On a wasp sting

Yes, I got stung on Saturday morning by a wasp–some sort of paper wasp, I think. Nailed me right in the leg. The pain is also accompanied by a burning sensation that reminds one that wasps are dangerous. Now, I’m rather fortunate in that I am not particularly allergic to bee and wasp stings, but others might not be so lucky. The little devils just love to build their little paper constructions in the most annoying places, such as under my back patio table. They are both persistent and fast, and before I knew it, I was stung and running for my life. You see, wasps, unlike bees, can sting you multiple times because their stingers are smooth, and it does matter how many times they sting you. A single sting for me is more of an annoyance than anything else, but I did take an antihistamine and put hydrocortisone on the sting sight. It hurt for awhile, no question. The question of cohabitating with these dangerous insects, even though they pollinate to a certain extent, is highly problematic because I won’t do it. I got out my can of wasp spray and killed the little interlopers–end of story. I don’t understand their role in the world, they are dangerous, and they build their nests in inappropriate places which pose a real danger to all–people, pets, and other animals. This was not my first tangle with wasps, nor will it be my last, I’m afraid. The whole experience was extremely distastful because I hate killing things.

On a wasp sting

Yes, I got stung on Saturday morning by a wasp–some sort of paper wasp, I think. Nailed me right in the leg. The pain is also accompanied by a burning sensation that reminds one that wasps are dangerous. Now, I’m rather fortunate in that I am not particularly allergic to bee and wasp stings, but others might not be so lucky. The little devils just love to build their little paper constructions in the most annoying places, such as under my back patio table. They are both persistent and fast, and before I knew it, I was stung and running for my life. You see, wasps, unlike bees, can sting you multiple times because their stingers are smooth, and it does matter how many times they sting you. A single sting for me is more of an annoyance than anything else, but I did take an antihistamine and put hydrocortisone on the sting sight. It hurt for awhile, no question. The question of cohabitating with these dangerous insects, even though they pollinate to a certain extent, is highly problematic because I won’t do it. I got out my can of wasp spray and killed the little interlopers–end of story. I don’t understand their role in the world, they are dangerous, and they build their nests in inappropriate places which pose a real danger to all–people, pets, and other animals. This was not my first tangle with wasps, nor will it be my last, I’m afraid. The whole experience was extremely distastful because I hate killing things.

On driving in Houston

First, let me say that the title of worst traffic in the USA (a designation given by AAA) is rightly deserved. I had to spend a few hours near the Galeria in Houston yesterday, and that traffic was brutal. To say that Houston drivers are aggressive is to really not understand the situation at all. Though it may be a cliche to say that Houston drivers approach driving as if it were a gladiator sport, I don’t think it’s too far from the truth. Too many cars in too little space with too little time to get anywhere equals gridlock almost twenty-four seven. The problem is too much individualism and not enough civic cooperation. Everybody wants to have their car and nobody wants to share, so traffic jams are full of angry and aggressive drivers who are all going nowhere all at the same time. Why they call it rush hour is a mystery to me because nobody is rushing anywhere. I understand the problem, but I can’t figure out how the people deal with this on a daily basis without going out of their minds. Or maybe they don’t? All roads are jammed, streets, feeders, and highways. You often have to wait two, three, or four cycles of the stoplight to get where you are going. Merging traffic brings flowing traffic to a complete standstill, and random construction zones throw a weird curveball into the entire chaotic mess. Sorry, Houston, I know you have lots to offer in terms of culture, food, sports, work, and shopping, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth braving the traffic to get to any of it.

On groovy

For those of you who did not grow up in the nineteen sixties, this word is nothing but a strange artifact of that lost decade. Groovy was the paradigm for a generation whose youth was lost in the maelstrom of assassinations, war, protests, draft cards, sit-ins, rock’n roll, peace signs, ecology, weed, Charlie Manson, the Beatles, and a whole raft of strange sitcoms on the television. It was the younger generation–the Hippies–who started to use the word to describe either things they liked or what made them happy, which wasn’t much during the sixties. Born in ’59 to the Eisenhower and Formica generation, I was a little boy during the “groovy” years, which were culminated by the election of Nixon in ’68 and the moon-landing in the summer of ’69. Whenever I heard the word used, or whenever I tried to the use the word, I always felt like everything was incredibly phony. I mean, I never lived in a commune, never smoked or took dope, never burned a draft card, or took part in a riot–I was just a kid. If one of the Monkeys or John Denver said, “Groovy,” I always felt like I was left out, like I didn’t get the joke, that I didn’t understand what the word meant. To this day, I’ve always felt like the word contained an edge of irony or violence that was contrary to what people thought the word meant. It’s as if the word was a self-contained parody of a word, that to use it, you were subjecting yourself to self-parody, ending up with egg on your face, foolish, as if you didn’t really know what groovy meant either. You see, the sixties were many things, but they were never “groovy.” Flower power, Mary Jane, the Cold War, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Detroit, Watts, Birmingham, Saigon, Paris, and the list could go on and on. For a child there was very little that was actually groovy in the conflicts that marked a decade that was filled with death, destruction, and random violence that seemed both common and mundane. Groovy did not seem to be the right word to describe the generation gap, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and marijuana, the fight for civil rights, the war in Vietnam, or the generalized pollution that contaminated our lakes, rivers, and air. We started to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dyed t-shirts. Although I still think tie-dyed t-shirts are rather groovy–I hate bell-bottoms. Although long hair is rather groovy, it never looked good on me. The sixties left me feeling empty, as if nothing were ever very groovy for me. I was growing up in middle America, small town, very agrarian, as if it were impossible to really ever escape the 1890’s, which was when the house I grew up in was built. I was about as far from “groovy” as any one person might get. Perhaps the essence of “groovy” resides in the changing paradigm of lost innocence that marked those years as our country slowly burned in the fire of urban violence and jungle warfare. When the sixties were over, and before Watergate started to garner all the newspaper coverage, “groovy” just passed away, a weird leftover relic of a strange and unsettling decade of the Domino Effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tonkin Gulf incident, Mi Lai, Robert Kennedy and all the rest of the un-groovy disasters that filled our lives and made headlines every night. Let’s not forget the dead report given by Walter Cronkite each night as he recounted the wounded, dead, and missing–nothing less groovy than that. Does anyone really know what “groovy” means anyway?

On groovy

For those of you who did not grow up in the nineteen sixties, this word is nothing but a strange artifact of that lost decade. Groovy was the paradigm for a generation whose youth was lost in the maelstrom of assassinations, war, protests, draft cards, sit-ins, rock’n roll, peace signs, ecology, weed, Charlie Manson, the Beatles, and a whole raft of strange sitcoms on the television. It was the younger generation–the Hippies–who started to use the word to describe either things they liked or what made them happy, which wasn’t much during the sixties. Born in ’59 to the Eisenhower and Formica generation, I was a little boy during the “groovy” years, which were culminated by the election of Nixon in ’68 and the moon-landing in the summer of ’69. Whenever I heard the word used, or whenever I tried to the use the word, I always felt like everything was incredibly phony. I mean, I never lived in a commune, never smoked or took dope, never burned a draft card, or took part in a riot–I was just a kid. If one of the Monkeys or John Denver said, “Groovy,” I always felt like I was left out, like I didn’t get the joke, that I didn’t understand what the word meant. To this day, I’ve always felt like the word contained an edge of irony or violence that was contrary to what people thought the word meant. It’s as if the word was a self-contained parody of a word, that to use it, you were subjecting yourself to self-parody, ending up with egg on your face, foolish, as if you didn’t really know what groovy meant either. You see, the sixties were many things, but they were never “groovy.” Flower power, Mary Jane, the Cold War, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Detroit, Watts, Birmingham, Saigon, Paris, and the list could go on and on. For a child there was very little that was actually groovy in the conflicts that marked a decade that was filled with death, destruction, and random violence that seemed both common and mundane. Groovy did not seem to be the right word to describe the generation gap, psychedelic drugs such as LSD and marijuana, the fight for civil rights, the war in Vietnam, or the generalized pollution that contaminated our lakes, rivers, and air. We started to wear bell-bottoms and tie-dyed t-shirts. Although I still think tie-dyed t-shirts are rather groovy–I hate bell-bottoms. Although long hair is rather groovy, it never looked good on me. The sixties left me feeling empty, as if nothing were ever very groovy for me. I was growing up in middle America, small town, very agrarian, as if it were impossible to really ever escape the 1890’s, which was when the house I grew up in was built. I was about as far from “groovy” as any one person might get. Perhaps the essence of “groovy” resides in the changing paradigm of lost innocence that marked those years as our country slowly burned in the fire of urban violence and jungle warfare. When the sixties were over, and before Watergate started to garner all the newspaper coverage, “groovy” just passed away, a weird leftover relic of a strange and unsettling decade of the Domino Effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Tonkin Gulf incident, Mi Lai, Robert Kennedy and all the rest of the un-groovy disasters that filled our lives and made headlines every night. Let’s not forget the dead report given by Walter Cronkite each night as he recounted the wounded, dead, and missing–nothing less groovy than that. Does anyone really know what “groovy” means anyway?

On losing the Super Bowl

I don’t quite understand the significance of a winner-take-all one-game playoff for the championship of the National Football League. After watching over forty of these things, none of them deliver the drama of the hype that is built up before the big game which turns out to be extremely anticlimactic. Even the exciting, close games are anti-climactic. Yesterday’s game was no different. Some great plays were mixed in with a few awful mistakes, and the Ravens won by three. So, on this given Sunday, the team from Baltimore won by three, which is not to say they were better, it just says that they won. Time finally ran out. The final grains of sand trickled through the hour glass, and the team from San Francisco came up three points short. I’m just not convinced that it means anything. The simulacra of battle, a non-lethal version of “take-the-hill”, is played out on a grid of one hundred yards with each team defending their “hill” at each end of the field, harkening back to the eighteenth century when the English and the French faced off on different battlefields across Europe. What is it about human beings, males in particular, that they must fight to prove dominance, to elect a winner. Why are we hardwired for violence? Granted, football is incredibly violent, but protections are built in to make it very painful, but generally non-lethal. Players are wounded in the simulacra of war, but they aren’t killed. Football is the ultimate simulacra of war with rules in place so that a winner might emerge and vanquish the loser. The losers are destined not only to the shame of defeat, but because they are not destroyed, they must live with their defeat. The worst aspect to their defeat may not be the humiliation of watching the victors pick up their trophy, but perhaps it is the dark shadow of losing which will descend on them, erasing them and their excellent season from the collective memories of all who saw them lose. No one remembers the losers–no fame, no glory, the taste of blood and dirt in their mouths as they lie beaten and sore on the ground, the sound of the winners shouting out their victory. The losers lost only by three points in this case, which makes their loss all the more bitter and painful. Was it a question of luck, of skill, of the stars, of predestination, of cowardly behavior, of bad planning, of poor execution, or perhaps it was a combination of many of those things. Now, it is all over, and planning for the next season is already underway. The fans will remember their heroes, and the vanquished have been swept into the shadows of sports history inhabited by the unlucky second-place finishers. Other than a little excitement when the lights went out, or when the losing side almost caught up to their destroyers, the game was a humdrum affair. Ironically, more people will remember the new advertisements that were displayed during breaks than will remember the actual game, which was pedestrian at best, totally forgettable at worst. So Audi, M & M Mars, Volkswagen, Anhauser-Busch, and Dodge had great games displaying their latest marketing strategies for selling their products. Perhaps playing the Super Bowl is less about deciding which team is best and more about a lollapalooza canon-sized salute to our hyper-consumer capitalistic society, obsessed with selling/buying the next big thing. The game is only a pretext to selling us more stuff.

On peace

Peace is an elusive creature that seems to flee human company. Peace seems to be a state that people desire, but no one is interested in working for it. War, on the other hand, and its good buddy, violence, cling to human civilization like the blood-sucking ticks that they are. War and violence have followed human civilization at every turn, everywhere. One often wonders why violence is the only way that human beings can settle almost any conflict. The wars that populate our history are too numerous to count, but that also begs the question, why are they so numerous? And do wars ever settle anything? Is the natural condition for the human being a state of war? With all the chaos, destruction, hunger, suffering, deprivation, and death that go with war, one would really imagine that humans would flee from war and seek peace at every turn. I think, though, that there are really two kinds of humans–those who seek peace as a state of mind and philosophy for life, a Gandhi, for example, and those who thrive on privation, violence, and destruction, even when it might mean their own destruction, a Napoleon, for example. I am totally convinced that some people only thrive when they are creating or fanning the flames of conflict, and the more conflict they create, the happier they are. There are human beings who are never content with peace, seek conflict, thrive on violence, and nest in destruction. From an evolutionary standpoint, war is antithetical because it rains on both the weak and the strong alike, and often those who survive, survive only because of chance, not because of any survival merit they might have. War, in fact, often destroys the strong, hardy, ambitious, healthy young people who are chosen to fight, which normally means young men in their prime. War is a self-destruction machine that chews the righteous and the evil alike, and in the end even the victors have lost something good, perhaps their own innocence. And, as all winners know, battles may be won, but the war is always ongoing and the defeated are always looking for a way back. Peace, on the other hand, is not a battle or an action; it is the absence of action in a state of compromise where the participating parties decide to leave each other alone: it is the absence of violence, the absence of action; it is the absence of arms, bombs, knives, and guns. Peace is not a strategy or an ideology. Peace is a state of mind in which people decide to tolerate each other even when they have differences or are different. Peace is not an action, but an inaction in which there is no room for conflict or fighting. Perhaps peace can only ever be a state of mind, no strings attached, no conditions, no stipulations because otherwise it’s not peace. Peace will never be an act of legislation or the outcome of a court case; peace has to be a willful act in which those who are different decide they can live life without turning their differences into acts of violence.

On peace

Peace is an elusive creature that seems to flee human company. Peace seems to be a state that people desire, but no one is interested in working for it. War, on the other hand, and its good buddy, violence, cling to human civilization like the blood-sucking ticks that they are. War and violence have followed human civilization at every turn, everywhere. One often wonders why violence is the only way that human beings can settle almost any conflict. The wars that populate our history are too numerous to count, but that also begs the question, why are they so numerous? And do wars ever settle anything? Is the natural condition for the human being a state of war? With all the chaos, destruction, hunger, suffering, deprivation, and death that go with war, one would really imagine that humans would flee from war and seek peace at every turn. I think, though, that there are really two kinds of humans–those who seek peace as a state of mind and philosophy for life, a Gandhi, for example, and those who thrive on privation, violence, and destruction, even when it might mean their own destruction, a Napoleon, for example. I am totally convinced that some people only thrive when they are creating or fanning the flames of conflict, and the more conflict they create, the happier they are. There are human beings who are never content with peace, seek conflict, thrive on violence, and nest in destruction. From an evolutionary standpoint, war is antithetical because it rains on both the weak and the strong alike, and often those who survive, survive only because of chance, not because of any survival merit they might have. War, in fact, often destroys the strong, hardy, ambitious, healthy young people who are chosen to fight, which normally means young men in their prime. War is a self-destruction machine that chews the righteous and the evil alike, and in the end even the victors have lost something good, perhaps their own innocence. And, as all winners know, battles may be won, but the war is always ongoing and the defeated are always looking for a way back. Peace, on the other hand, is not a battle or an action; it is the absence of action in a state of compromise where the participating parties decide to leave each other alone: it is the absence of violence, the absence of action; it is the absence of arms, bombs, knives, and guns. Peace is not a strategy or an ideology. Peace is a state of mind in which people decide to tolerate each other even when they have differences or are different. Peace is not an action, but an inaction in which there is no room for conflict or fighting. Perhaps peace can only ever be a state of mind, no strings attached, no conditions, no stipulations because otherwise it’s not peace. Peace will never be an act of legislation or the outcome of a court case; peace has to be a willful act in which those who are different decide they can live life without turning their differences into acts of violence.

On the thing that came from another world

This strange little film came out at a time when the world was wondering if it would have to duck and cover, and the world’s leaders were all caught up in dreams nuclear war, atom bombs, and anti-communist rhetoric. The whole world was Cold War obsessed, and the crazy senator from Wisconsin was carrying around lists of all the communists that worked in the State Department. Unsure of either the science or the ethics surrounding the nuclear age, people lived in fear that today might be their last day on earth if someone got crazy and punched the wrong button, sending nuclear weapons flying, helter-skelter, across the world and obliterating every living thing. So this archetypal ghost story comes with an interesting twist: one of our Cold War outposts in Alaska find a flying saucer in the ice near the North Pole, and they bring back, frozen in ice as if he were some wooly mammoth or something, an alien. This alien, played by Gun Smoke’s James Arness, is a rather blood-thirsty and violent creature who wants to wipe out the men and woman who are temporarily stranded in the Arctic wasteland. In the true spirit of American bootstrap initiatives, they fight back and (spoiler alert!) and defeat said creature. When I first saw this film back in the sixties, I was just a kid and it scared the heebie-jeebies out of me. Now I can listen to characters talk, understand their fear of the unknown, and experience their total blind panic in a very direct fashion. This film gives a strange vicarious thrill, but it is not cathartic, and the ending leaves one feeling both incomplete and nervous. This movie predates Alien by almost thirty years, but the story is there. There is a direct threat to the security and well-being of the people at the outpost, and those in command must do something to resolve the situation. What I found incredibly creepy about this film is this: the difference between life and death is very fine, and it doesn’t take much to move from one to the other. The intensity of the film, the nervous tension among the characters, the fear, and the violent nature of the human response drain the viewer of energy because the emotional response to this film is extreme. The fear of the unknown is strong, overwhelming, intimidating, reckless, chaotic, unpredictable, and powerful. People do crazy things when they must confront their fears, and unsurprisingly, most of the time they turn tale and run. This movie is a Cold War product because it reflected both the Cold War fears of the unknown and American bravery and ingenuity for dealing with an unknown and dangerous power. The movie shows these good intentioned, but violent, soldiers working for their country. They and their reaction to the situation is heroic and exemplary, even in the face of certain death in an isolated and inhospitable location thousands of miles from civilization. There’s even an embedded newspaper man with the troops to shout about the first amendment, free speech, and freedom of the press. Though the film is shot in glorious black and white, it’s really rather red, white, and blue.