Fuller Wiser

So this is it. Again.

Four years ago, I had every square inch of my hope for my country’s future wrapped around the campaign of one John Kerry, upon whose rather wobbly shoulders the fate of the nation rested. When the election day hammer fell, it landed hard on me. Fear had won the day. Fear spread by the Bush administration throughout the public to keep them leaping at shadows, and Mr. Kerry’s own fear of taking any stand too firmly, lest it offend someone.

And now, as McCain pulls ahead of Obama in the polls, I myself must suppress fear. Fear of a United States whose primary motivator is fear.

As much as I hate the living guts of Thomas Friedman, the man was right for once in his life this week when he noted the stark differences between the vibe of modern China and that of the United States, evident to this year’s Olympic tourists from around the world. He noted correctly that while China has spent the last seven years building its economy, the United States has spent those same seven years running scared, throwing vast amounts of cash desperately in any direction that appears to save us from hooded evildoers lurking in the shadows. And as a direct result, China is on the rise, while we are quite indisputably in decline.

I do not whole with China’s methods of achieving market superiority. Indeed, I studiously avoid buying Chinese-made goods for my child (inasmuch as that is actually possible) for safety reasons. But the overall approach of building an economy rather than invading every country that looks at us cockeyed seems much more sound to me, and I believe the evidence bears this thinking out.

The disgusting part is that it was chickenhawks like Friedman who helped bog us down into our current morass. Yes, I vividly recall the shock of 9/11, when in the words of Art Spigelman, the world had just come to an end. I remember the apocalyptic thinking, the mad rush to determine who, why, where, and how these new enemies had done this horrific thing. I remember the fear of what might be yet to come.

But I also remember the speed with which opportunistic warmongers leapt into the gap between what we feared and what we knew. I remember the bastardized logic designed to focus our fear in the direction of their choosing. I resisted, loudly and in the streets of the nation’s capital, but most did not. The collective buyer’s remorse sweeping our country in the past two years has given me some comfort. Even the stupidest among us are realizing that we have run off the rails.

So why, in the name of all that makes any goddamned sense whatsoever, would we elect someone who helped build this hellbound handbasket, and who promises to continue taking it even further into the depths?

Fear.

Americans no longer know what to do without fear. When the Soviets left us without a nemesis in the 1990′s, we turned inward. Liberals were the enemy now, nancifying our boys and letting women wear pants. Then 9/11 came, and now that the public was scared shitless of liberals, anything that sounded like a remotely non-neocon solution to the new threat was dismissed immediately as being treason.

And even war with al Qaeda and the Taliban wasn’t enough. Kabul fell too easily, too quickly, leaving the bloodthirst unquenched. Bush the Firste had already taught us that Saddam Hussein was our enemy (despite being our longtime friend), so why not kill that bastard as well? Already frothed up and fearful of any thoughts emerging from anywhere to the left of Bill Clinton (a center-straddler nonetheless portrayed as Abbie Hoffman by the dittoheads), the only answer, to any question whatsoever, was war.

So here we sit, like Germany in 1918 (though without even the balls to risk our own territory), surveying our ruin. And like Germany of old, we have two paths before us. We can seek out ever more specious scapegoats, firing down rabbit holes until we run out of ammo (WWII and the Holocaust). Or we can realize what should be obvious by now, which is that in the 21st century, the Post-American Hegemony century, the only way forward is learning to play well with others. Godwin be damned, these are our choices.

Mind you, I have no illusions that Barack Obama is the answer to all of our ills. But McCain is definitely running on a platform of fear, and the past seven years have shown us the fruits of that fertilizer. Much like our industry, we need an alternative energy driving us forward. Can we at least try something that isn’t fear? How about hope? Hope for economic prosperity, innovation, and social justice. Hope for something other than a smoking pile of rubble where we believed our enemies to be, and instead found ourselves, huddled in a corner, afraid.

Knowledge is a useful thing. Having been in the workforce for 17 years, I’ve collected a good deal of data. Much of it is cross-platform, meaning that it holds true for certain job descriptions no matter what the industry. Admin is pretty much admin. It’s what I do, and I do it very well.

When I say I do it well, what I actually mean is that I don’t do it horribly. And in my experience, that means I’m quite a prize.

The world is full of horrible admins. Cram-packed with them, in fact. I’ve supervised them, replaced them, been replaced by them in lean times, and sat in testing rooms with them, mowing over their scores like a half-ton John Deere. For every thing I can do halfway decently, there are at least a hundred people who cannot do that thing correctly to save their lives.

This is not braggadocio. It embarrasses me sometimes how half-assed my work is. And yet, barring broad layoffs, my jobs have always been as secure as I want them to be, for no other reason than my supervisors’ fear of who else might be out there to replace me.

Since this realization, which has come gradually over the years, my Calvinist fears of consequences for laziness have diminished greatly. I certainly don’t relish a talking-to, on the odd occasions when such things occur, but I am secure in the knowledge that this step comes quite a ways before an actual firing in the admin world.

Libertarian types go on about how you can’t fire union people or socialist Frenchies, but for all practical purposes, it’s pretty hard to fire admins even in the freest of markets. That Kristofferson song will tell you about what freedom is. If your two choices are mediocre and worse, it doesn’t feel much like real choice.

It’s what we do in politics. Most people decide between the lesser of two evils. My candidate, the one who represents all my values, never runs, and so I cast my vote in the direction I deem least likely to screw me. Even in our highest offices, we make the choice between mediocre and worse.

Whither excellence? Certainly it exists, but in finite quantities. I personally believe it is squelched by the way our society is structured. On the odd occasion someone makes it through the mangler untainted by institutionalized mediocrity, but far too often even these bright candles are extinguished shortly thereafter. If you make more money by being naked and stupid on the teevee than by thought and innovation, you end up with a country where being intelligent is a liability.

So here I sit, mediocre, but with aspirations of excellence thus far unrealized. Connection?

There once was a man who was none too good,
And then I’d say he was none too bad.
At times he was mighty good for a spell,
And sometimes he’d go out and he’d raise a little hell.
Mediocre Fred… Mediocre Fred

Fred went to work from 8 to 5,
And he punched a clock to show he was alive.
Went to church every Sunday morn’,
Sometimes he wondered why he was born.
Mediocre Fred… Mediocre Dull Fred

Fred went to the movies every Saturday night,
Liked to watch TV and the western fights,
And he paid his taxes most every year,
And on a hot summer day, why, he drank a little beer.
Exciting Mediocre Fred… Mediocre Fred

Well the days went by, all dull and grey,
And he didn’t think much and had little to say.
And when the full moon rose he’d limb over the moat,
Find some people sleeping and he’d BITE THEIR THROATS!
Mediocre Fred… Mediocre Dull Fred

- Mediocre Fred, by the Smothers Brothers

Back in the funk.

It’s a combination platter, as usual. Firstly, my sinuses have reinfected, giving me a lovely headache and corresponding general weakness, which serves as a fabulously rosy lens through which I can view the world. Meds on the way, just gotta wait it out. I hope.

Secondly, my kid’s got some problems. I’ve seen and read enough about troubled children (particularly in the writings of the great Rob Rummel-Hudson) to know that my son has a whole lot fewer obstacles in his way than many other unfortunate kids. And if there’s going to be trouble, I’ve previously said I’d rather it be physical than mental.

And physical it is. My son has muscle control problems that will require some physical therapy. Not just now, but for the rest of his life. For someone whose illnesses have already blazed through his allotment of paid time off, this just hit my brain at completely the wrong time. I had a very dark couple of hours just now, even firing off a desperate Somebody Help Me email to my mother. But oddly, upon reading my wife’s subsequent email to the extended family on the same subject, written in a can-do and somewhat flippant tone, I straightened up a bit.

We’re not dealing with Down’s Syndrome here. It’s just a muscle weakness, treated via exercise, which in a 2-year-old’s case is a whole lot of playing. Structured playing, but hardly boot camp. And he likes his therapist. Didn’t even want to leave after the evaluation.

As my mother has noted, I have my dad’s tendency to view the dark side of things first. Whereas one person might ooh and aah when they see a shiny piece of quartz lying on the ground, I immediately set about poking it with a stick, certain that it’s got a snake underneath.

I’m not completely crazy, because of course most things in life have a dark side. And in many instances it is the larger of the given sides. But not always. When I assume that it will be, I am doing the reverse of what the god-botherers do by finding the deity’s divine hand in everything. By searching for the devil in the details, I am assuming malice. Which, as an atheist, is a pretty damned stupid assumption.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that there can be a devil and not a god. But empirical evidence points to neither. The universe is not cruel, it is indifferent. This indifference can have positive or negative effects. And because it is indifferent, the types of effects do not necessarily balance out.

I gave up my brief foray into Buddhism a few years ago for a variety of reasons, some of which have been detailed here. One that I have not mentioned is karma. I know karma is more Hindu than Buddhist, but the two occasionally cross-pollinate, and those intersections are supremely irritating to me.

Karma is bollocks. It’s no surprise to hear an atheist say this, but it bears flogging. A whole lot of people who are for all intents and purposes non-theistic are still under the impression that old superstitions like astrology and karma hold sway even in the absence of the icky old dogmatic ideas they’ve eschewed in their personal journey towards enlightenment.

People: IT’S STILL SUPERSTITION.

Even Stevie Wonder worked this sort of doublethink, though in reverse order, claiming on the same album that “superstition ain’t the way” and “God has made us fall in love, it’s true.”

As discussed here previously, our minds are drawn to myth. Mine certainly is. But if we are to surpass our primate upbringings, we must step as much as possible outside of our brains and have a good poke at them now & then to see what crawls out. Thus I must remind myself that the universe cannot be a swamp of random chance and simultaneously be out to make my life miserable. It is one or the other, and the evidence pointing to supernatural malice is far from conclusive.

There are things in my life that are good. There are things that are bad. New good things happen, and new bad things happen. New things happen which are a mix of good and bad. But when I flinch under the whip of the invisible torturer, I am jumping at shadows. And a shadow, as Roberto Casati deftly notes, is an absence, not a thing.

So my son needs physical therapy. My car needs oil changes. My cat needs her litter box cleaned. These are facts, not dastardly schemes. We all have problems. If I can prevent myself from creating new ones out of thin air, that would be a very good thing indeed.

How does this stuff work?

I know, consult my local novelist/philosopher/physicist/psychologist and take a number. If humans can’t collectively come up with an answer, then what chance does a 34-year-old office monkey/weekend artiste have?

This is why sci-fi exists, to try and give our brains some form to wrap all the weirdness around, while providing a built-in caveat that of course it’s only a story. Religion does the same thing, only without the caveat.

I feel tempted to read some Joseph Campbell, given how influential his thoughts on myth vs. reality have been on society. George Lucas worshiped the man, and his sense of myth was definitely seared onto my youthful tabula rasa.

I need myths, that much is clear. I need things that give the world structure, even if I can’t throw myself whole hog into believing that they’re true. My brain can’t handle the chaos in its pure form for very long. Nature or nurture, who knows. Not a soul.

“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter” quoth Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.

Well, the crude matter doesn’t seem to give a shit about that.

All the tortured writings that have littered these pages, they come from the one organ of the body that believes itself to be independent of the others. And those of us inclined to find our bodies to be more cumbersome than a brain case should ideally be will readily ingest the fiction that mind triumphs over matter.

And of course it doesn’t. There is not a single intelligence which death, matter’s enforcer, has not or will not eventually snuff out. All claims to the contrary are at best contrived and at worst delusional. The works of the mind may live beyond man’s years, but for how long? Ask one Gordon Sumner:

They say a city in the desert lies
The vanity of an ancient king
The city lies in broken pieces
And the wind blows, and the vultures sing
These are the works of man
This is the sum of our ambition…

Matter has been very much on my mind these past two days, for an accident of chemistry has rendered me suddenly, inexplicably happy.

Awake and fretful on Saturday night, I took one of my wife’s melatonin supplements, figuring at the very least it couldn’t hurt. Sunday morning, though lacking a full night’s sleep, I arose feeling an immense calm, a sense that everything was, somehow, going to be all right. I spent the day with my son, with the usual mix of fun and child-wrangling stress, but no matter the conflicts, I never once gave way to despair. I simply enjoyed my son’s company, and took comfort in his happiness.

Anyone who’s read my previous writings will note their stark contrast with the above paragraph. My mind could hardly believe it. Happy? What the hell is that?

So I tried it again last night, and though my body is aware that I still didn’t get enough sleep, I do not currently hold that mustard seed of despair in my heart, threatening to bloom at the slightest provocation. But for Pete’s sake, where did it go?

It would both elate and enrage me if all this time, I had simply been suffering from a melatonin shortage. Of course, that would certainly not be the whole thing. I likely did need my recent surgery, and had legitimate recovery issues subsequently. Other medications I am currently taking are also helping, as Aimee Mann would say, to bring me up to zero.

And really, that’s what I’ve been striving for in recent memory. Not superhuman health, just regular human. Hovering a notch below that level is maddening, and demoralizing. Normal functionality is right there, almost within your grasp, but surrounded by a thin, impenetrable membrane that is nonetheless clear enough for you to see exactly what you’re missing.

I’ve been further down, of course, and so I haven’t complained as much as I might have. In those times when normal life is unfathomably distant, when you’re locked in an underground bunker of pain and disorientation, there is no complaining. Only begging your body and all beings real and imaginary to make it stop. I have no interest in going back to that place, and I retain enough vestigial superstition to therefore refrain from overdramatizing small-p pain.

But look at what such tiny troubles have wrought. My entire marriage thrown into a crashing wreck simply because the organs in my body were not receiving enough of a given chemical. It’s beyond offensive. It’s grotesque.

We are puppets on strings. The old ones were right, we do not fully control our destiny. But the gods are neither lumbering Titan nor ethereal sage nor undead father-confessor. They are indescribably tiny. They inhabit the space between spaces, and they govern our lives as surely as salt governs the taste of soup. We are their works, not the other way around.

So, my tiny masters, might I ask one favor? This feeling I have, that it’s all going to be okay, could you just keep that setting turned on? I promise, I’ll give you what you crave, just don’t send me back to the other side of that funhouse mirror. Pretty please.

I think therefore I am, my ass.

It’s never going to be the right time.

These objections I have in discussions with my wife, these caveats and conditions, they will never go away. If one of us isn’t sick, then the other one is, or we have a bunch of unexpected expenses, or we just had a big move, or the ozone level is brutal, or someone in the extended family is having a problem, or whatever the mother monkey fuck.

All these old Phil Collins lyrics are starting to make sense to me. Say what you will, the man knows about divorce. There truly is never a time when all parties can gather unhindered by life’s myriad assaults and discuss the problem rationally. How we behave in the midst of crisis is how we behave ALL THE TIME.

I meet people who seem to have a lower crisis-to-normality ratio than I do, but those people don’t seem to want very much out of life. As Siddhartha accurately notes, it is in the striving that the suffering is born. And as I’ve noted in this space before, there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my desires, any more than I can switch sexual orientation. I am what I am.

Then again, Aimee Mann has true words on the subject of what is changeable and what is not. However, I think I am in fact losing critical pieces by shambling down a road that my frame is unfit to traverse. And hoping that the road will become smoother is merely stabbing in the dark, no more useful than reading a horoscope. If my adult life has taught me anything, it is that major upheaval must be included in the equation not as an if, but as a when.

With that in mind, are we doomed? If the present state of chaos will only give way to a new state of chaos, can we assume that how we might behave in the eye of the storm is the anomaly rather than the rule? If that is the case, then this is the shape of the future. And in its form I see only darkness and despair.

I will never forgive myself for bringing my son into this situation. Had I a modicum of true spine, I would have prevented the disaster ahead of time. But like our deluded president, I cannot unbreak the vase. I only want to keep it from getting broken further. I want my son to be happy, I want my wife to be happy, and I want myself to be happy. The unification of these goals creates a fell chord of ear-cracking dissonance that will reverberate for as long as the attempt is made, and shake the bones of any who are near it.

Perhaps it is best to let go. We are drowning, clinging to each other for life, and in the process pulling everyone under. Maybe getting it over with before my son can grasp the full ramifications will make it easier on him. Or maybe my name will pop up on a therapist’s couch in 30 years and smart for it. There is so much that I cannot know. The horror of uncertainty has bred many industries over time. I work in one of them now. It shouldn’t surprise me to fall victim myself.

Pangloss, you bastard.

I need information. It occurs to me that I have a huge information hole in my relationship calculus, and that is the possible effect of a divorce on my son.

I have no personal point of reference on the subject, being the son of two people who, despite a truckload of domestic strife, are still married. The friends I have who are the children of divorce are also the children of alcoholics, psychotics, and the generally unwell. There must be sane people who get divorced and whose children must navigate those waters. I just don’t know any of them.

Thus, my picture of a kid whose parents have just divorced is that of a miserable wretch with no self-esteem, or else a conniver who plays both sides against each other for maximum material benefit. Is this the entire range of possibility? And it’s not the same as kids of celebrity divorce, because in our case, money is a huge issue. If my wife and I are both poorer (and more stressed as a result), my son’s life will be adversely affected.

But of course the other end of that calculus also bears examination. It would be tempting to say that the reason I have a good deal of my head together is because I had a stable home life as a child. But that would leave out the fact that I’m seeing a shrink because evidently there are fair portions of my head that are not together at all. How much of this is due to the fact that my parents were miserable throughout my childhood?

One of the things one always hears is that children of divorce think it’s their fault. If my parents had split, though, I don’t know if I would’ve come to that conclusion. They just didn’t get along. They only sort of get along now. True, my old man didn’t get along with me either, but it was always clear to me that the prime area of tension was between him and my mom.

But how much of the effects are due to the subsequent arrangements? If you have two parents who live in two separate places and you see them an equal amount of time, that situation will yield a different result than if there’s one parent who’s hardly around and another who spends most of their time with you.

Consider, however, the inherent feeling of instability that must be present when your life is split 50/50 between two homes. A sense of belonging would be hard to establish very firmly, given that even things like what room is your room change from week to week. Different neighborhood kids, different toys, different routines, it’s got to be at least a little jarring.

But maybe I only think that because I lived in the same house forever. My wife had the opposite experience, though, moving every few years, and it really threw off her sense of belonging and ability to make and keep friends. Though that’s not really what we’d be doing, it would just be a weekly rotation between two fixed points.

I still need more information. It’s all conjecture until I get firsthand sources. And I’m off…