Strange, Unworldly Sounds

Have you heard about the strange noises heard all around the world since 2011? If you haven't, that's okay. I myself had not heard about them until just today. Which is the first problem with phenomena which is said be be known worldwide, isn't it? In any case, these noises are said to be coming from the sky and are said to have been recorded all around the world. They are eerie, out-of-tune trumpet sort of noises and have occurred from Canada to Europe to the Ukraine. They have even been reported by several news stations, which have played recordings sent to them by people who heard the noises.

Upon beginning to look into these reports, I thought at first that I might have actually happened upon something was genuinely both strange and real. After all, there were dozens of recordings, purportedly from far flung locales. Could it be alien spaceships? Could it be the trumpets of the angels, announcing that the end is near? Was this connected to the end of the Mayan calendar? Or was this something more sinister - a secret military scheme, for instance, to control the mind of humanity through auditory echophonic sound waves?

Well, of course, the theories got weirder than the noises and the charm dissolved. The whole thing turns out to be a hoax, feeding on and growing, as all hoaxes do, from the power and the pull of imagination. People hunger for revelation, for magic, and long for the natural world to be, just once (and for all), unnatural. It is the grasping of modern man in search of a soul, as Jung put it. Give us something, anything, even a lie, to fill the unbearable void of not knowing.

Ashes

For nearly 20 years, my parents kept my brother in a cardboard box in the garage, on a shelf in the tool cabinet next to a battery charger. In a strange way, one hardly knew he was there while at the same time his presence was felt every hour of every day. Or maybe it was not his presence that was felt, but the lack of his presence. Something was there and gone at the same time; always there, always gone.

Sometimes, my mother would tell my father that we should take him somewhere – somewhere that he loved – but those conversations went nowhere, for silence seemed better, more bearable, and so that would be the end of it for maybe a year or two. During that time, I grew older, got married, had children of my own, and sometimes I would tell my mom that we should really do something, that the time was long past but the case still appropriate, and she would speak to my dad again, but the box would stay there, in the cabinet, on the shelf, just next to the charger for when the car battery went dead.

In 1995, my father died, and the mortuary sent his ashes in a box to the house, just as they had done with my brother. My mother put this box in the drawer of a file cabinet in the bedroom that used to belong to my brother, but was now used as a guest room, although no guest, as far as I am aware, had ever stayed there. Mostly, my mom used it for a sewing room, and as a Christian Science reading room. My father and my brother were the same now, both there and not there, and the not part of the thing made the there part all the sharper.

I visited often. And sometimes I brought up the matter of the boxes. Now we can get this done, I said.

Get this done? she echoed.

We can take take them someplace, I said. Together, now. Someplace they liked in life.

I don’t know, she said. It’s not the same now.

It seems the same to me, I said. More the same than ever.

She told me then about Mary Baker Eddy and the philosophy of Christian Science. She said that life, illness and death were illusions, not real, and that there was nothing in those boxes, nothing at all.

But they seemed too heavy, to me, to be nothing.

Five years passed and many things changed, people came and went, and I moved back into my parents house to take care of my mother after she developed cancer and then Alzheimer’s disease.

She died in early January of the year 2000. She was 75 years old. My father had been 80, my brother 30. A small funeral was arranged in the chapel of the same mortuary where my father and brother had ended up. It was quiet, but nice. And after the funeral,  the mortuary sent a  box containing her ashes to the house.

I placed them together on the dining room table. Three boxes. One hundred eighty-five years worth of ashes. Three boxes of nothing but illusions.

Camping

I must have been about 9 years old that year, or, really 9-1/2 by that summer, which would have made my brother, Gary, 11, Steven Upton 10 and Susie, his sister, just 8. We boys had decided to take our first solo camping trip together, and had chosen a secluded rocky spot on the western shoreline of the lake, just around a bend in the road, about of quarter mile from our parents’ cabin, number two among the eight owned and built by Steve and Susie’s parents and grandparents.

The cabins themselves were quite rustic and basic – but not rustic or basic enough for us. We had in mind some real live camping, where you had to set up your own spot, make do with what you could carry along and live off the fat of the land. We would catch or harvest our food, kindle our own fires, set up various precautions against wild animals and mosquitoes and sleep under the stars like the pioneers and mountain men used to do.

Each of us brought a blanket role, a hunting knife with sheath, a BB-gun, and Steven also had an ax wrapped in his roll. And a guitar. My brother brought a loaf of bread, but none of us thought to bring a fishing pole or bait. Or rather, we did think it, but then we all forgot the thought at the critical moment.

This was to be our first challenge, upon discovery of the same, after we had laid out our blankets on the smoothest looking rocks and gathered some wood, and kindled a pointless fire – for it was already about 80 degrees by that midday. How were we to catch fish without any fishing gear, and what else but fish were we supposed to eat?

We scouted about with this question in mind, but found only rocks and bushes and trees and a beehive. But they were hornets, Steve said, and didn’t make no honey. On the other hand, there were a whole lot of huckleberries, which made us feel relieved, for we could always live off of these if need be for the next three days.

We stripped down to our underwear and took a swim and then our luck got even better when Gary found an old nylon leader under the water with a hook still on it stuck under some rocks. All we needed was a limber stick and some salmon eggs or worms, and we’d got us a pole near as good as any of the fly-rods we had left back home.

We began to dig here and there for worms, but couldn’t come up with a single one. Of all the dirt in the world, we had camped on a perfectly worm-less patch. We all got pretty dusty in our efforts, and the day was even hotter now, so we took another swim. That water was cold – damn cold – and our teeth were chattering when we  sat back down on the shore.

Well, fish eats bugs, Steve said – probably even more than worms. And that’s one thing we got plenty of. Bugs.

So we set about catching bugs that would be large enough to stick on our hook, and would look tasty enough to the fish, and about the time we had twenty-five or so, of all colors, shapes and types, imprisoned in one of our pillowcases, we set about the task of fixing them, one by one, to the hook, and then casting the line out to where the water went deep and green and was doubtlessly swarming with schools of rainbow and brook trout.

The trouble was, we couldn’t find a single bug that any of those fish had a taste for. They didn’t want beetles, they didn’t want flies, they didn’t like crickets or potato bugs, and they didn’t even want dragonflies – which seemed the strangest thing of all, because Steve said he had once caught a 20 inch steelhead on one in the Metolius River.

In any case, it was dinnertime now, we were out of bugs, we had picked no berries and we were feeling pretty hungry. But once again, fortune smiled on us – for Susie showed up, quite definitely uninvited, though thankfully received, given that she had brought along a paper bag with three boiled eggs and a can of baked beans.

The fire was rekindled, the can pried open with some trouble, for she had forgotten to bring an opener, and then set on a rock amongst the the licking flames until the juice boiled to the top and began to drip over the lip. This was carefully rescued from the flames between two solid sticks and then Susie set out three paper plates with napkins from her sack. There were no forks or spoons, but we reckoned pioneers didn’t have such things anyway, and so we ate the beans with our fingers and sopped up the savory juice with Gary’s loaf of bread. We all agreed that it was a mighty good dinner, fish or no fish, and only wished that we had brought some coffee.

Susie had gathered some huckleberries while we ate, and gave us each a handful, and then set to fixing a line between two trees, upon which she hung our paper plates and our underwear with clothespins.

That night, we lay under the stars and talked about a thousand things and about how many billions of stars there were and about how very hard it was to try to sleep on rocks, and in the morning, we counted over 200 mosquito bites between us.

Steve’s dad showed up early in the Resort truck, surveyed our camp without expression and noted, in his customarily blunt way, that it had ‘dewed’ on us during the night. Which it had. We were wet. Our blankets were wet. Susie’s paper plates were wet.

Yup, he said. Sure did. Sure enough dewed on ya last night.

He gave another nod, stuck his hands in his pockets, turned back toward the truck, but then stopped and looked once once more.

Y’all wanna try another time, he said. I mean, when there ain’t so much dew?

We considered the thing pretty thoroughly for the next couple seconds. And seeing that we had no proper fishing tackle, and that we were pretty wet, and that the bread was gone and we had no other food, and most especially that it had dewed so heavy during the night, we reckoned that Mr. Upton had the matter about right.

There were more days to come, more summers, more years. We had all the time in the world and nothing at all to lose.

Good News, Except for Paradise

I have been enthused recently to read about at least two treatments under study that would promote remyelinization after MS relapses. It seems that these drugs would not only decrease the severity of deficits suffered from MS attacks, but could also restore lost function from old deficits. Wow! I mean, that's pretty big, if it actually comes about, and I'm definitely in.  But hold on a sec ... Oh, yeah, I live in Indonesia, where doctors have never so much as heard of MS. Where MRI films are the size of chalkboards and have the clarity of 19th century photographs. Where the idea of a strong pain killer is ibuprofen and where a thorough physical exam consists of testing knee reflexes with a little rubber hammer. Hmm. Oh well. Therein lies the price of living in paradise. 

Conspiracy theories

The most chilling thing about modern times, to me, is the proliferation of the conspiracy theory.
These alternative versions of reality seem to follow directly on the heels of every event of the
day and grow more absurd with every incidence. They cluster about real events like fantastic,
cancerous growths, obscuring the plain fabric of history itself. Despite being addressed and
disproven, one by one, they are repeated so often, and in ever evolving entanglement, that
they become prominent for repetition alone and ultimately fashion a mythology, though poor
and confused, that threatens to replace fact with fancy, comprehension with paranoia. In this
new world, nothing is as it seems; everything is a ruse, a plot, a trick cooked up by some
shadowy and sinister presence behind the scenes. An elite few – call them wizards, if you will –
are conspiring to control the common folk through the use of illusions so that they, the few, the
anonymous, can carry out their wicked plans, whatever those might be – for no one, you see,
can ever say. They are all things at once, whatever fits at the moment, even if the same thing
didn’t fit in the moment just previous. Whatever is most perfectly counter-intuitive, most
perfectly contradictory to both common conceptions of reality and to logic itself – this will be
the contorted substance of the myth and will, by its very idiocy, defy unraveling through the
use of traditional tools such as logic and common sense. The theories morph over and over –
again, like cancers – eluding the scalpel of truth by a redundancy of lies, until the disease has
become so thick that it has obscured the core beyond recognition. History itself is in vain, as our
new focus is not on the plain course of events in the world but on fantasy and falsehood.  

Flu (again)

Glad to receieve my new badge from Healthline yesterday. Thanks, folks. Just is time to do some MS complaining, too I came down with the flu two days ago and I'm anticipatimg, through experience, that MS will make the illness all that much worse. My experience in the past is that these common illnesses are unusually extended in the presence of MS, and may also cause some neurologic problems unrelated to the illness itself. Last time I was ill with a severe virus, I ended up with ringing in my ears, deterioration of eyesight and persistent headaches, all of which persevere to this day, though to a lesser extent as time passes and treatment modalities are discovered. For severe ringing, I take clonazepam at night, which significantly calms the problem by the morning, and also has the benefit of inducing a sound sleep. Later on, I discovered, rather by accident, that prozac provides a definite quieting effect throughtout the day, in general. With the present flu illness, however, the ringing is back, no matter what medicine I take. At any rate, if past experience is a reliable measure, I'm in for at least two weeks of illness. My wife and son, who also have this flu, will be well within a few days - just you watch. But there you have it. Life with MS. 

Boston

One day, two young men - residents of Boston, Massachusetts - decided they would go into the city center and kill some people.  As many people as possible. There was a marathon sporting event being held that day and many had come to enjoy the event. Men, women and children. The young men took home made bombs and placed them where they thought the most people could be maimed, injured or killed. In fact, three were killed, hundreds were injured. Some lost their legs, some lost their arms. Later on, the two killed a policeman. They bragged that they had achieved all their goals. Kill a policeman, check. Kill a child, check. Kill a woman, check. Thrilled by their achievement, they planned to travel to New York City next and continue their spree. As it happened, they were tracked down. The older brother was killed in a firefight with the police. The younger was caught, convicted of murder and now faces either life in prison or the death penalty.

And so we face the question in America of whether the death penalty is right, just as Indonesia has recently faced the same question.

The only way I can find of answering this question in my own mind is to very honestly ask myself whether I could face any of the victims - mother's of the deceased, fathers, brothers and sisters, strong young men who are now crippled for life, young women whose future has been cursed forever by the careless, twisted acts of these killers - to ask, in my heart of hearts, whether I could tell any of them, face to face, that the person who planned and coldly carried out their ruination should be spared from death.

And I conclude that I could not. I cannot. It was the young men themselves who decided their fate when they decided to murder innocents. It is not yet known whether the State will or will not be merciful. What is known, however, is that these two were not.