science

The Chool Bus (ch17)

CHAPTER 17: Professor T explains the rationale for his research.

Professor T has some well defined opinions about the nation’s fibrillating heart. Indeed. But also, he tries to keep personal opinions to himself when discussing research as a general rule. After all, it’s about the study’s participants and data, not the researcher. That said, he’s fairly open with the Forks and Buck, especially after a couple of margaritas. Something about returning to his grunge-metal roots in Seattle filled him with a blustering swagger that can only be interpreted as flow state channeling.

To set the scene: It was the gang’s last night in Seattle. As a fitting sendoff, they chose a place frequented by their favorite artists, the Central Saloon. 

“Woohoo, air-fried vittles and libations!” Jack was hungry and the gang was stoked to commune with their favorite grunge ghosts. This was the place. In the 1970s the Central Saloon helped introduce live blues and rock to the neighborhood. In the 1980s it played a role in the rise of Grunge, hosting shows by the genre’s leading lights. 

“Yup… that sounds like a solid plan,” said Mork T.

Now, when Professor T gets all liquered up…deep into one of those no-holds-barred-rages…he starts grumbling about the Great Flyover. He’s been known to echo the likes of HL Mencken, lamenting how sectors of the rural South and Midwest are vast, Dollar General wastelands where intelligence is a mark of shame and systemic prejudice clings like barnacles on the ship of culture.

“We are what we think and the American media is currently a swamp of rot and resentment,” said Professor T. “The national heart isn’t just skipping beats… it’s in a full-blown, fibrillating code-blue emergency.” According to the Professor, a glowing ember of white resentment turned into a goddamn inferno the moment an intelligent, scandal-free black man ascended to the White House without an Anglo-Saxon overseer holding the leash. This sent the small-town bourgeois…those without skills to join the laptop/air travel class or too proud to mount the struggle bus…into a total psychological aneurysm. “Many find themselves lifetime members of the doomed underclass… they know it and somebody has to pay. This paves an express-lane for demagogues promising retribution.” Mork T was approaching a tequila-fueled angry flow state.

Through the din of house music (a bit too loud) and the compensating murmur of the bar patrons, Professor T, fueled by top-shelf blue agave continued, “Let’s get down to brass tacks. This tooth-gnashing fury, in part, can be traced to the degradation of an indispensable social asset…whiteness…it’s a bank account that’s fast approaching zero.” Practically yelling over the din, and channeling Mencken, he referred to the phenomena as anthropoids reacting to civilized humanity… a primal, beastly shriek to reestablish an hierarchy nature was busy flushing down the toilet. “I actually feel a twisted sort of compassion for their apprehension. Imagine the sheer, bone-chilling terror of realizing a person from a traditionally marginalized demographic was actually the smartest person in the room, especially if that person is a woman, and you’re standing there with nothing but fading ethnic/gender privilege and a bad attitude for consolation.”

“And that’s just one pole of oscillation,” Jack was familiar with Professor T’s 19th Century Wildian musings regarding the attractive and repellent forces of science and religion.

“Right! Religion, the opiate of the masses,” Professor T extended the segue. “You have that end times doctrine… the ultimate supernatural shell game. It’s a beautiful grift, really. The apocalypse has a 100% failure rate, but hustlers never run out of marks,” said Professor T.

Jack was beginning to tap the flow. “It’s a perpetual motion machine of dread. Every time the world doesn’t end the year and month predicted they chalk it up to a clerical error by a god who apparently can’t read a Mayan Calendar, and the believers line up for more disappointment a couple years later.” Jack was yelling to be heard over the din just as one song was ending and before the next began. Of course nearby patrons heard the outburst and turned to look at the Forks’ table. Some snickers, some frowns, mostly disinterested staring. It was Jack’s second pint of Imperial IPA, so he was feeling particularly uninhibited. In response, he gave the gawkers a take a picture, it lasts longer countenance, sorta dancing in his chair to the next song’s groove.

“Why do they buy it?” asked Billie. 

Professor T put on a disinterested, deadpan countenance. “The outlook is grim. For one, Their Rapture represents a cosmic revenge for disenfranchisement. It lets the ‘pious’ picture their godless neighbors being slow-roasted in a lake of fire while they sit on a cloud playing their golden harp.” 

Billie snickered, “Good one,” she winked. She had always marveled at doomsday ravers’ ability to willingly suspend disbelief regardless of how many end times deadlines come and go.

“It’s a bitter-kiss theology of spite,“ Professor T chimed in. He had always found the whole thing absurd. “You’ve got people who swear the world is ending next Tuesday yet they’re fighting like cornered rats to control the local library board on Wednesday,” nods from the table. “It’s not about saving souls… it’s about will to power exercised with willful ignorance,” said Professor T.

“Right.” Jack was hanging in there. “The Evangelical Ethnonationalist is just a person who wants the Kingdom of Heaven because the Kingdom of Earth…with its books, its reason, and inconvenient facts…is too goddamn hard to navigate.”

Buck, attentively taking it in, offered his take. “It seems we’ve gone from bread and circuses to grievance and retribution, politics designed to keep the populace alarmed and clamoring for a leader to save us from an endless parade of imaginary threats. One day it’s a Black man in high office… tomorrow it’s holy war waged against a veritable parade of boogiemen.”

“The circus never leaves town because the customer never changes,” said Professor T. The former bourgeoisie still remembers when the world handed them all privileges at the front of every line. But now, they’re being asked to make room for formerly disenfranchised minorities. They fear the truth and revel in the freak show.” Professor T was fading.

As if a powerful amphetamine-laced turbo-hallucinogenic mind-jacking recreational street substance had suddenly taken hold in Billie’s brain, she gave the boys a look that can only be described as lucid, psychotic, reptilian predation. She addressed Jack first. “Were you going to let the good professor leave it at that? What about the war waged in kitchens and bedrooms everywhere, always. Have you forgotten about the fact that Western Civilization only granted women personal agency in the last century.” This made a significant impact. The room was still quite noisy so Billy had to up the volume several notches above her comfort level. But there was no indication of physical strain, and she didn’t appear rattled, but the boys knew, they were in for an ass-chewin’ like they haven’t experienced since their porch-monkey days.

“I’m sorry, Billie.” Jack knew there was only one logical response to this oversight, contrition.

“In fact, the rise of Feminism and the reactionary Manosphere are factored into the survey and focus-group methodology,” said Professor T. “We haven’t begun looking for patterns as we’ve only just launched the focus-group tour.” Professor T realized his explanation to Buck and Billie had not included this element, but he knew the advocates for Patriarchal dominance was playing a big role in the social/political disunion. 

“It seems to me, this may be the most impactful conflict right now,” Billie was on fire. “The idea of society digressing, shoving women back into subservient roles, turning the clock back on Women’s Suffrage, the feminist bra burning of the 1960s, and all those Rosey the Riveters getting a post-war taste of bringing home the bacon, enjoying the independence that comes with earning her own way.   

Buck was no stranger to the phenomenon of strong women, his mother’s sister was an architect. But not until an unfortunate scene in her first marriage convinced her to go back to university.

The scene went thusly:

HUSBAND (Jake): “If i wanted your opinion, i’d give it to you.”
AUNT JASMINE: “Excuse me?”
JAKE: “That’s right, look (he throws a pair of his jeans to the floor)…
I am the dictator and you are the subordinate. We’ll have sex when i say so, and you’ll serve up the sandwiches on command. This is a one-way monogamous relationship. You stay home, tend to parenting, my libido, my sandwiches, etc, and i’ll take care of whatever side action i please. Someday, when the world finally wakes up and takes the red pill, i’ll take multiple wives. And that’s how it is. You can contradict these dictates as soon as you can put on those pants… (he points to the jeans on the floor).”
AUNT JASMINE: “Thank god i’m not pregnant.” (she plans her escape)

“I wonder why she didn’t see that coming before the marriage?” said Jack.

“They need to include red flag training in high school,” said Professor T.

“We need to elect a woman in the White House,” said Billie.

“I’m sorry, Billie, i won’t forget the battle of the sexes ever again,” said Professor T.

NEXT WEEK:
The Forks crash through the dense Oregon forests, dodging Sasquatch and coastal pirates.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

Audiovision: Time and Pressure

Caught in a trap…?
Can’t walk out…?

Really…?

So, you’re not free to determine the path your life takes? Why? Is it like the song? Because your love is, “too much, Baby?” Is your autonomy actually restricted by the attachment to which you’ve surrendered? Or, have you, like another song, “the kind of debts no honest man can pay?” Or maybe, you just want to “fit in” or be “normal,” but that normality severely restricts the frontiers of your authentic self? Well… what to do? Will you roll with the imprisonment, or will you take action and do like a whole ‘nuther song, and choose one of the fifty ways?

First, i guess we need to define terms starting with, “freedom”. What does it mean to be “free”? For the narrow purpose of this mental snapshot, let’s go with a less than conventional definition (from A. Bierce’s sarcastic dictionary)… “FREEDOM (noun): Exemption from the stress of authority in a scant half dozen of restraint’s infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.” Could it be the effort is futile? We’ll save that questin for later. For now, let’s just agree the condition of “freedom” is slippery at best.

And what does it mean to be “caught in a trap”? Is this a good or bad, pleasant or painful condition? Again, an elusive concept to pin down. Do restrictions imposed by the trap cause pain, or are they more like liberators, freeing our minds to explore expanses of thought without the burdens of engineering and executing an escape plan? The question might take you back to those wild and wooly “salad days” when you KNEW you had to generate enough income to feed yourself and secure a warm place to sleep in those bone-chattering winter weeks or a cool oasis in the “dawg days.” This might have required a duel life, one that makes room for the tasks for acquiring necessaries, and another that feeds your restless soul. You didn’t want either to interfere with the other, so you found a normie gig that wouldn’t sap what creative bandwidth you had, and you avoided creative gigs that might jeopardize your meal ticket. 

A delicate tightrope to walk.

And finally, what exactly is “normal?” After all, science finds itself baffled by some serious inexplicabilities. For one, if gravity is an attractive force, what explains the dramatic “red-shift” observed by light from distant galaxies? According to what we know about the Doppler Effect, those pups are speeding away from each other at roughly the speed of light… WTF? Shouldn’t gravity be pulling them together? And what about that spooky “quantum entanglement” nonsense? If nothing travels faster than light, how can anyone explain the “instant” response of entangled particles across vast distance? How can those particles possibly move in synchrony with no delay? These and other paradoxes have to be reckoned with before we can stand on a box and declare what should and should not determine the boundaries of knowledge. After all, have you seen Escher’s art? How long can you stare at those images before giving up and just accepting the notion that sometimes you just have to be satisfied with a non-resolution resolution.

So… are you really not “free”?
Are you really caught in a trap?
Can someone or something actually force your soul into a restrictive box?

Seriously… have you ever tried to put yourself into the slippers of those unlucky bitches and bastards locked in cages? Sing-Sing, CSP Canyon City, Club Fed, the Hanoi Hilton, Auschwitz, Dachau, Siberia, and Gaza? What sort of redemptive discipline does it take to survive those literal “traps”? And can that sort of resilience be applied to the regular routines most of us endure on the daily? I imagine that sort of superpower would come in mighty handy for those elderly neighbors waiting out delays in medical procedures or the brief and scarce visits payed by over extended loved ones? Folks who were once strong and vital, free to move around with supple limbs and grand ambitions. But now they’re grounded by failing health and limited monetary resources? When they finally realize no one is coming to save them, what sort of mental expanse can they exercise to endure the quiet hours that comes with chronic sedentary existence?   

Could it be efforts to reach gold-plated states of “liberty” or “freedom” are futile? Einstein was right about time… it’s relative to local conditions such as pleasure and pain. If we could find a way to fill our days with service and purpose, even if that means dealing with… ugh… people or worse, our own nagging regrets or admonitions, maybe then time would be a friendlier companion. And so, if those literally confined in cages can do it, so can we. Even if we think we’re “trapped” by conditions beyond our control. Don’t wait for a savior, no one is coming. Get up, stand up, find a purpose and fill your days working for it. Give it your all… and don’t let disappointing results stop you. It’s like the lessons of geology and the Shawshank Redemption. Time… time and pressure. Time and pressure create diamonds and the possibility of genuine freedom.

What will time and pressure do for you?
How will you reconcile the non-resolution resolution?

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter V (genderpocalypse)

In the chaos of twisted chromosomes and warring hormones, we stumble upon the battleground known as “gender identity.” Picture it, loopers: a cosmic joke played on the fleshy stage of human existence. On one side, we have the cold, hard warriors of science, armed with their microscopes, brain scans, and impenetrable jargon, dissecting the very essence of what it means to be a dude or a chick. Like a swarm of blue ants, they peck away at the X and Y chromosomes… they focus their compound lenses on squishy gray folds of the brain hoping to uncover the secret lair of gender.

On the other side, we’ve got a dubious combination of politics and religion. And like red ants quoting holy scripture confined in a glass jar with the lab-coat wearing blues, all are content to share the space peacefully until someone comes along and shakes the jar. Ideologies and agendas are imposed upon the mix, where gender is leveraged as a weapon, a war cry, a bargaining chip designed to divide in order to conquer. Here, the forces of division speak in tongues, twisting words like “identity” and “expression” into righteous mandibles and impenetrable exoskeleton. They invent fake threats, hurl buzzwords like sugar crystals, and paint the very notion of gender itself as some kind of existential threat against all ant-kind. It’s an artfully designed battle, loopers, where common sense goes to die and the casualties are sanity and nuance… but enough of this ant-jar metaphor.

Caught in the political shitstorm, behold, the ordinary human! A curious creature, armed with little more than a body that feels and a mind that questions. “Who am i?” they wonder, peering into the distorted screen of warring society. “Am i what the textbooks say i am, what my birth certificate proclaims? Or am i something more, something deeper, an echo of feeling that defies the rigid rules of biology?” The scientists, bless their methodical hearts, try to offer answers, mapping out hormonal landscapes and brain circuitry. But what do they really know about being trapped in a body that feels like a prison, or feeling a defiant joy under a label that the world wants to erase?

Meanwhile, politicians bellow and posture. Christian Nationalists, with their faces twisted in apocalyptic fury, see transgender folks as harbingers of societal collapse, demonic agents sent to shatter the sacred order of man, woman, and holy matrimony. They clutch their dog-eared Bibles like shields, shouting verses about abominations as if the wrath of God himself will smite down those who dare to blur the lines. Oh, the irony, loopers, for aren’t those holy books dripping with gender-bending stories? Androgynist angels, prophets who blur the lines of man and woman… all stuff of genderqueer fever dreams!

And let’s not forget the paragons of liberal tolerance, sometimes just as ridged and uncompromising. Armed with academic tomes and social justice battle cries, they paint gender as a fluid, ever-shifting spectrum, where the very act of categorization is an act of violence. For them, biology is a mere suggestion, pronouns a tool of liberation, and self-declaration of the highest law. To question their orthodoxy is to be cast as bigoted troglodytes, clinging to a world that no longer exists, a relic of a less enlightened age… nuance be damned.

So, here we are, loopers, trapped in this absurdist play. The lab-coat wearing blue ants fiddle with their instruments, hoping to find a grand unifying theory of gender, while the red culture-warriors trade barbs and twist reality like cheap balloon animals. Yet, in the end, what does any of this say about the boy who looks in the mirror and sees a girl staring back, or the woman who feels like a stranger in her own skin? It’s the eternal human struggle played out on a new stage… a struggle to simply be, to exist without judgment, to find a sliver of peace in this glorious, messy, and often nonsensical thing Bill Hicks reminds us is “just a ride.”

And where does our fictional alter-ego fit in this absurdist play? Well, Ronnie Hays says he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body, but that woman happens to be a lesbian. So… the deviance is nearly imperceptible because if he’s dating… he’s dating a woman, and since his skin, flesh, and blood is male from the get go… NO ONE notices something amiss.

Cheers… Loopcircus

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter IV (arc of the spiral)

In an attempt to illuminate where Loopcircus is coming from, metaphysically speaking, we’ll draw a brief allegory of humankind’s struggle to understand its place in the universe as an ever oscillating battle between those who insist there is a particular source from which all creation springs and those who insist we can observe the universe as the result of billions of years of adaptive (and otherwise) incremental changes. Loopcircus may be tempted to side with one or the other of these conflicting views, but the bare-metal truth is we don’t know… nor do we believe ANYONE truly knows. So… without further adieu, the spiral of puny human metaphysical understanding from Gilgamesh to Sagan.

In the beginning, there was dust, then clay, then Gilgamesh, a king who wrestled gods, chased immortality, and discovered, like a Vegas lounge lizard hungover in a bathtub full of pennies, that life’s a fleeting joke. Fast forward a few millennia, and the frame focuses on the desert of Palestine, where a carpenter’s son strolls in, flips the metaphysical tables, and promises an afterlife juicier than a Lebanese fig. This, my friends, is the Big Bang of Western metaphysics.

Centuries later, Europe enters its Renaissance, a period where deities dance the can-can with da Vinci’s anatomy sketches and Galileo gets poked in the eye by the Vatican for suggesting Earth isn’t the cosmic navel. Science, now a pimply teenager with a telescope, starts flexing its muscles, whispering sweet nothings of reason and logic to the masses. And religion, the aging aristocrat clutching its pearls, declares war.

Enter Darwin, a fellow with a penchant for Galapagos finches, drops an apparent truth bomb making the Colosseum look like a petting zoo. Suddenly, humanity isn’t God’s special snowflake, but a hairy cousin to the orangutan, scrambling up the evolutionary ladder in a desperate bid to avoid becoming monkey chow. Cue the Wagnerian strains of existential angst, thicker than London fog, and the rise of Nietzsche, and his magnificent mustache.

Across the pond, the soon to be U.S.A., a rambunctious toddler all hopped up on Manifest Destiny, is busy carving its own metaphysical niche. The Wild West, a whiskey-soaked fever dream, birthed bootstraps pragmatism, a philosophy as rugged as a cowboy’s chaps, where truth is measured by bullets, dollars, and cents, not divine pronouncements. Meanwhile, in the East Coast salons, Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalist proto-hippies on a nature binge, preach a gospel of self-reliance and communion with the cosmos, a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone sermons echoing from the puritan pulpits.

The 20th century, a rollercoaster ride through world wars and atomic bombs, left humanity bruised and questioning. Freud, a psychoanalyst with a penchant for cigars and Electra complexes, peered into the murky depths of the human psyche, revealing a primal soup of desires and neuroses far removed from the squeaky-clean narratives of organized religion. Existentialism, a philosophy as bleak as a Greek Tragedy, became the soundtrack of the disillusioned, while pop culture, a neon-lit funhouse, offered fleeting solace in the form of Elvis’ hips and Marilyn’s pout.

And now, in the 21st century, the stage is split. On one side, the Intelligent Design revival, a troupe of fire-and-brimstone preachers, resurrects the old gods, their voices booming with the righteous fury of a televangelist hawking snake oil. On the other, Carl Sagan’s disciples, hold aloft the flickering torch of reason, their voices laced with the wry humor of a scientist explaining the Big Bang to a five-year-old.

Then there’s we, the ever-curious, popcorn in hand, watching this embarrassing spectacle unfold. Will we turn into pillars of salt? Will fire and brimstone engulf the stage, will the Saganite laughter pierce the darkness? Or will Camus, W.B. Yeats, and George Carlin’s detached amusement save us from the disease of “passionate intensity?” The curtain has yet to fall, and the play, as always, goes on. One thing seems destined to persist: The spiral… ever oscillating between extreme attractions and aversions follows a seemingly eternal arc… each epoch like Groundhog Day… round and round the galaxy we spin… forever… and ever… and ever.