How Things Hurt

When I was eighteen years old my cousin got me a job as a mason’s helper with a guy named Don Cullen. It was grueling torturous labor. Used brick and cinderblock will shred any kind of work gloves within hours and the limestone and cement suck the oils and moisture from the skin of your hands and abrade the callous like pumice, leading to checking, lengthwise fissures the length of your fingers that bleed and wake you up in the middle of the night with their throbbing and burning. Every morning was a nightmare of stiff fingers, cracking scabs and blood. The first tool, brick, block, bag of cement or shovel-full of sand one lifted unleashed a living hell of misery and curses. Unsurprisingly masons are notorious drinkers. The drinking would not begin every day before we were finished work; at least not the beer drinking. The surreptitious drinking that was done from pint-sized bottles in a tool bag was nobody’s business but the mason’s. Often enough after lunch, the six packs would magically appear, anesthetic for the cracked and bloody hands that endured day after day what no glove could survive for more than an hour.

One such day the two masons, the men who actually spread the mortar and position the bricks, were atop six levels of scaffolding capping an external chimney of used brick as the day was reaching its end. I heard my name from the top of the scaffolding and hurried to the bottom looking up, trying to read an expression, and waiting to do as I was bid. His trowel leapt from his right hand to his left as he reached behind him to grab the collar of the grizzled old man still slapping down bricks from the stack at his side, without ever taking his eyes off me and with no perceptible change of expression until the old man was verifiably looking at me too. Their faces cracked open like the fissures in their fingers, sun burnt grins of utter bemusement at my upturned face. Don said, “She looks like I am about to tell her the secret of the universe.” They roared with laughter, the old man’s trowel slipped from his grip and tumbled to the ground at the base of the scaffolding. Don doubled over, his forearms across his belly until he sat uncertainly on the stack of brick behind him. Their laughter began to subside after a moment or two until Don looked down at me again, my head tilted to the side, hands on hips, still waiting to hear what I had been summoned for. Don said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember what the fuck I wanted” They both erupted with hyena-like yelping all over again. I stepped under the scaffold and retrieved the old man’s trowel and tossed it high, the old man reached out and snatched it from the air at the moment of its apogee when it became motionless, neither rising or falling. “Thank you, baby” he said to my retreating butt as I walked back to the cement mixer. Another helper coughed beer through his nose as I looked from face to face, bewildered. What, I thought, am I doing in this world of stone faced, tearless men whose sole emotion is ridicule for all that is in me that I cherish and treasure?

The Necessity of War

War consists of the systematic taking of human life. War is not possible if the combatants and others are not deprived of their lives. Who can afford to spend more life or can contrive to make the opponent spend more life than he can afford to is the victor. Death is the operational variable without which war loses it's defining element.

Governing bodies require war to justify their existence. It is a device to enable an armed governance entity. All governing power derives from contrived defense against a fabricated enemy.

We as a culture are manipulated to atrocity. Every war is a war of necessity. Not the necessity of toppling a genocidal dictator or preserving the nation from attack or even the spurious necessity of preserving this planet's human inhabitant's liberty to engage in open trade. Instead every war is a necessary war in a manipulative context. 

It is an absolute necessity to scar and damage successive generations of human children to allow no generation to pass to adulthood without a sufficient number being inured to the horror of atrocity. They must be taught to accept the murderous objectives of warfare as banal, ubiquitous and necessary. Innocence and humanity must be methodically put to the torch. It needs to be excoriated without fail in each generation the way parental child abuse is inherited and passed from father to son. In no other way can the savagery be sustained. Battered wives and broken children are a generational gift.

Molestation, abuse and warfare have this in common. It must be made to cross the threshold of acceptability, with the distinction that murder requires a higher standard, it must be so contrived so as to cross the threshold of necessity.

Once placed amidst the murderous horror and savagery of war, the newest generation of war's victims fight. They fight for their fellow victims . They fight like abused children who cannot be turned against each other. They fight against the fabricated enemy because there is no choice.

There are no non-casualties in war. Care-givers and families are afflicted in their turn. There is no such thing as an unwounded veteran. Having been taught to abandon injunctions against murder, being made callous to the shredding of human flesh and the shattering of human bone, they carry "snapshots" of inhumanity and carnage in their scarred synapses. They find themselves no longer adaptable to the social structure they were taken from. They are primed and inured. They are the necessary product of war. That which the governing authority craved, another generation horribly remade in their father's image, immune to the human imagination of not sending children to kill and die for the necessity of preserving and maintaining the culture's over-arching, monolithic and profitable industry; death.

Government is by definition prone to coerciveness just like any entity composed of living individuals. It's actions are predicated upon self-interest and self preservation. Homicide within any context is unnatural. It is aberrant within human societies. Violation of the innate disinclination toward murder requires tremendous and directed effort.

Once accomplished, the eradication of psycho-social injunctions against human on human violence is sustained generation-ally. The use of society's children as "tally beads" in the conflict framed competition known as war is made acceptable through the damage inflicted upon previous generations in a manner reflective of the patterns of inter-generational child abuse.

Industries that lend power to government and the pretext that supports the continued existence of coercive government require continuous war to assure that no generation escapes, making war a necessity for the preservation of both government and industry. The damaging of human children is the first operative act in a vicious cycle where war is acceptable, necessary, profitable and beneficial to someone, and everyone.

opening post

Near where I live is an artificial lake, artificial like all lakes in Southern New Jersey. It was created with the erection of an head-wall, typically where a rural road crosses a creek. The resulting swamp would have then been cursorily cleared of trees or the trees were at least cut off at water level. The stagnating, choleric pond then has a limited life span of one hundred years or so, before the accumulating detritus and plant matter restore it to the condition of it's origin. 

This particular one was established and owned by some Wesleyan/Methodist religious group, with an abundance of the surname Wilson. Cabins were erected around it's white cedar lined shoreline and equipped with outhouses. The leach-fields of it's crude septic systems hastened the small-scale ecological disaster of confined groundwater in a watershed that is mostly sandy delta.

It quickly became unfit for swimming and unhealthful for any other purpose, but continued to be used for such as it was ceded first to the county and eventually the state. In it's periods of near abandonment, it was ice skated on in the winter but it's relatively shallow depth and the heat of decomposing leaf litter, lily pads and their associated root systems, along with the root boles of the trees that once lined the stream that now forms the channel made consistent, safe freezes impossible. So the poor little "Wilson's Lake" was dangerous notoriously in that sense as well. Finally the hapless little stagnant pond became a receptacle for gray steel transformers or whatever those ubiquitous canisters are that are typically attached to power poles every where, discarded along with their polychlorinated biphenyl coolant by poorly supervised employees of the Atlantic City Electric Company. The reptiles and amphibians there are prone to tumors. 

Along the west shore as I have walked many times through the plots where quaint cabins once stood is a track-way, it weaves it's way through the long abandoned cabin sites. At its terminus is, the midden pile. The midden pile is a small scale refuse dump, a place sufficiently removed from the domesticity of the cluster of cabin sites to shield the summer vacation residents from the obnoxiousness of their own refuse. I have been with friends who will tarry there musing over antiquated condiment jars, rusted cans and cork topped bottles. I studied the wire key for opening a canned ham distractedly. I am unable to endure that place. I do not understand how the trees themselves do not pull up their roots and flee. I believe I feel the body of a ninth child, discarded among the litter, drowned moments after birth by a depression era mother unable to care for the first eight. It is, I think the living trees themselves imprinted with the shame and personal horror of the ignominious burial. Perhaps it is delusion that makes me feel the rising bile in the chest of a father, intoxicated to shield him from a guilt that will shadow him through the remainder of his intoxicated life. As his breath steams in "off season" December chill, He scrapes away refuse and labors to excavate a resting place for the cooling body of a newborn. I cannot prove this. I would not waste my breath or credibility speaking of it to anyone who might have the vaguest interest in proving it. 

I do not believe in "ghosts". I do believe that all life is not only connected but sentient. The DNA that we all share lends us community and ties us, one to the other sublimely. Nothing lacks consequence. I will make no assertion concerning whether these cumulative tragedies have impacted the place or something older and more odious has drawn the tragedies. But that living things can bear the imprint of events and that for the duration of those lives these events can be carried into future, I have little doubt.