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Beta Culture: The Book of Good Living … Again

good stuffIf you’re a long-time reader here, you may remember a couple of Beta-Culture-related posts from 2012 about The Book of Good Living. If not, it’s like this:

You know all that wisdom the Bible supposedly contains? The Talmud? The Koran? What if you could get wisdom about life without all the goddy freight mixed in? Without all the “GOD SAYS DO THIS, DO THAT, OR BURN IN HELL FOREVER!” Might not be a bad thing, huh?

The general model for where you get all the good advice is your parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents. Mom teaches you how to cross the street, dad teaches you how to handle tools, Paw Paw teaches you how to be gentle with the horses and dogs, they all teach you about how to live and work with others. But … with the best of intentions, mom and dad and those others don’t always have time to teach you all they know. And some of us have parents who don’t teach us ANY of the good stuff.

And how many times have you been aghast at someone, silently asking “You don’t know THAT?? How have you gotten through life?” So you know there’s a need for it.

So what if you and people like you could collaborate on a sourcebook of things you’d like to know, or would like others to know. Helpful, self-empowering stuff. Protective stuff. Stuff that helped you get through life, that you really might not get anywhere else. Because failing learning it from your parents, you sure as hell won’t get it from Ice Road Truckers, or Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

I actually had a friend set up a Wiki for it, but then I failed to do my part, the actual writing. The idea was to start doing it, enough to give people the idea, and then enlist other smart/wise people to add to it, until we had our own source-book (and if you use the word “bible” I will come over and chainsaw the legs off all your chairs) of good ideas for daily living.

I kept on and kept on thinking I’d start, but I always put it off. Because I wanted it to be PERFECT.

Two years passed.

Then, yesterday, I realized I could start it on Facebook. Imperfectly, but regularly, posting little tidbits that would go into it. I even gave it its own hashtag: #TheBookofGoodLiving.

So here’s some of it. Incomplete. Lumpy. Imperfect. But hey, it’s a start.

BTW, the “Added comments” sections are a great example of how this is supposed to work in the final form. Everybody adds in the good stuff they know. The thing evolves, grows, and eventually you have a useful handbook for daily living. It’s definitely not meant to be a “do it this way or else” thing, but rather something you could refer to in those areas where you lacked expertise. Eventually — assuming you buy into this “Let’s create our own culture” thing — you could even tell your kids “Let’s see what The Book of Good Living says on that.”

 

#TheBookofGoodLiving – Being a Pedestrian

Walking on or near a roadway is a life or death situation, and your safety is YOUR responsibility. Yeah, the driver who hits you will be in big trouble, but YOU will be hospitalized or dead. It’s not a fair trade.

Watch traffic all the time you’re in or near the road. It’s a mistake to totally trust that approaching drivers 1) notice you, 2) are sober and/or sane, 3) are undistracted by texting, conversations, emotional storms, the radio/CD player, children or other passengers, 4) are unimpaired by vision problems, pain or age or illness, and 5) give a shit about your life and safety.

Walk facing traffic. It gives you time to react to the distracted driver who drifts onto the shoulder.

Be the guardian of friends and loved ones walking with you, even those older and more responsible. If they get hit or killed and you could have prevented it, you’ll feel guilty about it for the rest of your life. Children should walk farthest away from traffic, holding hands with an adult.

Cross the street in a way that doesn’t inconvenience drivers. They don’t dare hit you; don’t use that as license to delay them. Don’t start across when they have the light or the light is about to change.

When crossing the street, LOOK at the drivers stopped for the light. Meet their eyes and make sure they see you.

After a rainstorm, watch for puddles in the roadway that could splash you when drivers hit them.

Refer to: The Five Seconds Ahead Rule

 

#TheBookofGoodLiving – The Five Seconds Ahead Rule

If you could see just five seconds into the future, you’d never have another accident. In driving, in walking, in strolling to the coffee machine in the hallway, try to see five seconds ahead. Watch everything around you, the traffic, wildlife, motorcyclists, road conditions, people on cellphones, people walking, kids playing, construction workers carrying things, and react BEFORE any of those factors can cause an accident or inconvenience. Watch five seconds ahead for yourself, but also for the people around you, especially loved ones.

 

#‎TheBookofGoodLiving – The Doorway Rules

1) You don’t owe anyone an open door. It’s a complete courtesy; if you don’t feel like doing it, don’t do it. Having said that …
2) Open and hold doors for seniors.
3) Open and hold doors for handicapped people.
4) Open and hold doors for people carrying heavy loads.
5) Men: Open and hold doors for women, especially a woman carrying a baby or other burden.
6) If you’re holding the door for one person, make sure it doesn’t hit the next person when you let it go.
7) If someone opens or holds the door for you, say THANK YOU, smile and move on.
8) Don’t EXPECT thanks for door holding. It’s not about gratitude, it’s about creating a general atmosphere of social courtesy.
8) Teach your kids to open and hold doors for adults. Adults, smile and say “thank you” when a youngster opens a door for you.
9) If the door was closed when you got there, close it back. If it was open, leave it open … unless you know it’s meant to be closed.
10) In passing through a door or other tight space, the man/woman with the heavier/bulkier load always has the right of way.
11) Pay attention to doorway traffic. If other people are passing in and out, stand well out of the doorway.

Added comments:

Richard Wade: I diligently practice every one of these door rules, including #5. For me, that one is not about thinking that women are “weak” in some disparaging way; it’s about respect without condescension. It’s simply that often women are smaller and lighter than men, and doors in public buildings are often far too heavy and too strongly spring-loaded for any small or light person to easily open. Those doors are usually installed by big, strong men, and when those men test the doors, they think they open just fine.

I’ve seen women collide with such doors, assuming that they’d open easily, and the potential for injury to their shoulders is readily apparent. I’m of average height and weight for a male and still strong, and even I have painfully banged into such doors that failed to open as easily as I had expected.

It’s all about a generalized attitude of watchful courtesy for every other person who comes within my awareness. Doors and their etiquette are just a good metaphor for how we practice, or fail to practice the Golden Rule in every act of every day.

Chris Leithiser: I think #11 needs to be generalized. If you stop, whether in a car or on foot or in a supermarket, pay attention to your surroundings. Am I blocking an entrance or pathway? Can people get past me? Can I improve things by moving a bit further?

Dayla Reagan-Buell: Yes. I will always hold open a door for someone, doesn’t matter who. I also make sure the door is held for someone behind, and when hiking, hold branches so they do not thwack the person behind. Etiquette and manners never go out of style.

Kris Stade D’Arcy: I open doors for people when it seems to help them or just to be polite, male or female, child or adult. I always feel like doing it. Even if the person I opened the door for is cranky. Doesn’t cost me a thing. BUT — I think you need another rule, Hank. And that is “When an attractive woman reaches a door and you, a hetero male, are several feet behind her, she may question your motives if you race to the door in order to be able to open it before she gets there. So don’t do that!”

 

#‎TheBookofGoodLiving – The Tool Rules

1) Buy the best tools you can afford, and take care of them.
2) Never lend your tools out to anyone for any reason. If your friend needs to use a tool, go with him and help.
3) If you borrow a tool from someone, return it the instant you’re done with it. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not “later.” Now.
4) Return borrowed tools in the same or better condition. If you borrow a tool from someone and break it, you owe them a new one. If you borrow tools in good order, don’t return them in a jumble. If you borrow clean tools, don’t return them dirty. If you borrow sharp tools, don’t return them dull.
5) Never borrow a tool without asking.
6) Use the right tool for the job. If it doesn’t work, don’t force it. Get a better tool.
7) Think about what will happen if the tool slips. If you push something with all your strength and it slips, where will your hand go? What will happen to your leg, or your face, or your helper?
8) Treat tools with sharp edges like the potentially deadly things they are.

Added comments:

Gregg Bender: Good shop rules to live by. Also use an engraver to put your initials or name on the tools large enough to have a spot for them. It can help prevent later problems.

Mike Garber: Rule #1 (the 1st half) is nice if you have the money, but I think it has to be weighed against usage. For a tool you need personally for a single project, or need to use once per year, Harbor Fright is fine. For a tool used for your livelihood or use regularly, yes go for a good one!

Brent Rasmussen: Measure twice, cut once. (Or in my case, “measure twice, then measure 6 more times just to be sure, cut, erring on the side of caution, then trim to the cut line.” I know my limitations, and I make sure to work within them.)

 

For much of my life, I found it almost impossible to say NO to people. I got better at it in my later years, but I really perfected the skill when I started working with drug and alcohol abusers. So:

#TheBookofGoodLiving – Saying No

0) You don’t owe anybody a Yes.
1) If you don’t want to do it or stand by and have it happen, say No.
2) If you have doubts, say No.
3) If you’d like to think about it, and maybe say Yes later, say No now.
4) If you’re confused or uncertain about the thing, say No.
5) If you think you owe the person asking, but still don’t really want to do it, say No.
6) You don’t have to give a reason. Just say No.
7) You don’t have to defend it. Just say No.
8) You don’t have to feel guilty about it. Just say No.
9) Don’t reward high pressure pitches. If they push more than you feel comfortable with, say No … even if you want to say Yes.
9) If they ask again, and again, say No one more time, and then just walk away. Once people know you can say No and make it stick, it saves you time and trouble later.
10) You can smile and still say No.
11) If it’s for charity, and it’s a public request, but it’s not a charity that fits with your own personal values, say “Not at this time.”
12) If it’s an amazing, one-time, never-to-be-repeated offer, say No. If they want you to buy, they can damned well let you decide in your own time.
13) If you hadn’t already planned to say Yes, say No.
14) Even if everybody else is saying Yes, if you don’t want to say Yes, say No.
15) Unless you say Yes, and mean to say Yes, the answer is No. Just say it: No.

Added comments:

Traci Clark de Lorge: And if it’s high pressure, don’t explain yourself. That just gives the “salesman” fodder to pressure you more, by trying to “fix” the situation so that you’ll say yes. I’ve learned that silence is very powerful, and using it at the right time will often solve the problem. Also, if someone pushes and pushes, that’s an automatic no for me even if I had been considering it before. I hate that!

Dayla Reagan-Buell: We need to protect our boundaries. Other people must learn to respect that. Having no boundaries will make you miserable.

 

#TheBookofGoodLiving – The Gun Rules

Never aim a gun at a person unless you intend to kill them.
Never let the vector of a gun barrel accidentally intersect a person or animal.
Assume every gun is loaded until you know different. Check more than once.
Teach kids that the guns in the house are deadly serious business. Never assume children won’t find a hidden gun.
Never tuck a gun in your pants.
Never “play-fire” a gun.
“Before the liquor comes out, the guns go away.”

Added comments:

Hank Fox: This isn’t complete, of course. But it was what I – non-expert, but grown up in firearm culture – could come up with on the spot.

That bit about the kids comes from a time when you’d get your ass tanned if you even TOUCHED one of the guns in the house without permission. I’m not sure it quite applies in the “no-no, honey, daddy doesn’t want you doing that” era.

Gary Layng: Even after the gun’s been checked and cleared as unloaded, assume it’s still loaded.

Richard Lucas: Sounds very close to Jeff Cooper’s four rules. 1. All guns are loaded. 2. Never point a gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 3. Finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target. And 4. Be sure of your target and what lies beyond.

Jim Downey: Yeah, sticking with the “four rules” as a start may be a good idea, since they have become more or less standardized in the last decade or so. Adding in the other elements is a good supplement.

 

#TheBookofGoodLiving – The Knife Rule

When handling any sharp-edge instrument, never exert a force vector on the thing that intersects any part of your (or anyone else’s) body.

Meaning, always cut AWAY from yourself, and others. Never draw a knife toward yourself when you cut.

Added comments:

Chris Leithiser: Unless you’re shaving, and even then you want a TANGENT.

Traci Clark de Lorge: And never try to catch a dropped knife (words of wisdom from my dad oh so many years ago).

Brandon Morgan: Also learn how to sharpen knives and keep them sharp. Dull knives are unsafe.

 

#TheBookofGoodLiving – The Face Fur Rule

If the diner has a beard or mustache, he will need TWO napkins. Not one. TWO. Or more.

 

Does that last one seem silly? But it’s something *I* have to deal with fairly often. I don’t mind asking for extra napkins; I still wish restaurant waiters knew it ahead of time.

The point is, on big important things and small silly ones, there’s an awful lot of wisdom for daily living out here among us. Why not share it? And see where things go.

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Earth Day 2014: Thoughts Like Falling Leaves

[This is a repost of a piece I did several years ago, slightly edited for 2014. This essay is also part of the conceptual force driving my thoughts on the need for Beta Culture.]

Leaf One

Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else.

Like the movie teen backing through a darkened doorway in the serial killer’s lair, we focus intently on one thing while something more important takes place just outside the sphere of our focus.

I’ll give you a real-life example that has bugged me for a long time.

I met Timothy Treadwell some years back in Flagstaff, when he came to give a talk about grizzlies. Tim’s the guy who got killed and partially eaten by a bear in 2003 in Alaska, and was immortalized in the 2005 film “Grizzly Man” a “documentary” by filmmaker Werner Herzog.

I hated the film (and I think Herzog is a pandering jackass for making it as he did) because it projected exactly two messages into the minds of viewers: 1) Tim Treadwell was crazy. 2) Grizzlies are deadly killers.

The finger pointed in those directions, and most of the viewers looked that way. Treadwell was in fact killed by a grizzly. But off-screen, what the finger didn’t point at, and what most of us failed to notice, was that he lived within spitting distance of these huge bears for 12 summers.

Unprotected.

Unarmed.

Unhurt.

Out of all the things we might want to know about grizzlies, we already know “Any sane person knows them goldurned bears’ll kill yuh!” What we don’t know is “There’s a way to live right in among grizzlies for 12 years without getting hurt.”

I can tell you in one second which of those things I’d like to see in a film. Herzog, sleight-of-hand documentarian, wasn’t interested in it. Today we have one more titillating, somewhat stupid film pointing a finger at something we already “know,” and most of us still view bears as unpredictable, inevitable killing machines.

So here we are on Earth Day 2014, equally awash in sleight-of-hand: Oh my gosh, are we ever jumping on the “green” bandwagon. You can’t watch TV for half an hour without seeing five commercials about companies going green. Corporations are going green, politicians are going green, builders are going green, banks are going green, cities are going green, for all I know states are going green. Green green GREEN — Yowzah!!

TV, billboards, radio messages, magazine ads, newspaper stories, websites — everywhere you look, clean, well-fed mommies and daddies and happy children are pitching in to cut water consumption! Save energy! Produce less trash! Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Man, I already feel better about it, don’t you? We’re DOING SOMETHING, at last, to Save the Earth. Let’s all heave a deep sigh of relief. Yessssss.

Meanwhile, in all those places where the finger doesn’t point …

Leaf Two

Was it just a dozen years or so ago I was writing an article about Baby Six Billion? She was born on or about October 11, 1999. I wrote about the world of progressive scarcity she would be born into, and I wished her well.

But we’re already talking about Baby Seven Billion, who arrived on Earth — as estimated, anyway — on October 31, 2011.

Halloween was the SECOND scariest event on that date. Even though you’d expect Baby Seven Billion to be a daughter or granddaughter of Baby Six Billion, she’s not. (Unless Baby Six Billion got pregnant at the age of 12, that is.)

Instead, Baby Seven Billion was born, give or take a few years, to the same generation that produced Baby Six Billion. The SAME generation.

Jeezus holy jacked-up shit.

Knowing that, I have to ask: What exactly is the point of going green?

I mean, if you and I conserve and recycle and stop eating endangered fish and refuse to support companies that log the Amazon, and do everything we can possibly do to keep the Earth green and growing …

And we each of us cut in half our annual environmental footprint on the Earth …

Where’s the net gain if, during that same period, our neighbors produce more than 205,000 more kids EVERY DAY?

That’s 75 million a year, in case you wondered — roughly equal to the combined populations of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah,Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Or more than the individual populations of Turkey, Thailand, France, United Kingdom, Italy or South Africa.

Or, if you prefer, more than twice the population of Canada. Each and every YEAR.

Your piddly-ass half-person conservation effort vanishes in the noise.

Leaf Three

I saw a beautifully designed book on the environment a few years back, a thick, well-researched tome about all the possible things you can do to Save the Earth. (Wish I could remember the name, but I seem to have put it out of my mind.) I was so excited, I ordered it immediately. And man, when it came, I unwrapped it lovingly, admiring its heft, its colors, its stunning cardboard slip cover. I dove into it with excitement — it was like a whole weighty library of greenitude.

But I made the mistake, within an hour of getting it, of delving into the index for articles on population control.

Nothing.

Huh? I couldn’t believe it. I tried different words, different combinations. In the end, I discovered the entire book seemed to contain only two PHRASES related to the subject. I mean, there weren’t three whole sentences about it. Amid stories of fish farming and water conservation and energy from wind and sun and recycling plastic and improved strains of rice, there was virtually nothing about human numbers.

It was like going through a million-word book of instructions on how to save a sinking ship, reading a thousand different formulations of “Bail faster and better,” but finding no mention at all of “Hey, stupid, plug the fucking hole in the hull!”

I instantly lost interest in the damned thing. I mailed it to a friend who’s into green stuff, and have since then entertained several brief imaginings of punching the authors in the face if I ever get to meet them.

But … can I really blame them? I haven’t had the chance to read every book ever written on saving the earth, but I’ve found few recent ones that deal with population as the real core of the problem.

Is the subject taboo? Is it simple despair that puts it off-limits?

Maybe it’s the inevitable over-reaction. The instant you start talking about encouraging people to use condoms and contraceptives, to pursue various avenues of family planning, etc., to limit human population, the shriekers slam down on you like a rain of neutron bombs — blam, blam blam! “You want to murder babies!! You want to commit genocide!! Oh my God, why do you hate human beings so much!!?”

Whew.

Leaf Four

I had a cowboy friend, Tom Wood, who was an eternal optimist. I noticed the day I met him that he had this small purpley bump on the side of his face, and I asked him about it not long after, when we’d had a chance to get to know each other.

“Ah. That ain’t nothing.” Big smile, dismissive gesture with can of beer. “Been there for years! You gotta go sometime!”

Two years later, the purpley bump was bigger, but the gesture and optimistic dismissal was the same. Every time the subject came up: “Hey, you gotta go sometime!”

Except for the day he found out he had malignant melanoma, and the three or four months he lasted after.

Turns out optimism, like anything, is misusable. If you have a problem, but you refuse to grapple with it because you’d rather be optimistic and hopeful about the future … well, there are side effects.

To get well, you first have to admit you’re sick. To climb out of a financial hole, you first have to admit you’re not handling your money well. To stanch the bleeding of a gaping wound, you first have to notice the gushing blood.

Sometimes, for a while, optimism has to slide over into the passenger seat, keep its smirking mouth shut, and let pessimism take the wheel.

In the midst of an emergency, in the face of a deadly threat, you have to think more about the worst that can happen, rather than the best.

The population of Planet Earth has yet to realize this.

Leaf Five

I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t use the word “retarded.” And I get the point — it can be a callous insult to people with mental handicaps.

But like the shock value of carefully-applied profanity, it can also serve to slap people awake.

Here’s retarded: The smug idiot who laughs “Hey, we can’t hurt the Earth! Ha-ha! It’ll be here and fine long after we’re gone!”

Here’s retarded: “Even IF we were capable of wrecking the environment, God could fix it with a wave of his hand.”

Here’s retarded: Buying into all those corporate messages that if we recycle and reuse (with their corporate help, of course), everything will be just fine.

Here’s retarded: Every environmentalist and green advocate who ever lived who failed to recognize that the foundation of EVERY environmental problem is too many people.

Here’s retarded: The guy who repeats the vague reassurance that “Educated women tend to have fewer children. All we have to do is raise the level of education and social welfare in the world, and world population will level off at some sustainable level.”

Problem is, we’re out of time on hopeful reassurances. The planet is already over the load limit on humans — there’s nothing left, no excess capacity to hold us until that optimistically hoped-for population leveling begins to kick in.

If ever there was a moment to be pessimistic, to attempt to be thoughtful and worried and to imagine the worst, this would be that moment.

We’re killing the Earth NOW.

Leaf Six

I don’t see it getting better in my lifetime.

Don’t think I don’t hate to say it.

I hate to even think it. Hey, I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I was about 11 years old and first read Zip-Zip Goes to Venus.

As an SF fan, I’m a devoted futurist. For years I thought about the possibility of cloning my dog, the Best Dog I Ever Even Met, but I held off on doing anything about it. Then one day he got sick, and it hit me that I could either 1) read about all the possible technological innovations but do nothing to make ready for them, or 2) I could live and act as if these imagined futures would be real.

I picked the second option. The future is a real place, a real time, and many things will become possible. I set the wheels in motion for collecting tissue samples when Tito died. Today those samples are frozen in liquid nitrogen, providing me a doorway into one of those possible futures. When (if) cloning gets to be reliable and cheap, I’ll be ready to have them build a puppy for me, the latter-day twin of the Best Dog I Ever Even Met.

But futurist or not, no matter how much technological progress we make — on gene-engineered crops, fish farming, pollution-free energy — none of that can fix the hole in the boat, the hole of more and more people, more and more mouths, arriving daily like unstoppable civilization-smashing dreadnoughts of unthinking hunger.

Leaf Seven

The truth is — brace yourself for some carefully-applied profanity —

We’re fucked.

Seriously. We’re raping ourselves to death with our own appetites. We are bent over, grabbing our metaphorical ankles, while a dick the size of Montgomery, Alabama — population 205,764 — rams repeatedly, daily, up our collective butts.

And it looks like we don’t have the brains to stop it.

For instance: Even the idea of conservation has enemies. And not quiet enemies, but active, loud, wealthy enemies. Enemies with TV and radio shows. Enemies with audiences of admiring millions. Enemies with the backing of huge, globe-spanning churches. Save the environment? Do something about global warming? It’s un-American, it’s crazy, it’s EVILLLL!!

But even those who aren’t active enemies of possible solutions are still thinking we can do pretty much all the same stuff we’ve always done. Everybody can drive cars and live in big houses, and buy everything we buy wrapped in a disposable plastic sheath, and have two or three or four kids. As long as we all pitch in and conscientiously — voluntarily! — conserve, everything will be fine.

Even those of us who are active champions of the environment, as long as we fail to bring the subject of human population into every single discussion, are little more than enablers, co-dependents who help wreck things by failing to admit the real problem.

Taken together, we’re the battered wife who won’t admit she needs help. “I know he loves me. He only does it when he’s drinking.” Wham! “It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t provoke him.” Wham! “He doesn’t really mean to do it. I just can’t leave him.” Wham! Wham!

Out here in the real world, we’re already dying. We’re already killing everything else we care about. It’s just that it’s been happening in slo-mo.

Like the stupid pigeon that stands still while the cat sneaks up on him in broad daylight — “Yeah it DOES look like a great big predator, but hey, it’s barely moving, and nothing bad’s happened SO far, right?” — we’ve sat mired in calm complacency in the midst of a slow motion crash.

But things are speeding up.

The Earth is bleeding to death under us, faster and faster, and the best we’ve managed so far is a string of very small Band-Aids.

When the real way to stop the blood loss, the only workable treatment, is the tourniquet of Everybody Stop Having Children. For a while, anyway.

Leaf Eight

Nothing I’ve said here is meant to imply that I have absolutely no hope. Even the statement “we’re fucked” is not something I feel in any final way.

But I’m not optimistic. The only hope I DO see is if we admit the problem, the real problem, and deal with that. Plug the hole in the hull first.

Stop human population growth. Now. Reverse it. Get our numbers down to four billion, two billion, whatever number really IS sustainable in the real world.

Because this is it, kids. The photo finish where humanity as a group crosses the line a split-second ahead of Mr. Death and lives as the better selves we could be, the ones who become rational adults and enter the next Age of life on earth.

Or the photo finish where Mr. Death beats us across, and stands mocking as we murder each other attempting to claw our individual selves out of the sucking pit of our own sewage and malignant runaway growth … and kill everything else we care about — all the whales and wolves, the polar bears and eagles, and even the cats and dogs and horses — along the way.

There is a possible future, maybe even a probable future, where quite a lot of us will live to see the squalid, dehumanizing background-world of Blade Runner, or Mad Max, or Idiocracy, as the depiction of an enviable Golden Age.

(Just FYI, all you uber-rich people thinking you might survive inside some kind of walled compound, I’d bet real money that the zombie hordes will be eating you FIRST. After all, you’re the fat, juicy ones. Besides, do you really want to live in a world without toilet paper? Without coffee? Without chocolate? )

You, or your kids if you have any, will face this fact: A decidedly unpretty future of death, death and more death is coming soon to a planet near you.

Leaf Nine

And now — deep sigh — cue the shriekers. I obviously want to murder babies, and commit genocide on poor people, right? I’m crazy, I have no proof for my silly dark fantasies and I should probably just shut up — Why do you hate people so much, Mr. Gloomy? — and try not to kill other people’s optimism.

Anyway, things aren’t really that bad, and Science Will Find A Way. Like, you know, mining asteroids and colonizing the Moon, sending our surplus population into space. Stuff like that.

Besides, somewhere out there somebody smarter and better informed than you and I has the problem in hand and will fix things up.

After all, those wise strangers, wherever they are, whoever they are — you know, like government people and corporations and such — care SO MUCH about you and I and our families, right?

Right?

Right.

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Beta Culture: A Citizen of Earth

I don’t think I ever really got around to explaining the title of this blog. So why “A Citizen of Earth”?

When I was still in elementary school (grades 1-6, here in the U.S.), my oldest brother graduated to high school (grades 9-12). I’d been hearing him cheer for his junior high school (grades 7-8) football team — the Catamounts — for two years, but here he was suddenly backing his new high school team, the Eagles.

Something about being a Catamount supporter felt natural and right. The Catamounts WERE the best team. My brother had been telling me for two years, and I believed him. But now suddenly the Catamounts were forgotten in this new fervor for the Eagles.

“Why don’t you like the Catamounts any more?” I asked him, but he gave me his look that meant “That’s one of those Stupid Little Brother questions,” and that was the end of it.

I must have been all of 10 years old, but I remember wondering “Can you really care about something so much, fanatically cheer and support someone, and then just … not?”

Apparently you could. But I remember being disturbed, feeling something dark that said love, allegiance, whatever it was, was not something that just flipped from one thing to another, one tribal team to another, like a switched being flicked on and off.

Certainly I couldn’t do it. If I loved something, cared deeply about something, it was pretty much forever. Possibly as a result, love and allegiance came to me very slowly, very cautiously, like a forest animal checking the terrain before committing.

I sat out as many of my high school pep rallies as I could. While the rest of the school was in the auditorium, stamping their feet and shouting on cue, I was in the library reading. On those occasions when I got caught and sent to the auditorium to participate, I looked around at friends and classmates and wondered. I tried shouting and clapping, stamping my feet, all of it, and I’ll admit there were moments when I was caught up in the MUSIC of it, the thundering percussion of it all, but for the most part I sat quietly and watched.

More than team spirit, I felt suspicion. Learning to cheer and wave and stamp our feet on cue, were we being programmed to like this team, and then the next team? Trading whatever developing independence of thought we might have for this knee-jerk belief and allegiance?

Did all this have some goal in mind, maybe a goal that wasn’t even for us, but for the people asking us to do it? Were we learning to be excited and passionate – and sometimes angry and defensive – for somebody else’s benefit?

And after we were programmed to respond with this sort of instant allegiance, would we be switched to something bigger and more demanding and even less helpful to our own personal welfares?

Part of the answer – the Vietnam War – wasn’t long in coming.

For those of you who weren’t around back then, the Iraq War is an even better example. The type of pep-rally-devotion I’m talking about, national allegiance, at a level that ignores justice, reason, and even self-preservation, is right out there in plain sight. Not just for the prosecution of the war, but for the blind, loving, passionate support of it. During the Bush years, to question the war, to express one single word of doubt, was to be a traitor to every American ideal.

To question the war was to waste the patriotic, freedom-loving sacrifice of all those who’d died in it – almost as if you’d killed them yourself. To question the war was to hate America itself, the proud nation which bleeds to give you freedom, safety, wealth, family, God, EVERYTHING. If you doubted the justice and necessity of the Iraq War, you commie traitor bastard, you should definitely go live with Saddam … perhaps before one of your former countrymen, proud patriots all, took you out and shot you.

Well, that was just one of the more recent eye-openers that nationalism, team spirit on a national scale, was something so easily bent to irrational ends that it seemed designed for it.

“My country right or wrong” sounds good as a patriotic quote from American history. But if you THINK about it, think about what it means to support wrong-doing, to back unjustified, senseless war or smaller scale black ops, without thought or guilt or regret, it automatically makes you a bad person. To the extent that you support killing strangers off in some distant country, for no good reason you know, to that extent you are guilty of the killing.

To put it mildly, I don’t like that. I don’t want to be a part of it.

In fact, I don’t want to be a part of ANY automatic tribal or national action. I’m not a “national” person. Meaning, I don’t like to believe I’m owned or ordered by the concept of one nation or another.

I recently had a bit of an epiphany about giving and getting in the modern world, enough that I see that libertarians have some fairly selfish ideas regarding what the world owes them, and what they owe back. But the thing is, I’m willing to give, and give a lot. In fact, I think you MUST give – to family, to friends (human and animal), to some of those others who share the earth with us, in fact to Planet Earth itself.

But not to the people who see themselves only in terms of nations, and not to those nations.

Arguing with conservative friends, I’ve said many times that the “America” we US-ers get so soppy and poetic about is not a place or a flag. It’s a body of ideas. And when I think of myself as an American, my respect is to those ideas, and not to the land contained within these specific geographic boundaries, or to a symbolic flag.

Truthfully, it’s not even allegiance to all of the ideas. When the goddy faction starts in saying this is a Christian nation, they’re instantly disincluding me. I’m not a citizen of any Christian nation, and there is no exclusively Christian notion I hold with.

I’d even argue there are a lot of Christian ideas that are impossible to square with this American body of ideas. Hey, if your biggest Big Guy is a king, you ain’t living in any democratic republic I ever heard of. You’re LESS of an American than I am.

Legally, I’m a citizen of the United States. But ethically, and rationally, my allegiance is to this body of ideas – ideas of equality, justice, reason, individual freedom, fairness, strength, friendliness, community, generosity, charity, education, peace, privacy, intelligence, curiosity, a caring for nature, and a great deal more.

To the extent those ideas or ideals are at the foundation of the United States, I’m wholly on board. But to the extent they aren’t – which, lately, we seem to be diverging from rather radically – I’m less a supporter of the NATION and more a supporter of the IDEAS.

I’ve been headed this way since Vietnam, I suppose. I didn’t support that war, and I still think it was a catastrophe for all concerned.

The Iraq War of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was not only a catastrophe but an vicious betrayal of some of the deepest ideals of Americans. It was not just a war in the middle East, it was a war right here in the U.S., a manipulative war on U.S. citizens, a campaign of blatant, casual lying and brainwashing, which has yet to end and probably never will.

I can’t be a part of that. If the U.S. is redefining itself to be THIS – a corporate-military-media (and religious) machine that cares about profits and power more than the lives of people – my allegiance necessarily diminishes. I’m a citizen of something larger and better, I like to think.

My fellow citizens are not the people who just happen to live next door, but those who share my ideals.

I have more in common with the man who crosses a border in hopes of a better life than some of the “citizen militia” thugs who patrol that border. More in common with the people in other nations who protect women’s rights to reproductive health than the screaming fools who block access to Planned Parenthood doors here in the U.S. More in common with environmental activists on the Sea Shepherd than with American big game hunters who pose with dead African wildlife. More in common with the conscientious objectors of the Vietnam era than loudmouthed idiot hyperpatriots like Ted Nugent. More in common with foreign scientists than American creationists.

And more in common with the people who share my idea of a citizenship in something bigger and more inclusive, something that ignores and supercedes national boundaries and tribal identifications … than with the flag-waving “patriots” who think their country can do no wrong.

I’m A Citizen of Earth.

I know I’m not alone in this. I hope there are more and more of us as we move into our difficult future.

This is the kind of society, the kind of culture, I want to help build. I think it’s the only survivable one.

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Atheist Christmas Present from William Lane Craig

Eye roll. Fox Snooze gives us William Lane Craig writing A Christmas gift for atheists – five reasons why God exists.

He starts out, annoyingly enough, with this:

For atheists, Christmas is a religious sham. For if God does not exist, then obviously Jesus’ birth cannot represent the incarnation of God in human history, which Christians celebrate at this time of year.

However, most atheists, in my experience, have no good reasons for their disbelief. Rather they’ve learned to simply repeat the slogan, “There’s no good evidence for God’s existence!”

I know that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 45 years or so. Because fuck thinking, right? Far easier to parrot what I’ve been told, repeating stock phrases, kneeling, singing hymns, counting the Rosary … oh, wait.

And by the way, the dismissive presentation of that “slogan”? It’s not exactly false, is it? There is no good evidence for the existence of a supernatural superbeing in the mold of the Christian God.

But then again, Christmas — the religious part of it, anyway — IS a religious sham, even to some Christians. Take this article from Good News, United Church of God’s online magazine: The Top 10 Reasons Why I Don’t Celebrate Christmas … some of which are: Christmas is nowhere mentioned in the Bible. Jesus wasn’t born on or near Dec. 25. The Christmas holiday is largely a recycled pagan celebration. And the cool one:  You can’t put Christ back into something He was never in.

But as a cultural celebration, Christmas is one of a category of fun mid-winter events (think Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and at least 32 other Winter Solstice celebrations). I have fond memories of it as a kid, and fond feelings for it now. Sham or not, we can celebrate the hell out of it. Christians don’t own it. Christmas is not an item, it’s something people DO. And you can do it however it suits you.

I tend to think of it as Krismas, named after Kris Kringle, and my Nativity Scene would probably have a baby Skettymon cooing cutely from a large colander, but hey, the sentiment of joy and togetherness is there.

Back to Craig and his 5 reasons:

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.
3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.
4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
5.  God can be personally known and experienced.

I am not well equipped to argue physics, nor is William Lane Craig. Items 4 and 5 seem so irrelevant to anything real they’re not worth answering. But I can argue with Craig’s craptastic conclusions in point 3:

Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

I doubt there are “objective” moral values. We’re sort of working our way toward it, aren’t we? Muddling along as best we can. For instance, we no longer care all that much about Exodus 20:4-6

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Arrogant puffery. Such a god would be unworthy of worship, or even admiration, and every person reading this knows it … in perfect opposition to what it says in the sourcebook of Christianity. We no longer believe such stuff because we’re better than the Bible. Because our morals, at least in some things, have progressed in the past few thousand years. So much so that even Christians are now forced to ignore large parts of their own sourcebook.

But this was puffery written by PEOPLE (rather than gods) — humans who sought to control other humans with slippery arguments, subtle misdirection, and blatant lies.

Just as William Lane Craig does:

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

 

 

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Pain As a Monument to Life

The question always comes up: What do you say to someone who’s lost a loved one to death? How do you comfort them? Maybe the only useful answer is that there is no real comfort, and that that’s a good thing.

A few days ago I found a microcassette tape of my Cowboy Dad talking to me. The tape is nothing special, it’s just him sitting there in his living room talking. Teaching me something … and that was so HIM.

I wish I had more such tapes. I wish I had video. Jeez, I want HIM back. But I know I’m not going to get that. The rotten realization hits me yet again: I’ll go the whole rest of my life without him in it.

But I’m also thinking, you know, he had his moment in the sun. And this moment, THIS one, is mine. This is the moment in the sun of all of us, all we living people. And yeah, sadness is a part of it. We’ll always have that, those of us who feel real love, and lose it.

But this brief Moment, our moment, is also the only time we get for creating joy, for living our lives as our own selves, and discovering how much we can do with that.

That’s what we’re really about, isn’t it? Not just getting through the day, not just slinking through our lives making as little fuss as possible, not just dragging ourselves from one place to another and back over and over, but creating joy. DOING something joyous and big, and sharing it.

I suppose it’s irony that each next generation most strongly feels the sadness of losing us when we have created an environment of love, of the joys of life, for them to live inside. The sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one is the monument to a life well and lovingly lived.

In my view, nothing should be allowed to diminish that sadness, that monument. Not drugs, not religion, not well-meaning fantasies about better places and rainbow bridges.

When you lose someone you love, it should damned well HURT, and keep on hurting … until you rediscover the joys of life in your own time, hear the music of life again and find your feet dancing to it.

Every generation carries within it the darkness and pain of death, and yet manages to dance in the music and the sunshine of life.

It will happen for you.

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A Young Artist’s Heartbreak

You ever have the experience of finding something in your head you didn’t know was there?

I just had one of those moments. I’m not totally surprised to find it there — it’s based on a memory, after all. But it’s a leftover from, oh, about the age of 6 or so, and at my current age of 60, it’s just curious to find it still in there somewhere.

It has to do with how I felt about Crayola crayons. And the memory bubbled up at this bit on the ColourLovers site: All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts.

You remember when you were a kid how much you loved your Crayolas? You could do anything with those great colors. I wasn’t much of an artist when it came to creating original works on blank coloring paper, but I was pretty good at picking realistic colors to fill in pictures in coloring books.

I couldn’t match Michelle, of course. Michelle was the little girl in my class – maybe in every class – who could color things perfectly. She was the Winslow Homer of coloring books, so good at coloring she wowed even adults.

I still remember the alien perfection of her coloring. She not only picked the right colors, she had this way of bearing down at the edges of each coloring block so that it gained a special brilliance. Under Michelle’s hand and eye, simple line drawings in coloring books took on a life beyond what their creators dreamed, leaping off the page at you in smooth chromatic brilliance. She even put in extras, added lines of shading or definition to give depth to the flat images of kittens and frogs and cowboys.

And whereas I, with my 6-year-old hand-eye coordination, sometimes slipped and let the waxy color wander over a line, when the Crayon was in Michelle’s hand, not an atom of color lapped over.

Worse, she wasn’t even snotty about it, so I don’t get to remember her as a nasty little brat. She was sweet, even generous, about showing others how she did what she did. (Pfft. Rotten little minx. Today she’s probably on the board of Crayola, or a member of the Presidential Commission on Coloring Books.)

Anyway, coming across that listing of all the crayon colors, I felt a moment of … hurt.

Seriously.

My family was poor. Not starving and freezing poor, but raggedy-ass hand-me-down poor. Occasionally even charity-case welfare poor. I never lacked for my own socks and shoes, but until I was 13 or so I don’t think I wore a single shirt or pair of pants that hadn’t been worn by one or both of my older brothers. My “rich” uncle once bought me a chemistry set for Christmas that cost all of $15, and I felt like I was king of the world for months after.

The relative poverty played out in other ways. Toys were all hand-me-downs, or Goodwill acquisitions, and even so, there weren’t many.

Which leads me to Crayons.

They came in different-sized boxes. Still do, in fact, but I’m relating the memories of the 6-year-old at the center of this memory.

There was the 8-crayon box, which anybody could afford. Crayola says “8 ct. Crayola Crayons are the classic kids’ art tool. They are the colors generations have grown up with — includes red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple!”

There was the 16-crayon box, which included the coveted gold, silver and copper. There was the 24-crayon box, and then 48, which moved into ethereal realm of colors called yellow-green and sky blue and flesh.

There was the 64-crayon box, which I think I saw only a handful of times in my entire life, so I can’t say what colors it contained.

And then there was a box that contained 96 crayons. Ninety six!! Tangerine! Jungle Green! Fuschia! Red Violet! Royal Purple! Pacific Blue! Sea Green, Dandelion, Sepia!

The colors were ranked in disciplined rainbow rows in the huge box, like an invading Crayola army.

This was WEALTH. Raw, in-your-face goddam opulence.

Only two kids I ever met had it. Michelle was one. (The other was a kid in the 6th grade, long after any of us really cared about such things, so he doesn’t count.)

The first time that box came to school, it nearly caused a riot. Unheeding Miss Calvert’s orders, we left our seats to crowd around and gawk. There were gasps. There were wows. Even fat old Miss Calvert waddled over to marvel.

When Michelle opened that box for the first time, a kind of glow emerged, something like really religious people might imagine emanates from holy shrines. It wasn’t just glorious, it was Glory itself. Thinking about it now, I even seem to remember a sound, the distant choral notes of a heavenly choir (although this may only be the constant tinny whine in my aged ears) that accompanied the opening of the full 96-crayon box.

A brand new box of 96 crayons, in untouched splendor. Pristine tips. Not a scratch, not a tooth mark. Perfect, unpeeled paper covers. Unbroken. And the colors! None of us dared touch them, but Miss Calvert and Michelle read off their names as the rest of us stood in stunned, slack-jawed silence. Periwinkle? Cerulean? We’d never even heard of them.

Damn.

Eventually I went back to my desk and my own coloring book. I opened the page to the horse. I opened my own box of crayons. They were new and perfect, just as unbroken and unblemished as Michelle’s. But when I looked at my color selection, there was only red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple.

I had the 8-color box.

Sweet, wealthy Michelle might have colored her horse brick red or mahogany, desert sand or almond, but I had only brown.

The memory ends there. Surely I picked up the brown and started coloring, doing the best I could with what I had. Even at the age of 6, you know life doesn’t end just because it hurts. And there’s a hazy something in my head that suggests that later in the year, Michelle even lent out certain colors to special friends, and that once or twice I qualified to borrow her sunset orange, or silver, or even copper.

But carried unnoticed and unsuspected across half a century, there’s still a tiny little wound on the heart of that 6-year-old boy.

Being poor sucks. Certainly there are plenty of children in the world who have less, and the sensible-adult me of today well knows it.

But 50-plus years later, there’s a 6-year-old in me that still yearns, impossibly and hopelessly, after Crayola’s Big Box.

And I still have no idea what periwinkle looks like.

————————————–

[Afternote: I looked up the history of Crayola on Wikipedia, and I’ve misremembered some of this. The 96-box came along well after I was in first grade. It was the 64-box I recall.]

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 1 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Somewhere above all this, all the roiling newness of the growing atheist and progressive community, there’s an overview. I’ve tried very hard to see it.

It may be that there are plenty of people smarter than me, more educated, innately broader of understanding, who already know what it is we’re all working towards. But I have yet to read their books or hear their talks.

I look out and see … pieces. A chopped salad of efforts and understanding that forms no coherent whole.

I don’t feel TOO bad about that. I mean ‘feel bad’ in the sense that there are churchy luddites who oppose positive changes, and we have to be a lot better if we want to win this thing. Because they are chopped up even worse than we are. And though they’ve had power over us for thousands of years, it was the power of bullying and cowardice and lies, rather than some sort of coherent strategy or vision or real knowledge, and that power – in the face of real advances on our side – is waning.

I sometimes wish I had a formal grounding in philosophy, so I could have more tools in my head to deal with all this. Yet other times I’m glad I’m an uneducated doofus, philosophically speaking, because the journey I want to make is my own journey, and the tools I do manage to work out on my own … well, they seem to work better – for me, anyway – than the stuff I’ve garnered from more formal philosophy.

I get little glimpses of the Big Picture, from time to time. And it’s not just us in the frame. It’s us and … Earth. The life around us. The way we can fit into it, and cherish it and, well, live with it. I see us coming into a real sense of our own immense power, and finding ways to curb our excesses to create a truly sustainable relationship with Earth (which we do not have and have never yet had) and each other.

Atheism is very much a part of it.

There’s a book I want to someday write that will explain it all. I’ll figure out all the basic pieces, and how they fit together, and will at last understand something of what this is all about.

And yet, when I consider writing that book, I worry.

First that I might need about a hundred more years (and a hundred more IQ points!) to get it.

Second that I’m … well, just wrong. That there is not only no Big Picture, but no Big Picture is possible. Not for human intelligence to figure out, anyway. Which means we’ll never have it, and will never be able to live well on Planet Earth. And will probably wreck most of it, and kill ourselves along the way.

Third is a bit of a sidebar to the second worry. When I first thought of it, it actually scared me, because I was afraid it was a fatal hit at the heart of atheist philosophy.

Are you familiar with “follow-through”? If you’ve ever done any kind of sport, I know you are. Follow-through is the part of the swing AFTER the bat or the golf club strikes the ball. The arm and body motion AFTER the baseball leaves the pitcher’s hand or the bowling ball leaves the bowler’s.

Every Little Leaguer knows that if you swing AT the ball, you get one result, and not a very good one. But if you swing THROUGH the ball, you get both more control of where the ball goes and more power to get it there.

In baseball or golf, the ball is in your control for only a split second, and it is only in that instant that you can direct it onto a path that you deliberately choose. The thing is, you can’t see that path if you’re focused solely on the ball. You have to look beyond — aim beyond, swing beyond — your contact point with the ball, in order to properly send it onto some optimal path.

The thing that I worried about was that Christians had this larger vision for human life, a goal that passed beyond merely human concerns, and that goal supplied the follow-through for living a good human life.

If you swung for Heaven, in other words, you’d hit ordinary human life out of the park. But if you aimed only at your own selfish life, you’d fall short and end in some sort of inward-aimed and lesser life.

I actually worried about that for a good 3 years before I started to figure out why religion was the wrong follow-through, that it couldn’t work. Which is: There’s nothing there. Christians only appear to be aiming beyond their own lives. In reality, they’re aiming in no direction. Or, considering the thousands of religions or personal interpretations of religions, in a thousand different directions. Their aim, if they have one, is disconnected from anyplace in the real world that you can get to.

Besides which, there are a LOT of larger things to care about. Every one of us can find our own larger aims and follow-through to build good lives for ourselves.

What follows is a multi-part essay, a little bit about follow-through and a little bit about that Big Picture. Maybe it’s a prologue to the larger quest.

There’s a place in it – and it comes early – where you’re not going to like me very much. But bear in mind that this is about a journey, not a stopping point, and that we all have to come FROM somewhere in order to get TO somewhere. We change in our lives, hopefully for the better, and that change has to be arrived at along a human path, not a miraculous one.

In the same way you wouldn’t hold a grudge against a recovered alcoholic for getting falling-down drunk on a day 30 years past, I hope you’ll withhold judgment long enough to read to the end and see where I’m going with it.

.

About 1980

It’s a beautiful spring morning in California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

The sky is that impossible blue of high altitude places. The normally grayish-green high-desert valley is sprouting the rich shades of spring down toward the sparkling vastness of Crowley Lake, and an azure sea of wild iris, punctuated by dots of golden Mariposa tulips, sweeps out from the near view to vanish into the distance.

A red-tailed hawk circles overhead in the vivid air. Though I can’t see them, I know that off to the west, at the base of the rising mountains, migrating mule deer are cutting dusty tracks through the manzanita-covered foothills, browsing their way along as they trail lazily toward the passes which have yet to thaw enough to let them into the backcountry wilderness.

Fed by pure melting snow, crystal streams chuckle out of those mountains, running down in rocky leaps and bounds. Ice-cold trout lurk in their deep pools, visible from the surface as they dart about after insects and larvae and, to the joy of blissful streamside flycasters later in the season, the occasional artificial fly.

All in all, this must be the best place on earth in which to live, and the best of all possible times in which to be here.

And here I am in the glorious middle of it, covered in blood and dirt, working the spring branding at a local ranch … cutting the balls off bull calves.

— CONTINUED —