Chanting and Cursing

Yesterday I smashed our car.

Oh, it could have been when I was having one my bottled-up, rage-filled moments, which seem to be occurring more frequently of late as I try to cope with all the crap happening to us right now. I'm in the red of stress a lot of the time with my jumble of nerves pulled tight.

Despite the above, I generally do try to be a "defensive" driver; however, I do have my episodes where the other drivers are like vermin and I wish I had a box of D-Con with a car-to-car delivery mechanism.

So the accident could easily have been because of maybe a little too much aggressive driving or driving a little too fast or taking a curve a little too sharp. Or it could have been because of righteously zipping through that just-turned-red-but-should-have-been-yellow-longer light. Or it could have been because of my using our car to show a stupid asshole driver the error of his ways.

But no, it was none of those things.

It was just plain old fashioned stupidity involving myself and a stationary object.

I was maneuvering around the parking lot at Healthnet Southwest Health and Dental Center looking for a space. I parked in what looked like a space, but after getting out I decided it wasn't suitable because of the way my Mazda 5 stuck out. I decided I should go back to the edge of the far lot where it turns gravel and then into grass and some people were making their own spaces as they may in that limbo area.

As I backed out of that non-space, I started to turn my car so I could go in that proposed direction. But there were three cars in line already coming towards me from there. This is significant, because anyone who knows the lot I'm talking about knows the path to it is a two-way but one lane stretch. So I'd have to at the very least wait until the three cars cleared out before I could progress.

So I got the bright idea, and it actually would have been a bright idea if I hadn't also gotten a bout of stupid, to just park in the street. The street's not that far away.

And besides, I'd have to move anyway so those other three cars could clear out.

So I switched my reverse turn so I could be poised to head out into the street instead. I was watching the end car, a pickup, in a nearby row of parked cars, worried I was going to hit it as I backed up due to the tight confines of the lot.

I didn't hit it.

No, instead I hit a great big pole that was also planted at the end of the row. Or rather, not the pole, but the wide cement encasement around the pole, no doubt placed there to protect it from stupid people like me. And when I say hit, I mean HIT with sound effects.

I smashed in the driver's side rear corner of our beautiful car.

Fortunately it is still drivable and the hatch still opens and closes. It still should probably be fixed, but with money being the none that it is right now, drivable means it will have to wait.

Poor car.

So what's that have to do with Chanting and Cursing? I appreciate the indulgence of you reading this far, as I am getting to that. And if you aren't reading this far, to hell with you.

Anyway, so today I went to the Post Office and then to the store. And of course it was raining, which didn't put me in the best of moods to tackle those chores. Usually I deal with my less than best of moods by yelling at the vermin drivers, cursing at them, gesturing at them, and asking rhetorical questions to them, like:

Are you waiting for permission, or what?

You know it's not going to get any greener, don't you?

What the fuck are you waiting for?

I could go on here with commands to the other drivers as well, as I have a whole barrage of on the fly driving chatter, largely peppered with expletives. I sometimes include the weather, the road, and the world in such invectives, being the equal opportunity curser that I am.

But today, starting with my initial getting into the car and starting to curse the weather, I chanted instead: Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Literally in a forced change of wordage: Goddam fucking wea-Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (NMRK).

I chanted NMRK all the way to the post office. I treated the clerk with respect and she treated me likewise. I chanted to the store as well. Oh, I had my moments along the way where I started to let a Fuck or Asshole out, but I caught myself and said NMRK even louder, trying to keep my mind from falling into the negative space that draws me.

I should say right now, I'm not much of a religious person.

There's just too much evil in the world that's been committed in the dogmatic name of God, Ideology or Faith for me to generally have a high opinion of such things. I also can't just believe something as my naturally philosophically critical circuits aren't wired that way. Some religions I can appreciate more than others, but belief itself is more my husband's bailiwick.

Rituals in general seem more geared towards promoting the self-proclaimed elite rather than promoting the humanity of humanity.

I'm Buddhist more by marriage than by firm conviction, though Buddhism is one of the appreciated religions I mentioned above. A lot of the basic ideas and values of it make sense to me; more so than, say, a cross, seventy-two virgins, or circumcision. But the chanting -- praying -- of it is difficult for me take with the seriousness that the truly devout -- like my husband -- do.

Still, I'm of a somewhat pragmatic bent. So chanting in the car is one of the ways I'm trying to improve the way I handle stress, anger, frustration, and life sucking more than I would prefer. For we all know that familiar Einstein quote that is easy to remember but difficult to put into practice:

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity.

Cursing sure as shit hasn't done me much good. I'm generally as angry after the curse as before it. So why the hell do I do it? Damned if I know.  But I'm trying like a motherfucker to change that god-awful habit of mine.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Connie Lawson, Secretary of Hate

My e-mail to former Senator new Secretary of State Connie Lawson:

Dear Secretary of State Connie Lawson,

Your signature on the letter to the BMV asking for the removal of their specialty plate shows severe deficiencies in your ability to serve all Hoosiers. You should resign your new appointment as Secretary of State.

As a citizen, you are free to hate gay youth the way you evidently do. But the state shouldn't give you a paycheck for it.

Regards,
John D Fox
outsidethefox.blogspot.com
[tweeting this blog page under #ProfessionalBigot]

Um, No

Dear Mr. Ryerson,

I read your March 18th Doonesbury commentary with some interest.

Oh, not about Doonesbury. But instead, I focused on the absurdity of your other comments. Having isolated and occasional liberal voices such as Dan Carpenter in a paper otherwise awash with extreme right wing rhetoric is hardly providing a space for a rich conversation. Take for instance Micah Clark's hate speech disguised as "argument" given such prominent ink and real estate in your paper. My heart goes out to the IYG kids who read that moronic nonsense smearing their organization and felt their own hearts deflate.

Here's an exercise you can do that might disabuse you of your delusions of balance. Take a paper on any given day. It doesn't matter what day, really, as your paper is consistent enough. Take a blank page and divide it into two columns. Label one side left and one side right. Start filling up those columns with names of editorial writers you deem Conservative and those you deem Liberal. See what you come up with.

And that's not even giving sway to actual word counts and layouts, which provide emphases of their own.

Don't think that such things go unnoticed.

As Reverend Al Sharpton might say on PoliticsNation, "We got you, Mr. Ryerson."

John D Fox
http://outsidethefox.blogspot.com

Not Green but Red

It's St Patrick's Day. March 17. That's what my calendar tells me.

It also tells me it's 2012. 2012? Really? You could have fooled me.

We have long since passed the millennium, yet my husband Gary and I keep fighting the same battle for equality. I'm sure some people get tired of me writing/ranting/speaking about anti-gay stuff; but try to imagine how tired we get of living it.

The latest attack by the people elected to serve us was on kids. The only gay youth group in Indiana finally got approval for a specialty plate. They were selling well. Then, at the eleventh hour of their session, our state government, having failed to be able to legislate it away, pressured the BMV to pull the plate for reasons that are specious at best.

Gary has written a blog about it, along with the senators involved, which you can link to here. Politics is more his area than mine and he does a better job of that type of explication/exposure/fact-checking.

My educational background is in philosophy and I articulate it via my fiction. I write stories that I hope will entertain as well as subtly stimulate some new thoughts or reconsiderations of old thoughts in at least some of those entertained people.

Subtlety is one of the reasons I prefer fiction. Oh, I do have a definite moral vision in mind when I write as well as a philosophical space from which I am coming. But I try to keep my focus on describing the "real" fiction events in a "this is what happened" way that hopefully leaves it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For I firmly believe it is up to people to decide such things for themselves.

But the state of our state forces me to be more direct.

Lawmakers practice deceit, so I must be an outspoken champion of honesty to counter it.  Hate groups spread lies so I must be an outspoken bringer of truth to expose it. Unholy religious leaders subvert faith to warp kids' minds so I must be an outspoken evangelist of what's sacred.

For how are people free to decide for themselves when the triumvirate above alone crowds their ears and eyes with the white noise of their malevolence?

It makes me so angry I see red. And it makes me want to cut through that red into a greener world. I want my words to rain down on my -- our -- world so full of beautiful potential and leave in its aftermath a vibrant rainbow for anyone -- and everyone -- to see.

Doing the Disconnect

I am disconnected from our network as I type this.

For some reason our broadband gets kind of screwy at times, spontaneously deciding it doesn't have a connection to the Internet. It doesn't last, and is usually just annoying, but sometimes it can play havoc with blogging.

Oh, not my lowbrow kind of blogging where I'm typically just rambling like now. I mean, the seriously intelligent blogging like the kind my husband Gary does. He sources damn near everything, making sure his commentary is as informed as possible.

Which is good, as it makes his posts well-constructed and informative. But it also means as he composes his blog he typically has several tabs open for different articles he is citing and subsequently wants to link. A loss of connection, even for an instant, can cause problems for him as he tries to find all those lost web pages again.

So to help him out, I've been staying off the network as he works, wanting to ensure no sharing bandwidth issues encourage a lost connection.

But how I have done this in the past is put my computer to sleep by closing the lid. For generally when my computer is on it is also connected. I don't "do" anything to the connection, it just is on and when I open my computer lid and log-in it is on. I have a weird compulsion about not disconnecting it.

And yeah, I know you can disconnect it. And yeah, I've traveled to hotels where I have had to connect to new networks. So I'm not quite a Luddite. But I guess it's because I had to put in serial keys and what not to get it initially set up that I get worried -- unfounded sure -- about disconnecting it and finding out that connecting it is a huge hassle.

For I don't like things to be a hassle. Especially with technology. I know what I want to accomplish and hate having to deal with set up and codes and other crap. So I avoided such potential by just shutting the computer down altogether. But today I overcame such stupidity and just chose disconnect.

And it proved to be a painless action (I know this because I did test out reconnection, which was a similarly easy click). But it got me to thinking about how much can be done, really, without being Internet connected; something I sometimes forget.

Decades ago at Purdue, the Internet wasn't on my mind or even an option. Hell, I didn't even have a computer (not counting Atari 2600) until I met Gary. Instead, I had the library for occasional research and a dictionary when I was at home.

The Internet has definitely changed such things, with now my being able to spontaneously call up the most obscure detail if I need it for a story. It is a library on demand. But, as I am prone to do with real libraries, I can't help but wander beyond my original research purpose, until I'm in areas of knowledge  that are not needed for the current writing.

And for both better and worse, being connected now means I can click over whenever I want to check mail, or check Facebook, or check Twitter, or check a hundred and one different things. Growing up and going to school sans computer, the mail came once a day and then, unless the landline phone rang or someone physically knocked at your door, you were pretty much done with communication and there wasn't much else to do but focus on your work.

Oh, I'm not disparaging the current time and no way in hell do I want to back to what really wasn't all that golden of a time. But it does occur to me as I type this and Gary is in the other room working on his blog, that maybe I should periodically just disconnect for a while; not just for Gary's sake but for mine.

Disconnect and focus full-square on the words in my head coming out rather than all those distracting words coming in.

Addiction of Power

So I went to a substance use and recovery class today as part of a HOPWA requirement. I don’t use drugs other than caffeine. Not out of a sense of morality, but one of practicality: I create better art when my mind isn’t any more muddled than it usually is. So I guess I don’t use out of a sense of write rather than right.

Yeah, yeah. Feel free to groan at that…

So why was it a requirement for me if I don’t use? Bureaucracy moves in mysterious ways. But that’s not the point of this piece, anyway, so we can just leave it that I was there. And of course with substance use, the catch phrase power of addiction comes to mind.

But later as I was walking to the library sorting out the characters Randy interacts with in That Fargo Kid – a novel I am revising – I started thinking of the addiction of power. For that’s essentially what the story is about. Through circumstances, Randy finds himself in positions where he wields heavy influence on those characters, each of which have their own particular set of issues and insecurities.

Whether his influence is good or bad as far as the other characters are concerned will be up to the reader. But for the purpose of this mini-essay, it’s enough to say the influence is there. And Randy can’t stop himself from wielding it.

Power corrupts and all that. But it is not quite as simple as such a clichéd slogan makes it out to be. For we need power to accomplish anything in this world. You can surely harm people with your power; but then again, how can you help them if you have no power?

I think part of the “trick” of life is recognizing the power you have at every single moment while simultaneously making a conscious decision about how you use it; a decision to use it for the Good.

Moral might be a better word than conscious in the above, though I dislike using that term since people tend to wrongly equivocate it with religion. What masks as ethics in contemporary culture is far too often just a list of precepts rather than actual thought-out moral belief.

Deliberate would fit, too.

So what is the best use of one’s power? The answer to that is dynamic and wholly dependent on the particular situation. But I am struck by the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she shared her power with the other slayers of the world.

In our rush to use our power we forget that sometimes the greatest power we have is letting others use theirs.

And I wasn’t intending to go political with this piece, but I can’t help but end up there. For right now, we have a Republican congress that is using its power to take away my power as a US citizen; to harm me and my family. Why? Because they can or think they can. Just because they have the power to pass anti-gay legislation doesn’t mean they should.

Hassle

What is hassle? What's it mean to be hassled?

I'm not meaning like when other folks hassle you, although that is an important question with there being so many groups out there determined to do just that. Rather today I'm thinking of it in terms of day-to-day existence and the struggle with my own demons.

Today has been yet another "junk mail" day. I've been waiting on some important news moving at the pace of bureaucracy. Waiting for some time. And I feel like I'm in limbo because it's relevant to what some next actions might or might not be. So I start thinking about life itself being one great hassle and… well, depressing thoughts lead to depressing thoughts.

And such thoughts are kind of about the mail but not really just about the mail. When people think of causes, they like to think of one specific cause as if it works in isolation. But the whole past of existence -- environment and self -- is causal. So I might say, for simplicity sake, I'm depressed about not getting news in the mail, which sounds and is absurd. But the truth is more akin to something like: nothing in the mail scrapes at the scab of depression that frequently wants to bleed.

I start thinking how it seems like death would be hassle free, especially if an effective method is chosen. One, two, gone, and no more hassles.

But on the other hand, death isn't really hassle-free, is it? Because a hassle-free object would require a subject. It's neither hassle-free nor hassle-full, in that regard. In fact, in truth, it's not even a something to be a neither.  It can't even be described as an end because once it occurs there no longer exists the subject that would makes it into an end.

By logic, death is not a way out because at death "way" and "out" are no longer applicable values.

So I put the junk mail by the shredder, turn on the computer, and fight the feeling of it all -- all of it -- being a hassle by writing this.

It helps. Not always a lot. But enough.

And enough, is, well, enough.