Category: life

I miss my Grandfather…

…A man I never really knew. His name was Glen Howard, I can’t tell you when he was born and I can’t tell you if it was 1, 2, or 3 years since he passed away. All I knew about him I was told to me by my own father, whose moods were often fickle; reminiscing about grandpa was apt to put him in a black mood. Or I gleaned it from observation and the uncomfortable conversations he had with my father when we visited on holidays. Grandpa was born and raised in the Gila Valley in Arizona it is also where he died. He never forgave the Japanese. He was in the Navy. He married my grandma. He fathered 5 children, 2 boys and 3 girls. He cheated on my grandma and married the other women. He owned a bar. He threw silver dollars off of the ship he was serving on in WWII, thinking he’d never see home again. He drove truck. He had eagles tattooed on his forearms. He collected ceramic figurines full of liquor. He was larger then life. He had diabetes. He had goats. He had 3 mongrel dogs. He hurt my father deeply. He died of cancer. He thought he’d die in the Pacific fighting the “Japs”.

This is all I know of a man whose blood runs in my veins. This is all I know the man whose life I dreamed of chronicling. But I could never find the courage to speak up or the words to say. I sat there unhinged and desperate to escape during holidays. Not wanting to feel the tension and anger, the resentment, and love, the hero worship and scapegoating all fermenting in that tiny old trailer. I was only a child begging for his father and grandfather to be the adults I wanted them to be. So that the air could clear and we could all finally breath. They never should have done that to me. We all ended up losers. My dad lost his father, my grandfather lost his son. I’m crying now thinking that they never got to know each other, perpetual strangers to each other constantly dancing through a lifetime of introductions. I don’t want this to happen to me and my dad. I want to know the man who has most influenced my life. I want to understand who he is.

I don’t want to do what he did with his father.

If only we learned from those who came before…

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Wilfred Owen

 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

 

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You just joined the Jedis

I don’t have to tell anyone that religion has been around for a long time. Artifacts and red dust found at Neanderthal archaeological sites have been interpreted by Scientists as having a religious purpose. Every human society known to science has had some form of religion, so for whatever reason it has been with us. In recent years religion has been taking a beating from what has been dubbed by the media and others as “the new atheists”, fellows like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett who have recently released a number of books that attack religion, faith, and spirituality itself as evils that have outlived their usefulness to Mankind. Their books and rhetoric have drawn the ire of Religious leaders and believers, creating a whole new genre of youtube video.

While traditional religions have been losing their faithful and clout for the last 50 years (though this is a very relative term, as fundamentalism and religious activism have increased in proportion) interest in “new age” faiths, pagan beliefs, eastern religion, and other esoteric sects and belief systems. Most of these “new age” religions at least purport to be the distillation of age old secrets and beliefs, or at least a new revelation from a traditional deity. There are of course totally new home grown religions appearing, the Church of the Sub Genius, Pastafarians, innumerable others as well (think the hale-bop cult, heaven’s gate, etc., etc.). At the bottom of this sad scale of religious belief is believers in faiths that were created whole-cloth from the minds of people who pretend for a living and here we find such sad people like Jedis and Scientologists (who, I am only half joking, will send me some sort of nasty email form their lawyers). These are people so desperate for a belief system that they actualize the fictional religions of others, this is only half true with Scientology it was fiction but Hubbard was cashing in. Wired Magazine has a small article in their October issue about this group here, I couldn’t bring myself to read all of it. Of course what Jedis stood for in the Star Wars movie was mostly a good thing, but you can do what they do without investing it with anything supernatural.

The world is fascinating enough without creating magic, and omnipotent bearded men in the sky, or alien invaders from the deep past who destroyed prisoners in volcanoes on earth with nuclear devices… Take a break, step outside and enjoy the beauty of existence for what it is, not what you wish it was.

Indecision 2007

I ripped the headline from The Daily Show, you probably knew that. Unfortunately I’m not just indecisive every 4 years, rather it’s every day. I don’t think I used to feel this way. I vaguely recall I time when I was certain of things, when I could make decisions with a minimum of thought and consideration, mostly because I didn’t have to do any thinking of my own. Lucky for me it had all been done for me by nice people who were always right. This is of course when I had faith, thinking about it now I don’t know if I can call it faith in God, it seems more accurate to say it was faith in my parents and family, and faith in the LDS Church. Why would my parents lie to me? Who else has my best interests at heart? If the Church or my parents said “No”, that was good enough for me, even more it freed me up from having to make difficult ethical decisions. I didn’t have to way both sides of a question. I didn’t have to exam things from different points of view. This had been done and the correct answer package delivered. This made life at times very easy, it made me decisive and quick, all with any lack of guilt or doubt. Better, it made me feel superior, I knew what was right and everyone who didn’t agree was wasting their time debating and questioning, worse they were sinning and needed to be corrected, either in this life or the next. Self righteousness is never pretty, though we see a lot of it in the media, where every public person dresses themselves in it, as if it covers over a plethora of sins, the least among them being poor judgment.

Now though, I don’t have the benefit of people making decisions for me (except he “experts” in Sacramento and Washington D.C.) I’m constantly examining the reasons behind the decisions I make, this coupled with the fact that never had decisive nature, can make coming to conclusions difficult. It is hard for me to have definitive reasons for the things I believe now. I can support causes and beliefs, but it is only because the evidence to support them is stronger than the alternatives, nothing is set in stone, nothing is permanent and while I feel I am a better person for this, it comes at a price. The price of not knowing whether I am right, and after 2o years of having that it can be unsettling when it is gone, like a skiff suddenly being cut from it’s moorings, I find myself adrift in a sea of thought and opinion.

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