Looking at the Moon

It's been ten years. Technically, your recorded death date is four days from now. That's when your family pulled you from the machinery. However, I was there that night after your rollover, looking upon you battered and bloodied frame. Your body spasmodically working to push out your unborn son who would die in your mother's arms. My experience in transplant helped me recognize the obviousness of your situation; the lights might have been on, but you were not home. You were not so much my friend as family. Oh, how you could piss me off to the point of wanting to spit coffin nails. To throttle you and never speak to you again. Yet when things came down, if I needed you, you were there with a fury and without hesitation. When my mother was diagnosed terminal, when, a year and change later, she died, you were one of the few to call. An online comment, a text, would have been too impersonal, you said. When I announced I was done with city life and heading to the mountains with that woman I'd been running around with, you were one of the few who thought I hadn't totally lost my mind. Although I know it is vanity to second-guess the dead, I like to think you'd be behind me on this zany scheme we've concocted involving a tropical island. Your dying inspired a mantra I still use when things go pear-shaped; it's not okay. It's not going to be okay. It just going to be, and what will be is not what any of us expected. Perhaps that was your last lesson to teach me... It's been ten years. You were far more family than my friend. Like family I have lost, you do occasionally show up in my dreams. Like them, you are missed more than all the words in all the languages could ever describe.

 It's quite obvious that the sci-fi and disaster films are truly fiction. As good a mythology as that presented in a religious text. 

Humanity uniting in a time of crisis? Oh, how vvveeerrryyy droll...

Terrorist attack? Inside job! Clash of civilizations!

Pandemic? No worse than the flu! Biggest virus in over a century!

Civil unrest? Anarchy! Reckoning!

Climate change? A hoax! An extinction event!

And somewhere in the middle is truth, but we, as a species, are too solipsistic to notice or care...

Fuck all y'all. It's days like this and times like these I remind myself I all but gave up on the species when I was eight.

Facetime

My parallel about what's going on in the world with the pestilence and what the powers that be asked us to do after 9/11 and the now almost twenty years of a surveillance state. When 9/11 first happened, more people were willing to just go along with what the powers that be deemed necessary for the greater good than not. In recent meditation, I think I may have come across a reason why; tangibly.

A terrorist has a face, a virus does not. You can hear, see, smell, taste, and feel a terrorist. A virus can seep straight through you and it's not real until you're actually sick. The virus is so much more of an abstract than the terrorist.

That's why some dismiss out of hand; it's not tangible. Just a story to frighten us. The powers that be cannot declare a military victory over it. Instead, focus on the faces. Focus on the economy.

Ever notice those pieces of paper are imbued with the tangibility of a face?

Just think, if the insurrection of 1776CE had been crushed, such hoopy froods as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would be remembered as traitors and the stars and stripes a symbol of treason.  This would be just another day.

Only in the US is a failed rebellion romanticized. That status were erected to venerate traitors to the union and a battle flag of treason is flown in certain places and at certain events. Only in the US is treason a virtue, and those who would champion this concept as virtue hypocritically call themselves patriots.

Isn't that something?

I am more solitary by nature, so being away from my fellow hominids is not terrible. Towns are for social experience, trails are for reflection, meditation, and reverence. Out there is what some may call holy or profane. Perhaps. What I know is it does not play favorites.

However, Homo sapiens are social animals. With the exception of Orangutans, all of the Great Apes are. Not that I'd call humans great. Somewhere between okay and fair to middling, perhaps. From a zoological, anthropological, and sociological standpoint, I am very interested to see how this pestilence changes the way we, as a species, interact. The coming months are going to be very telling of how we adapt.

A little over twenty-nine years back, but not quite thirty, I was helping a buddy with his photography final. It involved me standing by his Scout as he took double exposure photographs, my hair and duster blowing in the wind. It was phantasmal, and artsy, oh so rock and/or roll.

Things got to taking longer than expected and I phoned home to give an update. I got my little brother. So I gave him the scoop and went about my business.

At the photo studio, we got the news; Operation Desert Shield had morphed into Operation Desert Storm. War was upon us. Via conversations and hanging out, as eighteen year old immortals are wont to do, it was again later. So I called home again, this time getting my mother.

"Where the fuck have been?!?" She demanded. Such a sweet and compassionate soul, my mother. One who had such a sense of lyrical language that I often wondered why she didn't follow in her parents' political footsteps.

Well, she did ask me a question and I did tell her. The fact my brother fucked up and neglected to deliver my initial message was irrelevant. This was somehow all my fault.

"You didn't check in and dinner's almost ready!" She said. "And there's a war on, you know?"

It was my turn to ask what the fuck...

I don't know that there's a point to this tale another than it has been rattling around in my skull all day...

I have written the first draft of my father's requiem. There is symmetry, twisted, in its countenance, that his death was within ten years and change of my mother's. In late summer, we scatter his ashes under the bristle cone where we left my mother ten years back.

So it goes...