8241: The Small World Effect Looms Large

The Oso mudslide hit home to me, in too many intimate ways.  Three of the lost were acquaintances - drinkin' buddies - and the mudslide and resulting flood killed a peaceful place, one I have been camping at, partying at, (even nude!) and mowing for a long, long time.  My best friends' daughters were there  a scant 12 hours before it happened.  These are kids I've taught advanced cooking skills, wing-chun, and carpentry to...  If they had been there, I'd still be up there looking.  Nothing in the world can stop a concerned entity.



"Does anyone know where the love of God goes,
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

Gordon Lightfoot's perfectitude... "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"


Dagnabbit, I'm gettin' older.  (Wheeze, cough, fart... sniff?)  We won't assume 'wiser' just yet.  Gotta know your limits...


I know/sense this alleged aging process directly because...

1) I'm saying the things my late Grandma Green used to say, like "You look just like So-And-So," and "Goodness Sakes."  (Perhaps one function of age is that everyone new you meet DOES remind you of someone else in the past, tangentially.  There are only so many facial types...  And random swearing loses its angry luster.  Kids don't need to hear those words until they're ready for them.)  I once took a close female friend out to my Grandma's on a sun-filled Whidbey Island road-trip, and her first comment to 'Rhiannon' was "Oh My, you must be an O'Brien."  She was.  My grandmother had gone to church with her grandmother, for decades, back in the 40s and 50s and 60s.  She'd known her father longer than 'Rhiannon' had.  And she saw... what she saw.  Nailed it.  (See note III)

B) I understand the visceral groans that came out of adults when I was a child.  Physiological degradation and physical pain is cumulative in some bodily places.  Especially the lower spine.  I never had the bod to be a builder, but I liked it, and it wore me down a lot.  I know those groans intimately now.  I earned 'em.  I can recognize the gait and 'carry' of people who have labored for years, the familiar-yet-subtle hop-walk adaptation to keep discs from pinching nerves...  the pinch in the outside corner of the eyes, from the thousand fortnights of squinting through constant, inuring pain, which becomes the new norm.  We recognize each other, and the physical choices we've made, and oft-times paid too much for.  Can fisherman have 'Tortured Artist Effects?'  Yeah, probably.  Adventure wears you out.

III) Having met and talked with, listened to, and definitely interrupted several thousands of people over the span of this life's mortal coil, I finally realize we ALL are just (maybe) a meager few degrees of separation apart.  Almost certainly not as many as 6.  Par example, I have a newer friend who I was telling a story to, regarding one of my 'inner-circle' acquaintances, in Seattle Proper.  This other guy had been diving into a nasty drug spiral, and had needed true-friend intervention or...  inevitable dirt-nap.  Before I even finished the opening theme, he named him.  700K peeps in this town.  Worlds DO collide.  Heads almost explode with the revelation of our connectivity.  (Dayum, the Universe is beyond amazing!)
    a) Used to buy gas from two Ethiopians on Mercer Street, who taught me some useful Amharic as we chatted.  (Genuinely nice guys, happy to be working/eating/trying to live the Dream, Hadish and Tedla.)  Amharic is a beautiful language.  (For some reason, I have an innate talent for picking peoples' native language upon first sight, with a few 'greeting' mistakes over the years.)  Five years later, going to pay my parking garage fee in the Westin Building, I greeted the lanky black gentleman there in Amharic.  Mn-dmmm'Ne!  He was obviously from the Horn.  Paid and thanked him...  Amesagennalo.  He asked where I'd learned that language, I told him about my old friends, and the OTHER guy in the booth turns around.  It was indeed Tedla, who'd taught me so many moons before.  We almost had tears in our eyes.  Okay, we did, but I ain't fessin' up to that here.  We hugged, as well, real hug.

    b) DISCLAIMER:  It's not just human-to-human.  It's mind-to-mind curiosity and a loyalty to motive life.  Therefore, it must include 'higher' animals.  Certainly dogs, cats, horses, pigs, orcas, seals, gerbils - any mammal.  Ever have a raccoon beg for its life in front of you?  (Spoiler: He lived.)

And it goes on...  Lotsa birds.  My crows are My Crows, they know that, being crazy-smart as they are.  I sing older Journey songs to them and they roost down a few feet away, up on the sunroom roof, cock their feathered heads at me and chill... We can add perhaps some reptiles, and some fish...  Carp seem to know their peeps.  It may go even further.  What the?  (I know... where am I going with this?)
    I've befriended a hoverfly before, for many days-in-a-row, so I'm theorizing that really anything with a conscience, no matter how small or discreet, can potentially meet you mind-to-mind.  Even mayflies and dragonflies will land on your finger if you peacefully put it out to them.  I really cannot estimate how many wily winged insects have landed on my willful, outstretched index-finger... dozens over the decades.  It's practically a neutral 'dock' for them.  They KNOW I will never hurt them.
    Maybe spiders.  I lived next to a female black widow for three months in Sonoma County, and until she had hundreds of babies, I let her web exist a few feet from my sleeping head.  (I transported them all outside - well, mostly all - with very minimal losses.)  I never bit her, she never bit me.
Seagulls are idiot opportunists.  They may be the one exception to friendship.




And now into the 'Meat' of this Cartesian space/time fill of a blog, which will be stored in some refrigerated server in Palo Alto...

Quantum Entanglement blows my mind.  Everyone I've ever hugged has given and taken electrons in the transaction.  We shared trillions of orbits of sub-atomic particles.  Some of those electrons are still in their orbits in my quadrillion cells.

"Kickin' around 

On a piece of ground

In your hometown.

Shorter of breath,

And one day closer to death."

Pink Floyd's masterpiece "Time"



WAIT!  Stop the presses!

Ms Beatrix, you semi-recently 'friended' my favorite professor/mentor.  (I JUST today noticed a 'mutual friend.') Why?  You told me decades ago you would never acknowledge or contact ANY of my friends... and that lasted all of 8 months before you went and saw Chris and Kyle in Mac and told them "you could still feel my presence" in Bellingham.  You had a flat tire or something, as well.  I told Nan today I don't care if she 'friends' you.  It just doesn't matter - the cat is out of the bag - you could've seen everything I've ever posted before already.  I've never posted anything about you, if you're curious.    (Probably aren't, but that isn't the point.)  A big part of love is loyalty and respect.  (Did you ever learn that?  Too bad you never had a dog as a child... or ever since.  They rule in that regard.)  I've never posted a picture or commented about you.  Only my closest friends have any idea who you are, or how you fucked with me after...  (and don't think for a second you didn't really send mixed-ass messages.)
Maya Angelou passed today.  To quote her is egregious... so I'll just put "...you remember how people made you feel."  And she's sooooo right.  And it took a while to realize my emotions framed that history.  I was never a stoic.
However, I went through the entire range of human emotions in my year (and after) with you.  I'm pretty sure I felt them all, like hailstones of inordinate size.  Just before Halloween 1990 to just after Halloween 1991.  That's all we ever knew each other.  Basically a year of everything, from meeting, to friendship, to flirting, to romance, to falling in love, to being shuffled out of your life, completely estranged.

Peace out.  Got things to do.