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The night before he departed he was inside his own head, seated in that high-back swivel desk chair in his office, hands unfolded and staring into space, feeling betrayed by his inner voice that would not let the past go. Rumination drowns out equanimity and Russ knew it. And yet he also knew the inner voice, and, for that matter, his outer voice, came unbidden. Rumination is not talking to yourself so much as it is an illness. If equanimity was the experiential goal of a human life then the brain would have to be trained to want it. Then, unexpectedly, another thought budded in Russ’ brain, a memory, maybe, of something someone had said: Nothing is probable without it first being possible. Possibly that person was Russ’ dad, so probably it was. Russ himself would not ever become a dad although as the son of one he wanted to do what he could to keep dad’s spirits high and reduce, though probably not avoid entirely, the bad feelings that sometimes came between them that could, if left unresolved, accumulate like small cosmetic insults to a cherished car which if put off too long can add up, sneak up on you, until one day you feel overwhelmed by the scale of disrepair leading to an irretrievable depreciation of affection for that something you once valued.

It was early September and years since Russ had returned home to visit with dad, and for sure mom as well, though it was dad who’d suggested he come north to get out of the heat and maybe enjoy a day of kayaking together. He’d had both Eddyline’s repainted, new seals installed on the hatches, the cockpit seats replaced, and he’d personally re-cabled both boats bow to stern and purchased two new carbon fiber paddles. The boats were now sturdy enough for a Lake Superior paddle that Dad’d been scouting for some time. What do you say, Russ, Dad had asked, all you have to do is show up.

Russ merged onto Interstate 35 in north Texas where he and Jill, his wife, lived and worked and he stayed on it pretty much the whole way to Wisconsin where mom and dad lived – the landscape along the route was devoid of topography having been scraped flat by ice, though that’s not the way dad saw it, through Kansas City, Des Moines, then veering northeast slightly up through Minneapolis, on to Duluth and then east on Hwy 2 to Ironwood where dad and mom had retired wanting to remain in Wisconsin, yes, though moving as far away as practical from the black blight of the city of Milwaukee that had done well by both of them for all their working years but anymore as far as dad was concerned – and possibly mom as well, although it was harder to tell from just talking on the phone once a week with her as he and Jill had striven to do ever since moving away from Wisconsin – had become a filthy crime-ridden mess; take for example the blacks who called in phony three-alarm fires in order to empty the firehouse so they could loot it. Dad, blacks? Really? It’s gotten worse down there since you left, Russ, a lot worse. Dad had a way with words the way pastor did delivering homilies from the lectern at the Lake of the Woods Lutheran church that he and mom religiously attended, and his metaphors were unsurprisingly drawn from the natural world which he was fond of so long as he felt he had a measure of dominion over it. ‘You can’t let nature run wild!’ he’d once parroted. Russ might have inherited his own love of nature from dad though his was more of an unconditional love. When Russ was a young boy, a budding nine year old, standing inside the house peering out the front screen door studying dad as he edged the lawn to keep it in bounds, or shaping the adjacent Boxwoods into globes with the Sunbeam hedge trimmer, the orange extension cord snaked between his work boots and his mouth clamped around a saliva-soaked cigar, Russ felt he didn’t want to grow up and ever try to tame the natural world like that. True, the lawn and the Boxwoods were no more natural than Rusty the family terrier was wild, but these were living things worthy of their own flourish. Surely they were. To Russ they were.

Russ turned into the driveway at mom and dad’s modest lake home at about 6:30 PM, came to a stop and cut the engine. Early evening light slanted through the canopy of birch and evergreen trees surrounding the property. Against the advice of the builder dad had insisted on a blacktop driveway which, this time of year, had a thin veneer of yellow-orange pine duff on it so neatly demarcated by the edged green lawn on either side it appeared to have been dusted by hand. The few select trees that’d survived clear-cut when the property was developed had been appropriately bottom-limbed, a proud cord of pine wood split into sixteen inch quarters had been neatly cross-stacked near the garage, the concrete path to the front door had been recently swept and power-washed. A pretty path made of non-native stones wound along the side of the house ending just above the steps that dad had fashioned of treated 4x4s and knocked into the slope, which descended gently to the pier on the lake. Russ recalled the day, must’ve been ten years ago now, on the phone with dad – he was peeved that he’d needed to get a variance from the DNR just to knock in three stupid steps on his own property. Maybe they want to protect the natural habitat of the waterfront, dad? Protect it from what? I don’t know, from destruction? But I constructed those steps, I improved the shore, dad shot back, a voice imprinted with indignation not readily disguised on a phone call – I didn’t destruct anything. Russ said, I’m not defending their decision, Dad, just trying to understand their motivation. He stepped out of his car now, he was stiff and sore from the long drive. He was looking to the lake shore where he spotted dad’s 16′ Alumacraft covered with a spotless canvas stretched tight over the length of the boat with a custom-stitched extension that covered the Evinrude outboard as well; then he got caught up in a stare, the distant boat bobbing hypnotically on the rippled lake, now and then gently bumping against the pier. A sand fly lighted on his neck. He instinctively swatted it and watched it fall into a puddle of pine duff, where it writhed for a second, then died. Nobody appeared to be home.

Russ steadied himself against the man door into the garage and peered through the window. There were the kayaks, each one upside down on two sawhorses. A light had been left on in the far corner so he could make out the Workmate with a Milwaukee power drill on it with the chamois attachment that dad had used to buff out those gleaming white hulls. The garage floor was shiny, gray, probably dad had it repainted recently. Unsurprisingly, everything in dad’s garage was in its place, always, the Shop Vac on casters at the ready, zero entropy.

Perfunctory hugs all around when mom and dad arrived back home. In the only guest bedroom Russ heaved his travel bag onto the foot of the bed. It left a crater in the bedspread, the surface wave propagated to the headboard disturbing three ornamental pillows mom had arranged in a chevron pattern and set lightly atop the sleeping pillows. Diagonal vacuum tracks were impressed in the plush carpet, not a spec of visible dust on the nightstand, the dresser, or the deep windowsill. A pleated shade was half drawn on the only sliding window, which was closed tight and locked. Russ sat on the bed, elbows on his knees he cupped his head in his hands and stared at the floor. He wanted the long drive to be worth it. He pulled his phone from a coat pocket and texted Jill that he’d arrived safely, then added: so far so good wit dad

The three of them enjoyed a late supper around the table, mom made spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread. Or might there now be four around the table after come lord Jesus be our guest was intoned with hands in laps. Russ mused, then he let it go because, equanimity Russ, remember? After supper, dishes were hand-washed and put away, the cord wrapped three times around the toaster, secured, and a custom-knitted thingy mom had had for over thirty years was placed over the toaster and then it was stowed in its proper place in a lower cabinet until next time. They played a few rounds of Skip-Bo and then turned in for the night. Dad said to Russ we’ll need to be up early and leaving the driveway to get to Chequamegon Bay before 10:00 am. He estimated the paddle might take them six hours to complete, including a stop for a sack lunch at a spectacular viewpoint on Madeline Island, if all went as he’d planned, that is.

So much for escaping the heat of the south. It was eighty-nine degrees at 9:30 in the morning where they stood on the shore of Chequamegon Bay, September 4th. The wind had picked up, though it was out of the northeast so they would enjoy following seas on the paddle back from the Island. Dad and Russ slithered into their cockpits, secured their spray skirts, tapped their paddles together for good fortune and pushed off. Russ struggled, but not awfully, to keep up with dad who had the benefit of many paddles behind him this season. About an hour and a half later they approached the shore of Madeline Island, not the spot dad had in mind for lunch but with an unexpectedly tempestuous sky taking on a suspicious orange-gray color, and rising waves all around dad thought it wise to make for an overhung, hollowed-out notch in the granite rocks instead, a shelter from the weather, to wait out what appeared to be a freak storm he was sure would pass soon. The notch was small, but both kayaks would fit if their approach was right and it was overhung in such a way as to permit both of them to get out of the worst of the rain that had by now drenched them. Dad entered first and then a powerful wave surge threw him hard against the rear granite wall. Russ entered next, battling one wave pulse after another cresting the beam of his boat – it took all he had to stay upright and then he too was swooshed inside the notch and pinned hard against dad’s boat. Sounds of wind and waves bellowed inside the notch and then it seemed the wind changed again and like bath toys in a washing machine they were battered relentlessly. Russ saw dad’s spray skirt had torn, his cockpit was flooding. Dad used his paddle to push against the granite wall, to free them, but it proved futile, his paddle snapped in two. Water gushed into Dad’s mouth as he shouted to Russ we need to get out of here, now! This bad idea! We’ll drowned! Then dad’s kayak heaved again and listed hard, his head slammed up against the rocks. Russ! dad shouted at him with all he had left, I’m not going to make it out of here, son, save yourself, go now! And with that dad’s kayak capsized entirely, its gleaming white hull face up in the water. Russ had witnessed his dad take his last breath. With all he had left in him, in the brief seconds between wave pulses Russ pushed against the hull of dad’s boat upside down and still wedged hard against the rocks, first with his hands to gain some separation, then with his paddle he somehow manged to free himself entirely and point his kayak toward the opening in the notch and then an adrenaline-addled Russ was back in the fury of open water, free of dad’s grave. Wind-battered and bobbing chaotically in high waves Russ swiveled his head to look back but there no was sign of dad or his kayak. In fact he couldn’t make out the notch at all, shrouded now by a gauze of rain and fog. As if it didn’t exist. Dad was right, to save himself Russ had get out of there less it become his grave too, and nothing but grief ever came from arguing with dad.

Just a note to say we’re traveling to a foreign land for the holiday weekend and my sister will be joining us. She’s flying here from far away and without getting into any detail no one I can think of presently is more deserving of a full week of focused R&R. When we return home I hope to resume story telling here as usual. I know that lately it’s been a dry spell in that regard but I would write more and more often if you paid me. I’d even write what you want me to write if you paid me. Short of that I will write when and what I want and never will I so much as surface a tip jar. The glam Nest we’re staying at (Chloe as well) is very near here

Enjoy your thanksgiving wherever it finds you

The not so great Borgification of the Internet. Roughly three decades ago I was an active participant on an incipient subweb. To think and write and breathe and fuck up with only your conspecifics to praise and criticize your thought represented a kind of baptism in fire for the brain except the purpose wasn’t to cleanse the brain but to plunge it into learning. This was very much analogous to a kindergarten recess without any adult supervision whatsoever. Anarchic interactions among mates in real time. The Internet arrived without an instruction manual. Like a new phone today. Unbox it, boot it, show your face, find a network. That’s it. You’re connected, you’re in, you’re enthralled, and there is no way out. The greatest trial of the capitalists, conceived and executed by them on a planet-wide cohort of the unwary met its endpoint. If you were on the control arm, a human alive today anywhere on this planet and not connected then extinction is all you have to look forward to. Be it due to old age or deep impoverishment or extreme remoteness, you’re done. E.g. the dinosaurs were not on the Internet and only a dim estimate of their story remains. ~1.2 billion humans alive right now will never, ever send a text, a tweet, or money. The disconnected have no money, have no use for money. What the jungle giveth the jungle taketh. They will never be surveilled or recorded in a database or experience that one life hack or download the great works or stream insipid photos of grandchildren on a connected device. The connected may never learn the ways of the disconnected who know nothing of this artificial intelligence born of sand. It is profoundly unsettling for me to know I exist on the crust of an otherwise molten rock along with the disconnected, hurtling away from other planetary bodies until one day the night sky will be devoid of any visible light whatsoever, the end of the Steliferous Era. I want to ask the disconnected now if they believe there is really only one person in existence in the universe where each of us is but one tiny insignificant part of the whole and if so what does that even mean to them. What I’m saying is time is running out.

The house speaker has the arrangement backwards. Mr Johnson is the employee. We (TheAmericanPpl™) are the employer. He works for Us. We pay his salary. Dig? We NoKingers are taxpayers, Johnson. If you’d step outside your own head and look around you’d soon find that the protesters you so cavalierly dismissed as “un-American” are themselves GovCo employees (just like you!), war veterans, investors in T-Bills, IBonds, TIPS, stocks of military sub-contractors etcetera etcetera. Collectively not only are very many of these protesters paying your salary – never more reluctantly so – these hard-working Americans as you so cynically refer to them when it suits your purpose are directly invested in America. And you have the temerity to refer to them as “un-American?” You ungrateful sniveling little toady. Who do you think you could be? If I were king I’d fire your ass in a hot second. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It used to be said, mostly by Libertarians but old-fashioned, small-government, abolish-the-income-tax republicans as well, that it was government employees who were parasites on capitalism and thus they were the real “un-Americans.” How dare you try and reverse the shibboleth. You want to see a real un-American, Johnson, look in the mirror.

Mr Johnson is a lawyer; according to his wiki page he was especially adept at defending religious liberties. How quaint. Before creeping into congress he once defended a group that wanted tax incentives to build a Noah’s Ark amusement park (on a property adjacent to the owner’s Creation Museum) against the loud objections of local taxpayers who didn’t want to pay for this nonsense. Johnson won the case, on a legal technicality, but you have to ask yourself why he would align himself with the cause of religious wingnuts. Unless, maybe, he’s come to believe that these wingnuts are the real Americans, and that it’s the disbelievers (and/or believers in the wrong fantasy) who are the un-Americans, and the best way to rid the country of these un-Americans is to out them, turn real Americans against them, and in this way start a holy war.

Just thinking out loud here.

In 1942 Japanese soldiers haggard but undaunted advanced night and day through a jungle of fog and rain and mud over the Owen-Stanley Mountains of New Guinea, then Australian territory, toward Port Moseby under order to secure the island and thereby create a tactical separation between Australia and America. Possibly no theater in WWII anywhere else in the world at the time featured more man on man savagery than what occurred on the island of New Guinea^[1]. The supreme commander in the A-P theater along with his Australian counterpart, displeased with the progress of the Allied forces, would sack three high level troop commanders in the land campaign although historians have since shown that this indicated a gross misunderstanding of the lethal precision of the actual fighting going on beneath the jungle canopy. Inside the war room waving a pointer at operational maps on which the collective strength (or lack of it) of real human beings is belied by color-coded dots and arrows on what amounts to a game-board. This kind of central command style had worked variably well in other WWII campaigns, but not in New Guinea, not in 1942. From a God’s eye point of view were one to part the canopy and look closely one would have witnessed a horror, unprecedented even in war, that drove some soldiers, actual boots-on-the-ground guys, into irretrievable madness.

The Australian war correspondent Osmar White tells the story of one Lick Lick, a native of New Guinea who along with his fellow natives had been enlisted by the Australians in the fight against the Japanese invaders. Described as no taller than 4’9″ Mr. Lick Lick, one day while out on patrol, was late to return to the rendezvous point carrying a large sack made from indigenous material bulging with thirteen heads. The heads of Japanese soldiers. Prior to the war the native people of New Guinea, so-called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, had been described as kind, warm-hearted and always welcoming toward visitors to their island. But then the Japanese invaded and routinely killed them for practice. Japanese soldiers were exemplars of lethality, capturing natives then tying them to a tree whereby a troop commander would run ’em through repeatedly so as to demonstrate to the rank and file the proper way to thoroughly kill a man, the enemy. This made the native people mad. Though of course the real enemy of the Japanese were the Allied troops, Australian militias and, somewhat later, Americans. So the angry natives aligned themselves with the Allied force, and were crucial in helping the Australians especially navigate the dense jungles and high mountains and were even enlisted in the fighting and killing of the Japanese. At the rendezvous point holding tight his sack of heads, Mr. Lick Lick asked for a brief leave of absence which he was granted. In a nearby village one by one he removed the heads from his sack and displayed them on posts for all to see. Troop commanders admonished him for his excess savagery of the dead but then Lick Lick told the commanders that the soldiers weren’t dead, only injured, so I finished ’em off first. Sometimes, lacking a proper bush knife for beheading, other native fighters like Lick Lick would instead take a dead Japanese soldier and find a sharp spine protruding from a tree trunk and skewer the dead man through the neck and then spin the body until it detached from the head. They’d learned from the invaders how to thoroughly kill a man.

Some eighty-three years later, in America, an inept dry drunk would address a stoic assembly of generals and admirals posturing to lecture them on the real meaning of Lethality and the Warrior Ethos. The 4’9″ tall Lick Lick was heard hooting from his grave.

1. Source: Dan Carlin’s (most excellent) Hardcore History podcasts – Episode 66.

“Our” pearl-clutching AG sure is a piece of work. An alumnus of a private university whose mascot is the Hatter which I had to look up to find refers to one who makes hats. If it’s not pearls our former Hatter dons for a TV interview where her ignorance of the law was on full display then one will often see instead a Cross on a gold chain (b/c the king loves Gold) hanging penitently above the declivity of her breasts. And just as frequently you see face makeup inexpertly applied the likes of which no one has seen since Tammy Faye. The staid costume of obsequious Maga women I presume.

Montel Williams on CNN was right that the murderer was not politically motivated but was instead seething at his mark for the dehumanizing statements he’d evidently made about trans-ppl, one of which the murderer was falling for and falling for in the ordinary way that any pugnacious young man past or present has experienced falling for his first love. There’s your Occam’s razor motivation. It was a crime of passion. I was in an east side bar in Milwaukee in the 80s when a man “took exception” to another man dissing his girlfriend then smashed a bottle of PBR on the rail and thrust the jagged half of it into the face of the creep. There is protected speech, sure, though not all of it is prudent speech and in a dangerous world it’s important to be able to read the room. The victim’s wife had implored him to start wearing a bullet proof vest at his rallies (not that it would have stopped the bullet).

Montel Williams’ take on the motive of the murderer was dismissed by all other guests on the panel who preferred instead to pander to the rage of how he must’ve been politically motivated because discussing it as merely another du jour crime of passion in America doesn’t sell Ads (or fit the king’s narrative), nor would it animate the panel. Montel Williams if you ask me was the only one on that panel who understood the likely true provocation to violence.

Loneliness is epidemic in America. It’s not listed as a frank psychiatric disorder in the DSM-5 as are anxiety and depression but it is understood to be a debilitating symptom of these disorders that together some really smart guy wrote a book about recently raising the alarm that the underlying cause of all this was screens. Get the kiddies off the screens and instead point them at forming real-world sensory connections within their peer group, scrapping in the sandbox, swinging on the Jungle Jim, plotting in tree forts, what have you and that way when they grow up they won’t need to be institutionalized or (best case) assigned to menial work roles appropriate to their mental health deficit. Never mind the twisted irony that in the not too distant future as other really smart people have warned these menial roles will be deprecated by a new kind of intelligence whose algorithmic ancestors got the kiddies enthralled to the damn screens in the first place! And not just kiddies because as any casual look around will evidence all of modernity is enthralled to the damn things anymore thus giving credence to modern-day Apocalyspers who say this new kind of intelligence is coming for us all. Paradoxically the really smart guy’s book is available in a digital format compatible with most e-reader screens.The least civilized peoples on earth are unaware any of this is going on.

So naturally fearing the coming of the end of mankind I traveled to Anchorage last week to visit with friends for what I should expect may be the last time. From the ANC airport I Uber’d to a friend’s condo that she very generously offered me to stay at for the ten days I’m here. Fatigued from flying and wanting to unwind I drove downtown in her “chariot” (an elderly Volvo) to Fletchers for a glass of Cabernet and a small Cesar topped with unwieldy large shrimp and sat at the only stool left at the bar close to two men who were carrying on, one-upping each other with exaggerated stories of past experiences the details of which they could not or would not agree on. Both appeared to be sloshed. Given my proximity it was impossible not to overhear them. One of them, the closest to me, into probably his fourth or fifth 9-oz pour of wine may have had Ketamine onboard as well, though hard to tell given the overlap of behaviors exhibited by users of many modern mood-altering amines. The man seated next to me kept jutting his head into my personal space and even butt-sliding his stool closer to me at one point which was already uncomfortably close as a way to try and loop me in to the hyperbolic banter with the other man who was distractedly stirring his half-filled tumbler of whiskey with two fingers, someone who I thought I might have recognized but couldn’t recall from when or where. He insists on hearing my backstory so I figured if I’m brief and polite about it maybe he’ll leave me be: Midwest raised and schooled, TX recruited, CA bound, three tours to AK separated by adventures in NM and OH and now living a mere swim away from BC, Canada. Didn’t work as expected. Instead, he insinuated himself further into my orbit to say that he was in AK to close down an apartment. Oh, OK, I said. I didn’t inquire further and instead returned my attention to my phone as a way to un-rudely indicate I was presently preoccupied but also to evidence my addiction, but he carried on anyway, gesticulating and going on with how he now splits his time between Fort Collins and South America and oh he also has been to AK three times before to work on movies his favorite of which was the Butcher Baker movie and had I seen it? Why yes I had and get this I once owned a second home across the bay from the state’s highest security prison where that mthr’fckr was jailed. Take that! This only served to reanimate him. I never so quickly downed a dressing-sodden portion of romaine lettuce and shrimp. Gulped the last of my Cabernet, tipped the bartender and left. As I walked out of the bar I spied him still carrying on to a Phantom Me seated on the stool, as if I’d never left.

In his very fine book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey, qua National Park employee, appalled at the overly protective behaviors of parents toward their children, finally snaps one day and loudly exhorts a family parked at a campsite tensely huddled together in their Airstream (I paraphrase), Get them kids out of that damn clam-shell, get them out there, tell ’em to go explore, cut themselves for god’s sake, draw some blood! I heard a similar lament in the professional sphere all the time from management teams flailing to understand why the Organization was broken, The problem is communication! We need to communicate more! Turns out more documents, more emails and more meetings did nothing to repair the Organization. The problem wasn’t too little communication, the problem was the quality of the interactions among employees. It was a low signal-to-noise (S/N) problem. Siloed project teams passing in the night. And now all these years later we have boomers and Gen Xers, experts who’ve been trained on past experiences like these, preaching to the youth to put down the screens and engage real life more or else you’ll grow up to be like us. A cohort that was not raised on screens yet as a group hardly exemplars of personal fulfillment themselves. I’m dubious that putting down the phone and interacting more IRL is the solution to loneliness and despair. I’m not claiming that doom scrolling Influencers applying face makeup on Tik Tok is meaningful engagement with the real world but neither is merely talking to and touching people who don’t really get you or care about you. Both are low S/N interactions unlikely to cure lonliness. And of course it’s a mistake to confuse pathological loneliness with the state of being alone, or wanting to be left alone. Abbey was likely right that the solution to loneliness is to embrace the good company of nature. It even works if you do it alone.

Jill was at the stoplight with Brake Hold On presently amused at the display on the trunk of the car stopped in front of hers. What an uncanny resemblance! – the Tesla icon and the international symbol for the Intrauterine Device, aka the IUD. Wait, the Tesla magnate has fathered fourteen children (so far), having commingled his seed with that of multiple mothers, maximizing natural selection’s expected value function. Because every incurious evolutionary biologist knows believes, above all else, that more and better offspring is the one and only True Imperative encoded in every organism’s DNA. When the Tesla magnate was a mere two cells old, Nature decreed his Purpose, he would divide over and over again. What scientists cannot explain is why this avatar of reproductive success would then seek a brand icon that in essence memifys a widely used antagonist of reproductive success. Ninety-nine out of one-hundred times the IUD, both hormonal and non- types, will thwart the spermatozoon from fertilizing its target. Certain types are in fact medievally cruel in their mechanism of action – these are made of copper, ions of which act to poison the spermatozoa. Jill herself had no explanation to account for this apparent opposition of “as-if” goals. It made no sense to her; supposedly, according to the theory, from deep inside the nucleus the genes direct the organism to make more babies, but then inexplicably reverse course, and direct the organism to advocate for fewer babies. Huh?

Jill long ago had read a book by a self important author. While out on tour promoting this book the author glibly dismissed a questioner who’d asked why, if all organisms including humans had been “as-if” designed by natural selection for the ultimate Purpose of reproductive success, he himself had no children evidencing his inescapable Purpose? Because I’ve told my genes they can go to hell! he snapped. A burst of smug laughter went up from the audience muffling the questioner’s followup. That question was: Wait, the genes purposing your gonads are the same genes purposing your brain (its thoughts and desires), this is boilerplate MolBio, so same genes and one Purpose then how is it that the “as-if” goal of the brain could co-exist in opposition to the gonads? The conundrum had always stuck with Jill. Try as she might, and for the past thirty years she really had tried to listen, if the Purpose of one’s life was revealed in the inner voice her own had been silent on the matter. Likewise, Russ, her husband, swore he never heard a thing. Throughout all the years of married life together, it wasn’t Russ’ and Jill’s genes exhorting them to make babies. No, the ultimate Purpose of their existence had to be explained to them by certain cajoling voices within their friend group. In every case, parents themselves.

Friday was the bleakest of the work week, today expressed in an overcast sky with water swollen clouds sagging like the salmon-sated bellies of bears. Jill was driving to work after passage of the recent RTO mandate. She reached up and pushed the button to close the sunroof, it had begun raining. The light turned green and all on its own her foot moved to the gas pedal but her stiletto got caught up in the dish of the floor mat. She fidgeted to free it. Barking horns went off in unison behind her. In the side-view mirror, two cars back, Jill saw the gesticulating arm of the driver extended out the window no doubt wishing her well. Fuck you too she said to herself. You try walking in these all day. She managed to separate from the shoe then mashed the gas pedal with her stocking’d foot. The Audi lurched forward. She’d almost closed the gap with the Tesla when another driver shot into her lane and closed it for her. Now the stocking’d foot slammed the brake. Oh, look at that, this one’s got a Baby On Board. Another Evolutionary Success. How Purposeful! How good for you! Wait, she recognized this car, the head of the driver too. It was Russ’ co-worker, Ginny was it? – a new hire and proselytizer for the emerging Pro-natalist Movement mostly via her Substack The Gene Pool that she’d giddily touted to Jill at the unironically organized pool party she and Russ had regretted RSVP’ing YES to the past weekend, had recently been reborn with over 200K subscribers. I had to pause posting for six months when the triplets arrived she’d said to Jill poolside but hold on I told the fanbase I shall return! Triplets because so often that’s the case with IVF which Ginny and her husband several years after their first two boys were born had to resort to owing to the inexplicable loss of Purpose in Ginny’s eggs and had paid for with an early withdrawal from the ol’ 401K balance. You gotta do what you gotta do Ginny told Jill knocking back another mocktail so do it with Purpose I write to my subscribers – live with Purpose! Ginny giddily said to Jill I can introduce you to the new Moms here while virtually pirouetting on bare feet and ceremoniously sweeping her arm to acknowledge the present partygoers as might have Eve revealing the fertility of the garden on that very first day on earth. Jill to Ginny: I’m good, thanks.

Whereupon the proselytizer runs out of persuasion to win over the impenitent disbeliever, well, there’s always Hell. As with the history of many things the history of the origin of Hell as a concept is dimly lit. The earliest descriptions of Hell as a place of misery and unending torment for the wicked date back to ancient Greece, at least four hundred years before Jesus arrived on earth. But one thing seems certain, the authors of the Bible likely had no notion of the role that threats of perdition might play in winning over skeptics to Christianity. There seems to be no evidence of early Christians trying to frighten disbelievers to Christianity by holding out Hell as a consequence of their disbelief. Even where Hell is mentioned in the Bible, it’s ambiguous, described not as a roaring furnace of eternal suffering for the wicked, but more a place where the souls of the dead experience interminable joylessness with no celebration. Think of waiting in line at the DMV for all eternity, for instance.

No, the promise of Hell as punishment for unrepentant sinners was an invention that would come some two centuries later. For hundreds of years since then, various religious sects have re-imagined Hell into its many ghastly forms¹. Fast forward through the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment to today, and it strains credulity that we continue to see examples of this fear mongering stapled to phone poles: The Wages of Sin Are Death!

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Nowadays, it is easy to commiserate with the person whose growth into a rational human being was stunted by having to first overcome and eventually dispose of inculcated religious beliefs. Children don’t choose their upbringing, and most of them experience little direct control over what they are taught (and not taught). The need to purge the brain of handed down stories of creators and miracles and phantasms of every sort, and refocus its faculty for skepticism where it belongs – on the real world – is rightly viewed as a mental handicap. This tugs our heart strings no differently than would hearing word of the athlete who’s had to overcome a physical handicap to achieve some feat in sport. Having untrue things imposed on a young human mind represents a setback on the path to rationality, it takes time and can be hard to unlearn nonsense. And we should expect that for some people (too many, sadly) this extra effort will prove futile, as H. L. Mencken notes in the last chapter of his very fine book, Treatise On The Gods (2^nd edition, page 274):

This common pattern of religion, like the similar pattern of government, has been impressed on the human consciousness for uncounted thousands of years, and it is no wonder that erasing it is an inordinately difficult matter, and, in the great majority of cases, impossible.

Throughout history, there probably never has existed an otherwise rational faculty entirely free of a small polyp of wonder regarding the existence of a merciful and benevolent supernatural being, the author of creation and all in it, at whose heavenly throne the souls will gather to adulate Him for, well, forever. This might help explain the hesitancy of the agnostic to go all in on hard atheism. But that form of doubt is most often benign and thus not a diagnosis that need concern us. It is in that person where the polyp of wonder is not excised but instead is nurtured over a lifetime, coddled instead of treated, and predictably metastasizes into a frank, irreversible piety. Its worst expressions sending the afflicted into a spasmodic, evangelical emergency exhorting the unrepentant to beg forgiveness and believe – or else! See, for instance, your favorite fire-‘n-brimstone TV evangelist. Perhaps no man should be dismissed outright merely for thumping a lectern and speaking his convictions, especially where his business is saving souls, but then failing to convince the skeptical it triggers in him the “or else!” and he lapses into fear mongering involving phantasms awaiting the wicked in perdition to devour them whole only to come out the other end, over and over again, forever – how can that be viewed as anything but doubling down on nonsense? How indeed can it be viewed as anything but a man without a faint of rationality left in the throes of a serious mental health crisis? And for those who would describe this diagnosis as condescension, we might recommend they get their own polyps biopsied! Would any rational 21^st century man say the expression of schizophrenia is “just another opinion?”

1. The earliest known depictions of Hell in Christian art date to the 6th century, over five hundred years after Jesus’ death.