"Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?" -- Frank Conniff
“Now, it's true that the [Wikileaks] cables were legally available to well over 1.5 million Americans, who had adequate security clearance. But trivial? Don't believe it. The cables show the daily business of a mighty empire acting in manners diametrically opposite to public pretensions.... The WikiLeaks documents show that the picture of the international business of the United States offered by the major U.S. media to the public is an infantile misrepresentation of reality.”
-- Alexander Cockburn
"I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer...The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like 'Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'" -- Jessica Alba in Elle
“Stupidity defeats you in some way. Especially when time is at a premium. And sometimes these questions are themselves mischievous.”
-- Arundhati Roy
“George W. Bush said Friday he will not visit Denver this weekend as planned because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was invited to attend one of the same events as the former president.... [Bush spokesman David Sherzer] said Bush doesn't want to be part of a forum that invited someone who has ‘willfully and repeatedly done great harm to the interests of the United States.’"
-- Sheila V. Kumar, Associated Press
“... Sam disliked the attitude of moral superiority above all else... One merely had to tip open the Britannica to discover that between the years 1912 and 1945 the Germans had destroyed a hundred million lives out of a basic assumption of moral superiority. And this was only the most notorious example that could be extrapolated in every direction in human history, including our own extermination of over a hundred Native American cultures, up through Vietnam, and perhaps Nicaragua in the future... Part of the ethos, the soul history, of American capitalism was to destroy absolutely everything that wasn’t immediately useful.”
-- Jim Harrison, “Sunset Limited”, in The Woman Lit by Fireflies
-- "Because the mongoose isn't fighting snakes for food, or for territory, or for survival -- it's fighting snakes because fuck snakes.
-- Danny Vittore, "Six Animals That Just Don't Give a F@*k"
"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Showing posts with label critters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critters. Show all posts
Pondering Mysteries
Koalas smell strongly of eucalyptus. So did my grandmother. Adult koalas look like old Jewish men (reference David Ben-Gurion and Lee Strasberg as seen below). My grandmother, however, was not Jewish, but a Spiritualist, in touch with an American Indian spirit guide.
Leviticus expressly forbids Spiritualism. It also forbids haircuts (19:27) and wearing clothes made out of more than one fabric,i.e. the polyester/cotton blend t-shirt (19:19). Koalas do not wear t-shirts. My grandmother did not cut her hair, but braided and wore it up in the fashion of her childhood. Neither did she wear t-shirts. Photographs show that Ben Gurion did on occasion cut his hair. Is this a signal to the gnostic community of his rejection of Leviticus' injunction against the Spiritualist church?
Seekers after knowledge lent my grandmother their house key, which she used to locate Bible verses relevant to their case. The Tree of Life, a diagram used in Kabbalah, can be thought of as a key or "map" that represents the structure of the universe.
Clark Gable nearly destroyed the t-shirt industry when he appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert appeared without a shirt in Sign of the Cross while bathing in wild asses' milk. Polly Walker as Atia in Rome is more to my taste, none of which is germane to the case except to reinforce the Kinsey Institute's assertion that 54% of men think of sex several times a day, not every seven seconds as claimed by urban myth.
Tourists complain that koalas are fractious and not as cuddly as portrayed by the media, but it must be remembered that for the koala, posing for a photograph with a tourist bus at midday is like waking a human at 4 in the morning. Koalas are believed by the Aborigines to call the rain, though their name means "doesn't drink" because they get their moisture from eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees = the kabbalistic tree of life-- kabbalah, koala-- coincidence? I think not.
The book of Deuteronomy is full of shit.
Leviticus expressly forbids Spiritualism. It also forbids haircuts (19:27) and wearing clothes made out of more than one fabric,i.e. the polyester/cotton blend t-shirt (19:19). Koalas do not wear t-shirts. My grandmother did not cut her hair, but braided and wore it up in the fashion of her childhood. Neither did she wear t-shirts. Photographs show that Ben Gurion did on occasion cut his hair. Is this a signal to the gnostic community of his rejection of Leviticus' injunction against the Spiritualist church?
Seekers after knowledge lent my grandmother their house key, which she used to locate Bible verses relevant to their case. The Tree of Life, a diagram used in Kabbalah, can be thought of as a key or "map" that represents the structure of the universe.
Clark Gable nearly destroyed the t-shirt industry when he appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert appeared without a shirt in Sign of the Cross while bathing in wild asses' milk. Polly Walker as Atia in Rome is more to my taste, none of which is germane to the case except to reinforce the Kinsey Institute's assertion that 54% of men think of sex several times a day, not every seven seconds as claimed by urban myth.
Tourists complain that koalas are fractious and not as cuddly as portrayed by the media, but it must be remembered that for the koala, posing for a photograph with a tourist bus at midday is like waking a human at 4 in the morning. Koalas are believed by the Aborigines to call the rain, though their name means "doesn't drink" because they get their moisture from eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees = the kabbalistic tree of life-- kabbalah, koala-- coincidence? I think not.
The book of Deuteronomy is full of shit.
Commonplace Book: Hypocrisy and the Culture War, Rabbits, "Original Intent" and the Constitution, and Ye Ancient Dogge of Malta
“Of all wars, only culture wars offer the hope of sheer, unadulterated hilarity. Sex and hypocrisy were staples of farce long before America became a nation, and they never go out of style.”
(Frank Rich)
***
"We Maltese — we bichon maltais, the Roman Ladies' Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world."(from the novel # The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroeby Andrew O'Hagan)
***
“[T]he constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre. ... The doctrine of original intent rests on a set of implicit assumptions about the framers as a breed apart, momentarily allowed access to a set of timeless and transcendent truths ...
... [T]he doctrine requires you to believe that the "miracle at Philadelphia" was a uniquely omniscient occasion when 55 mere mortals were permitted a glimpse of the eternal verities and then embalmed their insights in the document. Any professional historian proposing such an interpretation today would be laughed off the stage.”
(Joseph J. Ellis, “Immaculate Misconception and the Supreme Court”, The Washington Post)
***
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did beyond amendment....
Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs . . . Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before."
(T. Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816)
***
“Rabbits are clever about manipulating humans and can seem stubborn about learning how to live in our homes. It helps to see things through rabbit eyes: a wire is root that needs trimming, a piece of furniture is a tree, a household is a rabbit warren with strict hierarchy and rules.
Behavior
Rubbing chin on things, such as houseplants, priceless armoires, Italian leather shoes.
What it means
A great misconception: It does NOT mean marking territory. It is a rabbit custom, like saying grace before a meal. In short, "One day I will eat you."
What you should do
Give your bunny more sticks and branches, keep your stuff off the floor, and kiss the antiques goodbye.”
(from Rabbit Language , or: "Are you going to eat that?" by Carolyn Crampton)
What Song the Superman Sang: Commonplace Book of Quotations for February 2009
"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
- Alan Moore
“I always offend someone by asserting that the reason the death of a pet is worse than the death of a human is that you have mixed feelings about all people.”
-- Dick Cavett
"I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and -- to return to my first instance -- toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable… At any rate, Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time I have stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."
-- Orwell
“This town [Washington,DC] talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking.”
– David Axelrod
-- image by Sleestak, for his blog Lady, That's My Skull
“Faith is at best morally neutral, and at worst a vile mental distortion. Our habits are to respect people of faith, but I think we’ve been forced to question those habits. The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales.”
-- Ian McEwan, profile in The New Yorker
“The search for an impartial and neutral tool to mitigate the disruptive effect of factionalism was an important feature of political life in Italian city republics. As Waley (1991) maintains, the political scene in medieval Italy was characterized by factionalism fueled by intense competition for political office. The citizens were driven by an ardent desire to obtain the "honors and benefits" of office (Manin 1995). To overcome factional strife, most Italian communes adopted the institution of podesta, a foreigner endowed with judicial and administrative powers. The podesta was usually hired for a year and played the role of military leader, judge, and administrator. An important attribute of the podesta was that he had to be a foreigner so that he could be neutral to the internal "discords and conspiracies"
-- via Steve Clemons, The Washington Note
“The aim of literature is the creation of a small object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
-- Donald Barthelme
"I’m confused now, because I thought Lindsey Graham was DC’s official angry chimp."
-- comment by Sassette on the "dead chimp cartoon" controversy at Wonkette
"In Final Crisis 7, Superman finally kills Darkseid [by singing a song into the newly constructed Miracle Machine. Morrison doesn't let the reader know exactly what song Superman sings, but instead leaves it up to the reader to fill in this particular gap."
-- Meme explained in Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular Blog, with links to other examples. (For the record, it is the opinion of this writer that this song would only lengthen Darkseid's reign.)
- Alan Moore
“I always offend someone by asserting that the reason the death of a pet is worse than the death of a human is that you have mixed feelings about all people.”
-- Dick Cavett
"I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and -- to return to my first instance -- toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable… At any rate, Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time I have stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."
-- Orwell
“This town [Washington,DC] talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking.”
– David Axelrod
-- image by Sleestak, for his blog Lady, That's My Skull
“Faith is at best morally neutral, and at worst a vile mental distortion. Our habits are to respect people of faith, but I think we’ve been forced to question those habits. The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales.”
-- Ian McEwan, profile in The New Yorker
“The search for an impartial and neutral tool to mitigate the disruptive effect of factionalism was an important feature of political life in Italian city republics. As Waley (1991) maintains, the political scene in medieval Italy was characterized by factionalism fueled by intense competition for political office. The citizens were driven by an ardent desire to obtain the "honors and benefits" of office (Manin 1995). To overcome factional strife, most Italian communes adopted the institution of podesta, a foreigner endowed with judicial and administrative powers. The podesta was usually hired for a year and played the role of military leader, judge, and administrator. An important attribute of the podesta was that he had to be a foreigner so that he could be neutral to the internal "discords and conspiracies"
-- via Steve Clemons, The Washington Note
“The aim of literature is the creation of a small object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
-- Donald Barthelme
"I’m confused now, because I thought Lindsey Graham was DC’s official angry chimp."
-- comment by Sassette on the "dead chimp cartoon" controversy at Wonkette
"In Final Crisis 7, Superman finally kills Darkseid [by singing a song into the newly constructed Miracle Machine. Morrison doesn't let the reader know exactly what song Superman sings, but instead leaves it up to the reader to fill in this particular gap."
-- Meme explained in Dr. K's 100-Page Super Spectacular Blog, with links to other examples. (For the record, it is the opinion of this writer that this song would only lengthen Darkseid's reign.)
Thirsty Girl in Australia
Koala means "doesn't drink" (most of their intake coming from morning dew on eucalyptus leaves) so it's a sign of how thirsty she was that Sam drank from a bottle held by a volunteer fireman named Dave Tree. Caught on the ground in the daylight, too, but she quickly accepts that he is a creature of good will offering comfort from the forest fires that killed at least 180 people and Saint Francis knows how many animals.
Sam and her (Sam's a girl) burnt nose and pads are healing now at the Southern Ash Wildlife Shelter. She's even acquired some celebrity, a Facebook page and a boyfriend named Bob.
Addendum, March of 2010: Sad news on Sam's Facebook page: Sam has since passed away, of causes unrelated to the fire.
Joseph Campbell's Story About the Tiger Who Thought He Was a Goat
I heard Joseph Campbell tell this story at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids back in the Eighties. Just found this transcription, and the story wants to be told again, for what it's worth.
A starving and pregnant tigress comes upon a flock of goats and pounces on them with such fervor that she brings about the birth of her little one, as well as her own death. The goats scatter, but soon come back to find the newborn tiger by the side of its dead mother.
Tho goats adopt the baby tiger and it grows up believing it is a goat. He learns to bleat and eat grass, but the trouble is that grass doesn’t nourish tigers well, and he grows into a weak and miserable member of his own species.
One day, a large male tiger pounces on the flock and the goats scatter. The young tiger, not being a goat, remains standing there. The big male is surpised to find a young tiger living with goats, and when he enquired into it, the young one simply says, “Maaaa.” Mortified, the old tiger swats him back and forth a couple of times, but the only response coming forth was more bleating and grass nibbling.
The old tiger brings the young one to a pond and makes him look at his own reflection for the first time. He leans over and points out to him, “See, you look like me. You’re not a goat. You are a tiger, like me. Be like me!” He then brings the young tiger to his den and shows him bloody chunks of gazelle meat from a recent hunt. Taking a big chunk, he says “Open up and eat this!” “Oh no, I’m a vegetarian,” says the little one. But the old tiger would not take no for an answer, and shoves a piece of red meat down the little one’s throat, causing him to gag a little. Now the real tiger food is in his gut, getting into his blood. Spontaneously, the young one gives a a tiger-like stretch, and then a small little tiger roar.
“Now you’ve got it! Now go into the forest and eat tiger food!” says the big one.
Is there something larger than our ego that wants to come through, to demand authenticity and genuineness in the way we live? Are we to cruise onwards toward that inevitable ending, that certain exit on terms that were assumed and purchased for the first half? The second half of life is not a chronological issue, but a psychological one, in which we question what values and paradigms we are living by.
This is a question for each of us, whatever stage of life we’re in - are we tigers living as goats? If the answer is in the affirmative, then a second question - what is good tiger food? In other words, if we are not living as we ought to be, activating our fullest potentials, then what must we do, what would nourish us towards that?
-- A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by
Diane K. Osbon, The Joseph Campbell Foundation, 1991.
A starving and pregnant tigress comes upon a flock of goats and pounces on them with such fervor that she brings about the birth of her little one, as well as her own death. The goats scatter, but soon come back to find the newborn tiger by the side of its dead mother.
Tho goats adopt the baby tiger and it grows up believing it is a goat. He learns to bleat and eat grass, but the trouble is that grass doesn’t nourish tigers well, and he grows into a weak and miserable member of his own species.
One day, a large male tiger pounces on the flock and the goats scatter. The young tiger, not being a goat, remains standing there. The big male is surpised to find a young tiger living with goats, and when he enquired into it, the young one simply says, “Maaaa.” Mortified, the old tiger swats him back and forth a couple of times, but the only response coming forth was more bleating and grass nibbling.
The old tiger brings the young one to a pond and makes him look at his own reflection for the first time. He leans over and points out to him, “See, you look like me. You’re not a goat. You are a tiger, like me. Be like me!” He then brings the young tiger to his den and shows him bloody chunks of gazelle meat from a recent hunt. Taking a big chunk, he says “Open up and eat this!” “Oh no, I’m a vegetarian,” says the little one. But the old tiger would not take no for an answer, and shoves a piece of red meat down the little one’s throat, causing him to gag a little. Now the real tiger food is in his gut, getting into his blood. Spontaneously, the young one gives a a tiger-like stretch, and then a small little tiger roar.
“Now you’ve got it! Now go into the forest and eat tiger food!” says the big one.
Is there something larger than our ego that wants to come through, to demand authenticity and genuineness in the way we live? Are we to cruise onwards toward that inevitable ending, that certain exit on terms that were assumed and purchased for the first half? The second half of life is not a chronological issue, but a psychological one, in which we question what values and paradigms we are living by.
This is a question for each of us, whatever stage of life we’re in - are we tigers living as goats? If the answer is in the affirmative, then a second question - what is good tiger food? In other words, if we are not living as we ought to be, activating our fullest potentials, then what must we do, what would nourish us towards that?
-- A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by
Diane K. Osbon, The Joseph Campbell Foundation, 1991.
The Puppy Debate
I've been soured on CNN for more than a year now (somebody take those graphics away from Blitzer! And who made these chair-warmers into pundits?)-- but have decided to forgive Anderson Cooper, at least, for moderating this debate.
Bring the Cute: Panda Diplomacy and the Charm Offensive
In a better world of my own design (I’m avoiding the word “utopia”—you see how that worked out for Thomas More) conflicts between nations are resolved by pandas, snow leopards and lemurs. (There are other components to my plan: reseeding the primeval forest from Maryland to the Mississippi, restocking free-range bison from the Mississippi to the Rockies, a guillotine on Madison Avenue as a warning to publicists, and secluding Dick Cheney and his Eurasian counterparts in Death Valley or the Rub' al Khali, where they can fight their own goddamn wars to their hearts content— but hey, it’s Christmas, so in the interests of Peace, I limit myself to the Cute Animal Problem.)
After years of negotiations, China is making a gift of two giant pandas to Taiwan named Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan. (Please note that on this blog, we will distinguish from the red panda, Ailurus fulgens.)
This is the first success after ten failed attempts at panda diplomacy between China and Taiwan since 1992. Even their names were problematic-- Taiwan wanted pandas named "Independence" maybe "Friendly Harmony", but "Reunion" and "Unify"--? Fahgeddaboutit! See, if the pandas are on "loan" from mainland China, per international wildlife statutes, then Taiwan is being treated as an independent state (yay), but that also means the taxpayers of Taiwan will have to pay Beijing for the privilege of having pandas (boo)... but if Taiwan accepts the pandas as a "gift" from the mainland, then that implies Taiwan is a province within China, and not an independent entity.
I thank the Baby Jesus that this was all about cute little fuzzballs (see illustration) and not about bombs or anxious refugees. No panda skipped a meal or worried about hidden training camps. I'm a Confucian, not a utopian; it's all about incremental changes, chipping away for a lifetime at the stones in my passway until they turn to pebbles and someday, Lord, turn to sand. As Melissa Etheridge said when deciding to let Rick Warren say the goddamn prayer. "Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us." There is a paranoid streak in Taiwan that won't give an inch to the pandas-- beware that cuteness, for it hides the dragon's claw-- but it was interesting to me that Taiwanese editorials blame the KMT for selling them out, since it was the Kuomintang that started all the trouble in the first place-- Sterling Seagrave's The Soong Dynasty is a good place to start on our dysfunctional relationships in that part of the world. Still, and I cannot say this enough, better to be sniping about pandas than about invasion plans and missiles.
Mock if you will, but more serious thinkers than me prefer cultural exchanges-- cute critters, Peace Corps volunteers, well-digging, road building, Habitat for Humanity and NGOs like Doctors without Borders-- to the bullying, bombs and puppet dictators we’ve used instead of diplomacy for the last fifty years. Richard Vague, for example, believes that sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will not solve anyone’s problems: “…That is the last thing we need to do… The trouble is that we could defeat the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the warlords in Afghanistan again and again, but unless someone provides a viable economic path forward for the broad citizenry there, it won't matter. They'll just come back."
Here's to a year when the ascendant voices will not be those of the hysterical and the violent, but the protectors and the sharers and the builders. "Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too." Just a world where we can all smile at unconcerned, roly-poly pandas, joy without logos and without fear of either the madman in the crowd or the imperial satellites above.
My Kind of News Day
Congress tightened control of interstate monkey sales (good) but forgot to include a provision for trained caupuchin helper monkeys (bad). One lonely strip club on Bourbon Street (the French Quarter being on high ground, remember) remains open in spite of the hurricane, but only at half-staff (Bada-BING!). And regardless of John McCain's fantasy life, the invasion of Iraq is still so FUBAR that the first major oil contract between Iraq and a foreign country went to China instead of the U.S.; this administration can't even do "Blood for Oil" right.
I'm recovering with coffee and a copy of Burne Hogarth's Drawing Wrinkles and Drapery after a week of extroversion: getting ready for school on Tuesday, out for live music almost every night including a terrific performance by E.C. Scott at the new 411 Blues Club in town and a life-changing performance by Zion Lion on the downtown mall, and finally an Obama/Biden rally in Battle Creek. But mostly I like confounding the search engines with an entry like this. Whoever typed 'strippers', 'helper monkey', 'Barack Obama', 'Burne Hogarth' and 'the blues' into Google-- I was born to love you.
Benny and the Cat Club
One of my summer projects was to find a little brother or sister for Doc, badly in need of a playmate after the loss of Sophie, an incomprehensible divorce, and the I-Want-to-Be-an-Only-Kitty truculence of his older sister Phoebe.
So here is Lord Tony Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount of Stansgate, known as Benny, a graduate of Kalamazoo Animal Rescue. By the second day of his arrival, he and Doc were practicing cat-fu and grooming each other. Even Phoebe is willing to let the kitten share one corner of the bed or walk past her in the hall without hysterics-- some of the time. Benny is a sunny little guy who litter trained instantly and taught himself (and me) to play fetch. He's still enough of a kitten to suckle noisily on a paw or a blanket and knead my tender flesh when he naps by my side, purring and oblivious to my screams. Most wonderfully, he has Sophie's talent for making me laugh at least once a day.
I was amazed to hear from Kalamazoo Animal Rescue that it's more difficult to place black cats; I would've thought they were everyone's first choice. My cat vet, Dr. Seeley Rotigel, put me in touch with KAR and they really are a bargain in addition to their virtues as animal rescuers: Benny arrived already neutered, wormed, de-flead twice and with all his vaccinations, at a cost much lower than I could have managed adopting on my own.
Benn (two n's please, in keeping with his namesake, the great British Labour MP Tony Benn) is shown here only after some difficulty, as he insisted on coming closer and blocking the lens every time I took out the camera. For the uninitiated, the other Tony Benn is shown here below, and in spite of his inability to jump five times his own height from a crouch, he talks beautifully about democracy, the health of the citizen, and the ways of the world in general. Ees a life-ah changer.
Spiritual Comfort from a Dog and Merrill Markoe: PICK UP THE BIG FLAT WET THING
Tank and June, shown here, live with my friends Pat and Bill, all of whom have done the most to insist on my survival through the end of my marriage. The only good that I can see is that any bad karma I might have accumulated through causing pain to others has now been visited on my head threefold, balancing out any karmic debt outstanding.
This American Life broadcast an episode on "breakups" today, and although I meant not to listen, the radio was still on while I was weeping in the next room, and so I heard Merrill Markoe read the following story, which made me think of Tank and June (the cats at home being just as puzzled and confused as I) and contains the best of all the well-meaning advice I've heard from strangers and friends alike:
"Today our friend Paul came to the house in a near dissociative state of panic. Suddenly and without warning it appeared his marriage was unraveling.
He sat down on the big red couch in my living room , I offered him some vodka and he cautiously began to detail his anguish.
“Up until yesterday if you had asked me if my marriage was a happy one, I would have said yes, “ he said, choking back tears, his voice quivering with emotion,” and then last night, out of the blue, my wife comes in and tells me she wants a divorce.”
As Paul spoke , his voice full of shock and misery, our dog Puppyboy, a skinny brown and black Tijuana Shepherd, approached him. It appeared to be one of those moments of poignant intuitive empathy that people and animals sometimes share…right up until the moment I noticed that Puppyboy’s mouth was full of a large black completely deflated soccer ball. To Puppyboy, a ball is still a ball whether or not it is currently filled with air. And any occasion, even one that involves tears, is as good as any other to begin a game of “Fetch.” So he placed the flat wet piece of rubber gently on Paul’s knee, where it balanced like a rock at Stonehenge, then sat down right in front of Paul to wait for the games to begin. Paul, however, was too upset to notice....
"Hello, new seated person. I am Puppyboy and I can see that you are very upset for some reason. But I have something on my mind.
It is an idea so big that I can hardly hold my head up from the enormous weight of it. It is more than an idea. It is an urgent message. I am going out on a limb here and tell you that It is the most important thing I have ever had to say. And it is this: I have placed a thing on you that you must throw....
The only other possible explanation for your puzzling lack of interest is that you are purposefully ignoring me. And why would you do that? That doesn’t make any sense.
Especially since you are really hurting yourself more than you are hurting me. Because let’s face it…you’re the one who is passing up a great opportunity.
And by a great opportunity I am referring to the chance to have the kind of fun that everyone dreams of having. I speak of the chance to throw a big flat stretchy wet thing....
I don’t want to be preachy, but In life there are certain moments that may never come again. This, I believe, is one of those moments for you. Throw it now or live a life of regret.
I mean I can’t stop you if you’d rather just listen to yourself talk. Wife wife wife, she did this, she did that, really fascinating.
FOR CHRISSAKES LISTEN TO ME YOU WHINY HEN PECKED MOTHERFUCKER… JUST Look in to my eyes, and play along!
Pick up the big flat wet thing.
Pick up the big flat wet thing.
Pick up the big flat wet thing. PICK IT UP.PICK IT UP. PICK UP THE BIG FLAT WET THING?
CAN YOU HEAR ME OKAY? PICK UP THE BIG FLAT WET THING.
Are you even listening? You know, Maybe if you had LISTENED A LITTLE BETTER DURING YOUR MARRIAGE your wife wouldn’t want a divorce. DID you ever think of that? IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF YOU NEVER THREW THE THINGS THAT SHE BROUGHT YOU EITHER!"
Full text, by Merrill Markoe, at her website here
Monkey Puzzle
Monkey is the great trickster hero of Asia, kin to Coyote and Odysseus, Brer Rabbit, Mouse Deer and the rest. Monkey is always wandering, bragging, grabbing at everything and never shutting up, showing off, asking questions, and getting in and out of trouble. They call him "the animal with a hundred hands" because he's always grabbing at things, like the mind that won't stay still but gets itself into unnecessary trouble: the mind, the Zen masters tell us, IS a monkey.
I made this drawing some years ago as part of a long abandoned project. The monkey bodies spell out his name. There's a big painted version in color as well, with the word MONKEY arranged vertically, a blue-green background and the monkeys in red and yellow. An art lover paid me good money for that one (now will I believe that there are unicorns), so it either hangs on some wall or in a rummage sale somewhere.
Monkey: Journey to the West is a classic Buddhist novel of Monkey's adventures traveling with a Buddhist monk in search of enlightenment, faced with 80 impossible tasks 100 chapters and demons and temptations galore-- even pissing on Buddha's hand-- and despite all his character flaws, Monkey finally achieves enlightenment, hope for the silliest.
Now I'm pleased that Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and the Gorillaz) has combined Monkey's adventures with the Olympics as an intro for BBC Sports. It's a connection that was hanging there waiting for someone to grab it, so I'm glad it was them and not Disney or some other corporate thief of other people's dreams. Carlo Collodi invented Pinocchio and James Barrie created Peter Pan. Felix Salten wrote Bambi and Hans Christian Anderson dreamed the Little Mermaid (with an unhappy ending) and Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Books" is ten times more profound than that jazz-track abomination. Walt Disney may have been the Thomas Edison of idea factories, but that's scarcely a recommendation.
Never Mind the Sharks, Here Come the Crocodiles
July 30 is the anniversary of the sinking of the Indianapolis, one of the saddest horror tales of the sea. I hope it's just coincidence that this is "Shark Week" on TV. Halfway between Guam and Leyte Gulf, she was sunk by a torpedo on her way back from delivering the atomic bomb to Tinian. 900 out of 1,196 men went into the water, but only 317 survived when the sharks came in at dawn. Because it was a secret mission, her late arrival fell between the cracks and it wasn't until August 2nd that a plane accidentally spotted the men in the water.
This was not, however, the worst mass attack by animals known to history. That was the night of February 19, 1945, on Ramree Island off the coast of Burma. After six weeks of fighting with Indian and British marines, about 1,000 Japanese soldiers tried crossing 15 kilometers of mangrove swamp that was filled with 15-foot saltwater crocodiles. Of the 900 men who went into the swamp, 500 escaped to the Japanese lines and of the 400 still in the swamp, only 20 were left alive by the morning. The African naturalist Jean-Pierre Hallett, writing after the fact in his book Animal Kitabu, thinks the sound of the mortars and the sudden intrusion may have agitated the crocodiles into a killing frenzy. Nile and saltwater crocodiles are still responsible for more human deaths than sharks, though I hold out the mosquito and our own murderous impulses as the champions.
The Rabbit's Prayer: But First They Have to Catch You
It used to be respectable to learn from Nature, although that has fallen out of vogue-- deer stupidly refuse to adapt to motor vehicles, and fur, fish and fowl alike have shown themselves pathetically unable to fit in with a system dominated by asphalt, Dick Cheney and Monsanto. Adopt the wisdom of the animals? The Native Americans' embrace of casinos filled with clouds of blue tobacco smoke only shows that they've finally wised up and joined the party. If the polar bear didn't want to become extinct, he would would have planned for the future like the rest of us. And if military planners succeed in their quest for the robot soldier (127 billion being spent on something called the Future Combat Project), it'll be our turn to learn what it's like to be a raccoon in the headlight.
And yet, and yet... the book of Nature, when it's not paved over but read with care, contains undiscovered cures for cancer (oops, that plant just went extinct, sorry) and biological marvels of technology beyond human ken. If humans could make an elevator cable with the strength of a spider web, we would ride elevators into space instead of explosive rockets. The unassuming kangaroo can put a fertlized embryo into stasis for years at a time before it is born, effectively suspended animation. Jim Harrison learned a principle of Zen from watching his cat: "When a cat doesn't know what to do, it sits down."
The motto beneath this picture is the rabbit's prayer from Richard Adams Watership Down. Like most gifts granted to mythic heroes, it contains both a boon and a curse. The rabbit hero El-ahrairah was the last to receive a blessing from God in Adams' lapine mythology, and with a sauce familiar to owners of house rabbits, the trickster told God he could just bless his rear end, and so in a dangerous world where everyone else has the weapons and the money and the lawyers and the bulldozers, the rabbit-- "prince with a thousand enemies"-- was given the means of escape.
This is a world of killer apes, unspeakably cruel to the small things of this world. The voice of a woman named Zawadi Mongane is on the BBC testifying about unspeakable atrocities. Her children were killed; she was forced to hang her own baby. She lives in absolute poverty now because of the stigma attached to rape victims in the Congo. She stays alive because one daughter had been overlooked and still needed her. This is a world that makes good people live like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.
I think of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms", a clear definition the difference between the Western democracies and fascism. "Freedom from Fear" was one of the planks. Norman Rockwell made a picture: two small children lie asleep while their parents hold a newspaper filled with war news. No one is going to be raped or murdered or left behind. It was our credo, once, for about five minutes back in the Forties. It was a Tuesday. It ought to be our credo now, recited like the Pledge of Allegiance, but now we are an empire, and we only "rescue" people and "give the gift of democracy" if they're sitting on an oil reserve. The worst thing about a world of monsters and lawyers is that they force the rest of humanity to become lawyers and monsters just like them. The Cherokee, as I recall, tried adopting suits and ties and farms and churches and newpapers, they even tried the Supreme Court, and it didn't do them a damn bit of good against a man like Andrew Jackson.
Never mind the Hollywood Indian talking about Brother Bear and Sister Mountain Lion and busy Brother Beaver. There's not much they can do against a court order or an AK-47. What should I learn from watching my little rabbit brothers and sisters? When Sophie our house rabbit went into the dark, she went kicking, angry and grunting at her illness when it wouldn't let her stand up straight, but still kissing and nuzzling my hands to the last. She never was sad a moment in her life. All the races in her cosseted life had been for fun, mock assaults on our startled cats, ear shaking laughter when she outwitted an imaginary foe. Now she was running from death, and she saw no reason to drop her insousciance because she was going to lose this one. Pluck.
The robot soldiers are coming, papered with writs drafted by lawyers like Douglas Feith, and no one you know is going to own one. If the storm clouds break over your house, God grant you strong legs and daring.
(Rabbit print by Zanfandel, available at DeviantArt, which if you've never been there before, is the widest ranging online gallery for amateurs and professionals alike.)
Happy Marmot Appreciation Day; I Mean Imbolc, I Mean Saint Brigid's Day
Ah, syncreticism, without which we might as well all be Protestants. Julius Caesar conflated the triple goddess of the Celts as related to Minerva, which was dandy for religious tolerance but a pain in the butt for for historians because, following the custom of interpretatio romana, he described the Celtic pantheon to the folks back home using their Roman names. The original names are lost to the vagaries of oral tradition. Roman Catholics followed his cue and turned the Irish goddess Bride into the "Mary of the Celts" Saint Bride or Brigit or Bridget, midwife to Mary the Mother of Jesus.
The ewes start lactating, almost ready for the lambs, not that I'm one to be so up close and personal with sheep. Bridget features a cow, "our second mother" in her iconography, and some traditions hold that Brigid herself was wet nurse to the infant god. There's a lot of milk and fecundity and swollen bellies running around this holiday-- the name Ibolc itself means "In the Belly". Psychologically I suppose this is the part of the winter when we're waiting for something to happen, pregnant with change maybe, and waiting for the weather to break.
This plump little figure is from one of Saint Bridget's wells in Ireland. And the plump little fellow peeking out of his burrow represents my favorite part of the holiday, because what other day do we honor my favorite Mammalian order, the Rodentia?
The Celts had a rhyme they recited about a serpent coming out of his hole this day as a predictor of the coming Spring. That custom must have been brought over to America on the same boat as the carved turnip Jack O'Lantern, and mixed in with the animal the Algonquins called weeauchok. There's a paradox involved in the Chuck's prediction that I've never understood-- if the sun shines, and he sees his shadow today, that means more winter, not less?-- but it is the nature of the mystic quest and the way of the groundhog shaman to learn to live with paradox.
The prize for guttsiest groundhogs I know goes to a band of chucks who moved into a Michigan peace officer's back yard. Being a bear of very little brain, he decided to get rid of the woodchucks by setting charges of dynamite in and around their holes, inserting blasting caps and standing back to blast the critters out like Yosemite Sam.
Sad to say, it was an amateur installation-- by the trooper's brother-in-law-- and the dynamite failed to go off when they turned the crank. Didn't go off when they shot at it with pistols, either. Now instead of one groundhog family, there's a colony of woodchucks living in an overgrown mound more than 10 feet across, lined with explosive. The cop is afraid to go anywhere near the dynamite, which only becomes more volatile as its components separate, and he carefully mows around it. The chucks now live in a bramble and grass covered fortress, protected by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Michael Vick's Dogs and Mass Murder in Baghdad
The New York Times has a story about the rehabilitation of Michael Vick's fighting dogs. Casual readers are strongly cautioned that the story includes explicit descriptions of Vick's cruelty to animals. Television coverage was uncharacteristically discreet about what, exactly, was done to these dogs. Let's just say that Vick and his accomplices deserve to be in prison, though whether prisons cure or incubate savagery is a topic for another day.
My tougher but tender-hearted friends will want to read he story for the patience and kindness shown by the people who are caring for the dogs and trying to rehabilitate them. The dogs, as always, inspire me because of their ability to learn tenderness once their torment is removed. As Whitman observed, "they do not sweat and whine about their condition"; a dog or a cat missing an eye or a leg can become as cheerful and un-self conscious as the most complacent show dog.
I have known a rescue animal who became, with care, as bold and cheerful as any fictional Tiny Tim or Smike, who did her best-- with crippled feet that must have hurt-- to leap with joy in her own modest way, to walk tall with giants as if nothing could ever hurt her again. I knew a cat who had been used as a football by cruel boys who was a trusting and affectionate pet, though never quite secure enough to be picked up without coaxing. These small souls teach me stoicism in a way that Marcus Aurelius never could.
Friday, two women wearing explosive vests were used to murder at least 100 people in two Baghdad pet markets, places dedicated to the gentler side of humanity. It is not enough, apparently, that the killer apes go off in the bushes and kill each other; they feel justified in forcing their sorrow on others. Places like the pet market are called "soft targets", because those are the places where you can inflict the most damage on undefended, happy people.
To the happy warrior, this seems counter-intuitive-- the cause would be better served by targeting the people directly responsible for our suffering, though they tend to be surrounded by bodyguards, barbed wire and presidential palaces. These are called "hard targets", and sadly, they tend to die in bed.
The terrorist's dream is that suffering and chaos in undefended places will result in more government control, which will inspire the people to rebel against their repressive governments. In this, al-Qaeda played Bush and the US Congress like a cheap ukelele. We have a panicked government that embraces torture, air strikes and the invasion of privacy and kisses the hand that takes its freedom.
For antidote, the same issue contains an article on Animal Planet's Super Bowl Puppy Bowl (with the traditional kitten half-time show).
The Rabbit of the Air
Sophie, not content with bossing the cats around and being queen of our hearts, has learned to climb up on the back of the couches to inspect the cat beds and do some triumphant chinning on piles of laundry.
It's charming to have her nuzzle my elbow as I'm working or play about my feet, but surreal to be sipping coffee and find yourself at eye level with a small determined rabbit looking over your shoulder at the snow.
The God of Small Things Broken on the Wheel
Titian's Madonna of the Rabbit might be sweet and simple and pastoral: the young woman holding the baby, the child reaching for one of two domestic white rabbits, the mother's hand caressing the back of the child's head. You can almost hear them murmuring, gentle, now. The mother's hand cupping the rabbit's haunches rather than holding the scruff of its neck, an indication of trust on the rabbit's part that must have been observed from life. A shepherd in the backgrond that might be a guardian of the gentle triangle, petting a black sheep, his gaze not anxious, but dreamy and thoughtful in a place where "sheep may safely graze". Is the baby reaching, or blessing? Is the mother's hand intentionally making the Buddha's "earth touching" gesture?
That's a big part of Christmas for me, a midnight when animals can talk, a truce when soldiers from the tranches exchange cigarettes and play soccer, when the world is supposed to stop savaging children and animals. On any other day of the year, the Baby Jesus, the ox and the donkey would be "collateral damage", swollen at the side of the road somewhere-- just look at the statistics on civilians from Our Monkey Emperor's invasion of Iraq, or if, as Stalin believed, "statistics" don't count, Brian K. Vaughan's Pride of Baghdad. For one night, the Roman Saturnalia is turned into a celebration of the most vulnerable fragments of suffering humanity.
Titian's meditation goes deeper; the young girl attending the baby is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who lived almost 300 years later. Artists called these kinds of paintings "sacred conversations", sacra conversazione, figures from different periods brought together to carry some symbolic message.
A ghost of horror stalks the loving scene, because Catherine symbolized the torture and cruelty imposed on the small things of the world. When she was eighteen, she was condemned to be broken on the wheel: on the "Catherine wheel", the victim is bound to the spokes and the wheel is turned with a rod shoved in between the spoke and the all too human limb. Arms and legs can be broken many times this way, with the victim still conscious; sometimes broken so many times that the torturers could wrap your arms and legs around the spokes like a piece of string. According to the saint's legend, Catherine touched the wheel, and the wheel itself broke into pieces. Robbed of their fun, they beheaded her instead. Of the rabbits, and the flowers (artists were very specific about the symbolism of plants in Titian's day), the shepherd and the black sheep, I'm fairly ignorant, except as indications of gentleness and trust. That the world contains such cruelty in juxtaposition with beauty and tenderness is one of those mysteries of the "philosophia perennis" that I keep trying to understand with Christian and ecumenical metaphors, but there's real blood mixed in with the wine.
So Merry Christmas. Sorry, cosmos, that we've been such vicious, murderous primates all year, but we promise to do better next year. That was Christmas Eve, of course, and we made those promises and toast while we were drunk on sentiment, sentiment being defined here as emotions that you don't really mean, as sincere as Jove's perjuries. Christmas Day, people were back to taunting a captive Siberian tiger, dangling a leg over its prison and then affecting surprise when the tiger climbed up that leg, killed one of them and mauled two more, doing what tigers do. What would William Blake make of this?
Word comes as I finish this post of the death of Benazir Bhutto. Let us continue this talent for killing our best and brightest on the altar of a murderous God, and then see what we've accomplished. Our friend Michael in Colorado sends his usual cynical Christmas card: Merry Fucking Christmas. Not nearly cynical enough.
That's a big part of Christmas for me, a midnight when animals can talk, a truce when soldiers from the tranches exchange cigarettes and play soccer, when the world is supposed to stop savaging children and animals. On any other day of the year, the Baby Jesus, the ox and the donkey would be "collateral damage", swollen at the side of the road somewhere-- just look at the statistics on civilians from Our Monkey Emperor's invasion of Iraq, or if, as Stalin believed, "statistics" don't count, Brian K. Vaughan's Pride of Baghdad. For one night, the Roman Saturnalia is turned into a celebration of the most vulnerable fragments of suffering humanity.
Titian's meditation goes deeper; the young girl attending the baby is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who lived almost 300 years later. Artists called these kinds of paintings "sacred conversations", sacra conversazione, figures from different periods brought together to carry some symbolic message.
A ghost of horror stalks the loving scene, because Catherine symbolized the torture and cruelty imposed on the small things of the world. When she was eighteen, she was condemned to be broken on the wheel: on the "Catherine wheel", the victim is bound to the spokes and the wheel is turned with a rod shoved in between the spoke and the all too human limb. Arms and legs can be broken many times this way, with the victim still conscious; sometimes broken so many times that the torturers could wrap your arms and legs around the spokes like a piece of string. According to the saint's legend, Catherine touched the wheel, and the wheel itself broke into pieces. Robbed of their fun, they beheaded her instead. Of the rabbits, and the flowers (artists were very specific about the symbolism of plants in Titian's day), the shepherd and the black sheep, I'm fairly ignorant, except as indications of gentleness and trust. That the world contains such cruelty in juxtaposition with beauty and tenderness is one of those mysteries of the "philosophia perennis" that I keep trying to understand with Christian and ecumenical metaphors, but there's real blood mixed in with the wine.
So Merry Christmas. Sorry, cosmos, that we've been such vicious, murderous primates all year, but we promise to do better next year. That was Christmas Eve, of course, and we made those promises and toast while we were drunk on sentiment, sentiment being defined here as emotions that you don't really mean, as sincere as Jove's perjuries. Christmas Day, people were back to taunting a captive Siberian tiger, dangling a leg over its prison and then affecting surprise when the tiger climbed up that leg, killed one of them and mauled two more, doing what tigers do. What would William Blake make of this?
Word comes as I finish this post of the death of Benazir Bhutto. Let us continue this talent for killing our best and brightest on the altar of a murderous God, and then see what we've accomplished. Our friend Michael in Colorado sends his usual cynical Christmas card: Merry Fucking Christmas. Not nearly cynical enough.
How the Boss Made a Monkey Out of Me
The recent headlines about chimps who outperform college students at mental math are somewhat misleading. It's not that these were super chimps, or moronic freshmen. Boxer and Feinstein, two female chimps named for California's senators, played a memory game that asked them to compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. Their human opponents-- here's what made the difference-- "were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both chimps and humans typically answered within 1 second. And both groups fared about the same."
Comparing sets of numbers resembles a task primates might have to perform in nature: grabbing as much as you can before the hyenas chase you away, or the po-pos arrive, whichever comes first. Taking language away from the humans put us on a level playing field with the other primates. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," explains Jessica Cantlon of Duke. "I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.
The snatch-and-grab-it instinct tells us a lot about why so many right wing cranks reject taxation, and vote against their own self interest to support the Republican party while the infrastructure turns to shit around them. Kim Stanley Robinson does the math in his novel Forty Signs of Rain:
“The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.... Sixty four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value.”
".... What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand?.... Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?.... Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party."
“.... It's a matter of what you can see," [Frank] suggested. "You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it's given to you. You have it. Then you're forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you've created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.... The only things people understand are sensory. We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts or statistics just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”
Comparing sets of numbers resembles a task primates might have to perform in nature: grabbing as much as you can before the hyenas chase you away, or the po-pos arrive, whichever comes first. Taking language away from the humans put us on a level playing field with the other primates. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," explains Jessica Cantlon of Duke. "I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.
The snatch-and-grab-it instinct tells us a lot about why so many right wing cranks reject taxation, and vote against their own self interest to support the Republican party while the infrastructure turns to shit around them. Kim Stanley Robinson does the math in his novel Forty Signs of Rain:
“The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.... Sixty four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value.”
".... What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand?.... Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?.... Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party."
“.... It's a matter of what you can see," [Frank] suggested. "You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it's given to you. You have it. Then you're forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you've created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.... The only things people understand are sensory. We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts or statistics just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”
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