Quack!

I can see right through it, the righteous indignation, the fatherly “you’ll come around eventually” attitude. The AMA is just a quack Mafia, an organization whose sole intention is to see to it that the family (of licensed physicians) are the only ones who get to wrap their fingers around America’s pocket book and squeeze. Only chemical drugs manufactured in a laboratory somewhere can possibly heal you, or so they say, this band of snake oil salesmen who got together and decided they could pedal their wares as God sent and bully the other guys out of town.
Did I say guys? I should say gals, because really, it’s your grandmother with her peppermint tea and tablespoon of apple cider vinegar they want to tar and feather. They tell you very clearly that there are two men who can give you what you need to take to make you well: the pharmacist and the physician. We must consider that in the moment that this association was being formed, women were meant to be kept sort of like pets, and they might wander out into the yard and start eating some grass, and your job, as the man of the house, is to take her firmly in hand, lead her inside and tell her that she shouldn’t be doing what she has always done to cure a bad case of hairballs. What she really needs is a visit to good old Dr. D who will gladly prescribe her some Gen R X, fully patented and approved by the FDA and AMA and the United States Postal Service.
There is no way to stay well without exposing one’s self to a little radiation now and then. If your belly hurts then you need an x-ray. Perhaps you swallowed a puzzle piece you silly monkey, and we will need to perform a surgery to remove it. What? Forget about letting nature run its course and waiting to see if the thing passes, only gypsies can do that with diamonds. Good wholesome Americans submit to anesthesia and the blade. That’s right, just a little bit of the rubber rats dream gas and a scalpel and you will be right as rain. Unless you get a secondary infection from your hospital stay, or we accidentally sew you up with a pair of clamps still in place. Then when Dr. D comes around and says,
“And how is our patient today?”
You will say, not so good Doc and they will whisk you away, to do what? You guessed it! Take another x-ray! The Doctor will inspect the results and chuckle,
“I see what the problem is here. That’s my wedding ring in there, and this over here is Nurse Betty’s used tampon. We’ll need to operate again immediately, of course, before my wife notices the ring is missing.”
And they’ll do you up like a Christmas goose again, carving away. Afterwards they’ll hand you some ice chips in a disposable cup.
“It’s Styrofoam, you’ll love it! A modern marvel. You can eat the cup when you’re finished with the ice, it’s been approved for human consumption by the FDA.”
“Thank you Nurse Betty, I feel refreshed after that, but I seem to have filled my bed pan, can you take it away? Hello? Nurse Betty? Is anyone there? Hello?”

Enjoy The Trip

As a passenger you get to sit back and enjoy the trip. You don’t have to know what is happening in the cockpit, you don’t have to know what is happening in the communications tower. You are entirely unaware of the 5 other hunks of flying metal that are lifting off the ground in the same second that your own is rattling out of gravity’s finger tips. You have no idea that another plane has just been redirected so that it won’t collide with yours as it attempts to come in for a landing 59 seconds early. You know that the charming woman up ahead is going to bring you peanuts, (mmmm… peanuts) and a fizzy beverage after the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt lights. Your mouth is watering and you’re trying to decide whether you would like a Coke or a Clamata and wondering if you might persuade her to part with two bags of peanuts on your behalf while death is soaring around with you, talons neatly spread, wondering if it can make off with two jet planes full of people (mmmm… people). While you fret over the discovery that this airline no longer serves the honey roasted peanuts you had so perfectly envisioned and has switched to serving pretzels instead, some prematurely balding man in a button up white shirt is determining your fate. All you have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. When you hit that bed of clouds where veterans of the war that decided Satan’s fate are swapping stories and drowning their woes in tankards of still born’s tears, the turbulence makes your Sprite (the caffeine in Coke makes you pee and Clamata sounded too salty for this time of day, especially without vodka and celery) splashes all over your tray. Damn! You wipe it up with a napkin that conveniently sports a map of the US with all of the cities which this airline serves highlighted. When your plane changes course to avoid a lightning storm, you’re oblivious, reading the latest issue of Forbes that you bought in the gift shop back at the terminal. When you’re done with that, you ogle the flight attendant as she comes around again for your garbage and enjoy the view of her rear as she works her way up the aisle past you. Soon your plane is engaged in a whole new ballet of high speed hunks of metal guided by fallible human directors who may or may not be distracted just now because this high stress job has taken a toll on their sex life and their significant other stormed out this morning with packed bags. Death perks up again, hopeful, but you land safely and get to see the fasten seat belts light turn off and smell the armpits of the guy next to you as he reaches into the overhead compartment for his duffel bag. As a passenger, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy the trip, and say thank you when it is over.

Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

Birth

Nine years ago something happened which I was not entirely prepared for. I was a frightened caged animal. I had lived in captivity my whole life. I bonded with a male of my species. He was the first that I bonded effectively with, so he became my mate. Soon I was pregnant. Everyone around me was a frightened caged animal. They could do nothing to sooth my own fears. They were busy drowning in the wealth of their own terrified floundering. Far from being helped by others of my species that had once undergone the same experience, I found that they were obscenely domesticated, agitated by the repellent truth of their own bodies and unhinged by the new and obvious instance of my own. I began to discover things on my own through weird chances, a few random glances through the holes I poked in the box that had been the world since my own birth. I heard tales of women who gave birth in their own homes, and women who opted against vaccination, and women who squatted to birth their young instead of lying on their backs. Inside of the box I was treated as though I were sick, as though I were a sickness myself, something very disturbing to the other creatures in the box. I was too young to be overly brave, too uncertain to insist on too much, so though I longed to run away into the wild and find a quite ditch among some brambles and do what it was in my nature to do in a place away from accusing, and prying, and clinical eyes I submitted to the conventions of the day. I did hold firm on giving birth without the assistance of any pain killers. I arrived in a hospital early one day because something like water was leaking from my vagina. I was tested with a little swatch and treated as if I was very silly and told that my water bag had not broken, and I was not giving birth, and they sent me home. Less than six hours later, I was having real contractions and my father and my mate delivered me once again into the hands of the hospital staff. This time I was admitted. I was permitted to walk the halls and squat and stretch as I pleased. I asked not to be hooked to an IV but they insisted, and soon my resolve against it was weathered away by that insistence. I was young. That asked which drugs I would prefer, and I told them none. They stood in the halls and snickered amongst themselves, certain that I would beg them for their medicine in the end. I never did. There were none of the complications that they had used to frighten me into being hooked to the IV. My baby was healthy. I was changed from then on. I knew with a certainty that they were all cowards and liars. I knew that I would always have to fight to protect the important things, my true nature, and that of my new child. I knew that it would be a struggle to do more than peek through the holes I bored in the box, I knew that my fellow inmates would try to frighten me into remaining within our prison. I had been young once. Now I was something else. With the birth of my first daughter, wisdom was born within me, a knowledge that stemmed from my very core, and a resolve to do justice to that new knowledge of life. I ceased to be the domestic creature that I had once been, and began to seek out the wild that lived within me.

BOOM

All of that careful work, the seeds you gathered for the harvest, painstakingly filling your little gunny sack, careful to brush the dirt away and separate seed from stone and branch and refuse, all of that effort applied to accumulating and the accumulating itself leads to a precarious position. Each day you have made efforts to contain the energy of life, taking care not to raise your voice or titter and twirl like a squirrel on caffeine, abstaining from orgasm, and carefully taking measures to accumulate more, and more, and more. More fuel for the rocket ship, more fuel for your work, but it is so much more than you have ever had in your life, it is so much more than others going about their days and their lives have ever held in their sack. It is exciting, dizzying, tempting, difficult to bear. As the sack grows full, you wobble and weave under the weight, you are intoxicated by its volume. You may feel teeth chattering excitement, or you may feel as powerful as a Titan. If you indulge in sorrow then every seed will back you up with the power of plutonium. If anger comes a knocking and you try it on for size, then every drop of the energy you have accumulated may flow into the bulging veins of wrath. The seeds will apply themselves to whatever vice you apply yourself to, and the machine, the mechanism for harvesting will supply an endless array of dead end distractions on which you can blow your hard earned savings. The trouble, terrible trouble is that you must not only accumulate but apply the energy accumulated to a suitable task. All that fuel pooled together in a barrel is nothing special until you put it in the rocket, and the rocket is no good if it has no navigational system, no link to mission control. A moon launch would go horribly wrong if the computer running the mechanical functions of the ship suddenly feels it would be better to head for the sun or take a dip in the sea, because after all who the fuck needs mission control, I AM THE ROCKET. Naturally it leads to disaster. The operating system is not the rocket, it is part of the rocket just as mission control is not the rocket, but it is meant to be a part of the operation. A link between mission control and the operating system must be clearly established and maintained so that Mission Control can guide the rocket to uncharted territories. The energy accumulated for voyaging must be utilized properly for the voyage and not be allowed to pool up by that guy with the cigarette dangling from his lip glowering at the whole thing and muttering that space travel is not possible, and who gives a damn anyway, and someday I’ll be the one in charge, and BOOM!

The Hands

The real power is at the bottom not at the top. It is in the legs and not in the head, in the South of Egypt and not in the North. It is in the hands of those that pick the cotton and not in the hand that wields the whip. That hand learned to hit because it couldn’t do the work for itself. It was soft and white and weak. It wanted snuff and lace and iced tea. The hand with power wanted song and sex and to nuzzle up to the earth and sigh. That’s where it found its power, pouring out of the black teat of the earth itself, nurturing them and calling them back for more. The hand with the whip is too afraid to go near that teat gushing with the terrible flood of life and death. If it could, it would whip the earth too, and make her bottle the stuff of life and have it pasteurized and sent to them on a conveyor belt. They want to live like pasty white vampires taking by force and making fierce faces like wounded bears. The people who are friends with the dark rich soil and deep wild places don’t have to make faces. They don’t feel afraid. They just accept the elixir of life and drink until they are intoxicated by it and dance with the knowledge of it coursing through their golden veins and finally lie down to sleep without fear of what further dreams may come. Let them come, when they do, the party will begin again, the same party in a new guise. Life and death dancing round and round and taking turns like kind children sharing the swing under the old willow. My turn, now yours, my turn, now yours, my turn, and now yours, that’s what life and death do. The people with the power are the people that live close to this rhythm. They know how to do. They do and the others take. And even this they understand. But when will it be their turn? The white hand would be a day with no end, the abolishment of night and earth and legs for the continued rule of light and sky and head. They don’t want to take turns. They don’t want to share. They don’t want to do. They will whip so that the others do and spend their days in a haze of righteousness. They clutch the whip tight as they rule from above, because even they know: the real power is at the bottom.

Exchange

The banks take your money. They really take it, they don’t just hold it for you, they help themselves; $20 dollars here and another 20 dollars there and a dollar fifty here and here and here. Not so much, but it adds up over time. And what do you get? You get to feel human, like an outstanding citizen. You get to have little pieces of paper with your name on them to shuffle around and around and you can use a highlighter pen in electric yellow to circle random sums. You get more little pieces of paper to exchange as legal tender, you get green paper and paper in a fancy book and you can have pictures of Garfield or Mickey Mouse or dolphins copulating printed in the background while in the foreground it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF_________ You get plastic too. Mmmmmm…plastic. That means shoes and lipstick and hot donuts and shiny cars and fancy electronic gadgets that can play movies or music or accept a collect call from your mother. FANTASTIC! You can borrow money from the bank. The bank will gladly loan you money and then collect interest, which is perfectly fair. Sometimes though, when it comes to plastic, they will slowly charge you more and more interest on the amount you owe, and if you haven’t been shuffling through your papers you may not realize this is happening, and soon your card is over the limit in bank fees, Eeee Gads! It might have been better to wait until next month to pay for that pair of shoes with cash, hard cold green papers, the ones you get after a day of sweaty labor. You don’t labor? Oh, I see, you work in an office and never even see cash. Your pay is electronically deposited into your bank account and then you get by swiping your debit card, here, there, everywhere! They have made life so easy, haven’t they? The power that passes from your employer to you to your favorite pizzeria is all transferred in the form of numbers, data exchanged digitally. You function like a straw. You toil for one corporation that transfers numbers to you and a myriad of other corporations siphons those numbers away so that you never have to handle any cold hard cash. The bank handles your vital resources for you and skims a little off the top for itself. That is only fair. They should know. They made it that way.

Terror From Above

Once humans, now animals we scatter, like raindrops bursting on windshields. Our home is burning. The walls are falling. Death, the huntress, comes as terror from above, as fire and smoke, and the crack of shots fired. She comes from the sky with talons spread dropping blimp shaped bombs, funny little things like fat fish that lay the land flat. Our children are crying, our women can’t comfort them, our limbs are missing and the nurse patiently washes our wounds and, though she shines in her white robes like a priestess or an angel, she cannot save us from death, stepping over the corpses she has already laid to waste. She draws nearer and the nurse will step aside when she comes and let her claim her quarry. Then that little lady in white will close our eyes with her finger tips and draw a blanket over our head and hurry to the next soldier or civilian. Death does not care if you are a warrior, or a child, or a house pet. She comes behind Mars who makes his wars and, like a shark drawn to the scent of blood, she frenzies taking everything that crosses her path. The little flowers, the tiniest blades of grass, are burned to ash. The kings of the east and the kings of the west make the wars and we are spent like poker chips at the huntresses’ table. The war makes the king who wins. We, the subjects, must not be considered, only the greater good matters, the causes of freedom, or honor or might. The huntress would have come eventually. Maybe while I rocked on my porch, maybe as I lay sleeping with my wife in my arms, but she is here today answering the call of the War God’s bugle. She is here today, and I am not ready. Not ready to see my home burn before my eyes. Not ready to watch helplessly as my children suffer, as my wife looses all of her tears. I was not ready for the walls to fall today so that I would have to walk naked and alone into the wilderness of the unknown.
Once we were humans, now stardust, we scatter through the vacuum, drawn to the nearest stability, the first hope of home. She will find us again wherever we gather, and herd us into the wild places she holds so dear.

Gentle Touch

The awesome power of the sea cannot be described to one that has never felt it. To stand on the shore and listen to that roar and dance around in that foamy main is to be like a mouse stepping gingerly about in a lion’s beard. We frolic and play in the mouth of a beast and on days when it’s mood and fair it tickles our ankles and laps at our thighs and rocks us gently. On days when it feels in a black mood it slaps our faces and stings our eyes and grabs us and tosses us down and holds us under, snatches a shovel or pail or small child and carries it away to satisfy the whims of the dark eyes of dripping fanged beasties of the deep sea. In some places you can look down at your toes through clear and gentle waters and in others the water of blue and green and churning salt lather hides things that snake slimily around your legs or rise pointedly between your toes so that you lift your foot and hurry away from whatever it is, maybe backing out of the water, hesitant now to accept its cool wet kiss. What sharp toothed things are hiding under that laughing undulating surface? Eels and sharks and things with claws and other thing that strange children warned you about when you played on the sand as a tot. What were those things that they warned you about? Warned you that they were hiding under the sand in the water where the surf breaks. Something that you thought you could see as a line under the sand, something like a snake but worse because it did not even need to breath air. What things are out there? The multicolored beach balls, the bright umbrellas pushed into the sand have never dreamed of the things that lie out there waiting for some unsuspecting fool to wade out too far or splash too much thus giving away their precise location. And yet, often the innocent play around in the briny wet and feel the tingle of power splashing their tummies. The sea can be tolerant and affectionate. It will wash its long lost kin as an old grandmother bathes an infant, with the softest possible touch. With the same tenderness, it will feed them small shiny wriggling things, even if like some infants we bite at the very teat from which we wish to nurse. We would do well not to forget that it is a lioness with whom we are dealing, and her great age leaves her with no less ferocity than she was capable of in the days when her waters were red and not blue. So tread lightly little mouse. Play carefully, and never let down your guard.

Protect

The power to give life and the power to take it away, God-like responsibility invested in a fallible man and his companion. Studies have show that the intelligence of dogs is not superior to that of other species. It is their ability to pay attention to humans and respond to hand signals that makes them unique. No other animal on this planet other than the human animal is capable of connecting a meaning to a gesture. It is speculated that the wild wolves began to shift into dogs as a result of scavenging from the scrap piles of the hunters that are the ancestors of present day man. Drawn in by the food, only those who were gentle and affable were permitted to hang around a camp, any dog that displayed aggression to a human met with the sharp end of a spear. Slowly, accidentally, a process of domestication began. Wild dogs that barked when danger approached the camp, dogs that could assist men with a kill were rewarded with a share of the kill. Dogs who had the ability to observe and attach meaning to the actions of humankind found a way to make themselves necessary to the two legged pack. The police dogs that are employed by law enforcement agencies around the world are most commonly German Shepherds. The German Shepherd is selected, not because it is an aggressive dog, but for the opposite reason entirely, because it is a highly intelligent and naturally gentle creature. The officer that the dog is paired with is called a handler and the dog learns to respond only to those commands delivered by the handler himself. This naturally mellow dog is taught to be an aggressor when commanded. The greatest focus of training is the strengthening of the bond between dog and handler. The police officer can rely on their mutual contact, knowing that the dog will automatically defend him from any attacker. Police dogs are trained to search buildings for suspects and hold them at bay with a bark when they are located. As long as the suspect does not move or make any threatening gestures, the dog will not attack unless commanded. They are also trained to sniff for drugs and assist in the search for missing persons. These creatures find themselves quite by accident in a position of great power. They are linked with those that can bring protection or death and act as the instrument for these purposes as the angelic hosts act on behalf of God the Punisher, or God the Savior.