An Irrational Normality: The Life and Times of a Wire Mothered Monkey an American Nightmare

By Daniel Dewey

How Hot is Heaven? What is it to be Human? These and other questions are pondered in An Irrational Normality. An unusual creative non-fiction memoir not only because it makes living an everyday life in a schizophrenic world a compelling read, but ultimately answers, Who is responsible for What and is What responsible for Who?
Armed with the pervasive subjugation of his soul by government authorities and religious institutions with their certainties and choices engraved in tomes and on stones, the author navigates a world overflowing with psychopathic politicians, religious fanatics, and other visionaries from New York States 1st Protestant orphanage to an Iraqi head Bobbing in a septic tank complicating the establishment of an FOB.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503529823

Daniel Dewey

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. Dan Dewey is a disabled Vietnam veteran whose formative years were fashioned growing up in an orphanage and finally forged with years of bomb recovery at the El Uotia Bomb Range, northern Sahara desert, and the RVN - taking a break from experiential truths to pursue a formal education in literature and eventual Masters degree in Information Science. Following 25 years living in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a dirt road at “the end of the power line”, home schooling his 3 children, and pursuing art in many mediums, Dan moved back to Homogenized America to work with Florida’s most violent prisoners which honed a sense of gallows humor that permeates his creative non-fiction writing.

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Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Dewey.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in many instances I have changed the names of individuals, as well as some identifying characteristics and details.

Credit to Alex Floyd who’s work The long War Dead inspired me with words and writing style and my children Zachary, Amity and Kali who taught me who’s responsible for what which kept me alive.

Cover Art by the Author

Rev. date: 01/19/2015

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Contents

The Brooklyn Bomber

Food For Thought

Everyman Has His Jew

Football Practice

Incidentally

Chores

Xmas Plays Revisited

Initial Success Or Total Failure

A Short Lived Medical Mystery

Land Of Burning Children

Slaughtering American Boys With ROE

Suggestio Veri, Suggestio Falsi

Going Home Forgotten

Separated With Honor

The Peck Resignation Letter

The Truth To The Matter

The Shit Equation

Big Question

Humans

She And I Met Last Night

Chocolate Heaven

She Was An American Dream

Draco Constipatus

Color Me Orange

Floyd’s First Flat Frog

The Greatest Names In Frogs

Still Life

Home Is Through The Woods

Laundry Time

Reality Check

The Salem Frog Trials

The Landfill Of Yesterdays

The Gainesville VA Medical Center

Notes On An Aluminum Can

On Having A Psychiatric Problem In The 2⁰th Century

Deamlife Redux

I First Heard The Bell Toll Faintly In The Dark Of South East Asia,

After 344 Days

His Family In Their Entirety

After Baghdad Was Bombed,

Cinderelli

His Son Jamal,

The Children Of Gaza

The House Raid

They Were Firing At A Car

The Marine Lance Corporal Thought To Himself

We Can’t Get Anyone To Get Bob,

The Walter Reed Rumsfeld Military Hospital

Able Complained To His Mother,

Ackerman Only Had 2 Of 5 A’s

Adam Presented Paranoid And Suspicious

After 344 Days Of Combat Duty

Berns Was Brought For Evaluation And Treatment

Billy Budd Was One

Breaking Some Of The Ten Commandments

Charles’ Instant Offence,

O’Keefe Was Awake, Troubled, And Worried

O’Keefe Lay On His Back

Einstein Scored Way Above Average IQ

Fire Setting Started In Billy’s Early Childhood

Flynn Was Committed To Us NGI,

Frank, The Unofficial Shuffling King Of Mumble,

Grant Was Arrested For Attempting Purchase Of Illegal Substances

The Deputy Sherriff Shot Henry Twice,

Jamal

Lincoln’s Instant Offence

Lou Was Unconscious,

Max.

He Was Known As Michelangelo

My Ex Enjoyed Desensitizing Me

On Questioning Neo

Philippe Was A Foreign Student

Pollock’s Mother Had Alcohol For Embryonic Fluid

Ramirez Spoke Softly In Spanish

After Riker Killed His Mother, Brother

Robbie Called The Police Pregnant With Terror

Rocky Was Born Into A Tough World,

Sergeant James Emerick Dean 2⁵th Infantry Division

Smith Was A Big Man And Signaled His Hostility

Tate Filled Out His Application

The All Too Likely Heart Attack, Clogged Artery

At The Forensic MH Center

Winslow’s Petition For More Pizza

General Lesson

Shit Happens: A Compendium Of Ontological Perspectives

The Brooklyn Bomber

"The true test of civilization is, not the census,

nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, - no,

but the kind of man the country turns out."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of us are musicians, some athletes, and some warriors, nurturers, gadflies … I am a loner and like Jefferson, wouldn’t go to Heaven if the journey required going in a group. According to the Myers/Brigs Personality Inventory only 1% of the population thinks like I do which gives me pause to shudder – while you reflect on y Ortega’s, "Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody runs the risk of being eliminated (Revolt of the Masses).

Life for a two year old is a blast of awareness. Colors. The dry crinkly smell of leaves. Is there a psychologist alive who has never read that, The baby, assaulted by eye, ears, nose, skin and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion? Probably not, you see, psychologists are fed as much, if not more, bullshit than the rest of us. Perception is active, exploratory and motivated even in the two day old infant (Gibson, 1987). Meaning, even as infants, our perceptions are not pure chaos, ala Wm. James. Rather, early perception is a search for order almost from day one.

Flatbush, the Great State of Brooklyn. Home. :-) I was born there. A place which still glows of open-air markets colorful produce. Autumn leaf piles covering young tangled limbs. Christmas Time. My father left home then. He was always in and out of jail, until one day he stopped coming home and that was the end of his record. On our memory side anyway. 78 rpm. Ziiiiiiiip. I never asked Frederick, Jr. if he remembered dear old dad. I didn’t recollect anything but shadows. Not surprising since my brother and I were never to touched or held except for changing our diapers which represented the pediatric wisdom of the day. (Twenty years before Harlow’s experiments showed monkeys that had Terry cloth surrogate mothers to cling to were far less dysfunctional than the monkeys that had only wire mothers to cling to.) My wire mother also related that she to feared our beloved father (a member of The Greatest Generation) who was about to kill us, and my brother changed his name one day forever, so maybe he did remember something. I didn’t want to know, because I could barely deal with the here and now; but when I did want to know I was told by his father, You don’t want to know.

Mother got a job and fled to her wire mother who did not spare the rod, the wall, the strap or hairbrush in keeping my brother and I civilized. I’m not sure what was being communicated, but I guess we were civilized. (Acquiring brain lesions can do that?) I was thrifty, kind, clean, reverent, and learned to not be seen or heard. Well, scratch reverent. All I knew at the time was the Roman Catholic Church – an aerobic exercise for sitting and standing at the sound of a bell. And who could understand Latin? If I could have, I still would not have understood that all the great world religions represented and expressed Man’s public concern with his existence. As far as I knew, religion was about not going to Hell and everyone was going to Hell except for good Roman Catholics who refused to die. All I wanted from God was a bicycle.

I loved to spend my time going through the Park; under bushes, around trees, benches, rocks, bags, trashcans. Bottles all over. Big ones were worth 5 cents, little ones – 1 cent. There wasn’t much competition with everyone else in school so I was soon off to the grocery store running pell-mell, inevitably into their Mountain of Returns, always anxious they had so many – mine wouldn’t be taken, not understanding Economics then. The guns and butter science. Although I did know which side the butter was on and which way it usually fell which made me more of a pessimist than an optimist. I know more about butter and lots about guns now, as the economists do, yet if you stretched all their theories out in a line – they wouldn’t reach a conclusion and neither do mine. In other words, there is no exit to Absolute Truth from within the Castle of Science or anywhere else for that matter.

Forget thrifty too. A dollar would disappear before it could wrinkle in my pocket. A dollar of bottles meant a strawberry shortcake with honest to goodness real whipped cream. (A kid had to eat the whole thing at once in the summer and I could handle it.) A dollar could also trade for 10 ice cream cones. Best of all was a Dinky toy tank you couldn’t eat, but they had awesome detail. Impregnable, with real linked-metal tracks. They were on my side. Even the German ones.

Public school was iron-grated stairs teeming with civilized people. At least they wore clothes and spoke cryptic sounds. An initiation into the halls of reductionistic learning strategy. I bombed out of second grade twice. My brother was bombed with parts of a public works project. I was frozen between running and staying, but thawed out and abandoned him. I started to bomb windows and the English language with loose objects and F words somewhere between Brooklyn and Newark, N.J. This did not please my Grandma, who had filled our new home again with boarders. Aha! Dollars equal a room. More learning in Economics and behavioral control after Grandma demonstrated her control paradigm grabbing my brother’s hair and banging his attached head into the plaster wall as mother watched. Not hard enough to disturb the boarders or chip the plaster, but enough to convince my mother we needed saving from her mother too. Failing Second Grade twice probably didn’t help either. My brother and I bombed out of Newark, the mosquito capital, landing at Hope Farm, the first orphanage under other than Roman Catholic jurisdiction in the State of New York. Thank you Mommy.

According to Bishop Greer, the NYC Children’s Court was crowded every day with children who were brought before the judges, because of immoral home surroundings, drunken parents, vice, filth, and terrible neglect in the so-called homes from which they had been taken. Other children were, the victims of dire poverty, mother taken to the hospital, father sent to the Island for drunkenness or abuse of wife and children. (Greer, 1908). Fathers like mine, a drunken Irishman who thought he knew everything, so he’s probably dead now (Mother, c2009).

Of Hope Farm, it was said, The children at the farm are not misdemeanants, or juvenile offenders, but simply children of neglect, homeless little boys without proper guardianship and protection, for whom it is the purpose of the farm to provide home, shelter and useful training that will prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of future citizenship (Addams, 1913). And Hope Farm is a sure and certain outlet from the narrow confines of criminality into the wide spaces of morality … because it provides a place for little unfortunates whose lot would otherwise be most desperate.’ (Leonora Sill Ashton. Hyde Park on Hudson, New York. c1945)

I would not, however, become the poster child Bishop Greer or Leonora Sill Ashton envisioned, in-as-much-as I eventually accumulated two felony arrests and jail time for growing my own medicinal herbs after participating in the murder of thousands. The Veteran Affairs psychiatrist, who could not tell the difference between a mortar and a latrine, but knew who buttered her bread, stated I had a problem with authority. Well, Duh.

Hope Farm. A land with no empty bottles. No returns. Dormitories the far side of civilization. Counting the new cries of homesickness – I was always ambivalent about new kids. I felt their pain and wished they would bite the bullet. For me, the emptiness of Visitor’s Day was louder than the inner crumbling of belonging. I was marooned. That was my truth at the time. Awareness has a way of broadening itself. The truth is, we were abandoned. I felt more like marooned though. Like the Family ship hit the rocks and here I was – strange little kid in a stranger land.

There was no hope at the Farm for my brother. He got Rheumatic fever and then, Diabetes, so They bussed him off to a place with medical stuff. We used to fight most times anyway so it was probably O.K. that we never saw much of each other after that. I was a bright kid. They gave me an I.Q. test and put me in the Third Grade.

Living in the dorms was hard if you wanted to be alone some of the time. Especially in the morning. Getting a good toilet or sink meant interpersonal relationships. For a long time I only lasted a few minutes after wake-up before one of my molecules set everything to boil. (And like the Brownian Movement – I never knew which molecule would go first.) I didn’t even know what a molecule was. There was always some kid willing to check, even my brother. The older we got the less the other kids checked. We realized that we were all on the same island and by the grace of God and reaching 18, we would leave.

Tony V-neck was my best friend from the Marcy dorms. One growth spurt from Plum, where the real little shits still peed in their pants. Tony wore white socks and played the game. He even fell in love with the minister’s daughter. (She was straight in more ways than one.) Tony said falling in love was like a bolt of lightening. We were eleven. I imagined a bolt on a clear blue day, but didn’t see the flash. Tony was sure different. Anyway, Tony got religious and talked about grace and Jesus a lot, but he stilled loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and played good football.

I thought I was a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) eventually, even though I had been baptized Roman Catholic to avoid Limbo. I was saved, apparently from Catholicism, through Episcopal communion and the touch of a Bishop. I could now eat the essence of Jesus Christ’s flesh. That’s how much I understood attending Episcopal confirmation classes in exchange for being allowed to play baseball.

I hated wasps. When they stung me my body would swell up far from the teeny puncture. I thought I was allergic to my own kind. Some of my maternal parts are German too and, ironically, I later helped burn children - and rice paddies, straw huts, men, women, water buffalo, and the enemy de jour of our leaders, (mostly shorter, browner and flatter nosed peoples) while helping to reduce villages to rubble, then to debris, then to dust and finally, to nothing.

I used to smash wasps with anything I could find, usually the newspaper. Smashed with the Truth (that’s fit to print), those wasps were forever bent. I hope they didn’t feel anything – their separated parts still functioning, just like us animal wasps. We have a million parts all functioning separately, the less tangible, the least control. ID, Ego, hands, stomach, head, heart, feet. No part is in total control. Sometimes parts get stung by stinging parts – just like our bug cousins. Same here. I’ve hurt myself for years, thinking someone was trying to smash me with a newspaper. Truth. Theory. Rules. I had my own mental notes to hit myself with.

I used to think. Actually, after I started to think, I dropped the P (for the wrong reason) and became a WAS. This felt more appropriate. I needed to get God out of this mess. I was trying to buy into the Program. I never got in. I never dropped out. I just continually stung myself in disbelief apparently.

Why did you run away? staff wants to know.

Because I’m 12 now and hungrier doesn’t wash. They think I did it on purpose to get them in trouble, like I had a plan or something. Some plan – hitchhike 10 miles to the Dover Plains train, try to evade conductor moving between cars until Grand Central Station 80 miles later, run across street to get an irresistible sandwich behind the little glass doors at Horn and Hardots Automat, and try to get back before the State Police returned me. (Which would have been cheaper, true, but you had to sit in their station house until picked up by staff.) Well, I didn’t do that too many times, but did have a rope tied to my bed next to the window so I could slip out of my second story dorm room at night and go swimming at the reservoir or smoke cigarettes lifted from the canteen.

Although we claim that we’re conscious, we have scarcely a clue about what’s happening in our brains. E.g. we haven’t the faintest notion how ideas are constructed or how words are chosen. Instead we say, Something just occurred to me! or We have free-will – not recognizing that we hardly know the reasons for most of our choices. (Minsky, 1993). Heck, we can now take apart the 3 lb. brain bundle piece by piece, map the neurotransmitters, test each component, marvel at the more than 100 trillion connections, but we can’t get close to explaining how all the individual parts work in concert to produce consciousness (McAuliffe, circa 1990.) Not through reductionism anyway.

Staff were still out there vibrating air. Don’t roll your eyes when I’m talking to you.

I don’t think I handled being singled out that well. It’s really weird to feel alone, estranged, separate, whatever, and then be the focus of some moral train wreck or something. Well, I was guilty of breaking some adult rule, so to the other kids I was just doomed – not a