Pro Fence

It's a pretty creepy time to be alive. Maybe it's that whole February twenty-ninth thing. When the phone rang the other night, the caller ID told me it was someone calling from Baltimore, Maryland. My curiosity was piqued when I remembered that my wife has a cousin in Maryland who is an astrophysicist. It's always fun to catch up with him and his family and the rest of the galaxy. Well, as it turns out, it wasn't the professor at all. It was Mary. I know because that is how the voice on the other end identified herself. Mary asked my name, which I thought was kind of pleasant, so I answered. This made the interaction more personal and easygoing. Now we were on a first name basis, she wanted to know: Would you consider yourself Pro-Life, Not Pro-Life, or On The Fence. Those were my choices, and since I felt like there was a little bit of wiggle room in that whole Life thing I picked "On The Fence."
That's when Mary hung up on me. I would have felt worse about it if she hadn't been a robot. Okay, the real Mary wasn't a robot. She was once a real person who may or may not have been called "Mary." It occurs to me that it would be a pretty neat coincidence that I might have a chance to carry on a conversation with somebody named after the mother of God about abortion.
Abortion? Wait a minute. I thought we were talking about Pro Life. The semantics of this thing has always bothered me, hence my position on that metaphorical fence. From my lofty perch, it seems to me that everybody deserves to live. Except maybe Hitler. That kind of hypothetical exercise makes it hard to stay put way up here on the fence. What if Hitler's mom had the right to choose? Back in the early part of the twentieth century, many European countries were expanding their citizen's reproductive rights. When considering these questions, the qualification of rape, incest, and the mother's health are often brought into play. What about the health of six million Jews? That one choice could have saved so many lives. Hitler's mother's name was Klara, not Mary.
Mary was not a real person either. She was a disembodied hypothetical voice, sent to have me question my own beliefs. Then she hung up. My position in the bigger picture of things became more clear. From a galactic perspective, my spot on the fence was much less distinct. From the heavens, my spot was indistinguishable from those on either side. Pro Life. Pro Choice. From a point in the center of the Milky Way, that difference could not be distinguished. Not without a uterus, anyway.

Running Behind

The conversation turned, as it sometimes does, to who was the fastest. Other times it was strongest. Or smartest. It was the kind of conversations that I have become very familiar with as I listen to fifth grade boys wait outside their elementary school for their parents. Most of the time I don't enter into the fray, preferring to remain silent and indifferent. I stare off into the middle distance, pretending to look for the next car to show up, taking half of the discussion away and ending it. For another day, at least.
Today I wasn't getting that relief. There were a dozen kids stacked up on the steps in front of the school and the braggadocio continued for all the eternity that twenty minutes can sometimes seem. And then some. Finally, I could no longer remain the passive observer. "How about a race?" It seemed like a logical progression of events: make claim, test claim, resolve claim. We should know in a few moments which of them was the fastest and which one wasn't. They quickly chose the half block of sidewalk in front of the school for the test track, and as the excitement among the rest of my young charges grew to fever pitch, I counted down, "On your marks, get set, go!"
It wasn't that much of a contest, really. The quieter and more confident of the pair surged to an early lead and didn't look back. Not that I had a rooting interest, but if I were going to reward for put up or shut up, he would have won my prize. The slower of the two had the good sense to make his way back to the steps without much complaint. We had all seen how it went down, and there wouldn't be any excuses. He lost the race, fair and square.
The fast one took a moment to bask in the glow of his peers' adulation. Then he turned to me and asked the inevitable, "Do you wanna race, Mister Caven?"
"That's okay. I'm kind of busy right now, watching kids and all."
"Aw, c;mon," he wasn't going to let it go that easily. One victory had fed his ego and he was now hungry for more.
I pondered my options. I could run the half block and hope to win, avoiding the derision of my young charges on the steps and the stories it would generate for weeks afterward if I should lose. If I were to outrun a ten-year-old, what sort of satisfaction would I gain? It would be a quiet last few minutes before everyone went home since order had been restored, but would it be worth it? I chose a differnt tack. "You know, I think you probably could beat me in a sprint. I'm old, you know."
That got a self-satisfied smile from the speedster.
"But I seem to recall that most of the time when we're running our laps at PE, I finish ahead of you."
He gave that a thought. "Well," he reasoned, "that's because you've got more endurance."
And that was enough for me. I had won already. Not only was he ceding me the victory over distance, but he was also making me proud and happy by remembering the word I had taught him, weeks before when we had been discussing running a mile. The wisdom was catching up with him. That's when his mother pulled up, and he jumped into the car.

Divisible

Whether we are one nation under God or not, we are certainly not indivisible. We are regularly divisible for all kinds of reasons. The lengths that we go to as a group of individuals to make ourselves appear indivisible are pretty impressive: all those Fourth of July picnics and parades, those moments when we are attacked by space aliens and we all band together as one to repel the invading forces. There are probably a whole lot of things, aside from Sara Lee, but that list is often obscured by the oppressive way in which we tend not to get along. We even had a war, back in the day, that we like to remember fondly as "brother against brother." We called this one our "Civil War," and even though Guns 'n' Roses went out of their way to let us know that there is nothing civil about war before disbanding in acrimony, we tend not to focus on the irony of that title.
Instead, some of us continue to celebrate this period in our history. An estimated fifty thousand Civil War re-enactors go out into the fields and forests of our heartland to pretend to shoot at one another with pretend guns and die pretend deaths in order to keep this memory alive. It could be this constituency that Mississippi's governor Phil Bryant is trying to appease by naming April "Confederate Heritage Month." It could be that since the American Civil War took place nearly a century and a half ago that Governor Phil doesn't have all his facts in place, since my research tells me that the Confederates were the losers in that one, and the guys in the gray suits have generally been described as the bad guys. Sure, there are at least fifty shades of gray, but since there was a surrender involved as well as a piece of our Constitution that was written to make sure that the terms were spelled out for future generations this one seems to be a done deal. Or maybe we like to cling to our past, no matter how divisive it might be.
After all, it was just a few months ago that the last battle flag came down from its lofty spot above the state house just a couple states away from where Bryant made his proclamation. For many, the Civil War isn't over.  Somebody should probably mention that even the Mississippi flag is about one quarter Confederate, and maybe that represents the good-hearted folks down there below the Mason-Dixon Line. Or maybe it's about time to let the past recede into the past. Let all those flags and gray uniforms go where they belong: museums.
And maybe we can be glad that Governor Phil doesn't want May to be "Nazi Heritage Month."

Dead Men Walking

Remember back a few months ago when I kept referring to the crowded field of candidates on the Republican side of the presidential race as "a clown car?" Well all of a sudden, that metaphor doesn't seem quite as appropriate. It could be the lack of floppy shoes and red noses, but the attrition rate over the past few weeks has made me think less of that cramped carrier of colorfully costumed carnival comedians and more of an episode of The Walking Dead.
I make no real bones (pun emphatically intended) about my fascination with AMC's series about the zombie apocalypse. My wife and I consider it to be one of "our shows." It is appointment television. The same cannot be said of the Republican debates which we have avoided like the zombie-inducing plague. But I can't help thinking that it would be easy enough to simply throw a little grime and a little extra gore (lower case) on the group of survivors to add to the effect.
Way back when the TV series started, there were a dozen or so main characters who were making good their escape from the advancing horde of teeth-gnashing-brain-gobblers. Now, most of them have fallen away, leaving a very few of the original members of the cast to struggle through and find their way in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Heroes and villains have been left behind or eaten with callous disregard. Being a good guy doesn't mean that you get to live. More often than not, it is those selfless acts that cause that selfless one to become zombie chow.
This could explain why the remaining Republican candidates lean more to the "anti-hero" type. Most of them would look comfortable wielding a crossbow, or wearing an eyepatch, both of which are protected by our Second Amendment. What part of the hungry cadaver universe would these guys make up? The Governor is out, but it could be that he was never fully alive to begin with. The number of forgotten victims now completely overwhelm that of the ones left standing behind the podiums. In the coming weeks, who will survive and what will be left of them?
When the sheriff on TV encounters another survivor, he asks three questions: "How many walkers have you killed? How many people have you killed? Why?" I'm thinking the next GOP debate should have a much simpler format next time.

Time Passages

Time is a slippery thing. It flows like a river, if you believe what you hear on the record you've listened to for more than thirty years. You can't stand in the same river twice, someone will tell you, because that's wisdom. But then you think back to that song about time and realize that you've stepped in that same river hundreds of times over the year. That's what memories do for all of us. Photo albums and journals are like the recycling fountains of time. You can wade back in whenever you get a chance, those images and sounds and feelings are there once again to bring back the past and you can feel free to drink as deeply as you'd like since the past is there for you. It's a resource. It evaporates as the pictures fade or the CDs get lost or the emotions that you once held so dear are now just murmurs of the shout they used to be.
I have my own struggles with time. Like so many other humans, I can't get enough when I need it. Like another old song tells me, "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do." This is why I write these blogs days in advance. I am writing for the future. Sometimes this means that by the time I read the words I wrote days later, I have had other thoughts that would have made things more clear, or better jokes. Hard to imagine, I know, but as carefully crafted as every one of these entries appear, once I put them in line to publish I start to feel anxious about how it will be received in the days to come. Or weeks after when someone stumbles on my blog while searching for a connection to something that happened months ago.
Or years.
Meanwhile, in my living room there is a machine that is busy keeping track of the television programs that I don't have time to watch at the time they are being broadcast. It is keeping track of my present, in order to let me watch programs from the past in my future. Sometimes that means that I have to ignore my present, like avoiding conversations with friends and family until I have had the experience they had when it was now back then. It is now when I decide it is now. It is a manufactured sense of being able to control time. Pause, fast forward, rewind. Such power. And all around me that river rushes on. I like to pretend that I can keep up, but I know that eventually time will win, just like it always has. And always will.

What Now?

You know that slightly glazed look that people get after they have drunk the Kool-Aid. Zombies that lurch forward in response to simple commands. Like "Trump!" Billionaire narcissist and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trumpsil has an army of followers currently filling his tent and voting for him in primaries to the extent that one might imagine that he somehow represents the zeitgeist of American culture. With thirty-two and a half percent of the votes counted, Mister Trumplala won. Two hundred thirty-nine thousand eight hundred fifty-one South Carolinians got in line for what he was serving. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot when you put it in terms of filling sports arenas or waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
But what about that missing sixty-eight percent? When the smoke clears and the confetti has been swept up, will all those other votes just magically shift over to Camp Trump out of some mildly perverse sense of loyalty? Now that Jeb :{ Bush has packed up his show and headed back to Florida where I hear he has a job waiting, will his supporters surrender to the vortex that is Donald Trumpyoki?
I confess that it is something I worry about. Especially when I find out that His Eminence Trumplich has a beef with the Chicago Cubs. Oh, Dark Donald of Sith, is there nothing which I hold sacred upon which you will not somehow fling bile? The twit tweeted, "I hear the Rickets family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $'s against me. They better be careful. They've got a lot to hide!" First of all, it is the Ricketts family, but he may have been worried about his character count. Second of all, I guess it can't be that big a secret, since you were able to discover this nefarious activity and throw a light on it while everyone else was busy looking at something that might really matter. Like what might be hidden in the belly of that big private jet with a golden T on the tail. I heard that Donald Trumpaoli flies around the country with a cadre of slave children who work on his spare hair pieces in the dark while he is off on the campaign trail, searching for more souls to devour.
Well. That's what I heard. And all that squinting in the belly of that plane might explain the hair problem.
And stop messing with the Cubs.
Sheesh.

Get Smart

Here's what the lady on the radio said: "You know, back in the days before smart phones, they probably could have found another way to figure this out." In this story, "they" would be the investigators looking for clues in the San Bernardino shooting last December that left fourteen people dead. The part of this suggestion that rang n my head was "back in the days before smart phones." There was a time when we asked strangers for directions. There was a time when, if we wanted to know who wrote that song, we would have to wait until we got home and looked through our record collection. Or asked a stranger. There was a time when, if we didn't know what time it was, I would have to guess. Or know that it was time to ask a stranger.
It's not just police work that has changed in the digital age. This is what I am saying. What you are reading right now would probably be scribbled in a journal somewhere, never to see the light of day. Unless some intrepid detective got it into their head to pry up the floorboards in my house after those ice cream trucks went missing in my neighborhood. Nowadays, "they" would probably use satellites and thermal imaging captured by drones and fed back through a wireless network to cameras attached to lamp posts and ATMs without ever leaving their desk. A very high tech desk that can be converted into a yoga mat with just a flip of a switch.
Technology makes us lazy, and not just in that standing-on-a-hoverboard-slurping-on-a-slushee-kind-of-way. We don't have to think as much as we used to. I have surrendered to the pervasive cloud of information that makes my once impressive knowledge of pop culture something of a relic. Not when I can dial up Wikipedia or ask Google to check out the world for me.
I do love a good piece of technology. The Shazam app that allows us to hold our hyper-intelligent phones to the wafting sounds around to tell us what album that David Gates tune came from, it's a beautiful thing, but it's not like coming up with "Lost Without Your Love" all on your own. Arbeit macht frei, as they used to say in the old country. Or "if you don't use it, you lose it." My wife and I recently lamented about our reliance on GPS and the way we have surrendered our shortcuts to the navigating device on our dashboard. Is it really the shortest route? Take the next left and try not to think about it.