I’ll be back next week.
I’m in the middle of three book projects, yet I have made the time to post here every week for the last few months. I’ll continue to do this, but this week, I need to prioritize a different project.
Multitasking is really not my thing, but I appear to be doing it. How well I’m doing it is another question entirely.
Don’t piss it all away…
I heard a guy with an English accent
Use the word “pissed” in the American sense.
No one else noticed.
He was talking to Americans
And Americans certainly know
What it means to be pissed.
We are pissed. We all are.
So much of the time
And for every imaginable reason.
Over there on the other side
Of the big drink,”pissed” means “drunk.”
Being pissed is something you do to yourself.
But what are Americans drinking
That makes us so angry?
I answer that question all the time.
We swim in righteous dudgeon.
We ride a high horse as we wade through the river.
We vote our values.
Apparently, one of those values is revenge.
Another is the fear of being wrong.
But the greatest value is property.
You can own all the things
If you buy them in installments.
The things you own also own you.
Don’t piss it all away, some say.
If piss has no value,
Does that mean it’s free?
Like life in the USA is free?
Or bought with borrowed money?
Or rented, like beer and coffee?
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My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists.
I was raised in Southern Baptist churches. Every moment of my young life I felt like an outsider. The Baptists helped with that. Inside me was the hard truth that every day, I secretly wished I was a girl. I heard over and over again from the churchy people in my family, who insisted (without knowing what was true of me, because I kept that secret buried deep inside) that people with sin in their hearts were bound for Hell, and that femininity in a male was a sickness and a sin.
I was presented with a choice. And my choice was to embrace my whole self: to be a good person, and to let the idea that I was inherently evil go, instead of internalizing the self-hatred I had been raised to. Every positive step I’ve taken since then has led to a larger worldview and a stronger sense of myself in the larger context.
My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists. This is not to say that I have not been a little shit at times in my life. I have. I acknowledge that I have made mistakes, as everyone does, and I continue to try to move forward and choose to take good action for myself and those I love as best I can.
But the Southern Baptist Council, the governing body of the churches I attended as a child, continues to dehumanize and marginalize people, and continues to believe that its views should rule this country and hold dominion over this world. At the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention, attendees voted to actively oppose Obergefeld, to exclude from membership any church with a female pastor, and to keep the SBC’s financials from being made public, thereby confirming their ideology as toxic.
Of course, they also have this effed up resolution, dated June 1st, 2014, that permanently separates me from the ideology of much of my family: On Transgender Identity, which is contradictory and hateful on a profound level. They claim that “we love our transgender neighbors” and in the same document resolve to “oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity,” rendering the whole document nonsensical and branding themselves once again as hypocrites.
And that’s at the heart of my exit from that religion and from the positive regard of much of my family.
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Why Are There Now Concentration Camps in the US?
Recently, I read that there are 70,000 people being held in ICE detention centers around the country, and that there have been over 1,000 human rights complaints lodged against ICE in the last year. At least 30 people have died in ICE custody in that amount of time.
What is it about the makeup of human beings that allows us to be horrible to each other? Big imaginations with no bounds on them? Our vision bigger than our hearts? Can it be that we just… can imagine enjoying being that cruel?
It strikes me that the people who enjoy torturing others are the people with the least amount of imagination. They have parameters for acceptability, but somehow those parameters include… torturing, killing, creating human misery. Why? You won’t be surprised, I hope, to hear that I haven’t got any answers: only questions.
Lately, the name Phineas Gage has come to mind quite a bit for me. You might remember him from your Psych 101 course. He’s the railroad worker who got into a terrible accident in which a railroad spike was driven through a region in his brain. The story goes that he recovered, but was a changed person: cruel, violent, always angry! whereas before the accident he was kind and even generous.
Think about John Fetterman, who had been a well-thought-of Berniecrat, but who had a massive stroke during his Senate campaign. Now he’s the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus. Is it possible that conservatism comes about as a result of brain trauma? I’m sure that’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s something that I think about. Fetterman is far from my only example.
I’m sure you can come up with examples of people who were kind at some younger phase of life, but who later fundamentally changed. Maybe you can pinpoint when something changed for them? Not always, I’m sure, but I imagine that, like me, you know of certain marks in one personal history or another.
And I’m not suggesting that the only reason that people become reactionary and harshly conservative is neurological. But maybe it plays a role.
Also, why do so many of the people who are creating all of this cruelty claim to be Christians? How can the followers of the guy who proclaimed The Beatitudes be so far from those principles? And being far from those principles, how can they expect us to follow them into their depravity? why do they demand it with the ferocity that they do?
I’m flummoxed: desperate to find some answers and a path forward.
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It all speaks to some kind of elevated daily existence…
I live in a house in the country. I’ve lived here for 4 years now.
The people are friendly. I have never felt so comfortable to participate in conversations as I do here. The conversational pace is slow enough that my introvert-standard split-second processing pause before I speak doesn’t ace me out of the craic every time, just maybe about half the time. It may seem counterintuitive, since there are so many more things to be a part of in the cities and towns I’ve lived in before, but I feel more a part of things here. I’m still an introvert, and that will never change, but the personal battery doesn’t drain as much in a crowd here.
The light is gorgeous around my house. It’s strange. Is this a byproduct of cleaner air? Perhaps. There is a more crystalline, more buttery aspect to the light, a kind of radiance that I find soothing and wondrous. I feel attached to the environment here. I have a large yard that needs maintenance (which I’m only OK at attending to, it must be said) but it pays dividends in many ways. The many beautiful shades and hues of green, the flowers — some planted by previous residents here, some volunteers/wildflowers, some we’ve planted ourselves — that one can see from every one of the many windows in this house, the purity of the snow as it hugs the ground, never going black, never taking on the smoke and cinders and road filth the stuff always did in the city, the open space… it all speaks to some kind of elevated daily existence.
And that’s not to say that life is perfect. Nope, nope, nope. I don’t have a place to go walking here. There are no sidewalks. If I want to go for a walk, I have to either risk the traffic along Main Rd. (which is not insignificant, and some people drive through here at well above the speed limit) or get in the car and drive 5 miles to find a place to walk. Either way, it’s inconvenient, and as a result I’ve put on a fair amount of weight. My life is far too sedentary.
But this is a problem that I can address, and will. And if I can manage that much, I believe my life “out here” will be all the better for the extra effort, and that there may be some unexpected benefits to go along with it. One idea I’ve had to make these benefits manifest is to do some nature journaling. I’ve done it before. It’s been fun and it’s taught me stuff about the natural world and about myself.
So, yeah.
I love it here. In the places I can see from my window and in this beautiful crooked little house, life is sweet.
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