octopus with a book in each tentacle and spectacles on its separately-evolved but humanoid eyes.  Sci-fi.  That is, extending what is known into the virtual world.  It’s much easier to explain what “virtual” means to people who have been playing as avatars in online games.  I could not persuade my professors and would not be able to persuade some of the commenters on Aeon that it is possible, even likely, that there is is NO ultimate reality that never changes, that is a rock to which one may pinion oneself with a thousand little sucker-feet.  The real shape-shifter is the world itself.  We only exist through fitting our lifespans into survivable intervals, powering our computers with electricity derived from Cretacous coal that was once the lagoons and jungles along the Bearpaw Sea.

The genome analysers working on the deep past (much later than the Bearpaw creatures) suggest that neanderthal males were not able to produce viable offspring with homo sapien women (at least in the 600,000 year ago versions) because of missing genes.  But that around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago the babies survived, endowing us with depression, addiction, allergies and red hair.  This is all “maybe, possibly, tends to” stuff which I predict will soon develop into a tirade blaming X chromosomes, since one of the genes seems maybepossiblytendsto be one that interprets a fetus as a cancer.  How modern.

Can we actually hold physically mature women accountable for the interaction of molecules 600,000 years ago?  Yup.  If we are old abalones clinging to the rocks, mostly throwing their code into the water and taking no responsibility for their fate or the physical cost of creating eggs, we're out of the loop.  Female as evil and destruction is a steady theme in science, because science is institutional and political, just like the other religions.  The difference is that unlike most theologians, good scientists are open to new information, esp. the ones that reconfigure the thought world into an entirely new virtuality.

In the days of my childhood when we walked the beach, we found gorgeous blue-green hand-blown glass net floats that came all the way from Japan.  The glass had bubbles in it.  The spheres had floated unscathed across the Pacific.  Now when we walk along the Pacific coast we find tennis shoes, washed overboard from cargo ships.  Lucky if any of them make pairs.  Even luckier that they can trace the ocean currents that control our shipping and our weather.

In my childhood we visited a bit of flotsam that was two dead whales, one very large and one rather small.  At the time I thought of them as parent and child, but they weren’t even the same species.  Maybe our thinkers are also developing into two "species", one that clings and one that digs.  But there are also shape shifters like the octopus.

gray whale carcass

EAST SLOPE INDIGNATION

Looking at magazine-type websites is something I do when the rest of my day’s writing is finished and ready to post that night at bedtime.  Sometimes I reply to Aeon which has Aussie roots but lives in the vicinity of the Templeton leafy world in England.  Recently they published an article about land ownership by a young Montana woman.  I was offended.  The problem with this upper-class, educated set of people is that are always unknowingly offensive when they venture out of their own circle.  (The same goes for me.)  What they see from their perimeter is all mapped monoliths but the world is made of sand, and geology is crucially various.

The writer, who is living in Missoula — the humanities university which has now become fodder for a Krakauer exposé — made a pitch for common ownership of land.  She lives in the Flathead Valley across the Rockies from me but her family once homesteaded in Geraldine on the High Line which means a lot to her, a point of pride that dates back to 1900.  My location and emotional attachment are on the East Slope of the Rockies, an ecotone that underlies the Blackfeet Reservation.  (In Canada the Blackfoot Reserve; to the Siksika the remnant of a great gyring culture that circled  the prairie behind the buffalo.)

I told her — intemperately because I’m not a temperate woman when it comes to my heartlands — that the next person who said the mountains were “beautiful” and paired that with “hardship” was gonna get socked.  I called them “echo words”.  Hallmarkian exhalations of the tour leader pointing out features.  If some Blackfeet crusader goes on about saving the Badger-Two Medicine or Sid Gustafson, in his new book called simply “Swift Dam”, were to talk about the sacred land, I would agree but step away from the agonizing over Euro-abuse.  (Headquarters in Missoula.)

My view is geological and cosmological.  Tectonic, volcanic, sedimentary, and apparent only over the aeons.  (Ironic.)  When I drove back from the laundromat in Cut Bank the other day, there was just enough snow left to limn the huge ledges created when uplifting the continental crust from the cellar of the world.  That is, the buckling collision of two tectonic plates, one under the Pacific and one under what used to be a great sea from here to the midwest, which is what deposited the zillions of minutias that created the broken layers.  This uplifting is technically called “exhumation” but the editor where I sent a query said that was too grim.  After all, the mountains are beautiful.  She took the word out, shuddering.  It just means lifting humus, earth.  Echo: human, humility.

These Rockies are the third cordillera to rumple up out of the continent and they say that the underlying pressure, unbelievably deep, creates a kind of ringing that some people or some instruments can feel.  From the side they look like a silhouette, just the top edge making a line.  From an airplane they look like an unmade bed, rumple after rumple.  Peter Matthiessen advised me at a writers’ workshop sponsored by Missoula professors that I should not use small domestic words and images for phenomena so grand and overwhelming.  (I had said buffalo have purple mouths like chow dogs.)  I do it anyway.  Matthiessen is dead — he was old-school, wonderfully so, but still from my father’s generation that so venerated explorers, even if they risked being cannibalized.  Buddha and atahuasca were his edge.  They’re not mine, but I respect them because they are cosmic.

Bob Marshall Wilderness from the air

The land on the east slope is tilted up (or down from an eastern perspective) so that when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago, the melt water all ran out through the Mississippi drainage, creating a doomed port for New Orleans where the Euros landed their sea-going ships and boarded flat bottom boats that could steam upstream to Fort Benton, the farthest north they could go because of the great ledge of limestone left by the ancient sea.  It was far enough north to get them into Blackfeet country.

Fort Benton was where the first Indian agency was located.  That was where the first governor disappeared overboard, drunk again.  That is still where there are public monumental bronzes by Bob Scriver and the replicated fort houses a gallery of his Blackfeet bronzes.  This is where the roots of the Baker Massacre took hold in the family feud of Malcolm Clarke, an intemperate man who married a Blackfeet woman, whose even more intemperate renegade relatives murdered him.  The Clarke children feature large in the politics of the Blackfeet ever since.  Particularly the fact that the cavalry sent to punish the bad guys ended up exterminating an innocent peaceful band instead.

Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea

You can't see baby Pomp from this angle.

The white cliffs along the Missouri, a tributary of the Mississippi, are limestone, just like the White Cliffs of Dover.  Tour guides on float trips point them out and they provoke the imaginations of Euros who see castles and cities.  I don’t know what the Blackfeet saw.  They didn’t care much for boats.  Nor did they long to climb mountains except to go to a high place for a dream induced by thirst and staring at the sun.  (Don’t do that — you’ll go blind.)

The east slope is harsh in intervals because the Rockies make warm winds (catabatic) that come sweeping along, creating fifty degree temperature sheers.  They have a definite edge.  I recall stepping out of the van in Babb and feeling warm on one leg, cold on the other.  It strips the snow down to grass, but not so far east as Geraldine, I think. Geraldine crushes homesteads because of lack of water — not low temps and wind.

Geraldine, MT

One morning you look at the mountains and see a second range of piled up clouds that rise up in a “storm shelf,” hanging there while dropping water on the Flathead Valley.  Overhead there is a great blue arc of sky where the high altitude wind pushed back the clouds — it’s called a Chinook arch.  Sometimes a contrail from a Malmstrom cargo plane has passed across in a straight line.  Depending on where the sun is, it may glow like neon, or just be chalk.

My friend Barrus has a problem with Aeon’s treatment of pornography.  His relationship with the human body is far deeper and more multiple than that of most of us.  It comes from experience, not just humping customers or setting their responses on fire by depicting forbidden acts.  He’s done those things, but far more of his life has been washing autistic children and teens who have dirtied themselves with excrement or vomit, treating the terrible afflictions of those who have no immune defense because of HIV, calming the drug-deranged, and clasping hard against his own chest the bodies of boys threatening suicide.  What taught him was the great plague of AIDS in SF where lovers eased each other through death, a tribe of Charons who knew about flesh.

To him pornography is not just a literary money-making project — though that as well — but a glimpse of the abyss inside every human aware of living on this fractally broken and potentially erupting world.  How can we kiss each other when the whales are dying stuffed with our plastic?  How can we say the mountains are “beautiful” and “harsh” when at their foot people are suffering “pornographically” because of sanctions and limitations and stigmas that come from the rest of us?  All these mixed with fantasies of intimacy, specialness.  It’s a very real question.  One might say “religious.”

"AMERICAN ODYSSEY" A Series Review

Anna Friel

“American Odyssey” is totally misnamed from my point of view because once again the “managers” (investors) interfered to try to force something sympathetic to their condescending view of audiences.  The creating team was working with the idea of simply Odyssey and even that seems to me a kind of high school idea.  It’s not wrong, but this is far from a wily guy trying to go home after a grueling war.  This is about a female soldier who thought she was going on a few weeks’ raid but has gotten into a Star Wars world where she is a “raghead” (that’s a pejorative) version of Princess Leia with a boy who is no droid.  She is nothing like the Debra Winger character in “The Sheltering Sky,” except that she is as appealing.

Sahara

Part of the appeal of the film is the sublime sahara where the landscape rolls in human curves and the towns cluster along crowded cubic alleys where ragged wooden doors open into cushioned homes where small stoves prepare local foods.  In this film there are no Star Wars bars or Game of Thrones bordellos.  Well, except for the music venue where the uncle who presents as a woman is a media star with a general for a lover.

This series, which I see as a long movie, an episodic “book” like “The Jewel in the Crown”, consciously sets out to break up assumptions.  If it had been on cable instead of network, it would not have been cancelled, but maybe it is a lot for us to digest as it stands.  So many people — you have to leave the media to know this — have no knowledge of these worlds, no way to interpret the morality, and no skill with the highly technological stuff that drives the plot.  

If you took away everything in the last decade — those little glass wafer phones chiming in all pockets, the desktops that so easily hack into secret info, flaming predator drones watched from satellites, tracer transmitters the size of cough drops, and even the government’s corrupt addiction to outsourced evil — the show would vanish.

This series is really about the globalizing of the planet and the predatory nature of international corporations who act as nations with no borders.  It’s not pleasant, but it’s true.  It’s happening.

Grégory Fitoussi

Once you accept that, the binaries begin to show up.  “Luc Girard” (played by Grégory Fitoussi whom I knew from “Mr. Selfridge” from the BBC and “Spiral” from France) is presumably a fox who has escaped the French Foreign Legion.
  

Adewale  Akinnuoye-Agbaje

He is balanced by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje who plays “Frank Majors”, a massive invincible hired soldier.  It’s intriguing that England has formed a cadre of intelligent, educated, impressive Anglo-African actors.  They speak multiple languages and get their start as models.  That seems worthy a movie plot of its own.

Yousef "Joe" Sweid

Yousef “Joe” Sweid as “Shakir Khan” was the most sympathetic mainstream gender-crossover since Peter Capaldi’s performance as “Vera” on an episode of “Prime Suspect.”  

Casting was done by six people, who seem to be two anchor people, two less-used people with long lists of credits, a woman named Gemma Sykes, who must be English, and a specialty man named Saad Fedhari.  According to IMDB, he has a LONG string of credits in the film industry in many countries.  If things go on as they are, he is likely to be working for a long time, since so much happens in North Africa.

I despise these plot beats that depend on women being obtuse and demanding to know things they are not able to understand.  “Decker’s” wife and daughter are plot devices, I know, but there are too many of them in real life.  Odille's daughter is the counterbalance, a sort of Pippi Longstocking.

Sadie Sink

It would not surprise people who know me that I found Peter Facinelli (“Peter Decker”) unsympathetic.  It’s just me, but I thought he was too stupid to be believed.  Not his acting — his part in the script.  Of course, I also disliked Treat Williams and always have, even when he was supposed to be a good guy.  These men have an air of entitlement that’s useful for the plot, but they are “suits”.  The important women all seem to have lost their combs.  Otherwise, their suits are nice.

Nate Mooney

The balance for these fat-cat bullies is the character of “Bob Offer,” played by Nate Mooney, a relative unknown who did a masterful job of unfolding from a nut case who needed a tinfoil hat to a deeply sympathetic but slightly askew nearly-Asperger victim who was capable of loving, not always within the social lines. 

Daniella Pineda

His balance is the cold assassin “Ruby Simms” (Daniella Pineda) who is derailed by love.  They strike me as coastal types: Bob on the Atlantic and Ruby on the Pacific.  You could interpret this series as a collision between the world-view of New York versus the world view of California, or maybe they're merging.

Anna and Omar

In the end the value of the series for me rested mostly on two characters, which is suspect is true for most viewers.  The two are “Odelle" (Anna Friel) and “Aslam” (Omar Ghazaoui)  Between them, they pull the story much closer to the VERY American “road trip” story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim going down the Mississippi on a raft.  So far this is Ghazaoui’s only screen credit.  His value will be apparent if some smart cable channel picks up the series, because he will age and change, creating a gap.  I think he is irreplaceable.

As a concept, this real voyage towards home, never reaching it, is a time trip discovering a future while trying to return to the past.  Simply trying to get hold of the new reality is hard enough, but finding some kind of universal moral dimension is impossible.  The people in control prey on the rest of us, but the worlds of the ordinary people are too small.  We are all moving along alleys where doors, splintered or solidly embellished, open into our paths.  Doubling back is not an option.  The uniforms own the dragons.  That's not a movie.

BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

This post is a reaction to a post by T. on Medium.com who just returned from failing to save one of his boys from death. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly.

There are eleven years between T. and I. At one time that would mean I was too young to be his mother — not now that girls are getting pregnant at nine years old so that they have skipped adrenarche, the years in which people form their identities. Their identity is their baby and their black cocktail dress. The dress is a good thing because then they have something decent to wear to their son’s burial.

Deborah Kerr and John Kerr in "Tea and Sympathy"

Central casting always puts me in a bow blouse or a pastel sweater set. Pearl earrings. “Tea and Sympathy” casting — Deborah Kerr offering a therapeutic mercy fuck. No son and not quite a lover. Not even the Maureen O’Hara Irish shawl.

Maureen O'Hara

T. is right. I was up in the middle of the night to check his blog because I had an idea what was happening. AIDS doesn’t kill one directly, but sits on the sidelines (as long as the money for drugs lasts) and grins while the infections and traumas do the work, a plastic respirator on the mouth as though it were a ball gag and tubes going in, tubes coming out, in places that have better uses: arms and dicks for expressing intimacy. T. sits alongside desperate for the power to do more than hold a hand.

The part I play in this virtual world is the English teacher and the auntie. In actuality I didn’t do either one very well. As T. points out, I’m too much the narcissist.  (See above.)  Just as his own English teachers and aunties were. I think they saw him accurately, and their crime was failing to intervene to stop the torment. They knew his father was abusive, a near-killer, but they needed MAN power, like Woody Allen’s brother who thought he was a chicken and no one wanted to cure him because they needed the eggs. But this man was a rooster and he could kill with the spurs on his heels, aside from treading all the hens.

I’m not supposed to be me in the better version of this story — I’m supposed to be a man, maybe Jack, who can make an author notorious; or maybe that agent who pushed writers to go to extremes (esp. people who were already extreme); or best of all one of those original powerful SM leathermen who are dead or old now. Someone powerful enough to carry a young man’s body in his arms.

It’s not a sex change needed, but rather a cultural pattern they call “primogeniture” that goes back and back and back to when men were the heads of clans and castles, “landed”, in a time when men swore fealty to their lords by putting their hands under their master’s kilt to swear on his balls. No books.

Mr. Garnett

Two other deaths I’m processing this week are both men. One was my fourth grade science teacher, Mr. Garnett, who had been a sergeant in WWII. He was the only person to realize that my scowl was an effort to see. I lived in a blur but no one would believe my complaints until he simply called me to the back of the room and presented a vision chart. They say he was bitter late in life, but not why or how. Mr. Thuringer, who had lost a leg in combat, lectured us about the destruction of war and drove a knife into his wooden leg so we’d believe him. Then one day he disappeared.

Mike Burgwin

The second death was Mike Burgwin, my boss at Multnomah County Animal Control, where success pressed him to process his life. After we got to know each other, he’d call me up late at night and tell me stories, many of them terrible tragedies from his work as a cop. He was a big physical man, highly intelligent, with little formal education. I wrote about him on 3/28/16 prairiemary.blogspot.com. The memorial is soon so what I wrote is being edited for use. I look forward to hearing what others say, but I won’t be there.

T. writes with video, words read by Leighton, “Hypocrisy is my sacred lover and i suck his cock in old canoes/” Their work is not for the faint-hearted, the uninitiated, or the mommies except the ones who go to their son’s burial high enough to bear it. There is a community, but a shifting one, like a classroom or congregation. Still, it’s much bigger than anyone suspects, global.

“Anger is the new pornography.” It’s the old one as well. Dean. Brando. Pacino. “Father Knows best.” (Doesn’t watching it make you indignant? He was lying: he knew nothing, Jon Snow.) “Coronet Instructional Films.” Notice they just give instructions, not enlightenment or challenge. On and on and on, esp. on Friday afternoons when teachers are tired. All those classrooms with little chairs, accommodating the baby boom, boys obediently sharpening pencils (which can be weapons), seeming to be safe and happy.

These kids are the age when they don’t just attract abuse for crying and messing and failing to go to sleep. Now the sexual predators get interested, because the kid is old enough to ask why — “Why are you doing this?” as they ask in “Game of Thrones” and “American Odyssey”. We ask it all the time: why are you doing this? Because it’s so much fun to make you hurt. Because I can control you. Because it means I’m superior because I’m cynical.

from "American Odyssey"

There are escapes and compensations. Today the kids can slip away into tech worlds that adults can’t access. They can directly confront porn as extreme as it can get, crossing over into death. The boys in particular take refuge in movement: surfing, skate-boards, parcours. The adults object, “Oh, that’s too dangerous! Why don’t you go in for football where you will only get concussions or basketball where you will only blow out your knees? Or you could be a wrestler with a big important coach like Denny Hastert.” But the boys go free-form, and around here ride fast on horses, dogs running behind. Fathers say, “I know best. Get out of my house.” Around here you go stay with your auntie a while.

Dangerous is the knife that cuts both ways. One gets respect for beautiful danger, esp. if there’s singing. One can be a movie star. It’s a bit of protection, even in a time when as soon as the new “Star Wars” episode comes out, fans begin writing pornographic versions. It’s arousing. It’s a kick of adrenaline, the true addiction of our time.

Clever danger creates double-binds that guarantee results. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Tell about these semi-secret, sometimes marketable patterns, and you will be accused of knowing because of participation. (That was in “American Odyssey,” the movie I marathon-watched last night. The heroine survivor witnessed an American atrocity but the perps said she only survived because she was a collaborator. So much for patriotism.)

Don’t tell about the seething pit of violence under our society, and you are accused of being stupid, oblivious, uncaring. Nothing that can be cured by wearing a ribbon or even getting on the board of a nonprofit. So the first thing to do is accept the idea of being damned, but at least out of choice. Observe. Testify. Take the consequences. Which may be death, not even your own. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly. But with love. Because you can.