Vehicular Manslaughter

Last night I almost murdered somebody. A young woman. It was dark, and I was not in full control of my actions.

I'd pulled up to the T intersection that feeds out from the parking structure back onto the street. I looked both ways--I swore I did--and saw nothing coming from the street and no pedestrians. I took my foot off the brake and let my car start to roll forward in anticipation of turning right on the red light. I looked ahead, and there was a young woman smack in front of my Explorer. I'd not seen her before, even though I'm sure I'd looked to my right (hadn't I?), but perhaps I'd not seen her because she'd been concealed by the pole supporting the traffic light or because she was wearing dark clothing and it was late at night and the lighting was poor at that intersection. I saw her turn to me, though, cuing in on the motion, and immediately tried to step on the brake. In my rush, the tip of my foot somehow got wedged underneath the brake pedal. I tried to pull my foot out, but it only shoved up against the underside of the brake. The car continued to roll forward. The woman was looking at me with an expression of horror and anger. The front of the car was only a few feet away from her and closing. I managed to extricate my foot and pushed down on the top of the brake pedal, stopping the car. She walked on, looking at me with complete contempt. I threw up my hands in a gesture of helpless apology. The whole incident had transpired in the course of maybe one or two seconds. I'd been possibly half a second away from mowing her down.

Now, the look she gave me was one of disgust and contempt. I know the look well; I've given it to any number of drivers in my time who didn't respect my right of way and didn't allow for the scant few seconds required for me to pass unhit in front of their anxious grilles. She saw a driver being careless and threatening her life, and she hated that driver. Does it matter that, during the whole exchange, I was desperately trying to stop my car and so not injure her? Not to her mind; she can't know that I was aware of her and doing my best to not hurt her, all she can know is that I very nearly struck her down. When she relates the experience to her friends, it will be of her walking innocent across the street with the right of way and some evil asshole of a driver almost killing her. If I'd been about half a second slower and had struck her, would it have mattered, in a legal context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; there would be the fact of one person getting hurt or killed, and the criminal repercussions to follow. I was half a second away from being a murderer. Would it have mattered, in a personal identity context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; I would have struck her down, and this act would have become the defining action of my life, and I would have spent a significant portion of the rest of my life paying for it either with jail time or trying to make remunerations that I know I never could make, and my consciousness of inflicting a horrible injury or death on another person would come to dominate my consciousness, and I'd feel that no helpful or kind action I could ever take would overrule or override that one heinous one, and if I didn't destroy myself out of guilt I'd spend the rest of my life trying to make reparations that I could never make, because I'd never be able to undo the death or injury.

Half a second away. Half a second away from all of this. Even though I was trying to stop it. Even though I would never deliberately hurt another person like that. I was half a second away from ruining somebody's life or killing somebody and most likely ruining my own. Any other aspects of character or mind I might have possessed--my writing, my desire to be ethical, my sense of humor, even, if not my life itself--would have been sacrificed on a fire of guilt.

But the fact of the matter is that we are only ever a second or three away from killing somebody when operating a car. Close your eyes for one second while driving at freeway speeds with vehicles drifting on either side of you, let the car drift in accordance with its poor alignment for one second, hesitate for one second in the decision as to whether or not it is necessary to brake, look to the left and not see the pedestrian who materializes out of the darkness to your right, and bam, you are a murderer. You've allowed a ton of metal and plastic operating at high speed to crush the life out of yourself or another human being. The opportunities to make such a mistake are manifold, even if you are careful. Even if you are careful, you are liable to make such a mistake over the course of your career as a driver of a motor vehicle, just because there are so many little things that can go wrong and eventually one of them will.

In any other context, this capacity for casual murder would be entirely untenable. Imagine a society where everybody is walking around all the time with a loaded shotgun. And we'll assume that most of these people have some baseline competency in operating a shotgun, at least enough to receive an operating permit (read "driver's license"), though many of these people nevertheless will not. And just having this permit or having a constant familiarity with this shotgun will nevertheless result in a wide array of behaviors with respect to this shotgun, some more responsible and some more risky. And even then, due to inexperience or carelessness brought on by years of repetitive habit, it is entirely possible that a person will forget to put the safety on his shotgun, and a slight toggle of the trigger could set it off, and maybe that just results in a bunch of buckshot lodged in the wall or maybe it vaporizes somebody's head. Alternately, imagine a society in which pedestrians walk down the street clad in clothing that is covered in an array of blades, spear points and sword points, and the slightest stumble could set two of these pedestrians impaled upon each other.

(I guess such the gun scenario would actually be relatively true if you lived in Texas. Why anybody would want to live like that I don't really know. The spikes would be true in Sigil and that, gentle reader, is why Sigil is better off as a fantastic place than a real one. Like Texas.).

Driving is a fucking death game. Even if you're sober, which many people are not. Even if you try to be cautious and aware, which many people do not, and which behavior the repetitiveness and mechanical monotony of driving inhibits.

Is this right? I don't know that this is such a good setup, imbuing so many people with the power and responsibility over death, tested daily, where the failure of a moment can result in severe property damage, injury, or death for oneself and others. I am aware of this terrible power, and most of the time I say I do not want it. But I've come to a point in my life where I cannot now live without it.

I lived without it for a very long time. Twenty-six years, in fact; I didn't start driving a car until I was about twenty-six years old, although I got my license at eighteen and only put it into effect for its primary purpose one time in those intervening eight years. Part of this was due to the fact with the piddly-shit income I made up unto that point in my life that I'd never be able to afford to purchase a car, much less pay to fuel and maintain and insure one, unless I wanted to give over about half of my net income as a minimum wage slave to do so. And I resented the notion of having to pay about half of my income just for the sake of being able to get to and from my place of work, which is primarily what I would have done with a car. But at least as much of my lack of motorized mobility was due to the fact that this responsibility over death scared the god-damned fucking shit out of me.

I lived without a car in spite of the fact that the city where I lived, Irvine, presumes a car. The housing tracts are large and unbroken. When the city was conceived, walking must have been thought of as a source of recreation rather than a serious way of getting from point A to point B. To move out from my house at the center of the housing tract to the goods and services beyond was a trip of thirty minutes each way, at the very least; and that presumes that I was walking to the very nearest shopping center. If I wanted to so much as go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of diet coke it was a trip that I'd have to plan my entire afternoon around. And then there was going beyond that point. Getting to work on the Irvine-Tustin border meant a walk of two and a half solid hours, or else a one and one half hour walk up to Jamboree and a fifteen minute wait for the bus and the payment of a dollar fifty for the privilege of taking a bus for another fifteen minutes over a stretch of road with no sidewalk where I could not walk (though I tried once, on my first day before I realized this, with the cars rushing by half a foot away from me) only to arrive at my crappy job; it meant that if it meant that I didn't bum a ride from a co-worker or a parent, which I most often did. Going to school at IVC was a commute of several miles and an hour and a half either way, and it was a long several miles in the hundred-degree heat of summer that wrung sweat out of my body until my clothes, when they dried, were caked with dried salt or else in rains so thick that my pants would get soaked and the detergent would come up of my jeans and get worked into a froth by the action of my one leg rubbing against the other. There was another bus that ran to IVC, but walking to the bus stop would've taken forty-five minutes and then there would have been more waiting and the payment and so it wouldn't hardly have been worth it.

I realize that when I did get a ride with somebody else, I was just outsourcing my own dread of the responsibility of driving to another person, although others never seemed to experience it as acutely as I did. And do.

But the greatest moral quandaries I ever got into as a pedestrian were when I heard the crush of a snail's shell beneath my foot--I always tried to step around them, I felt no need to end a life, even a snail's life, if I didn't have to--or when I would say hello to another pedestrian and he would only stare back at me as if I had said something offensive or when somebody would cross to the other side of the street so that she wouldn't have to walk near me in all of my hulking long-haired freakishness. Never was anybody's life on the line. I know I am a massive beast, but my ability to accelerate that mass into motion was limited without mechanical aid and so the overall force attendant on my person was always pretty low (scaled to human, rather than arthropod or annelid or gastropod, size), and I trusted my reaction time and my muscular responsiveness, unfiltered and uninterfaced through any mechanical impedimenta, to stop me in my walking before I crashed into somebody. I was a risk to snails and ants and lost earthworms, and believe me after killing dozens of such beings entirely incidentally it did play on my conscience, but I was no real risk to any other human, in spite of what the women who were terrified of my appearance might have thought.

(I suppose everybody who has ever walked anywhere has engaged in such small acts or murder incidental to his purpose. Walking in grass, it would be easy not to notice. Paved sidewalk, though, is like a canvas for the spatter of small-scale murder. Your crush a snail under your heel and you see the green of its gore sprayed out over the sidewalk, and you come back the same day the same way or even the next day and the selfsame corpse is still there, perhaps now with ants scavenging its guts and perhaps you end up stepping on those, too, although you think that most of them will fall between the ridges on the bottom of your shoe but you know that some of them will not.).

And my God, was it a chore sometimes, in the heat or the rain or when running a fever. It was a chore, too, to buy food for myself and then have to haul it back over two or three miles. Buy something so simple as a six pack of beer and it gets pretty damn heavy after the first five minutes or so. Your arm carrying the bag gets to aching, and you switch your package off from arm to arm but it's still painful and burdensome. Walking out to eat and coming back I would almost invariably get heat sick and diarrhetic by the time I got back. There were a lot of frantic clenched-cheek fast walks across the last few blocks back to home, and I hope you won't think less of me, gentle reader, if I were to tell you that your humble narrator didn't always make it in time, in spite of his best efforts.

(There were, of course, no public restroom facilities in that sprawl of private housing. Even if I could find a restroom in a public park, it was almost invariably locked. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that there are few things more distressing than knowing that you are half an hour out from a bathroom with absolutely no way to get closer other than to walk, which churns your bowels or your bladder up all the more. I was often tempted to knock on a nearby house's door and ask, as politely as I could, if I might use the bathroom and state that I would not impose if there were not a dire need, but in my mental extrapolations of this scenario there was no request, however kindly delivered, that produced the desired result. Many's the time when I was nearly seduced into the evil of going behind a bush in the landscaping, but I never did, gentle reader, I never did. I walked that line, and I walked it hard.).

But now I drive a car, and so that life of being at the mercy of distance is behind me. A trip that used to be an insurmountable obstacle, or else was a two-hour haul that was sufficient for me to make the comparison within my own mind of my own journey walking along a paved sidewalk in a suburb to the treks of epic heroes--Hey, take two hours in which you have no technology and no incessant demands of new stimuli to keep you from thinking and see how much of an inflated opinion *you* get of your own efforts--is now an eight minute drive. A chore, to be sure, especially when one has to get dressed and put one's shoes on for the occasion, but a chore, and not a true happening. Two hours of walking used to take me to the store and back, a journey of about six miles. Two hours of driving takes me now from central Orange County to eastern San Diego, a journey of about ninety miles.

And in driving a car, I see how perverse it is, how truly perverse and subversive, to walk. Everything in my home town, from the circuitous streets to the great tracts of houses, was designed around the presumption of people having cars, and wanting to walk only for recreation rather than having to walk out of necessity. Nobody intended for me to use the sidewalks in the way that I did. If everybody in Irvine had to walk for an hour to buy groceries and then bought only what he or she could comfortably carry, the city would shut down. If everybody in the city had to take the bus, walking to the infrequently-spaced bus stops that stay superficial, street-wise, and don't even penetrate into the core of most of the residential developments (because what good suburbanite wants to see poor people taking the bus and have to deal with that noise and diesel smell?), and then waiting fifteen minutes or half an hour or forty-five minutes for the infrequently-spaced buses to arrive but God knows you need to get there early because you sure as Hell don't want to be late, the city would shut down. On the street level, on the literal level of its streets, Irvine resents pedestrians. It resents poor people who have no engines but their own bodies to propel them across distances. And as much as I resent that resentment, there's no way, now that I have a car, that I would want to go back to being one of the resented, before whom all the city is arrayed as a punishment of distance and time and physical wear.

Yes, I do appreciate the lack of density and congestion that are attendant upon suburban sprawl, which I recognize as being the point of it all. I appreciate the increased amount of green space and landscaping. I'm not numb to these things. I couldn't be, having had such values inculcated in me by the buildings and by the streets themselves for so many years of my life, and also by the persons who would choose to live in such a community.

From aesthetics to perceptions of necessity, though. Given the way cities are constructed now, it seems to be necessary for a person who doesn't want to give over hours of his ever day to transportation (and the hectic demands of contemporary living make it necessary that we do no such thing) to drive. And on the one hand, this is fucked up. Because nothing that is technologically intensive and resource intensive and prohibitively expensive and carries such serious risks and responsibilities as driving *ought* to be necessary. On the other hand, how could we do without it? Operating without a car within cities that are designed to accommodate the needs of cars rather than people is brutal. As technology increases, so too does the expectation of intensity, of being able to get what one wants even if what one wants is fifty miles distant, or being able to maintain relationships or careers even if the persons and places involved are separated by distances that would be impossible without technological assistance. I don't know too many people who would be content only with experiencing what- and whomsoever is within walking distance; I know I wouldn't. Footbound as I was for so freakishly long, I wouldn't want to go back to it. On a social level, we cannot go back to that. The small community model is alright for some things, but it could not sustain the informationally-dense, highly complex and technical and global culture that we have come to expect (and that people partake of even in small communities, such as small mountain towns, in spite of their complaints about urbanization or corporatization or globalization). And that kind of culture is only possible with cars. Or it could be possible without cars, if we were to re-conceptualize our lives and our expectations of intensity such that a two-hour commute would be acceptable, or if we were to tear up our Southern California cities and re-construct them with the aim of having reasonable facilities within walking distance of residences at the probable costs of congestion and density. And everybody would have to live very proximal to his place of work, so given the frequent job changes that people undergo these days people would have to move every year or three to a neighborhood where housing values or crime rates might be entirely different from his previous expectations. And I would have to live next to SDSU, where every night there would be sorority girls attired only in lingere parading down the street near my window and the attendant shouts of drunken frat boys, all through the night. Yeah. Fuck that. Or I guess we could effect a mass exodus of car-centric Southern California and all go live in San Francisco or Portland or New York, where neighborhoods are designed without the expectation of driving and there are corner stores and public transportation or even walking from place to place aren't only for the utterly disenfranchised or the insane.

(Or we could develop teleportation technology. Gentle reader, there are few things I would like more in this world than for human beings to develop teleportation technology. I'd even settle for a magical flue teleportation network or the ability to apparate. I fantasize about it frequently, this magical technology that would enable us to move freely from place to place, but remove the terrible burden of potentially lethal operator error from everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car. Mr. Scott can take on that responsibility all for himself; I don't want it, and he usually does a good job with it, except in the first *original* _Star Trek_ movie that everybody seems to have forgotten now and I understand that because the script and direction are pretty abstruse and consequently kind of do suck and are unfun but the visuals are nevertheless pretty cool and worth watching. But I guess teleportation could go the other way and we'd all get our DNA fused with flies, which would be kind of shitty, except we could vomit all over each other and dissolve each other and slurp up the soupy mess of vomitus and enzymed flesh, and that would suck but also be pretty awesome).

But cars, man. Cars. We have become dependent upon what began as a luxury such that it is now a necessity. It's another one of those things, like eating large quantities of meat or having a household filled with cheap consumer goods manufactured in China, that is a relatively recent habit that would be alien even to our own ancestors four generations back in this country to say nothing of the many billions of people in this world even now who manage to get by from day to day without such things.

Do I want to hang up my keys such that I will never accidentally imperil another person's life ever again? Yes. I do. Absolutely. Do I want to go back to devoting an hour and a half to a five mile commute? Do I want to not be able to see my girlfriend on the weekends because she live in Orange County and I live in San Diego? No. Not at all. And when I think about the consequences of failure when driving, which are severe, my attachment to driving for the facilitating of my own schedule seems all the more self-indulgent. But unlike smoking, which is an addiction that only ever did harm to my own self, this is an addiction to a luxury drug that I don't know how to break. And unlike smoking, which is an ever more difficult habit to indulge, this is an addiction in which the entire world around you is literally engineered against the possibility of you breaking this habit.

So I'll get back in my car and drive to work again today, knowing full well that murder is a moment away. The Rolling Stones say it's just a shot away; it's far less than that. It's one foot stuck underneath the brake pedal away, a mechanical failure away, as little as a blink away. Pulling a trigger is a pretty intentional and deliberate act. If only all murder required such intention. Vehicular murder is a mere unintention away.

Hey hey.

In Which I Tackle The Subject of Activism

Nation, you know I don't like social activism, and you know I do a crappy Stephen Colbert, especially in text where you can't even hear my lame attempt at a vocal impersonation. It's not that I'm necessarily opposed to the ideas forwarded by activists, it's more that I find most activism to be short-sighted and reactionary rather than constructive.

I'm not swayed by large groups of people making a public display of anger; I am frightened and disgusted. This applies as much to armed-to-the-teeth Tea Partiers as it does to people marching for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Well, maybe that's not true. The Tea Partiers who carry guns around in public *really* frighten me. At any rate, large groups of people minimizing a complex issue down to a single shouted, repeated slogan fucking scare me, so much so that I honestly can't even register their message most of the time. The diffusion of individual consciousness and responsibility and even identity into a mob scares me more than anything else. ANYTHING ELSE. Which is not to say that, given our heads, I think we tend to use them very wisely all that often. But an emotionally-charged humanity given license by what sociologists call "diffusion of responsibility" to act in ways that, individually, they never could? No thank you. No thank you at all. All ad Hitlerium fallacies aside, this is the primary component of Nazism, people, and of all other large-scale evils ever perpetrated in the course of human events. And of sports spectatorship, which also causes me to cringe and recoil in horror.

(I am so frightened by this tendency to de-individualization, which also causes those within the mob to de-individualize those *outside* of their group into conveniently targeted groups, that a major component of my life's work is striking back against it, and individualizing those persons who are all too often seen only as members of antagonistic "other" groups or urging conscience to those within a de-individualized group. This drive towards individualization is at the core of a good deal of my writing. I believe, rightly or wrongly but of course I think it's rightly otherwise I wouldn't think this, that the acceptance of individual responsibility and the refusal to generalize outgroups into one-note "others" are the solutions to a great many of the problems that we have created for ourselves.).

So, in order for me to be swayed, I need to be presented with a careful, rational argument replete with evidence and largely free of ad hominem demonizations or blatant emotional appeals. I'm still waiting for such an argument that will win me over to a free market approach to economics--I believe such an argument is possible in theory, although I definitely have yet to see it in practice. The day a campus evangelist can provide me with such an argument is the day I commit to Christianity (or Hare Krishnism, as the case may be). But I'm not holding my breath.

Let's be honest, these kinds of arguments are pretty hard to come by most of the time, especially in the public arena, especially in an age where media attention is all and stunts and stagecraft trump careful and considerate every time.

Which is why I was so incredibly charmed by this bridge:
http://www.bladediary.com/astoria-scum-river-bridge/
Make sure you click through to get the other photo blogs to be able to read the full inscription on the plaque and the local government's response.

Now this bridge, to me, is an activist gesture I can get behind one-hundred percent. I might even hyperbolically inflate that number over one-hundred, even though I know that such makes no mathematical sense, for the purposes of dramatic emphasis. For shits and giggles, let's say I can get behind this gesture one-hundred and *seventeen* percent, with the implication that this bridge mobilizes seventeen percent of me that I didn't even know I had or that is otherwise normally unavailable to me and puts that seventeen percent into effect.

Permit me to break down for you why it is that I think this bridge is awesome.

1. It is Useful: The bridge addresses a manifest public need, albeit a relatively small one, and offers a resolution for that need. Stepping in the Scum River was probably an inconvenience at best, slightly hazardous at worst when there were icy conditions. The consequences of not addressing this need were probably negligible in absolute terms--which is most likely why the local government never felt compelled to do anything about it, assuming it was even aware of the problem. Nathless, the presence of the bridge is of benefit to all who might walk that way, making the route safer and more pleasant. If the bridge is a gesture of protest designed to catalyze action more than be a solution in itself, it is still, at present, an improvement over what had existed previously.

2. It is Positive: The bridge does not fling blame. The bridge does not go on the attack. The bridge does not heap odium upon those whose oversights and failures have generated the Scum River problem in the first place. Instead, the bridge just works to resolve the issue. Of course, there is the implied critique of the city government and the corporation (Amtrak) for not being responsive to the needs of the public, but the critique is left at its implication. By taking this approach, the bridge has actually manged to engage with an individual in power, earning "a commendation...[and] a pledge to work with Amtrak to re-route Astoria Scum River off the sidewalk" from a city council member. Instead of causing those at fault to become defensive, the bridge inspires those persons to positive action.

3. It is Free: The bridge is made out of refuse, constructed at no cost to taxpayers or to anybody else, even its creators. One of the awfulest things about living in a capitalist society that inculcates one with the belief that everything has its price is the corresponding tendency to believe that that which has no monetary value is that which has no worth. We feel disempowered to deal with problems on account of the solutions being cost-prohibitive. Or, Hell, I don't know if I'm speaking for anybody else here, but I know I sure as Hell feel that way about a lot of things. This bridge, though, shows that positive outcomes are possible with the use of found materials and individual effort. It is a triumph of personal creativity over a depersonalized and exclusivistic economy. This is, again, a potent critique of those powers with the resources to do something in the traditional, cost-intensive capitalistic mode about the problem but that opted to do nothing.

And, clearly, like any good protest these days, it is media savvy. I think Boing-Boing has picked up on it now. But whatever. I couldn't care less about that crap. Even if the city councilman hadn't been guilted (maybe inspired?) into responding to it, it would still be sufficient in itself, exclusive of any external attention.

Now, just about the only *possible* criticism I can conceive of against this bridge is that, being constructed by two individuals who assumingly are not licensed contractors, the bridge is not built in accordance with state and local safety codes. The _O.C. Register_ loves to cite such codes as a corrupt Statist conspiracy to keep the working man down and to keep slick cronyism in place, but I think they're a good portion of the reason why the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake killed about 2,500 people and the 1989 Bay Area Earthquake killed only 57. Oh, I know there was a difference in magnitude and in distance from the epicenters for the two quakes. But the quake that struck Haiti a couple of weeks ago was about the same size as the Bay Area Quake, and that one caused 200,000 fatalities...I think that this ends up being a pretty convincing argument in favor of rigorously engineered construction. If the artists had waited for a bridge to be constructed in accordance with code, though, they and everybody else who walked that way would still be waiting for any kind of solution to the problem. For the end user, the fact that this bridge wasn't pumped out be a large, faceless organization and was instead built by individuals would be enough for my own mother, who literally lives in a constant fantasy of nearly everything that is not compulsory being prohibited by law, to avoid the bridge. I don't know how many people would share her thoroughly oppressed opinion. Too, there is the fact that the bridge has steps rather than ramps, which makes it wheelchair inaccessible. I expect that wouldn't have happened if the bridge had been built according to code.

But all of this is circumvented if one simply walks (or wheels) around the bridge. And then one is in exactly the same situation one was in before the installation of the bridge--i.e., walking through iced-over scum. Participation in the bridge is non-compulsory. One loses nothing by the bridge being there except for perhaps half a second of effort required to step slightly to the side, or some amount of resentment if one is in a wheelchair and cannot enjoy this amenity. But I'd hope that people in wheelchairs wouldn't be too bitter against the bridge for all that, and would look forward to the now-hopefully-imminent day when Amtrak and the city of New York effect a permanent solution to Scum River.

To sum up, if more gestures of protest were like this bridge, I would be a fan of more gestures of protest. I wouldn't expect everybody who has to confront some kind of public problem to deal with that problem with this same level of creativity, unambiguous and (relatively) non-exclusive utility, and freedom from resentment and malice. I think it's hard to channel these qualities, especially when the public problems start to pile up or are more life-threatening in nature, and especially when we get into groups, which necessarily dampen these qualities. Just the same, I think this bridge provides a model for positive and meaningful activism that could serve as a good example for us all when we think about how we are going to interact with the world beyond our doorsteps.

Erotic Fail

I was walking away from a party with this woman I've known for some time now and whom I consider to be reasonably attractive, physically and mentally (and if you think I'm going to tell you her name, gentle reader, I am afraid you are gravely mistaken). We walked into this large sitting room, with a leather couch on side of the room and picture windows that admitted a view of the sun setting over the harbor on the other. The dissipating sun infused the water with orange light and silhouetted the masts of the yachts.

We sat on the couch, I in the middle and she at my left side. We smiled at each other. Both of us were feeling good. The small contacts between our bodies were electric hot. I felt a flutter of emotions in my chest. One these emotions was guilt at cheating on my girlfriend, but that got drowned out by a rush of other feelings.

Grinning, she knelt on the couch and turned her backside towards me. She hiked up her pleated black skirt, exposing her well-shaped ass and a blue thong. She told me to kiss her butt, which I did, happily and repeatedly. Things progressed from there, with us shedding our clothing and playing with each other and feeling very good.

(For the record, gentle reader, I will tell you that this is quite honestly how I prefer my sex: friendly and happy and good-natured. Lame, I know. I should probably, for dramatic effect, favor some sort of violent fetish or sleazy kink, but that's just not how I roll. With all the other things I could choose to focus on, I find nothing so erotic as a woman's broad and genuine smile, though a playful sly smirk is quite good, too.).

After an extended period of mutually enjoyable foreplay, she was lying nude under me as I knelt over her with only my underwear remaining on. I could feel the warmth emanating from her sex. Our bodies were moving towards each other, independent of any thought. She told me to take off my underwear, which I did. Quickly. I turned back to her, eager and ready. God, was I ready.

And then my mom walked into the room. Adam and Eve ashamed all over again, we quickly fell back on the couch and pulled a comforter up over our nakedness (Where did this comforter come from?). My mother seemed oblivious to our in flagrante delicto condition. She chattered on at me, as she is wont to do. I think I managed to mumble out some curt responses intended to make her go away, which she did not.

The woman giggled next to me. I gave her a smile that was the barest cover for one of the most colossal disappointments in living memory.

And then, in that most awful and inexcusably cliche of endings, I woke up.

Now, gentle reader, you must understand that my usual excursions into dreamland involve people hacking off my toes with axes, or my father crouching over me and eating the heart out of my body with my blood running down his jaws. A disproportionate number of these dreams leave me mutilated or violently murdered, which leaves me bolting up at night, heart hammering and out of breath and covered in sweat. The last erotic dream I can remember having had me watching as grotesquely rotted corpse-women proceeded to have lesbian sex with each other. So to have an honest-to-goodness wish fulfillment dream is damn rare for me. And I finally get one, and what happens? My mom bursts into the room. I think I would've preferred another screaming nightmare.

My unconscious hates me. Or maybe my unconscious is very committed to fidelity and honesty in relationships, in which case I think there are far superior ways in which it might make its argument that don't involve offering me the perfect temptation and then thwarting my desires by means of the most embarrassing of all possible extrinsic intrusions. Which is all dumb anyway, because I'm quite certain that my conscious mind would never allow me to be in such a situation in the first place, circumstances permitting, which I don't think they would ever be. Or maybe my id is the bitch of my superego, even in dreams.

I guess I should just be happy that this woman didn't turn into a feculent living corpse or a twisted sadistic demoness while I was inside of her, as dream women have done to me in the past.

I'm going to go with the conclusion that my unconscious hates me. Really, really hates me.

In Which I Get Het Up

My roommate is moving to North Carolina. He says there's not much to do in his new town. I suggested he learn to fish, which of course he refused: he's extremely averse to animal cruelty, and has told me on multiple occasions that he would defend his pets with physical violence against anybody who would maltreat them. He also, with much attendant stink and greasy mess, cooks fish every week in the skillet.

I have a lot of contempt for this particular kind of hypocritical cowardice, which I find to be so very common. Few things bother me so much as that person who says "I don't want to hear about it--I'd prefer to stay ignorant [as to the actual ramifications of my actions]." If people make the decision to eat flesh, they shouldn't live in denial as to the costs and consequences of that decision. The fantasy that the processed product wrapped in hygienic plastic and placed on a Styrofoam tray--all of which is calculated to encourage this distance from the actual acts of killing and butchering--can somehow be divorced from the suffering of a living creature is self-serving and delusional.

My roommate takes a womanish approach to violence towards animals, in that he's the only man I've known to employ this particular disassociation. I've observed it in many women, though, who express great fondness for animals--even and sometimes especially chickens, cows, and pigs--and who are repulsed by the concept of killing animals but who nevertheless eat meat. The more common masculine approach that I've observed is to revel in the irony of eating flesh--to acknowledge that there is pain involved, but to laugh it off. This defense comes closer to admitting to the reality that eating meat engenders pain, but then retreats all the farther from that reality for it.

I believe I have heard Ted Nugent posit that all people should be compelled to kill and butcher an animal, so as to be aware of the process. God help me, but I think I agree with him. Not in any other regard, mind you, but I do think it is perverse and quite possibly psychotic for people to claim to love and empathize with animals one minute and sink their teeth into a steak the next.

For, in the end, I have a lot of contempt for a civilization that esteems it progress that the average individual be removed from violence, but that perpetrates violence on a scale that beggars the efforts of all previous civilizations, and is able to effect this violence largely by keeping it out of sight and out of mind.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." It's so damn true.

And I wonder if we had to kill and skin and gut and butcher our own meat if we would opt to eat so very much as we do. (Personally, I'd have zero problems killing and gutting an animal--I'm a vegetarian for other reasons, in that I could not accept the environmental costs of the production of meat). I'm reminded of 9/11, in which so many people were shocked that that kind of violence could be visited upon American soil, as if Americans hadn't been going into other countries and taking their resources without effecting an equitable distribution of compensation and flooding them with an American material culture to supplant their own and as if these actions would not make those people really mad at us. But if we looked really long and hard at where and how we got our oil and how we dealt with the Arab world, I don't think it would've come as much of a surprise, and I wonder if we'd allowed ourselves to contemplate the real costs of our energy in a serious way if we might not have altered our course prior to 9/11. Just as if I wonder if we were to throw out the laptops that allow us to push a button that launches a cruise missile or an unmanned drone to blow up a target fifty miles away if we'd have as much war as we do now.

We look at immediate, intimate, interpersonal violence and say it is diseased and dangerous. I look at dispassionate, depersonalized, formatted violence and say it is far more so. We outsource and abstract the actual costs of things, but how long can such a system persist that is so ignorant of the sources of its own success? And even if it could persist into perpetuity, what would be the real cost, the real ethical and human cost, of this denial of cost? And if we were to examine the consequences of our actions and choose to go on in the same old way, would we not then be callous? Yes--but give me an honest, callous cruelty over a cruelty that affects the image of innocence any day.

Thoughs on the Holiday Special

“But Grandpa Itchy, you're a Wookie! Why, when given the option to visualize any fantasy you want, are you dreaming about a human female?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, what's up with your ridiculous underbite?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why do we have to dress up in red robes and walk into the sun? And why is our most sacred Wookie Life Day ceremony hijacked by a bunch of humans, including a singing Princess Leia? And why are our names so stupid? And why do we have five image projectors in our living room? And why is my attention span so short that I can watch a cartoon and be happy when there are Storm Troopers invading my house and I don't know if my father is alive or dead? And why do we grunt and growl at each other for minutes a stretch with no subtitles? And why does an 'unedited' video from Tatooine have cuts and changes in camera angles, and why would the Empire broadcast some lame-ass cabaret song that rhymes 'rhyme' with 'time' and that is critical of the Empire in an attempt to boost morale? And why would anybody think that Harvey Korman's physical comedy is funny?"
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older. Or maybe you won't.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why does participating in our wookie lifeday ceremony make me want to kill myself?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. Just hush. Eat your Wookie-Ookies.”

Duerminatrix

She slept in a nest of loaded guns: sawed-down shotguns with sanded-down triggers. The walnut stocks were stacked and threaded thickly together. Each night she would insinuate herself, at the rate of one inch of flesh per minute, into the tangle of wood and high-speed steel, cobalt steel, Parkerized steel, and bluing finish. And, after an hour of careful contortion, she would sleep naked among the a-wake triggers, neither shifting nor tossing nor deeply breathing nor dreaming for fear that she would jostle the guns in the slightest.
I questioned her, asked why she did not sleep in a bed of synthetics and feathers or at the very least on the naked floor. She stared at me quizzically, jaw agape and teeth naked. She slept in a bed of loaded guns; it had never occurred to her to do other.

A Fire on One End and a Fool on T'other

It's been twenty-one days since I last smoked a cigarette. This is less of an accomplishment than it might sound; it's relatively easy for me to go a month or more without smoking. I was up to five or six weeks back in February before I un-quit again. I'm sure there have been spaces of six months or a year since that I have gone without smoking. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself; I quit smoking, and then I quit quitting.

It's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-smoker. When I smoke, I tend to be more nervous. Smoking raises my blood pressure, which is already too high as it is. When I smoke, there is this feathery feeling in my lungs that comes whenever I breathe hard, and while I know it's not lung cancer, it's always difficult to convince myself that it's not. Concordant with this is my even-more reduced capacity for exercise such that I am incapable of walking up a single hill without wheezing. And I swear, although I've never heard of this being a normal side-effect of smoking, that smoking contributes to my migraine headaches. I bet I could accept all the other consequences, aside from this one, because if smoking does cause me to have headaches--and it definitely seems to me that I get a lot more migraines when I smoke than when I don't--it would be downright idiotic for me to voluntarily inflict that kind of torment on myself.

But it's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-non-smoker, either. I don't get pronounced withdrawal symptoms when I don't smoke. Even when I do smoke, I rarely have more than three to five cigarettes a day, which doesn't seem to be enough to cause me to physically addicted to nicotine. No; the withdrawal is mental more than anything else. When I smoke, I have a need that must be satisfied every few hours. I can satisfy that need, and then I'm good for a while again. I think it's the regularity and ease of satisfaction of this need that attracts me most to smoking--I should wish that all of my needs should be so scheduled and so simply met. And when meeting this one need, it's possible to ignore other needs--like my needs for companionship, comfort, reassurance, and touch. Those things, in my experience, are very hard to get. A pack of my preferred brand of cigarettes, on the other hand, is available at most gas stations and grocery stores for about five dollars.

Given my very moderate tobacco use, and given that brief, dizzying rush of stimulants to the brain that allows me to forget, for thirty seconds, whatever else might be bothering me, it's been difficult for me to convince myself that smoking is really harmful to me. I *know* that it is, but it's difficult to do the assessment and find that smoking is more of a drawback than a benefit.

Do you know, gentle reader, what the best part of quitting smoking is? It is, most assuredly, that first cigarette after you unquit again. True, the experience is tainted by guilt, but the physiological sensation of those pathways in the brain that have gone extinct coming crackling back to life in a minute of intense sensation not unlike orgasm--it almost makes it worth it. Repetition deadens the sensation as the brain becomes accustomed to nicotene, but if one can leave off the chase for the dragon for a few days or a week or a month or a year and then resume the chase, it's as if you've got the dragon by the tail all over again. After a day or three of repeated exposure, though, the experience becomes mere mechanics--no real rush, just a feeling of irritability and dullness without the drug.

And that small, stupid, completely legal high is only a single smoke away. And it's sad that'd I'd throw away three weeks of sobriety--or better to call it three weeks of relative calm, with clothes that did not stink and a tongue that did not taste of tar and stale ash--for a minute of craving satisfied. But I would.

I guess I'm waiting for some definitive, conclusive experience to forever purge me of the desire to smoke--because that desire still persists, even if I do my best to deny it satiety. I don't know if it's possible to hit that fabled "rock bottom" with respect to cigarettes, though. In faith, there have been moments when I felt the muscles in my neck constrict and red pain seared through my skull like some breed of contained organic lightning, and in these moments I swore "Never again." There have been a number of such moments. And, with the possible exception of the most recent iteration, I have broken that vow every time. I am apparently very bad at being operantly conditioned. (It should be noted, though, that it only required three or four such comparable incidents to forever purge me of the desire for being very drunk). Will this time be the last time I need to quit? Hell if I know. I think maybe keeping track of the individual days as they pass by might be helpful; it's harder to throw away twenty-one days of progress than it is to throw away some while of progress, and it's easier to congratulate oneself on resisting that temptation that comes multiple times a day if one reminds oneself that one has been clean for twenty-one days, rather than clean for a good while now. Ticking off that calendar in my head does seem to have both a positive and negative reinforcing effect.

Nietzsche says something about resisting temptation that I wish I could find now, but I can't. But I remember the essence of the quote being something like "There are two ways to conquer temtpation: the first is through regular indulgence, and the second is through surfeit." Oh, Hell, I don't know if Neitzsche said that, but it sounds like him. Anyway. I wonder if the means for conquering my addiction to smoking would not be to smoke so much as to make myself so absolutely sick that I can never ever want to smoke again, or to accept that occasional indulgences are less costly than the stress of spending a significant portion of my day thinking about not smoking. Or else, if there is some switch I switch I can find and then flick that will make me want to smoke no more forever. Until then, instead of enjoying the satiety of a cigarette, I content myself with the much colder comfort that it's been twenty-one days since I last lit up.

Tomorrow will be twenty-two.