Ode to Celebrations at Stonehenge

According to our local meteorologist, the summer solstice arrived this morning about 8:26 a.m. There was no word on it’s point of entry, no trumpets blaring or red carpet rolling out, and no announcement about robed and hooded Druids or Wiccans waiting on a hill or in a green field or at Stonehenge with arms upraised in welcome. But there should have been.

The vernal and autumnal equinoxes have simple scientific explanations, but during our ancient history, people didn’t know that. They were only aware that the sun, that ball of warm light in the sky, gave them a cause for celebration. The vernal equinox or advent of summer was and continues to be the longest day of the year, which meant that darkness and long, cold nights, were held at bay by bonfires and the longer presence of the sun itself, making it a promising and hopeful occurrence. Midsummer Eve as it was called in medieval times was a period of fertility and renewal.

I don’t care much for pomp and circumstance, for the pretentious trappings of so many traditional events that most people imbue with unquestioned importance, even when they are unable to explain any significance or their rationale. Yet, I have a major affinity for both the summer and winter solstices which herald major seasonal changes to our experience with this planet we inhabit. Perhaps all this is due to my Danish heritage, or it could be due to my Germanic heritage, or it could simply be that I like being defiant and contrary, but in my opinion, in many ways we’ve become too smart and progressive for our own good.

No one could say that many of our advances in science were not needed, yet far too many of those advances have set our feet on dangerous pathways. The splitting of the atom has aided us in understanding our universe at the same time it has led us to create and use the most deadly weapon ever envisioned by a human brain. Our understanding of human illness has led to extraordinary breakthroughs in healing the body and the brain, but at the same time it has led to abuses of humanity through corporate greed and abuse of drugs, knowledge and compassion.

Science has assisted humankind in becoming smart, but it has not made a contribution to making us wiser. Advancing civilization has not made us civil. In our enthrallment with progress, we have forgotten many small things of vast importance. Perhaps the major disaster of this memory loss is that we no longer know how to be grateful – for the pleasure of being together, for sunshine, for the natural benefits of our planet, for longer summer days in which to grow our food, for longer winter nights in which to reflect.

Trying to stand an egg on end might be an amusing bi-annual experiment, but our loss of awareness for simplicity and goodness has not only turned our world upside down, but has made us careless and unfeeling about what life really means. Our present rush to civilization and determination to harness its power has less potent mystery and wonder than welcoming a change in our seasons.

The Hazards and Horrors of Time

Apologies to Albert Einstein and H.G. Wells, but time is something few of us outside astronomy sciences understand and almost all of us fear. Simply because we are alive, we are encased in time which often crushes us, threatens us, or confuses us, especially as we get older.

Time and timing is critical to everything we do and every decision we make, whether our choice results in success beyond our imaginings or total disaster. We become pressed for time, we take time, we waste time, we kill time, we try to find time, we have a good time, we make up time, we don’t have enough time, we have time on our hands. None of us can escape time, nor can we ever make up for the time we have lost. Time is always tugging at us, it is always in the back of our minds or staring us in the face. Time is our ally, but time is also our enemy.

I’ve always envied those people whose internal time clocks automatically wake them, as though they purposely set an alarm in their heads. I envy those who can look at the sky or shadows on the sidewalk and accurately measure time. Sadly, I am among that block of people who easily lose track of time or whose sense of time has become warped by time’s passage. Too often I discover that things I think occurred last week or last month or last year actually occurred five years ago. As we age, time runs together, like dye colors in a madras jacket bleed into the fabric.

Someone once told me that finally reaching adulthood is the moment we realize that time moves at a more rapid pace. As youngsters time moves especially slow as we keep waiting to hit those traditional benchmarks of life, like turning thirteen when we’re finally a teenager rather than a child, or sixteen when we can drive, or eighteen when we think we’re adult. I remember that as summer waned during school breaks and I grew anxious for the change into fall, time seemed to creep. Now, of course, time is flying simply because there are fewer instances of newness to each day. Days run together because they are primarily the same when as a child each day let us learn something different. In my opinion, is the rejuvenation of the spirit through frequently learning something new that keeps some older people young at heart. Those are the people I truly enjoy because of the vibrancy they retain toward life.

The strangest thing I discovered when quitting smoking was the sudden influx of time, since I no longer stopped for a cigarette break or had to look for my lighter, or an ashtray, or needed to rapidly put out the embers I dropped on my clothes. Once I finally got over the feeling that I was forgetting something important, all those unconscious yet wasted moments became ‘found’ time, an opportunity to do something new or different. I experienced the same profound phenomenon today, this time with paying bills.

Like many other people, the change of the economy, the change of my working status, the changes in many financial regulations, and escalating prices on necessities like gasoline and food have forced me to carefully watch my pennies. One of those contributing changes was the last hike in the price of stamps. Yes, those stamps I choose always carried a very subtle message, like the Mickey Mouse stamps I always use when sending my check to the IRS or the mortgage company. I’ve even complained to the post office about wanting a stamp showing Yosemite Sam with his crossed bandoliers and both guns drawn, because that’s how I feel about credit card companies, energy companies, and the insurance industry – that they purposely try to rob us blind.

In an effort to save money and time, I signed up with my bank today to use e-pay for bills. I truly despise banks and bankers (along with many other leech-like industries that ignore humankind in favor of greed), so it took a long time for me to block my certainty that the bank would screw me over somehow. Pressed for time on a deadline to pay one of my creditors, I used that electronic service to pay one bill this morning. Then sat still wondering why it felt like the earth shifted. It had nothing to do with the money, but it had everything to do with time. It was such a damned fast transaction that it was scary! Not only did I save the cost of a stamp, but I saved the week it would take for the mailman to deliver the payment, the gasoline it would take to go to the post office, and the stress of worrying about being late and hit with an excessive charge because I was a sluggard or some kid in their mailroom spilled coffee on my payment and threw the wet mess in the trash.

I will definitely not succumb to automatic payments out of my account (I don’t like anyone messing with my money but me), but I will probably pay most if not all my bills in this fashion in the future instead of taking an entire morning to do it all by hand. And just think….I suddenly found all this extra time to be suspicious that the bank will screw it all up! Time can be such a worry!

A Stastical Replacement for the Warmth of a Smile

Does anyone with an iota of functioning brain power enjoy thinking about death? How many of those same people relish the idea of war? Does everything we do have to be a fight of some type? Are we now not only bloody minded, but emotionally bloody? Are our hearts so inured to the rush of our own blood within our bodies that we crave the rush of blood out of the bodies of others? Are we no longer capable of realizing what we’ve done to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our children?

A few days ago, the number of American war dead in Iraq hit 2,500. Tony Snow, the president’s (I’ll not give him the honor of a capital ‘P’) new spinning top press secretary callously opined that 2,500 was only a number, but of course, no one ever said that it was important for such a person to be either smart, aware or sensitive – only that he be glib. It is highly doubtful that parents, siblings, husbands, wives or children of those 2,500 human beings ever saw them as just a number, however. Somehow, a statistic can never replace the warmth of a smile or a hug or a kiss or a hope for the future.

We don’t even have a firm number on Iraqi dead, whether innocent or guilty of “insurgency,” another of those strange terms that defy accurate definition, since it could mean local denizens of that particular nation who are rebelling internally or non-Iraqi agitators who are zealously encouraging a blood letting form of defiance for whatever reason. What is the difference in whether the number of Iraqi war dead accrues to Saadam Hussein, or Al-Queada, or Mother Nature, or to the interference or determination of America? Aren’t they still dead? Aren’t’ those once-living souls missed by others who loved them?

We seem to love the idea of war at the same time we deny the reality of so many dead bodies. Were we not infatuated with the many guises and uses of war, why would we have had a War on Poverty during the Johnson administration yet still prefer to ignore the on-going ravages of poverty all these years later? Why would Ronald Reagan have encouraged a War on Drugs sufficient to fill our prisons with drug users rather than major drug pushers and yet still be a drug using society – condemning illegal drugs while simultaneously embracing legal pushers with their television commercials to encourage sales? Do we forget that WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Granada, and so many less formal wars should not even have happened since in the second decade of the 1900’s we had the War to End All Wars?

We are currently conducting three wars: the war in Afghanistan, the training ground, home of the religiously fanatic Taliban and safe harbor for those we believe instigated the attack of 9/11/01 on the World Trade Center and 3,000 innocent civilians; the war in Iraq, now a bloody occupation, which was instigated by greedy and bigoted old men for less than honest reasons; and the misnamed and misleading War on Terror which those same old men have tied directly to Afghanistan and Iraq, ignoring the reality that one cannot make war against a tactic.

During this same period, our leadership has been rattling sabers and voicing strident threats of invasion against Iran for its interest in developing nuclear capability supposedly for energy but possibly for weapons. Meanwhile, our own military industrial developers plan, research and probably execute the creation of more and different nuclear weapons and no one seems willing to contain the spread of such totally destructive capabilities to ‘friendly’ nations, or secure loose nuclear materials left unaccounted for and/or exposed by the massive changes to the former U.S.S.R. Our wild west rhetoric and bowlegged cowboy actions toward North Korea, another historic ‘enemy’ with its own leadership as unpredictable, unscrupulous and fanatic as our own, have been insulting, dangerous and non-productive to what is already a volatile situation.

It is less that comforting to realize that another snit, or moment of unthinking belligerence, or instance of poor judgment or incompetence, or simple human error could put us in two additional wars when our own military resources are at an all time low with poor morale, exhausted troops, and lack of safety resources for them. It would be a historic precedent of unspeakable proportions – five simultaneous wars in six years.

One would think we worship war and long for more death.

The idea of death is at the crux of most of our reasons for doing or saying certain commonplace things. In order to encourage ourselves to do things we fear, we ask what is the worse thing that can happen. Our answer is that we’re dead. We have bumper stickers for our cars that read “Life is a beach. And then you die.” We joke that only death and taxes are inevitable. One of the world’s most lucrative businesses is the life insurance industry, for obvious reasons. Our high school sports teams are encouraged to destroy the opposing team. Business men want to kill off their competition. Wasn’t it the inevitability and fear of death that prompted humankind to create religions that offered an afterlife?

Almost every religion exhorts its adherents that they should not kill. Yet, we seem to ignore that ‘value’ as we rush off to make war. Our military budget is the largest percentage of all our expenditures, and what is the purpose of a military if not to kill. We speak of the death of innocent people, whether in combat or in urban warfare as collateral damage, as though such lives were of no significance. We natter and babble about morality at the same time we teach our young people to hate and kill. We decry terrorists at the same time entertainment box office receipts for movies filled with violence, mayhem and death hit profits in the millions. We condemn animalism at the same time we apply the laws of the jungle whenever it is convenient or expedient, and too often we do so under the false flags of our loudest and most offensive religious factions.

One of our oldest Christian hymns contains the words “death has no sway,” and apparently it has no sway on our emotions or determination to kill those who disagree with us. Death ultimately means little – unless it is the death of our child, of our husband, father, brother, wife, mother. Then it becomes personal. It becomes unforgivable. It should not have been allowed.

One would think that in humankind’s long existence, we would have learned something. We would have improved ourselves and our lot in life, even though we realize our time on this earth is short and eventually we will all die. Yet, by our very actions, we also say that only the deaths that matter to me have importance. If those deaths are not of people I care about, it isn’t death. It’s only a number. It’s merely collateral damage. It’s a statistic.

Praise God. Pass the ammunition. Die, you sucker.

Is it Plagarism to Steal Creative Excuses From a Friend?

Last week I had one of those days that comics make jokes about and that turn you paranoid…or worse. I’ve always been my harshest critic, my best friend, and my most tenacious enemy, but I seem to constantly prove my mother’s wisdom in not making my middle name Grace.

For a relatively bright person, most of my mishaps are caused by perennial stupidity or blatant clumsiness. Several years ago, because I was too lazy to go downstairs for a ladder, I managed to mangle my left knee while standing on an unmade bed with about 30 yards of fabric in my hands and a couple cats at my feet. Yeah, I know…dumb. And no sooner did the injury improve enough for me to walk upright, than I stepped down wrong and re-injured the injury. It’s only given me twinges in the last couple years, usually when the weather is bad, but rushing around last Tuesday, I did it again!!

This is a long way around to say I ended up spending most of the evening hours last week sprawled on the sofa alternating ice packs and heat, an unwilling captive of the television age. While feeling sorry for myself and keeping an eye on the continual weather updates (tornado warnings in the area again), I kept ruminating on my flaws, pretty much assured they were too ingrained to change. I won’t list them all here – my pc hasn’t enough memory for that long a list – but a few will always occupy the marquee of my life – a flash of neon flubs. They’re my own little entourage.

One of those flaws is that I’m easily bored. That’s a nerve wracking flaw simply because the general rule is that easily bored people are boring. I don’t need people or props to enjoy myself (and my ex summed it up when he said I could have fun all alone in a closet), but when you’re having a pity party, a shoulder to cry on would be nice.

Anyway, the tornado threat passed and I started flipping channels, finding this masochistic show called, “So you think you can dance.” It had the American Idol format, but with dancers, some trained and some not, all vying for a shot at dancing in Vegas. The viewing public is being inundated with these newly minted ‘talent’ game shows, all built on that 3-judge panel format of quasi experts who pride themselves on conciliation or nastiness or simple idiocy. One of the dance judges was appalled at the number of untrained and barely mobile hip hop dancers who had all the enthusiasm of a slug on sheet ice, and the same level of talent as blank typing paper. And, each one professed to be professionals, teaching dance at some studio in Podunk. His major horrified comment as he said ‘get lost’ to each one, was “What is American coming to?” Hmmm. Did he really expect an answer, this man so enthralled with himself at producing a cloned TV extravaganza using dancers?

See, all that exposes another of my flaws – going off on tangents, or to use the pop-psysch label, flowing along down the stream of consciousness. Somehow, my disdain for television, my preference for contact with only interesting individuals, regardless of age, combined with my clumsiness, my pain, tornadoes, and one cat throwing up a hairball and other unmentionable things on top of a solid Mahogany end table made me reflect on exactly why it is I hate housework and so am not adverse to ignoring it to my peril. With my level of unfailing grace, someday soon I will stumble over the booby trap of an abandoned cat toy or a baseball sized dust bunny to splat indecorously amid discarded magazines and newspapers and when inhaling to shout my disdain with vivid blasphemy and curses, I’ll inhale a bushel of cat hair and promptly succumb to asphyxiation.

There’s another of my major flaws. Somehow I only get the cleaning bug when I’m incapacitated enough to be sprawling in pain, and that’s because I’ve slowed down sufficiently to look around and realize just how long I’ve let mundane chores build up, and now am in no physical condition to do anything positive about it. Then it becomes mentally frustrating and overwhelming and what’s left of my morale is demolished by the vision of deadly embarrassment should someone wearing white gloves and a caustic eye ring my door bell expecting entry. The only way such a predicament can be eased is with a healthy application of imagination to come up with excuses for such slobbery, like putting get well cards on the mantle, a pained expression on the face, and voicing a story about terminal illness. I’m also fortunate to have a friend with the same aversion to housework who is even better at creative excuse building than I am and if I can figure out how to acquire a temporary live-in boy friend or an easily discarded significant other to leave behind while I travel – after having called in a cleaning service – then he can tell those wielders of mops, brooms and disinfectant that the horror of the house exists because his wife recently died and he had been too despondent during the last year to clean. Is it really plagiarism if you steal an excuse from a friend?

Popular Songs and the Death of Intelligence

Bear with my idiosyncrasies, gentle readers, because I’m off on another of my many tangential forays – this time weaving through the realm of education gained in mysterious ways. Even before we start on this journey, yes…I readily admit my by brain jumps about oddly, but it all makes perfectly good sense to me.

While not given much to astrology, I was born a Gemini, supposedly the cosmic twins, although I’ve always thought of the sign as representing the identical but in opposition, wherein one side (at least in my case) would display the creative or visionary while the other represented the practical or firmly rooted. One of the reasons this always seemed personally appropriate was that during my mother’s pregnancy, the doctors supposedly heard two heartbeats although there was only one squalling infant delivered on Father’s Day.

Anyway, all my early formative years through college were spent in creative pursuits; dance, art, writing, and primarily music, my major in college. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the powers that be in that creative world seemed to think they were guiding talent, although I personally felt that talent too widely scattered for true expertise in any one field. Upon finding my self married, however, all that burning creativity was suddenly overcome by the simultaneous desire and need to earn a living while my hubby returned to school to complete his degree. That need subjugated all creativity except as it led to idea development in a corporate setting. For someone with no real grounding in the business world, I did quite well.

Finally free of all those restrictions, I’m back indulging the creative side of my nature while at the same time wondering sometimes how it all came about. I’m pretty convinced I didn’t take the road cosmically laid out for people like me, but I also admit it was an interesting if confusing trip. Anyway, a couple nights ago, I finally caught a movie I’d wanted to see, “De-Lovely,” about Cole Porter’s life and love. While studying music, Porter was always and icon, and one of those composers and lyricists whose music was a highlight and continues to be played and sung now, years after his death and after all the major shifts in popular culture from his time.

Because I’ve always had a love of words, I had also always listened closely to lyrics, and remembering not only his songs from that era but also those of other lyricists from Broadway, I began to wonder about the ways we unconsciously expand our vocabularies, and thus, our ability to communicate. All this nostalgia and rumination fed the germ on an idea, not only about how music is probably the most insidious of the Arts in sparking ideas and revolutions, but how the words we hear within popular songs impact upon our ultimate level of intelligence.

The curious question that came to mind is how much of the dumbing down we seem to experience everywhere today is due more to the popular music and songs that permeate our lives than it is to a failure of education. Certainly formalized education plays a role, but it’s highly doubtful today’s failure of intellect is primarily due to that milieu.

It is only a leopard that is unable to alter its spots. People change. Because people change, so does society, culture, and language, as well, yet one would think people still required actual words as the lyrics to the songs they choose to sing. Unfortunately, we seem to relay more on grunts, lisps, single syllable nonsense sounds, squealing and wailing guitars, thumps, crashes, dissonance and curses to say… whatever. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m neither prudish nor thin skinned. There are definitely times when only the strongest, most vivid curse can adequately express the fury and rage we often feel in today’s screwed up world, but when that becomes all we are capable of saying, whatever is being said isn’t worth hearing.

Also, I’m not advocating any form of censorship or that any music I might deem hard on the ears should be outlawed. If that were the case, vocalized bluegrass would have vanished. But, stop for a moment and think about all the current commercials for cell phones that can record and play ‘your’ personal music, all the encouragement to drive, wander down the street, stop, eat or study while bopping to some favorite tune, most of which today seems to consist of only one syllable words, if words they be. What does anyone learn from that? Are we all afraid to be alone, or not to have our bleeding ears engaged? Just how much of what passes for popular music is memorable? And how many of those subliminal messages clutter our brain forever after?

There have always been silly songs. Who could hear “mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” or “yes, we have no bananas,” or “does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bed post overnight,” and not realize that whimsy and silliness is part of the human animal? Silly isn’t nearly as bad as nastiness or meanness in songs, or even the ones that hold deadly threats of suicide (“I can’t live without you”) or messages of hate (“I’m gonna get you, sucker”).

I can easily accept music as subversive. After all, there are some great protest songs even today, but I have a difficult time accepting that music and the lyrics tied to those sounds are being subverted. Somehow, the joy and companionship of such a personalized art is demeaned and dangerous when it not only condones but furthers ignorance.

Alas, Mr. Orwell...the telly has destroyed the Aspidistra!

A long time friend and fellow blogger recently offered a post related to the HBO program “Big Love,” about polygamy in Utah. She regularly watches this show, and her conclusions as relative to Utah’s primary religious group were particularly valid, especially since her childhood and background gave her intimate, if disagreeable, experience with said group, the church of Latter Day Saints (LDS to use her abbreviated term which put me in mind of Timothy Leary and the 1960’s experiments with LSD). Personally, I’ve only caught bits and pieces of HBO’s offering while indulging my habit of surfing TV channels when bored and deciding that the entire scenario and premise struck me a drivel and dreck, which ironically, is pretty much the same opinion I have about all formalized religions.

I’m not a television fan, although there are occasional offerings on various stations that surpass the normal garbage which is typical programming. Generally speaking, I think television is intrusive, abusive and damaging to the normal function of the human brain, and I’d rather read a good book. When I’m exhibiting symptoms of insomnia, however, television is a guaranteed sleep inducer, providing a soma holiday from the troublesome and mundane.

During the late 60’s and early 70’s my penchant for reading introduced me to numerous writers that continue to intrigue. For some reason, most of those given to good political satire were British and I delved hungrily through their repertoire, which is possibly the reason I still spell catalog as catalogue and refer to idiots as Epsilons. For those not immediately familiar with that last reference, I’m speaking of Aldous Huxley, the writer of Brave New World.

One cannot refer to this period of British writing without mentioning the name George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, best known for his books, Animal Farm and 1984. Born in India of working class parents, he was one of the more interesting of the British writers because of his liberal, socialist views in his early years, which changed with maturity and experience to strong anti-totalitarian views. One of his earlier works, Down and Out in Paris and London, would be an eye-opener for anyone enamored by eating in ‘high class’ restaurants anywhere on the planet. (Anyone really interested in the reality of what goes on in those particular kitchens should definitely read that book.)

Because of the futuristic works of both these men, I wonder what they would make of our present world, which is not particularly Brave but most certainly artificially divided by geographic classes of the elites (Alphas) and the stupid or downtrodden (Epsilons). Since our reptilian brains seem more likely to make the decisions which rule our existence, one could say we have become far more Animal like, but that does a real disservice to animals. And, as in 1984, Big Brother is certainly watching and listening, our privacy and individual identities lost to governments and large corporations.

Also, the Aspidistra no long flies, either in Britain or anywhere else. One of Orwell’s funniest shorter novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, was based on the premise that as long as British housewives keep growing Aspidistra plants on their window sills or atop their TVs, the sun would never truly set on Great Britain, the aspidistra being far more symbolic of the realities of the country than either St. George or the English lion.

Unfortunately for us and for Great Britain, the craze for electronic media and entertainment over substance has undermined more than just the iron-like aspidistra plant. And that reminds me of two of my favorite American science fiction writers. Robert Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, which matches what many of us feel like when considering the actions of our present government, and Ray Bradbury, who wrote Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which paper (and the knowledge within books) burns, turning people into the type of zombies who spend their time gazing at the moving pictures on a TV screen.

Alas.