My Least Favorite Life

This is my least favorite life

The one where you fly and I don’t

The kiss holds a million deceits

And a lifetime goes up in smoke

This is my least favorite you

Who floats far above earth and stone

The nights that I twist on the rack

Is the time that I feel most at home

We wandering in the shade

And the rustle of falling leaves

A bird on the edge of a blade

Lost now forever, my love, in a sweet memory

The station rolls away from the train

The blue pulls away from the sky

The whisper of two broken wings

May be they’re yours, maybe they’re mine

This is my least favorite life

The one where I am out of my mind

The one where you are just out of reach

The one where I stay and you fly

I am wandering in the shade

And the rustle of falling leaves

A bird on the edge of the blade

Lost now forever, my love, in a sweet memory

https://youtu.be/dFh71_ftxLE

Writing Xmas isn't "taking Christ out of Christmas," it's shorthand

Xmas is not a non-religious version of “Christmas”. The “X” is actually indicating the Greek letter “Chi”, which is short for the Greek χριστός, meaning “Christ”. So “Xmas” and “Christmas” are equivalent in every way except their lettering.

In fact, although writing guides such as those issued by the New York Times; the BBC; The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style; and Oxford Press discourage the use of Xmas in formal writing, at one time, it was a very popular practice, particularly with religious scribes, who are thought to have started the whole “Xmas” thing in the first place. Indeed, the practice of using the symbol “X” in place of Christ’s name has been going on amongst religious scholars for at least 1000 years.

Eventually, this shorthand trick spread to non-religious writings where nearly everywhere “Christ” appeared in a word, the Greek Chi would replace that part of the word. For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there are numerous non-religious documents containing instances of “Xine”, which was a common spelling for someone whose name was Christine.

Lying to kids about drugs is a shitty deterrent

It is perhaps the greatest fallacy hoisted upon the peoples of civilized society that there is an inherent danger to recreational drug use. 

Perhaps the reason that anti drug campaigns fail so miserably is that they all lie. Drugs are awesome. They make you feel great and they don’t seem to cause the advertised harm, at least in the short term.  Whenever someone decides to try “just one little hit” as an experiment they undoubtedly learn that everything they’ve ever been told about that drug is horseshit.  

We tell kids their hearts will go into tachycardia and possibly explode if they try cocaine. While I’m sure that may be true for a small number of cases—overdoses notwithstanding—the (purely anecdotal, I grant you) experiences in which I’ve partaken, surrounded by rock musicians and strippers, proved that the experience is mostly limited to feeling really good, really sexy, and really talkative. Imagine the worst day you’ve had recently, and then imagine the best day. Quantify the difference emotionally between those two and add that to an average feeling and you pretty much have a mathematical understanding of how cocaine (and most stimulants, really in their own way, affects you.

We tell kids if they smoke marijuana they’ll burn their brains out and sit around being worthless and stupid. Inserting more of my anecdotal experience here, I can tell you that the valedictorian and salutatorian of my high school, and the class president of my third year of college were all huge pot-heads. This doesn’t mean that they weren’t holding themselves back—maybe they would have been über-geniuses if they hadn’t smoked—but they didn’t seem like lazy losers to me. 

As for Meth, I’m convinced that if cocaine were easily available and cheap that nobody would mess with that nasty stuff. In this same vein I place heroin, were morphine readily available. 

Adolescents are biologically programmed to be difficult and rebellious. When we lie to those kind of people about drugs (and exaggeration and omitting positives is still lying) it makes them less inclined to believe anything. Tell a kid he’ll get addicted from one snort of cocaine and when he doesn’t he’ll doubt that that same snort of heroin could kill him, which it most certainly can (especially if the cocaine is still in his system).  

Drug policy should be based on education. Drugs should be decriminalized because after all, ruining someone’s life over possessing a recreational amount that we were yesterday lying to about the affects of that very substance isn’t a productive way to discourage experimentation. 

Eulogy For My Father

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. It’s like walking up the stairs in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things. 

Daddy encouraged me to play music, to read, and to follow all my artistic interests. He showed concern when my grades were sub-par, but stressed that actually learning something was more important than a letter grade. He stressed that I should always endeavor to learn everything I could. He taught me dad/son things: fishing, how to work on engines, carpentry, shooting, old cars, boating, how to dissect a cat… Dad also taught me to not let myself be pushed around, to stand up for what I believed in, and though it might seem contradictory, Dad also taught me to remain calm.

Those who knew Daddy are aware of his tendency to “fly off the handle” over inconvenient minutia, But we who were closest to him know well that he possessed a very kind and gentle heart. While small things may have seen him quick to anger, he was immensely patient when it came to important matters. The same man who would scream over me spilling a drink never failed to maintain a reassuring calm when when discussing a large infraction I’d committed. I knew I could always go to my father when I screwed up and that he would support me outwardly, no matter how much he might disagree with what I’d done in private. Albert Pike once wrote “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” To me, many of the defining characteristics of who I am embody this statement.

A common past-time with which dad would engage me was to drive all around, showing me the back roads of Lauderdale County. Often, these concluded when he would make his way to a small, redneck bar just across the Tennessee line. I remember one such trip especially well. 

Daddy drank a Miller Lite because he refused to drink Budweiser products due to some political stance I never really tried to understand that somehow involved Jessie Jackson’s son, and I drank the Heineken I’d learned to order once I accepted the futility of inquiring into the darkest beer they carried. It was either a Friday or Saturday because the band was set up on the small stage. It was late afternoon, and Dad called my attention to a woman who’d come in. Her attire, makeup and hair were done up to the nines and Dad pointed out how it was awfully early for someone who’d put so much effort into being attractive at night to already be in a bar. At this, Daddy dispensed what I took at the time as sage advice: “No matter how pretty that woman is, somewhere there’s a man that’s tired of her shit…”

I know now that this is actually the punchline to a joke, but at the time I thought he was serious. It’s a unique quality to be able to impart humor and wisdom and have it be so memorable, and that’s what I remember most about my father.

A Boy and His Dog

Few relationships we form through our lifetimes will have the longevity, co-dependence or love as that we choose to share with a pet dog. The canine has been domesticated by man since before recorded history. There has literally always been a human understanding that a dog makes an appropriate companion. I don’t know why this is, but I can only imagine that those humans through the ages have recognized the same loyal companionship apparent in the species. Great and small alike, it seems the natural state for a canine to be a social creature and to accept man as immediate family.

There are many tales of dogs caring for wounded people or abandoned babies. We read these will understanding and emotion yet we aren’t really surprised by them. Indeed it seems few and far between are those in our society who don’t share an affinity for man’s best friend. 

There are good people and bad people in this world, and most straddle a line somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. But no matter the foulest person there is, I’ll bet there’s a dog who has at some point loved that man above all reproach. 

Dogs don’t need us. There’s plenty of evidence that they can survive in the wild on their own. But they seem to need us. And we need them. There doesn’t exist a truer, more faithful bond than between a boy and his dog. No woman can ever hope to provide that intense level of love and no parent can wholeheartedly express such empathy with that boy’s emotions.

I can be friends with people who are acquainted with those I don’t care for—I can trust them with my life. I don’t think I could ever trust a man (or woman) who didn't like dogs. The mere idea seems inhuman to me. 

I wrote this cradling my crippled, blind, 15-year-old miniature pincher, who has lately been having some gastrointestinal issues. I had to break away somewhere in the fourth paragraph to run her outside in the rain while I was barefoot as she had begun to lose control of her bowels on me. After tending to her and changing my shirt I returned to finish this essay. It strikes me that if any human, even my own daughter, were to poop on me I’d be so disgusted that I’d probably vomit up my dinner. With this poor creature, who’s given me her entire life though, I could only manage mild disgust and limitless pity. That’s the power of a dog. 

My Father Is Dying

My father is dying.

We die, all of us, eventually. Sickness; accidents; suicide; apathy; time; assure we will eventually breathe in and exhale for the very last time. And yet that doesn’t make it easier to accept. My father is dying, but not in the sense of “we’re all dying” that lives in that little room in our minds where we lock away our unpleasant thoughts, only bringing them out occasionally to ground us in reality or to experience an emotion and invoke a memory. My father is dying now. He currently exists in an indescribable, but very familiar state—he isn’t dead, but he isn’t really alive either. I have come to his home to see him in the hospital bed, to hear the moan of the machines, to smell the antiseptic and sickness, to see his grimace at the slightest provocation and the way his features soften as another half-milliliter of Morphine is squirted into his mouth. His breathing looks labored but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s so quiet I catch myself looking to the many layers of blankets that cover his failing body to assure that his chest still rises and falls. Cheyne-Stokes Respiration, they call it. The description reads more complicated than what actually occurs. Technical details aside, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, you “know it when [you] see it.” The fact that I can still prompt him to react unpleasantly by moving his head or rolling him over is, in a certain sense, comforting. I spent nights alone with my mother in Hospice and was holding her hand when she died, yet I had seen nary a reaction from her in the preceding weeks. She was already gone and we were waiting for her heart to stop. Dying isn’t a black and white thing, as one would think. That in-between space where you’re not actually dead but certainly not alive is a philosophical gray area. Medically, of course, this is a stupid proclamation, but clinical terms can’t encompass the gravity of sitting in the same room with the people who are solely responsible for your existence as they leave their bodies, and then their lives with a whisper. 

My father is dying, and no matter how much I know he has to I don’t want him to; I don’t want to make him stay either, though.

Hey, Pretty

Kyrie suggested we go for a drive in her new 2-door BMW coupe

In the parking lot, we slipped into her bucket seats. Kyrie took over from there.

At nearly 90 miles per hour she zipped us up to that windy edge

Known to some as Mullholland, that sinuous road running the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains where she then proceeded to pump her vehicle in and out of turns sometimes dropping down to 50 miles per hour, only to immediately gun it back up to 90 again. Fast, slow, fast fast slow. Sometimes a wide turn sometimes a quick one she preferred the tighter ones. The sharp controlled jerks, swinging left to right before driving back to the right. Only so she could do it all over again until after enough speed, and enough wind, and more distance than I had been prepared to expect. Taking me to parts of the city I rarely think of and never visit...

I can't remember the inane things I started babbling about then, I know it didn't really matter, she wasn't listening. She just yanked up on the emergency brake, dropped her seat back, and told me to lie on top of her—on top of those leather pants of hers, extremely expensive leather pants mind you, her hands immediately guiding mine over those soft, slightly oily folds. Positioning my fingers on the shiny metal tab, small and round, like a tear Then murmuring a murmur so inaudible that even though I could feel her lips tremble against my ear, she seemed far, far away. Pinch it, she said, which I did, lightly, until she also said pull it, which I also did, gently parting the teeth, one at a time, down under and beneath, the longest unzipping of my life...

We never even kissed or looked into each other's eyes. Our lips just

trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my only tongue, until as our tones shifted, and our consonants spun and squealed, rattled faster, hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn. Fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine...I didn't hear mine, only hers, probably counter-pointing mine

A high pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly, to practically 
a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense anymore, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straightaway
Too bad dark languages rarely survive...