Mouse On The March

Antediluvian cousins: Don in front

I was thinking about my cousin Don the other day, and wondering what he was doing. I was hoping it wasn't the dog-paddle. Don lives in Minot, North Dakota, where the Mouse River has been over-expressing itself of late. It's not a really big river, but it doesn't have to be to cause trouble, because it runs through really flat terrain. Any water that breaches the banks will flow wide and far. There is some variation in elevation in Minot, but a lot of it is caused by moles, and I don't know the town well enough to know if Don's house is built on a molehill.

Obviously it isn't completely flat there, because otherwise there wouldn't be a river. It would just be a sea. That's what used to be in North Dakota, a big inland sea. We know that for a fact because of the work of scientists in the fields of geology and paleontology. Discovering things like the origins of our topography allows us to have topography of our own. Everything we learn builds on everything else we learn and directs what we might learn next, until our knowledge accretes in hills and ridges and uplifts and moraines from which we can see splendidly. It's a beauty and a joy.

Looked at that way, and only that way, the contestants in the last Miss USA pageant are really flat. Each was asked the same simple question: should evolution be taught in our schools? And nearly every aspiring queen had the same answer. Only two betrayed the slightest familiarity with science. They reacted as though the interviewer had farted in church, then regained their poise and merrily allowed that maybe evolution should be taught "too," so that children have a chance to learn "both sides" and decide for themselves what to believe. This is a land of freedom, and every child should have the opportunity to conclude that she is living on a five-thousand-year-old landscape the shape of a dinnerplate under a whirl of spinning stars that have a say in her love life, if that's what she wants to believe. God bless America!

Meanwhile the Mouse floods like it's never flooded before, tornadoes strafe the prairies and speculate into New England, islands sink and glaciers die and vintners prospect for land in the Yukon, all of which was accurately foreseen by scientists from the high ridges of their own hard-won education, and nothing can be done about any of it because a small number of powerful people have enough money to buy a controversy where none exists. And when years of deliberate miseducation have flattened out our population, a little stupid can flow wide and far.

God vs. Ganesh

You know those old pre-Renaissance Christian paintings, with the flat faces cranked into an unnatural position, the way they posed you for your school photograph? And halos like dinner plates? Never cared much for them, but I care even less for Hindu art, which always strikes me as looking like it should have been painted on velvet and sold hanging from a cyclone fence at an intersection. I don't get too worked up about the sacredness of any of it. I figure any currently viable gods are unlikely to look like anything we'd come up with. "When my glory passeth by, I will cover thee with my hand while I pass by; and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts," the Lord said, and that's vivid enough for me.

That doesn't mean other people don't get all het up about the accuracy of these things. The folks in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho recently installed some public art works including a sculpture of Ganesh, the Hindu god, and the Kootenai County Constitution Party threw a fit about it. It was a false deity, a demon god, and had no place in a land reserved for Christians, which I am told Idaho surely the hell is.

God, the genuine article, is, as we all know, an old bearded white dude in a dress. Ganesh is an elephant-headed fellow with four arms, so there's really no mistaking the two. It seems like there are a lot of Hindu gods and goddesses, but as I understand it, they are all considered aspects of the one God, Brahman (pronounced "Al-lah"), as opposed to the pantheon of irritable wack jobs the ancient Greeks had to contend with. For instance, Ganesh, with  his big old elephant head, might be invoked when one is embarking on a new venture, because he removes obstacles from one's path, but he's still God. It's as if we could worship an auxiliary Jesus operating a front-end loader: it would still be Jesus.

I'm interested in the way gods are envisioned in various times and places. I think people ascribe to them the attributes they would like to have, themselves. They start out assuming God looks just like them, only with improvements. The Christian god is usually depicted as an attractive white man, but bigger and floatier. The Norse god Thor was basically human, but with a really big hammer. Heh heh. If modern American women were consulted, their gods might look just like them, but about five pounds lighter. As far as the Hindu gods are concerned, many of them have more than the usual allocation of arms. So I'm assuming there's something about India that makes you itchy.

For my money, the Greeks had the most realistic ideas about their gods. They were out there smacking each other silly and you were best off just staying out of their way. They sure weren't looking out for you. They also had a surplus of sidekicks demanding respect, many of them inspired ensembles of several critters, including, of course, humans. The sphinx was set up with a lion's body and a snake's tail and wings and a woman's head and I don't know what-all else, but they made sure to get her titties in there, too. Then you have your minotaur and centaur, which you see rarely these days; and the half-man, half-goat items, which we still frequently elect to office.

I've never thought about what my own god would look like, but I have given thought to my own totem pole, ever since I was a kid. These aren't meant to be worshipped, but they include animals important to the artist. You often see ravens or eagles on top, where their outspread wings make an imposing statement; bears and other heroic sorts figure in too. But this is my pole. Clearly, my own personal totem pole would have to be crowned with a salamander head. It would make my totem pole look like a smiling thumb, but there's no help for that. Moving on down, I like marmots a lot, but there's really no improving on the little noodly salamander arms, so I'd have to carve them in too. Bears are cool, but they'd look really silly with the noodly arms, so I'm thinking the main part of the pole might as well be a salamander's midsection, with more noodly legs towards the bottom. At this point finishing it off with anything other than a salamander tail would be gimmicky. There. Perfection. If you can't see the sacred in that, you have my sympathy.

As Long As You're Peeing Anyway

I was in the Convention Center the other day and went to the restroom to pee and there, near my left foot, was a big black spider. The rest of the women in the room were very lucky, although they didn't know it, that it was me in that stall and not my friend Casey. If Casey is startled by a spider, or, frankly, if there's one anywhere within the county lines, she will emit a shriek that could be used to evacuate an entire town. She can't help it. She's like most of the rest of us, only way louder. I've heard this shriek a few times, and it is not possible to hear it without suffering a little urine leakage. So I guess if you're going to find an indoor spider, the restroom is probably not the worst place to be.

My friend is a calm, competent, multi-tasking wonder of a woman with freakish self-control, but she is undone by spiders. Her husband, early on in our friendship, demonstrated The Shriek for us by bringing in a dangling spider and passing it briefly in front of her face. He wanted us to see what he had to contend with. It was impressive. Scared the silk right out of the poor spider, who bobbed along the ground like underwear with sprung elastic. The shriek was followed by a thunking sound. That was the sound of months of our lives being sheared off.

A lot of people have a problem with spiders. I don't. I think they're interesting and most of them are beautiful, and as long as they're not in bed with me I'm happy to leave them be. I do have a little problem with snakes. Not prepared-for snakes, which are handsome and silky, but snakes with insufficient signage. A properly announced snake is a delight. I react strongly to sudden snakes, however, and also feel that they do not belong in the water or in trees.

One day on my mail route years ago I stepped in the epicenter of a nest of baby garter snakes, a hundred of them, and they all slithered out at once on every possible radius. All I could see was movement, movement totally inappropriate for a solid patch of ground, as though I had stepped in a black hole. In case you want to know what it feels like to step in a black hole, well, it's zero to intestinal-flu in point-five seconds, followed by a generalized internal liquefaction. Aftershocks of the willies continue regular as malaria for--well, I'll have to get back to you as to when they stop.

The reactions to spiders and snakes are probably hard-wired into us at this point in our evolution. The parasympathetic nervous system comes into play and floods us with adrenaline to prepare us for either fight or flight, or, as the case may be, just standing there leaking urine.  It was originally developed to help us deal with tigers. We use it to this day in preparing for a bout of public speaking, in case there's a tiger.

As it turns out, the spider at the Convention Center was glazed right into the tile floor of the restroom. It wasn't real at all. Ha ha, you wacky city employees! What an artistic sense of humor you have! You are truly the civic dickens, you are! I do think the ceramic toilet rat was a bit much.

A Family Reunion

I came upon a glory the other day, a sight to behold--made me all trembly. And it's a good thing Dave wasn't there for it, or he might have keeled over dead, and not in a good way. I saw five billion murres in one place. He's in favor of murres but thinks they are best in small and manageable numbers, such as One.

My murres were massed on several rocky outposts in the Pacific Ocean, jammed in together, which is what they do when they're brooding. I have many similarities with my cliff-roosting cousins, but there are divergences. For instance, no one wants to be around me when I'm brooding.

Also, murres are good at flying, whereas I'm only good in the gravity-assisted direction and for a very short time. They are also good swimmers, and I am not. No one taught me when I was very young, which is the time to do it. Dave learned at an early age, himself. He says it was easy. The hardest part was getting out of the burlap sack. Murres learn very young. They are punted or fall off the cliff and we don't hear from the bad swimmers again. They are excellent divers; they can be underwater for a couple minutes, where they are said to be very maneuverable. I am also. Once I quit struggling, I expect you could tow me just about anywhere.

Murres gather on cliff tops to breed and lay eggs. The eggs are very pointy so that they will spin in place like a dreidel instead of rolling off the cliffs. And this is important because the murres do not bother with nests. According to the biologists responsible for murre egg monitoring, the female murre turns around and takes a good look at her egg when she lays it, so that she can recognize it among the other thousands of eggs on the cliff later. Supposedly each egg has a slightly different pattern and is thus recognizable, but really they all look the same--they look like shit-spattered rock, which is surprisingly handy for camouflage. One egg is pretty much like another, and that too is apt, because one murre is pretty much like another. I'm not sure it matters much who's incubating what. Any way you look at it, you're getting a murre out of it, and you shouldn't be looking for anything else. This keeps them emotionally stable too, when bald eagles come flying patriotically in to eat an egg. All the murres flap and holler for a while but after a certain point they all go away and hope for the best, and the eagle makes her selection, and Gladys and Ethel can duke it out later for the remaining egg. "That's my egg," Gladys says, and Ethel says "suit yourself," and goes off somewhere to get a little reading done. Once all the kids have fallen off the cliff, the girls molt and stick around for an extra month, maybe form a book club, and they don't rejoin their mates and young out at sea until their 'do grows out.

Just between you and me, a lot of field biologists haven't dated in a while, and are inclined to idolize their mothers. It's possible murres are carefully memorizing their own eggs, but I submit that any time something drops out of your butt, you're liable to turn around and have a look. I've given this whole issue a good half-hour of binocular time, and these ridges are coated--coated, I say--with identical birds. I believe if any one of them sees an unsat egg, he or she is going to sit on it. If it cheers up a biologist to believe that it's their very own, so be it. This looks less like a paragon of motherhood than a cocktail party with unsupervised children up past their bedtime. They find a big rocky promontory, they shit all over it, drop eggs on it, and then punt the little buggers over the edge when they achieve fluff. Then they get a new haircut and lounge around for a month and no one even talks about the kids.

Murres are also known for preening each other, although it is unclear if they know they are doing this, or think they're taking care of their own hygiene and can't tell each other apart. Both sexes are identical. The description in the field guide is "black head with white underpants," or "underparts," depending on your trifocals.  Scientists insist that when they fly to their roosts on the rocky cliffs, they unerringly find their own eggs, and it is true that landing is a chaotic affair; they sort of fold up and drop in wherever they want to, without bothering to see if someone else is already at that spot. There's a lot of flapping and shoving and eventually everyone settles down until someone else bombs in. This is the evolutionary reason they have developed webbed feet: to avoid head punctures.

Murres are large members of the Auk family, named after their entire vocabulary. There was a larger one, but it is extinct, and the wise murre reins in her aspirations.

This particular platoon of murres is lucky enough to have its rock right in the sea, so that the punted chicks, which cannot fly, have a high likelihood of making it to the water. Other colonies nest on cliffs just inland and the chicks have to bump along a bouldery beach for quite a distance before reaching the sea and a ticket to adulthood, a path strewn with predators and tragedy. This is an evolutionary method that goes at least as far back as the 1950s, when our parents sent us out to play in traffic, assuring that children who do reach maturity are those genetically blessed with insane luck.

Hormones: A Personal History

I've heard it said that an idle mind is the Devil's workshop. I don't know about that, but I do know that hormones are the Devil's nuclear arsenal. They start out small, edging into the game with spitwads and paintball. "Let's see about some hair," hormones begin, installing shrubbery here and there. That seems to go well, so they experiment with acne. "This will go away in a few years," hormones say, snickering. Hormones get a huge kick out of themselves. If it looks like they're going to run out of territory to plant pimples on, they manufacture a giant ass.

Once the landscape has had a chance to settle in for a while, they get into human outreach. At first they just take ordinary people close to you--mothers, fathers, people who had previously been kind and nurturing and lovable--and turn them into complete idiots. Eventually they make virtually everyone you know profoundly irritating. By the time thirty or forty years have rolled around, they are capable of taking a person who had previously been quite companionable and making him walk into a room--a room you had planned to be in, yourself--and make little cheerful whistly noises to the point where any reasonable person would want to rip his lips off. Throw in the  humming, and the incessant inquiries into your well-being, and there's not a jury in the world that would convict you, either.

Just about the time that life sweetens up a bit and the acne has consolidated into one or two recurring volcanic outposts in the center of your forehead, hormones put on the old thinking cap and work on new projects. "You know what would be fun," hormones say, "would be if we just started building big condos here in the abdomen. We can set up a few new arteries for the infrastructure and just have at it, what do you say?" And just like that, there you are with a whole sorority of fibroid tumors under development. "Where do you want one? Here? We've got room for one more if we shove it right up against the bladder." Hormones have no concept of zoning. They are total Republicans. No offense.

Then hormones begin zipping around the system like a spooked cat. The room of contentment? Boring. They zip to the Room of Righteous Indignation. Double back on the Trail of Tears to the Den of Unfocused Rage, rumpling up the carpet and sending knick-knacks of affection flying off the shelves. It's a rough time. They do not plan to leave without trashing the place. Some women have such difficulties with that last little party that they keep letting new hormones in just to mollify the bunch. I guess it works, although researchers warn that, over time, this increases the risk of death. Of course, they're not counting homicides.

I did not choose that route, opting instead to go without sleep for a few years and see what happened. And finally hormones made their exit, dangling for a while from a thicket of new chin-hairs before dropping off. They get your face all stretched out that way, but Lordy, it's nice and quiet.

Television

If you want to know what's on the TV around here, it's usually Tater. As a television, ours is a really good cat heater. Tater likes to watch videos on the computer screen, preferably while sitting on the nice nubbly keyboard, but even she won't watch our TV. It might well be the crappiest TV in America. It's old. If you come over to watch football on our TV, the game will always be between the dark green uniforms and the even darker green uniforms. The players will be wearing leather helmets.

There must have been a time this TV was new. For a while there we had new TVs all the time, due to our frequent contributions to the street-drug and window-glass trades. I do remember Dave coming home with this one. Neither of us likes shopping. We're liable to snap up the one closest to the front door in the store; there will have been no consumer research involved. We grab and go, knowing our purchase will instantaneously lower the price of the same item in stores all over town. So Dave went out to fetch us a new TV with the same attitude he might replace butter, and whichever salesman was closest to the front door was in luck, unless he screwed up. This one screwed up.

Dave was standing between two televisions, a thoughtful expression on his face ("eeny-meeny-miney-mo"), and the salesman came up to offer assistance. "Well," Dave started, and the guy said "you don't want this one." He pointed.

"I don't?" Dave said. He didn't, actually. The other one looked a little better.

"No. This one still has rounded corners on the screen. They've gone over to square corners now, like this one."

Dave gave him the drilling stare, to which he was immune. "So you think I'll be missing a lot up there in the corners?"

"You don't want the round corners. That's old. None of them will have round corners soon."

Actual unretouched photo

Dave is old. Unwittingly the salesman had just provided Dave with a reason to buy the old-style TV. Dave distrusts newness on principle. Dave also dislikes doing something just because that's what everyone else is doing. That's why he stayed registered a Republican forty years after he voted for his last one. If you want him to quit wearing something, tell him it's fashionable. Dave took his business elsewhere. He came home with a new TV. It had square corners, but nobody at that store pointed it out.

When I was little, our family was several years tardy picking up our first TV, but when it came, it thudded into the house and squatted heavily in the corner. It was a massive piece of furniture with a screen embedded in the center like a navel jewel in a plump belly dancer. When you turned it on, you could hear the electrons swarming. A star would appear and then nova into Donna Reed. We didn't watch it much. Back then TVs didn't run that many hours or on that many channels, and ours got fewer hours and channels than most, because Daddy was our never-remote control. Mickey Mouse never squeaked in our living room, because Daddy thought Walt Disney was a fascist. Later, Mission: Impossible was banished after one viewing, because Daddy didn't approve of cheering for a CIA-facsimile to infiltrate foreign countries and conduct secret operations. Hogan's Heroes were out because Nazis weren't funny. It's a wonder I didn't rebel my way into the right wing.

TVs got better. Some families that were not ours got remote controls, and then they started coming out with color sets. "Do you want your children to grow up thinking baseball is played on gray grass?" went one advertisement. Already, the notion of punting the kids outside to roll on their own lawn was getting quaint.

When I was in college, someone brought a significantly better TV back to his apartment. It was amazingly clear. It was a Sony Trinitron. Soon, all TVs were that good. Now, they're all so amazing they can even refill your chip bowl. The actors can pitch Chex Mix into your slackened jaw. Soon, they'll be able to check your insulin level and speed-dial the ER.

Our TV does have a remote control, and sometimes it will change the channel for you if you're really precise with your thumbnail, but you can't turn it on or off with it, or mute or adjust the volume. We had a TiVo once but the TV slit its throat in the middle of the night. The whole screen is dark, and if you're watching one of those dramas that takes place in the alleyways at night, it's more of a radio.

But it's not dead yet, and we're keeping it. There is a neat diagonal striping down the entire face of the TV at all times, like a Mad Men tie. Call me fancy, but I'm hoping to achieve argyle.

...........................................

Late-breaking news: mere days after this post was written, nephew Michael came over with his old TV because he bought a better one. Dave accepted it with gratitude and regret. He is a faithful guy, and he had hoped to be watching the old one when it blew up, but even he admits the new one is a big improvement. I discovered that some of my favorite shows are not deliberately edgy and dim, and Dr. House's gang does indeed do surgery with the lights on. I like it. At least it's not a flat-screen.

Holy Crap

A recent study of the priest-pedophilia scandal, commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has concluded that the priests involved were mainly victims of the Sixties and bad training. I'm not buying it, but not because the Sixties was not an unusual time. All sorts of odd ideas became mainstream, and although people learned to be reflexively skeptical of pronouncements from the government ("looks like rain! Bullshit!") they lost all skepticism with regard to pronouncements from their peers. Smoke this. It will make you hack bits of your lungs out--no, hold it in! hold it in!--and eventually curl up into a fetal ball in terror. If you can hold it in long enough, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida will sound profound. It's harmless! And all sorts of things began making sense: Let's do some shrooms and then a twirly dance and then let's blow up something for peace. Heck, in the Sixties we even thought free love was a great idea, even though people used to pay perfectly good money for that, and you could only get 35 cents an hour for babysitting.

And I don't think it was a matter of poor training, either. Did they really need to remind them that altar boys should be instructed to pop back up after genuflecting? I suspect not.

My suspicion is that whatever causes certain priests to develop their own special sacraments was not a phenomenon confined to the Sixties. The only thing that has changed is the willingness of the victims to tell. My suspicion is that although these sorts of things go on in every stratum of society, it's possible that there were aspects to the priesthood that were appealing to certain people who were unlikely to fit in anywhere else.

My parents' generation played things close to the vest. Both my parents lived through two world wars, a flu epidemic, Prohibition, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and Pat Boone singing Tutti Frutti, but about all you could get out of them was "if you can't pay for it in cash, you can't afford it." As far as I know, neither of them had any undue contact with a priest. (They were Lutherans. I don't even know how they reproduced.) But if they had, nobody would have heard about it. Some things are not spoken of. One is expected to go on conducting one's life in modesty and dignity, right up until the day one starts taking potshots from the bell tower.

So no, I don't believe the Sixties were to blame for the wayward priests. Carob chips, a fug of Patchouli and Fat Elvis, but nothing worse than that.