Dna

By Terry W. Gintz

Is there such a thing as Fate? Are we destined to live out our lives toward one final destination? Is there something in our DNA that predetermines our future actions and ultimately decides what our successes and failures amount to on this Earth? Whatever universe we're born into, I guess a positive answer to all of these questions would indicate a very sparse element of free will given to one, or is one's life truly random and what one makes of it? It is clear that no answer to these questions will be forthcoming or only available posthumously, so why ask at all? "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." -- Jean Racine. But deep feeling can also be triggered by deep thought, especially when the abyss of questions winds itself around your thinking and pulls you down. This book is a sometimes humorous sometimes ridiculous attempt to answer these questions and in the same vein solve some pressing problems of our time and in the not so distant future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry W. Gintz
• Release date: Apr 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310943713

Terry W. Gintz

When I'm not doing anything else, I read a lot of novels. With years of experience as a poet, it's not surprising that I developed an interest in writing my own novels too. Given the multi-faceted iconoclast I am and the great affection I have for my wife it's also not surprising that the books I write are innately eccentric, robustly erotic and critically anti-establishment.Fractals have been a passion for me since around 1984 when I read Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature. I designed my first iterative fractal program (then called ZPlot) in 1989 on an Amiga 2000 computer.Since 2007 I have been heavily involved in lapidary or stone creations. You can view these at http://tgintz.epizy.com/ along with 3d prints I've made based on 3d fractals from my software.

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Prologue

Is there such a thing as Fate? Are we destined to live out our lives toward one final destination? Is there something in our DNA that predetermines our future actions and ultimately decides what our successes and failures amount to on this Earth? Whatever universe we're born into, I guess a positive answer to all of these questions would indicate a very sparse element of free will given to one, or is one's life truly random and what one makes of it? It is clear that no answer to these questions will be forthcoming or only available posthumously, so why ask at all? Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. -- Jean Racine. But deep feeling can also be triggered by deep thought, especially when the abyss of questions winds itself around your thinking and pulls you down.

In one's lifetime are many roads to travel, streets to walk, waterways and oceans to cross, hills and mountains to hike. Along the way are many relationships to cultivate or abandon, lovers to pursue, sexual entanglements, with mixed intensity, and long-time friendships that end due to illness, accident or irrevocable distances. You may get rich through smart investments, or lose a fortune in a stock-market crash, or money may have no interest for you at all except to provide sustenance and highlights for what is otherwise a meaningless existence. When success is measured in terms of material accomplishments and social standing, then no vacation or holiday retreat can fill the void of an unproductive or unappreciated life's work. Does it get any better if all is handed to one on a silver platter, where exceptional ability is a commodity to be bought and sold on a corporate-controlled marketplace? We shall see.

Even the longest story and the most prolific words cannot spell out the rambling threads of my patchwork life, so why am I pursuing this? For a long time it was unclear what I would become, bootstraps are so hard to grasp, and the weather of mankind is quick to beat you down, especially the weak and downtrodden. That’s what I was, weak and downtrodden, an ego easily overcome by doubts and uncertainties, all of which are carefully cultivated to keep you in your place, until death do you this earth depart. Who cultivates this grand garden of illusions? Why the Holy Ghost for all I know and acknowledge! But seriously, I would imagine it is more engrained than that, and all of us must share responsibility for the misery and chaos. That sort of view gives new meaning to the initials DNA, doesn’t it? Depraved Numbskulls Anonymous or something like that.

Well, now that I’ve started, I’m in my own menstrual soup, for better or for worse, and it lies solely on my shoulders to unravel what it was that got me in this mess in the first place and what will get me out of it. Don't expect me to cover much more than your basic convoluted story leading up to my current status as President elect, long elaborations not being my particular forte, as I'm no Tolstoy or Victor Hugo (and what United States President professed to be that literate, anyway?) This colossal and deceitful life I've been forced to lead may come crashing down at any moment, but one can only try to hang on, put your best patent-leather covered feet forward into the slush, and hope the damn driveway doesn't fall out from under you, can you imagine that? No? Well I never claimed to be another Steinbeck. Drink up, folks! The ride's about to get a bit hairy.

Chapter 1

I remember when I was nearing sixteen sitting on my back porch one day stroking my short-haired cat with one hand and wiping my dirty runny nose with the other. I could hear my dad through the screen door making a deal with the local slave trader to sell my sorry ass for chump change or just enough cash to buy a keg of beer and maybe a case of cancer sticks, aka cigarettes to the unenlightened.

I know he’s not much to look at, about as strong as a flea, but he’s quite docile and will do anything you tell him if you crack the whip loud enough. I’m tired of seeing him mope around the house, stroking that silly cat of his, with his constant runny nose and his tongue hanging out like a Mongolian idiot’s. He’s too stupid for my taste, but maybe you can do something with him. Teach him to keep house for one of your clients, hey?

Don’t worry, Sir; we always have something for young boys to do, even if they are as weak as you claim. Here’s the sum we agreed upon. Confidentially, you understand this is just in lieu of the boy’s immediate apprenticeship. The authorities frown on slave labor and such, so if anyone asks you, your son is off learning a trade, a cabinet-maker's apprentice, eh?

Son, my dad called through the screen door, Come here and meet your new master. You’ll be living elsewhere from now on.

Scoot, Dingbat, I brushed the humongous cat off my lap and stood up.

After hurriedly feeding Dingbat a last meal and saying my goodbye to him, I entered the house and was escorted outside to an unremarkable black van, a Ford or Chevy I couldn’t tell; they all looked alike to me. with their squared-off sides and pug-nose fronts. I was stuffed in the back with several other orphaned children.

So there I was apprenticed to the surliest lot the world has ever let fall through the cracks, and not making much of a fuss at that. Maybe I was at the lowest point in my biorhythm, or maybe I just didn’t give a hoot anymore. I’d been through so much already, that it didn’t seem things could get much worse. Boy was I in for an awful surprise, not!

Oh wait a second. Before I go any further with that thread, I should perhaps start at the beginning, and my story might make more sense. A beginnings is like a light rain that quickly turns into heavy showers, then the meandering and rippling streams that form spread out and weave their paths throughout the tale...

I was born in the late 1980’s in the middle of a rainstorm, or so my mother professed. She’d just run out of onions for the night’s stewpot and was slowly heading for the marketplace, big with child and waddling like a duck, when a sudden deluge struck. She sat down to rest for a while under a banyan tree until the storm passed. (In Key West, Florida flash showers happen all the time, so the best thing to do is find the nearest shelter and stay put.) Then the pains in her abdomen started and she knew the birthing process had begun, or so she said, though in not so many words. (She just said I was born in Key West in a rainstorm, and knowing what I do now about my own daughter's delivery, I just imagined the ordeal she must have gone through, all alone on that vacant road. Who goes shopping in Key West, nine months pregnant, when a storm is about to break?)

The women in ma’s family had always been quick to eject their burdens, and since I was more or less a runt, I came sliding down her delivery passage with hardly any effort and out her retracted diaphragm with a snap, crackle and pop, right on the crown of my head before she could scoop me up and cradle me to her bosom. The afterbirth followed with a sucking sound and a splash, but by then I was nursing furiously and oblivious to anything else, or so my mother professed, though in not so many words. (She just said I came quickly like her mother had given birth to her, and I just completed her story with a little embellishment.)

That she gave birth unattended by a doctor or midwife or even a passing stranger, I find harder to digest the older I grow and the more I think about it, but I can see no reason she would lie about it. I can believe it when she said dad was no help at all in changing my diapers, because when I was old enough to observe him with any clarity he was always sitting on his ass smoking and swilling beer and watching ESPN sports all day (on his off days or holidays) and all night long (which was most nights as late or later than I was permitted to stay up.) This went on for as long as I can remember, the memory of which ended close to my sixteenth birthday.

As a year-old toddler, ma said I had a penchant for stuffing cigarette butts in my mouth, when I found them lying about, then immediately spitting them out. After which ma would wipe my mouth out with Lysol-infused tissues whenever she caught me doing it. I guess I sucked on my share of the foul-tasting butts, perhaps confusing their shape with the tips of ma’s breasts. My thumbs were the next best thing to suck on when I wasn’t nursing.

Ma took her time in weaning me. I guess she enjoyed the company when cuddling me. She rarely got that from dad, when he wasn’t working at the KFC Drive-In or watching the sports channels. Why ma married him, I never learned unless it was just to have a child like me. There certainly wasn’t any romance involved that I could see.

As I’ve mentioned, dad had a poor opinion of my IQ and often referred to me as his dummy son when he had one of his friends over to watch the Friday night fights. I heard this so much I actually started to believe this hogwash. So I began to act out the consequences of being dumb as a jackass. Damned if I didn’t at times pull down my pants and urinate like a dog, with one leg up, against the wall in back. If dad saw me when he came outside for some fresh air, he’d just say Stupid mutt! and slam the screen door as he reentered the house.

I saw a zombie movie on AMC one time when dad was at work Night of the Living Dead maybe it was called. Ma let me watch anything on cable to keep me occupied while she did her ironing or cooking. Nothing in the movies scared her and she taught me not to be afraid either.

Just remember it isn’t real, anytime you want to scream, and then laugh your head off! she would say to me, and that usually did the trick.

Only once was I scared out of my skull when I saw Black Sunday. That witch with her reconstituted eyeballs made me want to retch. I had to watch the flick several times before I could laugh in the witch’s face. Those were great special effects for that day and age. When dad came home I was staggering around and laughing with my tongue hanging out, bug eyed, and clothes torn to shreds, or as torn as I could make them with my puny strength. Luckily they were old clothes or ma might have tanned my hide. The zombie movie was just ending.

Dad took one look at me and said Who are you supposed to be, king of the nitwits? and then with a flick of his wrist he changed the channel to ESPN.

Chapter 2

When it was time for me to begin my education, I ran into all sorts of degradations. I don’t remember much about kindergarten, but once I stepped on a yellow jacket or a wasp and dropped my lunch box on the gravel-strewn pavement outside the classroom. It was hot and I was giving my tootsies a breather when that happened. The contents of my lunchbox spilled out and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich ended up with lots of grit in it. I chipped a tooth on what I thought was a crunchy peanut, but it turned out to be a pea-sized pebble. I wailed and wailed until someone took me to the nurse’s office. That was before they invented dental prosthetics, or maybe my parents couldn't afford to fix it, so I walked around with a chipped tooth until the baby tooth fell out about a year later. My folks thought it was so cute when I grinned that they saved some pictures of me with my dazzling smile to look at when I grew up.

Alas it was only after my dad had passed away I was able to go through the old family albums and read the writing on the photo backs, one of which stated with a humorous intent, Here’s Jake with his chuckle-headed mouth, the dumb ass! Obviously this was my dad’s comment, though I can’t imagine him being much of a writer. You never know though; maybe he had a hidden talent like Kerouac’s but chose never to expose himself to public scrutiny. Mom’s writing on the photos was more endearing: Jake at age 6 running through the sprinklers, how cute! was one of her comments on a photo that showed me butt-naked from the rear prancing through a reciprocating hose fountain.

Since I was smaller that most kids at that age and correspondently weaker, in the first and second grades and all the way through the sixth, I was a magnet for all the bullies in the school. Being a God-fearing Christian woman who believed in family values and eschewed all fighting, mom always said Turn the other cheek when someone gets on your case, so I never put up much resistance when some kid pounded on me, again and again. I got beat up, spat on and once a dog even whizzed on my pants and shoes; he must have thought I was a fire hydrant I was so recalcitrant and reluctant to stop the kids’ abuse.

When it hurt too much I sometimes got the bullies off my back by yelling profanities at them. It took them back a step every time I cursed them as a M___f___! a term I often heard in blaxploitation movies of the seventies." This gained me some respect with the older boys who returned the compliment with expletives that would make Mother Teresa blush. Black eyes my dad thought were a sign of healthy boxing, though he never thought to teach me sparring.

My mom never said a word