Necessity Is A Mother

Recently I was in a van with a bunch of folks from my building, coming back from the food bank, when a man with a shopping cart pushed it off the curb across an intersection right in front of us, while we had the green light. I reacted first and said, “Smart!” Then the others all said, “Stupid!” That got me thinking. Why am I so unrelentingly ironic?

I’ve also thought about how a lot of people say things to me like, “Dr. Wes, you must be the smartest person who ever lived. Where do you get your amazing understanding and knowledge of everything, especially things you’ve never experienced, like racecar driving, or stellar nuclear fusion, or significant work, or humility?”

The answer, of course, is that I utilize my enormous gift of imagination (making stuff up in my head), combined with my equally enormous gift of association (making the made-up stuff line up with other stuff that’s not so made up).

Let me illustrate. I have never actually tied one end of a long elastic cord to the railing of a bridge and the other end to my ankles and then took a flying leap off the bridge into an enormous gorge over jagged rocks. So how could I ever speak knowledgeably about bungee jumping? It’s easy! I just imagine stepping in front of a #1 bus on its way past Yesler and imagine showing the driver my middle finger. When the driver slams on his brakes and stops the bus an inch from my nose, in my imagination, I’ve understood the essence of bungee jumping. And aren’t the essences of things all we ever need of them?

But being so gifted intellectually isn’t all sweetness and sunshine, or pizza and cheese, or pajamas and coeds. There’s hardship too. I have long been a target of bigotry, having to endure the taunts and slurs of brainists. Growing up, I was called vicious names like Egghead, Einstein, Brainiac, College Material, Smarty Pants, Smart, and Poindexter.

The turning point came in the 8th grade when my math teacher called in our homework and I had forgotten to do mine. Supposedly his difficult homework should have taken me an hour to do, but I said, “No problem,” and took some paper and did the assignment in front of him, in a minute. The teacher said I was “weird.” At first I took that to be a compliment. But then I realized he didn’t mean, “You’re refreshingly different” or “You’re oddly delightful,” but rather something dark and mean, like, “You’re never going to own a house on Mercer Island,” or “You’re never going to be a member in good standing of a major fraternal organization such as the Elks or the Rotary Club,” or “You’re never going to sleep with a cheerleader.”

At that, something snapped inside, and, all at once, I became mean-spirited. I began to plot revenge on all the brainists. I used my enormous intellect and inhuman imagination for evil rather than good, as I dreamed up one hideous punishment after another for my many tormentors.

Sadly, most of the punishments I dreamed up were out of my price range. Being 13, I had no credit, and as my parents were cheap bastards my allowance barely paid for my school lunches. So I was unable to realize my plans involving the fighter jet, the remote-controlled giant robot with the heat-ray eyes, and the genetically engineered jock-eating gerbil.

I could complain about that from here to the end of the column, but the truth is that “Necessity is a Mother” and never having a mass-murdering genetically engineered gerbil made me what I am today, and that’s something I’m thankful for.

Because there wouldn’t be any Adventures in Irony if I hadn’t been forced to learn more constructive ways to cope with frustration than bombing and strafing all of my enemies.

If only all of us could be as fortunate as I’ve been.

Intelligence is for SOCAs

Let’s talk about subversion!

“The Raging Grannies” is a worldwide subversive movement. It aims to undermine our (your!) civilization’s underpinnings and metaphoric undergarments. It takes our most underpinned, our elderly women, and uses them as weapons of mass instruction. Its MO consists of nothing less insidious than the wearing of silly clothes and the singing of horribly silly, but instructive, songs.

Who is really behind The Raging Grannies? Could it be the world’s grannies themselves? Could it be that our Mothers and our Mother’s Mothers have become subversives entirely on their own? Or are these unveiled, exhibitionistic women, who wear the silly hats and sing the silly songs, not the brainwashed dupes of Al-Qaeda?

Speaking for itself, members of the local chapter of The Raging Grannies were recently quoted singing, "Oh, we're a gaggle of grannies, urging you off of our fannies. We're raising our voice. We want a new choice. No -- more -- war." Clearly they are intent on ducking the question.

One member, and herself intent on ducking the question, indeed on ducking any and everything, is Anitra “Not an Italian Duck, But Ducky-ish” Freeman. Ms. Freeman, like the others, won’t admit to being a tool of Al-Qaeda, even to me. But regular readers of this column will know that I have spent many years in close association with Ms. Freeman, and they will correctly guess that I have thereby been afforded deep insights into her devious ways.

What I know about Freeman tells me that the evil masterminds behind The Raging Grannies are truly masterful, for if she is any indication, these hardened women aren’t going to give up their secrets to the prying eyes of mere amateurs.

Thank goodness the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped in. America’s professional prying eyes have been surveilling the elderly female parodyists for a while now, and any day they will get the goods on them, revealing them for the threat they are. Or not. In either case we can sleep peacefully at night knowing that our trusted G-Men are on the job, protecting us from people who sing.

I wouldn’t have brought any of this up now if I hadn’t read the news from the other side of the Atlantic that Tony Blair is starting up an organization intended to be modeled on the FBI, to be named, and I swear on a stack of holy scriptures of all faiths true and false I am not making this up, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA.

How can anything modeled on today’s FBI be called the Serious Organised Crime Agency? How about calling it the Silly Organised Crime Agency? That would fit. And since it won’t change the acronym to call it that, that’s what I’m going to call it. The acronym is perfect. SOCA to me, SOCA to you, yes.

The news stories say that about a third of the initial staffing for SOCA will come from British customs. Those are the twits who wear bowlers and carry bumbershoots and, if you’re a married man, dig through your suitcase during inspection until they find a pair of women’s lacy underpants, and hold it up where your wife can see and say, “What’s this now?” and she says, “Hey, those aren’t mine!” and you have to say to her, “Maybe they got in there by accident at the cleaners in Amsterdam” and she says, “As soon as we get home I’m filing for a divorce!” and you think, “Customs twit.”

It’s clearly better that Customs twits work in the Silly Organised Crime Agency than that they root through our suitcases. They will make excellent British equivalents of our G-Men. Blair is definitely on the right track.

That right track, of course, is the track to greater unity in our civilization, to be achieved by eliminating all traces of disunity, such as unapproved silliness and unaccounted-for undergarments, until we are all one great united government approved and accounted-for whole.

The Ol' Perspecter

We are excited about all the news concerning Viagra these days. We get to use arithmetic!

They say 42 or 43 of the roughly 30 million users of Viagra and the like have become blind as a possible result of their use. Additionally, somewhere on the order of a thousand sex offenders in some other states have been getting Viagra from Medicaid, even though that is stupid.

OK, so we learn that 0.143 percent of one sex offender in those states should now be blind! An entire 3/10,000th of a blind sex offender may be running around in New York State alone! At this rate, they'll all be blind in a million years, making them that much easier to hide from.

All of this is nevertheless dreadful news for Pfizer, which makes Viagra, because now men everywhere will forgo sex in order to save their vision, causing Pfizer to go bankrupt. Ha! That was a little joke of mine. Nobody is going to give up sex just to see. Still, Pfizer is worried that possible new warnings for their product might scare very stupid people, thereby ever so slightly decreasing the profits they make off the highly valuable demographic of Very Foolish, But Somehow Not Completely Parted From Their Money Yet, People.

I think, regardless of Pfizer's worries, we SHOULD warn guys that if they use Viagra regularly it might raise their odds of going blind to as much as 2 in a million, if that will help them make an informed decision for once in their pitifully ignorant, uninformed, existences.

For that very same reason, I am in favor of many other kinds of warning notices. Surely if we warn people of dangers we could only improve their lives, never diminish them. And wouldn't it be so much more useful if all the scissors we made, or that the Chinese made for us, had the words, "do not run with this product in hands - eye puncture may occur," rather than always having to rely on one's memory of one's mother? What if one had no mother? What if one had no memory, owing to advanced dementia? What if one were raised without scissors, forced to cut paper with crude razor blades, therefore having had insufficient direct prior experience with scissors, making one's parental admonitions seem purely theoretical, lessening their impact?

To take another example, shouldn't there be warnings on car doors? Let's do the math. There are 15 deaths per year per 100,000 Americans (whether they drive or not!) due to traffic accidents. That works out to around 4500 deaths per each 30 million, a lot more than 43. So maybe a warning on each car door would be appropriate. I'm thinking of something to the effect: "You are 100 times more likely to die from riding cars like this one than to go blind from using Viagra. According to 4 out of 5 doctors, dying is worse than blindness. But remember that Detroit and Toyota depend on you. Please make an informed choice."

How about warnings on warnings? "Warning, the following warning may either (1) unnecessarily alarm you, due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, causing you to avoid living your life, or (2) not alarm you enough, because you've seen too many warnings already today, and due to an unbelievable lack of ability to keep things in perspective, and as a result you may very well die or at least be permanently maimed. But remember that the medical profession needs work too. Please make an informed choice."

Obligatory homeless connection: How about warnings on streets? "Warning, if you use this product as a home, you are twenty times more likely to be murdered in your sleep, while everybody else on the planet only cares whether they can take sex-enhancement pills safely. Oh, wait, you probably don't have a choice about living here. Never mind."

Can't Draw A Leviathan? What Good Are You?

The other day I got into an argument with a vendor about whose mother was worst. From my understanding it boiled down to the fact that her mother both looked and acted like the Wicked Witch of the West, so I should give up, cry Uncle, and admit that her mother was by far the worst.

I'm sorry, but the Wicked Witch of the West was a pushover compared to my mother. My mother would not send flying monkeys to do her dirty work. My mother would go do it herself, because she thought the hands-on approach was more fun. My mother was no ugly cackling witch, either. She was pretty and personable, so she could get away with just about anything. My mother was more along the lines of your basic conniving, manipulating, torturer -- the kind that never leaves permanent marks as evidence. My mother made Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest) look like Mary Poppins.

As usual such thoughts made me think of Job. I thought what I always think when I think of my mother, that Job didn't really have it so bad. He didn't have my Mom.

That brings up one of my chief complaints about the Bible. That whole Book of Job was really underdone, in my own disinterested, impartial, and objective opinion. I mean, I personally didn't write that Book, so it's no skin off MY nose if it's thirty chapters short of being done. I'm just saying that if it HAD been one of mine, I wouldn't have skimped so much on the details, that's all.

Maybe there just wasn't enough space for the full treatment. OK, I can see that. But really, do you think that if the author had insisted on the extra space, the editors wouldn't have slashed a few reams of begats to make room? Of course they would have.

First of all, the trials and ordeals of Job are just so understated. So, big deal, his servants were killed. He should have been happy he HAD servants. So, big deal, the fire of God burned up his sheep and dead servants, and a great wind killed his sons and daughters, and Job himself was covered head to toe with hideous sores. So what?

We all have bad days. There needed to be more detail in that part. Maybe it should've said, "And oh yes, the Lord God sent unto Job Wes Browning's Mom, and everyone did see that his suffering was great."

And sent irritable bowel syndrome. And Job should have had to endure late Sunday night TV programming, without the benefit of cable.

But the part where the Book really skimps is the part where Job and God are arguing. If I were writing it there'd be a lot more said on both sides.

Right off, I'd have God try this angle: "So Job, you think you shouldn't have things so bad 'cause you're so good. Did you ever think that was where you went wrong? Maybe I'd treat you better if you didn't think that being good automatically entitled you to it, huh?"

So then Job would go away and work on that, and then he'd come back and say, "I see your point, God, and I've mended my ways. I don't anymore believe I am entitled to good treatment for being good. So how about restoring my fortune now?"

"Good try, fleshy one! But you still expect your fortune restored, so you don't really believe what you are saying, do you? Hah! Catch 22!"

They could go back and forth like that for twenty chapters or so. Then finally Job would get smart. He'd say, "Hey! wait a minute, underlying all this is the premise that you, God, determine the Good. But suppose the Good is independent of you. Then being good, you must treat me well if it would be unjust otherwise."

At this point I would break all the conventional rules of a Biblical Book and have my ultimate protagonist (God) say, "What do you want me to be, good and just, or do you want me to be powerful enough to restore your fortune? You can't have both in this world."

I would have God spend a few chapters badgering Job into answering this question. Finally Job would give in, and true to character he would ask God to be good and just. I would then have God turn Job into a good liberal Democrat under an evil Republican administration.

Yo Mama Is A SUV

When I was six I knew that I would never lack a home. I could stay at my parents until I finished college. After that, I could always sleep in my spaceship, if necessary.

As I grew older, I came to realize that I was being silly. It didn't have to be a spaceship. It only had to be an all-terrain ground vehicle with a self-contained ecology. The ecology would include me of course. It would have a fully automated hydroponics system that would not only grow my food for me, but prepare it and serve it to me. If it weren't also a spaceship, that would be OK. It could be a time machine, for instance.

I pictured the thing being only half as long as the average camper.

My design didn't even call for a convenient door, because there would generally be no reason to leave the contraption. I imagined that I would have a television screen with which to communicate to the outside world. I could manipulate external objects with robot arms. Somehow all the books I might want to read would fit in the on-board computer.

My seat would recline to a bed. When I needed exercise I could pull a lever (all the best inventions were controlled by levers and large impressive dials in those days) and suitable exercising devices would appear at my hands and feet.

Eventually, I began to sense a crucial flaw in the design: there was no passenger seat. I came to realize that there must not only be a passenger seat, but there must be no levers between it and me. So I was finally led to appreciate the idea of a camper with a separate space for a bed.

Campers, and their latest incarnations, the SUVs, are not just alternative homes that can ease the suffering of the houseless, they are also archetypes. The security they represent is the security of the womb. I am sure that this is why so many American guys feel they have to have an SUV. They miss their mothers, in a physical way.

Clearly though, the homeless have especially good reasons to appreciate the camper. Lets say you live in Lynnwood, in a house, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in houses. Well, then, you're stuck. But now, suppose you live in Lynnwood in a camper, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in campers. Then you can drive to Bothell and wait for them to be backwards. Bothell is prettier anyway.

Lynnwood's stated problem with the camper-endowed and other such homeless, is that they often relieve themselves in bushes. This doesn't prevent everybody in Lynnwood from owning campers and/or SUVs and polluting the air I breathe by driving them unnecessarily to and from work. Taking a daily crap in the air is still OK for Lynnwood, Everett, and Mark Sidran. Just keep it off the rhododendron roots.

Then there are people like Dave, whose real name is also fake. Dave is an old friend of mine who once made the mistake of morally opposing a war while people with guns were transporting him to it. They put him in the brig. After that his life sort of went downhill.

What makes Dave interesting, besides being a man of convictions, is that he is a whiz at creating shelter in deep forest, but his livelihood (recycling the cast-off toys of the middle and upper classes) depends on living in the city. So he would be a perfect candidate for a camper, except he can't drive.

But Dave shares the dream we all have for that mobile womb. He just has had scale his dream back to more of a rickshaw-like vehicle. He would build a home on wheels which he could physically pull from parking space to parking space as needed.

Such dreams are so powerful that they consume men like Dave, so that they spend years fretting over blue prints of the perfect home away from mother, and never demand more from society than that their dreams should be possible.

A Muse-ment

Last February I admitted to having an imaginary good friend Cindy, my Muse. Questions have been raised since then, such as "What? An IMAGINARY friend?" Well, why not? After all I am imaginary myself. And (think about it!) you should be, too. Mostly, though, people complain "Why does Cindy sound like such an airhead?" To this I answer "Hey - that's my Muse you're bad-mouthing!" and "If I had called her/him James would you have interpreted her/his directness as cranial ventilation? I think not!"

But I don't have to defend Cindy or any other imaginary person. I can let her do it. Here are 3 portraits of 3 other imaginary women (all homeless) by Cindy, so you may get to know her better:

"Marjorie"

From that dark moment

A floodlight upon

A dead branch in snow

Reveals a Person

Inside and outside

Forever caring...

Shining on the lost.

For one dark moment

She feels forgotten.

Then the light expands,

Embracing her tears.

"*Elizabeth*", by Cindy

Trees outnumber *Elizabeth*

Clouds blossom Streets carpet

Locks harbor Walls garden

Glass pictures Steel poses

Lamps fountain Stones nurture

while

Trees,

still

outnumbering

*Elizabeth*,

surround and defend....

"Ann", By Cindy

Ann plays only the black keys.

The harsh realities of her life

As ex-wife and 5-time-mother

Want another scale than mine

To remind THEM of THEIR ways

Until the day she sings again.

I'd like to sum up with these Thoughts: An unexamined image is a stereotype. An unexamined intuition is a guess. And an unexamined life is a long, expensive, stupor. But if that's the way you like it who am I to argue?