Tag Archives: family

Sad Grief — reposted

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From Ashleigh Brilliant via email:

The payoffs on my election bet did not come all at once, but have been arriving in dribs and drabs. (And where chocolate is concerned, a drib is just as good as a drab.) Thanks to all of you who lost the bet and have sent, or are sending, their $5 worth of chocolate.  As I told you, I have special emotional need of it just now. Dorothy and I have been together for 45 years, and are currently going through one of those well-known life crises This is the one that involves failing health of a spouse. Dorothy can no longer safely take care of herself . You may remember that just three months ago, her driving license was revoked. For the past month, she has been in an “assisted living” facility, but she wants to come home, and to have caregivers come in at certain hours. But she has been a world-class hoarder, and our house in its current condition is hardly suitable for such a lifestyle. This problem is worth all the chocolate I can apply to it.Since such transitions are traditionally a source of grief, and this one certainly is hitting me quite hard, please let me share with you a piece called BAD GRIEF which I wrote some years ago. It’s attached, but if you can’t read it, I’ve also put it on the Writings page of my website at http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/writings.html#anchor144923

All the best,
Ashleigh Brilliant

Not every college graduate was an A+ student

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The event calendar reminds me I’m supposed to give a detailed analysis of the current negotiating points in the resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis.

Crisis?

Are you kidding me?

When do politicians get to tell me that they’re lives are more important than mine?

Oh, wait, that’s right — the old argument that the government rarely makes permanent the cuts in taxes it had announced were temporary to begin with.

Property taxes, payroll/income taxes, sales taxes, and on and on.

I’m sophisticated, educated, informed and jaded.

I know what society/civilisation should be and isn’t.

Do you remember the first time that your ancestors lived off the land?

Take that last thought in whatever direction you want to take, assuming whatever your subculture has told you is the proper length of time to consider the lineage you publicly claim as yours.

You can go back to the early days of your belief sets and look forward to now.

In that span of time, what has been accomplished that we clearly say is different than then?

I’ll give you a few minutes to draw your family tree.  Use as much paper and time as you need…

Tick…

Tock…

Tick…

Tock…

Got it?

Good!

Now, let’s proceed.

When was the last time your family had to subsist on the land?

When was the last time your family had to depend on others’ subsistence?

Are you descended from a family of tricksters?

Farmers?

In this global society of excess, how much belongs to you just for being alive?

The air is free to breathe.

The sky is free to view, the rain to drink, the wild grass, trees and animals to eat.

But if you can read this and are reading this, there’s this bit of stuff we call infrastructure, the woven threads of social fabric, the safety net of civilisation that props you up in place to distinguish your sophisticated, educated self from the air, sky, rain, grass, trees and wild animals.

But if you want to live off the land, making your own clothing and shelter, growing/raising/harvesting your own food, property rights unimportant to your wandering lifestyle, then by all means let us not bother you with the concepts of taxes and fees to pay for what we deem are necessary components of our civilised social species.

We shall cordon off areas for purely self-sufficient subcultures and leave them alone to figure out how to live with local insect populations, changing weather conditions and whatever it takes to survive without technologically-advanced modern conveniences.

Otherwise, if you have used and in any way lean upon present-day developments such as dictionaries, mechanised labour-saving devices and transportation networks, then we have to figure out a way to share the costs of our local/global interconnectednessisms.

Is there a fair way to share?

Competition is never fair.  Someone always has more information to make a better decision about the value and costs of a connection.

The seller of a single deer carcass who’s asking an exorbitant price, implying it’s the only deer left, may or may not know there’s another herd out of sight of the potential buyers but the buyers aren’t always sure.

Or one buyer, who may know of a market where the deer is even more valuable because there are buyers with many extra labour/investment credits to spend on the luxury of an expensive deer carcass, becomes a new seller.

And on and on.

The value of a connection is relative, not absolute.

So, too, the fairness.

What is a fair share?

How do I know that the person next to me is paying the right amount for the free use of a public transportation network we agree to share, obeying rules of the road together, mutually ensuring the safety of each other during our travels?

How do I know that the doctor who’s treating me for a rare disease was a top-notch A+ student and is an energetic continuous learner who has a burning desire to treat me as if I was the most important patient to cure?

What if I don’t know but if I knew, it wouldn’t matter?

If you and I knew the rules, obeyed the rules and reaped our rewards for our hard work, is it fair that the rules are changed to make up for the rule breakers or those who didn’t work hard enough or in the right way?

Change is constant and what was right yesterday becomes wrong tomorrow.

The air in a tyre is part of a closed system.

A tear in the tyre wall causes a leak of air into an open system.

No matter how much we keep pumping air into the tyre, the tyre can’t hold the same air pressure as before the tear occurred.

Same for a subculture’s pool of resources.

Inputs and outputs, simple as that.

Politicians from the local, state, national and international level will have us believe that the United States of America must resolve the “fiscal cliff” crisis or we could see a worldwide recession.

Why do I feel convinced these are just hypnotic games of population control?

Two phrases I keep in mind here: “the emperour’s new clothes” and “what’s in it for me?”.

I look around this room in which I type and see all the stuff that exists because of publicly-pooled resources as well as stuff that exists because of excess beyond subsistence farming/hunting.

Pretty much everything.

Almost nothing is directly related to living hand-to-mouth off the land except for the air I breathe and sky I could out of the shuttered window.

Therefore, I must think about this subject from another angle.

How is the threat of recession bad for us (I can think of many examples where going over the fiscal cliff could be personally bad for me but I’m not selfish enough to plead my case here)?

Eventual anarchy?

Income inequality off the charts?

Exotic, complicated financial instruments too complicated for the many to understand and thus used to greatest advantage for the few who do — derivatives upon derivatives upon derivatives, yes, and on and on, like pricing a deer carcass beyond any value its meat could provide.

Bottom line: no one can convince me that their hot air expended over the dead deer carcass we’ve labeled the fiscal cliff crisis is a threat or great buy other than one people promote to inflate their self-worth.

The U.S. economy is not a tightly-sealed closed system and if it leaks more or less than it did, so what?

If I have less buying power or more expensive access to healthcare, does it matter?

What about restrictions on my free air or free sky or availability of wild grass, trees and animals?

I blame no one for my economic hardships on anyone but myself.

I take personal responsibility for determining if the people with whom I interact and on whom I depend for their college-acquired knowledge/curiosity/wisdom were or need to have been A+ students.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Hardships create acute awareness of what defines necessity.

Ultimately, only I can say what is necessary to make my life worthwhile.

Let us go over the fiscal cliff and see what happens — guess what, the world keeps spinning, the Sun keeps shining and people still have to figure out how to compete for our global pool of resources while sharing public space and respecting private rights.

In other words, the fiscal cliff is a sleight-of-hand illusion.  Don’t be fooled.  You will figure out how to put food on the table if it’s no longer handed to you from the public trough.

Enuf sed.

Tonight, I miss my father

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Tonight, at the end of the day, this day being the 7th of December 2012, 71 years after the Japanese military attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, I admit my familial sorrow.

Dad, I miss you and hearing your voice.

Not that we talked a lot.

No, as you aged — as we aged — you grew grumpier, more grouchy, more angry at a culture that became less and less familiar, making our conversations a give-and-take on your views that the world was going to hell in a handbasket over the falls, up shit creek without a paddle, or a pot to sit on and shit in.

Of course you were right.

Your world did go to hell, the last months and days in your medical conditions (ALS – bulbar option?) not enjoyable — a PEG tube in your belly, a ventilator down your throat, and IV needles in your arms like quills in a porcupine — unable to speak or swallow.

At least we had that one last enjoyable drive through the countryside in east Tennessee before we took you to the hospital.

The three of us, minus your daughter (my sister), two parents and a son taking in the view of farms, freeways, subdivisions and downtown Kingsport where you had worked and shopped for over 40 years.

Dad, a few weeks ago, we survived our first family Thanksgiving without you.

I sat in your chair, the eldest male taking the reins but not able to fill your shoes.

A little over two weeks from now, we’ll celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day.

We’ll open presents, eat too much food, drink a shot of Rebel Yell in your honour and…

We’ll miss you.

You touched a lot of people’s lives.

I never knew how many people who felt your positive influence until we saw the hundreds that came to pay our family respects to you before your memorial service.

I’m still amazed and will always be so.

Dad, Mom said you were quite a good dancer.

Tonight, while I was struggling across the dance floor with my wife, watching many other couples gracefully sway, I remembered when you used to enjoy square dancing with Mom.

She misses you a lot more than I do, learning about the little things you took care of around the house without her having to know about them — checking air filters, winterising the garage door, changing the temperature settings on the heat pump, and paying bills.

I’ll never be like you Dad.

Of course I can’t tell you that in person.  Instead, I have this blog to catch these word trails that my thoughts create.  Me, the casual writer.

Many a person told me that you were proud of me but I rarely heard you say that to me when you were alive.

Funny, isn’t it, how we think we know who we are in our parents’ eyes but don’t.

Somehow, I thought you were always disappointed in me but maybe it’s just because part of me is disappointed with me for not following a track I had announced to others I had taken, a track I thought was what you wanted me to take but I didn’t want to.

Instead, I had to be the me I want(ed) to be.  And am.

Well, Dad, I guess I better go on to bed.  My wife and the cats are snuggled under the covers fast asleep while Christmas music plays on the TV during this writing session, making me sleepy, too.

Plus, I’m no longer hot and sweaty from dancing.

Also, I no longer feel a streak of envy at the ability of the dancers around me earlier tonight who appeared so light on their feet it made me hurt.

I should remind myself of the many people who are physically and mentally unable to dance but would like to.

That’s why I miss you tonight, Dad.  You would have triggered that thought in me immediately without my having to find it hours later by writing for a while on a cold plastic keyboard wirelessly connected to a warm CPU and motherboard.

Dad, I never thought about being here, writing you this note when you’re dead and buried.

But that’s okay.  I don’t know everything.  I can’t see the future through the emotional cloud of family, a weakness I’m proud to claim.

Good night, Dad.  I’ll see you again soon in my dreams.  These next few weeks are going to be tough but we’ll get through them, knowing you’d want us to tough it out like good soldiers.

Thanks for serving in the U.S. Army when our nation called you to service.

Love,
Your son

Short-term vs. Long-term Memory: Competing Against Our Technological Brethren

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In the debate about debt restructuring and causes for male social infertility, let alone actual male sperm count decline, we face a longterm dilemma —

The advancement of technology past the ability of our short-term and long-term memory capabilities to keep up.

Do you compete against others?

Of course you do.

You competed with the distractions of the environment around your parent(s)/caregiver(s) for their attention to feed you, did you not?

You competed for the opportunity cost of baby clothes, baby food, toys and housing versus other items the money for your baby stuff could have bought.

You competed against life itself to live, from the very beginning of your existence — one specific sperm finding its way to an egg — at one time, a birth control device such as an spermicidal cream, a viral infection or mix of toxic chemicals in your mother’s womb could have wiped you out easily.

You still compete against the billions of nonsymbiotic cells that live on/in you for their/your existence.

We are sets of states of energy in constant competition.

That never changes.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Civilisations grow technologically, eventually creating an insurmountable gap in the echelons of civilisation complexity, usually between geographical regions, where competition between peoples is competition for the creation and use of better technology/tools.

When a global civilisation forms, there are no longer any barbaric civilisations with more brute force than clever technology to threaten any one highly-civilised population.

Instead, the barbarism grows from within.

Technology becomes a threat, rather than a benefit, to subgroups.

On a side note, hucksters can coerce unsuspecting customers into buying complex products for only so long until the customers start realising they’re giving the shirts off their backs for a set of the emperour’s new clothes?  How do the customers educate themselves enough to know they’re getting ripped off?

Technological automation improves productivity past the ability of basic tool-using skills so that large groups of workers with low skills are no longer needed.

Eventually, the threat of complex technology you can’t grasp, let alone compete against, is like a bully you can’t escape, beating you down at every opportunity to better yourself.

You’re trapped by your memory/cognition skills into a feeling of worthlessness.

The once proud, dominant male in lower/middle class society becomes a shadow.

But low skills are gender-neutral, despite current trends.

Not every woman is seeking more/higher education.

Where along the path of competition from birth does a person start losing touch with society because technology is too complex?

Technology refers to many things, such as language, cultural memes, shirt buttons, hammers, wheels, looms, chainsaws, and computers.

Is there a tipping point where this becomes a vicious, downward spiraling unraveling of our social fabric, regardless of attempts to turn the un[der]employed into entities dependent on the Mother State?

When does technology advance of civilisation become a threat to itself?

How do we determine where technology has failed to keep a person socially engaged?

How do we reconnect the unengaged both emotionally and intellectually?

What if every child was fitted with a device that automatically notified someone when the child’s behaviours and the environment were threats to the child’s long-term future?

What if that someone who was notified was a computer program that slowly nurtured the child into a useful place in a technologically complex civilisation?

When do the rights of a child to be functionally literate in a modern society override the rights of parents to raise their children to be whatever they want them to be — social misfits, creative geniuses or average, middle-of-the-road compliant citizens — the “rights” of the civilisation to grow and nourish unimportant to the parents?

Back to Besse

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Fleshing out connections, here’s a set of data points:

  • Besse Cooper, once the world’s oldest living person at 116 years of age, was born in Sullivan County, Tennessee, USA, in 1896.
  • Besse graduated from ETSU* in 1916.
  • My father in-law was born in 1916.  He and his wife (my mother in-law, born in 1917), both also graduated from ETSU**, in the early 1930s.
  • My father, born in 1935, taught at ETSU as an adjunct professor for over 20 years, and died earlier this year.
  • Besse Cooper died yesterday in Monroe, Georgia.
  • My uncle, former dean of history at Valdosta State University, and my aunt live in an assisted living facility not far from Monroe, Georgia.
  • I was born and grew up in Sullivan County, Tennessee, USA, and attended ETSU in the early 1980s.
  • My sister was born and grew up in Sullivan County, Tennessee, USA, and received her master’s degree from ETSU.
  • My wife was born in Sullivan County, Tennessee, USA.

Question: We can create as many connections as we wish but how many of them are real?
Question: How many of us will live to be centenarians?

* called East Tennessee State Normal School at the time.** called East Tennessee State Teachers College at the time.

Laws on the Books of Booked Lawyers

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In what has been labeled as the Presumptuous Journalist Act, lawmakers approved a convoluted batch of legislation aimed to clarify the rights of meateaters, vegetarians and gun owners.

From now on, at least once a year meateaters must kill their own food, using guns or other means at close quarters.

Vegetarians who refuse to eat meat, let alone kill an animal for food, must pay tolls for the use of anything — every road, building or other infrastructure; any product, including food, medicine, and/or clothing; any ideas, such as business, technology, arts, science, and/or sports — that was designed, financed, built and/or maintained by meateaters.

Meateating gun owners who kill their food more than once a year are given exclusive rights to own as many guns and as much ammunition as they want.

Vegetarian gun owners are allowed to own up to as many guns and as much ammunition as they can carry to a knife fight at a broccoli slaughterhouse.

In addition, submitted at the last minute in tiny print buried deep within the Presumptuous Journalist Act, any human killed by a gun, whether through acts of war, property protection, self-defense and/or domestic violence, must be used to feed the homeless, the malnourished and/or refugees without a reliable source of food.

A rally was planned for protestors on all sides of this issue but was delayed until this year’s harvest has been brought in, counted, graded and sent to market.

CORRECTION: The rally was canceled.  Everyone sat down at the tables for the Harvest Festival and resolved their differences, agreeing that meateaters, vegetarians and gunowners can exist, if not always peaceably, in the same society.

POST-CORRECTION: A family quarrel broke out at one of the tables and a gunfight ensued, offering opportunities for more presumptuous journalists to jump up and down, getting attention for themselves and the advertisers who support them.

First, Do No More Harm Than Is Absolutely Necessary To Do No Harm

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The men sat back in their leather chairs, cigar smoke gathering in layers below the ceiling.

“Boys, this is the way I see it.  We gave the women the right to vote.  A few decades later, we paid some kids to crash planes on 9/11.  From my point of view, we’re right on schedule.  Any objections?”

“Why are you so certain this will work?”

“Why?  Because it always has.  We enfranchise and disenfranchise various portions of the population to keep them off-guard and forever picketing city hall for the same rights they’ve lost and gained so many times they can’t remember.”

“If only this next one happened in my lifetime…”

“Anyone else with a question?”

“Yes.  So let me get this straight.  Your schedule shows us implementing Sharia law in Western countries within 100 years of 9/11/2001, thereby reinstating the role of men as supreme leaders…?”

“Uh-huh…”

“But it doesn’t bother you that our religion is pushed off to the side?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t Sharia law the antithesis of ours?”

“How so?”

“Well, our religions are not exactly best friends…”

“Abrahamic, Ibrahamic, call it what you will.  At the end of the day, it’s patriarchical and that’s all that matters to us men.  Right, boys?!”

The yellow-orange glow of burning tobacco sticks bobbed up and down.

“Next item on the agenda — determining which families get first dibs on occupying the initial Martian colonies.  Any suggestions?”

“Well, hadn’t we better make sure the women we send with those families are self-sufficient if need be but ultimately dependent on men?”

“Of course, of course.  As you can see from the list I gave you, the men and women from which you will choose the best candidates have been sequestered into isolated subcultures for three generations, allowing us to control their thought patterns, dietary preferences and genetic tendencies with 99.99966 percent accuracy.”

“I don’t know.  Six sigma sure leaves a lot of room for error.  I’d feel a lot more secure if we had a 10-sigma process in place.”

“You get what you pay for.  Gentlemen, anyone want to raise the stakes to ten sigma?”

“I’ll put a wager on seven.”

“Eight for me!”

“Okay, anyone for nine?  No?  Okay, going once, twice, sold!  Eight sigma.  By my calculations we need an additional half a billion dollars for seed money to get this started.”

“I’d still feel more comfortable with ten.”

“And if you can cough up 100 billion dollars, we’ll give you ten sigma.”

“Let me think about it…”

“Sure thing.  We’ll table it until next week’s Committee meeting.  Now, looking at the list, are there any objections to the list of potential candidates?”

Thirty-one years ago…

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Tired of turkey and dressing for dinner, my wife and I treated my mother to a supper of pizza a few days ago.

At the table next to us sat a family celebrating a child’s birthday.

After we ate, we spoke to the family and discovered they lived about 20 miles away from my wife and me in north Alabama.

Quite a coincidence, eating at the same restaurant 300 miles from home, it seemed.

Then, the grandmother at the table spoke up and said she recognised my mother who, as it turned out, had taught the 37-year old man with graying beard whose son’s birthday was sung by the pizza restaurant staff a few minutes before.

There we stood, watching a couple with a six-year young boy, recalling when the father was six 31 years before, under the tutelage of my mother.

On the ride home, my mother described what she remembered of the man when he was a boy — smart, skinny, shy — who is now an engineer working for our government’s military.

In our country, a popular phrase called “fiscal cliff” hangs in the air, with hints of government military cutbacks threatening to dampen celebrations of birthdays for little boys who depend on their parents’ government salaries to support local restaurants.

The “trickle down theory” is no longer popular but applies in many different ways, from the effect of a first grade teacher on a boy’s future to the effect of political wrangling on the income of restaurant workers.

The future is in our hands, which are the signs of the effects of the past.

Time is irrelevant.  Action is everything.

Grave Symbols

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My mother, while talking with a cemetery planning specialist, discovered that the bronze military marker for which my mother seemed to assume would only have a few religious symbols such as Christianity and Judaism, as well as some like the Masonic, has, in addition to a wide, diverse variety, a symbol for Atheists (which seems to imply that science is a religion or set of faith-based beliefs).

Hey, anything you spend more than an hour a day studying and devoting your time toward is probably indicative of your major set of beliefs, faith, religion, or whatever you want to call your m.o.

Chains of Love

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To combat the rise of disrespect for parental authority and to preserve family wealth, the world government passed a law that allows parents to place an irrevocable/untouchable lien on their disobedient children’s future earnings, depositing the money in a family trust long before student debt, underwater mortgages and government wealth redistribution programs reduce parents’ investment of time and money in their progeny.

Parents now have the right to make supersocial decisions about their children who waste talent and time on frivolous activities — the children may be sold into virtual servitude to large multinational corporations and the parents allowed to convert the proceeds of the sale into the fabrication of new children for the chance to create more obedient citizens, thus giving the parents an opportunity to show their dedication to preserving their subculture one more time.

The cycle may not be repeated more than three times; after that, the government may have the parents’ childrearing methods observed more closely — those who display abnormal parenting methods will be sent to retraining camps for central nervous system reconfiguration.

Same for disobedient children who refuse to obey their new multinational corporate leaders.

Those who are completely ornery may be sent to recycling centers at any time after two attempts at retaining.