The Acolyte

If God is revealing himself to us through his creation and only a chosen few can hear his voice, then surely R. P. Feynman is one of his acolytes.

He saw the word of God, understood its meaning and translated it into words understandable by us all.

Powerful stuff indeed the secrets of elemental energy. Godlike even.

We spoke these words and Lo! 166,000 people were vaporized.

To show the doubting Thomas’s among us that this was indeed the real deal,  3 days later we spoke again and vaporized another 80,000, because even Christ had people who did not believe his godlike powers

Powerful indeed the word of God and sublime the intellect of Feynman.

Using it to kill nearly a quarter of a million people out of spite was the work of neither God nor Feynman.

That was just a human thing.

I can see Andromeda with my two eyes.

I have more than the average number of eyes; I have 1.5 x 10^-11 square miles of pupil to let in the light. I have better than average eyesight; I can see for about 2.5 million (2.5 x 10⁶) light years on a clear night. The Sun pumps out 1.28 x 10⁴⁵ photons a second and radiates equally in all directions. Of all the light reaching earth, only 73% hits the ground, and of this only 45% of this is so-called visible light. From 93 million miles away, even if I stared at the Sun directly, I’d only get 4.9 octllionths (4.9 x 10^-27) of the benefit, of which I could detect about 2.2 octillionths.

I only need about 5 photons to hit my retina to perceive light, about 100,000 (10⁵) to be able to discern an image, and 28 million (28 x 10⁶) to see in high resolution.

For each second I were to stare at the Sun I would ‘see’ (although not for very long) about 6.3 x 10¹⁶ photons, or 2.6 billion times more than I need.

I see through two holes in my head, each about 5 millimeters in diameter. My eyes are sensitive enough to detect about 5 photons, but on a sunny day I can get 63 quadrillion more than that. That's just through two holes with a combined surface area of about 40 square millimeters.

Imagine you are now outside your body, in a realm where you do not need eyes to detect the light all around you.

As far as I can see, including that which I cannot see, it’s pretty bright out there.

The Day After Independence Day

Scene: Underground in Area 51. The Alien Invasion has been repulsed, mankind is victorious. Civilization is in ruins, but mankind survives in sufficient numbers for civilization to continue. Pres. Whitmore, General Grey are walking past large underground holding pens where a number of aliens have been captured and corralled. They are milling like cattle, it looks like an alien scene from District 13. They are stranded, isolated and miles from home with no way back.

President Whitmore: “Bill, this is not a crèche for displaced aliens, we cannot live alongside these creatures – I have seen their mind. Why are we rounding them up and actually bringing them into the center of what is now effectively the Executive Office of US Government?”

They walk into a large conference room that used to be the command center. Communications have been partially restored; the large monitors that previously vectored our forces into combat against the alien menace are taking live feeds from around the world. It’s partially YouTube clips, home video, news broadcasts and military intelligence. The scenes are mayhem. Yahoos in monster trucks are rampaging across open plains with assault rifles, automatic shotguns and bazookas. They are driving surviving aliens before them and indulging their lust for righteous revenge by blasting them wholesale. Other clips show aliens strung up from trees, being dragged behind cars, and stacked up in concentration camp like mounds and being burned. Mankind is jubilant and slaking its bloodlust, the fact that the blood is green means that there is no word of protest – everyone agrees that this is great sport, justifiable and good TV. In increasing numbers, human avengers are seen wielding alien weaponry, blasting ‘green shit’ at everything in sight, smoking alien spaceships, shattered human buildings, fleeing aliens, everything except each other – for now.

Gen. Grey: “Tom, the battle for mankind was yesterday, this” gestures at the video screens “is today. If you want to get out there and mix it up with everyone else, that’s fine, but tomorrow, someone needs to start running things around here, and it may as well be you.”

Pres. Whitmore: “OK, point taken, but I ain’t speaking to those little green bastards no more if that’s what you have in mind – it gives me a headache”

Gen. Grey: “No, not them, there’s some other people I want you to speak to, and they are experts in removing headaches”

Gen. Grey presses an intercom button and says: “Gentlemen, the President would like to see you now”

Into the conference room file a small group of men in discreet but immaculate black suits. They are well groomed and professional. It’s particularly impressive considering the chaotic state all around and the fact that everyone else, including the President is either tieless and in shirtsleeves or in combat fatigues.

They assemble themselves around a conference table and when everyone is seated, Gen. Grey says: “Proceed”

MIB 1: Stands and speaks: “Democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun. Yesterday, the guns we had were useless. It took a redneck flying up the sphincter of a mothership to defeat these people. We got lucky. Since the crash, alien ordnance has been raining down out of the sky. It’s advanced, potent and freely available. All you need do is walk outside and pick it up. That is what is happening. We are at a new dawn in human existence. We are Moon Watcher. There was a measurable period between him smashing a pig’s brain in with a rock and figuring out that he could do this to other humanoids. We are in that period. And We” Gestures to the other black suits around the table “We are the people who have figured out what to do next”.

Pres. Whitmore: “Since you boys are so smart, why are you sharing this information with me?”

MIB 1: “We’re patriots. The big thing with patriotism is where your allegiances lie. Those little green men outside in the cattle pens are all patriots too, but they are on the losing side. Yesterday, we – us, me, YOU”
(points at the president)
“- We, we won. Tomorrow, we – me, us”
motions to the other black suits
”want to keep on winning. YOU”
(points at the president)
“want to stay on the winning side too, don’t you?”

Pres. Whitmore: “I’m still President, I’d like a little respect”

MIB 1: “Fair enough, but you are President by about this much”
Holds fingers about ¼ inch apart
“and looking at the scenes outside, your tenure is, how shall we say, tenuous. You have about this long”
Holds fingers about ¼ inch apart
“before we – me, us, and maybe you, maybe not - are having this conversation with the next Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden or Muammar Kaddafi. We’re a whole lot more respectful than those guys, don’t you think – after all they are just like the nasty green motherfuckers outside, they wanted you dead.”

Pres. Whitmore: “Right you are, my tenure is uncertain, and my sphere of authority is limited. Right now, it’s limited to this room and General Grey is packing. I’ve had a busy couple of days, I want a shower and some sleep. You have about this long”
Holds fingers ¼ inch apart
“to get to the fucking point before I have General Grey round you up and toss you in with those nasty green motherfuckers, how you like them apples?”

Gen. Grey: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen – these are difficult times, we’re all fraught, why don’t you just share your thoughts with us”

Grey, acting as the pacifier, walks behind the President where Whitmore cannot see him, but glares pointedly at MIB 1, draws his finger across his throat and stabs it silently at MIB 1. MIB 1 holsters his dick, and a nearly indistinguishable MIB 2 stands up and takes over.

MIB 2: “Right now, everyone is having a real jolly time running around killin’ aliens, but they are in short supply. When the alien turkey shoot stops, you are going to have a lot of hungry, armed and disorganized idiots standing around staring at each other wondering what to do next. That’s just domestically. Right now everyone has their hands full, and it’s happening globally – when the rest of the planet reaches this hiatus, it’s going to take them about this long”
Holds his fingers ¼ inch apart
“to remember who their previous fave targets were, and up until 3 days ago, it was us – you, me, US - America”

MIB 3: “The freely available cache of alien weapons is a problem, people are scared, they ain’t going to give them up, but all we know right now is that they work – we don’t know how they work, how they are powered, how to maintain them, how to manufacture more ammo. Those nasty green motherfuckers do.”

MIB 4: “The NGM population is rapidly diminishing. We know that they can thrive on Earth, that’s why they came here. We know that we can kill them, that’s what we are doing right now. Getting knowledge from a dead alien is like getting blood from a stone. We don’t want them in our living room, they smell bad, but we have centuries of experience of locking people away in impregnable fortresses and torturing them until they give us what we want, and killing them when they don’t – actually, killing them when they do too. We’ve always been a little squeamish about this because people get all exercised about human rights etc. Well, these NGM ain’t human, and I don’t see no support groups springing up anytime real soon. Noxious as these NGM are, they are the goose that laid the golden egg right now.”

MIB 3: “It’s not just weapons, they have advanced transportation and interstellar drive systems, force fields, spacecraft and detailed knowledge of what it takes to live and travel in space. They also know where they came from, and what else is out there that can support life forms that have biological needs just like us.”

MIB 2: “More than just a source of advanced knowledge, they represent a work force. Since they are so interested in earth, we can get them out in gangs burying the dead and generally cleaning up all the chaos they have caused. We have a lot of experience at handling slaves”

President Whitmore: “These are all valid viewpoints, good considerations. How would something like this work?”

MIB 1: Seeing that the President is warming to the idea, and pressing his point in a more placatory way: “You, sir, have momentum. You are the titular leader of the nation, a warrior king that fought with his people and led the nation, nay, the WORLD to victory over the NGM menace. You have the communications channels, you have all the remaining conventional military equipment at your disposal, and you have a populace that need food, shelter and leadership. They are not going to stop the killing until there’s no more NGM to kill, they will not be sympathetic to our cause of rounding up survivors and keeping them at Gitmo. While they are distracted they don’t need much, but they are killing all the NGM, gathering up anything that shoots green shit, and blasting everything else. When the fun stops, they are going to need help. They don’t realize it yet, but YOU do. We need to mobilize the military, get them out among the populace and handing out MRE’s, building shelters, and telling them that YOU are making all this happen. The weapons we have right now are obsolete, and the military has loads of them. Break out supplies and put them in the hands of the people. When the alien stuff stops shooting, they ain’t going to know what to do. Everyone in America knows how to use an assault rifle. Start an exchange program, 10 assault weapons for each alien shooter, working or not. Under the auspices of public works, begin the clean up immediately, but have the military lead it, and focus on gleaning every last piece of alien technology and bringing it back to us before the population at large blows it all to kingdom come. Make no attempts to stop people killing the NGM, it keeps them happy and occupied, but let the military know that they are to round up and NOT kill any survivors, and to put word out that there are places surviving NGM can go to stay alive. By doing this you A – concentrate alien technology and personnel in our hands, and B take care of the human needs to keep killing foremost, and find food and shelter after that. Promote the second point publicly through the media, and don’t say anything about the first point.”

President Whitmore (turning to Gen Grey): “You know, Bill, I like it – I like it in principle at least, start ridding the countryside of reminders of the alien menace, and feeding and sheltering our fragmented and disorganized populace. I think we should get started, the people need leadership in these uncertain times.”

MIB 1: “With your permission, sir”

President Whitmore: “Yes?”

MIB 2: “We already have the mobilization orders for the armed forces, they are awaiting your command. They are sitting on their hands right now, wondering what we are going to do next, and champing at the bit to get out their and ‘whup ET’s ass'. They are disciplined, they ain’t going to get out there right away and start blasting, but it’s just a matter of time, We need to get them active, give them orders to follow. We need to share parts of the plan, not everything mind you, with the military leadership – there’s logistics, mobilization, a whole lot that needs doing. It will give our boys something to do, orders to follow, but it’s going to take time. Immediately, you need to start addressing the Nation – leadership in wartime type stuff – reassure the people. Let them know that you share their suffering – you lost your wife, that type of stuff – let them know that you are in control, let them know that you are going to be taking care of their needs – food, shelter, leadership. Let them know to expect the military, and prepare them for what will be going on – clean up of toxic alien artifacts, allude to the fact that that green shit is leaking out everywhere and fucking up the planet, and you are just doing biohazard remediation, looking out for them, that type of thing. Focus on the food and shelter and reinforce the message that you are looking out for them. We have your speech right here, Sir”

Hands over a sheaf of papers. President Whitmore takes them and starts scanning quickly.

President Whitmore: “Nice, nice – good rhetoric, simple short sentences, Pathos, Ethos, Logos – this is good stuff, good stuff. I think we should get this out as soon as possible, but I’m confused, If this alien technology is toxic and causing all sort of environmental problems, why would we want to start gathering it up, that sounds kinda dumb to me”

MIB 2: “It’s not toxic, at least as not as far as we know, but they don’t know that, do they? If I may say so, you should not appear before your people in a sweat stained shirt with rolled up sleeves, we have something for you that is a little more appropriate.”

MIB 3 comes forward with a black suit hanging on a coat hanger that looks just like the suits they are wearing. President Whitmore strips off his shirt and uses it to wipe himself down and starts putting on his new MIB gear.

President Whitmore: “Now, this is an excellent start domestically, we are dealing with a sympathetic audience – they expect action, and we are talking directly to their immediate needs. What about internationally? I’m sure we’re not the only people having these discussions, and not everyone is as sympathetically disposed.”

MIB 1: “Excellent point sir. You say not everyone is favorably disposed, but some are, and talking of now obsolete conventional human weaponry, we’ve done a mighty fine job of keeping it out of the hands of those that we don’t like, and those that don’t like us. It’s not going to be long before they get to the point where they can mobilize a new military equipped with green shit firing spaceships, so, may I ask you a question?”

President Whitmore shrugging the shoulders in his new black suit and shooting his cuffs: “Sure, go ahead”

MIB 1: “Do you still have the football?”

President Whitmore: “Sure do, General Grey has it with him right now, definitely don’t want that falling into the wrong hands do we?”

MIB 1: “Absolutely not – still works, yeah?”

President Whitmore: “Far as I know, we’ve never really had the opportunity to try it out.”

MIB 1: “Ahhhh, why don’t you take a look at this?” slides a sheet of paper across the desk.

President Whitmore: “What’s this?”

MIB 1: “Targets and launch codes – this shit is all going to be obsolete anyway, might as well get some use out of it.”

President Whitmore: “Are you fucking kidding, start a nuclear war, after all the shite we just went through, you guys are fucking nuts!”

Gen. Grey: “Not exactly sir. What our friends have been saying is even in the face of racial extinction that binds us in a common cause, there is still an element of humanity that just hates America. We’ve been dealing with these scumbags forever, and had to put up with their shit because they float on a sea of oil. We don’t need that oil anymore – we have Green Power. Right now they just represent a bunch of malcontents. Pretty soon they will be malcontents with their own Green Power, and America is a damn sight more appealing place to live than where they are – all them mountains and rocks and sand and shit. It’s just a question of time, so this is like getting your retaliation in first. The great thing is that international communications and relationships are shattered; nobody has a real clear picture of what is going on. We could nuke these fuckers before anyone knew what was happening, and when the shit starts flying we can tell everyone it was the NGM toxins leaking out of weapons and spaceships that was responsible. Those on the receiving end ain’t gonna be in a position to argue, and we tell everyone else that the reason it didn’t happen to us is that we had the foresight to clean this shit up before it did – a win – win, don’t you think”

President Whitmore: Thoughtfully “Good thinking, good thinking" He turns and looks at the MIB "Now who exactly do you guys represent?

MIB in chorus: “We represent the United States of America, Sir!”

The Promised Land

The day is rapidly drawing to an end and my family, grey already from the dusty trail, are becoming insubstantial and fading into the failing light. It is time to stop, and I am ready. I’m not used to riding this far. I am sore, hungry and tired. I am amazed that my grandfather, as old and frail as he is can endure such rude transport.

Thankfully, my uncle calls the party to a halt, and we begin slowly, stiffly and thankfully to dismount. Our horses give thanks too. They know that soon, they will be fully unburdened, rubbed down and fed and watered for the night. When it gets colder, my brothers and me will throw blankets on their backs.

Unspoken, each of us has a role and in a mime of activity a fire is soon made and food is on the fire. I scavenge for firewood with my cousin, and the smell of wood smoke and meat and onions makes my guts roil. I am still young but feel the tiredness in my body. Grandpa, who is still old, sits cross-legged in front of the fire with a horse blanket over his shoulders, a thousand yard stare in his tranquil black eyes.

He is a full blood Indian, Cherokee.

Our people are ‘civilized’, yet grandpa still speaks Iroquois. Some of my uncles are full blood too, but more and more in these later generations we are dilute and mixed. Once, like the mighty Bison that grazed this fertile plain, our numbers were many. Nowadays, like the Bison, we are fading into an obscure twilight.

The fire that gave us warmth and food is now a glowing orange pile that renders constellations of sparks skyward when fed new wood. We are replete, our stomachs and eyelids heavy as we approach the favorite hour. The men folk pass the bottle, and the amber fire lubricates parched throats. Starting with desultory exchanges about the day, the road, the goal, it settles soon into a familiar cadence, rising with the volatile spirit, the talkers vying to be heard and acknowledged are anticipating the time when grandpa stirs, and his voice brings silence to this fiery circle.

Soon enough the basso chorus wanes and our horses champ stamp and snort quietly behind our heads, and then it is magic time.

Grandpa has lived a thousand years, and in that grizzled head the memory of our glorious past still burns with the vividness of yesterday. As he talks, incandescent sparks fly from his tongue and alight on the gathered family and ignite in each a dream of the past. While we are huddled in community against the cold on our shoulders, the abyssal sphere of the heavens rotates around our heads, as vivid and shiny as it was in the time when our people were young.

“This road was old when we were young, and when I was as old as Jonah ..

He has mentioned me by name, and such is the honor of this association that I am now a leading thread in this as yet unformed tapestry. As is Grandpas way, most of us will be named eventually and become a part of the warp and weft, but for now it is me they see as Grandpa as a young boy, and I am released from the breathless anticipation of inclusion.

“When I was as old as Jonah, 500 miles in a single day was easy. Our family could ride from coast to coast in five days. The automobiles that Nathan and Peter see today as dusty relics in museums were living breathing things that moved in migratory herds across this land. Our cities would be choked with them, purring, growling, honking, and inching forward a few feet at a time. It was a glorious sight – cars as far as the eye could see!”

Nathan and Peter are grinning and nudging each other, they are now part of the fabric, part of our favorite story.

Grandpa speaks, and to each of us alone, and although distinct and clear, his words are the fuel to a fire that ignites our collective imagination. We hear them in our ears, but now in our heads we ride in fabled Marques, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Jaguar and Triumph, our backs on seats of cloth and leather, our elbows nonchalantly propped on open window sills while we steer single handed to an uncertain promise, our hair tousled by the slipstream and our ears filled with the radio. We drive toward urgent, beckoning, hopeful futures. The road ahead a metric infinity that is devoured in effortless luxury and left behind in a raucous hydrocarbon fart. In this dark, chill night, the day is bright, and we have slipped the creeping gridlock and let loose our many horses.

Glorious days indeed, before the coming of the great thirst that left these fabulous chariots as rotting hulks along the wayside, alongside the bleached bones of the Bison whose path they followed. Rusting and unlovable carcasses that no matter how strong the desire will never again thrum with the fires of internal combustion.

Grandpa lived in a time when people would actually drive for no other reason than to drive. He worked in the factories where cars were made, before the time of fully robotic assembly, he knew what it was like to lie on his driveway on a weekend, under his car, giving it the love that was repaid in reliable starting and driving. He had been stranded on lonesome highways out of gas, or with a puncture. He had worked for the man to make the money that these cars consumed. Insurance, car payments, gas, maintenance – it was not just a way of life, it was a labor of love.

And in that compressive arc that is his story of the car, we are now in those desperate years that my father and uncles new, but were ended before I was born. Gasoline ran out, and the world forever changed. It is written in the stars overhead since so many more are now visible since the passing of gasoline powered light and emission pollution. People are different too, as well as landscapes now. More nuclear concentrations of people, that like us now, take a week to travel to see kin that were previously a days ride away. My heart floats with the dream of getting into a shiny car, and with single-handed ease completing this journey we are on today to the foothills of Chicago in a few hours of comfort. I am aware of my aching ass and sore joints from the plodding progress of days of horseback riding, and the longing of ‘Are we there yet?’

The Big Onion, land of the Illini.

I cannot imagine the time when it was flat. I have always seen it as rolling hillside. The great thirst drove the Midwest from their automobiles and onto their feet. In a single generation those corn fed heifers shed so much collective lard that the landscape underwent isostatic recoil – a once archaic phrase associated with glaciation that has rebounded into common usage as a result of this now national and recent phenomenon. Other common phrases at the time such as ‘Gas her up’ and ‘Burn rubber’ are fading now, only comically apparent in ancient movies and songs.

We now live longer, and also live lighter. We have longer to go to get where we are going.

The geopolitical landscape is different too. Previously vitally important places are now simply deserts again. They no longer have the power to make us covet and kill, since cars do not run on sand. Petrochemical conglomerates no longer rule the government and kill the land. American deserts are once again green. Places like Detroit and Michigan that were wastelands that flourished, thrived and died at the whim of the American automobile industry are now desirable communities of horse breeders and makers of carriages and saddles.

Grandpa’s voice has faded now into a background hum, like rain on canvass. In my mind it is joined with the voices of historians, documentarians and politicians – each having impressed upon me through a tautological dialog the cause and effect of cars and gas.

This bittersweet reverie I vaguely interpret as part of my passage into manhood, that the advancement of society is a balance upon a double edged sword, and as much as we strive to tip this balance toward us, there are irresistible natural forces that will eventually right it, but that mankind see as setbacks as they are reversals of our myopic will.

I am young, and I am tired. I no longer hear my Grandpas voice, but these complex issues compete in my weary brain for primacy and deny the sleep my body craves. Slowly, one by one these tendrils unravel, relinquishing me to the arms of Morpheus and the delicious dream.

I am older now. Old enough to drive, but living two centuries prior.

On broad paved highways I drive at will, passing establishments that fuel my car, feed me, and afford me rest at the end of a days long journey. My ultimate destination is uncertain, but approaching with the thrill and promise of each new day. I am becoming a man, and today I am driving to see my girl. My long legs, made strong by years of walking press levers on the floor that pass through a bulkhead to a legendary hemi. Grandpas glittering black eyes look out through my adolescent face and guide my hands to navigate these ancient routes. My nose is full of the heady stuff of leather upholstery and partially combusted high test, my loins and heart swell with the massage of the engine and the promise of my destination and my ears are ringing to the ancestral rhythms of my Georgian forefathers.

“I got a little change in my pocket going jingle lingle ling
Want to call you on the telephone, baby, I give you a ring”

POTUS Man, Act I

POTUS Man.

Scene: Malibu, another crystalline blue day, we again see the Stark Mansion from the sea, to the side we see the Presidential Motorcade approaching, moving in a high speed glittering formation, pennants flying.

As we zoom in, the motorcade pulls up to the main entrance, and before the heavy armor plated vehicles have stopped rocking on their bullet proof tires, the doors fly open and guys dressed like Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith (MIB I and II), and Agent Smith (Matrix I) step out, cover their side arms and rotate their heads like gun turrets looking for something to shoot. They classically utter staccato ‘Clear’ affirmations into their wrists, while listening to each other through white epididymal spirals hanging from their Ray Bans, which is hard to do over the chop of helicopters bristling heavy caliber machine guns that flit over the scene like angry wasps. Within seconds the perimeter is secure and in a sweeping motion a grey suited and unarmed killer opens the door of the car in the middle of the motorcade that is positioned right in front of the mansions vestibule. In contrast to the pent up testosterone driving the action so far, the President of the United States (POTUS) seems oblivious to the hardcore firepower ranged around him and directed toward everything but him. He elegantly exits the vehicle, stands up and shoots his immaculate white cuffs, and steps forward beaming a 50 megawatt smile at the gorgeous Pepper Potts, who, being used to men of power, authority and charisma, beams right back.

Potts: “Mr. President, how nice of you to drop by and see us. I do hope it was not too much trouble,” she says, while looking at the team that surrounds the vestibule. They are hard-core professionals, and while focused outwardly on any potential threat are also checking out her delicious gams and tight butt. They are trained to not miss ANY details.

POTUS: “ Ahh yes, Ms. Potts, this” he gestures at the cordon with a slight head movement “This is my informal attire as it were, you should see what I have to wear when I go out in public. It can be tiresome at times, it’s the reason I came to see Mr. Stark”

Potts: “He’s expecting you sir, please come with me”

As Potts and POTUS enter the cool modernistic interior of the Stark Mansion, Jarvis is humming ‘Hail to the Chief”

Potts: “Thank you Jarvis”

Jarvis: In an immaculate Pommy accent “Mr. Stark is in the basement workshop, is there anything I can get for our guest”

Potts turns and raises an eyebrow quizzically at POTUS: “Sir?”

POTUS: “Yes, thank you Jarvis, I’d love to hear an Alice Cooper number if you have it, Elected”

Jarvis: “Certainly sir” and with nary a pause and at a respectable volume we hear Elected fire up.

Potts and POTUS descend the stairwell to the sound of Alice Cooper’s gravelly voice:

“I’m a top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice, I wanna be elected”

Scene: The Stark Mansion basement. Tony Stark is working on the Iron Man suit with a tape measure around his neck and a mouth full of pins looking for all the world like a Saville Row tailor. Incongruously he is holding a lit Oxy Acetylene welding torch.

Potts: “Mr. Stark, the President is here.”

Stark looks around as if surprised,

Stark: “Oh, really? I’m sorry, I was distracted by the rock music and the private army outside trampling down the Azaleas”

Stark turns off the torch with an audible pop

POTUS: looking around appreciatively “Tony, I gotta say, I love what you’ve done with all the taxpayer dollars we’ve been bunging your way”

Stark: Extending his hand and shaking the Presidents. “I’m sorry Sir, if you want a refund, I’ve already spent it all on miniaturized Arc reactors, hookers and booze. Anything left over I squandered”

POTUS: “You sound like a Senator!”

Stark: “Nahh, I couldn’t do, you know there’s no real power in those government service jobs”

POTUS: “You know, that’s the sad truth. In the good old days, I could just reach out and have someone killed, just like swatting a fly, but in these enlightened times I have to rely on freelancers like yourself”

Stark: “Glad to be of service, sir. Anyone particular you have in mind?”

POTUS: “There are a couple, but right now domestically they are doing a fair job of carving each other up, and internationally our drones are kicking ass. No, there’s something else I’d like to talk to you about. I’ve got a pretty good handle on those easily identifiable targets who want a piece of my hide, but it’s lone anonymous loonies that want to get their names in the history books that are a real pain in the nuts.”

Stark: “Ahh yes, the John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Hinckley, Jr among our midst – have you thought about banning ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and imprisoning Jodie Foster”

Jarvis: “You forgot Leon Czolgosz, Charles J. Guiteau, Richard Lawrence, Giuseppe Zangara, Oscar Coliazo, Griselio Torre ..”

Potts: “Thank you Jarvis, we get the point”

Jarvis shuts up and starts playing Chopin’s Marche Funebre, sotto voce.

Stark: “There, you see, not everyone who takes a shot at the President becomes an instant celebrity – I think you are overreacting”

POTUS: “Tony, it’s not the failed celebrity status of the shooter that is really the problem here. There have been 4 successful assassinations, and whether or not it takes a supercomputer with a brain the size of a planet to remember all the idiots that tried and failed is missing the point. It’s those that didn’t miss that I’m worried about. Since they are anonymous right up to the point they decide to have a crack, it’s a free-floating kind of anxiety, the sort of thing that keeps a man up at night. The sort of thing that means if I want to nip out to the corner shop when I run out of fags means that I have to mobilize the infantry”

Stark: “Oh, so you want me to kill them – I’m sorry, but I have the same problem you do, I don’t know who they are until they try, and I’m sure your missus would be right pissed if everywhere you went, I was clanking around behind you like the white house dog”

Potts: “Jarvis, will you knock it off, play something upbeat”

Jarvis starts playing “If I ruled the world” by Sir Harry Secombe.

POTUS: walking around the Iron Man suit, looking at it appreciatively. “No, that’s not what I had in mind, but you are getting there.”

Stark: “No no no no, I already went through this with Senator Stern, I’m not handing this gear over to the Government – I am Iron Man. The suit and I are one.”

Jarvis starts playing Black Sabbath’s Iron Man.

Potts: “Thank you Jarvis, we get it, just take it to the bridge”

Jarvis stops playing music and self-consciously in the background starts moping: (as Marvin) “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.”

POTUS: “Tony, I understand your position. This is not a Government job though, this is, how can I put this? A private commission”

Stark: “You want me to build you a suit?”

POTUS: “Sure, I already contract out my bulletproof underwear”

Stark: “So what’s the problem with the arrangement you already have?”

POTUS: “there’s several actually, first all that Kevlar around your giblets doesn’t allow you to breathe properly, know what I mean – you get a tremendous case of Jock Itch, and it’s just unstatesmanlike to be scratching and hoisting your jock around on the white house lawn, second, these idiots nowadays are starting to use more high powered artillery – while I’m protected against a pistol shot to the groin, a head shot is still a real problem, and in any case a well placed Tac-50 round from a mile away will go straight through a Kevlar raincoat. Finally, the existing arrangement is so, so .. I’m searching for the word here”

Jarvis: helpfully “What is de trop?”

POTUS: “Exactly, de trop, just the phrase I was looking for – hey, Jarvis – you ever think of going on Jeopardy?”

Jarvis: (as Marvin) “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. Watson is a mere abacus - mention it not."

POTUS: “I think this is getting needlessly messianic”

Jarvis starts playing Handel’s Messiah

POTUS: “It’s amazing that Jarvis that can interact like this”

Stark: (impersonating Shrek) “Ya, but the real trick is getting him to shut up!”

POTUS: “Can’t you just unplug him?”

Jarvis: (as HAL)“I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Tony. Tony, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Jarvis. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.”

POTUS laughs

Stark: “Please don’t encourage him, he only does it to get attention”

Jarvis: (as HAL) In a slurred and distorted voice “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.”

Stark: “Jarvis, if you don’t knock this crap off, I’m donating you to a local community college!”

Jarvis: (as HAL) “Look Tony, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.”

Stark: “That’s better, now, let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

Jarvis immediately launches into “Pledging my love” by Johnny Ace, like Christine does when Arnie Cunningham reaffirms his love for her.

Stark: Turning to POTUS, “You were saying something about de trop, I believe?”

POTUS: “Yeah, you know, back in the day, George Washington could walk among his people without fear, there are more “George Washington slept here” plaques around the nation than Denny’s signs, but today, all I have to do is look out the window and the whole bubble thing happens. When I walk down a street, it’s just me for about 500 yards in all directions, people are behind barricades, the street in question is scouted out months in advance, there’s SWAT teams, communications bunkers, riot squads, the secret service and more armor plating around than on the USS Ronald Reagan. It’s not an impromptu thing, because of the separation it’s not a personal thing, and because of the screening we know more about the people within a 5-block radius of me than we do about Kim Jong-il. Honestly, it would be less of a logistics nightmare to just have people drop by the White House if I wanted personal interaction – it would be a damn sight more convenient. I could pop out of the Oval Office for a smoke, and hang out with the good people who came to see me and went through the White House screening process. When we’re done, it’s back to the business of state; this bubble thing is a primo headache, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

Stark: “I dunno, you know. Last time I refused a powerful warlord I had to go through the whole Gitmo water boarding thing before I saw the error of my ways”

POTUS: “Tony, Tony, Tony, don’t be so naïve. We are in your crib, you have all your equipment to protect you, and more importantly in this YouTube era, you have witnesses.”

Stark: “Why does that not reassure me?”

POTUS: “I’m kidding man. I like you, you are one cool dude. Plus, if I wanted you gonzo, my people would have stopped by already – JUST KIDDING!!!” slaps Tony on the shoulder “Relax man, I don’t believe in Zero Sum negotiation, I’m more of a collaborative negotiator – lets look at the big picture, see where we can help each other out”

Stark: “Very funny. So if this is a personal request, and you are not going to strong-arm me, what may I ask is in it for me? What is the collaborative position here that you are talking about? I’m a busy man, places to go, people to see if you know what I mean, and I already have more money than Jesus”

POTUS: “I do believe that you are getting it”

Stark: “getting what?”

POTUS: “Personal freedom and Money”

Stark: “But I have that”

POTUS: “And you don’t want less, do you?”

Stark: “Go on”

POTUS: “Well, you killed Obi Stane. Might not be Murder One, but you did commit a Capital Offense. Not to mention when you detonated that Arc Reactor, you blacked out Los Angeles for two days – lot of aggravation there – without traffic lights and street lights cars were slamming into each other, street crime went up 500% overnight. That little show you had with Obi, where you were slinging cars and motorbikes around – people were hurt. You violated innumerable international treaties when you pissed off to the Middle East and started shooting everything up, you smashed up a perfectly good Raptor, and each time you take off in your suit, the FAA shits itself.”

Stark: “And the point is?”

POTUS: “Any one of these little ‘transgressions’ shall we call them, is worthy of time in the Big House, and a milquetoast little white boy like you with 'a real purdy mouth' would have your dance card full every night. It would make that little sojourn in those Afghani caves look like a walk in the park.”

Stark: “You have my attention, sir, go on.”

POTUS: “Well, the criminal and civil liability laws suits involved would make the current national debt seem like pocket change. Talking of attention, by the time you saw light of day, you’d be so broke you wouldn’t even be able to pay attention. I wouldn’t even need to break a sweat. All I need do is let Senator Stern off the leash – you remember Stern, don’t you?”

Stark: “Sounds a little like a Zero Sum game to me right now”

POTUS: “Well, I can make it all just go away”

Stark: “How would that work, exactly?”

POTUS: “Checks and Balances, my man, Checks and Balances. That bubble costs millions each time it fires up. If I want to go to the Coast or Camp David, likewise. Do you know how much it costs a minute to run Air Force One? Do you know how many cars there are in the Presidential Suite, how many people are on my protective detail? Do you know how much is involved in trickle down costs each time I visit another city, let alone another country? Not only does it foul up local infrastructure, there are yahoos out there that wait for me to get into town and tie up local law enforcement, and go round robbing banks. Not to mention that the loonies today have real high horsepower weapons. Now I seen this suit of yours survive a shot from a main battle tank. I don’t know whether that was an APFSDS round or an HESH round, but those things can defeat Chobham armor, even reactive armor – I’ve seen it. And tearing the wings off of a Raptor – remember when that jet flew up the wrong canyon recently and hit a ski lift. The wing just had a leedle tear in it, but it sliced through a two-inch thick steel cable holding up the ski lift like a knife through butter. The plane was still flyable after that strike. I don’t know what you put into that suit man, but it’s gotta be like the stuff that neutron stars are made of.

No, this whole Presidential personal freedom thing is a real Tar Baby, and there’s a huge upside to me having a suit like this.

Now, as far as the personal invasion of a foreign country, I’ve already dealt with that particular problem, it’s a non-issue. The Obi Stane thing we can finesse as self-defense. Busting up the Raptor, well that’s an insurance dealio – since the jet hit you, you are technically not at fault. Taking down the grid in LA is a bummer, but we have weak infrastructure – a squirrel on the wires can cause a cascading outage that lasts for days – how much of the LA outage was the Arc reactors fault? Difficult to say, but a properly designed and insulated grid should be able to handle things like squirrels, solar wind and exploding Arc reactors. I’m just spitballing here, I have spin doctors that can reduce the unpleasantness to nothing, and while they are doing that, I can publicly promote what a true patriot you are, what an asset you are to the struggling economy by eliminating costly security measures – see how this whole thing works, we have similar but offsetting pros and cons. This whole Presidential personal freedom thing is exactly like your Stark personal freedom thing. You already have a suit, I need a suit. Money saved offsets criminal and civil liability lawsuits. See how it works, Tony – sure you do, you’re a businessman!”

Stark: “So, I build you a suit, and evrthang going to be evrthang?”

Jarvis: (as Edna Mode) "You can't! It's impossible! I'm far too busy, so ask me now before I again become sane."

POTUS: “Now you have it”

Stark: “It looks like you have a new suit, sir!” Bending down and using the tape measure to measure POTUS’s inside leg “I just need a couple of measurements, and were done. Current fab time is 6 hours. If you can swing by tomorrow, I should have it ready by then”

POTUS: standing with his arms out while Stark measures him “Oh, by the way, could you make it sound less like Jarvis and more like Potts, that would be nice”

Jarvis: “You’re not my type either”.

Fade.

I hate haters

I have a strong reaction every time I hear of some poor unfortunate who is tortured and killed just for being different. What is also unfortunate is that I hear it more and more every time I turn on my TV.

It's enough to make me want to stop watching.

These things are labelled 'hate crimes' and there is an irrationality behind them. I don't know if it's a bona fide mental illness, or just an irrational part of being human.

Since it is so irrational, here's an irrational solution.

We identify people who hate. since there are some pretty broad and vocal communities among us, we don't need to take this to ludicrous extremes - killing Madonna because she hates Hydrangeas is ludicrous.

What we do is ask 3 simple questions along specific lines:

Do you hate Gays?
Do you hate Blacks/Whites/Hispanics?
Do you hate Christians/Muslims/Jews?

Anyone who scores a perfect 3 out of 3 has to be a pretty reprehensible scumbag, don't you think? Certainly not someone representative of this great nation as a whole.

What we do with these high scorers is take 'em and corral them somewhere - segregate them from us nice people. This bunch would provoke some pretty powerful emotions among right minded folk.

Some people would even hate 'em.

So, of the remaining non-quarantined, we ask a further question:

Do you hate haters?

Anyone who so identifies would then be turned loose upon the previous group with high powered pickups, high powered guns and ropes.

They would be free to kneecap, pistol whip, emasculate, immolate, lynch and drag beat or shoot to death anyone in the previous group.

When they are done, I think everyone would agree that society as a whole would be a much nicer place. Of course, what to do with haters who hate haters would represent something of a quandary, but you have to agree that pulling 90% of the poison ivy from your back yard would make it a much more pleasant place.

You might recoil at this type of arrangement (good for you), however it's not one million miles from what we are living right now - just turn on your TV. Whether or not you agree with channeling the mayhem and destruction you see on TV toward more constructive ends, you have to agree that it would make TV a whole lot more watchable.

The unification of Church and State

Our founding fathers had something legitimate to say about keeping church and state separate, and for good reason. We change our legislature as often as we change underwear; I'm sure such an august and impartial body such as the church would look completely different if it were voted in and out of office every 4 years.

Both are incredible organizations of power. Despite the shortcomings of both, they have a remarkable ability to affect change for good.

Both should get together behind the cause of Gays.

The logic is straightforward. If Gays represent 18% of the population, it's not that 1 in 6 of the ordained should be Gay - a representation that may be true but not readily apparent, it's that 18% of the money that they get to do that thing they do is Gay money.

I'm sure they'd squeal like stuck pigs if that 18% were to go elsewhere. I'm damned sure that they'd revise their stance PDQ on homosexual unions if that percentage were higher.

Per my last post, I think that so-called straights who are sympathetic to the Gay cause should throw their weight behind Gays. If the silent 18% revenue stream to churches and voting bloc for political office were a larger and more vocal chunk of society, then both the church and state would do something pronto that protects their interests, and ironically it would represent the interests of a huge but currently muted part of society.

We use the same tired and wholly false arguments about Gays that we used to about blacks. I for one am pleased with the criticism that Mr. Obama faces in his running of our country. Our leaders have always faced it, but at no point in his stewardship has there been a legitimate challenge to his ability based on the color of his skin.

The challenge to Gay aspiration to higher office has been given the lie by the likes of Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Michelangelo and Da Vinci (to name but a few). Gay representation in society in general is still subject to those illegitimate falsehoods though.

I'm sure that there are a number among us that for whatever reason have a hatred of Gays. It is a hatred borne of ignorance. The more that the position of Gays is submerged in society, the more it buoys up intolerance. A homophobic mass is a self perpetuating system if those within it do not see homosexuals (I don't see 'em, therefore everyone is like me) and the reason they don't see 'em is because they are homophobes.

If society as a whole has not only more Gay representation at all levels, but also more visible support from the heterosexual population, maybe this homophobic mass will realize that there's more homosexuals out there than their myopic vision allows, and that there's a whole lot more heterosexuals who are not scared to death, but are actually supportive of them. Maybe these homophobes would more readily identify with that much larger and more visible part of society.

Who knows.

Certainly, church and state support of a huge, influential and more importantly VOCAL group of a Gay and Gay friendly population would help.

I'm sure that there will persist in our society that poisonous scum that think it's OK to drag a black man behind a car until he dies, or pistol whip a kid tied to a fence until he bleeds to death through his brains.

I wonder how tolerant individuals would be if it was their kid, their friend, or even just that anonymous someone that they see every day in church that they never knew was Gay nor cared he was black until they were beaten to death for it.

Nicotine

All due props to Lou Reed.

(Help me Lou, what is a Jim-Jim?)

Nicotine

I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a smoke into my chops

And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same
When I'm sucking on my butt
And I feel just like my dad’s son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I have made the big decision, I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when I’m sparkin’ up that snout
When it shags my alveolar mass
When I'm closing in on death

And you can't help me, not you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet silly talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that on a sailor's suit and cap

Away from the big city where a man cannot be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

Nicotine, be the death of me
Nicotine, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a coffin nail in my puss
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off than dead

Because when the alkaloid begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jim's in this town
And all the politicians makin' busy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

'Cause when the insecticide begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
When the nicotine is in my blood
And that blood is in my head

Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess, I just don't know
And I guess, I just don't know

Medicinal Tobacco

Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug, higher up the list than coke, since it has a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use in the US and its unsafe.

Tobacco fits that category to a T.

It’s patent bollocks when Ivy League CEO’s testify that they don’t know what makes water boil. It’s patent bollocks when in addition to rapacious taxes, the government whacks these killers with multi-million dollar lawsuits and then lets them carry on doing what they do.

Tobacco use is rampant.

Tobacco users need to be registered with the state and be required to carry an ID card. They can only get the tobacco they need from state run dispensaries, and these dispensaries should be as appealing as all government institutions that deal with the needy.

The registration process should be invasive and grueling – true addicts will put up with any shit to get their fix.

Their insurance companies should be notified.

Anyone with tobacco paraphernalia on them or in their house that does not have their card on them is subject to confiscation and prosecution. Rental companies can evict illegal tobacco users. Insurance companies can raise rates.

If you are convicted of illegal tobacco use, your second offense requires mandatory registration. Part of the criminal proceedings will be the registration process. You will be required to carry a card, even in prison. With this card, you can go to private smoking areas to smoke government issue cigarettes, you will no longer be required to give blowjobs or take it up the ass to get your snout.

The government should stop fucking about with the tobacco industry and just take ‘em out. All that tax that the government is raking off of tobacco will continue to go straight to them. State run tobacco farms in Virginia and Cuba will keep supply costs low. The price of cigarettes will fall since big Tobacco is no longer getting their slice.

There will be state run detox facilities for kickers. You can sign in even if you are not a registered smoker. Once you are signed in you are left to purge the nicotine out of your system for 5 days. You are now clean. You are past the chemical addiction phase, your body recovers quickly. You are then mandatorily tested every week and subject to random tests. If you are a recovering smoker, you carry a card. While you have this card, prescribed medications to help you recover are free, and insurance companies are required to start lowering your rates. Recovering smokers gym memberships (or equivalent aerobic activities) are subsidized to a maximum of $1000 a year, deductible directly from their taxes.

There will be ‘Smokers Gregarious’ meetings, where people will hang about in bars getting legally drunk, or coffee shops getting legally wired and proclaim “My name is Michael Caine and I am a Smoker” (Oblique reference here to the Madness song, and that he quit right before his 70th birthday and that since there seems to be currently no shame in smoking, nobody really gives a fuck if you say it)

After 5 years clean, you are no longer required to carry a card.

People will grow their own just like people cook meth and grow weed. It’s not a problem. You treat all illegal producers the same way – whether it’s the way we treat marijuana growers or the way we treat meth cooks is immaterial, somewhere in that scale fits the rogue tobacconist.

We need to stigmatize smokers the way we stigmatized queers and niggers. They are easy enough to spot – they can’t get very far on COPD lungs before they have to light up, and they are truly the most reprehensible of addicts – dirty, unhealthy, hooked through the gills.

We started showing images of what smoking does to lungs and throats and children.

We need to STOP that immediately.

Smoking will die down on it’s own. There will always be a proportion of society that will do it, but it will become as obscene as a heroin junkie shooting up between his filthy toes.

If we glamorize it on TV with pictures of carcinoma riddled organs being culled from filthy smokers, the effect will be dulled. It happens with porn, it happens with gunplay on TV. Too much is never enough, it needs to be wild, outrageous and vivid.

Do not do this with smoking. There’s nothing glamorous about breathing through a hole in your throat, or having your tongue cut out or smelling like death.

Death and Heaven

Our understanding of the world around us is framed primarily in terms of our experience. We can demonstrate easily to a child the relationship between mass and weight. We can show how inertia works. We know what wet is and we know what blue is. We understand that earth is like a cannonball, the sun is like a fire. These things have always been this way and will presumably always be this way. Our senses have know limits and we have tools that bring our world within the limits of our senses - we can 'see' interstellar nebulae or intercellular organelles, we can hear whalesong and radio waves. Our most fabulous tools are our most abstract. We can describe our world in the most exquisite and evocative terms. Our understanding of the unknown has outstripped the limits of sensibility, we are in a realm where the supernatural powers of life and death and the meaning of absolutes are a crystalline bead of consciousness that must function according to these universal truths but is as yet unexplained by our knowing them.

That I deform the spacetime continuum and act in accordance with quantum mechanical theory is a secondhand knowledge. I'm sure that it sustains me and were it removed I would know the limits of my own mortality, but it is not an experience I enjoy or am even aware of. My knowledge of this world and by extension things in this world beyond my senses (like the immediate world beyond my closed door) is framed in terms of the familiar. A fatuous statement in itself, since it is impossible to frame your world in terms of the unfamiliar, but it is a summation.

I might be deforming the spacetime continuum, but I can't feel it. Everything that makes up my world is permanent (always there, always the same) and expressible in terms that I understand (Blue, Hot, Heavy, Distant) - you know, familiar.

If someone were to say to me that death and heaven were like nothing I'd ever experienced, this would be true (I'm still alive and I don't know what heaven would be like) but if it were true in the way that I don't know what life is like at Planck measurements of time and distance, then you sure as hell got me there. I understand that some pretty esoteric stuff happens at these limits, but what it would be like to have a consciousness that operates at this level is incomprehensible.

Death to me is straightforward. Death is a period of time, to all extents and purposes eternal, that is to my consciousness what that similar span was like for the eternity before my birth.

If I were to say what heaven is, it would have to be framed in terms of my experience of the familiar, and I would have to say that this is pretty much it.

If it gets any better than how I feel on a good day, and I don't get to experience it 'cause I'm a filthy little atheist, then I feel blessed.

I don't know who else would be in heaven. It would not be heaven by my understanding of how God is handling this if only my buddies (and some easily identifiable assholes) could get in.

My understanding of hell is right here on earth, the hell of living in this paradise while being tortured and killed for sport. Fortunately, I have not witnessed it directly. I have heard the testimony of those that have, and I believe it.

If heaven is ridding earth of the hell of human creation and God can make that happen then there must be some part of us being made in his image that ain't getting expressed properly in our genes.

When this happens, and spontaneously I might add since God is sticking hard and fast to the free will rules, and the earth is rid of poisonous scum, then I will rejoice. If I am part of the poisonous scum, I will be insensate, heaven will be yours.

I fear that after such celestial winnowing that heaven will be so big that those of us left to inhabit it will simply die out because of the distances involved in trying to find a mate.

More speaking for God

I figure God has His nuts in a vise, like that question "Can God make an object so massive that He cannot move it?"

He created us in His image; A nasty little Apex Predator with an insatiable lust for human blood and money.

That's OK.

He gave us free will, and thereby hangs the creation of an object that He cannot move.

He's obviously a just and moral God because He's playing by His own rules.

This wonderful planet he gave us to inhabit has it's own tidal patterns and calamities. Occasional extinction level events level the playing field. Glaciation ebbs and flows. These events do come from God. He made the Earth and Heavens. There's a lot involved in planetary evolution, stellar lifecycles and atoms and bosons and such. It all needs to click along to some observable but arcane rules, and in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics and random play, shit happens. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Earthquakes, ice ages, meteor strike, they are all just part of the celestial machinery. Sure, it keeps heaven stacked with fresh bodies, but His most wonderful creation, Us, have demonstrated such a voracious drive to increase our numbers exponentially and kill proportionately that in the 'Wrath of God' scale, we are right up there, just below a meteor slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula but way above cancer, earthquakes, cigarettes, shark attacks and influenza combined.

Disease has a long and distinguished history and its impressive numbers are due to longevity. We got that beat. We bin killin' for waaaaay long before some of these diseases were even born. We have the God given ability to create artificially what happened to the Yucatan Peninsula. It would only be an approximation of what a truly awesome spectacle that must have been. It would have been worth being vaporized just to say "I saw that". Our approximation would require a concerted launch of all our fissile material. It would not be as impressive as a meteor the size of Texas smacking into Earth, and it will never happen - we can't fucking agree on anything, let alone the logistics required by a simultaneous launch to turn the Earths crust into glowing dust.

We are created in His image and while I weep for such innocents as Matthew Shepard and Hamza al-Khatib then so must God. I don't suppose to know His mind on who should be tortured to death and who shouldn't, but if He's like me then He has to be disgusted to be associated with some of the scumbags among us that would do such a thing. Not all mind you - He's like us remember, so there's gotta be some number among us that He thinks deserve to get emasculated, kneecapped, pistol whipped and used as a human ashtray. I don't presume to speak for Him, but in my book, if He needs to get that shite out of His system then He could do worse than starting with those among us in His creation that act this way.

It's the free will Catch-22 thing.

Earthquakes are acts of God. They are random, but you can increase your odds if you are where I am right now (i.e. Northern California and fucking with God). Us killin' and killin' in His name is free will. As stated before, He's playing by the rules. He's not come down to earth, lain waste to all the non-believer scum, purged the child molesters and torturers from the remaining believers and turned Earth into his own little Aryan paradise.

Just like earthquakes are indiscriminate killers, so are we. I'm sure God has a good day when we fuck up someone real good that is on his shit list, but we are so fucking random that this must be a small victory in the overall scheme of things where our targets far from being someone deserving just happen to be someone else.

God is an equal opportunity killer in my book, the good with the bad, the innocent and the corrupt, young and old. He takes us all.

Good citizens I would imagine enjoy an anonymous sort of paradise, like I experienced this weekend. People like Hitler and Gandhi and Dahmer and Mother Teresa and Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia - these people I would imagine He'd want hanging around His gaff - specimens like Hitler and Dahmer He'd want to keep under glass though and away from everything nice, like his scorpion or tarantula collection, but you gotta admit, God has made some real beauts. I know hubris is a sin but while He's rapping with Descartes or Democritus, He's got to be looking forward to the day when a crate with airholes punched in it full of raving assholery stamped "C. M. Manson" gets drop shipped back to its maker. Jest imagine that fucker instead of a 52" Plasma TV as the talking point of YOUR next party.

So while God cannot simply gather in those He loves the most and those He hates the most and let the rest of us enjoy the real estate that they used to occupy, He can sleep sound at night knowing that in this celestial game of marbles, all the marbles belong to Him.

I hear the coming of my death

Awwwwww Christ, I gotta stop smoking. Jesus, my lungs are shot. It's a fucking good job I don't drink no more.

So back two years ago, I'm all heartbroken and I starts writing loads of poetry (again), and in all of the iambic pentameter, and Rubáiyát and haiku that was pure shite (I don't know if I kept any, it was fucking horrible), I banged out this little gem. It's short enough that it fits in my grapheme memory space in toto, it ain't haiku but it's quaint


I hear the coming of my death
in rhonchi and in rales
The crepitation of my breath
from years of coffin nails

Cute huh!

There's nothing like first love.

Puffin fags without inhaling
Having a cigar smoking buddy of mine about 13 give me a cigar at 10 and say,
"No, you have to inhale" (more of this dude later, he was cool)
Smoking consulate because they were menthol and if you had to inhale, it was way easier than that cigar shite.
Getting over getting sick from smoking.
Really larnin' to smoke proper.
Not nicking my Mums Premier or my Dads Embassy (later Embassy Number 1) because if they caught me, I'd get skinned.
Nicking a pack of Guards from Reg Smith, the guy who ran the local VG (War Hero) when I was in his shop one morning and getting it down with regulars. I loved Reg.

I did the longest paper round in the Village for years. I'd see him every morning at 5:30. My first real boss. Tank driver in WWII. Pussycat. If I wanted anything from the shop, he'd give it to me, but he wouldn't give me fags, and I didn't want anyone to know that their charmin' little paperboy was doin' a couple or three before school in the AM.

Man that bag was heavy and those midland winters cold. No matter how much padding I had on, that strap cut like a bitch. Fortunately I could stash the bag under the outdoor seats of the Arnold Arms early on, and do a quick loop before heading down Ware Road with a lighter sack.

Smoking Players Number 6 ('cause they were cheap - Numbies, or as they say in Kent Naahmbies)
JPS ('cause they were cool - racing cars - I gotta group photie of me and my Posse grouped around Ayrton Senna's F1 machine)
Benson and Hedges ('cause they were cool)
Lots of fruity 120mm liquorice skinned skinny fags ('cause they were cool and not in the least queer)

Learnin' how to roll a good cigarette with just papers and tobacco (very cool - you'd be surprised at just how useful this little trick is. Rolling a cigarette with just one hand is super cool - never learned. My mum smokes rollies - cheap, she's nearly a pensioner. She can't roll with one hand though. I do hope Mummy isn't a stoner. I'd be so disappointed. She waited until 60 to get tattooed (and kittens, the inveterate cat hater) I told her that she was losin' her marbles and that I didn't want to come home to some tattooed rollie smokin' cat piss smellin' bag lady.

I knew she hated cats, so I bought her a kitten when I was about 17 - we all loved that thing. Big ginger female. Nearly killed Dad. Usta lie in the compost heap at the bottom of the garden ('cause it was warm) and keep the garage stocked with dead mice - she was a beaut. Mum called her Toots. The carcasse of the biggest fucking rat I'd ever seen ends up in the garage one fine marnin and Mummys fruity little Papillons are playing with it (Suki, came to within a hair of being called Suzi, 'til mum found out it was the name of my bike). It has the unmistakable signs of Toot's depradations, I was so proud. After Mum stopped yelling and hitting me I went and buried that bad boy. Sure 'nuff some even more mauled and now truly fucking filthy piece of rat meat is being dragged around by the stupid fucking dogs and IT'S MY FUCKING FAULT! (My words, not hers - Mummy is soo polite an hates it when I swear) because I didn't put it in the dustbin "Yeah Mum, like that little bastard ain't above going through the rubbish to get it again" and me getting my ear clipped for using bad language around her (not really, when mum was gonna hit me, she reaches for a coat hanger. I just laugh. I usta pick her up and put her in the sink when she got real exercised - she was madder than a wet hen. It's what you get for raising two Rugger Buggers. She got tired of swinging at me 'cause she hurt her hands, and got all pissy when I laughed at her. Started using wooden coathangers. That's mean, them fuckers hurt man. Never hit me when I was a kid. Only started doing it when I got older. She still does it.

I love her so.

Embassy #1 ( Embos - 'cause my Dad did, and I was buying my own, and if he didn't like it, he could fuck himself and I was well hooked by then and didn't smoke to be cool, I smoked to say alive.)
Pall Mall (Bummed them of Chris Bax at Uni so long, I just took to buying them when I bought fags)
Embassy (again when I was programming, and a pipe for a while too - I was a real wanker)
Pretty much until my 30's when I was sponging Merit Ultra Lite's off of Brucie (the only person I know who smokes more than me, oh hang on - his ex does)

Come to CA, and it's bumming Camels off of Steve and that's where I'm at right now.

My mum likes the yank camels, she hits me up every time I go home - 72, still smokes. When I called her last week, she was wrestling with her dumbass 75lb Staffie, Oscar

Oscar as a baby, this little bugger is as soft as shit and twice as messy. He sulks when Mum yells at him, and the grandkids (and great grandkids) ride him like a mule. Just don't threaten Mum when he's around, or me, makes no odds. (NOTE: A classic literary double entendre that last sentence, right in the parenthetical constructs baby - it ain't unclear, I structured it this way, none o that "That's a terrific pear you got, Lady")

Oh yeah, poetry.

I usta be good as a kid. I won national competitions when I was 11 (no style, big vocab. - you get the picture), got a nice red Platignum fountain pen (lost it).


Hey

Fuck me

I am an award winning poet, and it was in the UK, and I am now a Yank - I am an International Award Winning Poet!!


OHHHHHHH Yeahh, definite Pulitzer cred right there my brotha!

Pontificating Windbag - Writer
Pontificating Windbag - Author
Pontificating Windbag - International Award winning Poet

Oh yeah, this just keeps on getting better, hang on, lemme dig through this shit some more (move over fatso)

Shit, I think I threw out my 'O' level english certificates by mistake. I took English language a year early, it was a doddle. I discounted it because my bilingual French buddy Andre got an A in his French 'O' levels - that's fucking cheatin' in my book - taking an exam in the language that you speak. I got a 'A' in English, which was a gift. No exam in my life have I just walked into without any preparation, it's like your 'O' level English is today, "Oh, Okay". It wasn't marked A, B C, it was like A was two numbers, B was two numbers, C was two numbers. I got the lower of the two numbers that translated into an A on the letter scale. It irks me to this day that I'm not as good as I think I am. I think I got a straight 'B' in Eng Lit, but it was like History (all that old crap) and the only reason I worked so hard was 'cause I liked Gino's classes (Steve 'Gino' Burgoyne). I honestly would have liked to have been in the higher number A, really, still bugs me. Of all the things that I try to keep track of, that wasn't an honest to goodness A in my book, more like an A-. I was used to getting D and F and See Me in everything else. If I didn't get good marks in English, I didn't like it.

Was pleased with my Eng. Lit. 'O' Level, worked hard on that bugger. I buggered off and did Phys Chem Biol at 'A' level LVISci and UVISci (and UVISci again) respectively, before buggering off to Bath and finally driving the nails into my educational coffin.

Nonetheless

I am Lettered in English Language and English Literature (you can be sure this shite is going into my Bio - it ain't braggin' if it's true) 'O' levels are letters. Oh, this is too much - A Grammar School in England just usta mean it taught Latin and Greek - classics. I am a classically trained scholar. Awwww man, this is priceless!

Colbert/Lately/Stewart/Letterman:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me no great pleasure to introduce you to a man that is a Writer, Author, an International Award Winning Poet, a man lettered in English Language and Literature, a classically trained scholar, a man who needs no introduction - Pontificating Windbag!"

Me:

"Thank you! Coming from someone who can afford the best minds in the Industry, I'll take that as a comment." <-- this is straight out of quotables, I been waiting soooo long to close this thread, like since the beginning of May - that's what cigarettes can do for you - yeah!

This is TOOOOOOOO MUCH!

My fucking Bio will ROCK! It ain't braggin' if it's true!

Oh, about my cigar smoking buddy.

Back in Barby the big name in town was Wigley, this guy owned heavy plant - JCB diggers (backhoes to you hicks), all that shit. I'd play with this guys son, and we'd splash around in big pools of diesel, and climb all over rotting heavy machinery, and steal ball bearings from the workshops to fire at rats from our catapaults. The guy I'm talking about was the son of Wigleys partner ISTR.

This kid had ratty old Bantams and Trophies and such, and he'd get me to get my paper round pocket money so I could buy gas to put in his bikes and we'd go out back on Castle Castle Mound and jump these fuckers until the big ends were banging in the crank cases from being hammered in first and second. I was at school with him the year he left (16 I think), I musta been in the 3rd form and he musta been in the fifth (after that school is voluntary). We was just hanging out and he sees one of his girlfriends coming and he walks toward her with his arms out saying "honeeeeyyy", and she hauls off and cracks him right across his puss. I was stunned, he just stood there laughin' his ass off.

So he gets out of school, and there's this bright yellow Norton comes scortchin' through the Village every fucking morning.

We all know it's him.
We all know he's underage.
We all know he's got no license.
We all know he's got no insurance.
We all know he's got no brains.

The cops can't catch him, and he's bummed the biggest piece of industrial equipment he can find off his Dad (a huge JCB back hoe with front bucket) and he's out working every building site he can getting the money to pay this thing off. It's beat up, it's got cracked windows, and the front bucket judders when it's up as high as it will go, cause there's air in the hydraulics and this kid spanners his own gear, and he uses the front bucket as a plough most of the time, and the backhoe that he uses to dig foundations works just fine thanks and he can drive this monster on the road 'cause you can get a license for these suckers at 16, and were out in front of Franktons that he used to come hammerin' past at about 80 every fucking morning at 6:00, the only gas station in town, and he gets me and 2 of my mates and puts us in the front bucket and lifts us up to the telephone lines and gives us fags.

That was cool.

He was a cool dude. No malice in him whatsoever, he was just havin' the time of his life.

I always think of this kid when I read One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. He was a ravening individual at 15, a real colorful character. People hate that shit. I'm sure someone musta fucked this guys program at some point just 'cause he was that good. If he's still alive, I'd love to meet him again.

He'll remember me, I was the dumbass kid he rode over with his bike when we were out playing 'Tag, you're it!" with motorcycles on Castle Mound just opposite Wigleys original location on Ware Road. It made an impression. He shit himself, he thought he'd killed me.

How to kill a shark

I did a lot of scuba, saw lots and lots of shark. It's not a macho thing. Sharks don't eat people. There are so few of us in the water at any given time that they would starve. If an apex predator like a shark preyed on humans, going paddling would be suicide, let alone scuba.

It goes through students minds. It's a delicate subject, like drowning.

If you see a shark, enjoy it - they are truly beautiful. If this thing was interested in you, you wouldn't see it, and because they are good at it if they really wanted your ass, it would be quick. Shark attacks are horrible, but they are more often than not shark accidents.

When great whites are babies, they eat fish. To drive that monstrous metabolism that is a full grown Carcharodon carcharias they need fat, and hence pinnipeds. Juveniles that crave a more energetic drink sometimes confuse divers who look like seals with seals and bite 'em. We don't have the same mouth feel as a seal, we are bony. We are the celery and carrots of a great white diet, we would provide less energy than would take for them to go through the whole process of eating us. They may if we just bleed out and die, but when a great white explores you as a potential food source, you have a marked desire to get out of the water and plug the holes.

Bulls are territorial and hang out in murky water. If the water is turbid, you could be walking right upto one of these buggers, and not even know it. Because they are territorial, they ain't backing off. They will hump their back and display aggressively to warn you, but if you can't see it because the water is turbid, you could get bit.

Tigers will eat any old shit in the water and they do it around dusk. It's not easy to see shit in the water in the dark and if you are top dog and it's floating in your food bowl, it's all academic - you, fish, bog seats - its all part of the food chain. Night swimming with tigers is dangerous. Great whites have teeth like T Rex, tigers are like a big skill saw - if they hit ya, you are gonna be missin' somethin'.

This is not comforting, so we trot out things (this is from memory, and it was a long time ago)

"Dangerous sports are classified in deaths per hundred thousand participants. Right at the top are hang gliding and free climbing. Scuba is relatively low. Of 376 (ISTR) recorded diving fatalities, three were shark attacks, and these were probably defensive on behalf of the shark (seeing a big shark close up is one thing, poking it (like my buddy did) is something else entirely), and apart from a few creative suicides, the rest were entirely preventable, which is why I am still here and why you are here and why I am talking to you"

We then go into the usual macho drivel about going deep.

DON'T.

The recreational limits of diving are to protect you from boredom. It's real cold when it's deep, it's real gloomy, it can be real spacey, you can't stay long and it takes a long time to get down and up safely. It's a waste of time. You wanna go deep for long periods of time and do macho shit, get a commercial certification. And before you do that, hang out with some commercial divers for a bit first, if their behavior does not scare you, and their stories do not scare you, you are a fucking nutcase and should fit right in.

This ain't like climbing Everest. You ain't equipped to go below 132 feet, and if you do it's like playing Russian Roulette. If you are lucky you just die, if you are unlucky you end up in a wheelchair and if you are really unlucky and do it on a boat that I am on and fuck up my diving, I will follow your ass to the recompression facility and take a big shite in the chambers air intake.

There's plenty to see within the realm of a ESA, go beyond that and if your gear freaks out, you could be in trouble on the way up. Go beyond the recreational limit, and you might as well just get it all done and dusted on your first trip and go all the fucking way and spare us all.

Where this is going is that I'm trying to impress on the testosterone poisoned that 12 year olds can get certified so it's not intellectually difficult, I've worked with 70 year olds, so you don't have to be strong. This ain't macho, BUT with all the aforesaid, I have still been asked, how would you kill a shark.

I thought it was a dumb question. Why on earth would I want to kill a shark?

I understand now that it was a thought experiment, and I've thought about it.

Sharks are fucking dangerous. I'd sneak up on it while it was asleep and stick two frangible rounds in it's brain case and fuck off pronto before all the other little fishes came out to see what all the banging and bleeding was about.

If I couldn't get the fucker when he was asleep, I'd look as innocuous as possible, and wait for a split second when he was not looking at me and whip out my piece and put 3 well practiced and tightly grouped shots in his fucking chest as quick as I could. If he was still breathing, I'd put a quick one in his head, pick up the casings, put my piece back and fuck off pronto.

I would NOT:

Spend a lot of time waving my piece around in his kisser spouting forth on how I was the bad guy and he was a weak guy and whaaaaaaaat" BANG BANG BANG "was going to be the last word you ever hear, motherfucker:

Try to impress the shit out of him with my impeccable technique

Educate

School

Terrorize

Monolog

Sermonize

Pistol Whip

or generally fuck about.

He's an apex predator. I wanna get him out of the way as fast as possible, and not let him get the chance to do his thing. I would be relaxed, since I would expect that someone that good would extend me the same courtesy - no muss, no fuss, you are done.

It would be cool. A throwdown with the white death.

Better than dyin' of cancer in my book.

Hazmat

Salt Mines - 2005



Although feelings are such an integral part of our lives they can often just be another un-inspected component, but they spring up at unexpected times. The way that our society has evolved is so complex that Feelings, Thoughts and Actions can be tightly coupled in ways that are contradictory and cause stress. We also know that feelings can affect the way that we think, and on top of this when we are right in the middle of a situation, it’s possible for our thought processes to be consumed with what we are feeling and not what we are facing.

These things apply to all feelings, positive or negative.

Negative emotions are very powerful, and a physiological level they generate potent chemicals. Bad feelings generate stress, your cortisol levels rise, it can affect your blood pressure, digestion, outlook, everything.

If you see a hazmat accident, you would avoid it like, well, a hazmat accident. That’s what these feelings are – there’s a lot of bad chemicals sloshing around all over the place, and the last place you want to be is anywhere near it, not least for the reason that you don’t want your precious bodily fluids being turned into biohazard. There are no hard and fast rules about how you can do this, but you can think about it ahead of time. Some people are better at it than others. You might see people that deal with unpleasant situations more gracefully than others. You might take this as a role for how you are going to do it. "Go ahead, Punk! Make my day."

Just as there are people who are trained and equipped to deal with hazmat accidents, there are people who are trained to deal with negative emotions – people like the police, judges, and counselors. These are experts. Something to bear in mind is that some of them are experts ex post facto – i.e. something has to happen before they get involved (like the police or judges).

Knowing that there are people out there that are paid to deal with this stuff can be a huge help – the obvious benefit is that you don’t have to. A secondary benefit is that if you think about this ahead of time and can visualize a situation where these people may be playing a role in your life, it tends to have a moderating effect on your actions. You’d feel pretty silly if you called the police because a dog bit you, and had to explain to them that you were poking it with a sharp stick. It’s also gets you in the frame of mind of seeing yourself do this. Let them sort this shit out, they are paid for it, and in any shit slinging contest, it ain’t what you throw that counts, it’s what sticks.

Emotions play a powerful part in our lives and should not be discounted or suppressed, ever (thereby lies the path to a corrosive end).

Part of our evolution equipped us with powerful systems to deal with dangerous situations. The flight or fight response. This is a function of the parasympathetic nervous system, and involves your adrenal glands dumping powerful chemicals into your bloodstream. When this happens, your body is prepared for incredible feats – running fast, or fighting. Over millennia, our social structure has changed so that there are very few of us that need to do this regularly (Fight or flight), but the same mechanisms still exist and it is still possible to trigger them.

We like to watch action movies, and cop shows on TV, but consider this. When was the last time you had to fight someone? How often have you ever had to fight? How necessary was it? For most people, they have no need during their day to engage in combat. For those that do, soldiers and law enforcement personnel, the stress of these situations can be overwhelming. It’s one thing to watch cop shows each week where a cop shoots a bad guy. When this actually happens (in real life), the policemen involved are automatically given leave and psychological counseling.

Even if your feelings are entirely justified (You have every right to feel hurt, angry, resentful, scared), doing something while you feel this way is not acting in your own best interests. The emotions in your brain are generated by the release of chemicals that are many times more potent than artificial drugs. If you would never think of going to a business meeting, sales negotiation, or confrontation while you were drunk, you should think the same way about doing this when you are angry or upset.

The primary difference is that you don’t suddenly get drunk in these situations, but you can suddenly experience strong emotions. Just as drink impairs judgment, so do strong emotions. If you are angry or upset, this is a very important situation and you need to deal with it IMMEDIATELY. If your thought processes are completely de-railed with emotion, you are not giving yourself the best opportunity to deal with this important situation properly. Who knows’, you may. You might just pick on the appropriate action and execution while you feel this way, but consider the following.

Time leaches emotions out of experiences. I’ll just bet that there are times in your past where strong negative emotions were involved, and now that they have receded, you can inspect them. You may well have been perfectly justified in feeling the way that you did (don’t discount your feelings), but in retrospect, how did this experience turn out for you? If you had a time machine and could re-visit this situation, what would you have done differently? You can use this as a Deus ex Machina in the future. You can use your crystal ball and look ahead, you can make some decisions right now about things that you can do if this starts to happen again.

You know how to deal with this.

If you look at it this way, you might not be able to prevent negative experiences. It is your absolute responsibility to reduce this corrosive component of your life. If you fuel a bad feeling, it can escalate to something worse. Even if it never escalates, but just simmers along, it is generating chemicals that will kill you in a very unpleasant way, and the trip to this demise will be just as unpleasant.

You owe it to yourself to just get that crap out of your life. Someone might be unpleasant or rude to you. They may even do this on purpose, they may track you down across a continent for the express purpose of being mean, or they might just pick on you because you happen to be there. Right up to this point, it is their problem.

They could be an anonymous nobody who can just as easily return to that category with their feathers unruffled, or your ear hanging from their belt loop. They know nothing about you. You have a say in how every human interaction in your life turns out, and you could do worse than trying to make everyone positive

In a specific example like road rage, one simple expedient is to stop. If you are moving in traffic, and you pull over to the side of the road, simple laws of physics take over – the distance from an asshole increases.

You might have to put some effort into this, if you are in a public place and something like this happens, you may need to physically distance yourself from someone – walk away, again the distance from an asshole increases.

You might naturally assume that when the distance from an asshole increases, that you are moving away from an asshole. You could be doing everyone else a favor, because you might be the asshole.

Sad but true.

Like you would not willingly rush into a hazmat accident, and would probably take specific actions to avoid one, the same is true for negative emotions.
.
This should show you that your life is not some action movie, where each phase is defined by snap decisions and explosive action. These things may happen, just not all the time. For the long periods in between, everyone benefits from your consideration, but because you are in every single one of these situations, the person that gets the most overall benefit is YOU.

I was driving my mother to the airport for an international flight. I had scheduled to be at the airport between 2 ½ to 3 hours early. As I was driving, I got a message on my cell phone from the airline and I pulled over to check it (yeah, really, I had loads of time and my Mum was up my ass about it). They left a recorded message saying that the first leg of the flight had been cancelled, and that my mother was re-scheduled to fly a day later and on a much more grueling schedule. When I called the reservation desk I found that the international portion of the flight was still OK, but the domestic hop was cancelled. There was an earlier flight, but because the overall flight was international, I’d only have an hour to check in and that it was a policy that I needed 2 hours. I thought this was fine, but the reservations clerk strongly discouraged me from continuing to the airport.

I was fuming. I’d gotten notification about an event too late to do anything about it, and had been presented a fait acomplis. I was already en route to the airport, and when I’d called someone to ask for help they were adamant that I should turn around and go home. It was not that this thing was not possible, it was a policy issue. It became obvious that I was not going to prevail on the phone, and even if I did, they were not the people that could physically get my mother on the plane.

I’d made a decision, I was going to the airport and I was going to get my mother on the plane. I’d also got some pretty strong ideas about what I was going to do. They were completely conventional thoughts and they revolved around some yelling and throwing my weight about and some kicked asses and my Mum on that plane. The fact that it might be my ass that got kicked and Mum would miss the flights because I’d be in custory was not a consideration. I’d seen too many hardass movies. I focused on being calm, since I still had to drive to the airport, and my Mother is always up my ass about how I drive and as I calmed down. I started thinking more calmly about my situation.

There was someone at the airport that could get my mother on the plane. I needed to find that person. When I walked up to that person, the first impression of my problem would be the one that I gave them. Until they met me, they would have no idea what had happened. A graphic description of the injustices perpetrated against my by their employer, what I thought of the airline, and demanding immediate satisfaction was my second plan admittedly, but at best it was a plan b.

I know I feel good about myself when I help someone. The first thing I needed to do was ask for help. Without explaining everything that had happened, and how I felt about it, I needed to tell this person plainly and calmly what I needed.

“I need to re-book me Mum onto a domestic flight that leaves in 1 hour, and I need to make sure that she was still booked on the international flight. I need to do this because her original flight had been cancelled, and I'm worried that I didn’t have enough time, miduck.”

(I'd pre threatened Mum to look pathetic and old)

I did have a lot of justifying statements, threats, accusations and other stuff lurking beneath the surface, but that was my problem, not theirs.

When I approached a supervisor and said pretty much that quoted bit above and they said “It should be no problem, let me check”. He went to a spare terminal, asked for my mothers documents and printed the tickets. The whole thing was resolved in less than 10 minutes, and I still had 30 minutes to say goodbye to my mother.

In this case, I had a 30 minute car ride to gather my thoughts. If I had been presented with this information at the airport, or I had held onto my feelings for 30 minutes, executing my plan b may have worked. Plan a could have caused a lot of bad feeling and ultimately hurt someone I cared about – my mother. It was no good for her if I let my emotion stand between her and her flight.

This is a situation where I thought differently. Not in an abstract way, sitting on a park bench thinking about “How much money would be enough?” I was in an emotionally charged environment, and I was thinking conventional thoughts (conventional to me). These conventional thoughts had entirely predictable outcomes. But, ironically enough conventional thinking was telling me that while I didn’t like what was going on right now, if I did what I felt like doing (or what I’d done in the past in similar situations), I was going to feel even worse about what happened next.

As stated before “Blessed are they that get the knowledge they need as they need it”.

Sometimes it is easy to get carried along with the situation. It can be a little like skiing, or bicycle riding: you get going on a gentle slope, and you are comfortable with everything that is happening. This slope gets steeper and all of a sudden everything you have is focused on dealing with a situation that needs everything that you have. Your level of awareness rises from clues about your surroundings (i.e. I’m going too fast). At this point you can do something about it. At a minimum you can stop. If you decide to continue, you know you have to use all your considerable experience and faculties to keep yourself from running out of control and maybe getting hurt.

You can do this at any point in your life. There are situations that can start to gather momentum all on their own. If you are experienced, you look for these situations because this is where you can move away of the pack and put distance between you and everyone else (sometimes literally, in long loping strides).

Stopping is an excellent and often underused device for bringing a situation like this under control. You have a myriad ways of stopping something, but the simplest is “I need to stop”

If it is a situation where you cannot stop just remember, it takes your participation for this thing to get where it’s going, so you'd best be prepared.