Meanwhile, Oregonians ready their supply of dynamite… [3]
It’s a state tradition.
Oregon has a proud history of exploding whales, including a lesser-known incident which occurred 33 years earlier, in Warrenton, on Sept. 1, 1937. Unfortunately, no news footage has been found of that particular event.
“A large dead whale floated onto a tidal flat beach on August 18 (1937). …At first this whale was a big hit. Many flocked to check it out, and Warrenton was digging its new tourism draw. But that slacked off rather quickly as the creature began rotting in the summer sun. Soon, the entire burgh of Warrenton was getting hit with the stench and by the last few days of August it was a nasty, pervasive odor.
According to various newspaper reports, Warrenton sought the help of the State Highway Department in removing the smelly carcass…state officials said no (the highway department only had jurisdiction over the ocean shores and not the tide flats where the whale ended up). So Warrenton turned to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Locals hoped the CCC boys would burn the carcass, ‘but they balked after the Clatsop County court decided the highway department first must give its permission.’
Warrenton official G. Clifford Barlow was practically livid at this point. ‘Something has to be done to destroy the whale because of the increasing stench,’ he wrote in a letter to the highway department.
So locals turned to dynamite. You can guess where this is heading. They snagged a ‘powderman’ as news reports called him, a man named A. W. Foster from Portland. He volunteered, actually.
A large crowd had gathered, and as The Eugene Guard (later Register-Guard) put it ‘Like the crowds that rush to a fire, a lot of people stuck their noses into something that didn’t concern them at Warrenton last night, much to their own chagrin.’
The 53-foot whale sat stinking to high heaven as Foster placed some 500 pounds of dynamite around it, hit the button and….
Boom.
Blubber did indeed blast into the air. The Guard’s headline was ‘Whale Splatters … Crowd Scatters.’ The explosion ‘scattered Warrenton’s dead whale all over the landscape of Clatsop Beach.’ The next day the paper ran another blurb and proclaimed it was a ‘noisy funeral.’
The Oregonian notes ‘tourists arrived and departed hurriedly’ [4] because of the smell and the raining chunks. he day after the big boom locals flooded Astoria’s ‘cleaning and dyeing shops’ and ‘automobiles were lined up waiting for their chance at auto steam-cleaning laundries.’
In other words, towns folk were soaked in whale guts and goo, as were their cars. Still, locals considered the explosion a success, with tons of pieces scattering in all the right places, into bite-sized morsels perfect for local meat-eaters like gulls and such. At least a ‘success’ is how regional papers described it.” ( excerpts, Exploding Whale history, beachconnection.net news )
May you have (or make) the opportunity to visit Florence, OR; May you never have a reason to be one of those tourists who “arrived and departed hurriedly;” May you appreciate the fact that the American classic novel, Moby Dick, was about chasing a whale and not trying to blow it up; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Don’t make moiself answer that challenge. Oops, too late.
[2] Yes, it’s possible, and likely welcome, after the verbosity of last week’s post.
[3] As of this writing, there have been no plans announced for the whale carcass’s disposal.
[4] Sometimes, words are worth a thousand pictures.
[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[6] Important to remember: listen for the heartbeat of the planet *before* the whale explodes, not after.
Department Of This Is Neither Here Nor There, But Now It’s Here
Some Well-Meaning Person ® didn’t deserve the answer they got when they asked this question about my sleeping schedule:
WMP®: “So then, you get up at the crack of dawn?”
Moiself: “It’s more like I get up at the butt crack of dawn.”
* * *
* * *
Department Of The Mormon Witnessing Story
Not as in, moiself witnessing to Mormons, or Mormons trying to witness to moiself (hmm, department of, this department needs a better title?). This story involves me being a witness to some folk who were attempting to “witness” (read: condemn and harass) a local Mormon congregation, which I somehow manage to link to the story of what happened to my offspring when they visited relatives for a weekend.
Background for the Mormon witnessing story: a Cliff’s Notes version of why happy heretic moiself and MH used to be members of a Christian church, and took our children there regularly, for many years. I’ve known for decades – as far back as when I was a stellar Lutheran Sunday school student [1] – that I am not a religious believer. However, similar to the experience of many “I-knew-I-was-gay-in-the-third-grade” LGBTQ folk, I mostly kept my non (and even anti-) religious thoughts to moiself, as there were few-to-no options or role models when it came to being out of that particular closet. It seemed obvious to moiself, even/especially as a young’un, that myth and superstition ruled the world; thus, the choice (which children don’t have, until they fledge) was to align yourself with the denomination with the least whackadoodle worldviews.
MH once explained to a friend, who’d questioned MH on his political registration as a Republican despite MH supporting so many causes antithetical to true conservatives, that he felt a duty to support moderate viewpoints within an influential institution that seemed in danger of slipping even further to the right. [2] A similar analogy applies as to why MH and I took our children to a church.
More than one friend or family member has asked moiself, why did I [3] join a Christian church ( a very liberal/progressive one, but still, a Christian church) and take my kids to it for years, despite knowing for as far back as I remember thinking about such things (if not for all of my life) that I was not a religious believer? Well….when MH and I were preparing to have children, I realized that not that much seemed to have changed since I was a child: religious ideas still seemed to run the world; thus, I wanted my kids to get some firsthand knowledge of it…even as I viewed it (religion) in terms of a disease. That is, my participation in religion and allowing my kids to experience and learn about religion was done from a medicinal POV.
Yes, really.
Part of the reasons MH and I joined a church and stayed for so long (until our children were ages 12 and 9, respectively), is that we wanted them to choose or reject religion from knowledge, not ignorance. Despite (or perhaps, because of ) my conclusions as to the false premises of religion, [4] I wanted K and Belle to have an opportunity to learn firsthand about religion. I thought it was important that they understand religion as a common human/cultural expression and institution, but also important that they be kept free of the repulsive ideas common to most religions, such as they would either be rewarded in a heaven or punished in a hell based on what they think about religion ( thus we joined a “liberal” Christian denomination, the UCC [5] ).
We did it as a form of inoculation; we wanted K and Belle to get an education about our nation’s dominant religion, but not in a church where they would hear theologies of condemnation and damnation for those who didn’t agree with cognitive absurdities certain theological tenants. Frankly, I thought it was (and still think it is [6] ) better to expose your children to a relatively benign form of Christianity, like that of the UCC (United Church of Christ denomination) or the Liberal Quakers, than to completely avoid religion. I have heard this practice referred to as the smallpox theory of religion: exposure to a mild form of religion is likely to inoculate your children against more virulent forms of religion. If they didn’t get a mild dose of religion when they were young they might catch a more extreme form of it later on.
So: I was a member of a weekly morning book study group at that afore-mentioned UCC church. Over ten+ years the group read and discussed a theology/comparative religion Ph.D. student’s worth of books analyzing and comparing (and sometimes rebutting) religious history and theology. [7] One morning as the book group session was ending, a church member (who was not a book club member) stopped by to tell us she’d seen something she thought we should know about. The previous evening she’d read a newspaper story about a group of traveling evangelists who were holding tent revival meetings near the local fairgrounds, and after the meeting the leaders of the revival would go and “witness to” (in the form of picketing outside) churches that they considered to be heretical (Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others. [8] ) That morning on her way to work she’d driven on a road which passed the local Mormon church, and she saw protestors on the road outside of the church, holding up signs that….condemned the church and its members? She wasn’t sure; the signs were hard to read, and the road had no safe place to pull over, so she just slowed down and took note. She wanted to alert us as to what seemed to her to be an obvious case of harassment…and maybe we could do something, show support for those being picketed?
That piqued moiself’s interest; after I returned home from book group I did an online search for the news story and found pictures of the traveling revival group (members of a Christian denomination I’d never heard of). At first, I thought the pictures were historical…or just a case of someone playing dress-up. The group leaders – all male, of course – were attired in 18th century garb: black wide-brimmed hats, black duster-length jackets, black pants, black vests over white shirts, skinny bolo-style ties, and black boots.
Later that day, after picking up K from his preschool, I decided to drive by the Mormon church. Sure enough, there were five men who could have passed for Johnny Cash groupies or impersonators (except that they held signs instead of guitars), picketing on the sidewalk on the east side of the road, by the church’s front lawn. No other cars were on the road; no pedestrians; no sign of any occupants in the church (whose parking lot was completely empty). I pulled my car over on the west side of the road, turned off the engine and told K, who was sitting in the back seat, that I wanted to check something and would be back in a sec (he was engrossed in his coloring book; I don’t know if he even heard me).
I had no intention to debate theology (or anything else) with those Men In Black. I was simply and genuinely curious to find out what their signs said. What were they doing there, and why? Did they want to talk with actual Mormons, or just protest, or…? As I began to cross the street one of the MIB saw me, and began to march toward me. As I beheld his face, all comparisons to Johnny Cash (except sartorial) fled my mind.
The man’s eyes were dark, piercing, wild, burning with hatred; his neck veins were visible, purple and throbbing, and he snarled at me, his voice feral with rage:
“What are you doing?!?!? Get back in your car! Unless you’re here to help, go away!”
I was taken aback, and tried to respond with a reasonable voice, the kind mental health intervention officers use to talk a potential suicide jumper down from a bridge.
“Everything’s okay…I’m just wondering what your signs say, and what you’re ….”
His voice took on an even more menacing tone as he shifted his grip on the sign he held. He wielded it like a sword as he approached me.
“GO AWAY NOW !”
Holy shit, I thought, is this looney going to brain me with his Mormon blah blah blasphemy blah blah child molester blah blah hell sign ? [9] I slowly walked backwards ( no way was I turning my back to this psycho ) and flung some vitriol of my own before getting in my car:
“Oh, go home and pray!”
I know, right?
The thing is, I was shaking as I drove home, and for at least an hour afterward. That encounter had triggered my fight-or-flight reflexes. It’s difficult to describe, but I’d seen it before: “it” being that look of righteous, bloodthirsty, savage certainty in that man’s eyes, and in the eyes of Nazi soldiers who were photographed herding Jews and other “undesirables” to a concentration camp; in the gleam in the eyes of the White mob smirking at the camera as they posed by the bodies of the Black men they’d lynched; in the leering, gleeful expressions of the faces in paintings and woodcuts of the priests torturing heretics and the pastors hurling charges of witchcraft against the women they were preparing to burn; in the news pictures of Rwandan Hutus holding the clubs they used to brain their fellow Rwandans (Tutsis) whom they called “cockroaches”… It is a look found in believers across many political and cultural spectrums but which is made even worse – even more deadly – in religious ideologies, which carry added weight via adherents believing they are follow the holy orders of a deity who holds their lives in its hands.
My body shook with an instinctual recognition of danger: of how that man’s eyes broadcast that he was doing the righteous bidding of his angry god, and he would have no problem crushing me if he thought I was in his way. It was the same shaking I recognized in the voice of my son K, several years later, when he told me about an incident he found disturbing, and frightening.
Dateline: Several years after that “Mormon witnessing” event. My sister (“YS”) had invited my son K and my daughter Belle to spend a long weekend with her family (her and her husband and their four children, two of whom are K’s and Belle’s respective ages). My kids didn’t see their cousins often (they lived 600+ miles away from us) and were eager to spend more time with them. As I helped my kids pack for their flight, I let them know that, seeing as how it was a weekend visit, it was likely that they would be expected to attend YS’s family’s church on Sunday. Both K and Belle gave long suffering, oh brother/the-things-we-do-for-family sighs. I knew YS and hubby held conservative religious beliefs, so I thought it prudent to warn inform my offspring that “their church is different from the one you’re used to…it’ll probably be no big deal, maybe even interesting…. And if there are things said or done that you find strange, just pretend to be cultural anthropologists: you don’t have to say anything, just observe, and take notes, on a new experience.”
That weekend, K the budding anthropologist got an eye-and-earful, and I got the latter, when K’s time at YS’s church was over. Under the guise of being homesick, K asked YS if he could use their phone to call me. He did so from the privacy of YS’s bedroom, and from his first two words I could tell that he was distraught. K spoke in run-on sentences; he was upset, something about YS’s church…. I got him to calm down, take a few deep breaths, and tell me what happened. What had he seen or heard that upset him? One of the things that bothered him the most, he said, was wondering about about his relatives: “Is this what they think, do they really believe *this*?
*This* turned out to be a basic tenet of almost all religions: Believing in our theology/scriptures/god is the correct and only way to believe, and those who believe elsewise are wrong, and doomed, and need “saving.”
*This* also turned out to be the focus of the Sunday School class K attended. [10]
K was in the Sunday School class with his same age cousin, “Oscar.” Just K’s luck, the class topic of the day was witnessing to non-Christians. Righgt from the get-o, K found the teacher to be a bloviating ignoramus. K sat in his chair, seething quietly, as the teacher
– described the many ways “non-Christians” are missing out on life and what will happen to them for “rejecting Jesus;” -expressed his opinions-as-facts about what Buddhist and other “false religions” believe;
– told his students that it was the duty of Christian kids to witness to their friends, family and classmates in order to “save” them.
Several times K bravely raised his hand and, when called upon, challenged statements other kids had made which were demonstrably untrue and/or anti-science, or which made fun of other religions. [11] K also said to the teacher that it was unfair to label kids with heir parents’ religion, when kids aren’t old enough to understand or make their own decisions – after all, when it came to religion they had to do what their parents did, go to their parents’ churches… K stopped offering his comments when he realized that the other kids were staring at him, all except for Oscar, wouldn’t make eye contact with him.
The SS teacher told his Sunday school charges that, since it was their duty to witness to non-Christians, they needed to know how to tell if someone is not a Christian. Who had any ideas as to how to do that? Eager sheepreligious bigots evangelists in training raised their hands to the heavens. “Oh oh oh, I know, I know – they’d be sinning!” one boy gushed. K was somehow able to stifle his snort of derision at that remark (they’d be sinning? Uh…specifics, please?) “Yeah,” another child chimed in, “they’d probably be mean, and do bad things.” “They’d look unhappy!” came another suggestion. “They’d be, like, saying the wrong prayers, Buddhist chants or stuff”…”They’d be sad, or angry, or….”
It went on and on, with the teacher (in K’s view) encouraging his students’ absurdities. But K had taken to heart one of my most sacred (ahem) teachings – that in the presence of ignorance and bullying, silence implies acquiescence. Alas and finally, he could no longer remain silent.
“You could just ask them,” K offered.
There was dead silence; all eyes in the classroom turned to him. The teacher asked K to explain; K replied that if you truly want to know what someone thinks or believes, you should ask them, instead of assuming.
This was near the end of the class; the How To Identifier A Sinner ® discussion continued for another minute, then the teacher led his students in prayer before dismissing the class. He asked the students to bow their heads and close their eyes and join him in praying for the strength to witness to the unsaved, and for a few other requests K couldn’t remember, and to ask (their) god to “touch the hearts and show the right way to the unbelievers among us.”
Observant unbeliever that he was, K left his eyes open during the prayer. He saw that when the teacher made the unbelievers among usremark, several students opened their eyes to take a peek at him, then quickly turned away and shut their eyes….but he’d gotten the message. As had I, when K told me what had happened. That S.O.B. bully Sunday School teacher had made my preteen son a target, as the object of a supposed “prayer of concern.”
We talked (translation: I let K sound off) for a long time. I told him how proud I was of him, and advised him, perhaps mistakenly, that if he was still upset about it, maybe he could talk to his aunt? He didn’t. Looking back, it’s probably good that he didn’t. After hanging up from that call, I was aching for my son despite realizing that what had happened to him was a valuable, Oy, Such is Life ®experience. I in turn had a milder version of his own shaking experience, as I began to recall similar incidents, including the one with that Raging Mormon Witnessing Dude.
It is viscerally unsettling, to be the target of irrational fear and anger and us v. them ideology, and to realize that something as seemingly innocuous as a Sunday school class can transmit the dynamic of otherness. It is a basic, almost instinctual fear, IMO, wherein such encounters you have a gut-level realization of the history of your species: people have been and continue to be judged, shunned, bullied, abused, and even tortured and killed by their fellow human beings because of being The Other/The Heretic/The Unbeliever. Something deep in my DNA recognized the look in that Raging Mormon Witnessing Dude, and understood the warning my intuition was sending me:
This is how ‘good’ people can, and do, go bad. Feeling so strongly about something – that this is what your god commands, and those who disagree with you are disagreeing with your god, and not only are they wrong, they are (possessed by) evil –this is how human beings eventually justify killing other human beings.
When my offspring returned from their visit I asked Belle about her experience at YS’s church. Being three years younger, the Sunday School class she went to with her same-age cousin was focused more on doing churchy-crafty things, and Belle told me that she really didn’t pay attention to “the rest of it” (read: any “god talk.”). Just as Belle did in her own church’s SS class, she ignored the churchy/Jesusy stuff and concentrated on crafting her popsicle stick recreation of Noah’s ark or whatever.
* It is immoral to brand children with religion. ‘This is a Catholic child.’ ‘That is a Muslim child.’ I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, ‘That is a Marxist child.’
* Do not ever tell a child, ‘You belong to this religion,’ – that is child abuse.
* I am persuaded that ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like…eternal hell.
I love it when a child has the integrity to challenge and speak the truth to those in power. This is how people are truly “saved.”
* * *
May you know when to stand up to bullies; May you know when it’s wiser to back away from a ruthlessly righteous bully; May you rise at whatever time around dawn is best for you; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I just got props for being a good student, even though Sunday School teachers didn’t give out grades
[2] MH’s political party registration has changed several times over the years (as has mine, although I’ve been “no party for over a decade now), depending on the candidates and primaries.
[3] and MH, although you’d have to ask him for his own reasons.
[4] Chief among those being that the natural world is the way it is due to a supernatural world.
[5] MH and I both were from families which were members of the most liberal Lutheran denomination, the ALC, which is now the ELCA.
[6] Which is why I’m in favor of comparative religion classes in schools – not teaching the rightness or wrongness of any particular religion, but merely the history and existence of various faiths.
[7] We took turns suggesting books; after I left the church, a fellow long time book study member said he wasn’t surprised, considering the titles and topics I always suggested.
[8] Basically, anyone who wasn’t them was on the wrong side of religion.
[9] The only words I could make out on his sign…there were a lot more
[10] I can’t remember if YS’s church, like many churches, had children and their parents present during the first part of the church service, then about halfway through (before the sermon) dismissed the kids to their Sunday school classes.
[11] Some kids made cutting remarks about Buddhism, Islam and other worldviews.
[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.
No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Happy Syttende Mai (“sit en day my“), for those of y’all lucky enough to either have Norwegian ancestry or love someone who does.
* * *
Department of Mama Nature’s Northern Lights Dance Party
Re last weekend’s solar flare phenomenon: moiself was très appreciative of the postings people shared – photos of the heretofore unimaginable splendor of the skies which were taken not from a telescope, but from outside their own homes.
At the beach, MH and I appreciated the rarity of the occasion: for once, Oregon had clear skies when there was a noteworthy astronomical event.
I missed the spectacle Friday night, perhaps looking too early and thinking, ah well, it’s not here...and then in the morning we saw friends’ pictures they’d taken from the beach dunes. We went back to that dune on Saturday night, but didn’t see any northern lights. We still had a lovely time sky-gazing. The silvery moonlight reflecting off the waves is its own natural phenomenon, worthy of appreciation.
* * *
Department Of A Meditation On Meditation
In my morning meditation I’’ve been unpacking the familiar phrase, Be here now. Taken from the groundbreaking 1971 book by American erstwhile professor-turned-meditation-guru Ram Dass[1]be here now is usually considered to be a prescription, a something-to-do. But, what about thinking of it not as a prescription, but a *description?*
Moiself has four meditation apps, three of which I mostly use for their choices of ambient music and timers. For guided meditations and/or learning, I use Waking Up, which besides also having meditation timers offers a daily guided meditation and an expanding audio library relating to establishing or maintaining a mindfulness/meditation practice.
After having been away from the app for a time, I opened it a couple of days ago, and decided to skip the Daily Meditation ( my usual choice) to see the new offerings in the library. Under the practice category I saw The Nature of Now, 11 short sessions [2] by scholar, author, and meditation teacher John Astin, and decided to check them out. But, four days in, I’d only made it past the intro and session one. I kept repeating session two, Being Here Now, because…well, because of observations like this:
“Be here now….those three words certainly sound like and are often heard as a prescription, something for us to do, something to practice…. In this inquiry however, I’d to flip that notion on its head, and invite you to consider that these words, as with so many others we hear in different teachings, are not so much prescriptions to do something, in order to arrive somewhere else or get ourself to some other state, but rather descriptions of the way things actually are – the way reality already is….
Astin goes on to examine each of the simple three words. The observations he offers sound so forthright or obvious on the face of it, but are definitely not the way we – or at least, I – “practice” our daily lives:
“See that being requires absolutely no effort or practice in order for it to be so. It simply is. Existence is already here; effortlessly, and spontaneously….feel the inescapable truth of this: the fact that every moment, we are.”
I was much younger, in moiself’s more cynical, late teens,-early twenties, when I first encountered the phrase, “be here now.” I never gave it much thought, other than to deem it an example of the existential hilarity to be found in woo-woo disciplines of crystal gazers and the like:
“Be here now…oh, wwwwwooooowwwww. As opposed to, Be there then?
Looking back, was I arrogant or merely ignorant? Most likely a combination of the two. I certainly was ignorant of the science of meditation. But that was then and this is now – oooh, speaking of woo…, that’s a phrase from the title of another seminal 1971 book, one of the first of what would be called the coming-of-age or YA genre, by SE Hinton.
Once again, I digress.
From what I have read and talked about with others, and experienced moiself, a common obstacle for people trying to start or maintain a meditation practice is that meditating is seen as a prescription – as yet another thing that you should be doing because it is good for you, like flossing your teeth or siccing Child Protective Services on parents who wear MAGA hats taking a daily vitamin supplements. Due in part to that (mis)understanding, when people approach meditation that way they can find it stressful, because the equanimity or relaxation they are expecting is not immediately apparent; thus, they think they are “doing it wrong” instead of just doing it, sans judgement or expectation and allowing….
This is tricky to articulate. I’m no meditation expert or teacher, just someone who has a (oft times sporadic) meditation practice. I can say that the benefits of allowing moiself to be aware, even if it’s just aware of doing “nothing” other than observing moiself while I’m doing that nothing, are palpable. That simple proposition – that be here nowis a description, not a prescription – I’m still chewing on it. It’s a perspective changer, for me, that the reality of our existence, being here, is happening all the time, whether or not we are taking the minutes to sit and realize it that all you have to do is to be a human, being. Not a human striving, or a human wanting – just a human, be-ing.
That’s enough profundity for today.
“Great…that means it’s back to political rants, anti-supernatural invectives, and fart jokes?”
“[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief.”
I both love it and hate it when I’m trying to be (somewhat) serious, then remember that it has been some time since I’ve included a fart joke in this space, and realize there will be no peace for me until I do.
Q. What’s the difference between a saloon and an elephant fart?
A. A saloon is a barroom, and an elephant fart is a BARRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOM.
* * *
May you remember that you don’t have to remember to be here now; May you have a good viewing seat for Nature’s next astronomical light show; May you meditate on the utility of political rants,
anti-supernatural invectives, and fart jokes; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[2] Each ranging from 3 to 8 minutes long; most around 5m.
[3] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[4] Shall we all meditate on the usefulness of footnotes?
Somehow, reading moiself’s thoughts as voiced by a Palestinian gives them more chutzpah (ahem). I don’t know who this guy is, but Mo, you’re my bro.
Intro:
“This is a repost of a list of posts I made to Threads last fall.
I am a Palestinian-American who is tired of stupid people. I wanted to share a (not exhaustive) list of 50 useful and indisputable facts on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.”[1]
In particular, Fact 39 nails it – and re the war in Gaza, all else is irrelevant.
Fact 39
“Stop with the fucking history lessons about what the Israelites did, or what the Ottomans did, or what the British did, or whatever. IT IS FUCKING IMMATERIAL. There is a pile of dog shit in the living room. Instead of arguing about whose dog took the bigger shit in the living room, maybe focus on how we clean up the dog shit, and maybe we keep the dogs outside.”
However, IMO, Husseini’s Fact 50 disputably does not merit the adjective indisputable. The only non-resolvable dispute in the world is seemingly *not* which group of people have the more compelling rights to claim whatever territory, but which country/culture deserves the credit for inventing hummus. [2]
* * *
Department Of Mother’s Day, Schmother’s Day – Craft A Card For *This* Holiday, Hallmark
This weekend, instead of choosing to acknowledge that most commercially co-opted sentimental of holidays, moiself will instead celebrate that genetic inheritance we all have – Mitochondrial DNA[3] ( mtDNA ) – which we get only from our mothers:
* * *
Department Of A Different Kind Of Mother’s Day Story Sub-Department Of A Story Both Profoundly Sad Yet Profoundly Reassuring ( at least to moiself ) [4]
Another in the installment of stories from my years working at the OB-GYN practice of Dr. DWB (“Dr. B”) and Nurse Practitioner POM, in the late 1980s, near Stanford Hospital.
Background information for this installment, which is a bad babystory: Among a group of OBs I knew back then, there was a (fortunately little-used) term, “bad baby.” This term was not used to refer to babies who didn’t fetch or sit or rollover, or who had colic or behavioral issues.
“Bad baby!”
Obstetricians (and some nurses) used the term bad baby[5] to refer to the phenomenon of what “should have been” a stillbirth – a newborn who just a few years earlier would have been declared DOA – and/or a newborn whose acute congenital morbidities, heretofore unknown by the parents or medical staff, meant that it would die soon after birth…except for the pediatrician who swooped down and performed drastic resuscitations and interventions (often against the wishes of the obstetrician and even the parents), which “revived’ the infant long enough for it to be placed on respirators, cardiac assist devices, etc. Once revived, the essentially brain-dead infant could be temporarily kept breathing and with a beating heart. And so the pediatrician got praise from certain people, who didn’t know that the seemingly miraculous interventions he [6] performed were, quality-of-life-wise, for naught, as the infant, with minimal brain stem activity, would now die in a few hours or days or weeks, instead of at or shortly after birth.
As devastating as these situations were for the baby’s’ parents, they were also heartrending for the obstetricians and nurses.
Fortunately, most of the pregnancies and deliveries our practice saw – the majority of pregnancies and deliveries for mostwomen – were relatively uneventful, with happy outcomes. Bad baby cases were uncommon. Nevertheless, one particularly memorable bbincident occurred when Dr. B and POM were on vacation. Speaking of which….
Indisputable Fact #51: Like any working human being, doctors have to take a vacation, at some time. And no matter when a doctor goes on vacation, it will never be a good time for all of the doctor’s patients.
Dr. B’s and POM’s patients were particularly loyal to the practice. Once a patient had had her first prenatal care and delivery via POM/DWB’s practice she always returned to us for care if she had another baby [7] (unless she had to relocate; e.g. for a job transfer). New patients searching for an OB often called Dr. B’s practice to get information before scheduling a meet-n-greet appointment with POM and DWB, and a common question they asked the staff [8] was, “My due date is (____) – can you look at the schedule and tell me if the doctor is going on vacation during that week?”
Moiself couldn’t actually, or accurately, do that. And I told them so, and why: Dr. B’s vacation schedule tended to be erratic – we rarely if ever had a time blocked off in the scheduling books for, say, seven months in the future when he would definitely be gone (and there wasn’t time when he always went on an annual family fishing trip, or whatever). Also, due dates are informed-but-nonetheless guestimates; there are no guarantees when it comes to when babies arrive.
Dr. B tended not to take more than a week’s vacation at a time, and rarely missed his patients’ deliveries. Once, in the course of one of the rare intervals when he took a two week holiday, he had *five* patients whose due dates were during his vacation. Not one of them delivered. Another once, when Dr. B took a vacation weekend – not a long weekend, just a regular weekend – his on-call group delivered three of Dr. B’s patients, none of whom were due to deliver during the two days he was out of town. [9]
Yet again, I digress.
Brace yourself; here comes the sad story.
The particularly memorable bad baby case to which I refer occurred when Dr. B and POM were on vacation. Patient MM, who was not due to deliver for another two weeks, went into labor one weekday evening. It was a quick labor and birth, as second deliveries can sometimes be (Dr. B had delivered MM’s and her husband’s first child, “Sam,” five years earlier). MM’s baby, another boy whom she told us she would name “Matthew,” was delivered by an OB in Dr. B’s on call group. The next morning, when that doctor called to give us the news (our practice remained fully or partially staffed when Dr. B was out of town), I knew something was wrong the moment I heard his hello.
It was a bad baby. Awwwwww…ooooohhhhhh…….crap.
I walked over to Stanford Hospital to see MM, who was in the maternity ward. Dr. B was out of state; there was nothing he could do; I thought at least a friendly/familiar face from the practice might be of some help during this distressing time for MM and her family. I first checked in with “Anika,” the nurse in charge of MM’s care. Anika had been a NICU nurse for many years and was now a labor and delivery nurse. As we I walked up and down the hallway outside of MM’s room (a private room, thankfully [10] ) Anika gave me the details of the situation (this was years before HIPA). Anika said she was glad to see me – MM’s husband had taken Sam down to the hospital cafeteria to get lunch, and she thought MM would welcome my visit. The parents were in the process of deciding what to do: baby Matthew could not live long if removed from life support, but even with it, he was experiencing systemic organ failure. He might live a few hours or even days longer, but his death was inevitable. Anika had seen such cases before, and was hoping MM and her husband would ask for her advice, but they hadn’t yet, and she of course wasn’t going to give it unless asked.
I remember the glistening, anguished compassion in Anika’s eyes, which contrasted with her professional demeanor. Despite the latter, I noticed that she wrung her hands as she told me what she’d experienced in her years in the field. She’d never seen parents regret taking their “bad baby beloved infant off all the tubes and machines and holding their baby until it passed peacefully, in their arms; she had seen the parents who were devasted with regret – painful beyond description – the ones who’d insisted the doctors do “everything possible” and then their baby died anyway, in the sterile incubator, all tubed and hooked up, looking more machine than human. But, whatever their decision was, Anika stressed, it was their decision….
I thanked Anika for her kindness, and knocked on MM’s door. MM lit up when she saw me; she reached her quavering arms out and enveloped me in a hug. We had a long, heartfelt conversation, with me mostly listening as MM tried to make sense of her world being turned upside down. MM was trying to conjure up any outcome for Matthew other than the inevitable (Anika had warned me that MM wouldn’t even say the word death, or die, or dying, or passing, or anything related to mortality). [11] Although MM was physically in good post-partum health she was in no emotional state to leave the hospital, and the ward nurses had advised that she stay for at least another night. At MM’s request I promised to return the next morning to see her.
The next day I returned to the maternity ward around the same time (late morning). MM was not in her room. I found Anika, who told me what had happened. After I’d left the previous afternoon, MM’s son Sam and MM’s husband had returned from their lunch break. Early that evening Sam played with his Care Bears and Legos in the corner of MM’s room while MM and her husband consulted with members of NICU team, with Anika present (as per the family’s wishes).
After the NICU doctors and nurses left the room, Sam asked what was going on with his new baby brother? He listened while his parents tried to dance around the situation, then he crawled up onto his mother’s hospital bed. The tender bluntness of his question brought reality crashing down.
“Is Matthew going to die?”
“Yes.”
Anika said MM looked almost startled at the sound of her own voice, as if she were realizing that sad fact for the first time.
“Yes, honey, Matthew is going to die.”
Sam and looked up at this father’s tear-stained face. Sam’s dad nodded, and placed his hands on his son’s shoulders.
“Oh.” Sam took a deep breath. “Then, can we hold him?”
Sam and his parents got to hold and kiss Matthew, and speak to him of their love for him, for almost an hour until he died peacefully in their arms.
I thanked Anika for her compassionate care of MM’s family, and managed to keep it together long enough to take the stairs down to the lobby and exit the hospital before I sob-gasped my way through the parking lot and back to the office.
“I have to be able to say that I disagree with your religion, regardless of whether you get offended by it. The thing that you have staked your life on and built your hopes and dreams around is a fraud. It’s not true. God will not cast you into eternal damnation if you wear garments of two different cloths. You are not committing an abomination against the Creator of the Universe if you eat shrimp. I love you, but what you believe is not only wrong, but nearly insane.
Now, we will run into the argument of…’but a lot of people don’t believe in it literally.’ Good for them, they realize you shouldn’t murder your son because he cursed at you. Bravo. But then, why should you believe the book at all? If it is riddled with nonsense, complete irrationality and fairytales, perhaps you should pick another book to put your faith in. I bet The Lord of the Rings has a better moral story to tell without as much rational nonsense.”
I love it *and* I hate it when I make moiself cry when I’m typing, and realize, It’s just something you’re typing in your blog, FFS.
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May you literally or metaphorically keep the dogs outside ( or at least don’t let them shit in the living room ); May you hold a soft spot in your heart for those who’ve had a bad baby; May you take a moment to celebrate the fact that hummus exists; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Well, his last fact might be debatable, as there are several cultures/countries who’d like to claim credit for that.
[2] Now y’all have to go to the list and read Fact 50, right?
[3] Mitochondrial DNA is the circular chromosome found inside…wait for it…mitochondria, which are structures within a cell that are analogous to organs in the body, in that they have one or more specific jobs to perform in the cell (mitochondria are the site of the cell’s energy production and other metabolic functions). Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to offspring in humans and most multicellular organisms; thus, both males and females have mitochondrial DNA, but fathers don’t pass on their mitochondrial DNAbecause the sperm’s mitochondria are destroyed when the sperm fuses with the egg.
[4] Actually, no footnote here. Thought y’all could use a break before reading further.
[5] I don’t know if it’s still in use; it was certainly not standard medical nomenclature; rather, it was, moiselfobserved, a way for doctors to slang-name a situation which was depressing for all involved.
[6] All of the bad baby cases I saw during my 5+ years with the practice involved male pediatricians (no gender slur or disparity implied; most of the pediatricians at that time were male).
[7] Not only that, when he delivered a baby for an OB in his on-call group, who was either out of town or in surgery or who for some reason had to miss the delivery (which is why OBs have on-call groups) he was notorious for what the on-call group doctors groused about as “stealing” that patient. Translation: the patient, of her own free will, would transfer her care to our practice when she was next pregnant (and sometimes well before that). It’s not that the other doctors were bad, it was that we – the entire practice, as well as Dr. B – were so good.
[8] This was a question that they asked of other OBs as well, when they were searching for care.
[9] Each of those patients birthed their babies from one to three weeks earlier than their respective due dates.
[10] Sometimes due to hospital crowding or insurance or other issues, mothers who’d given birth to a bad baby had to share a room with a mother who’d just delivered a healthy baby…which was, IMO opinion, beyond cruel.
[11] It had been a completely normal, “uneventful” pregnancy, with no indication from any exam or test that anything was wrong.
[12] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Department Of Did I Raise My Offspring Right, Or What?
Dateline: yesterday, noonish. Son K, who is aware of my preference for dry, subtle humor which mines the nuances and incongruities inherent in trying to lead a life of service and reflection in these coarse and chaotic times, sends me this catchy ditty. Moiself hereby nominates the following for Best American Folk Song Ever. Just try not to sing along (but be warned, definitely NSFW).
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Department Of Two Annoying Life Event Trends I Am Looking Forward To Seeing Combined
Those would be a wedding reception which features a gender reveal, and a robot.
“After the vows, the champagne toasts, the filet mignon and the first dance between the bride and groom — after all the normal wedding stuff — came the cue. The cue for the abnormal wedding stuff. ‘Start waving those hands for the PARTY ROBOT!’ Into the candlelit banquet hall lumbered a menacing eight-foot-tall humanoid machine, pumping his metallic fists to the thumping electronic music, flanked by servers bearing sparklers and trays of dessert.” (The Robots are coming…for your wedding,” The Washington Post 4-24-24 )
Silly moiself, googling the idea of gender reveal/wedding, thinking I’d get nothing (but it would still be better, as in, even tackier, to combine it with a wedding reception)….
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Department Of Arguably One Of My Favorite Pieces of Jesus Art…
…is a stained glass window at Saint Ignatius College Prep, comedian John Mulaney’s high school, which he and David Letterman visited while filming Mulaney’s appearance on Letterman’s show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
Moiself can’t help but think that the stained-glass artist who created that panel was a closeted (which, until relatively recently, you had to be) atheist or at least skeptic, as the artist gave JC an eye-rolling, “Oy vey, the horseshit people believe!?” expression.
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Department Of All-Time Great Pranks
This slice o’ life story is courtesy of the six degrees of separation principle vis-à-vis my [1] neurons making the connections that they…just make, sometimes.
Dateline: last Saturday 7:45 AM-ish; walking. The podcast I was listening to reminded me of some actor, [2] who reminded me of another actor, which reminded me that one of those actors is either currently or formerly a Scientologist, which brought to mind one of the great pranks ever played on me, which occurred when I was in college at UC Davis.
Way back then the town of Davis had a very active Scientology Center. I use the term Centerdeliberately – there was no “Church of Scientology” at that time, [3] a fact that Scientologists boastfully emphasized in their recruitment efforts. When a Scientology proselytizer knocked on your door or approached you on the campus quad, and you as the average student/citizen had no interest in taking the time to challenge Scientology bullshit beliefs, it’s likely you’d use some version of the customary brushoff:
“No thanks/not interested, I have my own religion.”
The eager beaver Scientologist would scoff, “Religion?!? Scientology is *not* a religion!” The Scientology recruiter would use that as an entryway into assuring their target that there’d be no conflict in learning about Scientology – “which, *not* being a religion, would not require any renouncing of your personal religious beliefs – which is a proven/effective method/philosophy combining spirituality and Science ®, to handle stress and show pathways to healthy and successful lives….”
Moiself could (and may, eventually) share more stories re my encounters with Scientology adherents at UCD. Instead, the afore-mentioned prank, which discerning readers will surmise has something to do with Scientology, will now take center stage.
My college boyfriend “Scott,” [4] no fan of any supernatural beliefs (including the religions of the dominant culture, one of which I pretended to believe in, at the time), considered Scientology to be the most egregious example of spiritual and intellectual quackery. As a student who would go on to get undergraduate and graduate degrees in several scientific disciplines, Scott particularly objected to the cult’s organization using the word sciencein any way shape or form.
I knew that Scott had visited the Scientology Center at least once, to check it out, after I’d amused him with my tales of encountering Scientology recruiters on campus. Scott and his best friend “Bruce” returned the favor, amusing moiself and a couple of my apartment mates one evening when they showed up at our apartment, pulled out a small tape recorder from Bruce’s book bag, and played back Scott’s session with a Scientology auditor which, unbeknownst to the auditor, they had surreptitiously recorded with the tape recorder hidden in Bruce’s book bag.
The tape’s audio wasn’t all that great, but we could hear enough to be both flabbergasted and highly entertained, as the auditor asked Scott a series of questions while Scott grasped both handholds of the infamous Scientology E-Meter.
The E-meteris (was? Are they still using that batshit crazy thang?) a crude electronic device meant to mimic a polygraph, and was used by Scientology auditors (“counselors”) to purportedly “examine a person’s mental state.” [5] In terms of sophisticated electronic devices, Scott described the E-Meteras perhaps one or two steps above using a “telephone” consisting of two tin cans connected by kite string.
One evening about a week after Scott entertained us with the E-metertape, I heard a knock at my apartment door. My three roommates and I had a lot of regular visitors to our apartment, most of whom just opened the door and announced their arrival – so, someone who actually bothered to knock was something different, maybe even special. When I opened the door I beheld a young man standing on our welcome mat. He was carrying some kind of satchel and a piece of paper with a name and address on it. He looked at me, then past me to my three (all-female) roommates who were in the living room, then down at his paper, then his eyes traveled back up to our apartment door. He asked if this was 224 A St. apartment 16? When I replied in the affirmative, he said that he was here at the behest of a man named “Victor Lazlo, who visited the Scientology Center and expressed a desire to ‘get clear.’ “
Had I been sipping a beverage there’s no way I could have avoided a classic spit take.
Young Scientology Man seemed undeterred by my and my roommates’ scarcely muffled guffaws. I got rid of him by throwing him a bone, something ala, “Oh, yeah, Victor – he moved back on campus,” and giving him the dorm address of a male friend of mine. [7]
* * *
A Haiku For Unglamorous Vegetables In Our Weekly Farm Share
Celery root, and turnips. I was surprised by Their very pleasant
aroma, as they boiled. Meanwhile, I sauteed leeks in (plant-based) butter.
Garlic; a pinch each of white pepper, nutmeg, and green salt; [8] a splash each
of lemon juice, and veg broth; mashed all together; top with fresh parsley. Yummers – who knew?
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Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [9]
“If you think it’s offensive that I call alleged biblical miracles ridiculous, you should ask yourself whether or not it’s ridiculous to insist that Muhammad flew on a winged horse. Or that the earth was hatched from a cosmic egg? Or that Xenu, the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of his people to earth 75 million years ago and killed them using hydrogen bombs? These are all religious beliefs of others, but that doesn’t mean calling them ridiculous is an insult – it’s an objective fact until proven otherwise.” (David G. McAfee, journalist and author, of No Sacred Cows: Investigating Myths, Cults, and the Supernatural, and other books)
* * *
Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I hate it when I realize that April 1 is way done gone and past, and no one even tried to play an April Fool’s joke on moiself.
* * *
May homely vegetables inspire you to write haiku; May you appreciate having a creative prank played on you; May you avoid gluing your __ to your…..you know; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] In olden days referred to as “the six handshakes” principle, Six degrees of separation is the theory the idea that anyone can be connected to any other person via six or fewer social connections – that is, a chain of “friend of a friend” statements can connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. For example, let’s say that, despite having never been to China or having met him, moiself claims to have a connection to Chairman Mao Zedong, to whom I am connected, six-degrees style, via my sister-in-law who is from Canton, whose great uncle was an aide to a vice president of the Chinese communist party who served under Mao. (BTW, my SIL is from Canton, but that’s the only part of that example that is true….I think).
[2] An actor who was not mentioned in the podcast, but, there it is.
[3] The Internal Revenue Service did not recognize Scientology as a “charitable and religious organization” until 1993, after a 37 year dispute and controversial negotiations.
[5] As in, if used by a properly trained (ahem) auditor, the device can allow the operator to “see a thought” and uncover hidden lies and other thought “crimes. “
[6] A key character in the movie Casablanca, Victor Lazlo (played by Paul Heinreid) was the heroic Czechoslovakian resistance leader, and unintended rival to (Humphrey Bogart’s) Rick Blaine for the affections of Ilsa Lund, Lazlo’s wife (played by Ingrid Bergman).
[7] Damn! All these years later, I think I’d forgotten to ask them if the guy ever showed up.
[9] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Active, reliable, sarcastic, affectionate, bipedal, cynical optimist, writer, freethinker, parent, spouse and friend, I am generous with my handy supply of ADA-approved spearmint gum and sometimes refrain from humming in public.
