Saturday Diary: A primal scream in the dead of night / P = mv*

We're all familiar with the various kinds of screams we humans can emit, from the squeals of a child in those "boo!" moments, to the shrieking of scream queens on the big screen. But there is a primal scream that lurks within all of us, awaiting the proper moment to burst forth in all of its primordial glory. I uttered one of these Monday night, or rather, very early Tuesday morning, on my way home from the office.

While tooling along the interstate just above the 65-mph speed limit, quite alone in the dark, listening attentively to a spooky audio book, I suddenly saw a large, glistening form materialize immediately in front of my car. I screamed.

It started in my colon, rumbled upward into my stomach, hurtled through the esophageal sphincter in my diaphragm, gushed into the esophagus and up into my throat, where it was met with the full force of all the air in my lungs, and finally, under tremendous pressure, burst out of my mouth in the loudest, hoarsest, most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard, followed a millisecond later by a crash and cacophony of twisting metal and crumpling plastic.

My hapless victim, literally the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, vanished as quickly as it had appeared. In a foggy daze, I mindlessly proceeded along my course, every neuron firing incoherently as I tried to get a grip on what had just happened. In my frazzled stupor, seemingly unhindered in my course and direction, I removed my right hand from the shift knob and reached up to turn off the car stereo. I remember wondering how my car could still be running after such an impact. I also remember thinking that maybe the damage wasn't too bad.

Coming to my senses, I realized that the car, though still running, was slowing down. So I tried to accelerate. As the motor revved, the tachometer needle made its typical clockwise movement, but the speedometer did not. It was then that I realized the car was in neutral. I concluded that, in my panicked state, I must have tried to brace myself by pushing against the steering wheel with my left hand and against the shifter with my right, setting it to the neutral position.

I then put the shifter back to drive, depressed the accelerator and started speeding up again. As I exited the freeway, I surveyed what I could see of the front of my car. The hood was clearly damaged, having been twisted and bent several inches above its normal situation. But I still had at least one headlight, and could see the road with no trouble.

•

I began to think about the deer. Countless stories of collisions of motorists with deer finish with, "And it just ran off, like nothing happened." Surely, the same was true in this case.

Whenever I see a deer carcass on the road, I always assume it was an 18-wheeler or a cement-mixer truck that was responsible for the carnage. Mass, multiplied by velocity, equals momentum. Whatever a cement-mixer might lack in velocity, it certainly makes up for in mass. So I concluded that my little Chevy Cavalier probably could not have inflicted much damage to one of those impervious venison denizens of darkness.

When I arrived home, not 10 minutes later, I pulled my car into the garage, turned off the ignition and got out to take a look. It was a horrible, nauseating sight. The bumper was cracked down the middle. The right headlight was gone, probably still on the freeway in shattered bits. And the entire hood was a wrinkled, concave shape, a sheet of silver paper that had been crumpled into a ball and then smoothed out unsuccessfully.

When I saw deer fur stuck all over the hood, a sickening feeling came over me, exacerbated no doubt by the lingering effects of the adrenalin that had been surging through me just moments before.

It took me more than an hour to get to sleep, the muscles of my chest and abdomen still burning as if I'd had a late-night work-out and my throat feeling as if I had been at a concert, shouting at the top of my lungs for hours; both, of course, the result of that volcanic scream that had filled my head and my car with unprecedented volume.

•

Tuesday morning, I went into the garage, took another assessment of the damage, got into the car and drove off to begin the new day's responsibilities.

Retracing the previous night's route in reverse, I looked along the shoulder of the oncoming lanes to see what, if anything, had been left behind. Much to my surprise, I caught a glimpse of a lifeless fur-covered heap of animal against a concrete barrier on the far side of the highway. Apparently, what my compact Chevy lacked in mass, it more than made up for in velocity. Mass, multiplied by velocity, equals momentum.

Adding to my surprise, after I saw my victim lying there, a throbbing pain began in my right palm and wrist, apparently the result of bracing myself so violently at the moment of impact. It was as if seeing a creature I had killed spotlighted some fateful organic connection between us, having shared the same physical space, the same millisecond of terror, and undoubtedly, in one brief, chance moment, the same primal scream.

• In physics, P stands for momentum, m for mass and v for velocity. P = mv

Gifts and Genuine Ownership of Property

Here's something that struck me out of the proverbial blue while I was grilling burgers today:

I was thinking today about the concept of giving as it relates to personal property and ownership. Whether we're talking about gifts between friends and family, or donations to charity or church, the very idea of a gift -- generosity, altruism, philanthropy -- presumes true ownership and personal property. In other words, you cannot truly give a gift to another unless you already own it. If I give something that does not truly belong to me, then it's not actually a gift. It is stealing, because I am giving to someone something that did not already belong to me.

Applying this principle to progressive ideology coming out of Washington every day, not only does such a government undermine personal property and ownership -- with onerous taxes on personal real estate and inheritance, and the threat of punishment if we presume to act as if we actually do own our homes or inherited resources -- but it necessarily redefines giving itself. It does so by (1) taking away property and/or usurping our personal ownership of property, and (2) by example, that is, by taking (i.e., stealing) the wealth of those who worked for it, and "giving" (i.e., redistributing) it to those who did not.

The story of Robin Hood is often misunderstood. The overly simplified summation, "stealing from the rich and giving to the poor," does more to promote class warfare -- that the rich are evil and miserly and should have their money taken away and given to the noble poor, the jobless and homeless people -- rather than representing the real Robin Hood story and mission.

Most people seem to forget -- or perhaps never knew -- that the story was actually about onerous taxes. The wealthy government officials were rich because they overtaxed the common people. And the common people were poor because they were overtaxed by the corrupt government. Robin Hood, the outlaw, did not steal from the rich and redistribute their wealth. Robin Hood did not "give," in the gift-giving sense, to the poor. He and his Merry Men of Sherwood actually took back, in behalf of the common people, what rightfully belonged to them.

If our current government, and the statist progressives comprising it, continue to drag us down this road, the concepts of generosity, altruism and philanthropy will become either entirely superfluous, or else change in meaning altogether.

"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." ~ Thomas Jefferson

Fast or Slow

Ethan, my 10-year-old, number-two son, asked me if I would help him to remove a large adhesive bandage from his gashed knee so he could go to the pool. This injury he acquired when he fell off his skateboard at Josh Bemis' house yesterday.

Ethan came over to where I was sitting and, putting his foot on an adjacent chair, showed me the large, business-card-sized bandage. I asked him how he hurt himself, and he described how he wiped out on the skateboard. "Did you cry?" I asked, careful not to make it sound like I would be disappointed if he had.

"No," he said, with typical "I'm-almost-eleven" toughness.

"Was there much blood?" I further queried.

"Not at first," he answered, "but after."

I felt the edges of the bandage for place to get a good grip and said to him, "We can do this one of two ways: We can do it fast, which will hurt, but the pain will be quick and we'll get it over with in a hurry. Or we can do it slow, which will also hurt, but it will probably hurt longer."

Ethan thought for just a second, and with no further hesitation said, "Fast."

Gripping a frayed and slightly lifted corner of the bandage, I gave it a gentle tug, making sure my fingers wouldn't slip and turn the quick-painful one-step process into a not-so-quick, even more painful, two- or three-step process. Satisfied with my grip, I took a breath and yanked hard. It came off in one blurred motion. Not yet noticing what sort of injury lay behind the bandage, I looked immediately to Ethan's face.

He hadn't even flinched. He didn't make a sound.

"You okay?" I asked him.

"It wasn't so bad," he said. I was proud of him, but found it difficult to find a way to tell him without making him think that I would be any less proud of him had he flinched or whimpered at the pain. So I said, "I'm glad you're not a big sissy, because it would be almost impossible to love you if you were."

No, I didn't really say that. I merely handed him the used bandage so he could toss it into the trash before trotting off to the pool.

Spawn of The James

The last time my children and I were at the library—I think it was Thursday—I was trying to round them up so we could leave and get back to the house for lunch. Affecting the tone of Super Nanny, I said something like, "Children, children of mine. Come, come. Attention, spawn of The James. We must depart." Something in this string of appellatives apparently caught Tabitha's attention.

As I was leaving for work today, I called upstairs to Caleb and Tabitha so I could say goodbye to them. They were both in their rooms; Ethan was in the office, and I had already said goodbye to him. I shouted up the stairwell: "Tabitha! Caleb!" They both emerged from their rooms and stood at the top of the steps.

"I'm leaving now," I said.

"OK, see ya," replied Caleb, in his customary way, as he went back into his room.

Tabitha came running down the stairs to receive her hug (she doesn't hug me back, but she accepts my hugs). I kissed her on her head and said, "Love you, sweetie." I heard her mutter something as I was releasing her from the hug. "Pardon me?" I asked. A tiny bit louder, and more clearly she said, "Spawn of The James." Then she giggled and marched back up to her room.

How NOT To 'Mellow' The 'Yellow'

During the inauguration broadcast this morning, I didn't to get hear The Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction very closely because I was preparing lunch at the time. Below is an annotated excerpt from the benediction. Keep in mind that each of The Rev. Lowery's requests look forward to "that day" when God will someday help to bring each of these things to fruition.

"Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, …"

Help me out here. Are African-Americans still required to sit in the back?

"... when brown can stick around …"

Is he referring to illegal immigrants from Mexico?

"... when the red man can get ahead, man; …"

Native Americans are being oppressed? Where? Last I heard, they've got their own Nation, carte blanche on casinos and cigarettes, and they don't pay any effing taxes!

"… when yellow will be mellow …"

Oh. My. GAWD!!!!! If The Rev. Lowery wants "yellow" to someday be "mellow," he needs to shut his racist pie-hole. As a "yellow" myself, his rhetoric is doing nothing to mellow me out.

"… and when white will embrace what is right. …"

WTF?! What does he think this is, Montgomery, Alabama in 1955? Does The Rev. Lowery even know that Martin Luther King and President Abraham Lincoln were both REPUBLICANS?!

"That all those who do justice and love mercy, say Amen. Say Amen"

His words belie any coherent comprehension of the terms "justice" and "love" and "mercy," let alone "Amen." Whose idea was it to give this guy a microphone? Did The Office Of The President Elect get a transcript of this "prayer" before it was delivered? So much for the unity and oneness that Obama called for in his inaugural address.

End of rant (for now).

Election Day Googling

As regular users of Google are no doubt aware, the ubiquitous search engine commemorates certain calendar events with modified versions of their logo, often incorporating clever juxtapositions of images related to the day or event. Among them are the obligatory major holidays, Independence Day, Father's Day, Mother's Day, St. Patrick's Day and anniversaries, such as the 50th anniversay of NASA. Google will also often recognize birthdays (Marc Chagall, Diego Velázquez, Walter Gropius), ethnic holidays (Persian New Year), and historical "firsts" (first hot air balloon flight, first ascent of Mount Everest). See the following link for examples of Google's special logos: http://www.google.com/holidaylogos.html

Today is Election Day. This morning, I used Google to seek out some information, and was curious to see what they had done with their logo in honor of one of the most cherished traditions of American life. But what I found was their usual logo. Unaltered. As if it were any other day in America.

According to Wikipedia, as of Nov. 4, 2008, "Google, Inc., is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking, and video sharing services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. The Google headquarters, the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of 30 September 2008 the company has 20,123 full-time employees."

If anyone can say they have benefited from the freedoms and traditions of America, Google certainly can. Few things are as important as our ability and freedom to cast votes for those who would govern over us. But for some reason, Google was not inclined to recognize it. Was it mere oversight? Or was it a deliberate eschewing of something for which our forefathers fought and died? Why would Google, a company that at least partly owes its success and greatness to the success and greatness of America, go out of its way to recognize the birthdays of Chagall and Velázquez, and yet seemingly ignore one of the most important events in the life of an American citizen?

UPDATE: As of 5:59 p.m., Google now has a special logo for Election Day. Please disregard the above.

Only From Photographs

Today would have been my mother's birthday. She would have been 65 years old. My children only know her from photographs. She has been dead for 23 years, and sadly, the fact is, I as well only know her from photographs.