Slacker

Here's something I've never done before, actually writing about a movie while watching it, before it's even finished, but something tells me you can do that with this film. I should know. I'm a medical doctor. You should stop traumatizing women with sexual intercourse....

Just kidding. But really. Call it a slice of life. I have to call this one a slice of crap. Actually, it's really quite funny but probably not in the way it intends to be. This is the internet but without the computer. The paranoid rants, the aimless statistics, the guy selling t-shirts of Nelson Mandela, the kids stealing soda and trying to sell it. JFK assassination theories. Even the girl from the Butthole Surfers trying to sell Madonna's Pap Smear - what says eBay more than this? People wandering around, clicking from story to story, split second relationships, eavesdropping. Tons of wasted intellect. Is anything we learn in college worth knowing? (yes, I was a liberal arts major)

Says girl, "Thank you very much, ya know everyone else just thinks you're an asshole. The more I get to know you the more I just feel sorry for you."
Replies guy with spine,"I'm glad they think I'm an asshole. I don't think anyone who has ever done anything hasn't been considered an asshole by the general populace."
Finally someone I can sympathize with.

Profiles in cowardice, conspiracy a go-go. Are we really such chores to each other. Yeah, I guess we are.

This film doesn't go anywhere or do anything but hey, Nice GOaT! It's like Two-Lane Blacktop (which should definitely top the nihlist's to-see list of classics) but without all the car racing.

Double Dragon!!!!

"I know her, she was in my ethics class."

God, did we really drive so many junkers back then?

Pirate TV. Psychic TV. Digitized TV. Space Shuttle disaster looks like a scorpion carved out of clouds. Bad haircuts never go out of style. Everyone knows everyone but nobody knows who anybody is. Fucking hate Lyndon Johnson. Remember when people used to smoke? I've always hated smoking, yet I liked it better when everyone smoked. Give it up. Elvis is dead. Elvis was not a freemason. Squeaky Fromm should be on the dollar bill. Will they ever finish burying Gerald Ford or is his corpse going to run again in 2008?

This isn't anything like what I remember of the nineties. Although, licking stamps! That brings back memories. Forging blacklight stamps for freshmen in the dorm was the true beginning of my career as an artist.

Thank god I borrowed this one from the library and didn't have to pay anything for it. Sucks to be you that you had to read this.

Sorry. My parents weren't hippies.

I am not nor have ever been a slacker.

Ok, so maybe this was what it was like.

Discover the True Meaning of Christmas

Discover the True Meaning of Christmas

This seems to be the theme of the season, especially since “Merry Christmas” has smacked “Happy Holidays” about like Russel Crowe in the movie Gladiator. But what is the True Meaning of Christmas – aside from a shameless plug for a movie built around a nativity set?

It's actually gift giving.

Thousands of years before Christianity and known civilization, mankind invented the agricultural system and it in turn gave us the rhythm for all the holidays to follow. The gluttony of the autumn festival (now encompassed by Halloween and Thanksgiving) was designed to get people to turn as much of the late harvest into body fat as possible so as to survive the long winter. Easter, as a holiday celebrating self-sacrifice, conveniently comes along in early spring, a time when food reserves are at their lowest point and everyone needs to give of themselves and not be selfish for the community to survive. May day, although now primarily celebrated with high school proms and June weddings, was the time to procreate. Given that the average pregnancy takes nine months to complete, there was no better time in the agricultural system for children to be conceived September and October were the worst, hence the demonization of sexual urges during the autumn of the year. A woman who becomes pregnant in May could still work the fields during the summer, develop a heavy belly over the autumn when food is plentiful, be laid up and off her feet after the harvest is done, finally giving birth around the turn of January – which brings us to Christmas.

In the agricultural system, the Christmas season is unique. It's dark, cold, and surprisingly free of things to do. The family is shut in by the winter. To pass the time they fixed things and created handicrafts. Parents carved toys for the children, and may have used the veil of secrecy to get some private time for themselves. The practice of cutting down a tree and bringing it inside may have been a way of freshening the air. There was also the matter of birthdays and giving birth. The idea of a human breeding season is no joke. Ancient Rome once had a holiday in May which was tantamount to a week long public orgy, the whole purpose of which was to cause conception. Because of this, out of Christmas we also get the idea of the birthday party as well as the “start of the new year.” More ancient agricultural systems tend to begin the year in April to coincide with the first planting of the crops. It could be that the streamlining of mankind into the agricultural system eventually caused the bulk of all birthdays to occur at Christmas time, making that period not just the start of a new year for society but the start of a new year in the life of its favorite citizens (meaning those who flowed with the cycle and decided to have kids at the right time. On a symbolic side note: it's also no accident that September is marked by the sign Virgo the Virgin, or that June is presided over by Gemini which is considered the unluckiest of signs, and then followed by the only two true mythological monsters of the zodiac – Cancer and Leo – both of whom opposed and were defeated by Hercules. The zodiac is nothing celestial, it was the calendar before calendars were invented. The signs symbolized not so much the personalities of the people born under them, but the personality of the month itself.)

So in the Agricultural system, long before Christ and Saturnalia (and all the other holidays different cultures have created their own names for and superimposed on the season), you have this phenomenon where a bulk of people are being born and recognizing the passage of another year, and giving homespun gifts to one another – largely to show their love and the comforting feeling of being cared about, to realize that you exist on other people's minds and not just your own.

Then along comes Jesus.

In truth, we don't know when Jesus was born or when he died. The man himself, as well known as he is, is actually shrouded in quite an amount of factual mystery. However, like all celebrity, it's not so much the man as the myth – the story we've built around the man – that matters. Jesus is our divine savior here to free us from sin. Normally any conversation with the devout ends right there. I see Jesus as important to society because he is our role model for the perfect citizen. He's not a warrior. He's not a politician. He's a commoner (although not too common). He works with his hands, is kind and caring, and represents the best that we commoners can hope to aspire to in life (sans family - possibly, maybe, ask Mr. Da Vinci). Jesus is not going to be born in July or August – both named for Roman Caesars. Jesus is going to be born in December along with the bulk of society so they can better relate to him. He is also going to die for our sins in the early spring to inspire us at our weakest moments to stay social and tough it out. The spring has a dark side, both March and April are named for Mars and Ares the Greco-Roman gods of war. By no coincidence most wars, especially brutal wars of acquisition and genocide, are begun at this time (The American Revoluton, The American Civil War, The Bosnian War, The Rwandan Genocide, and The Invasion of Iraq). The spring is a time of selfish assertion, a time when people are weak to the idea of pillaging their neighbors, killing them off and stealing what meager foodstuffs they have left to live on. So the church needs society to accept Jesus as a role model at Christmas time, and society needs everyone else to accept Jesus as a role model at Easter time. It provides for a smoothly running and relatively conflict free civilization.

The problem is that it's not exactly working. To some degree I feel for the church. They desperately want us to, “accept Jesus into our lives,” which is a frau-frau lace-gilt way of saying, “we need you to make Jesus your role model.” Yet what they get is the support usually given to football teams – Rah! Rah! Rah! Win! Win! Win! Go Team Go! Kill Them All! Send them Home! Or they get a lot of people who jump through all the Christian hoops so as to take advantage of the social implications, and yet leave all the actual practice of Christian values to the commoners. A case in point – as well as one of the reasons I'm writing this evening – Ethiopia, the second oldest Christian nation in the world, a country with no separation of church and state yet a nasty reputation for starving little kids by the thousands, spent this morning dropping bombs on Somali airports sparking off yet another war against the forces of Islam. WWJD? Don't even make me start with Dubya, our most Christian of Presidential leaders. I think this is why any discussion of Christianity is so ripe for inducing cringes, because it often seems that its staunchest defenders are it biggest problems, that be being so deep in the reference they miss the most basic of points. Jesus was not a warrior. Christmas is a time for giving gifts, a time for showing people that we care for them and that they are so deeply entrenched in our thoughts that we knew what to get them without even asking (or were kinda lame and got a gift certificate – hey, it's better that nothing.) Christmas is not a time for dropping bombs. And for the people who claim quite fervently that Christ is their one and only savior, there is never a time for dropping bombs.

Peace on Earth.

Good Will to Men.

Science vs. Religion vs. Vanity

Ever get the feeling that so much attention is being heaped on Evolution vs. Creationism that we forget the real war between Science and Religion? It almost seems as if a smoke screen has been set up to keep people away from the larger issue at hand. Or perhaps the war between Science and Religion is such a simplistic one that it is generally avoided? No matter how you feel it cannot be denied that Evolution vs. Creationism has amounted to millions of book sales, awards, and grants both public and private. But what about those of us who simply want an answer and could care less about rooting for one side or another? Well. Here's mine.

The war of Science vs. Religion is all actuality a war between what we have discovered vs. what we have been told.

What we have been told.... In a broad societal sense, religion is the parent to the child of man. Unlike real parents, it never grows old, it never appears weak or unenlightened, it claims its authority from no less a power than that of God himself – that is of course - so long as you believe everything religion says about itself, which is why religion tells us so much. Like a good parent, religion tells us how to get by in the world. The tribalists were concerned with hunting and gathering in a tribal setting. The polytheists were concerned with living from the meager means of early agriculture. The monotheists were and still are concerned with political survival inside an empire. Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not kill, etc..., the Ten Commandments are very good advice for those living inside a civilization. They are not so good for the hunter/gatherer living outside of it, someone whose existence may depend on the ability to kill and steal from those outside the tribe. But does conflicting advice make the big three (tribalism, polytheism, and monotheism) completely unrelated? Of course not, they are in the business of compiling the advice a society has collected over the years, editing out the questionable stuff and distributing it amongst the faithful. Just like bread, the wheat grows up, the seed is separated from the chaff, ground into flour and baked into something edible.

The problem with religion is that just because it fulfills a parental role on the grand scale, this does not make it a good parent. Like a bad parent, religion often lies to its children, it weasels its way around awkward truths, it provides a shelter which ultimately becomes a prison, and it can even become abusive when the child doesn't do what it says. The worst sin of religion however is vanity, not just self-adoration but the need to keep that appearance of agelessness and infallibility The worse thing to ever happen to Christianity was the printing press. Before Gutenbergs interesting device, Christianity could change with the times and the regions in sly ways no one but the clergy themselves might pick up on. After the fifteenth century and the mass-production of the Bible, as well as its translation into foreign languages like English and German, all hell breaks loose. The Bible was a mirror religion had to look at itself in and see just how far from an ideal state it had strayed. The warfare of the sixteen century was basically Christianity hitting the gym to appeal to this vanity. Unfortunately millions of people were maimed, killed and tortured in the process.

As the tellers of truth and the dispensers of communal warmth, Religion does provide a necessary service for maintaining civilization (or at least attempts to, capitalizes on?). Society needs a parent just as much as a child needs a parent. Unfortunately, religions are human constructs and the claim of infallibility is hardly infallible


What we have discovered.... In response to the parent of religion, science is the eternal child. It knows what religion has told it to believe, but it really wants to find out the truth for itself. It won't believe anything until it witnesses it in a material sense, and it revels in discovering the untruths its parents have told it. Where the parent of religion sees God in itself and is closed to any knowledge which might change this perspective. The child of science sees God in experience and is incredibly open-minded to what the universe has to offer. Unfortunately, imagination is not science's strong point and its brattiness is ingratiating. Science locks itself up in the material world and adamantly refuses to ponder anything outside of it. The more religion pushes the more science retaliates – until finally atheism results, which is science saying, “you're wrong because you're a big poopy head, and I'm going to hold my breath until you admit there is no God.”

What science often misses, largely because of this math-camp mentality, is that it's own knowledge is expanding and that an experiment performed in 1906 may not produce the same result in 2006 because of the change in analytical technology. Once upon a time we didn't know about X-rays, we couldn't perceive X-rays, and any theory about them would have been laughed at. Now no trip to the dentist is complete without one. Science suffers from a different kind of vanity. It is humiliated by having to utter the phrase, “I don't know,” and bases its self-worth on knowing all there is to know and being rock-solid with the facts. While it prizes open-mindedness, it also has a nasty habit of closing itself off to any possibility that might tarnish the golden construct of knowledge it has erected in its head.

So what needs to be done? To some degree nothing, in our age the war between science and religion has done nothing but make people rich. Of course, this is only because here in the USA we still have a separation of church and state. Once Corporate Christianity breaks down this wall – then you can start keeping a body count. On the whole though, it might be nice to get a little less vanity from both parties. Both should really stop believing they know all there is to know.

In the natural world, children grow up to become echoes – not complete duplicates – of their parents. In the process changes are made to help the family cope with our ever changing world. Sociologically, we have parents who never change and children who refuse to grow up – maybe this is good place to start.

Reincarnationism

I'm Catholic by birth, a Half-Cath, as in I only believe about 50% of what I hear in church, yet I keep going to Mass every weekend because it keeps the family happy and it keeps the congregation happy, which in turn keeps me happy. And when everyone is happy no one gets burned for being a witch.

But. What of the other 50% I believe in that doesn't jive with the church's teachings? That's too much to cover in a single essay, yet this past Saturday (I go for the night Mass) I found myself ruminating over one of my biggest points of derision – namely what happens after we die. I don't believe in either Heaven, Hell, Purgatory or Oblivion - not as they are currently taught – I do however believe in reincarnation and heavenly or hellish states of existence. This is nothing new. It's an idea I've been batting about since the early 90's. One thing I've yet to come up with is a name for the phenomenon. Originally, I thought about calling it Catholic-Buddhism, but I have problems with Buddhism too (Half-Budd? Nahh, wouldn't fly with the Rastafarians). Instead, I found myself fixated on the term Reincarnationism, thus making me a Reincarnationist. Ok, ok, a Catholic-Reincarnationist.

What are the tenets are Reincarnationism? First and foremost, shovel all your Shirley Maclaine new agey ideas out the door. Who you were in a past life is not important. What's important is who you are and who you may become. Unlike Hinduism there is no transmigration of souls from a lower state (insects) to a higher state (Bradgelina). Unlike Buddhism there no “freedom from self” to be lusted after (how does one desire to be free from desires anyway?). Quite simply, every living creature is made up of three aspects: a physical Body, a pattern of being or Soul (aka Personality), and an eternal spark of awareness or Spirit. In death they split. The dead body decays, the freed spirit seeks another body to inhabit, and the soul? Actually it's hard to say what happens to the soul, maybe the spirit carries something of it along to the new life, maybe it seeks out circumstances which promise to provide something like the last life, or maybe the soul dies when we do and only lives on through the influence we had on the culture we left behind. The fact of the matter is that we are all born (or reborn) with a Tabula Rasa, with no bankable a priori knowledge. This is actually quite important, especially if you died with massive credit card debt.

Where Heaven and Hell come into play is with the possibility that there is some kind of universal pattern of justice woven into the matter that causes us to come back into something like the circumstances we left behind. Take for instance the Middle East, which currently is a flaming hell hole of religious intolerance, perpetrated largely by gun toting idiots who are convinced that the next stop after death is Heaven. Surprise! No, they don't go to Hell, but they do get born back into a war-torn society of their own making, which currently is placing a close second to Dante's Inferno. Here in America we ride on the accomplishments of those who came before us and are riding high on a Heavenly existence, yet we suffer from sloth and greed so there's no telling how long this wave of prosperity will last.

Note that I said one comes back into the same circumstance as the last life, not an exact copy of the last life. When rain falls from a cloud it doesn't care where it hits, just so long as the droplets fall. A Jew could come back as an Arab, a Man as a Woman, a Pauper as a Noble, Black or White or anywhere in between. It doesn't make a lick of difference to the natural world, so the chance of it happening in the spiritual world is just as likely as it is not. This is why Reincarnationists are kind to strangers, tolerant of differences, and always interested in doing what is best for everyone involved. It's not because there is some angel on a cloud writing down all of our actions, judging whether we are worthy of Heaven in the afterlife. It's because behind every strangers face, no matter how old or strange, there could reside the spirit of someone we once knew and loved. Reincarnationists do not turn a blind eye to genocide, pollution or third-world sweatshops because there is always a chance that we or someone we knew might be born into the sad end of genocide, pollution or third-world sweatshops. As I said before, it is actually quite important that we don't know what exactly happens after we die. We might come back as our own great grandchildren. We might come back as a member of that family down the street. Currently the big looming horror on the world stage is Global Warming. If the oceans grow warm and acidic and start to bubble with bacterial born hydrogen sulfide it could mean the end of life as we know it. I have no clue what would happen then. Maybe we all come back to life as cockroaches or planaria. This might not be bad, just so long as we don't have to live with the knowledge of once being great and mighty human beings. Although I've never asked one, cockroaches don't seem to have any problem whatsoever with being cockroaches.

To a Reincarnationist, the here-after is the here-and-now. Heaven and Hell are states of being largely dependent on the sum total of what we as a whole have done with our many lives (as well as what we are currently doing with this one).

There is no Us and Them. There is only Us. And that is eternal.

English as a National Language

Why do you hate foreigners?

I don't hate foreigners.

Why do you hate Latinos?

I don't hate Latinos.

Then why do you want English as a national language?

Funny you should ask!

The answer has very little to do with me and my tastes, and everything to do with how humanity uses language – often without realizing it – as a tool of demarcation. Before the twentieth century with its highway boom and satellite maps, a traveler basically knew he had crossed out of one country and into another because of the change in languages. Everyone in the small country town is speaking German, therefore I must be in Germany. Of course, this was rarely accurate. The small town could be in Austria or Switzerland, but the important point is that the people were not speaking French. One region had changed into another, and if our traveler happened to be a downed Allied pilot during WWI or WWII – it meant all the difference in the world.

Nowadays, we have borders, checkpoints, road signs and coastlines to give us a physical reminder of what country we are in. We have also retained many of the old traditions of yesteryear, namely flags and currency and iconic figures on display wherever we can get away with displaying them. The flag, most importantly, is not just a symbol of rulership – it is rulership. The raising of the Flag is the defining moment of the battle of Iwo Jima. The end of the space race came when we planted a flag on the Moon before the Russians. A few months ago I was traveling through the small town of Perry, Florida (north central Florida) and was very disturbed to find a Confederate Flag flying on its own over a community ballpark. Closer investigation showed that the flag was not on public land but a small private plot which just happened to be out in front of a large swath of public land and - according to the plaque at its base - standing as a reminder of the fallen heroes of the Civil War. Um. Yeah. Right. The message it was sending out and the values they implied were loud and clear. This wasn't the Duke boys with the Rebel Flag painted on the roof of the General Lee (something I've always seen as the actual token love of the South which most flyers of the Confederate Flag purport to have). Instead the flag over the ballpark said, “We rule here. This town is under the domain of the Old Dominion, and you will respect our authoreeettay.”

The whole situation could have been made better by flying the Stars and Stripes above it, thereby showing an allegiance to the Union as well as reverence for the south. It might have even been best to simply replace the Confederate Flag with the American Flag (after all, this is the USA, right?), however doing so might conflict with how the townsfolk view themselves as citizens (they are freedom loving Americans, right?). There is a lot to be said for flags, yet on a completely different angle the flag also shows just how easy it is to turn the control of a region over from one ruling power to another. Rulership is really quite superficial. Remove the table dressing of flags and statues and it's hard to tell what country one is in.

Until someone opens there mouth and speaks.

Flags require fabric, dyes, and a broad dependable system of communication - things we have not always had in this world. For the thousands of years before they became readily available, there was language. You could cut people's tongues out or hang them in droves yet you could never really stop the unifying force of language. While this may sound like a good thing, providing stability in a topsy turvy world, it's also important to realize just how solid and unyielding a barrier language presents. Quick. If any of the provinces of Canada were to secede and become its own country, which would it be? Nunavut? Saskatchewan? The answer is of course Quebec, the only province in Canada which has French as its provincial language (all the rest use English), and the only one with a running history of trying to leave Canada. Why? Because they speak French and the rest of Canada speaks English and that alone makes them feel as if they should be a different country. It's only natural. In the 1970's it even hatched its own terrorist organization the FLQ. They wanted separation from the country. I wonder if there's ever been a terrorist group which has wanted unification with a larger country? It always seems to be a matter of separation when dealing with terrorists.

The only real way to defeat the territorialism which is deeply entrenched in language is by getting people to speak one language over another. This can be done the nice gentle way, by teaching it in the schools and proclaiming it to be the national language. Or it can be done at gun point, a tactic which has never worked, yet has been tried as a desperate fix for a long ignored problem. In a sense it's like getting people to agree to fly the American Flag above the Confederate Flag (or Mexican Flag or French Flag or McDonalds Flag....) on the flag pole in their minds. Dominance is an ugly business, and someday it will be nice to live in a world without borders, one where people can expect the same fair treatment worldwide. Not an Empire, such as what we have now where all the torture you need can be outsourced to a seedy corner of the Soviet Bloc, places whose only other exports are porn and heroin, but a one world nation where both industries and governments need to abide by a single set of minimum wage laws and environmental regulations no matter what corner of the globe they run to (sorry about the tangent, it's just a small dream I have :-)

But until then! We do need a banner to at least show the incredibly simple minded among us that we are an actual us and not just a loose collection of them. If you go farther south on the Florida peninsula you will encounter more small towns where nothing but Spanish is spoken. They may fly American flags there, but how do you think a game of baseball would go against the community leagues of Perry? Would the Latinos agree to play on a field which has nothing but a Confederate Flag flying over it? Would the rednecks play in a game where the other team doesn't speak any English and the referees have to say everything in two different languages?

On the whole, life in the country would be better for everyone if we all agreed to speak the same language and be a little more sensible about what we choose to run up a flag pole. It would also make for a much better game of baseball.

Druids, Nature, Halloween and Harmony

Believe it or not, druids did exist before Dungeons & Dragons. Yet it was through the game that most people encountered them. It was also through D&D that the druid became usurped by the iconic figure of the stoned-out hippie, babbling blissfully about hugging oak trees and harvesting mistletoe as opposed to going to see Phish and sucking down quarts of Ben & Jerrys. There's nothing in the game to point to this, but somehow it happened. It was something we needed.

In truth, the druids were a fearsome lot. They were the polytheistic high-priests of agriculture. Unlike the future high-priests of society which would replace them, first by Roman Paganism and then by Christianity, the focus of their religion was not individual sanctity and collective self worship, it was the simple matter of getting the plants to grow. The druids probably secretly hated nature. Early agriculture was miserable. It was riddled with pestilence, fraught with drought and thick with the fear of a bad harvest. When it yielded a bounty, the results were often quite unimpressive. Imagine trying to coerce primitive hunter/gatherers to give up the wandering existence they have followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to leave behind the reindeer meat steaks they love so well, and do back breaking labor in a mud pit for the promise of a few bags of lentils. Um. Yeah, right. If we were meant to spend our lives stooped over pulling weeds God (or the Gods) would have given us stubby little legs. As it is, I'm gonna go spear me a Caribou and accomplish in a few hours what you and your aggreeecultour takes a whole year to make.

Yet, it needed to be done. While the orchard and apiary predate the farm, cities cannot stand on apples and honey alone. They need a constant dependable supply of high-yield grain. Wheat, barley, lentils and beans were all intentionally cultivated by man from grass for this purpose. Corn, tomatoes and pumpkins were once the stuff of dreams. No modern vegetable would come about on its own accord – which is another way of saying “they wouldn't happen naturally.” So you have the druids, worshiping the gods of nature not out of love but fear. They used human sacrifice as both a representation of what the gods of nature expect from them and as a way of terrorizing society into line. This ultimately would lead to their own undoing and explain the popularity of early Christianity. Even though we often worship the forces we stand at the mercy of, we also aspire to emulate that which we worship. People wanted a god which loved them like a parent, Christianity provided it while Paganism dropped the ball. The druids knew the natural world. They knew it as a fickle, selfish monster - a dragon - which thought nothing of releasing a cloud of locusts to wipe out a town or village with famine. The idea of a loving god was about as alien to their world as the idea of civilized living was to the hunter/gatherers they tamed into farmers. A sleepy and appeased god at the time of Samhain was the best one could hope for.

Which brings a bushel and a peck of irony to the idea that druids should be tied by the modern mind to the hippie. The iconic hippie is also a nature worshiper, but one who does so out of love not fear. They pick daisies and string them through their hair. They bathe in forest streams and bask naked in the sun. The world is alive and everything is groovy. Of course, the hippie is about as natural as a twinkie. The hippie is a reactionary caused by the septic abuses of modern society and empowered by the prosperity of living in a first world nation. They love nature, just so long as the forest primeval somewhere has a microwave oven which can reheat a frozen burrito.

Have you ever wondered while kids love Halloween and almost instinctively climb trees? Neither make much sense to adults. They are both hold-overs from the days of Australopithecus, when we were more often hunted than hunters. We have found caves in Africa which are filled with the tiny fossilized skulls, initially leading anthropologists to believe our early ancestors were cannibals. While not entirely ruling out the possibility, the presence of other bones – notably that of the saber toothed cat – has since led them to believe that we were actually the morsel of choice on the big cat's dinner plate; that the caves were the cat's dens and only the skulls remain because they couldn't be easily eaten. The cats hunted us and primarily sought out our children. Humanity only survived by becoming very adept at quickly climbing trees, and by developing a hair-trigger adrenalin-fueled fight or flight response – especially in kids. This is what the orange and black side of Halloween is all about. Kids love horror, spookiness and a hair raising fright because to them it is a part of getting back to nature. Granted, this is a natural world which no longer exists (for the most part), yet it is far more real than the one their parents dream about while sitting in a cubicle behind a computer.

Which – believe it or not – finally brings us around to why I started writing in the first place. Nature. The word has been popping up all over the news like dandelions on a freshly mowed lawn. In todays Sunday paper I read an article about modern kids developing NDD or Nature Deficit Disorder (“The Broken Bond” by Kathy Baughman McLeod ). They don't get out and climb trees or wander through the forest the way they use to, and now they're getting fat and lazy and unable to focus on anything. I don't doubt it. However, I am getting tired of people talking about Nature as if it is a good thing. In 2005, hurricanes nearly gutted the Gulf coast. An early snowfall a few weeks ago downed trees and brought Buffalo to a screeching halt. Wind storms this morning knocked out power all along the east coast from Maine to Rhode Island. Elsewhere around the globe there have been killer heatwaves in Europe, Tsunamis in the Orient, and god knows what else.

Nature is not a nice thing.

Yet, I still consider myself to be both an environmentalist and a conservationist. I do so out of interest in defending the word which should really be used while people are rattling on about Nature, and that word is Harmony. You're not getting back to Nature when you go camping, you're getting back to Harmony. It's a harmony with that side of us which was fine-tuned through countless generations to a hunter/gathering existence. We are not as modern as we seem. Look at the perfect diet to build the perfect body and you will find nuts and berries with small amounts of meat; just what the hunter/gatherers use to eat – with no breads, complex vegetables, processed food or fruit juices anywhere. That's harmony. It's not a harmony with what seems platonically correct (otherwise we'd all be vegetarians) but with what humanity has made of itself. Kids should get out more and climb more trees, just as parents should not be so dismayed by violent entertainment. Both provide a safe and social way for people to achieve harmony with their biological beasts while at the same time living as citizens in a largely non-harmonious and wholly unnatural modern world.

To achieve Harmony, nature needs to be both respected and controlled. Global-warming needs to be stopped, yet the environment should not be treated like a sacred cow. If a technology can be found to control the temperature level of the planet (and it can be kept out of the hands of Dr. Evil), then the global thermostat should be used to best regulate life for the bulk of humanity. To some degree it is good to see nature as the druids saw nature. The real druids. The Earth may give us life, but it is also quite adept at taking it away. Nature is neither caring nor ethical nor in the least bit sympathetic. At heart it is perverse and self-centered. Like a lion in the darkness, it will eat your children if you let it.

Harmony is something different.

Happy Halloween Kids!

Connotation and Denotation

Back in college, Delhi to be exact, I actually remember the day when I learned the word connotation. It was in October, and I spent the whole walk from the classroom back to the dormitory thinking about the implications of it. By way of the dictionary, connotation means “the associated or secondary meaning of a word or expression in addition to its explicit or primary meaning: A possible connotation of “home” is “a place of warmth, comfort, and affection.”” Denotation is just the opposite. It is the primary definition of a word “home is a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.” Yet, it is important not to be tricked into thinking that denotation is the first definition in a dictionary and connotation encompasses all the extra definitions, like a baggage handler for rare extrapolations. There are at least thirty different definitions for the word home. We can’t expect connotation to carry them all!
Connotation is best boiled down to the phrase, “what a word really means,” which in a perverse sense of logic is actually a connotation of the word connotation. We humans hate to have words which mean more than one thing. It opens up the possibility of being misunderstood by the people we communicate with. At the same time, words are not as airy and ephemeral as they appear to be. They carry weight, and it takes work to pick them up. A very small percentage of the world knows what it means to be ephemeral, and quite frankly, if I hadn’t tacked on the word airy a few sentences back statistically even fewer people would have a clue as to what I just wrote. So. We tack extra definitions onto the words people already know. The world hates this, and remedies the situation by skipping the denotation and capitalizing on its most poignant elements.
What separates a fruit drink from a cocktail? It’s the presence of alcohol. It can be just a trace 3%, yet that spike of vodka completely changes the drink. It changes the attitude brought towards the drink, the acceptance of the drink in social circles, the simple ability to get the drink if you’re under 21, and let us not forget that you will probably have to pay two to three times what it is actually worth to get one at the bar. Is a unicorn masculine or feminine? If they actually existed they would need to have male and female members to keep on as a species, yet through countless successful marketing campaigns as well as a popular mythological background, the unicorn is about as feminine as it gets. Low-riders, are they Chicano, Anglo, Oriental, Black, or Eskimo? In truth they are just glitzed-out hot-rods with hydraulic suspensions, yet anyone asked off –camera who knew of low-riders would have to peg them as Chicano. They could have been embraced by any culture, but Latin culture got there first and/or made the most of it, so now it’s considered theirs.
Now what would you say if you saw me driving down the street in a cherry-flake low-rider with a unicorn sipping a pina colada in the back seat? You probably wouldn’t say anything, maybe look, point and laugh, but inside there would also be a mix of wonder and revulsion. As adults we connotate people, boiling them down to “who they really are,” finding the mold which fits them best and considering all deviations from this pattern to be a contamination of sorts, which is a part of the corruption of old age. Children are not tuned in to cultural patterns and do not think in systems of thought. For a short time they are the ultimate denotators. They are the ones who actually see things as they are and value them intrinsically. Which is not to connotate that connotation is evil. It is to say that connotation is a necessary evil brought on by the bulk of knowledge which comes with adulthood and the Herculean task of sorting it all out, which also goes to explain culture. No matter what kind of noun one is dealing with (person, place or thing!) whether it is accepted as a decent, non-contaminating, part of ones culture depends on the amount (sometimes even trace amount) of radical, polarizing ideals or ownership which allows it to fit in. This also explains the rigidity which comes with both old established cultures and old established people. Purity comes from rejection and is associated with cleanliness – which is fine, providing ones world never changes (another goal of culture, religion and government which will addressed at some later time), however the world is constantly changing, and living without studying its vast creations is like trying to develop an immune system by living in a hermetically sealed bubble. Not only does one miss out on the possibility of discovering something new and powerful, but one also opens oneself up to calamity by not correctly identifying and learning to deal with what might cause harm.
Which is yet another reason to keep on learning. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have to go hop in my low rider and drive my unicorn to his AA meeting. Class dismissed.