More Than Meets The Mind--Episode 13: Razorclaw (Decepticon)

RAZORCLAW: It was the most awesome battle I’ve been privileged to be a part of. The denizens of Charon should be grateful.

That’s an interesting perspective.

Those that survived will be talking about that battle for the rest of their lives. It’s the most significant thing that has ever happened to that backwater and the only thing it will be remembered for.

The survivors described it as the most hellish day of their lives.

The most hellish moment of their lives? It was glorious. It was the best thing that could ever have happened to them.

I don’t---

Let me tell you about my day.

This morning, Starscream pulled me aside for a “frank talk about the direction of the Decepticon cause “ and to not-so-subtly gauge my level of support for his potential leadership.

Next, I had a meeting with Ratbat about Predaking’s energy expenditure. We came in well under-budget, and were summarily rewarded by having next cycle’s budget cut by fifteen percent since we “obviously didn’t need it.’

Then  I spent three hours with Onslaught as he outlined his strategic plans for the defense of Fakkus--a planet, incidentally, that we cannot defend as it is not currently held by us and that we have no intention of capturing as it is in the middle of Autobot space and has a strategic value of exactly zero.

 Finally, Drag Strip approached me because Motormaster was--and I quote--”mean to him.” He said that as a Decepticon warrior, he should not be subject to bullying and asked about transferring from the Stunticons to the Predacons. When I told him that we were not seeking new additions, he told me he could defeat my current team with one arm missing.

What happened?

I tore off his arm and gave him the opportunity to prove it. Headstrong, Tantrum, and Rampage ripped him to pieces and Divebomb dropped the remains off Polyhex tower. It was the high point of my day.

I see.

Do you? Because now I have to attend a disciplinary review board convened for next week. Instead of thanking me for backing him up, Motormaster  lodged a formal complaint with Shockwave that I undermined him and exceeded my authority by disciplining troops under his command.

Charon was not hellish. Charon was beautiful.

Hell is middle management.

Skin Like Iron

One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them.  The Lord said to Satan, “where have you come from?”

Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.”

-Job 1:6-7

For some of us the road is more important than anything.

More important than money. More important than careers. And as guilty as we feel about it when we lay awake at night--more important to the people who are nearest and dearest to us.

"Have you considered My servant Job?" the Lord asks, and we think: Job? Who gives a shit about Job? What is there to consider about some faithful, well-to-do family man?

Take your Job and shove it, man. What can a Person of the Road learn from some…some citizen. I want to know what Satan saw going back and forth.

I want to roam around too.

Our road can be literal--wrestling, comedy, or music. It can also be a metaphorical road such as the pursuit of truth, science, or the secrets in our own heart.

Either way, we can’t not follow it.

But there is, as with all things, a price to be paid.

The road forces you to face yourself, and that’s a hard thing. Not just a thing that‘s hard, but a thing that hardens.

Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho & Lefty is a song about cowboys, courage, death, life, and regret. But it’s also a song about the road, the choice to follow where it leads, and paying the price.

Here’s the story: Pancho and Lefty are presumably bandits who terrorized the Mexican countryside in spite of the attempts of the hapless Federales to bring them to justice. Eventually, they catch up to and hang Pancho while Lefty flees to Ohio. It is strongly implied that the only reason for Pancho’s defeat was that Lefty betrayed him to the Federales, likely because he was bribed (*).

In any case, we have a few characters in our story.

Pancho, the man who fought.

Lefty, the one who fled.

And the Federales, who didn’t do anything at all.

The song contrasts Pancho and Lefty, but for me, the real contrast is between the two protagonists and the Federales. While the two men made different choices and reaped different consequences, both of them made choices.

The Federales…not so much.

The Federales claim credit for successes and rationalize failure, but they never take action. They defeat Pancho through Lefty’s actions, not their own. The only things the Federales do in the song is talk about what they could have done:  We could have caught Pancho anytime we wanted. We let Lefty go…out of kindness.

And for what? The song starts out talking about “All the Federales” but by the last chorus there are only “A few grey Federales” left.  Their bold talk, their self-righteousness, their caution, their lack of action gains them nothing.  They are as subject to death and aging as Pancho and Lefty. The only difference is unlike the song’s protagonists, they remain nameless and faceless, greying and dying while talking about things they could have done.

Pancho chooses the road and dies on it. Lefty starts along the road and turns back. The Federales refuse to step on the road at all. And as a result, from the beginning of the song to the end, they never change

It would be easy to judge them for it.

But as we learn from Pancho and Lefty’s respective fates, choosing the road is no guarantee of successful travels. Like Pancho, we can strive fully and still fail, with no one to listen to or care about the things we most want to communicate. Like Lefty, we can quit and bury everything we once strived for and spend the rest of our new lives frozen with regret and wondering about what could have been.

We romanticize the road. As the unnamed narrator cautions us in the first verse, we think it will keep us “free and clean.” Whatever our dream, we believe we can sink into it and it will keep us from harm, that the righteous armour of our commitment to a cause  is the only protection we need.

We find out this is not the case. We learn things about the world, about others, about ourselves that we might not have wished to discover. We find failure, rejection and disappointment. We experience betrayal, sometimes at the hands of others, sometimes due to our own shortcomings, insecurities, or expectations. Our victories don’t bring us the things we expect; instead of an end to the road, we find it now stretches out further than we ever dreamed. Sometimes instead of a clear path, the road becomes murky and hard to follow or expands into a labyrinth.

As a result, we harden ourselves. We find ourselves wearing our skin like iron. We will not let what we’ve seen, what we’ve felt, what we’ve learned hurt us again.

But in doing so, we becoming something other than what we were. It’s never talked about in the song, but I wonder if on the morning of the Day of the Dust, Pancho or Lefty ever looked in the mirror and wondered what had happened to them, how the pursuit of what they loved had turned them into something they no longer recognized.

Something to mull over.

I started this post talking about Job (**). He’s an interesting case. He never wanted to be on the road. But the road found him anyway. God brought it to him.

That sometimes happens. None of us are safe. Some of us choose the road, but sometimes--through tragedy, adversity, or the unexpected--the road chooses us.

(*)Not everyone agrees with that assessment. At least one writer points out that there is no textual evidence in the lyrics that Pancho and Lefty EVER EVEN MET EACH OTHER. Which is mind-blowing and textually true, but still feels like a reach to me.

(**) Which is weird, because spiritually speaking, the Book of Job doesn't do much for me. I'm an Ecclesiastes man to the bone.

Slaughter & Vinnie Vincent Invasion

The thing I remember most about Slaughter was how likable they were.

Slaughter rose out of the ashes of Vinnie Vincent Invasion when singer Mark Slaughter and bassist Dana Strum got sick of Vincent’s bullshit and quit his band to start up their own.

They seemed like really good guys in interviews. I wanted them to do well and I supported them to the point of writing the name and logo of their first album ‘Stick It To Ya’ on the back of my denim jacket in magic marker over what was supposed to be a heart with a knife through it, but ended up looking more like an apple.

Which was an odd decision on my part, because even back then, I didn’t think Slaughter was very good.

Vinnie Vincent Invasion’s  ‘All Systems Go’ is a better album than  ‘Stick It To Ya’ in every possible way. I would go so far as to consider ‘All Systems Go” as the platonic ideal of late eighties pop metal--shiny production, catchy hooks, high pitched lead vocals with shouted or harmonized backing vocals, fast, technical guitar work and sex-obsessed lyrics (“Come together in serenade/Pull the pin on my love grenade“). Meanwhile, visually, Vinnie Vincent & Co. were all leather and denim and hairspray. Hair metal doesn’t get any hair metal-ier.

Vinnie Vincent Invasion never really caught on though. Slaughter on the other hand--well, nobody remembers them now, but “Stick It To Ya” made its mark in 1990 with the songs “Up All Night“ and “Fly To the Angels.” Along with Ugly Kid Joe, they were one of the last bands to break out into the mainstream from the metal genre. Their next album, “The Wild Life” was better, but by that time, hair metal was making its last stand, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the rise of grunge and the commercialization of Country & Western.

I‘m not sure why. Like I said, their songs weren’t very good.

I guess we just liked them for some reason.

Privilege and Karma are like Captain Mal Reynolds: They Do Not Exist...And They Are Also Totally Real

 

I was reading a discussion about privilege on the internet between people who subscribe to that particular theory and people who don't.

It probably comes as no surprise that communication was breaking down.

Talking about privilege, I think, is a lot like talking about the Buddhist concept of karma in that in order to have a productive conversation on the subject, everyone involves has to be able to wrap their head around the paradoxical fact that something can not exist, and at the same time be totally real.

Let's a less political or religious example.

Consider Captain Malcolm Reynolds.

Mal Reynolds doesn't exist. He was never born and never had a childhood. Nothing happened to him between the Firefly TV show and the Serenity movie because there is no 'him' for anything to happen to. He's nothing more than an actor with a different name saying words a writer put together wearing a costume someone in wardrobe designed on a set a production designer built.

At the same time, people have a real experience of Mal. The writers in the writer's room asking "What should Mal do here?" are asking a real question. The tailor measuring Nathan Fillion's inseam for Mal's costume is having a real experience. The worldwide assembly of fans and self-proclaimed Browncoats who were inspired by Mal's "thrillin' heroics" and were broken-hearted by Firefly's untimely cancellation are feeling real feelings and having real experiences.

The THING is not real. The EXPERIENCE is.

Syrio Forel is neither alive nor dead. Nothing happened when Arya fled the scene leaving her Dancing Master facing off with the Kingsguard knight. There is no Arys Oakheart or Syrio or Arya or King's Landing. Words on a page and the images they conjure in our imagination is all there is.

Yet the exeprience of Syiro is absolutely, unequivocally real. We have opinions about him. We have feelings towards him as a character. His existence touches our lives.

Concepts like 'privilege' and 'karma' fall into this same category. They are things that don't exist independently of our ability to experience them. We can't measure them, take pictures of them, or carry them home in a bucket. But we CAN experience them and they do have an effect on us, the people around us, and the world.

We need to understand this contradiction if we're going to have meaningful conversations about these concepts. We also need to embrace it if we're going to work with them effectively.

People who ONLY take the position that they don't exist struggle because their lives and those of the people around them are affected by these ideas. They are cutting themselves off from something that is a reality of human experience. And yet they continue to reject it because they can't see, touch, hear, or smell it like people denying the existence of elephants just because they've never seen one in real life.

People who ONLY take the position that these concepts are real struggle because they start to believe that privilege is something that exists in the world of reality instead of the world of ideas, concepts, and explanations. As a result they burn themselves out. You can't 'smash the patriarchy' or 'exterminate racism' any more than you can 'win the war on drugs' because your opponent does not exist to be fought. It's heartbreaking watching good people exhaust themselves to tears swinging baseball bats at ghosts.

Things don't have to be real to exist.

Things don't have to exist to be real.

Only by making peace with this contradiction can we hope to have meaningful conversations,  take effective actions, and find lasting peace of mind.

Portrait Of An American Family

For all of it's trappings of Cold War politics, 80s settings and technology, and espionage, at it's core, season one of The Americans revolves around one central question.

How much can I trust the person I share a bed with?

Spycraft and marriage have things in common. They’re both games of trust, of making decisions in the face of uncertainty and ambiguous evidence, games where reliable information is the most valuable currency.

Phillip and Elizabeth have been together over 20 years. But things keep coming up from new developments to old flames. Passion ebbs and flows.

And the questions keep coming up:

To what extent can one of us make unilateral decisions for what he/she believes is the other’s own good?

What is the statute of limitations on old lovers and the road not taken?

Can a lie told 20 years ago be used against us today?

What are you telling people outside our relationship about us? About me? Do those people have our best interests at heart?

Do the years we spent together count for something when things aren’t working now?

In a relationship where both of us are having sex with other people, what counts as a betrayal?

What do we tell the kids?

Perhaps the biggest question is this one:

What makes a marriage a marriage anyway?

Phillip and Elizabeth have made no official vows, gone through no ceremony.  Their commitment is a professional requirement, not a personal commitment. They report to different bosses, have different priorities. They sleep with other people.

On the other hand, they live together, raise their children together, work together. Officially, they are married. They live a married life.

Is their marriage real? Some days it seems like it is. Some days it seems completely false. There are times they both believe what they have is real…but they don‘t always both believe it on the SAME days.

Like Syrio Forel, their’s is Schrodinger’s Marriage, not a lie, but not completely true either.

Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings spend their lives being pulled in many different directions. They are constantly trying to serve the demands of multiple masters from their bosses, to the other relationships in their lives, to each other, to the demands of their own conscience. They are two individuals trying to make their way in the world, juggling and balancing their needs with the conflicting needs of those around them.

And they’re trying to do those things while both depending and being dependent on another person who is walking a parallel, but different, tightrope of their own.

Which, I suppose, makes it as real as any other marriage out there.

Thursday the 12th

The axe was an old friend, and Jason spent the morning with it, chopping firewood until his shoulders ached. He stacked it neatly by the cabins and when he was finished, he lay in the sun on top of the picnic table. When the sun got high enough and bright enough that he could feel it even through his closed lids, he draped one arm over the eyeholes of his hockey mask to shield his vision.

It was a beautiful day.

His favorite time of year was the week before the counsellors arrived. He had the camp all to himself. There was enough to do to keep him occupied, but not so much to do that he ever had to rush. He could work leisurely and enjoy the stillness, the solitude.

In the afternoon he went through the campsite, testing the light bulbs. When he was done, he put the new bulbs on a shelf in the supply shed, as close to the back as possible.

As he left, he noticed the door wasn’t closing right. He inspected the latch, the frame. A rusted hinge was the culprit, he decided.  It needed replacing.

He tested the door again. It was okay, just a little sticky. Good enough for this summer, but he made a mental note to look at replacing it next year. As he rose, he stretched out his back, circled his shoulder a

He spent the rest of the afternoon wiping down surfaces, taking special care to with the kitchen. When he was finished, he put his cloths and bucket away and went through the camp, gathering up any dirty dishes he might have inadvertently left, washing them and putting them carefully away in their place.

With nothing to do in the evening, he sat on the dock with his machete on one side of him and his battered copy of Birds of North America on the other. He dangled his toes in the waters of Crystal Lake and watched the sun set. On the other side of the lake, loons warbled.

He watched them land on the water until it was too dark to see and then he rose, picked up his boots and machete and stretched out his back before lumbering towards the woods. It was still early, but he wanted to get a good night’s sleep , for tomorrow, the counsellors would arrive.

It was going to be another beautiful summer.