IN THE CONTINUUM

remains of a day and time

The two angels flew up the driveway to hover over Jr and make him better. A very little bit before they arrived he'd made a mess. It was all his mind that's gone haywire. It gets fixed on something and that's it, for days and nights. He's at that second time in life when fecal matter is interesting. I left him to them, because they came to clean him up and they do it a lot better than I can. Then later in the day he went and made another mess. I'll never figure out how it happened and don't care to try. Let the mystery be.

He feels so bad about the messes he makes without any self control, he sometimes looks at me expecting me to bark at him, but I don't. I put on the rubber gloves and do as I've been trained by the 2 angels. Rubber gloves first. That's such a good thing to have. It makes all the later stuff easy. Peel those gloves off when done, drop them in the trash and that's it, clean hands. They have the cleanup down to a minimal fine art. When they're done, one of those plastic grocery store bags full of this, that and the other, tied at the top and dropped in the trash is all that's left.

I've learned how to do as they've taught me. They leave plenty of the kinds of supplies we need, rubber gloves, some absorbent pads, some washrag things that don't need water and soap. It's not a great deal that's needed. It's just knowing what is needed and having it. This kind of prepared readiness state I'm in has informed me to get the fire extinguisher for the car. Something really bad can be reduced to something easy to manage with a little conscious readiness. I look at the interiors of other people's cars when we talk and I see fire bombs. I pray that the people of my world be safe from these bombs we travel in.

We are an intelligent civilization. We have all kinds of really worthwhile aids to existence; collectively we have tremendous intelligence, yet we have to have wars that kill off and hinder intelligence, while at the same time advancing our intelligence by leaps. War is what we do as humans. It's our most serious activity, a high turnover time in reincarnation. Men love it. It makes them crazy as bats afterward and they go home to raise kids with post-traumatic stress disorder, a seething anger that's too easy to set off, then their boys are angry, problems at school, learn nothing and join the marines to direct their anger, or go to prison, these being the cures we offer.

Again, I don't mean this to be a generalization that applies to all, but more a rule of thumb, a pattern in the process that's been with us since before Roman times. Since before civilization. It comes from tribal times and before that. Chimpanzees do it. Ants do it. The very most primitive people do it. The very most advanced people do it. And hold wars way up high. A relative who fought in the Civil War we hold dear. Same goes for any war. He dropped firebombs on Tokyo. Oh my, what a hero.

Perhaps in my high school years on tv was a show where people get together with people who were important in some way to their lives they've not seen in a long time or sometimes ever. I don't remember what it was called. Maybe Art Baker could have been the MC. This Is Your Life. That's it. Was it John Cameron Swayze? One night they had a Japanese man who had survived the Hiroshima bomb, and lost his extended family, meet the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb. It was very awkward for all concerned. The pilot was like a good ole dog with his tongue hanging out saying he was following orders, a good soldier, no hard feelings, no guilt.

The Japanese man was freaked out, holding his composure as only the Japanese can, like when the American President puked in the Japanese Prime Minister's lap on tv. Solly Cholly. That's how we do things in civilization. This is a particularly awkward time in civilization with the old ways going away all over the world and the new ways becoming a universal civilization of bluejeans and tshirts with television and rock&roll, pop culture the universal culture. Michael Jackson is America to the rest of the world. Madonna too. So is Arnold the Gov of California. And Sylvester Stallone. And cocaine and every other drug there is.

A political cartoon I saw at the time of Obama's inauguration: he was given a broom to clean the place up after the fraternity party mess left in the White House for him, in the tradition of black people cleaning up after white. I think it's funny that Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich look like pigs. Some pigs are more equal than others.

Then we have jazz, which knows no borders or races. Russian jazz musicians are brothers with Zimbabwean jazz musicians, with French jazz musicians, with Egyptian jazz musicians, American, South African. A jazz musician from Norway is a friend with a jazz musician from Brazil. They don't need to know how to speak the same language. They can make music together and that's what matters. I like to believe that somewhere in the near or distant future the varieties of people on earth will come together in the same dignity and respect as jazz musicians have for one another no matter the race, religion, nationality. That appears a ways down the track, but I do believe we're headed in this direction despite detours from time to time.