The Progress of Evil

 A couple of posts ago, I lamented the deep well of evil that seems to reside inside every human heart.  The well that is so easily tapped.  The source from which we are able and more than willing to broadcast evil to every corner of the world we come in contact with.

One of the theoretical building blocks of many human religions, certainly of Christianity, since I heard it many times when we were in that world, is that humans have an inborn yearning for God.  I've heard it said that we're born with a god-shaped hole in our hearts. 

Maybe that's true.  But I think it's more likely that mankind has spent a tremendous amount of time, brain power, concentration and energy searching for someone or something to scrape our shortcomings on to.  This evil that we can't seem to control, that does such grievous damage when we allow it to escape and fester in the world...that can't possibly come from us!  So we project it on to an outside source, and create a celestial custodian whose job it is to clean up the disasters our evil leaves behind.  And when it doesn't, we whine and cry and grovel and curse.  Instead of getting a clue that the disaster comes from US and it's OUR job to clean it up.  And perhaps to take enough control of our weak selves that we keep the disasters from occurring in the first place.

The state of our country and the world at large has me indulging in a great deal of thought about where evil comes from, what it does, and whose job it is to deal with it...something we had all better figure out soon, or the consequences are going to be cataclysmic.

 

Caution: Whining Ahead

  

For the first 40 years of my life, I clung to the family of my birth.  My parents and sisters were central to my existence.  I married, we bought a home, we acquired pets and jobs and stuff.  We had a life, my husband and I, but it was always in orbit around my parents and family.   I would make little independent forays away for awhile, but I never went very far, and I always snapped back to them, like steel to a magnet.  When they moved away from me, I followed them. 

Then, all at once, I was exiled from the center of my family.  Following my dad’s death, in the midst of complicated issues of guilt, grief, and control, my mother and sisters pushed me away, turned their backs on me and marginalized me to the point that it was too painful to remain in physical proximity to the family of which I was no longer a cherished member.  So I packed up husband, dog and cats and moved away.  Only 120 miles away, but more away—physically and emotionally—than I had ever been from the roots of my existence. 

And I stayed away for eighteen years.

Mostly, I developed a tough skin.  I learned how to get along on my own.  I figured out how to extract joy from life by broadening my horizons with solitary activities.  (And I ran a restaurant that ate five years of my life.) I learned how to be without my family.  It’s not that we didn’t visit, spend times together, heal our relationship some over that 18 years.  But the relationship we’ve cobbled together with the broken pieces is vastly different from the one that was my life and breath 25 years ago, before Dad died and our world changed forever.  

I am actually mostly okay with that.  I suppose the umbilical had to be cut sometime, and maybe the reason it was so painful when it was cut was that I had waited far too long to do the deed…waited, in fact, until it was cut for me.  And that was not destined to be a smooth transition.   

Three years ago, I got sick of the redneck world we had moved to, tired of living so far away from the place we had chosen as home when we left actual home, and a little paranoid about what our choices were going to be, with retirement roaring up on us like a freight train.  Some stubborn, residual attachment planted deep in my brain insisted that family still meant comfort and safety.  So we “downsized” back to Eugene, back to the land of my sisters, for better or worse.

I don’t think I had any lofty expectations about how this was going to affect our relationship.  I guess I hoped it would bring us closer.  I guess I was just tired of being so alone all the time, and any scraps of companionship I could scrape together would be better than the solitary existence that had become so colorless and lonely.  And for the most part, that’s how it has played out.  And it’s okay.  Good enough, anyway.  My life is certainly far superior to what it was, even taking into consideration the last two pandemic-ridden years.

But the reason I’m writing this, the thing I’ve come to notice more and more, is that, when I’m with the sisters, I’m…invisible.  I don’t much get a word in edgewise.  My “problems” are not problems to them, because each of them seems to have life challenges that are so much more difficult than mine.  To them, I come from a place that is solid (in that I have a successful 45-year marriage to a man who is actually a reasonable human being) and secure (we have a home with no mortgage payments, make enough money to pay the bills and have a little left over.)  So my role it so sit and smile and give no input when conversation drifts to life’s difficulties.  Okay. 

However, if I DO try to add my voice, or relate a story that I believe contributes to the conversation, they talk over me as if I haven’t even opened my mouth.

THAT bugs the shit out of me.  I find myself pulling back and avoiding spending too much time among the sisters.  A situation I had hoped I would not have to navigate any more.  But there it is.

And it sucks, because I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to doing things by myself again. 

Shopping alone isn’t any fun.  It never was, but I did it and told myself it was fine.  Going out for little picnics and little photo-shoots and drives/walk out in nature by myself is just…lonely.  I could do that, and I have.  It’s obviously better than not going at all.  But I’m not excited about re-visiting that chapter of my life.

So here I am, destined to pick my way between unfulfilling solitude and companionship that is almost equally unfulfilling.

Bah.  Here we go again. 

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday

 While my sister spends the day freaking out about the number of candles on her birthday cake (if we could find that many...)

I'll take a few moments to remember the man with whom she shares a birthday.  The finest man it has ever been my privilege to have known.

Miss you, Dad.  You were the best. 

Self Discovery

Too close to bedtime Tuesday night, I downed a glass of Barefoot Bubbly and a frozen strawberry sorbet bar.  A little later, I swallowed an Ibuprofen, hoping that would take enough of the edge off my recently rampant arthritis discomfort to facilitate a decent night’s sleep. 

AND… I woke up at about 2:00 am with a raging case of heartburn.  The feels-like-I-swallowed-a-bottle-of-drano kind of heartburn. 

To ward off another of those middle of the night panic attacks brought on by physical misery when one is half asleep, I cracked open my iPad and delved into the archives of “Coming to Terms.”

I ended up in a place on my blog timeline that I had completely forgotten about.  It was December of 2016, and apparently I had decided that I wanted to complete 1300 posts by the end of my 13^th year of blogging.  I had actually set my sights on that goal two months prior, in October, where I revved up and posted 36 entries in 31 days.  I was trying to set myself up for a relatively attainable less than 30 posts in each of the two final months of the year.  Then November of 2016 happened.  The shock of the election, along with a 40^th anniversary trip to Canada (where we seriously considered never going back to the US) derailed that goal and set me up for the nearly impossible task of putting up 40 posts in the month of December.  

Impossible.  Unthinkable.  Absolutely unattainable.

But I did it.

A remarkable feat five years ago, to be sure.  But when viewed through the lens of how much I’ve struggled to drag myself to 40 posts a year of late…well, it blew me away.

So of course I had to read them.  

And they were decent.  Good, even.  I seemed to have a remarkable amount to say, and a still-viable voice with which to say it, five years ago.  I could even make a post about a Christmas shopping stop at Sears articulate and interesting, if not compelling.  

I don’t know whether to be beaming with pride in my past self, or deeply disappointed and depressed by what I have become.  Perhaps the two extremes will neutralize each other, so I can go on with my milquetoast life, rather than heading toward the nearest bridge to throw myself off.  

Maybe what I should make of this is this:  I have the potential.  It hasn’t gone anywhere.  I just have to tap back into it.  Which will take discipline, perseverance, creativity and imagination—four things of which, for whatever reason, I have found myself in short supply lately.

And I’ll need to crawl outside my head long enough to observe things that inspire me to write about them.  I need to get back in touch with the world.  And maybe that’s been the problem, in these pandemic-battered, fear-driven, contentious times.  The world has become so ugly and so dominated by negativity, strife, selfishness, anger and violence that I have pulled in my head like a little turtle.  There’s only so much of that crap you can expose yourself to after awhile.  And only so much ranting and scolding and proselytizing one can do before it becomes obvious that you’re screaming at a hurricane.  

 

 

At some point, you shut your mouth, turn your back, and walk away.  But...should you?   

I don't know.  I only know that being silenced is almost as suffocating as shouting into a gale.

And now I have to figure out what I want to do about it. 

 

My Advice...

 COVID-19 is now entering its third year of vexing the planet. 

I distinctly remember St. Patrick's Day, 2020.  It was the cliff from which I fell off into the abyss of anxiety in which I mostly floated, sometimes almost drowned, for weeks after the onset of COVID. 

We had our last lovely dinner together as an extended family--corned beef and cabbage at my sister's house.  Afterward, I stressed for two weeks at every twinge, just knowing I had contracted the dread disease and was going to end up in the hospital, or worse.  It was a terrible time.

I haven't written all that much about COVID issues since.  Which seems odd, since it has certainly dominated the world, the news, and our daily lives in these 2+ years.  I suppose I couldn't support endlessly beating that dead horse here on my blog, since it was all over every other aspect of social media.

But now, I think it's worth noting that the world seems to have decided it is done with COVID.  At least, the western world.  Mask mandates are being terminated all over Europe and North America.  Government agencies have all but given up on vaccination efforts, since we're now at the point where the benefit of vaccinations is very nearly neutralized by the damage done through the increasingly violent political polarization surrounding them. 

And it's also worth noting that just because we want to be "done" with COVID-19, this does not mean that COVID-19 is done with us.  

My advice, as captured on Twitter:

I will now step off my soap box (and don my N95...)

Hands Off The American Flag, Traitors

Dear Far Right Wing Q-Nuts and Trumpanzees:

If you can't love this country with all its boogers and warts and people who don't believe exactly what YOU believe; and don't behave exactly as YOU behave; or have skin that isn't exactly the same color as YOURS; or speak exactly the same language YOU speak...

Then you don't get to claim THIS FLAG as your own.

 

Because this flag represents, in the words you like to throw into everyone's faces,

"ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE, 

with liberty and justice for all."

And you don't believe one word, for all that you think every person in the country should slap hand over heart and recite them every day, hot tears of patriotism trickling down their cheeks.

(Much as you don't believe one word of any prayer you recite by rote to your version of God, but that's another rant...)

So get your hands off the flag of the UNITED States of America.

You can have this one--the flag of losers, racists and bullies...

 

Or this one, which many of you seem to prefer these days, as if an enemy perceived by those who don't share your political ideology must be a friend of yours... 

You traitorous bastards do NOT love the nation the Stars and Stripes represent.  

Wave your TRUE flags. And go to hell right along with them.