When is telling better than showing?

Unfortunately, beginning writers can come away from classes, workshops and books with the wrong idea about the guidelines being taught. They might not distinguish the hard rules, such as verb-subject agreement and correct use of punctuation, from rules of thumb, like using the active voice rather than the passive. The latter are principles and practices that will usually improve your writing. However, they also have exceptions, and if you don't use some judgment, the exceptional cases will either make your writing worse or put you in a straitjacket. 

I love my writers' group. Recently, though, member criticized me for saying "She was despondent." He said I was telling instead of showing. Never mind that the  character was in a place where she wouldn't have shown it, and it was important that the reader know she was feeling that specific emotion.

I agree that in storytelling, showing is better telling, usually. However, like the active vs. passive voice, where the active is preferred 95 percent of the time, you have to be alert for the other five percent.  Showing not telling, all the time everywhere, can cause you to commit fouls against more important writing principles, including clarity and word economy (or brevity).

This is most often true in describing human emotions. The body language that expresses emotions often doesn't translate clearly into words. Instead of "She was despondent," I could say "Her shoulders slumped." But is that clearer? Slumping shoulders can be things other than despondency. So, how to show it's specifically that emotion? I have to add other details. "Tears came to her eyes." But what if that's not even in character? Well, maybe I change my character so it is. Even then, what in that clause says specifically, "despondency" to the reader? It might be she feels tired and has eyestrain. So, it's necessary to add, "Her posture sank," and it's just as ambiguous. If I choose to show all three just to make sure the reader knows what the emotion is and knows it's significant, I come up with, "Her shoulders slumped and tears came to her eyes, while her whole posture deflated."  Never mind that the character was not going to express it visibly, that's fourteen words when I could have used three. Worse, I'm still not certain the reader would interpret it right. This tempts me to "Show and Tell," where after describing all of that, I still feel I have to add "She was despondent [you see?]. That's seventeen words. Also, using just the three word "telling" sentence gives it emphasis. If you're in the midst of showing, showing, showing, and suddenly you tell, the reader will notice it.

("But Fred," you point out, "shoulder slumping is part of posture deflating." You're right. It's a lazy example but speaks to the paucity of brief terms that might physically describe despondency, or something else. It's awfully hard to find one nearly as short as three words.)

Furthermore, showing here is all for naught. Unless the emotion compels the character to do something unusual, you're not showing readers anything they haven't seen. Showing the obvious gets boring fast. They know the physical signs of grief, disgust and happiness, and so on. In fact, readers can imagine it much better than you can describe it. Just tell them what to imagine. As long as you're usually showing, they shouldn't mind.

That is, unless they're coming straight from their creative writing class.

Overemphasizing these rules of thumb without mentioning exceptions and urging good judgment can spoil writing. The worst mistake a writer could make when resolved to show no matter what is to become convinced that if it can't be shown, it's not important. Outside of a spec screenplay, this is totally wrong. Don't limit your writing like that. Any "rule of thumb" should expand your ability to express, and if it doesn't, you're doing it wrong. Or the rule itself is wrong.

Why write horror?

When I took my recent getaway, I struck up a conversation with this middle-aged retired couple. They were okay until I said I wrote horror. Their reaction was immediate condemnation and disgust. If they had a cross, they would have pulled it out then, and if they had Bible, they would have started an exorcism. Next time I'll just say I write fantasy.

This wasn't the only time that happened. Back in 2002 when I was at an SF workshop, one of the three stories I submitted was horror. The published author and professor leading the workshop said he didn't like horror fiction, as opposed to optimistic SF, and proceeded with an acerbic review of it. He didn't say, “no horror," so how was I to know? SF and horror have a lot of overlap (see Alien) . At the time, I used an earlier version of OpenOffice, which by default saved in a file incompatible with Word. No one informed me it didn't print up right. So, included in the critiques, I got this truly inappropriate blame about the format by a woman telling me she didn't read horror, that it gives her nightmares. Her tone suggested I not only inconvenienced but actually abused her. Workshop rules said we couldn't defend ourselves or speak during critiques. So it was all very embarrassing. I still want my money back; this workshop cost a lot. I will say, though, one author, Kij Johnson, (creator of The Fox Woman series) took me aside and gave a me some very helpful suggestions, though it was to be years before I wrote again.

This goes to show writing horror marginalizes you, even more than atheism does. This poses another question: why would an atheist like me even write fantasies about supernatural beings that absolutely do not exist? The short answer: because reality gets boring. It's part of a larger question, though, why should any fiction author waste time writing characters that they know don't exist? There's a more lengthy answer is also more theoretical and philosophical. Reality weighs on us. Being conscious requires our minds to create a constant waking narrative. That narrative is our mind's interface with the physical world. To maintain it puts unconscious constraints and demands on our minds and emotions. Because that "real" narrative is strictly connected to events and objects we perceive in the physical world, a person's it is rigid and wearisome for us.Yet, consciousness must create, immerse or conform to narrative.

Dreaming shows that our minds do this as intrinsic function. My hypothesis: our unconscious minds crave a "vacation,"  a narrative it can create or escape to, one that has more imaginative freedom than the reality we live in. That is the whole reason for fiction and much of the reason for games. Meanwhile, the mind still craves the stimulation of the unexpected.

This hypothesis might explain the appeal of fiction, but it leaves horror as an anomaly. Why “escape” into something that frightens you? No doubt, enjoying a story or film that scares you is a paradoxical experience to say the least. Evolution has made fear unpleasant, thrills notwithstanding. Though nothing can jump off the page or out of the screen to kill the reader or viewer,  physical safety implies neither a feeling of security nor a psychological separation from the fate of the characters in the story. It's not that audiences are cowards, either. They simply can't see a reason to marshal courage for story they're supposed to enjoy, nor can the see the cause in withstanding the nauseating things described. Additionally, such bravery is futile; they can't change what's already written on the page, and when the story or film is finished, they might not feel relief. Many carry it to bed with them where it prompts nightmares. We all know somebody who has memories of the horror movie that traumatized them as children, and they have never checked the genre again as adults. Of course, such people can't see the point in horror, and their aversion is understandable.

More than any other genre outside of porn, horror isn't taken seriously as literature. Even more than fantasy, it's maligned as exploitative, sensational and shallow. People question the morality of its themes and motives of its creators. For a writer trying to sell his work, it's a niche with few outlets. In most Writers' Market fiction entries, the most common phrase you'll read is "no horror."  (This makes searching for horror with Writers' Market's clunky, inadequate search engine just that much harder. Every publication that says "no horror" comes up with a search for "horror.") It's largely segregated from more respectable literature. People don't want to see those disturbing stories juxtaposed with "real" fiction. Even many SF & F fans don't want it.

On top of this, there are religious and moral objections even to the lightest, most fun horror. Such as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. (I know; not the "lightest" horror by any means, however, the stories are written on the same general theme that became a cliche fifty years ago. Hence, nothing's left but hydrogen).  Any of his stories are a challenge to any Christian dogma and doctrine. Yes, the Cthulhu universe is fictional, but its non-occult parts resemble ours enough to challenge believers. They have to think again about where the universe might have really come from. This line of thought, for Judeo-Christian religions can't lead to anything but blasphemy or weakening of faith.

Writers, especially for screenplays, are reluctant to confront religion directly. It hurts profits to have your movie banned, and it's painful to have your books burned. Also, many writers have not thought out the tension between horror and religion and are themselves religious. Sometimes the conflict between religion and secularism is played out within a writer, a skirmish in the culture war. A writer can be as torn as the society he or she lives in.

I knew all this when I first began to write. Yet, I was driven to write horror and it wasn't rational, wasn't commercially the best of choices. I tried to go against it, and results were decades of writers' block, which if you think about it, is commercially the worst choice.

And from here, I get to one reason to write horror: even with the low regard for the genre, originality in good horror is a way to challenge our deepest assumptions. In life only a trauma causes re-examination of beliefs. So, horror is like a simulated trauma. Perhaps, this is a way to illustrate the nature of good and evil, conscious and unconscious, spiritual and illusion, in a way that can't be managed in conventional literature, cinema, or in any other genre.

Horror has a long, fine, unappreciated tradition. For an example: the Bible is a horror story. I say this without any sarcasm. How? Look at the Old Testament objectively: a wrathful, unstable, vindictive supernatural being who says He's God, who probably is God, takes control of a small desert tribe. They proceed to massacre the tribes around them and create a thriving kingdom. But this "god" is both mean-tempered and jealous. They must make sacrifices to appease his constant bad temper, and He loves the smell of burning animal flesh and blood, making his altars, and later his temples abattoirs. Meanwhile, his subject people may acknowledge the powers of no other supernatural beings. But since the existence of God implies that others might exist, this proves to be impossible for the people. They incur their jealous God's wrath and he goes on regular killing sprees on His chosen. Finally He withdraws His protection and lets the surrounding kingdoms punish them decimate them.

Look at the psychological elements of using horror in Christianity: horror, original sin, the fear of Hell and of a wrathful, vindictive God is used to challenge people's deepest assumptions. The preacher hopes that these stories will convert people. And, when contrasted with the Christian “loving” God as a source of relief, it works. So, don't tell me that horror isn't effective.

Before I get sidetracked into making this a criticism of Christianity, I'll add horror elements are hardly unique to Christianity. Most religions have them. The Iliad and Odyssey: the Cyclops was a monster, of course. So was the Hydra in Heracles Twelve Labours, and Medusa, even the concept of such a thing is terrifying. There's always a monster, an evil to fight in any culture. Back to Christian literature, there was Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost, with plenty of horror scenes in both. Then there are Indian myths. Modern horror stories draw on Kali a lot. Examine any of the Assyrian or Aztec gods, and they are monsters.

So, despite its ill-repute, horror is a refinement of ancient literary traditions, that go back long before Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Take all the horror out of religious scriptures central to our culture, and they will make no sense. The difference today is that it has been segregated into a genre, and people are more skilled in writing it, and depicting it on the screen than they were. 

The reason why horror occurs in religious scripture is because fear makes people pay attention and remember. Of course the writer always wants that in any literature. If you're careful, you can sneak a theme in there that will make readers think later as they recall how scary the scene was. If you're clever and lucky, they will do so many times in their life, especially if you connect it with something commonplace. All writers desire this. As Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, said when asked why his stories were so violent, he said it because he was competing with movies, TV and video games, so he needed to use whatever he had in his arsenal. I never forgot that quote. Nevertheless, he understated it. With the Internet, there are literally millions of writers. If you feel you have something important to say, you pull out all stops to get noticed, get your point across, and get people to remember it. People remember being terrified. We all have memories to this day of that horror movie that scared us as child, made us hide behind the chair, and gave us nightmares.

But let's face it, when you're not in danger, an adrenaline rush is thrilling. Some travel the whole world for it, such as to surf fifty foot waves in the cold water next to a crumbling glacier. People desire horror for the thrill, but readers are not generally thrill seekers. If they were, there are greater ones in real life that entail real danger. They want to simulate the thrill in a safe way.

Moreover, horror stories create tingles just like spicy food, providing a morbid sense of humor, or creating shivers that one can later laugh about. Comical horror is not the brand of horror I choose to write in, however. Yes, my stories do have humor, but no gags. The people in my stories aren't generally laughing. They're too scared, too stressed, and too beleaguered. The readers, separated from the danger, have the luxury to be outside the situation looking in. They can laugh, and, I hope, (I am still a new writer) often do. The humor comes from characters responding to impossible situations, to creatures that "have no right to exist.”

Also, horror stories can and do inform people about life. They rescue us from the danger of too much optimism and remind us of how happy we should be for our good luck. This was the point Leonard Mlodinow made at the end of his non-fiction, non-horror book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. If you're reading a horror story and not living one, you have every reason to be happy, and also something to learn from a horror story now and then.

So, I've made every point except one: any rational reason I list here is dwarfed by my unconscious mind. I “followed my muse” into horror. I went where my creativity was most fertile, after I resisted the call for decades only to spend the duration with writers' block. What I must put on the page starts deep within my unconscious. After it's out, I can embellish and alter it according to the themes that I think are important. Though even that process is a conversation with my unconscious, a difficult one because that part of one's mind is not verbal. I simply have to try different things until they feel right, while it speaks only with yes, no or maybe.

Experiments indicate that people act first, and then the part of the brain that thinks consciously kicks in to give the "cover story." Even with an electrode in their brain causing their hand to move, the person will claim that they moved it deliberately and will come up with reasons why. Our unconscious minds are really what control us. Our surface mind only provides the narrative to explain it. This implies nobody generally knows why they do things. Our conscious mind is a PR department; it makes our our actions socially acceptable. However, it's more than that. It provides the stories, the threads that makes our lives coherent.

For a writer, it's also an outlet for emotions that are too extreme to be appropriate to the situations of every day life. What if you have more excessive emotions about something than is socially acceptable? You do the best things, but still there isn't enough relief. When this happens, I find writing it helps.

I could resist it more, deny that I am a horror writer, but now that I've seen some of my writing, I know I'm onto something good. It's fulfilling, and I'm not going to garrote the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Update 12/20/2011: I'm sorry it took so long for me to notice it, but blogger cut off the first paragraph of this entry. I've put it back on. For people who have praised this essay and forgiving that glaring error, I thank you for your forbearance, and I'm glad the message came through despite the mistake. I've had so much trouble with the blogger interface, I'm tempted to switch to wordsmith.

Unexpected date.

I went on an impromptu date last night. I corresponded with this woman on a dating site. The chemistry wasn't perfect. She doesn't like horror stories, never read science fiction and seldom read fantasy, and didn't read books that often. So, the possibilities were limited and I told her that after the fourth email.

I get an email at ten giving me her number, saying she's in my neighborhood when she lives twenty miles away. So, of course, I decide to go out and meet her at one of the bars. We had a drink. It didn't come to anything. There was nothing wrong with her, it just wasn't a match, and wasn't a one-night stand. I know, I'm a guy, a stripped down, lean, mean libido. I'm atrocious, but something in me drives me to think it was a success only if it's one or the other. When I heard she had come to my neighborhood, I thought it was going to be the latter. I had my hopes up. I believed there was no way she would come out at ten at night unless she wanted sex.

Or, of course, the other possibility was that she did and I just didn't charm or impress her, but that goes back to the first problem: the chemistry was flawed.

But, on the bright side, it felt good to get out, even in the cold, night air. 

Held Up.

I've been writing as much as life allows me to. I completed another short story, which I read at my elite writing group, who gave great suggestions. I changed my other short story's name and submitted it to another outlet, an Internet site this time. I'm proofreading Chapter 31, 2nd Draft of Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond, and it will go up on fanfiction.net pretty soon, I'm also putting the whole work up on Google Docs. I'm relieved the novel looks like it will end on Chapter 33 followed by an epilogue, not Chapter 36. One thing the writers' group has taught me, and that's how to write leaner.

Finally, I've been working on a blog entry which has me stymied for now entitled, Why Write Horror?  I think I've written everything I could on the subject, and now I have to cut it a lot.  I'm going to follow that another entry, "Why Love Ginger Snaps?" where I explain why the movie made such an impression that I would write a whole hybrid fan fiction novel based on it.

My new place has been just about perfect for writing. It's mostly quiet and secluded, has interesting things within walking distance. Of course, sometimes I feel too alone, but that's not too bad when I'm getting so much done.

The Occupy! Movement has me both impressed and anxious. I do want to join them, but I have a bad back, bad hip, permanently bad ankle, and medication requirements that would make jail a catastrophe. I wish them success.

Occupy!

It seems the rest of the Left has caught on to what I was said in my previous entry. Too many things have gone wrong, so many that you can't tell which issue is most important because the most serious ones have been left to rot by the system for so long.

Say you want a revolution, but when you talk about destruction . . . well, you know . . . if everyone is counted out, revolution doesn't happen. So, how do you have a revolution without destruction?

The only way would be to do what the Occupy movement is doing. Simply camp out and gain membership and support, and with every assault by authorities, it gains more sympathy. I realize it's not the most stirring way to have a revolution, nor is it really, any plan at all, but it avoids the bloodshed that marred previous revolutions in western civilization and made way for the conservative backlashes that always followed. These backlashes were, invariably, international even if the revolutions were local. The violence of the French Revolution made all of Europe and the US terribly conservative for seventy years. The Russian Revolution generated its own antithesis in international fascism.

Warfare and bloodiness traumatize people and make them insane anyway. I'm convinced that Vietnam wouldn't have happened if decisions weren't being made by leaders who suffered through World War II. War, real violence, they do something to people's minds, something that violent video games don't do. Take Vietnam, and Dean Atkinson, who worked in WWII under General Curtis LeMay. The general ordered firebombings of Japanese cities. Those firebombings took far more lives than the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The one on Tokyo alone killed 110,000 civilians. In Fog of War, a film documentary, Atkinson quotes LeMay as saying if the allies had lost the war, they (LeMay and Atkinson) would be up for crimes against humanity.

Just imagine giving the orders that kill tens of thousands of civilians a night, for a year or two. Imagine what that does to your thinking later. Maybe that's difficult to imagine, but I can illustrate it this way: then dropping Agent Orange doesn't seem so bad, even if it might (and did) kill 400,000 people and cause numerous birth defects. That's only one way. There's also paranoia. A people that oppose you look dangerous, even if they're opposing only your presence in their country, not to replace capitalism with communism.

What the Occupy Movement is doing is far better. It avoids the trauma that make people stupid and turns them into monsters. It will avoid the conservative backlash. I hope it continues. And of course I support it.

Idea ramble: the way things seem.

People need fantasy. Religion proves this. The opposition of religion to scientific fact underscores it. In previous ages, people answered broader questions about reality, as best anyone could, by filling it in with fantasy, myth and religion. So, where did the originators of the myths get them? Purely from imagination, with the writer so proud and amazed by his insight that he wanted everybody to read it and believe it.

I can understand that. As a writer, you often surprise yourself. Writers call it a muse for a reason. You sit down with a blank page and when you finish, little or none of it had been in your head at the start. They ancient scribe/myth-maker must have been impressed, and not necessarily with him/herself. With few exceptions, the names of ancient writers did not survive. I have a writer friend that despises the whole idea of a muse. Yes, it is in a way, insulting to the writer. Because if there's one thing about writing, and that is it's work. Even when imaginative ideas are easy, they have to be conveyed in words, which requires rephrasing, correcting, making the right word choice. The muse lore is misleading about that, but if we expunged the notion of a muse from our minds, writers would recreate it tomorrow.

However, so, an ancient writer comes up with the myth, such as the Garden of Eden story (I have to put on In-a-gadda-da-vida now.) How does the myth go from entertainment to religious dogma? Part of the answer might be that people just didn't have a better explanation for how the world came about and how things sucked so badly. However, I think the greater part is mental illness. Where anybody's guess is as good as anyone elses, the one who believed their story the most probably spread the account to all those who knew they didn't guess. The one who acted fanatical enough won, especially if he could make a good show of talking to something supernatural. Then things really get moving when other, more lucid people realize that forming cults is lucrative business that gets you money and power.

Imagine personalities like L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Jim Jones and Leonard Jeffs in the ancient world, where science was non-existent and where the idea of empirical fact was theoretical at best. Such people had have existed then, too, and they would have been competing in making cults.

I like to point out to Christians that in Classical Rome, Christianity was the Scientology of its age. If you go ahead 2,000 years from now maybe Scientology, or its successor, will be dominant, and Christianity would go the way of Mithraism-- extinct. (I don't want anybody to think I hope this is true.) They can't accept the notion. They hate to think that the principles of evolution and extinction could apply to their faith, and really, to all human thoughts and myths. Of course, their main objection would be that Christianity is the real truth. When declaration fails, they'll insist that it must be the truth, because without "the truth" humankind would fall into immorality and chaos. What they fail to grasp is that if God doesn't exist, then people have living without God for millennia. In fact, always, and we have fallen in and out of chaos. World War II was an example of chaos and strife on a truly colossal scale.

I will concede to the Christians one thing: yes, perhaps there is one truth. But what is it isn't Christian? What if your belief about it doesn't directly effect your destiny? Once more, what if it's a truth your mind isn't adapted to perceive? That's the way the universe looks to me.

There may be something that you could gods, or something I can call God in this universe, that of course, I can't perceive. I'm limited in space and time, and I have only so many senses. Gods would be superior beings, ones that could say, move planets. Whereas God would be a supreme being, something that created the universe.

I strongly doubt there could be a creator, though, and I there's no way that creator could be anything like Yahweh/Jehovah in the Bible. Why? Because he's too small-minded and ignorant to create anything like this universe. Maybe the character worked when we thought the heavens were above, and the sun rotated around the earth, which was flat. In that universe, all he had to do to create the universe people thought they were in was separate light from darkness, separate waters, put the plants and animals in place. He could concern himself with the geopolitics of a single faction of humans and give his approval to their crimes and power or punish them for their disobedience. God the Father fits in a small flat world.  However, along in the 19th century, once "the world" became the universe and we realized there were no heavens up there, and we determined we're on one of a trillion worlds in an expanding universe, the idea becomes untenable and those clinging to it look like buffoons who take themselves and their own cause too seriously.    

So, let's look at the Old Testament God. He's totally ignorant of what he's purported to have created. Instead of telling them about sanitation, he provides them Kosher Law. Instead of telling them about bacteria or viruses, he eventually sends his Son to heal people, for three years out of four thousand. He doesn't describe any stars for us to later discover with telescopes, and thus prove his knowledge. He receives blood sacrifices when really, blood isn't any different than any other animal tissue. That and much more.

My opinion is: whatever, if anything created this universe is nothing like a human mind, nothing we can communicate with like a Father or a human being. In fact, most likely it wasn't created. Creation is a human notion, and we do it with our mind. All a human does to create is find something in the world, or some notion derived from the world and alter it. This concept cannot be applied to creating something from nothing. I know Christians will say that's because God is so much better. No, that's because their divine notion of creation is false, does not exist in this universe.

Declaration: no human being has ever encountered the Supreme Being or anything that "created" this universe, and it's going to be a long time, if ever, before any human being knows where it really came from..  

And "belief" isn't going to change those facts.

Now this more like it!

Finally, life is perfect! I have my own private place. Everything, so far, is where I need it to be, and the things I haven't got yet will soon be where I need them too. Now, I can get up and start writing immediately and continue for as long as I want, as long as I need to.

My parent's house was noisy, messy, and in chaos constantly. What's more, there was nothing I could do about any of it. At least not while I was there and on edge. I couldn't sleep. Turning to writing, I did the best I could there. I'm not knocking my family here. My life had collapsed. I had fallen into a serious depression. If it weren't for them, I would have been homeless, and obviously, my conditions would have been far worse then.

However, I also remember going to friend's houses in college and feeling unnerved at things being so quiet and orderly.  The beds were made, the children behaved, belongings put away, things were clean, and everything was quiet. I was disturbed that the television did not compete with the stereo, and that records (vinyl remember) were not scratched up. None of that existed where I lived. In an odd way, I was judgmental of it existing at their houses, thinking that it showed a conformity or lack of life.  That might be true in other ways, but no, what I experienced growing up was not the joy of living nor nonconformity.I wasn't envious of my friends' homes. The silence alone disturbed me. A horrible sound of silence.

When you have a psychotic mother (and I'm talking about in the clinical sense if you're tuning in now), an aloof, detached father, and a brother with a serious, rare, birth defect that causes him to get loud and destructive, things can get pretty disorderly.  When you're also the youngest kid in your class, (a Leo) and sometimes kids in the previous grade can bully up on you, then you need to escape, mentally, and escape all the time. But then what if you're psychotic mother doesn't allow that? What if the kids in school won't leave you alone?

I knew in junior year of high school what I know now: I can't last alone. Yes, it's required for the writing, but even Asperger's people don't actually like being alone day after day their whole lives; they just can't solve the problems that being social throws at all of us.  

Move finished

It has been a long time since I posted. I guess I planned this move starting in February. In between time, I bailed my Dad out of foreclosure and buried my mother (pitching in with the rest of my relatives).

And the place I settled on was a bit of a fixer-up. It not longer smells of gas. I no longer fear for my life when I enter. They still have to replace the furnace, but it doesn't leak, and it does work, if I can qualify that. It does work if I can get up and shut the blower off every night. They are supposed to replace the furnace, soon. The blower doesn't shut off as it should, but it doesn't leak, regardless.

My cat is asleep under my desk, looking terribly content. I envy her. I unpacked the last of the boxes today, collapsed them and took them to the recycle dumpster. I declared the move finished and tabulated the receipts for figuring the final cost. But tonight I find myself drunk. Drunk from loneliness. The taste of grain, hops, and yeast. I wanted the relief that semi-consciousness grants in altered states. I hear joyous people outside, slightly threatening. I have to admit, it might all be hallucination.

I've switched to water from beer. I expect things to clarify, but I don't expect a return.

Moving Hell 4: Denouement

In the past two weeks, maintenance was in the apartment fixing gas leaks and then getting the furnace to work a total of eight times and Laclede Gas was in six. Finally, at 1:15 yesterday afternoon as I was looking at a list of landlord-tenant lawyers I could call, the man turned the furnace on and it worked. My apartment was officially habitable again so I didn't have to go through the process of voiding the lease.

I insisted that they have it inspected by an independent contractor to make sure it was sound. To my surprise, the management fought me on this one, saying that the maintenance guy who worked most on it was a certified AC-Heating Tech. I answered, fine, but he had also assured me twice that what I smelled wasn't gas when  Laclede's methane detectors proved it was. Immediately, I regretted saying that. I didn't want the maintenance guy to get in trouble or lose his job, but I hadn't been prepared for them to argue against an independent inspection.

So, I'm finally ready to finish my move. I should have just about everything here by Sunday, and I'll be putting things away and organizing for the rest of next week. It should have never been this bad. I had this move figured out better than any other I've done. But a little bad judgment and a lot of bad luck will defeat you every time.

The Frustrations of Leftward Political Activism

I've had to put a moratorium on my political activism. Activist meetings now put me in despair. Here's the reason: the last one I went to, when we went around the table introducing ourselves, everyone had a different idea about what the priority was. One person, the person who had the highest standing, said that before we did anything else, we had to make Missouri food self-sufficient. (I wanted to ask why Missouri and not Eastern Missouri, Western Missouri, or Missouri, Iowa and Illinois together?) Another said the environment was the thing we had to work on first. A third said voting rights and balloting reforms were the most important, a fourth said clean energy was most important, and another said campaign finance reform was the most important. Than of course, there's jobs, there's education, there's healthcare, there's the war in Afghanistan . . .

It depressed me, but not because I disagreed with any of it. No, just the opposite. Except maybe for the food self-sufficiency one, (where I disagrees on the arbitrary particular but not the principle), they were all right about it. Those issues are all very important. They all critically need the work. What's more, any one of them could be the highest priority, they are all that important.

What makes me grieve about all of it and what all the other activists missed is this: all of those things going wrong at once means that this system, this nation, is finished. Because any government that has allowed that much, and more, to go wrong is not capable of correcting any of it. The socio-governing process in this country is broken beyond repair. Moreover, you can't correct that many serious problems in any reasonable time with our government now. Three or four of those are crippling. All of them at once are fatal. As the cliche says, I've read the writing on the wall. I don't like the news, but it's it's the truth.

I wish I knew what could possibly replace the United States, and I wish I thought the world without it would be better, at least within my remaining lifetime, but I don't. Our nation is finished, and I don't see anything good coming out of it. I also wish I knew exactly what I meant by saying "our nation is finished." What will happen? Will the Red States secede while the Blue States petition to join Canada? Will Texas secede from the Union and end up being ruled from Mexico? (In the short term, at least that would make Perry ineligible for the presidency). Will we fall into a Somali-type civil war while the federal government collapses? I don't know.

Rome fell, but Italy still existed afterward. Obviously something would still be here. Whether it's a bunch of separate nation-states or squalid hunter gatherer tribes at the end does matter.

I also wish I had a solution, that is, some marvelous socio-economic system that works great on paper and is ready for a field test. However, the trials and tribulations of the twentieth century makes me jaded about any such thing.

So, what would I suggest to the left now? Try to formulate and organize such a system while this one falls. Don't push it. Don't aggravate the wounded beast that is the US. Just stay out of its way until it stops moving and rebuild afterward. That's all I could suggest.

And meanwhile, find a way to mentally escape, such as in Brazil, and educate others as to what is unfolding.

Moving Hell 3: Anxiety and Despair

We all have had the argument with friend or family that starts with something minor. A criticism someone asserts out of the blue over something rude you did, something that, perhaps, didn't even involve them, but they've made a judgment based on it. You try to explain, because you first think, surely, they couldn't have all the details right.

In this case, after I made sure she had all the details right, her opinion is unchanged. Now, when that happened, I could handle it. Yes, I think, but don't say, maybe that was gauche and maybe I shouldn't have done that.  I won't do it like that again, but it was also a really small thing.

However, I never get to say this, because while I was in the fact-checking stage of it, she brought up, just casually, much larger issues I know she's been holding in, and the subject was an entry point for her to express those.  These are things that I can't do anything about, not even after seeing therapists and psychiatrists over thirty years. Personality traits that are more like symptoms of mental illness than any preference I have. 

Let me explain one of these: hiding on my computer away from people.  I played alone a lot as a kid. So much so, my mother forced me to play with my brother. I can't tell you how much anxiety and anger I felt over that. I used to make up the stupidest games for him, just so he'd stop wanting to play with me. Not that I didn't like my brother either. I just needed to play alone at that time. I craved being alone the way an alcoholic craves vodka. The games I played, I couldn't even describe them to people. Just knowing people noticed me as I played them embarrassed and terrified me.

(Now, I did also play with other kids, but I spent a great and growing amount of my time solitary.) 

There were other bizarre fears. Like I hated to go to the barber. I just despised it. Not because long hair was in (though I pretended that was the reason later) but  just because I didn't like him behind me touching me on the head. Especially with the sound of the scissors. I spent my time in the barber chair holding back panic attacks. I'd leave with my clothes soaked in sweat.

I'm not trying to milk sympathy about this. I'm just saying my tendency to isolate myself is a behavior from childhood, probably in my genes, and it came with other peculiar behaviors. I've had it as long as I remember. It's not something I can do anything about. I know it's a symptom either of Asperger's or a personality disorder. For reasons I give below, I'll probably never know which.

I have tried to remedy it. I knew midway through adolescence that I had to do something about it. So, I tried to do more with people. I joined theater and cross-country in junior year high school. Both were disastrous setbacks. I was way too under-socialized by then. I told my parents I needed to see a counselor or something, and the response could be summed up with "Shrinks are phoney. Pray to the Virgin Mary." My mother had enough problems with her own psychosis, and by that I mean she was clinically psychotic and she felt the shrinks had screwed her over. Meanwhile, my father acted annoyed at the very thought. In hindsight, I think he didn't want to face failure, that my needing help reflected badly on him, though my problem wasn't his fault, wasn't his failure to commit, but it was certainly his failure to ignore my pleas and act like nothing was wrong. I found my own counselor through asking a kind girl I knew. He was a failed Catholic Brother and member of the Transactional Analysis cult, the Parent-Adult-Child nonsense, though it didn't seem like bullshit then. I was earnest to try anything.

He was a rank amateur, my association with him turned into a worse fiasco than anything in my life previously, while my parents pretended to support me, ad hoc. The state didn't require counselors to be certified then. I told them I was seeing him, that he was letting me pay for the sessions by working around his house. They didn't ask any questions about him, didn't check anything.

He and his TA books gave completely the wrong advice for an under-socialized kid trying to survive high school and college. Remember hitting the pillow when you're angry, and how they found later that it aggravated anger? Things like that. As I got worse, my parents suddenly thought he was wonderful and sent tons of insurance money his way as he retroactively added sessions we ever had to the record . He was phony, fraudulent, exploitative, unethical and greedy, and really didn't care about the desperate adolescents he saw. When none of his bullshit worked, he blamed me, and finally refused to see me. Stung, I left him feeling more lost and worse about myself when I arrived.

However, I will say in his favor, he never molested me. For a kid looking for help without parental assistance, it could have ended far worse.

Remember the beginning of The Sixth Sense? The guy who shot Malcolm "Bruce Willis" Crowe, his old, failed, counselor? I have to admit identifying with that guy. I'd have shown up in ninja gear instead of skivvies, though. I pride myself that my counselor was far worse, but I came out better than Dr. Crowe's patient. My resentment is mollified by sympathy. My counselor ran his business out of the house. So, I knew his family, too. I found out his wife and son, then a teenager, died in traffic accident. That's not a grief I would wish on anybody. 

So, late in adulthood, somehow I always spend most my day alone, much more so than I did as a child. It's not the way I prefer it. No, I am very lonely. But when I'm by myself concentrating on something, time just flies by, with no time left for anything social. It's the one thing I wish I could change, something I'm still trying to change, but every effort to do so has failed. Writing is perfect for me, though, but I have to temper the isolation if I'm going to survive.

Moving Hell 2: Injury and Delay

The apartment manager told me that they were likely going to replace the range. Despite the fact that it would mean having wasted my time cleaning it, I hope that they do. I wouldn't doubt if this one goes back to '70s or even the '60s. The range isn't why I chose the apartment, but a newer one (I'm thinking they might buy used) would be a plus.

Let me be clear, it was clean on the surface. Under the top, though, it was filthy. When I saw all the old grease, I wondered if you put two cockroaches in there, how many more cockroaches would it create from that food source alone? I'd give it a ballpark of 5,000, but you might as well stop counting after 800. Considering one or two are enough to make me twitch when I see them, hundreds are seizure-inducing.

Last night, I twisted my ankle, an injury unconnected to the move. I was taking out the trash at Dad's house and stepped on a gumball from one of those trees. It hurts, but I've been elevating it, putting ice on it, been taking massive amounts of aspirin and have been walking with a cane. I've been rewarded that it hasn't swollen. Damage from the internal swelling, I'm told, can be worse than the initial sprain.

The truly heavy work of the move is days away. Sunday, I hope.  Then I'll actually be living in the place, of course. But I'll be packing up, sorting and moving smaller items for days or weeks. The good thing is, I have time to do it like this.

The bad thing is, of course, that even by the standards of taking my time and keeping it orderly, it's taking forever. I mean, the apartment wasn't extraordinarily dirty, far from it, but the cleaning is taking forever.

But that's part of me and part of my troubles on the job. It seems that everything I do takes longer than anyone else. I'm not saying that as just a gripe. It's true. Every boss, every coworker I've had has noted it. It's what led me to abuse amphetamine and caffeine and part of the reason I'm on disability now. It's not that I'm lazy about it either. I tend to space, my mind wanders or I overthink things. And it's one thing if you're doing it on the job, you might be accused of being lazy. It's quite another if you're moving into a place and it's taking forever because you're cleaning things too slowly.

What happens if I just go faster? I panic. I begin to abuse stimulants because I constantly fear that I'm not fast enough. In fact, I tend to panic and freeze up if anybody watches what I'm doing. I joined theater just to try to get over that, but it was a disaster. I have that problem, but then I also have marginal speech deafness. My hearing has been tested perfect, but I if there are any distractions in public, I can't understand people.  For most the time in my life, I wasn't able to hear music lyrics. ADD medications helped with that. I changed my music collection as it totally changed the way I appreciated music. As a child and adolescent, I had a terrible problem recognizing faces. That did begin to get better in my twenties, thank goodness.

That, and the fact that I preferred to play alone as a child makes me wonder about Asperger's Syndrome. But I didn't have parents who gave any credence to psychiatry or neurology, or medicine in general, and my next brother had profound retardation. It was a great irony of my parent's that they and their family were beset most by medical problems that they found dubious, for religious reasons. The upshot was, any problems I had were dwarfed by my brother's. He needed my parent's attention more. Their couldn't deny his problems, but they could they could deny mine.

I rambled. Yes because I'm up late, but I went to bed early and got up in the middle of the night. I'll get an early start tomorrow. Soon, I'll be moved, and soon after that, I'll be settled.

Panhandlers and beggers

I encountered two different panhandling situations in the last three days. In one, I gave. In the most recent one, I didn't. Why? Because in the first case, it seemed like it was likely true. In the case tonight, I knew it was a con. However, upon checking, it seems the first one was just a better designed con.

In the one on Sunday, which I reported on Twitter, a bunch of people were walking with collection cups in traffic with a sign up. It said they were collecting money for the funeral of Robert Floyd. I guess that one resonated with me because my family and I just buried my mother. The sticker shock for the funeral was extreme. I can't imagine a family without the means having to come up with $13,000. (The sticker said $6,000 at the cheapest, but when all the expenses were added up, it came to $13k. Mom had made it clear that cremation was not an option.) As my brother said, the funeral director should name his yacht after our mother. Me? I prefer to think his daughter went through freshmen year of college from my Mom's death. 

So, I guess it was the right con at the right time for the right mark. Not only did I give, I pulled out of traffic into a Rent-a-Center parking lot and gave five dollars. The teenage girl said it was to bury their uncle Robert Floyd. When I said I just buried my mother, I got no response to speak of. 

Tonight I look up the obituary of Robert Floyd, and guess what? Either he's being stored in the closet until the family could afford to disclose his demise and bury him, or no such person died in my area, or seemingly, nationwide in the last week. Or in the last year. A dupe. A con. Or perhaps it could be called "an imaginative beggar's pitch." Buy our fantasy and you'll feel generous. 

I gave $5 to those grifters. I should have called the police on them.

Tonight in front of a discount store, I ran into a different grifter with a different beggar's pitch. Unlucky for him, I heard the pitch before, by a guy who got caught in the lie. Moreover, tonight's grifter dressed his story in so many pathetic curlicues that he red flagged his it with less credibility. What are the odds that he's lost, looking for a large municipality (not a street), just got out of the hospital (wearing a bracelet, you see) just blew his money on a prescription (when he walked up to me from the opposite direction of the drug store he pointed to), desperately needs to pick up some kids (in his car, you hope) but his car is out of gas and he only has $1.13 in his pocket? Come on, guy, find one story and stick to it. When I told him no and walked away he said "God bother you." I've never heard that curse before. Hearing that line made the entire thing worthwhile. 

The car broke down/out of gas bit I've heard before. It's familiar like a Nigerian Scapam to me. I was with some friends one night in front of a coffee house more than a decade ago when I guy walked up to us and said he needed to pick up his daughter who was in a somewhat seedy part of town, but he was out of gas. One of us actually gave him money. I don't remember precisely, but maybe it was me. 

Not even a week later one of my friends who had been present told me that the same grifter came in the front door at his work asking for money for the same reason: grifter's car was out of gas and he needed to pick up his daughter  from a somewhat seedy part of town. Again, the guy mentioned the exact amount of money in his pocket. This time, his mark, or at least his host, was a heartless, soulless corporation, with a guy there who had heard the pitch and recognized Mr. Tough-luck, who then went to jail.

I'll readily admit that I might beg at some time in my life. I mean to say I'm not too proud to avoid it if I need the help, but the line between begging and conning can become very thin. You have no way of knowing if anything they're saying is true. The fact they give precise details without being asked tells you something. People's desire to help can become a magnet for psychopaths. Also, in tough economic times, despearate people tend to listen to the psychopaths. That's how an entire family can be made to beg and walk out in traffic and raise money to bury their nonexistent dead relative, throwing all safety and dignity aside. A family was doing it, and somebody in the family was behind it. 

What's sad is there a people who really need the money and help but won't ask for it. The Rush Limbaugh's of the world will say it's shameful whether you need it or not, and whether in crosses the line into grifting or not. No, it's those who use it as a racket who make it shameful for everybody else, and it's it's a shame that the best people should be made to starve, while the worst people are the wheels that squeak the loudest and therefore support themselves very well with begging.  

Moving Hell

For the work that I've done, I haven't got a lot to show for it. The only things I've been able to do so far is buy and move cleaning supplies in, find places to put them and add some extra lighting. Hard to believe that seems to have taken up two days. Of course, delays due to the lock and gas emergency led to some of it. I did get diverted today to looking at the neighborhood's famous open-air market. I bought lunch for three dollars, a bowl of rice and beans. It's a wonderful neighborhood to walk in with plenty of houses similar to the French Quarter in New Orleans, except in brick. Once I'm settled, hopefully before it gets cold, I should have fun just walking it and taking pictures.

I didn't realize how similar these houses were to dreams I've always had. It comes from my grandmother's old neighborhood, where huge spectacular houses of this style, practically mansions in their day, were abandoned, neglected and left to decay. It's the setting in my horror story Wil-o'-wisp. These, however, are mostly the idealized version of that architectural stereotype. As I post pictures, and I will soon, you'll see the idealized and the nightmare version.

The houses on my grandmother's street were mansions by 1860s standards. Unfortunately, after the Civil War, people began to abandon St. Louis. The city had already peaked, in population and importance, by the 1870s. After that, came Kirkwood, which was the first commuter suburb.The wealthy began to abandon Park Avenue near downtown for Kirkwood, the first community of its kind, and other suburbs like it. So, Park Avenue became the poor neighborhood. When it came time to set up public housing, they placed one of the biggest projects, the Darst-Webbe-Peabody project, right on Park & 12th (Tucker).

For me, though, I'm living in a cheap, decent apartment in Soulard, a great old neighborhood. The ghetto spot in the ritzy district. Despite all the troubles I've been having, it's well worth the wait, and I don't think I could have done better.

Fatalities averted

The move's not a total disaster, yet. Today I had to call in a gas emergency. The gas man came out and discovered two leaks, plus that the stove was not up to code.

To give a little background, this management company doesn't really "show" people apartments for rent. Instead, the management gives them keys and let them look by themselves, with a stipulation that they'd report something wrong, like a burned out bulb and such.

When I first saw the apartment, I noticed an odor that reminded me of gas. Now, I was immediately skeptical, because I thought this management company couldn't be sending people into enclosed, vacant apartments that are full of gas. But, I did report it on the day I turned in the credit check application, which was a Saturday. I reported it as a smell that was "like gas," but probably not. The regular manager for that apartment wasn't there. The woman I reported it to said that I should tell the manager on Monday. She added that they hadn't got done cleaning it and bringing it up to spec.

Good, I thought, they would find the source of that probably not-quite-gas smell, which I thought was probably the result of grime under the stove-top. I trusted, though, that it would be taken care of, that the woman I talked to would leave a message for the manager, or that the maintenance crew would go through and clean. Then I went on vacation.

I thought no one would rent out an apartment that had an obvious gas leak, and that was a grave, though not fatal mistake. Yesterday I could still detect the smell, though I didn't feel light headed or get a headache or anything like that. Besides, on the stove, the pilot lights were on. No way would there be free gas with that. Wrong again, using errors to support errors.

Last night, I probably would have felt the effects, except instead of staying there and cleaning, I got locked out when the lock jammed first time I locked it. So, I waited for the locksmith and didn't get to clean. Today, I had planned to clean that stove under the surface, and first I was going to shut off those pilots. I don't like pilots on stoves anyway, I was going to use a striker.

I opened the top, and the air conditioner blew the pilots out. I don't smoke. I wasn't planning on relighting them, so I didn't bring a striker yet. Instead, I tried to shut off the pilot valves with the tiny screwdriver I brought. If only I had brought some pliers, because the valves were frozen. I looked for a valve to shut off the gas to the stove, and that was frozen, too. Now I knew the place had gas escaping into it, there was nothing to do but get out and call a gas emergency and then call management and give them the short version of what had happened.  I set my card table up outside in the gangway, out in the heat, but it was very shady, if laden with mosquitoes. I sat on the stool I brought and it was that way that I met my neighbors.

The gas man came and I told him what happened with the pilot lights and he then he looks at the stove and tells me the pilot lights were out. I began to think he hadn't had a lot of sleep the night before, or something. Then he discovered that the line going to the stove was brass and not up to spec. He checked the furnace, detecting a gas leak there and also detected another one in the basement.  By then, the maintenance man arrived. Apparently, it's up to maintenance now to track down the exact location of the leak and replace the line running to the stove. Meanwhile, I can't use the stove.

However, this management company wasn't only sending prospective tenants into a life-threatening situation, but it was endangering the other four people living in the building, including an infant. The apartment manager is there on Tuesday or maybe Monday, I'm going to talk to her. Meanwhile, I'm going to do some research on tenants rights and other legal issues that could be involved.

Of course, I'm not naming this company here. Anything I do depends on what they do next.

Inauspicious new start

Signed the lease at 5, got the key, and immediately the lock jammed. I locked myself out after I emptied my pockets. I left my cellphone and wallet inside. I had the key, but it wouldn't operate the lock.

In a panic, I drove back to the management office. She said she would open it with the master key but she had to wait for a prospective tenant who was viewing another apartment in the neighborhood. So, I went back and waited for her, and in the meantime took some pictures of houses on the street, but more and more time passed and I got bored. I went back to the office hoping that I wouldn't miss her driving out to me. Remember, my cellphone was trapped in the apartment, along with my drivers' license.

When I got there, she told me they had called a locksmith and that he should be there in fifteen more minutes. I went back to wait. Fifteen minutes came and went. I began to wonder if I missed the locksmith as I drove to the office. Maybe he arrived early. I listened to the car radio. Then, I had to take a piss. With me, sometimes it hits suddenly and extremely. I didn't want the neighbor's first impression of me to be the guy who was caught urinating in public. However, I have to admit, I was scouting around.

Meanwhile, it's 6:30 p.m. and 101 degrees outside. It's good to know humankind has accidentally brought us Hell on earth. How have we offended the earth to cause that shit? In heat like this, even putting the key in the lock causes a flood of sweating.

Well, of course the locksmith arrived and he unfroze the lock immediately and moved the hasp. Then it worked as smooth as butter, or perhaps Astroglide.

It pretty much blew my plan for the evening, though, which was to clean it. With record heat, though, the window AC unit has to work extra hard to cool the place. I think I'll drop by early in the morning to activate it so it's cool later in the day when I come by to start cleaning.

I'm taking pictures of some of the houses around the neighborhood. I love the architecture here. It's the only place in town that reminds me of French Quarter, New Orleans, but there are differences that make it even better. (I'm not talking about the sex industry, or lack thereof, either way.) I'll post the pictures I have in a few days.

Happy heart, nervous, abused stomach

Sometimes when I'm nervous with anticipation, I don't eat wisely, in fact, I get eccentric. That happened yesterday, and my stomach is suffering today.

I changed my diet recently anyway. I've gone on a variant of the Adkins Diet. My Dad asked me why, and I said, "Because if you're a male over the age of fifty, your chances of developing heart disease are over ninety percent." He looked at me startled, like Mr. Three Heart Attacks, two stints and quadruple bypass thought I had nothing to worry about. Immediately he realized how weak his argument would be and let it drop.

 The attitude seems to be in my family, and actually in a lot of families, that one shouldn't show that much concern for one's health. There's a shame involved, or perhaps a concern for being thought a hypochondriac (and I've psychosomatic illnesses before). Or that diseases should be regarded as God's choice. That translates to mean "random and out of our control." Trust prayer for your health. What's left unsaid is, trust laziness for your health.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world. No, it's not exactly the result of the Western Diet, though the Western McDonald's diet might bring it on sooner. In physical terms, there's a major engineering/logistics challenge to providing trillions of cells with oxygen and nutrients. Probably the evolution of the circulatory system to solve it was the reason for the old "Cambrian explosion," where thousands of macroscopic animal species of novel variations suddenly evolved 530 million of years ago.

However, this means that the circulatory system is also the weak link in animal physiology. It's most important and most prone to catastrophic failure. Though cardiovascular disease is random, it's random like poker and not like roulette. You do have some control, some actions you can take to effect the outcome. Diet is known to be important. Controlling inflammation in the the blood vessels is also important. It's important not to eat things, like trans-fats or excessive sugar, that actually irritate the artery walls. Of course it's also important to control weight for many reasons. I won't even go into smoking and the ways it sabotages your circulatory system.

 The Adkins diet is almost all fruits and vegetables. You keep calories from fat to less than ten percent total calories consumed, and avoid poly-saturated and trans-fats. This makes it almost totally vegan, the only animal product you're allowed to eat are egg whites. It restricts you on grains. You could snack as much as you want on fruits and vegetables. However, the diet is designed specifically for people who have had heart attacks and need to reverse cardio-vascular disease. That doesn't include me, so, I'm not that restricted. I'll eat a serving of meat once every other day. I don't totally avoid dairy, and add the occasional egg yolk to my food. I don't avoid high fat vegetables like olives or avocados. Instead of less than ten percent of calories from fat, I'll go with twenty, especially when I snack of vegetables that have far less fat content than ten percent.

 With the move on my mind, where did this get me into trouble? By snacking on carrots, radishes, adding some pickled okra (high salt, I know) and olives to the mix. (Bean-O or anything with simethicone is a must with this diet anyway, otherwise you become a pariah.)

I chowed all this down at bed time and when I woke up, I knew my stomach had penciled in half my day for intimate time. The toilet has become my workbench for at least a few more hours.

 Except for that damn okra, I know my heart is joyful at least. Oh, what price love. .

Movin' Ramble covering communism, paleontology, vacation and poor Internet service

I'm now officially in the middle of the move after talking about it for half a year. I found the perfect small apartment in the perfect vibrant neighborhood. The move is going to be a trick. I don't really have a lot to draw on in terms of help. The standard stuff moves first, the bed, the desk, a dresser, and the PC. To my surprise, Charter can't hook up the Internet for a full week. What's with that, Charter? Are you trying to tell me I'm living in a 3rd world country that can't keep up with Taiwan in Internet service? It does remind me of my days in the communications industry in the years between the dot.com/telecom crash and 9/11, working in Internet maintenance. I remember the empty feeling as management realized Internet usage was only growing at a quarter of what they thought. I realized that they couldn't get the capital to improve the Internet from private sources anymore. We've privatized everything with the Internet, and so we're under-capitalized and lagging every industrialized country. We have the narrowist Broadband. You might tell that I'm not a capitalist. I think the capitalist ideal is a fantasy on par with "Lord of the Rings." It's really in to regard communism as a failure. While I don't have faith in communism, and I haven't read Marx, I'd say Bolshevism and all it's spinoffs are proven failures, but Marxism? Communism? I don't know. Also, everyone I heard attributes it to "central planning," when that's really what just about every company does. What the capitalist groupthinkers fail to consider is that Bolshevism was run by terror and enforced conformity. Maybe that was the reason for the failure and not the central planning? After Stalin, the most terrifying dictator, died, communism began to unravel, but it did take more than forty years to unwind. We probably won't find out in my lifetime if other forms of communism might work, since it has been buried before the autopsy, and it's not going to be disinterred or reconsidered for a while unless people become desperate. It certainly does look to me like the wealthy in this country are doing their level best to prove Marx right after all, with the banking-mortgage scandals and TARP. I went on a cheap vacation last week, to the beautiful Black River. I need to find out why it's called Black. It must have appeared different when they first named it. Now it was low, almost a creek. It's spring-fed, and almost all the water in it was spring-water. I do think about the Ozarks and how old those hills are. They're an eroded mountain range that go back to the Cambrian Period. For you Creationists out there, that's about five hundred million years before God discovered the earth. I just wish my State had dinosaur bones, but it was above sea level during the time of the dinosaurs, so everything washed downhill. The vacation gave me a chance to sleep in a quiet place for a week, I came back feeling revived. Just in time for a move. Usually, I meet with my writers group every week, but I might not have anything to present to them next week simply because of the move. I hate that, though, so I'll try to eek out something: a poem, flash fiction, anything.

My Depression: SF & Fantasy fans and Alienation

I lost a week to depression. It also effected my work in terrible ways. I was appalled and more than a little embarrassed at the critiques I got on Monday. I'm guessing now I wasn't quite myself when I wrote it. The depression wiped out a week of my life.

Two nights ago, I went back on my Trazadone. It's the one anti-depressant whose side effects I hate, but its very effective. Immediately slept 11 hours that night, with pleasant dreams and got up in a good mood, if a little stiff and with a painful muscle spasm in my shoulder (side effects). I hadn't been able to sleep, and at this rate, I should be caught up within a week.

Besides catching me up on sleep, it's the one anti-depressant that does prevent the heavy, downward swing, when combined with Buproprion.

People point out that we're over-medicated in the US, where doctors are wined-and-dined, and otherwise encouraged to prescribe medications. That all might be true, but if nobody has noticed (and there's a lot of people who haven't) things are very depressing now. Our economy is wrecked; our political process is corrupt; the citizenry is mis-educated and misled; the environment is being destroyed, and the world is overpopulated and full misery that will only get worse.

I realize there's a lot of good news out there. Crime is down. Teen pregnancy is at record lows. Automotive fatalities are as low now as they were in the 1950s. Those are things we had pipe dreams about in the '70s. New transmissions and mortality rate for HIV are down. The Mexican Gulf seems to have recovered from the Deepwater Horizon spill (though I'm still skeptical about this one).

Still, the bad news is overwhelming, and I'm not the only one who finds the bad news both sobering and a reason to get drunk. It may be true that doctors prescribe a lot of anti-depressants, but it's also true that most people willingly take them. They at least feel that there's something wrong.

Additionally, we wouldn't need so much escapism, so much media committed to SF and Fantasy, unless people really needed to remove themselves from the world. Look at any top ten list of box office movies in the 1930s-50s. There was not one SF or high concept movie on the list. In the early '60s, eight of the top ten shows on TV were Westerns.

The 1930s, remember, was the time of the Great Depression. The 1940s was a freaking World War. Yet, the movies were set in the real world. It appears that something in this world is somehow more stressful than the Great Depression and a World War.

SF geeks have received such a bad name recently (being called Fanboys or Fangirls). Not that they've ever been too well regarded, except now, people who actually make movies aimed at them admit to holding them in contempt (see Zach Snyder talking about his movie Sucker Punch). Not to mention the fact that those who see SF and Fantasy movies hold them in contempt. That's a bizarre case of self-hatred.

Nevertheless, they're people who feel alienated from the real world. Some are very intelligent. However, they have little or no power to effect what's happening now. To be accurate, in a culture that worships athletes and physical prowess, they aren't asked. They feel a disgust with what those in power are doing. Totally out of power, of course they find the real world boring. That's what I see in their personalities.

So, the geek looks to the future, after everything that's presently happening in the world becomes insignificant. They either escape there, or completely into a different reality, like fantasy. Or movements like “Goth” which celebrated the power of being dead. In some cases, however, they read or watch “cautionary tales.” Like the little girl in Pan's Labyrinth, sometimes fantasy doesn't let you escape your fear. Sometimes your terror enters your fantasy and it's no longer an escape. Usually, though, it's sublimed into a form you can fight in a way you can't in the real world.

Then there's also horror, my current genre. At it's lightest, it's an escape. At it's heaviest, though, it shows you a fantasy more frightening than reality. If anything, it makes the real world look better by comparison. It's also a way to ask disturbing questions that are real. A way, perhaps, to wake people up.

SF and Fantasy only became hot since the 1960s. I think it's from alienation. What else has changed in this culture that would explain such a great change?

So, now we have SF and fantasy and we have video games. Like religion, I'd call them the opium of the people. Or maybe religion is the opium while SF and fantasy is the crack and video games are the crystal meth of the people.

With me, that opium doesn't always work. For one thing, I know it's supposed to be opium. A layer of denial would probably make these far more effective.

Though, use of this metaphor does make me note that people do get high just to escape. The tendency to use drugs and get addicted to them, however, is set by biology.

I don't really escape from reality, though. I take medications to prevent it from getting me down. I used to have manics, too, a few were life-changing experiences, but those don't happen so much anymore.

So, now that I'm not down, I'm going to be working on my various projects. I'm going to submit my short story Wil o' Wisp this weekend. I'm keeping to who a secret. Let's just say, I'm starting at the top of the market and I'm working down. Thank you, Writers' Market!

The Party's Over: The End of the Internet.

I know I haven't written in a very long time. I have a lot of excuses for that: my mother died (more on that later), I've been concentrating on fiction writing, depression, and maybe at other times just plain laziness. More than anything else, though, I'm not sure what direction I want to take this blog. I decided that I won't discuss family- - too many privacy issues over the net. That's about 40 percent of life I can't discuss right there.

Without knowing the exact direction, it's hard to get attached to it. I have to somehow fit it into an hour a day at most.

As a horror/fantasy writer, I guess one thing subject I can write about are real-life horrors. There are so many bad trends today. Like the political process, the economy, and "everything else," that is to say, the environment. I'm not an optimist. Because I'm an atheist, I don't think a God is going to save us from any of them.

Today is a minor horror: I'm foreseeing the end of the Internet, the only thing that has made last ten years tolerable.

A story by Gerry Smith in the Huffington Post tells us of a massive, apparently coordinated global spying operation reported by McAffee, most of it targeted in the US. The attacks were leveled against both companies and governments. “The data stolen included closely-guarded national secrets, source code, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, the report said.”

“Last month, the Defense Department said foreign hackers infiltrated the network of a defense contractor in March, stealing 24,000 military files in one of the most devastating data breaches suffered by the Pentagon to date.”

The economic consequences alone are staggering. Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research said that there has never been a transfer of wealth like it in the history of the world.

By now, it's apparent that the Internet, and computers in general, cannot be secured, that companies can't trust putting their data on them. The general public also is probably realizing the same thing. Privacy is going to come back into vogue.

The obvious, if unpalatable solution: don't put things on the web. I could see a backlash now where people and companies begin to withdraw from the Net: a great exodus. This will throw marvelous future we have come to expect since the 1980s into reverse. Markets will grow for “web-free” products and processes. Calls to do away with web anonymity and privacy will accelerate the process. People will come to see the web as predatory. Expect a surge in orders for “brick 'n' mortar” which might or might not help the company depending on the wealth lost by Internet based services. Expect also a surge in the use of plain old paper.

This has come in the wake of a few other problems that will also stymie the Internet. The upcoming lack of net neutrality will make it a less rewarding experience. Fewer people are going to want to sign on.

Innovation on the web is not going to be as bright and shiny now, either. Our stupid patent system, that allows anyone to patent the “picking your nose” process, is bringing innovation to a standstill.

Companies can patent anything with broad strokes and then sue over any product that rhymes with their patent is killing innovation. It's going to be difficult to reform the system, now that patent suits and their defense are a multi billion dollar industry. The lobbying against leaving it broke is going to be fierce.

It's adding up to the end of the Internet. The death of the dreams of the 80s & 90s. The Internet will have a niche. Just don't expect it to be the economic and innovation driver that it has been.

Why do I write best in my darkest moods?

I spent my whole life, and I mean thirty-five years fighting the stereotype of the neurotic, moody, unstable artistic type who labors out his creations on the edge of sanity, goes in and out of the hospital or rehab, and dies tragically of suicide, or of a drug overdose. More than likely he dies in poverty with a trail of wrecked relationships.

In the middle of adolescence I saw this as a distinct possibility and tried to avoid it. The main step in avoiding it was to take care of my sanity problem and try to clear the depressing and disturbing thoughts from my mind. Or avoid them as a writing subject. Meanwhile I tried my best to avoid writing about the things screaming in my mind or visions that brought tears to my eyes. No, that wasn't going to be my life. I was going to be someone who had it together, who could hold down a real job and write.

In an important way I succeeded. I avoided drugs and alcohol throughout my life. I might have been hospitalized, but I was never in rehab. So I never complicated my illness with drugs. Nevertheless, I totally failed at everything else. I ended up putting myself through thirty-five years of writers' block, social withdrawal and loneliness. I stopped writing, stopped even reading. I held terrible jobs because I couldn't get myself together enough to get and keep a good one. I went bankrupt due to massive spending mostly on things I didn't even keep or on pure whim. I gave a lot of money away too. Few remembered it.

I ended up imploding. I quit my job and my sister and parents had to rescue me from homelessness. I never asked them. I'm thankful. I might feel differently at times, but I was lucky then to have my tattered, dysfunctional family.

It was the same family I started with. I've never been married. Relationships have been difficult creating that loneliness problem.

I went into the hospital and had the depression zapped out of me. Rebooted with flat-wave DC current, I realized I had to approach my life differently. Maybe it was self-censoring my darkest thoughts, emotions and fears that ran my life into a concrete wall, that embittered me and that took away my pride.

I'll never say I had the most miserable life. Objectively speaking, it isn't close to being true. Though I can't be called blessed, most people have lives worse than mine.

But for some reason, the dark moods and the traumatic memories are a storm of excess emotions, words and visions. I can't ignore the creative energy of it and be successful as a writer. Or be successful in relationships, or strangely, have any pride. Truth is, it's most of what I am. I write till it hurts, if I don't have tears eyes writing it, it's no good.

Yes, and so, I'm in a terrible state today. And what do you know? It's great for writing horror. I hope the fact that I feel better now that I've written this hasn't disrupted the flow.

So how much have things changed?

Bit of personal information, I've been extremely busy. I'm in the market for a trade-up on my car. (I think $600 blue book gives me a lot of room to trade up). I'm looking for a decent apartment unlike the two bedroom basement one advertised on Craigslist. Something about that term "basement apartment" tells me my romantic life will be dependent on streaming Internet video, which better be free.

Though, what made it tempting was that it did have some redeeming features: a free washer and dryer left by the previous tenant (the ad said) and a second bedroom for the price of one, along with a huge storage room. I wonder, in a basement apartment, can you really tell the extra bedroom from the huge storage room? Or are they the same room mentioned twice? I guess if you store a person there, and if they're alive, it's a bedroom, if they're dead, it's a storage room.

I won't know, because despite those tempting amenities, I'm not curious enough to look. By no means am I financially in great health, but moving into a basement apartment would feel something like making a crater. My mental health is important.

After days work, today I was just tired, and a little sick. My short story went over pretty well last night. I went to bed early, meaning, of course, that I'm up now in the late night.

So, waiting for sleep to hit again, I was guided by Twitter links to the Abolition Society of Oklahoma site. To see their latest: "Abortion-on-Demand Encourages Child Abuse."

I know I haven't answered Rhology or Vox Veritas' posts about my points, something I had to put aside. I'm trying to get that done. Unfortunately, if I post to the ASOs, I usually shoot from the hip, and I'm not disciplined about it, like right now. I answered them on impulse. I'm trying to answer them in a more thoughtful way.

Here they quote C. Everett Koop, MD's and Francis A. Schaeffer's 1983 book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race:

"Since 1970 it is conservatively estimated in the United States that there are probably over ten million fewer children who would now be be between the ages of one and seven. Since these ten million were 'unwanted' and supposedly would have been prime targets for child abuse, it would seem reasonable to look for a sharp drop in child abuse in this same period." He goes on to say, "In 1972 there were 60,000 child-abuse incidents which were brought to official attention in the United States. Just four years later, in 1976, the number that received official attention passed the half-million mark." This shows indisputably that the "every child a wanted child" pro-choice logic is patently false.

And here I quote my answer:

"'In 1972 there were 60,000 child-abuse incidents which were brought to official attention in the United States. Just four years later, in 1976, the number that received official attention passed the half-million mark.' This shows indisputably that the 'every child a wanted child' pro-choice logic is patently false."

I'm not only going to dispute it, I'm going to refute it. Take a look at the number of child abuse laws on the books before and after. Take a look at the press coverage of child abuse just beginning to come out in 1972, at the same time as Roe.

Yes, the "implausible" happened. The culture did change that much, and you are ignorant of it.

Not only legally, but about how the whole culture saw child abuse. You simply have no idea. It was so different, I bet many states had no child abuse laws in the 1970s.

This I know. I lived during the '60s & '70s. I happen to know there was no attention paid to child abuse at that time. People were told to mind their own business about family matters and it wasn't reported. Just like domestic abuse.

A case had to be really outrageous to be reported, and then usually as assault, not child abuse. There were no medical reporting law or ethical guidelines. A cover story by the abusing adult was believed.

The legal-cultural attitudes began to change in the mid-70s.
The same is true of two other social issues: drunk driving and sexual harassment. Before the '70s, if you killed somebody driving drunk, the fact that you were drunk was your excuse. The change in culture about child abuse has been that radical.

Roe was not the only big change. I was there. I saw it. It was the much maligned, post-Watergate "liberal activist" press that brought public attention to all those problems and changed the culture and laws. I saw exact stories in the press that began them. A major one about domestic abuse was broke by Linda Elerbee on "Weekend."

If you're going to compare child abuse statistics at the time to now, why not, for a control, compare drunk driving statistics then and now? Why not sexual harassment statistics? I challenge you to even find the term "sexual harassment" before 1976, or later. Look for any press story before 1978 that had that term in it.

I forgot to say, the same is completely true for domestic abuse. I somehow lost that in the edit. It simply was not in the public or legal mind at the time. Never.

Roe paralleled many changes in the culture that you would never argue weren't improvements. You would not recognize this culture if you saw it in the 1970s, and you'd generally think the attitudes now are an improvement.

End Quote.

Writers' block: Hit the books today

Today I just read. I got up late and discovered my day was blown anyway. So, I committed it to reading and learning. Mostly I'm doing research about Pius XII, or Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli during the rise of Hitler. I'm also reading up and studying writing mechanics.

I just read a blog by the Abortion Abolitionists that makes my blood boil, or would if I weren't so tired and so busy. I'll have write my response over the next several days.

Looks like I'll miss that deadline

Today was Mothers' Day, but I don't talk about family here. I will say I think my Mom appreciated my gifts.

Yes, today was a working day for me, but not a very successful one. I wanted to have the latest installment of my short story ready for the writers' group tomorrow, but the rewriting is taking a long time, and tomorrow time will be scarcer than usual.

Tuesday and Wednesday will be my "weekend." But if I get the latest installment up to spec, it means that I won't have the previous parts of the story rewritten until maybe the real weekend next week.

The frustrating part of fiction or any writing is it takes a long time and I can never tell how long it takes.

That goes for discussions online. I'd like to argue and read more of the ASO's blog, but I don't have enough time for that diversion. Really, I only go there led by Twitter and only start answering their blog out of pure impulse. It can be frustrating when I look at the blog to close my day only to stay up three hours doing it.

I don't respond well to lack of sleep. Usually, on a good morning, I need desktop or sticky notes to tell me what I should be doing. And sometimes, the work is a total waste because I'm too dazed to know what I'm doing. It's the nature of my illness. So, when I stay up answering a blog, I'm really wounding myself.

The ASOs like Rhology have it in their minds that I'm not knowledgeable about Christianity. Actually I am, but when they question me about dogma and doctrine, instead of telling them what their Church tells them, I tell them what I think about those doctrines and what I learned about them outside Christianity. The two do not match.

So, from now on, I'll at least start by telling them what they believe about it. It might take these confrontations down a different path, don't expect it to get any less confrontational, though. The ASOs are a cult.

Losing focus and arguing against an antichoice cult

I'm up too late and have to get up too early tomorrow. Writing fiction means a hard daily schedule.

I managed to take some time to answer the Abolition Society of Oklahoma, or as I call them, ASOs. They complained that some people weren't taking them seriously and were being snarky to them, to paraphrase.

http://is.gd/GJpD7l

I've had arguments in the past with this cult, who are trying to make antichoice a religious crusade by conflating the issue with slavery, despite several humongous differences. I can't see an underground railroad for fetuses. I just can't. I also can't see Canada going along with it . . .

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

Actually, I can see their point in not trying to engage you. I've tried. It hasn't done anything, and periodically I hear, "oh, you really said nothing to support your point."

Each time that was a lie. Fact is, you never engage in a discussion sincerely, that is, entertaining any thought that anything said can change your mind. You never ask yourself what information could do it, but instead look for things to prove yourself right, and you explain away the things that to prove your wrong. Though in these respects, you're not really different from anybody else.

However, you also make logical arguments with terms defined to bolster the conclusion you've already made, affirming the antecedent and making circular arguments regularly. You have a faith-based religion, which means you have a sworn duty to believe no matter what, and you've trained yourself to accept the weakest, flimsiest arguments and pseudoscience so you could keep your faith and not feel like idiots. Moreover, because you've connected your antichoice views to your religion you're committed to never changing your mind on it. Since you've also linked antichoice to an antislavery narrative, you've shifted the discussion from whether the fetus is actually a human being to winning rights for the fetus. Thus assures you will never say anything appropriate about abortion.

Even though I try to now and then, I guess because I'm human, I don't think there's any point in engaging any of you. It's like trying to engage the Moonies in a rational discussion about their beliefs. You are a cult, and more cultish than most Christian sects.

So, I'm pro-ridicule. If people aren't engaging you, but ridiculing you, maybe you shouldn't declare, claim and argue things that require proof of sanity.

It's fair to ask what would plausibly change my mind? Prove to me in a material way that there's something in a zygote besides a genome that makes it a human being. The reason I start with the zygote is that's where the antichoicers say "human life," or what I would call a "human being" begins.

I reject the argument out of hand that it's a human being/person just because it's human life with a complete, distinct, diploid human genome. Though a human being must have such, the arrow of inference only goes one way: because something has a complete, distinct, diploid human genome, it does not mean that its a human being, according to Bayes Law. For a zygote, there are a lot of necessary things missing. Like a brain and body, like any functional senses or emotions. No emotional or sensory life can be inferred from it.

So, what quality does it have? According to the ASOs say a zygote/fetus "possesses the Image of God." They don't say it's in God's image or that it looks like God, because that would immediately underscore how absurd their claim is. A zygote, a fetus and a middle-aged human cannot all be in God's image, if God is perfect and unchanging.

Now, in Genesis, Man was created in the image of God (and women from Man's rib, slightly less dignified.) Genesis 9:5-7 says, “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind." A zygote doesn't have blood. I don't think I'm stretching this point: a zygote, purportedly where "life begins," cannot not be what that passage is talking about. The presumption, if you're going to use it as a moral guide, is that human beings have blood and if you shed it the human being dies. If we're going to take the poetic language about "image of God" we should take the whole thing literally. If you could kill somebody without spilling blood, it shouldn't offend God or anyone else. Poisoning might be recommended.

Now, for their exact statement, nowhere does the Bible use the phrase "possess(es) the image of God." We don't say that in the English language. If somebody looks like somebody else, we never say one possesses the others' image. In fact, if we were to say that, it means one person carries a picture of the other. It means the fetus is committing blasphemy, and probably we should stone its mother. If one is made in the others' image, we say it just like that or have. Their saying that the zygote/fetus "possesses the image of God" just avoids the questions that would normally be raised if they said it the regular way. They know this.

In doing this, the ASOs cannot be using an understood definition of "image," which is where their tactic enters the Orwellian realm. It's a statement that's meant to guide opinion, not make a proper, logical argument based even on their own faith.

Using the "image of God" argument, in other words, can be rejected outright, and it still first has to be a human being, with a completed "image of God" to apply.

So, what would I accept? I would need material proof that despite all it lacks, a single-celled zygote is something that the later, developed human being could recognize as themselves, by appearance or behavior. If it's a unique, individual human being, the unique, individual human being should be able to look at videos on how it behaves along side other zygote/fetus videos and say, "That's me!" In fact, anybody should be able to study zygotes/fetuses, study the later people, and pick out which zygote/fetus is which person, just from behavior, or perhaps appearance.

Or, I would need some physical quality that proves it's as conscious in a way that the fully developed human is. A good test: does it dream yet? If it dreams, it means that it's ready to take sensory information and synthesize a narrative from it.

Or, I would need physical proof that a soul exists, that human beings have one, and the zygote/fetus possesses it, too.

"Possessing God's image" doesn't cut it.

Atheist Morality, part 2

First I'll recap part 1

In Western Civilization, the concept of morality originated hand and hand with the concept of theism, with a concept of piety being central even for pagan cultures. Therefore, it is difficult to formulate an atheist concept of morality that's explicable to the religious, who presume that no morality could exist without God, or at least, the self-deception that there is a God.

They are wrong. As social animals, human beings are born with an inclination to find out what behaviors others expect of them and what behavior they should expect from others. More than that, find out what behaviors other people will cooperate to stop or punish, or reward. There are, of course, those who are deficient in morality, sociopaths and psychopaths, but for the most part, human beings are born to learn this.

To explain anything about atheist morality I first have to define it in a way that's not dependent on belief in God and show how it functions in a Godless universe. Like God, though, morality only exists in the mind of human beings. Unlike God, it's not an illusion. It's a behavior we all depend on.

A person is born to look for what behaviors are expected or prohibited from others, but also they are born with their own desires behaviors and so must alter their behavior and learn what the social group expects from everyone. From the interplay of these two, the person will eventually form a moral code.

(Last paragraph altered.)

To go on now:

So, the person's internal, subjective morality is then compromised with the social group's, whose code may more accurately be called inter-subjective rather than objective. The social group, by the way, might be a religion, a gang, a nation, or a political party. It might have a written code of laws that fit everyone's subjective morality just approximately. A person if free to explore, will look for one that compromises with their subjective morality the best. If a person is stuck in an authoritarian society, such as Saudi Arabia, they will generally conform their morality to it, and might become as stern as the society they are in. Since people are very adaptable.

Some of these social groups will have the morality written out in laws, such as in Christianity. In these cases, the moral code would be only a rough approximation of the inter-subjective morality of its members. The believers buy the entire package, including parts they might not personally like. Such as a believer might not have anything personally against gays & lesbians, but in Christian mythos, God, not humankind, dictates what's moral. Therefore, the believer must buy the whole code, and because they need most of it, they'll pretend to go along with all of it. Or do their level best to find reasons why being gay is sinful as murder.

Leaving psychopathic personalities out of this, atheists form their moral code exactly the same way Christians do, which is why atheists tend to be no more criminal than Christians, in fact, probably less.

So, that's a very general description of how a person forms a sense of morality or moral code.

To a large degree, people can agree on what is right and wrong, due to the fact that we're the same sort of social animal. Every moral facet also has an evolution-adaptive reason behind it, such as a disgust or outrage toward murder. It's because for any social group to be advantageous to its members, they have to be safer from each other than they would generally be without each other. Human beings evolved in strong social groups, hence, our brains create averse feelings in us regarding murder, and we act our feelings to prohibit and punish it.

Nevertheless, it's notable that there are exceptions allowed, and I'm not talking about abortion, which I will get to in the last part of this essay. Exceptions are made in the Bible. In case we think those are behind us, one was made just recently in the case of Osama bin Laden.