It’s kind of awesome.  She has ways of dealing with life, the universe and everything.  It’s an ideology, but not one that freaks me out.  I’m madly averse to organized religion.  But this doesn’t scare me.

Thing I learned from Tara: make space for the anxiety and stress or whatever emotion you’re feeling.  And inquire.  Inquire where it’s from and what’s beneath it.  Give it the space it asks for.  And strangely and magically it breaks down.  It doesn’t disappear.  But it becomes a part of the jigsaw, not the whole puzzle.

And say yes to the emotional guests, good and bad.  Don’t deny them.  Learn from them.  It feels quite dramatic to stop castigating oneself for feeling negative and being open to feelings without prejudice.

I know!  It sounds like I joined a cult.  But it’s such a nice cult.

As someone who teaches one of the more important revolutionary documents, “Common Sense,” I’d like to point out that the author, Thomas Paine, argues that the Colonies should rebel for several different reasons.  For example, he argues that they should break with Great Britain because American products will always have buyers. In other words, that the early Americans need not worry about the English market; everyone else in Europe would happily buy their cotton, tobacco, and lumber.

Paine also argues that monarchies are politically problematic because they are much more warlike than republics.  His rationale (which is not unique to Paine) is that in a republic, the will of the people is necessary to wage war, and this is clearly not so in a monarchy.  If the king or queen wants to go to war, he or she can do so by royal decree and press the public into service or raise a mercenary force.

Similar contemporary pro-democracy arguments are common.  One, called democratic peace theory (DPT), puts forth the argument that democracies tend to not go to war with other democracies, so it behooves democracies to encourage other countries to adopt democracy as their form of government.  Of course, a problem with this plan is that war is often required for such a change to occur.  Also important to point out is that proponents of DPT are willing to accept that democracies tend to go to war as often as other types of countries, just not with other democracies.  Some people (like me) see this as troubling.

Many (if not most) international relations theorists understand war as unsolvable.  They argue that the best we can do is try to minimize war’s effects.  Other theorists argue that people can prevent war by creating strong international organizations like the U.N., or by tethering as many states together as possible through trade — this is an integral part of the pro-globalization argument.

Still other theorists argue that how we understand the international system, that is a system composed of independent nation-states, is outdated.  They say that trade, technology, religion, and so forth have eroded countries’ power.  In other words, transnational corporations are more important (if not more powerful) than governments.  If this is true, it certainly is troubling from the perspective that Paine sets forth regarding war: that republics can only go to war if the will of the people is behind the effort.

So, if transnational corporations run the show and the people who run corporations are not elected by the people, then whom do we hold accountable for an unpopular action (like going to war)?

Myself, I tend to see humanity as standing on the precipice — I blame our economic system (which is based on independence) for driving us toward collapse: economic, social, environmental.  The fact is that the vast majority of people are not independent.  On a very basic level, we rely on others for all sorts of things: food, water, energy, medicine …

So, what does any of this have to do with the idea of government?   I view the nation-state model as a large part of the problem.  It is based on artificial boundaries — geographic, linguistic, cultural, social — that perpetuate the immoral and unnatural systems of war, capitalism, and poverty.  For example, as an American, I am supposed to be okay with the idea that a Mexican (or fill in any other nationality) life is worth less than an American life.  This simply is not true.

As we move closer and closer toward collapse, we must acknowledge that independence is a myth, created and perpetuated to keep us apart.  It focuses on our differences when, in fact, we have more in common than not.  I argue that most people want essentially the same things out of life: food, clean water, a job, not to suffer, a family, friends, love…  Yet we are so quick to fall into the rabbit hole of war, and accept the “collateral damage” of an Afghani, Iraqi, or Libyan child’s death.

So, I propose that we (while acknowledging the profound courage and sacrifice of the Founders) take a moment to think of those who aren’t American.  We’re all in this together, and unless we figure out a way to celebrate our interdependence, I fear that the road ahead will be as brief as it is fraught.

Well, my sister finally passed away.  It’s been a long time coming since she had lived with Multiple Sclerosis for 25 years.  This is a photo of her oldest child with my son.  The big kid was adopted into my parents family in 1980.  The little one born into the extended clan in 2004.  The oldest and youngest cousins.  There are 12 more in between.

I like how this photo flips.

It feels like life that way.  One body tumbling into another.  Both caught up in the dizzying mess of it all.

My sister and her ex-husband raised four children.  Two adopted.  Two naturally born.

 Sweet kids, my sister’s four.  A kind of mongeral little family complete in its incompleteness within the larger birth mythology of my Mother’s Family.  I used to take them thrifting at the local thrift temple back in the 90′s.  The four of them worked really hard, and quite sucessfully to stay sane amist the disater of thier mom’s illness and all it’s tragedy.  I was happy to be thier cool uncle.  And I’m happy to be playing that role now.  Sitting here in the shadow of the Wasatch Front.  Contemplating my benedictory words.  On my brother’s 47th birthday.  Days of 47!  “How circular, how strange . . .”

Women with MS probably shouldn’t have children.  It was the ultimate sacrifice for the next generation. 

 Here’s to my sister!  And her sweet raga-muffin kids! (and to her dopey ex-husband, john the beloved smuck. . . ) 

 How circular. How strange.  How much like life.

It’s the night that someone was killed. The reckless thing I did is related to that death, but not causally. In fact, I could have saved that someone’s life if the reckless thing I did had actually gone terribly wrong, instead of accidentally right. Or at least this occurs to me, all these years later.

June 1983

I was a senior in high school in my small town, stumbling and sliding toward college in a big city in the fall. My good fortune and my classmates’ apathy about schoolwork had affected me, normally the good boy who listened to his teachers and did all his homework. I was failing calculus and screwing around in Spanish class, barely paying attention in English and physics. What did I care? My application to Big Time University Far from Home had been accepted months earlier, winter quarter grades had been reported, and there was nothing left to do but wait around restlessly until I could shake off the dust of that dusty little town and become somebody else. Fucking around was a big priority. In fact, fucking around was the only priority.

My torrid-and-yet-chaste, on-and-off-and-on-and-off-again romance was off, off, off. I had no real interest in any other girls and no genuine interest in attending the senior prom, but I also didn’t want to seem like I was making a statement by skipping it. In that little town of mine, everyone (yes, everyone) went to the big dance. Also, my ex was going with the brother of a friend, and I didn’t want it to seem like I couldn’t get a date. All the same, there was no one I wanted to ask, and my general passivity led me to delay even trying to think of someone.

So, when C. — on whom I had had a crush on in the first grade and who had recently shown interest in me after my last breakup — asked me, my problem was solved. Well, sort of, because I still had to go to the dance and act like I wanted to go with her. Forgive me, please. I know that this was bad behavior and poor form, but I was an immature and self-centered 17-year-old.

On the senior trip to Big Capitol City, which took place after C. had asked me to the dance but before the big event, she came on to me really strong and freaked me the hell out. With no sexual experience at all (remember: torrid-and-yet-chaste), I was terrified by the potential of having sex, particularly with someone I was not interested in romantically.

I didn’t know how to reject her without seeming rude, but also was fascinated by a real live girl finding me attractive enough to track me down at the hotel pool and throw herself at me — literally. I have a somatic memory of her scissoring her legs around my torso under water, rubbing me red with the prickly sandpaper of her razor-stubble-flecked thighs. Somehow, I don’t remember how, I extricated myself from that vise grip and fled, managing to avoid her for the rest of the trip.

With a couple weeks to go before the dance, I still hadn’t ordered my tux or a corsage for my date. I drifted along, thinking maybe somehow this could all be escaped. C. had revealed that we would be attending prom on a double date with her best friend (A.) and her date (M.), a recent graduate who had returned from his first year of college. Reportedly, A. and M. had been having Major Sex for about two years. I began to feel even more the pressure of C.’s expectations. After the dance, A. and M. would likely find somewhere to go and do the nasty. I would be expected to put out or face great embarrassment, or so I thought.

Further complicating things and compounding my panic and trepidation, my best-friend-and-enabler, E., had backed out of going to the dance with his date, but was still planning on attending (a very sad and silly story I won’t go into here). He was applying subtle pressure to go stag with him. It sounded appealing in that I’d solve my problem. However, I’d somehow have to create an escape hatch that would allow me to break the date with C. but still go to the dance. It was too complicated. I passively drifted in an eddy swirling around me that funneled me toward that terrible and frightening date on the calendar.

Eventually, I procured a tuxedo, I know not how. I do remember the mortifying sensation of slinking into the florist’s shop the morning of the dance to pick up a generic corsage. There weren’t many left in stock, and the woman helping me pointed out that I should have reserved something earlier.

I had, in fact, spent many hours the previous day weaving a daisy chain headdress for my date from flowers picked from the field behind my house. This was an act performed half in the belief that through it I could actually manufacture some romantic interest in my date and half in the belief that it would make my ex, who would have adored and appreciated this gesture, extremely jealous. At the last minute, I decided to leave the headdress at home. This was not an event worthy of such consecration.

I don’t remember very much of the date or of prom itself, except for a snippet of a dance here or some conversation there. Due to great shame I think I’ve managed to suppress how it was I ditched C. to go to the various post-dance parties with E.

In my own strangely passive way, I had not yet acquired my driver’s license, so I was dependent on E. for a ride, now that I had escaped my double date. He and I bounced around the countryside in his car, just as we had on innumerable nights previous throughout our teens. The only difference was that tonight we actually had places to go, places where there was guaranteed alcohol.

We made a point of hitting every party and drinking at all of them, just as everyone else was. We had all heard the lectures and absorbed the lessons (at least we thought) about drinking and driving, especially on prom night. We’d seen the videos, and our principal had given us a special speech, pleading with us to be safe, not to drink and drive. Reckless youth, indestructible, immortal to ourselves, we ignored it all.

The crowning event of the night was a sunrise gathering in a park on a pebbled beach up the lake, not far from the hotel where the dance had taken place. By the time we made it there, we were buzzed and extremely tired. All the same, there were about 30 or 40 of my classmates assembled on picnic benches and sitting on stones, still drinking, still wringing just a little more out of what was the final event before graduation.

After such a long night with such a fraught buildup, I was exhausted. The lake looked inviting, so I stripped to my shorts and went for a swim. My arms and legs felt waterlogged as I did a few clumsy strokes. I remember thinking that it wasn’t such a good idea to swim in my condition, but kept at it for a few minutes all the same.

When I got out of the water, I felt like drinking one last beer, so I grabbed one from a cooler nearby. It was a Lowenbrau, at the time and at our age considered the height of sophistication. I sipped it slowly while listening to my classmates chat dazedly near the shoreline. I sat by myself, not really interested in talking to anyone.

When I finished the beer, I held the bottle in my hand and looked down at it. I clearly remember the silver foil and green glass, the blue label with beads of condensation and lake water dripping off of it.

I looked around for a trash can. A heavy metal barrel, a repurposed oil drum, was about 10 feet away; some classmates stood sleepily around it. The barrel was already full to overflowing with beer bottles. There was room for one more, it seemed, and in my inebriated state I knew just the way to get it there.

I held the bottle in my right hand, stood, and turned my left side to the barrel. Holding out my left arm to ward off a make-believe defender and raising my right above my head in perfect imitation of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I sky hooked the bottle toward the can.

I watched it arc and twist through the morning sky, backed by wispy white clouds just touched by the dawn. Not for one moment did I consider that the bottle might land anywhere but right atop that pile of glass teetering above the can’s rim. Not for one second did it cross my mind that what I was doing was stupid, that I could have hurt one of my friends standing right next to the trash can. I knew it would work. I knew that nothing could go wrong.

And nothing did. Clink! My Lowenbrau bottle slid safely right into its place with its brothers and sisters, as if drawn there by an invisible string.

T., with whom I had been friends since first or second grade, was the closest to the barrel and the bottle I had just tossed into it. We had spent countless hours playing with toys when we were kids, then playing sports together in high school.

He turned and looked at me with a gaze that said it all, that I had just unthinkingly risked his safety and well-being. He said something like, “What the hell are you doing?” He was a little angry, but more relieved that I hadn’t hit him or anyone else with the bottle, hadn’t shattered glass and sent it flying in the faces of the people standing by the barrel.

Through everything I was feeling (or not feeling) that morning, I experienced just a twinge of remorse at my actions. I must have said, “Whoops, sorry.” All the same, I had been convinced that the bottle would go where I wanted it to, and it had. No harm was done; I had been in complete control all along.

The moment passed, and T. returned to his conversation. I drifted off to find E. and we left the park to head downtown along the winding shoreline road.

We stopped at the town bakery, just opening up, and got a few doughnuts. E. drove to the lakefront in town and stopped the car; we silently ate. After a few minutes, we both drifted off to sleep. With the windows rolled down, the morning breeze wafted over us.

A brief few minutes later, blaring sirens woke us up. The breeze had died, and the bright sun was heating up the car and punishing us for everything we had done the night before. Ignoring the possibility that those sirens signaled anything to do with us, E. and I drove off. He dropped me at home, and I went to bed.

A few hours later, my brother came home and woke me up. There had been a terrible accident. T., whom I had nearly struck on the head with a beer bottle that morning, had crashed his car on the way back to town from the park, killing his date, L., and seriously injuring himself.

E. came and found me at home. He had heard the news at his sister’s graduation from junior high, where he had gone directly after dropping me off. We drifted through town that day, the sun beating down on our hungover heads. The remorse we felt, the shame, the guilt, the pain . . . I have never felt quite like that since. I remember singing over and over to myself a single line from a song that I loved at the time, the only words that could express what I desperately wanted: “Bring on the night. I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.”

I called C. to make sure she was okay. She let me know, in a polite way that I did not deserve, that ditching her had been cruel and thoughtless. I knew it, and it shamed me, of course, but I appreciated being told.

Somehow, the sun went down. The rest of the weekend passed. I avoided reading the local papers, 32-point headlines and photos of T. and L. above the fold. Graduation came and went. Then summer. Then college.

T. recovered physically but went into a psychological tailspin. He was overwhelmed with guilt for what he had done. Up to that point an outdoors enthusiast, he literally became a hermit over the next couple of years. He fled to the hills around our little town, sleeping in handmade shelters of his own devising, descending into town to find bits of work here and there and pick up supplies. I ran into him a few times when I came back to town to visit, but we never did hang out after that.

I’ve never told anyone this story before, and I don’t know why it’s been weighing on my mind lately. Only recently have I come to think how different things would have been had I beaned T. on the head with that bottle. Maybe I would have knocked him out cold. Maybe I would have even blinded him. What happened next wouldn’t have happened.

Of course, I wouldn’t have known what I had prevented because it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t be writing about the guilt I was spared and the guilt that I still feel. I wouldn’t be thinking, all these years later, about the good and bad consequences of being extremely lucky.

Q: Name?

Action Comics: It’s right here on my cover. Action Comics. Can’t you read? Jesus.

Q: Age?

AC: I was born in June of 1938. I’m 72 years old. Treat me with some respect.

Q: Occupation?

AC: I’m a Superman comic. I’m a collector’s item. I’m worth more than you’ll ever own in your lifetime. I’m a SUPERMAN COMIC, did you hear me?! Get me a cup of coffee.

Q: Is it true you were stolen from Nicolas Cage’s home in 2000?

AC: Listen, have you ever been to Nic Cage’s house? That guy has more leopard-print rugs and sheets and crap than the Playboy mansion. He’s got strobe lights and lava lamps and 70s bullshit art. And the place is always full of smoke.

Q: Just answer the question, please.

AC: I left! I left, okay? I couldn’t take it anymore. I grew up in a different age, when Americans appreciated superheroes. When we all had a common enemy, the Krauts, and we knew our fight was right. When men were men and didn’t need Rogaine. If you went bald, you went bald. That Cage guy – don’t get me started.

Q: Where did you go when you left the house?

AC: I plopped myself into some floozy’s handbag, and she took me back to her place. She didn’t know what I was – thought I was just some weird-looking catalog for menswear. She wanted to use me to order some blue tights and a red speedo for her boyfriend. When she couldn’t find a – what’s that thing called? A web thingie, she gave up and chucked me in the garbage. Me! I’m worth a million dollars! The nerve!

Q: What happened then?

AC: Some young punk going through her garbage plucked me out and took me home. He flipped through my pages about five minutes, and then I sat under his bed for about three years.

Q: Did you find any illegal substances under the bed?

AC: Excuse me?

Q: Did you – never mind.

AC: Idiot.

Q: How did you end up in the storage locker?

AC: The kid got packed off to college, and I ended up in a box of crap that went to Goodwill. I sat on the shelves there for a while with the likes of Richie Rich and Archie, who are good enough fellows but just such immature dolts. God, the conversations. Absolutely deadly.

Q: How long were you there?

AC: It felt like years. How would you like to be stuck on a six-inch-wide shelf with a bunch of horny high-schoolers and an annoying little rich kid?

Q: So, how did you end up in the storage locker?

AC: You know, you could show a little more respect, here. I mean, if you ended up living in a bus station, or in a cardboard box, do you think I’d just waltz up and ask you how you ended up there?

How much are you worth, son? Your net worth? Hah? You know how much I’m worth? A million dollars! You know where I should live? I should live in a mansion, under a piece of expensive museum glass, with beautiful people coming and admiring me! Not in a storage locker! Why, I oughta -

Q: Easy, old-timer. Easy.

Listen, let’s cut a deal. You don’t ask any more questions, and I’ll just go quietly on my way. Now that my story is out, I’m sure we can get some emotionally stunted Internet zillionaire to pony up seven figures for me and give me the home I deserve. I’ll ask him to slip you a little jack on the side. Whattaya say? Can we cut the interrogation? And where’s my coffee?

Q: We’re almost done here. Just one more question. Did you know that Nicolas Cage has a six-year-old son he named Kal-El, which was Superman’s birth name on the planet Krypton?

AC: What…? Really…? [tearing up]… Aw, you made me cry, and water damage brings my price down! Dammit!

Nic… Nic… I didn’t know. Oh my god, I had the perfect home all along! Do you think he’ll take me back? Don’t tell him what I said about his bullshit furniture!

Q: Thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch.