Good Song: Nobody Asks

Here's insight we can use.

In this short meditation, Rusty Ring favourite Peter Mayer sums up the lesson we all should have learned long ago, but that many – perhaps the majority – of us are still sulking over.

Candid elaboration on the Zen notion of dependent co-arising, as applied to the human condition (a subordinate form I prefer to call co-dependent arising), the whole track consists of little more than Peter's own voice and guitar, enhanced here and there with a ghostly violin at the edges. It all adds up to power that commands attention, and a sedate simplicity our sort esteem.

Another cut from Peter's excellent album Heaven Below.

I've got this on frequent rotation these days, as I absorb demands to take arms against successive waves of faceless, vaguely defined offenders. Give it a click; see if it doesn't help to keep you on-task as well.


NOBODY ASKS
by Peter Mayer

Nobody asks to be born
They just show up one day at life’s door
Saying here I am world
I’m a boy, I’m a girl
I'm rich, I am sick, I am poor

Nobody asks to be born

No one is given a say
They’re just thrown straight into the fray
The bell rings at ringside
And someone yells fight
Some just end up on the floor

Nobody asks to be born

And no one’s assured
Of a grade on the curve
Or a friend they can trust
Or a house where they’re loved
And no life includes
A book of how-to
Because nobody has lived it before

So to all the living be kind
Bless the saint and the sinner alike
And when babies arrive
With their unholy cries
Don’t be surprised by their scorn

Nobody asks to be born

Trash Talk

In killing my Self
The monster is defeated
Eat my Zen, dickweed


("Enrag'd Monster" courtesy of John Hamilton Mortimer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Found Poem: Bigfoot

I think Bigfoot is blurry
That's the problem
It's not the photographer's fault

Mitch Hedberg


(Graphic courtesy of Steve Baxter and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Great Pacific Sock Patch

According to figures released by the Index of International Statistics, the Great Pacific Sock Patch may be one of the greatest environmental threats of our time. In this region off Australia's east coast, millions of odd socks churn, from every nation in the Pacific Rim. Some are sweat socks. Some are dress socks. Black, white, and argyle; toe socks and boot socks and nylons. And around December, a documented uptick in Christmas stockings. But they all have three things in common: they're footwear; they're unmated; and they threaten one of the world's most sensitive habitats.

The basic mechanics of the Sock Patch phenomenon have been known for centuries, but with global warming accelerating the rotation of the Pacific gyres, it has become a matter of international concern. Single socks have a well-documented tendency to drift; that's why you're likely to find fewer of them after laundering than before. Over the years there have been many attempts to explain this frustrating peculiarity. Children in my grandparents' day were told stories of the Sock Thug, a pirate who stumped into homes while the noise from the washing machine masked his footstep and snatched out single socks to sell to other pirates. Families in the 1940s were cautioned against keeping cats, after an article in Ladies' Saturday Evening Journal posited a high correlation between having a cat in the house and coming up short on stockings. And then there was the exorcism fad of the 1970s, when priests were called into homes to cast out the "dryer demons" that randomly ate socks. Because, you know: evil.

But in the mid-1990s, scientists working with superconductors finally cracked the case. Turns out all socks are either positively or negatively charged. The negative side of the pair tends to remain passive, but the positive one leans, imperceptibly, toward ground. That's why they often end up on the ground, and then, drawn by the superior conductivity of water, in lakes and streams. At last they reach the Pacific Ocean, where they swirl in the currents, slowly wending their way south, drawn apparently by the static cling generated by Australia's low average relative humidity. Sadly, before they can actually wash up on the Fatal Shore, they become snagged on the giant barbed wire fence that is the Great Barrier Reef. So insidious is this phenomenon that parts of the world's largest living structure are now all but buried in odd stockings, smothering the coral and hastening its destruction by storms, owing to greater resistance.

Solutions have so far proven elusive. Attempts to interest private industry in harvesting the garments have foundered on the expense of sorting, coupled with the lower saleability of unmatched socks. Like so many other human-generated threats, the best response may be a fundamental change of lifestyle. The California Maritime Coalition suggests pinning socks together before washing them, a time-honoured strategy that not only keeps stray stockings out of the world's water, but also produces substantial savings for large families. Others advocate a total ban on wearing socks at all, while still others are calling for legislation to require that all socks henceforward be made of hemp.

Because, you know: hemp.

WW: On the Green Man and Woman's patio

(Never heard of the Green Man?)

WW: Demons in the driveway

Straight From the Tahre Pits

Weird US Navy CH54 flew low up the beach this afternoon, exactly window-height at my house on the bluff. Reminds me of some giant prehistoric crane fly. Maybe that's why they call it a Sky Crane.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia and the US government. It's an Army helo, but you can't have everything; where would you put it?)

Monsters

Night filled me with dread.

That the world turned black, leaving windows like sheets of obsidian against which my little brother's face resembled something my reptilian cortex clearly remembered, was bad enough. Beyond lay strange noises, cries of marauding wolves and phantom babies that grown-ups dismissed as dogs and cats.

But the worst was the bed. There, I lay alone and unarmed, swaddled in flannel and bound in bedclothes. In such a state, I was completely vulnerable. I had no clear idea what might happen, but it was awful, and certain.

Interesting now to think that I once feared the dark. Growing, I came to prize the cover of night: the protection of a nocturnal forest, the kindness of a dark room. But at seven, that very darkness manured my nightmares. My lifeline, and the only power standing between me and destruction, was a paper-thin beam of light slicing in from the hall. The door was kept cracked for just this purpose, so that a sliver of day would fence my bed from the darkest night in the room.

As I was (and am) also an insomniac, bedtime was almost as stressful on my parents as it was on me. First came the operatic resistance, then the serial interruptions in television shows as they stalked back down the hall to threaten me with ill-defined but horrific consequences if I didn't "go to sleep right now".

As if sleep were a place to which I could simply walk, in my striped pyjamas.

One night my mother happened to glance through this narrow gap on the way to the bathroom, and saw me seated on the floor, reading Dr. Suess by that thin reed of light. The shout that followed sent the book flapping like a flustered chicken. I can only guess that she had parried one too many of my counter-recumbence tactics that night, and a vain hope of peace had been rudely extinguished.

Taking scarcely a terrestrial step I dove headlong into bed, vanishing deep beneath the covers before I'd even touched the mattress. Outside my mother continued raging, while I curled into a fetal posture and pinned my last wager on science.

For as any child knows, children's blankets are made of some advanced space-age stuff – possibly Kevlar – and are fully UL-rated against ghosts, prowlers, and middle-weight monsters. They may also be effective against parents, if, upon finding no head protruding from them, these last conclude they must not have had children after all, and withdraw.

But as no blanket is soundproof, I was able to determine that it hadn't worked this time.

At length my mother wound up with the observation that if I couldn't be trusted with an open door, she could damn well close it. Followed by a slam, and silence.

Here was trouble. I popped out, already terrified, and found the situation exact. The air was opaque as cast iron.

The door was closed.

It's hard to describe, or explain, the horror of that moment. It engulfed me like fire, and scorched away all trace of reason. I only knew that whatever hid in the dark each night, waiting for just this opportunity, was in that very instant converging on my bed. It was big and vicious, able to shred a child's blanket with a single swipe of its nondescript paw. And it was horrible.

I screamed in the dark, begged for the door to be opened, hot tears pumping down a face that had been dry. But there was no response.

For some reason it never occurred to me to get up and open the door myself. Being decapitated by a giant praying mantis was one thing; a spanking was quite another. But I was otherwise completely disabled by panic, chest heaving as I sobbed, quilt clutched to my sternum. A pounding heartbeat, maybe two, and whatever it was, would happen. And I'd be dead.

Not the dead you get playing army. Actual dead.

And then a strange thing happened. Something did surge out of the dark. It came from 'way down, 'way down to the first rung of a long, twisted ladder, a place so black and estranged to light as if it had never been.

But this thing came not from my room. It came from me.

Something angry, arrogant, powerful, climbed my spine. Undaunted. Unafraid. Something...

Scottish.

"Rrrrright, then!" it snarled, in my voice. "So et's eatin' me ye're aboot?" Well, GET ON WI' IT, ye blatherskate!"

Even in the dark I could feel my eyes burn red, my teeth gnash each syllable.

"Come 'n' get me, ye gory great monsters!" I, or It, continued. "But I'll STICK IN YER THROAT on the way doon!"

I'm not entirely certain I was speaking English. It might have been Gaelic. It might have been whatever we spoke before Gaelic. But the words came from deep, down where peaty black water laves the gates of creation, where things live that intellect denies.

And the thing would retreat not an inch. Not so much as the breadth of one unearned blade of grass.

"Och!" I cried. "STEP UP, ye pukin' milksops!"

No roar, no attack answered. Not a rustle. I sat bolt upright, quivering not from fear, now, but fury. My small fists clenched to hammers, and I was avid to ply them. To be sure, I was still aware of my tininess. I knew the big-scaries would probably just laugh and bite me in half. But this was no longer about winning. Or even survival. This was about giving as good as I got.

This was about honour.

I scanned the shadows again, fixedly, panting, but no longer crying.

I cocked my head toward the murky space beneath the bed. Nothing afoot there, either. Nothing breathed in that room, seen or unseen, except me.

Since that night it's been harder to frighten me with darkness, harder to threaten me with solitude. Lurid tales no longer run me. Hysterical exhortations to strike a shadowy enemy before it strikes me. Imperious demands that I not look under the bed, "for my own good". Because that night I learned a truth too true to be unlearned.

The monsters are wussies.

(From Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson.)

Sea Monster

I'm reading Journey by Junk by Willard Price. It's an old discard from the San Diego Public Library, unearthed in a used book store in Olympia, Washington. (Library discards are a favourite of mine. You get the rarest, most interesting reads there.)

The book is the interesting account of a summer Price and his wife spent gunkholing Japan's Inland Sea shortly after the Second World War. But what caught my attention last night was the following passage:

Leaving Nushima, we sailed straight across an arm of the incoming Pacific with nothing between us and America -- except some five thousand miles of salt water. Sleek black porpoises played around the ship. Far out we saw the spout of a whale. But the most astonishing spectacle was the sea serpent.

What it could actually have been I have no idea and I have a fair acquaintance with the denizens of the deep. It swam with its head well out of water (sic) and its tail licking the surface some ten feet behind. Its head was irregular and crested like that of a mythical dragon or giant iguana. It was not the streamlined head of a sea snake or moray eel or conger eel. It never went down during the twenty minutes we watched it. Evidently it was a land creature, quite without gills, yet it was many miles from shore and headed straight out to sea. It did not swim with speed of a fish, but slowly and with effort as if propelled by the wriggling of the body rather than by fins. It showed no fear of the ship, even when we sailed within a few yards of it, and when we turned aside to make port it calmly continued on its course towards San Francisco.

As Price notes, he was an experienced naturalist, and wrote among other things a long sheet of children's books on exotic fauna that were required reading for boys in the post-war period. What the hell was this thing? A Google search didn't even net a mention of the mystery, let alone a resolution. None of the usual suspects are in the dock; Price makes it clear this was no fish, so oarfish, squid, whale sharks, rays, and the like are out. It also was apparently not mammalian, or even aquatic. One wishes Price could have been more specific. Colour? Order? Body type? What's ten feet long, lives in Japan, and occasionally swims to San Francisco?

Ideas welcome.


(Graphic courtesy of Sebastian Münster and Wikimedia Commons.)