cyranosdemet

Ok, not really, punctuation is a good thing.  But I heard a tidbit drift across the other night down at the diner that involved punctuation, at least one element of it, and it’s been slowly foaming in the back of my thoughts ever since.  The humble semi-colon apparently has been drafted to have a brand new meaning.  Apparently some well meaning folk have designated it the new symbol for those involved in some manner with the subject of mental illness.  Hmmm… ok, if you say so.

The choice of the semi-colon is actually a bit interesting considered against its’ grammatical usage. A semi-colon is one of the trickier of the punctuations to use correctly.  As I understand it (and lord knows I’m no grammar nazi so it’s entirely possible my understanding is incomplete) a full colon is used to indicate the start a listing of related things or ideas within the sentence that share some commonality defined by the section before the colon appeared.  When the list is of objects or simpler well understood ideas the more common comma is most often seen used for a delimiter to break up a list into its’ component items, but when the list is of new thoughts or new ideas spun off from the definition the semi-colon comes into play.   Most generally the list definition added to any section defined by the semi-colon would stand on its’ own as a full and complete sentence.  The humble and in these latter days seldom used (beyond the inevitable emoticon semi-colon allowed writers of days gone by to build very complex sentences reflecting very complex ideas, veritable eco-systems of related thought.  Where there are semi-colons there is usually a great deal of thought or, failing deep and deliberate thought, a very limited understanding of the subject at hand.

Perhaps it is the very complexity the semi-colon enables that got it chosen as a small and unobtrusive tattoo symbol for those who define themselves to the world in skin and ink.  Fair enough, I’ve no grief with someone for choosing to wear such a symbol be it as fair warning to the world or to indicate their life stands in support of someone so afflicted.  Not a bad thing, not at all.  Still though for myself I think I’ll stay with me old favorite the triple dot ellipse… the evolving thought, continued.

If your soul were fully writ
Upon your naked skin
Tell me Pilgrim, if you can,
What alphabet it’s in?

The clock crawled up to midnight, on the stroke of midnight the noise faded from painful to merely loud.  Not that you could hear the noise in the cockpit, the cockpit was soundproof.  Soundproof, and currently lit by more red and yellow telltales than green.  The board actually looked like the Christmas tree it was named after.  The pilot surveyed his world, spoke to his second in a tired voice.

“We got enough left to get this thing back in the barn under it’s own power?”

His second, as weary as he, didn’t need to read his panels to answer.  “Yea, barely, if we cut Hawaii off early.  Three and eight are still at rated nominal, I can coax sixty percent out of two and eleven for a little while.”

The pilot shook his head.  A three month run and they had two and two halves left out of twelve.  What more could they want from this contraption?  “Then I say pull the freaking plug and let’s go home.  Call the barn, tell ‘em we’re on the way.”

“I’m totally down with that idea.” 

He reached up, yanked a large red handle.  Outside the night went almost silent, almost dark, almost peaceful.  Almost.  The only thing disturbing the peace was the hiss of laboring hydraulics as the far end of Madison Avenue lifted three stories into the air, the road beneath settling down six more leaving a gaping hole in the heart of the city.  Two deep clunks resonated and for a long moment the night was startlingly silent. 

After a bit the normal noises of the city returned, a bit after that they were augmented by a long wail of clacking clanging grinding groaning sounds that echoed like the gates of hell being used for some macabre jungle gym.  The sounds traversed the night becoming softer as they went, softer and yet somehow more poignant for those who knew what they heard.  Most of the city dwellers only paid attention to them for a little bit, they’d been heard before.  Shortly afterwards again the hiss was heard and the deep clunks echoed, but everyone ignored those.  It was over.

In the cockpit the pilot took his hands off the control yoke, patted his console in salute.  “Damn, I didn’t thing you could do it but you made it home all on your own ya’ old whore,” he said.  He said something similar pretty much once a year.

From behind him his second chuckled.  “Yea, by the skin of our teeth.  Number three locked up twenty seconds ago.”  The pilot shook his head, yanked a lever by the side of his seat.  A pressure hatch swished open, the pilot and engineer rode the drop plate to the concrete four stories below. 

Stepping off the drop plate a shiny flash of light where it didn’t belong attracted the pilots attention.  Four strides later he bent and lifted the tiny talisman, held it up for inspection backlit by the lurid neon fogs settling to the floor from the greed and jealousy generators of The Mighty Merchandising Machine as they cooled.

“Sweetheart, how in the world did you end up here of all places?” he said, speaking to the mother and child pressed into the little foil nativity scene.

“Say what?” his second asked, pulling up beside him.

The pilot handed over the trinket, his second inspected it as he had.  “No shit.  This is entirely the wrong place for you guys.  Think I’ll take you home with me, see if I can’t find you a better place to raise your child.”  He slipped the trinket into the breast pocket of his jump suit.

For a moment the two men shared a smile as they shook hands.

“Merry Christmas Bob.”

“Merry Christmas Dan.”

It’s an old saying, an old superstition if you will that has a solid basis in fact.  I’m pretty sure it began among the infantrymen, the soldiers of the great wars and it has to do with not getting yourself shot.  It’s said to be terrible luck to be the third man to light his cigarette from the same match.  Makes sense, by the time the third guy gets a light the sniper out there in the darkness has a bullet on the way aimed at that tiny dot of light that just happens to be right in front of your face. It dawns on me though I’ve seen something concerning women that also comes in sets of three, and in point of fact is exactly opposite the first consideration.

As is so often the case this observation came into focus courtesy of one of the gals crewing the diner.  Normally she’ll be working day shift, moving like the wind and keeping the whole operation pointed in the right direction, a true veteran.  But for the last few weeks staffing issues have caused her to work the hoot owl overnight shift a few days a week.  Now the overnight shift is either utterly dead or utter chaos (when the drunks arrive out of the bars) and so during the dead times she gets to be human, play with the regulars and tease the cooks to fill the time.

The other night I was camping in the diner, drawing doodles and trying to bring a totally different thought (from the Third Reality of Man essays) into focus when I overheard her talking to a fellow new to the place.  They were discussing marriages, he was fishing for her current status (be careful what you ask for dude, you’ll end up like the Indian who chased the puma till the cat caught him!).  Anyway, what caught my attention was a change in her tone of voice, for a little bit it went soft and sensual, almost to be called seductive, way out of character for her.  Normally she’s the kind to say “Oh hell yeah!” with a great big grin and wiggle, you know, kid sister of the cowboy who’ll say “I don’t give a damn how big an ole’ boy he is, I’ll whup his ass anyway”  and then grin.  But not in that moment. In that moment, for a few moments, she was a totally different woman.

What did she say?  She said “I’m on my third now, and I think he might just make it.”  I looked up, took in the look on her face and looked back down shaking my head.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard something similar, in a similar tone of voice and demeanor, and what suddenly dawned on me was that every time it was from a country girl, a redneck woman just as tough as her brother, in some ways tougher.  I filed away her expression in the library (yea, that’s one of the ways I want to remember her) and since I wasn’t having any luck on what I’d been working on anyway changed the direction of my thought.

To a totally informal quicky count three quarters of the country women I know are on a third husband.  Why is it so many of the country girls don’t seem to settle down until they’re with their third husband?    Maybe one in four will have found her mate with her first husband, but if the first doesn’t work out they almost always seem to settle down with number three.  Not very many seconds at all.

I’m coming to believe the reason has to do with her pride, and yes, a country woman is a proud creature.  Ignore that fact at your own risk, bro.  I think it has to do with her pride, how that pride is expressed as she’s in the process of growing up, how the social elements involved with the expression of that pride become a filter of a sort on what actually makes it to her heart for her to work with while the job of growing up is underway.  It’s starting to make more and more sense why and how such a filter would have a great deal to do with the whole third man thing. 

The country life is in many ways a great deal more honest than the city life.  Fact takes priority over opinion.  One of the facts of country life is that the sisters compete heads up with their brothers in many of the same realms, always have.  She may not be able to throw quite as heavy a bale of hay as he can, but she can stay in the field just as long if not longer.    She doesn’t need to take anyone’s word on what she’s worth, base her self esteem on some man’s opinion of her, she has other things, real things, to draw from.  Seriously.  You think you can outride me?  Get on your horse and prove it.  Right.  She’s lighter, better balance, crushes Volkswagens between her thighs just for practice and more importantly she was second momma to that colt, it’s her horse and the animal will die trying if she asks.  That sort of thing.

Long and short of it is when you’re talking about a genuine country woman descended from and still in the mindset evolved by the pioneering women of the old west the whole women’s lib thing really didn’t have much traction in her life.  The elements of her self esteem, her pride were not formed in the same set of molds as those born to the urban or suburban life.  She really didn’t need liberating, she was never enslaved to begin with.  

Her problem is finding men folk undamaged by what the maturation of the land and culture have done to their lives.  The sad truth is that the country man took more damage to feminism than did the country woman.  The closing of the land closed off so many of the root sources of a country man’s pride and identity that in what is essentially an expression of despair the incidences of gross excess in all of the self destructive behaviors began climbing like a homesick angel.   She has a hard time finding a man of her own kind whose life isn’t deformed and incomplete by reason of the compression.

I think it’s that compression of the country man’s life that drives the whole affair. 

Like I said, the country girl compete with her brothers pretty well heads up, a way for both to establish identity and status within their world.  But what happens when the competition isn’t based on the things required to take a chunk of wilderness and turn it into a home?  What happens when the competitions become who can out endure who in the self destructive behaviors? 

(Ok dammit, load up twenty bucks worth of Tammy Why-Not on the jukebox and someone go get some more beer, we’re almost out and what I’m gonna be talking about next is gonna need a whole bunch of both)

Number one?  He’s the guy she couldn’t drink under the table.  He’s the man whose passion and pride was just as hot as hers, she couldn’t intimidate him into subservience.  He’s the guy the other girls want but he’s mine dammit, keep your hands off (and of course, same same from his side).  He’s the guy who showed up one night at their lover’s bed carrying a (metaphorical) hackamore bridle only to find her wearing a set of (allegorical) Spanish spurs… barefoot.  Round and round they go, and in the end decide if neither can take the other down then they might as well get married because what the hell, if we can’t take each other down then life ain’t got half a chance of taking us down playing as a team.

Sometimes it works, but only when the underlying attitudes on a great many things are still synchronized by their culture.  The ever more elevated failure rate of first marriages gives pretty solid evidence of how often that happens.  The changes of time and tide have left both compromised, and he more than she.  They chose each other not based on their relative abilities at doing positive things but rather on their abilities to endure the self destructive things adopted as substitutes for what changing times have denied.  Fact is that sort of endurance isn’t the same thing at all as the sort of endurance needed to support each other across the years and the tears, nor does it do a thing for learning the wisdom of when to offer support, and when not.  More often than not the marriage fails as they turn and return to the only things they know… a challenge of the self destructive just when both are most desperately in need of genuine support rather than a competition of internal ego.

Number two?  That’s when they realize what happened with number one and set about learning how to be supportive in a high endurance relationship.  A good thing really, but one minor problem:  when self reliance is a point of pride at the deepest of levels for one to offer support to the other the other has to be in need of support or what is offered becomes an insult.  When both  are in the support mode?  It’s impossible.  For the relationship to work both must be perpetually off their game, eroding away the sources of their emotional strength in order to provide the other with something where they need support.  Often enough the self destructive behaviors are continued more to compel a state where support is needed rather than any genuine desire.  Still a terribly negative spiral, a relationship based not on mutual strengths but on mutual weaknesses.  Co-dependence takes the place of both bridle and spurs.  They don’t tend to last long, a relationship like that is actually harder on a life than the first kind, it’s get out or degrade into broken down derelicts.  The vast majority get out, and fairly quickly.  What happens to them that don’t generally ain’t very pretty.

That’s what she’s known as she finished growing up.  They married young, that’s part of the convention of the culture, to marry young and start the work while you’re at the peak strength of youth.  When the land was a challenge to fill both lives to the limits of that strength it makes perfect sense.  But… that ain’t the way things are anymore. 

What usually happens is that by the time she’s looking for number three, usually with two or three children to raise, she’s actually had a chance to understand what it takes to build a marriage.  Both she and the guys who moved opposite her in this dance of changing times have had the chance to realize that building a home in today’s world is still a matter of taking that home away from the wilderness, it just isn’t the honest wilderness of nature but rather the despicable and dishonest wilderness of modern sexual politics where the shamans and the shrinks, the macho gay masters and the feminazi libber lesbians are constantly working to make sure anyone who has any intent to a stable fertile hetero relationship will fail that understanding and ultimately degrade into the sort of derelicts where they harvest both their living and their livelihood.

So, back to where this little ramble began?  Third man on a match?  Very bad idea.  But if you happen to be the third man to strike fire in country girls heart?  It’s just entirely possible fate just put the best thing that could ever happen to you right there where you can see her… if you’re strong enough in the ways that matter to keep up with her.

Let’s face it, probably the largest threat to humanity at the moment is population pressure.  Even more than the demands for physical resources is the challenge of living with the stress generated by so very, very many personalities attempting to cohabitate on one rather overstuffed planet.  

The physical options for fixing this look rather grim, they involve things like “random population reduction” (read war) or perhaps “compulsory population attrition” (read mandatory sterility), you know, those good old Orwellian desperation generated double think euphemisms for “we need to get rid of about half of us.”  Hmmmm… all very biblical when you get right down to it.  Maybe the mark of the beast will turn out to be a USDA stamp of some sort like in the movie “Soylent Green.”  I don’t know, I don’t really want to know. 

But that’s just the physical side of the coin.  Maybe the brains that be have decided to approach the problem from the other side of the issue, decided that if enough personalities can be structured as functionally identical then the stress levels can be held manageable for long enough to not need such drastic measures.  After all, the stress is being generated by so many different personalities, so many unique personalities putting unique loadings on the social systems.  Perhaps they’re thinking that if ten or a hundred or a thousand physical bodies share one unique personality then the stress levels will fall by the same order of magnitude and genocide of one form or another can be avoided. 

If that’s the case then the machiavellian maneuverings of mass technology take on an entirely different perspective.  From that perspective the digi-drone gestalt resolves out as the saving grace of the human race, their essential suicide of self a noble sacrifice to save the race.  

What a thought: AT&T saved the world with a smart phone.  What a thought.  Think that one deserves a full double shot of good whiskey.

It was in the comment section afterwards, and it said something to the effect of “if you read this article, if you even hovered to long over the headline, you’re now in their database.”  I’d say those are probably true statements.  All I can say is freedom ain’t free, these days that’s the price of patriotism. 

“You hold ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the ass…”  You’re fast, aggressive, arrive with overwhelming firepower and don’t stay any longer than it takes to dispose of the target you were sent to neutralize.  The kind of warfare Patton learned from his mentor enemy Rommel.  The way wars used to be fought, WW2 evolved into version 6.4 or so by now (I don’t play Call of Duty so I’m just guessing at the version number), the styles of warfare where physical geography is the prime factor in separating the combatants out into those called US and they known as THEM.  The kind of warfare Patton espoused as a necessary evolutionary function within the global community of mankind.  The kind of warfare every nation’s military was designed for, what the vast majority of mankind thinks of when you say “war.”  

The key factoid (to understanding today) is in the paragraph above.  Did you notice it go by?  I’ll be back to the thought here in a bit, but in the meanwhile a humble example of what I’m talking about from me world of real life. 

A couple of years ago I could go to pretty much any parts store and buy one off the rack for less than ten dollars, they were stocked along with the fuses.  You know, fuses, the things that protect an electrical circuit from melting down and starting a fire if they short out.  But a gross excess of amperage isn’t the only danger an electric circuit must defend against, particularly if it’s a DC circuit involving solid state devices, computers and the like.  If you’re a device designed to use DC electricity (as in your automobile, or the working guts of the computer you’re using to read this) one of your larger enemies is the presence of AC electricity (as in your house) running loose in your wires.  The two forms of electricity just flat do not mix well, failure isn’t an if, it’s a when. 

Those who know their technology already know I’m talking about a diode, another of those ubiquitous little devices that keep the modern world going.  A diode is a device that only allows electrons to flow in one direction, the symbol used on the diagrams to mean “diode here” includes an arrow pointing in the direction of flow.  You use diodes to convert AC electricity into DC, you use a diode when you want to make double damn sure that AC electricity isn’t going to damage your DC circuit.  In the latter example a diode is like a little soldier who will die (blow to open and break the circuit) before he’ll allow any electrons to go the other way.  Rather noble little things, in a blow the bugle and fire off a salute at sunset sort of way. 

I ran into one that did just that, died in defense of the system.  Yea, I’m still working on my old pickup truck Brutus, checking out the full system to find and fix what a bad ground cable plus twenty years of attrition have done to the system.  I’m becoming down right intimate with Ford system IV fuel injection, a whole lot more than I ever really wanted to be.  He’s down, I don’t see any sense in bringing him back up until I’m sure things are the way they need to be.  I need the old guy reliable, you know?  Anyhow, after climbing the system from the battery headed in I’ve found and fixed a couple of things that were no doubt major contributors to his problems, have one more major “now dammit, that CAN’T be right”  to figure out and resolve.  Quite a jigsaw puzzle, really, I’m drawing my own diagram as I ohm out the wires confirming the circuits.  Victory will be sweet, I’ll have earned it.  You see, the diode that died is in the main fusebox, its’ job was to defend the ignition system and computer from the AC electricity a defective alternator (one of the things already found and fixed) can set loose to run the wires like terrorists on the freeway.  

So what in the name of Noah’s pet whales does a blown diode in an old pickup truck have to do with modern warfare?  It has to do with that key factoid I mentioned, the bit about warfare where physical geography is the prime factor in separating the combatants out into those called US and they known as THEM.  A rather scary, hell, VERY scary fact of the modern world is that combat, warfare, is no longer primarily region to region but rather corporation vs. corporation, geography really doesn’t play any major role, not anymore.  All the daughters of ceCorporation (ceFord, ceGE, ceHaliburton etc et all ad nauseum) are involved in a very nasty civil war, and for them the geographic regions and the forms of politically motivated conventional warfare are just subsets of their arsenal.  They are some seriously vicious bitches, and for them this is mortal combat, a fight to the death, they’re using anything and everything they can get their hands on. 

The fact that a couple of years ago I could buy a direct replacement diode for Brutus off the rack while now every parts store says “dealership item” is just a tiny example of how desperate the fight has become, essentially how desperate the combatants have become to make sure they’re not helping each other survive.  Where that diode has blown there’s a really, really good chance there’s a defective alternator as well, and, well, ceFord wants to know about it and have a chance to sell you the new alternator (at grossly inflated dealership prices) by refusing to sell you the five dollar diode unless you bring the machine in for their shop to service.  They damn sure don’t like the idea of you buying and installing your own alternator from someone who *gasp* might, just might be contributing to the profitability of the parent corporation of say ceBorgWarner (memory serves BorgWarner an ally of General Motors… but not totally sure on that point, uniforms would be a really nice thing, you’d know who was on who’s side). 

Folks, heads up, wise up.  The Bushite Bastards are back, now fighting on several fronts.  The concept of Monopoly by Maintenance is one of the newer weapons in the arsenal of ceCorporations’ civil war, it is being installed at the state level of things (where politicians are cheaper to buy and easier to hide the bribe) and it has the potential to have “Ford Territory” or “Honda Turf” on the maps in say fifty some years.  

Just one of their campaigns, nasty as it is the lesser of their efforts.  The biggy they’re building (think Nazi Germany’s nuclear program during WW2) is the loophole the DAMNED BY ANY DECENT DIETY BUSHITES have discovered in the United States Constitution and are proceeding to exploit with things like the Trans Pacific Partnership and others of the same ilk, but, more on that later.  If you haven’t checked out what the World Trade Organization is up to these days on behalf of their Bushite masters DO IT NOW or forever live with the consequences, and while you’re doing that I’m gonna go fire up the volt-ohm meter and go back to being a modern mechanic.  

Just what fucking eco-idiot decided to bolt wheels on a computer and sell it for a pickup truck?   I want to find this person and make very, very sure they do not enjoy meeting me.