Addicted To Stupidity: a flavor of consciousness

By Voltwain

Welcome to Philosophy Farm and Truth Nursery. You are invited to come on in and think awhile with the Fini's and their many friends, neighbors, farm patrons, and, yes, even enemies. The Finis are a three generation Vermont farming family whose daily habits are to laugh, think, farm, and work for the creation of the Common Good for the Good of Al

• Language: English
• Publisher: Voltwain Collective
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798887967493

Book preview

Addicted to Stupidity

By:

Voltwain

a flavor of consciousness

Cover art by Mr. Fish, copyright ©Mr. Fish 2022 all rights reserved.

Addicted to Stupidity. Copyright©Voltwain Collective 2022 all rights reserved.

1st edition

ISBN 979-8-88722-283-7

Dedicated to:

CONSCIOUSNESS

ISW, this is precise history –

just not exactly this one.

A Jazz Symphony in Three Movements

Premise A:

What the Truth Should Be

section 1

section 2

section 3

section 4

section 5

section 6

section 7

section 8

section 9

section 10

section 11

section 12

section 13

section 14

section 15

section 16

section 17

section 18

section 19

Premise B:

If God

section 1

section 2

section 3

section 4

section 5

section 6

section 7

Conclusion:

AfterMath

section 1

section 2

section 3

PREMISE A:

What the Truth Should Be

Americans think a loving idiot is a good enough teacher

if her name is Mom.

– my Mom

I was born beneath Main Street, Barre, Vermont, when an early April sinkhole dropped my parents’ Impala station wagon six feet beneath pavement. The whiplashing fall jolted the soon to be mom into labor and, shortly thereafter, me into the world of a rescue backhoe bucket, aka, my first bassinet. My father, a pig-sheep farmer, state representative, vast trail snow cat plower, in that order, was nonplussed by the event, in true New Englander fashion.

So, this is where the rats live. the to be dad said, as the dust settled around him exposing the broken sewer line which was the reason for the collapse.

This oft repeated story was the reason I was ‘trapped’ into the nickname Rat Boy, not by teasing peers, but by my family, who had labeled me with the loving moniker, Rat 34, after the famous lab rat of Milner and Old’s ‘Pleasure Center’ Experiments, where the pair of scientists discovered that an electrode fitted rat would endlessly press a bar – up to two thousand times a hour – to receive an electrical stimulation of that portion of their brain which produces dopaminergic pleasure.

This is the place our first child is going to be born. in equal Northeastern fashion, my mother, a farmer, weaver, weekly Flowers Not Firearms soup-ladling protester, in that order, groaned a response, as her water poured forth in sympathy with the sewer line.

Rescue has been called. looking down from the jagged asphalt above the still idling car below, a voice sang into the hole. Can I get you a coffee while you’re waiting? Sondra, owner of Bueno Espresso, located at the corner of North Main and Merchant, and my soon to be Godmother, asked in her ‘nothin’s unusual here’ tone, given she was unable to see what has happening inside the station wagon.

Thank you, Dad turned off the engine. That’s mighty kind of you. leaning out the driver side window, Dad looked up at Sondra. I’ll have mine black, as Dad swiveled to ask Mom, who was now moaning and laying back flat in the broken front seat, if she wanted anything, much to his surprise he saw my head crowning.

Mom was having me.

And everybody laughs.

You don’t love your child, if you don’t care for their world.

– my Dad’s last campaign motto

My Dad called himself a philosopher farmer and enjoyed quoting Lysander Spooner, Antonio Gramsci, and Salvoj Zizek around the farm and State House.

Voting is the illusion of democracy, if the People’s will is being held hostage by the pragmatism of the lesser evil. Dad mused provocatively, while he waited for Wally’s prognosis on our truck.

Well, Tiny, my Dad’s nickname. I’m no expert, but I think everyone’s opinion matters, doesn’t it? Red, a semi-regular at Wally’s Garage, treatied. I mean, that’s why we vote, don’t we? So, everyone can have their say so, so to speak. he meditatively stroked a beard the color of his nickname.

Red, votes and opinions are not the same, my Dad, six-four with the thick limbs of a stunted giant, stated calmly and slowly. Though he hated stupidity, Dad was forever instructing with patience. They might feel the same, but an opinion is a point of view, while a vote is choosing between competing points of views. Not all points of views are equal, and many are neither true nor valid. Dad stood in the first bay’s open door. But in a democracy, theoretically I grant you, all votes are valid, true, and equal. Thus, in a democracy, you can vote for competing points of views, none of which might be true, valid, or equal. Tiny smiled with a self-effacing honesty that kept getting him reelected.

Mom, ever since her and Dad started dating at UVM, thought Dad should have been a public school teacher; instead, he taught his own children, Kunekunes, and constituents, in that order in proportion to time spent.

Every story has the right to be heard. Wally chimed in from under the hood of our Toyota Tacoma, where he was working.

Our truck was in the only working lift in a three bay, rural neighborhood garage, where a half-dozen locals could usually be found, whenever Wally was awake, milling, drinking, and opining on any subject that crossed someone’s tongue.

Really? Heard by whom? Who bestows that right? Dad, the gadfly of Central Vermont, a Socratease so to speak, challenged Wally’s premise.

Well, Tiny, let’s just agree that every story has two sides. Spence, larger than the average bear, did his usual refereeing. It is not that Spence cared about mediating, he just liked declaring that all opinions were created equal.

No, Dad, raised with truth as his companion and tutor, always dared to disagree with nonsense and untruth. In fact, most stories have more than two sides. With two people, let’s say, there are, minimally, both person’s points of view and what actually happened. he leaned against a barrel full of used, to be sold as scrap metal, auto parts.

What about with one person? Red parried for the sake of parrying, as he slid off his stool and edged along the front wheel well to see what Wally was up to.

Same thing. sipping his coffee slowly, Dad had a way of encouraging antagonists. What the person thinks is the case and what actually is the case. Dad invited people’s antagonism; it meant they were listening enough to disagree.

I’m no expert, but I think I know me better than you know me. Odie, the Toyota Gnome, the only teetotaler among this menagerie of mostly autodidact master mechanics, was a first class jury-rigger. Odie was the one who mentored Wally, the race car driver and local crowd favorite at Thunder Road International Speedbowl, in how to keep a car on the road with whatever was at hand.

That’s what makes it fun. Odie would refrain again and again. Makin’ do with what’ja got on hand. aka the motto of rural life.

And that was Wally’s ethic both as a mechanic, which could save the customer money, and as a Vermont Official Inspection Station, which meant getting cars to pass ‘good enough’ to keep them on roads that bounced and bashed them across ruts, wash outs, and heaves into their local mechanic’s garage. It is the awful condition of Vermont dirt roads that has pushed the State to very slowly adopt California’s stringent vehicle smog and safety regulations, thus permitting Wally to keep the poor, and their ‘spit, gum, and string jalopies’, on the road.

When it comes to us, to what and how we know, we should be very cautious when declaring we are the experts of ourselves. Dad spoke slowly to Odie, who was lighting a Marlboro as he leaned under the Tacoma’s hood. That simple, universal self-bias magnifies the errors of all our other biases.

Bi-ass my-ass. laying on the S’s like a horn coming out of a blind driveway, Odie good-naturedly deflected, then ducked under the hood with his lit cigarette.

In the late fall of 2003, Wally and the Garage Gang were out hunting when they found Odie’s burnt body in the charred remains of his cabin, which had ignited when Odie’s ad hoc firewood loader malfunctioned and overstuffed his wood stove, jamming the door open, and allowing sparks and flames to lick the nearby carpet and bucketed kindling into an inferno, while Odie coma slept dead drunk for the first time in twenty plus years – the fire marshal surmised by the presence of multiple empty gin bottles.

What really happened should matter to us more than what we think happened. Dad turned his eyes towards Spence, Wally’s other full time mechanic, and the only one currently not crowding around the truck’s engine. We should always want to know more than what we feel about the case and, instead, want to know what is the case, especially with our biasing wants and judgments. Dad began launching into his Three Realities talk. You see, it’s important to understand that there’s the reality in which things occur, the physics which describes that reality, and our private interpretation of it all. He declared to Spence and the Toyota hood wall raised before him, which hid the giddy Garage Gang behind it.

For Wally had found something ‘unusually’ amiss in the engine and so, once again, the gang found Dad’s vehicle more interesting than his words and the infinitely complex and textured reality which his descriptions tried to reveal.

Fake reality makes us sick with stupidity.

– Mom to the world on why we

    did not participate in Christmas

Sondra was my godmother for the simple fact that neither of my parents followed the beliefs and traditions of godparenthood, however negligible or substantial they might be. Alwaysthemore, they both cherished the sinkhole event as wonderfully absurd, ironic, and profound, and decided to ‘gas-lark’ the godparent concept by making our accidental benefactor the deus ex machina of my advent story. GM, as she liked me to call her, as did Wally and the gang, was a serendipitous perpendicular, as my Dad liked to call her and she, reciprocally, liked to be called.

Sondra killed her dog.

That’s how everyone likes to say it.

That’s not exactly true. my Mother, a well-mated cynic to my Father the skeptic, would invariably correct. Sondra administered a coffee enema under the mistaken belief that it would cure Rosa’s intestinal cancer. she would detail to whomever might be accusing Sondra of, either intentionally or not, being the cause or her ‘eternally beloved’ Rosa’s death.

She gave the mutt a buttful of high octane and it ran into the woods, mad dogged a fox, and got its face torn clean off. was the gist of the universal reply, bka punchline.

And everybody laughs.

Except for Sondra, she never laughs, and Zach, her husband, who never laughs when Sondra is around.

My parents used to laugh at the invariable punchline, back when they thought all were laughing at their own and each other’s individual and collective absurd practices and behaviors in everyone’s ‘drunk bear’ search for truth, meaning, and the termination of unnecessary suffering. No one but my parents, not even Sondra and Zach, thought this. In a short period of time, my parents quickly came to the realization that others were utilizing this event to divert unwanted critical analysis from their own magical, fantastical, and error-prone beliefs and acts, and, rather, sending them Sondra and Ruby’s way. That’s when Mom and Dad stopped laughing and started correcting the record.

She’s practices homeopathy. my Mother matter-of-factly stated just one of the alternative ‘medical’ practices Sondra engaged in, all with the appropriate documentation to certify she was a well trained ‘fraud’ – Gramspa’s description of Sondra’s ‘School of Useless Tinctures’, bka her home based, side business hustle.

She’s a healer. effused Ariel, after a ‘miraculous’ cupping session dispelled her ‘day shattering’ menstrual cramps. There’s nobody else I would trust more with my body and spirit than her. Ariel raptured from behind L.A.C.E.’s deli counter, while we unloaded home cured hams for Wednesday night’s free Open Table.

Ariel was off-gridding a homestead for herself and her two boys in somewhat nearby Peacham. In Vermont, somewhat near means a meandering path, which equates to ‘you’ll get there in a mosey.’ A Vermont meandering path of road directions is, to the rest of the country, how they might conceive of an intoxicated bear staggering through the woods. In Vermont, unfortunately, drunk bears are a frequent occurrence, thanks to people’s penchant for large, furry totems and a general indifference to the fermenting waste of uncollected apples littering many a yard, roadside, and field – wherever the tree it fell not too far from might be. If you buy property in rural Vermont, there is a good chance you will get yourself an apple tree or two. Two is how many were on the land Gramspa and Nina purchased, aka my home.

That might be the case, plopping a half bucket of russet potatoes unto the counter, Mom said as gently as she could. But if she heals you, it’s a coincidence and not due to homeopathy, cupping, or whatever else she might do, other than make you feel relaxed and cared for. However, Mom’s tone was well known for its ‘all bullshit aside’ sensibility, and the social sin of saying anything that confronted or contradicted another’s ‘personal truth’ was a transgression that both my parents committed as a matter of discourse.

Well, they say the Finis stopped going over to their house, and she to theirs, when Sondra said the Finis couldn’t come back until they had a spiritual cleansing, due to Rosa not liking them for some reason. many a tongue rumored after the unexpected split between friends of auld lang syne.

That’s how it’s generally stated.

And it’s basically true.

Except for the fact that the particular reason was that Rosa, who was hit by the car Sondra’s slowly dementing mother was driving, associated that event with my parents, who were standing with Sondra when Jessica, Sondra’s mother, hit Rosa, the soon to be caffeine launched dog. Sondra believed the only way to rid Rosa of this erroneously held cause and effect was to conduct a ceremonial spirit cleanse, and told my parents – when Sondra came over, a week later, to swap vegetable seeds with my family on a stunningly warm April morn – that that is exactly what my parents would have to do before they could visit Sondra and Zach’s Spiritual Retreat, aka self-sustaining homestead, greenhouses, meditation arbor, and ‘micro-brewery’, again.

They say that was the day my Dad stopped talking to Sondra.

And that’s basically true.

They like to say it was because Dad was offended.

And he was, but not by the request, rather by the belief that some ‘hocus pocus focus’ would cure the dog of its having confused an unrelated attending feature with a causation.

Sondra’s welcome to test her theory at the next town hall meeting. Dad would say to those who asked him about the incident when he canvassed their neighborhood, for many quickly heard about ‘the spirit feud.’ And it was the use of that term, alwaysthemore, which infuriated my family far more than the incident itself.

How would she prove it? most would invariably reply, some snidely, some seriously.

That’s for the one claiming it as truth to figure out. Dad would politely instruct. Who has time to disprove every empty assertion? then smile. Not I. yet, like Barnum disproving hoaxes, Houdini exposing spiritualists, and the Amazing Randi debunking paranormal claims, my father regularly enjoined the tradition of cynical Americans confronting bullshit wherever it might be trying to contaminate the pool of truth. It is why a little over fifty-five percent of Central Vermonters cherished him and regularly supported his various political campaigns, no matter how ‘notorious’ Dad’s opponents made him out to be.

Sondra never tested her belief at a Town Meeting, or anywhere else that was subject to verification by the appropriate experts or even unbiased witnesses, although many townsfolk, mostly those who believed in her special crafts and skills, have encouraged her to do so. Sondra is a well-known ‘healer’, well-respected herbalist, business women, and quite social in the activist crowd, and my mother endeavored to maintain a cordial, socially-happenstantial relationship with her after the ‘Rosa event’, but since that day both of them have ceased being part of the others’ attempt at building a cohesive, rebelling core group of, as my Mom insisted on saying, ‘revolitionists’, though nobody else seemed ready to adopt it yet – another artisanal fruit from Mom’s ‘Truth Nursery’, which has continued to expand since the day my parents stopped ‘interacting’ with my GM, who did not invite them over again, even after Rosa’s unfortunate face removal.

Social stupidity picks our pockets and breaks our bones.

– Dad, on the 2016 presidential election

    Vermont State Assembly

Gramsci Garden Wood Slat Sayings day after

In his first campaign for public office, Dad ran as a Patriot of Consciousness. You can do that in the Green Mountain State and not only be taken seriously, but also get elected Town Elder. When he made his inaugural announcement, Dad swore that until the day he died he would always be, regardless the repercussions, proudly POC. To be a Patriot of Consciousness, according to its founder, is to defend consciousness from its enemies. For Dad, the first betrayal of consciousness was intentional idiocy.

Americans have devolved into an inherently stupid people. Dad made the mistake of muttering one of his favorite declarations to himself one day down at Wally’s, while the gang milled and talked as a radio blared the offensive patriotism Dad had taken umbrage with.

Stupidity, in case you did not know, ‘is the poor ability to understand or profit from experience, the inability to acquire new information.’ Dad had to clarify this again and again at various Town Hall Meetings, where he would invariably be asked, ‘What did you mean when you said,..’, which really meant, ‘Are you calling me dumb?’

In his 2002 State House campaign, Dad had said ‘stupidity in the information age is willed idiocy,’ as he began his long response to a question citing the already burgeoning conspiracy theory regarding the highly unusual collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7 during the 9/11 terrorist attack. It eventually ended with Dad saying, ‘No, President Bush was not the architect of nine-eleven’, much to the chagrin of many earnest, google mentored theorists who were popping up, with the advent of digital fertilization, around a doubt-ravaged country that was becoming obsessed with, for the umpteenth time, the enemy within. And that is one of the reasons my sister and I were not raised within the ‘Christ and Claus’ Christmas cult, though my mother had been.

Santa is the global hoax that trains young children to ultimately distrust elders, institutions and society in general, since they’ve all consistently lied to them from birth, playing the ignorant for fools. Mom would explain when people stopped at our Free Food For All street side vendor’s cart and invariably asked what our bunting – Truth Saves, Myth Kills – meant.

Children aren’t stupid, Mom declared, year after year, while separating gladiola cromlets from the main crom, before layering them in sawdust for winter storage – a yearly practice since Gladiolas are only cold hardy down to zone seven, and we are three zones lower than that – even though, to the contrary, children seemed to continually grow into adults committed to the practice of not learning how to think better. But, Mom labored on, year after year, knowing that even the most intelligent person can be rendered stupid when shackled by faith to any ideology or belief. We take advantage of children’s naivete, by serving it up to them dressed in the rancid remains of a decaying myth while calling it a yuletide feast. Mom would reflexively smile whenever she saw questioners balk at her ‘indecent’ Christmas declarations, even while she paper plated them a slice of cherry angel food cake.

People always seem to applaud truth until it contradicts a sentimental myth. Gramspa, tending a kettle of Free to All garden vegetable stew, would casually say to the cool breeze of those leaving with an unappreciative gruff and a seasonally apropos humbug.

Undaunted, or should I say not physically attacked, and still, almost ironically, smiling, Mom would continue, year after year, whenever Santa was mentioned –

This childhood betrayal gives many kids Post Hoax Credulity Disorder, Mom would declare her personal diagnosis to bewildered faces. Whose number one symptom is a propensity to believe in conspiracies in an attempt to find the same comfort they had as a child wishing for magically delivered gifts. she would quickly stream before the inquirers left without hearing the answer they had solicited.

Although this diagnosis was Mom’s own invention, after years of ‘research’, I also concur with this partial diagnosis of our ‘unique American dilemma’ – the glorification, institutionalization, and worship of the Hoax and Con.

The crime committed against children is one they’re enabled, encouraged, and exhorted to commit against their own mind. Mom would shake her head, tears of fury tiding at the corners of her stare, cake knife lecturing in her left hand. That’s the danger of Christmas: it teaches children to cherish lies and trust fantasies.

What my parents saw as dangers others saw as pleasures, and that disagreement would return my father, time and town meeting again, to the Spoonerism, ‘Vices are not crimes.’

If Christmas were a private vice, a hobbled attempt at finding personal happiness, it’d be no harm to other, but since it’s a public fraud, it’s a crime against both the youth and the future. Dad, toasting us standing around our extended table, buffet’d with dishes appropriate for the festive time of year, proclaimed when announcing his alternative celebration to the yearly holiday season. Thereby I declare a new holiday – Happy New Day! – which can be practiced any and every day you wish and however you wish to practice it. lifting his glass of this year’s homemade Oruja towards us, we, in kind, raised our cups of blueberry mead, apple kiwi juice, or alcoholic beverage of choice towards him. Let the habit of magical wishing fall away and the practice of daily cherishing begin again, and again, and again with each new day! Dad jollied like the man in the sleigh.

And evening! Mom added, then tilted a swig of merriment.

Day after day! with eyes brighter than any ornament aglow, Gramspa added with a gulp.

Year after year! Nina likewise swigged.

And we all drank heartily, with long drafts of laughter, together.

And as we all cheered that day, and nearly everyday thereafter, up to this very Happy New Day, I will always practice this tradition, which will be appropriate anywhere, as long as there is self-aware consciousness feeling that peculiar aesthetic sentiment, ‘It’s good to be alive.’

My parents enjoyed creating many alternative holiday traditions, and, therefore, my sister and I were raised according to a very different calendar, with an ever changing, altering, and expanding sense of time, space, and place.

To see things as they are is to see things more wondrous than all those dreams fabled to exist in the myths of religions or poets. while handing out free Flowers Not Firearms bundles of magenta Sweet William, multi-pasteled Yarrow, popcorn clustered Fever Few, all nestled around a creamy-clovish smelling orange-yellow Oriental Lily, Mom responded to one who insisted that we, her ‘myth-free raised’ rabble-rousers, were missing out on the magic of childhood.

My maternal grandparents had, unfortunately for them, happened by the Christmas of 1978, when I was six and Sofi four, and heard the most recent, ever updated rendition of their daughter’s now notorious ‘anti-Christmas blasphemy’ message spewing forth. Presumably because it was their daughter, my grandparents felt no trepidation in broaching the hot topic subject with the ‘ferocious anti-priestess of infidel self-creation’, bka my Mom.

But what about peace on earth, joy to the world, and good will to all? Certainly these are concepts worth celebrating. Mom’s Father, our Papa, humbly offered, while eating a Russian tea cake in our living room.

They’re even better concepts to practice. Mother dryly intoned. Alwaysthemore, those starry-eyed wishes, long in the coming and well past due, will forever remain paralyzing sentiments as long as they’re conveniently ignored practices. then emptied her glass of Oruja, blazing her lips, mouth and throat.

Americans are prone to believe that merely celebrating holidays makes you a virtuous person. Dad underscored Mom’s point, while extending her a glass of water in time to the tearing of her eyes.

It’s a strange metaphysical alchemy that can turn gorging and greeding into christian ideals, whatever the hell those are. leaning upon the standing writing table, which was holding bowls of au gratin potatoes, green beans, and stuffing, Gramspa chimed a jab at the excessive indulgence of American Thanksgiving and Christmas practices.

But the children... Mom’s Mother, our Nana, would endlessly drone, like the mono-chord of a medieval chant – ‘...the children, the children, the children...’ – haunting an ice shackled cathedral the morning after a Christmas Eve bombing killed the candlelit hallelujahing parishioners – a traditional holiday gift from one christian nation to another.

The young mind wants truth; it’s adults who want fairy tales. Mom advocated for those who would be formed, bka groomed, necessarily, by one or another belief, yet it mattered which ones and, even more importantly, which ones not.

That’s because the truth never brings adults what they want. sipping some strawberry mead, Papa mused in a way that seemed completely incongruent with his professed hodgepodge creed of spiritual absolutes.

And what is it they want? honking like a holiday goose, Mom almost sneered, seeming to not hear her father’s melancholy confession. A false consciousness?

Chosen stupidity is not only a false consciousness, it’s the enemy of consciousness. and, as Dad would later add, ‘apparently a very popular choice.’ The people are its and their own enemies, whenever they will ignorance and mindlessly embrace error. I enjoyed listening to my Father lecture; no matter the audience size, he was always equally animated by the pursuit of truth.

That’s how Dad explained it to those who came to his ‘Talk Shop’ talk entitled, ‘Patriots of Consciousness in the Age of Stupidity’. Talk Shops were Dad’s, our, ‘acoastal, non-elitist saloon events’ where he ‘nurtured conversation.’ However, the Garage Gang never came to his Talk Shop gatherings.

Hey Tiny, a voice emerged from the din of the crashing bay door, hydraulic lift, and random shop scattering. I’ve been hearing that you’ve been saying Americans are stupid. Spencer asked tonelessly.

Nobody laughed.

However, my Father desperately suppressed a guffawing, ‘Damn straight.’ Damn straight, according to Todd, a neighbor, traditionally referred to furrowed rows, specifically of corn. For in a state where farms and homesteads have the logistical features of a gerrymandered district, straights lines are as hard to come by as square plots and rectangular fields. When you have to plant any shape of land, the lines meander where they must and you follow where they plow you.

As a matter of fact, I just said it a moment ago. Dad leaned where he could.

Ain’t you an American? asked Red, beer already in hand, who knew not only my Dad, but also his parents who lived and toiled the farm my Dad, and my sister Sofi, were born on.

For better or worse, like all of us here, yes I am. Dad grimaced as the ‘support our troops’ ‘brandhiking’ ad ended with a blaring clip from the National Anthem. Dad detested how ‘to buy’ became synonymous with ‘support.’ But when consumption has been nationalized, all consumption has been conscripted. he smiled like sun off snow, aka blindingly bright.

What does that mean? Earl, Wally’s early teens son, growled, as youth often does when challenging any perceived authority not to their liking, and most are not.

They’re taxing your purchases without your awareness nor consent. Dad was actually alluding to the outsourced costs of pollution, illness, and disease that the consumer pays on behalf of industry, but the word ‘tax’ has been weaponized in the US, thus ranking it higher than cancer on American’s Most Feared list, thus triggering many in the garage. Dad often instructed my sister and I that, whenever our patriotism was challenged, we should just recite the clarion call of our nation’s originating protest, ‘Liberty without Taxation.’

Ain’t that the truth. pointing with his Marlboro, George amened like a dog to a whistle, as Shadowfix, Wally’s white shepherd mix, barked to a cue no one but him heard or knew the meaning of.

They tax us to death. Red, putting his beer on the hood of an engineless jeep, then looking for something in the rolling tool box, took the bait and the government’s patriotism was now being questioned instead of Dad’s.

And then after that. with lust and want, Earl tore at the carcass before them, as he wiped grease from his hands, for ever since I have been going to Wally’s Garage, Earl has been helping, tinkering, and experimenting in his dad’s shop.

Ain’t that the sorry ass truth. cigarette in hand, Odie dog piled from a stool near the office.

Think they’ll finish the bridge this year. lungs averse to the cigarette hot boxing of the garage, Dad looked out the open bay door, while ironically changing the subject to a local perennial sore spot and mystery.

Worthless government never does nothing. tossing boxes about in search of some part, Earl savaged the bones of his own malnutrition.

They haven’t none nothing to that bridge since before who knows when. Wally spoke from beneath our Subaru wagon, for as much as Dad enjoyed his self-ordained mission of educating the American mind, he never went to Wally’s except for auto and truck repairs. Dad was aware that the gang preferred to limit their exposure to his ‘headaching’ ideas to a half dozen or so times a year, for, although he was a native Vermonter, Dad had been raised by non-card carrying ‘anarchists.’

That is how the locals put it. Well, to be honest, sometimes they said, ‘antarctickids’ and, at other times, ‘antichrists.’

And they were basically right, not in their pronunciation, but stereotyping.

They’ll never finish that bridge. walking towards our car, Spence declared or was it prophesied?

Where’s it supposed to go to anyway? Earl looked up from his frenzied attack upon empty boxes and the ‘mis-government’ with bewilderment.

To here, stupid. laughed Odie from the stool.

According to the aforementioned Talk Shop talk –

A stupid person is one who says they’re not a hypocrite, a liar, a thief, a taker, nor ignorant. A stupid person declares they’re smart, believing it’s the case if one simply professes it to be so. This they call positive psychology. Dad tossed a few sticks into the wood stove. Although it was only mid-September, the yurt got cold in the late summer frosty eves. Professing what one wants to be as if one already were is how individual opinion becomes not only equal to the expert’s, but superior to it. A stupid person doesn’t stop at, ‘I’m no expert’, rather they always and incessantly add the but, for that is the entire purpose of the disclaimer – to show they’re smarter than the expert.

Although it was fairly small – a twenty foot circle on a thirty by twenty-eight foot platform, the yurt, bka Trum de Tokeville, was usually capable of holding, in the early days of the talks, the often sparse crowds.

The But-heads aren’t conning you, my Dad would say. As much as they are themselves. They’re the ones who need to believe all is as easy as they perceive it. due to his height, Dad needed to stand away from the walls towards the center of the yurt, where the ceiling slopes up to a fourteen foot high center dome.

Sofi and I, dressed in our usual holiday attire of either an XL or XXL printed sweatshirt pulled over our winter jackets, were all the attention, as the Christmas Eve faithful headed towards Soup N’ Greens, in the plaza next to the Triangle of Worship: the Unitarian Universalists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians on one leg, Church of Christ and 7th Day Adventists on the other two. With only a slight hesitation – to momentarily gawk or squawk at our message: ‘Merry Jesus was a Commie’ – they hurried to the restaurant from whom we collected food scraps for our animals. Our farm animals were always quite grateful for the wastefulness of the ordinary, average American faithful.

And all is as they believe it. For them, faith makes fact and fact serves faith. Mom added as we walked through TriCorner Park looking at the holiday decor as we worked our way towards Main Street and then to L.A.C.E. – the Local Agricultural Community Exchange, which was run by Ariel.

Then what do they say truth is? I asked, waiting for Sofi to unscrew the thermos – it had been an unusually cold December, with many of the days’ highs in the single digits, according to ‘Fahrenheit’s monster.’

That’s what the Qua, visitors from Quebec, such as Pierre, called our temperature scale, because of its cumbersome use of positive and negative numbers. To number the transition point between water and ice at thirty-two seems not only arbitrarily random, but mentally cumbersome. On the Celsius temperature scale, zero is water freezing and one hundred is water boiling, thus making the transition states the basis for the numbering, not the medium, as Fahrenheit did in his alcohol and mercury thermometers. Kelvin, on the other hand, made absolute zero – when molecules stop moving – the grounding of his measurement system. This is very helpful and relevant for scientists, but not so much for farmers, who measure the world according to how temperature stresses plants and animals and not atoms and electrons.

Whatever founds their faith. Dad answered, as we paused to savor a round of Nina’s hot mulled cider, while huddling against the Barre Opera House to partially block the assault of the frigid wind.

Across Main Street, the Toys For Tots collecting Santa in front of Ned’s Hardware was wearing khakis and drill sergeant barking, ‘Merry Christmas.’

Jesus loves the U.S. winking at us, Sly insisted to whatever audience might be attending his solitary wail stilled by the frozen sky. With his mutt barking incessantly from the cab of his Toyota truck left running to keep his pet warm, crew cut Claus exclaimed, We’re in his name.

And Santa’s too. Sofi giggled.

And we all laughed ourselves warm in the shivering cold.

In a self-interested world,

self-justification is the only kind that matters.

– Gramspa

Dad’s parents came from Barcelona, Spain, in 1939, shortly after the defeat of Revolutionary Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War. Gramspa – my sister and I named him after Mom’s inaugural fruit garden, Gramsci Garden, the first one decorated with hand painted Wood Slat Sayings, in addition to stanzas of Beethoven’s 5th, 6th, and 9th symphonies – and Nina – our grandmother, who insisted everyone call her by her first name – founded Farm Filosofia in Orange, Vermont, a rural enclave five miles from downtown Barre. This is my home non-town: a town without a town nor zip code, only a clerk’s office and meeting hall. Although founded in 1793, Orange borrows its zip code from East Barre, which is a Census Designated Place. A CDP is simply a defined geographical area for the purposes of census taking. That is how the non-town of Orange feels to me – a mundane abstraction, a defined space without anything to occupy it. How can you be nostalgic for a town that does not really exist?

Gramspa was proud to be an American citizen, a Spaniard, and an Anarchist – in reverse order.

Anarchism is the purest form of democracy. Gramspa loved to say to voters when he handed them their ballots on election day. Gramspa worked every federal, state, and town election in Orange from 1944 to 2001, when he died, age 82.

Dad not only got his radical politics, ethic of social involvement, and love of philosophy (in no particular order) from Gramspa (and Nina), but also his habit of refuting sports announcers who argued that the ‘real case’ was different from how the umpire, referee, linesperson, or judge called it.

The game includes the arbitrator. Gramspa explained to me, one warm summer’s day at the dandelion strewn Town Field, when I was called out on strikes.

What the arbitrator decides is the case. Gramspa explained to Sofi, when her ‘hit’ was called foul and she subsequently flew out into the expansive blue rising above the pine tree outfield fence, that separated the field from the Town Garage.

It’s not both a fair and foul ball. Within the game of baseball, whatever the umpire calls it is what it is. Gramspa would explain to anyone anytime someone was arguing over fair or foul, foul or flop.

What about outside the game? I asked after just finishing Bram’s, ‘Game Theory and Politics’, which Gramspa had ‘assigned’ me the summer of my seventh grade year.

Outside the game what does it matter? with a Holmesian twinkle, Gramspa let me know my logical steps were being watched, as we scattered a treat of snipped up sunflower heads, bursting with seeds – some of which the squirrels and birds had already gotten – for the sheep, pigs and poultry to ‘amuse’ themselves with.

To the observer outside the game, what matters is what’s actually the case. I ran to the surest base I could imagine, the inquiring self, while watching chickens peck at seed heads near pigs’ mouths, bobbing up and down, back and forth, in the dance of ‘how close can I get to your mouth, before I become the food?’

But the case is the game. Gramspa waited for my domino step, while shaking out his basket above a clutch of eager hens ready to scrounge the easy ‘to eat on the go’ peck and swallow single seeds raining down among the loose green leaves and yellow petals.

And the game is the case. I ahaed and there it was – baseball taught me physics, again. The ball is neither fair nor foul until the umpire calls it. I clarified out loud to myself.

Gramspa twinkled with the merriment of my insight as the pigs nudged my legs wanting whatever remained in my bucket.

Whenever Sofi or I disagreed with a call Gramspa made, we could always make ourselves or the other smile by laughing –

Another Schrȍdinger call. after the famed physicist Erwin Schrȍdinger’s even more famous thought experiment about a cat.

In that quantum mechanics based thought experiment, a superpositioned cat – one that is in two states simultaneously, i.e. dead and alive – would remain that way until observed. And there the rub: who and what counts as the observer and when does the collapsing of many into one occur?

‘What a great call.’ would ring out from our living room as often as ‘fantastic play’ or ‘wonderful catch’, for, without the umpire or referee, all would be chaos and cheating, my word or eye versus your word or eye, with every word self-justifying and each eye biased by desire. Gramspa enjoyed watching sporting events as games and cared not who won, but, rather, that the game was played ‘wonderfully.’ Many times he used ‘this fantastically organized rounders’, aka baseball, to explicate geometry and Einstein.

Today I was discovering how thin the line between observers and how disparate the influences upon what and how we observe.

You can say the fair ball landed in foul territory, but you cannot say the fair ball was actually foul, or that it was both fair and foul. Gramspa instructed while I checked the egg boxes and he tossed diatomaceous earth into the coops – to control bugs and fleas. Because it’s a game, it’s what the umpire calls it. Gramspa and Dad both taught us to play the game not to win, but to play.

Ten in that box. I declared, then tossed two broken ones – casualties of hens fighting over boxes, eggs, and ‘laying’ space – over the fence and towards the pigs grazing in the western pasture.

The umpire is also playing the game. with a now heavy basket – two dozen eggs and counting – hung in the crook of his arm, Gramspa led us towards the next hen house. They’re playing beyond winning and losing and trying to umpire to the best of their ability. Gramspa told me and every team he ever umpired.

And if it’s not a game? I returned again to the game/play distinction the following year, my eight grade summer, as I explored a thought world exploding with if/if not conditionals in Sofi and my study of logic gates and how to escape from the black hole terrain of infinite contradiction.

Truth, verifiable truth. holding the bucket of diatomaceous earth with one outstretched hand, Gramspa spontaneously threw his arms open to the skies, as if to praise, as if to embrace, as if to be consumed by, all simultaneously without order.

‘What is True?’ was Gramspa’s theme for me and Sofi’s sixth and fourth grade summers, respectively. You can still see the remnants of some of our insights painted and burned across our homesteads’ many structures, fences, and, of course, Gramsci Garden.

That’s why life is not a game, neither is reality, nor should the law or politics be either. even as Gramspa gently pushed a ‘locked elbow’ lamb back into its mother’s birth canal, so as to extend its legs so it might be born, and that without injury, he would remind us that truth was not a game.

Gramspa thought Game Theory was suffering the same ignominious fate that Relativity Theory had suffered – gross popularization resulting in ubiquitous and trivial applications leading to common misunderstandings and dangerous inferences.

There should be a true standard of fair and foul meticulously adhered to, perpetually perfected, and indefatigably reflected upon. as Sofi and I helped hold the ewe, centered on its back for ease of maneuvering the stuck in transit lamb, Gramspa extended the lamb’s legs. Fairness always struggles against the sloppy indifference of a bleary eyed, ‘I’ll call ‘em as I see ‘em’, drunk-with-power idiot inflicting senseless suffering upon humans, animals, and planet. he said without missing a beat, then nodded for Sofi and I to rest the ewe on her side. The true order of things should matter to everyone. Gramspa Orwelled, as the ewe resumed its labor, for nineteen eighty-four was a very serious summer for him and, therefore, for all who knew him. It was my summer of becoming infinitely discontented with blind faith, magical wishing, ungrounded opinion, and all biasing errors, as I continue to endeavor to be.

Umpiring our ad hoc summer recreation league of ‘all ages welcome’ kids, straggled throughout the nearby neighborhoods, i.e. any place close enough to bike from, until we aged into high school activities, Gramspa never liked instant replay for officials nor the inclusion of the machine into sport.

With instant replay, the umpire is no longer part of the game – the part of the game that requires one to be as unbiased, as objective, as attuned to details and rules as one can possibly be, with no interest in the game other than it is played fairly. Gramspa mildly lamented the transition to video replay officiating, as we sat through a coaches’ challenge in our living room awaiting the resumption of play. Now, within the game the umpire is no longer the final word, so the game has ceased to be play and has become completely zero sum. he took a handful of homemade tortilla chips. Imagine if every play and move were judged by the letter of machine law, how greatly the game would change. he crunched, smiled, then resumed his complaint. When one plays, the match is a composite artistry of many players with the artwork being how we played, but when one games, the competition is either won or lost. When game is zero sum, winner take all, there’s no play, only war and the rules of war. his voice stalled, crumbs on lips, like it always did whenever he spoke of that ‘vulgar reality.’

Gramspa felt humans were betraying themselves by the desire for mechanical precision in play. He insisted that play, especially team sports, was precisely not life nor death, and that is why we played them – to escape the seriousness of life and death scenarios and, rather, play an inconsequential game whose winner really matters not and whose loser does not really lose anything.

If it seems absurd to expect absolute perfection from a player, then why expect it from a umpire, since they’re playing too? even at Fourth of July town gatherings, or family and friend picnics, Gramspa umpired, due to an injury to his knee suffered during the Spanish Civil War, which limited his quickness and lateral mobility. Everyone respected Gramspa’s umpiring for its impartiality and attention to detail. He was the one who called me out on strikes and Sofi’s ‘fair’ hit foul.

In Barcelona, Nina, operating the wool drum carder on the dining room table while Sofi and I gathered the separated fibers for spinning, often began her wisdom stories with this introduction. After we finished in the factories and fields, we would spontaneously erupt into a game of futbol, with people dividing into teams and no one keeping score nor any thought about winning. In a pause that led to our own self-reflection, Nina would, in turn, look each of us in the eye, as if to see if the seed of her idea had found the soil of our thought.

‘Fair or foul matters not, only the persistence of play does.’ was how Mom summarized Gramspa for Gramsci’s Wood Slats and was an idea I often meditated upon in my late adolescence, whenever the weather became inclement, which it does for long periods of time every year in Vermont.

Play is an attitude; game is a strategy. Nina would remind us, as we stood together, her arms around Sofi and I, looking out our sliding glass door at the driving snow blurring our view of Trum and all that lay beyond it.

What games you play, why and how, makes you more than the game makes the player. was all Dad would caution whenever Sofi or I asked if we could play game x. And the only ones we had to answer to was ourselves, for we needed to practice being honest to and with ourselves, since with every desire comes many selves and ‘one needs to learn how to silence the biased selves’ – which I’ve been practicing since Sofi and my first lessons in the Fruit-Twenty Garden, when I was twelve.

‘Do you want me to be a passive audience for your self-justifications, or do you want me to try to be an objective judge of your reasoning and rationale?’ one Fini or another would irritatingly ask whomever, whenever someone began offering justifications for why they believed x or acted y.

Gramspa, who, in my estimation, was unusually joyful for his intellect – as was our family in general – was a critical thinker who was seriously disappointed in sports fanatics and die-hards. He asserted that their ‘no laughing matter’ gravity betrayed the essential purpose of play and game – to laugh with life. It is why he refused to follow the Olympics, for it focused on nationalism rather than fraternity.

If the goal is to foster peace, then get rid of the uniforms, for these are mere military tokens. Everyone should have the same outfit and teams only need a blue and red one. Gramspa would ceremonially repeat every four years, as our TV would be turned off, not merely turned to another channel, but turned off, during the entire two weeks of the Olympics, summer and winter, to protest its ‘unintentionally ironic’ promotion of nationalism. Prior to each game simply flip a coin to see which team wears what color. No team colors, no flags, no anthems, just people from around the world playing games with each other he sipped his home ‘grown’ and brewed elderberry mead. Otherwise, it’s simply a substitute for war. And any substitution for war results in violence, not peace.

And Gramspa wanted to play life, not death, like they had played futbol even while their country was torn apart by civil war, for he had grown exhausted with all of America’s death denying immortality rituals in the pursuit of competition and the privileges of victory.

‘Maybe next year’ not only justifies a loser class, but turns players into failures. Nina kissed Gramspa on his pate, as she added to his point, while placing a plate of sandwiches on the table near the sliding glass door that leads out to a deck, then down to Trum, the gardens, and pastures beyond.

The promised land of ever upward social mobility is the fundamental hoax of capitalism. Mom slipped on her winter boots in preparation for lunch time feeding rounds. The mass will never be the upper class, yet, alwaysthemore, the rulers get all of us to compete for one golden trophy. Mom’s clarification to us brought its usual smile to Gramspa, who grinned while sipping a cup of coffee.

‘In the name of Gold’, Mom burned into the inner pasture fence that summer, ‘the horrors of the World.’

In Barcelona, Nina would warmly declare whenever she needed help, but would rather us offer than to request. We knew the collective joy of cooperation. booted and suited for the barely zero degree day, Nina said before going outside to shovel snow against the house, coops, and stables for extra insulation.

In Orange, Sofi and I, as my father before us, replied. We know the peace of loving life. and, suiting up to help, off we’d go together to turn the chores of the day into the revolition of the ‘spirit’, as our grandparents drenched everything in applied wisdom so that we might ‘marinate in thoughtful reflection.’

According to Gramspa, the self-interest in winning as opposed to the collective joy of cooperation was the peculiar cause of America’s exceptional psychosis. Yes, Gramspa, Nina, Dad and Mom all believed America was uniquely ill and insane with exceptionalism. They taught us that our heritage consciousness was not simply a hoax, but pure hoaxism – to be an American is to have the cultural mind of the hoax: to be a hoaxer, to be hoaxed, to defend the land of the hoax, simultaneously, over and over, again and again, with only the winners laughing.

A competitive, merit based society entails winners as the highest virtue. So, if what matters most is winning, then cheating becomes necessary, since it’s better to cheat than to lose. Mom explained to Sofi and I, after another of our many long chats with Gramspa and Nina, which often left us with many fascinating questions and wondrous bewilderments as we chattered ourselves to bed and, hours later, to sleep.

Everyone chasing the winner will cheat to win. with weeds in hand, I surmised at age nine.

Precisely. Mom, neem oil sprayer in hand – to protect leaf, bud, and blossom from bugs and their larva, especially the flower destroying Red Leaf Lily Beetle – smiled while we tended the yellow Day Lilies – the only type of lily the Red Leaf Lily Beetle does not infest – and pink Peonies in one of the front yard garden beds.

And the winner will cheat to maintain their status. Sofi, seven, adroitly alluded to our lessons on cognitive biases and how humans respond to threats against their homeostasis, then placed the now emptied bucket down next to me and knelt to help weed.

Precisely, and since cheating, by necessity, slowly becomes universalized, following rules is a fool’s errand. Mom’s gardens were known throughout Vermont, for they were free to sit in and pick from. It’s foolish to study for a test, but smart to cheat. In all of her gardens hung a sign declaring, Free Food For All. As we become better cheaters, we become stupid thinkers, for all our thoughts turn to cheating what is there rather than inventing what is not. pronounced the founder of both a free food and free flower movement, thus decreasing the financial profit of the farm. Often times ‘cheating the system’ of its ill gotten gains resulted in our relative deprivation. Yet, I not only never felt poor, I never even considered it to be an adjective relevant to my situation.

Nevertheless and alwaysthemore, we were known as the ‘Poor people’s farm’, because we refused to pocket as much money as we could or monetize the land as much as possible.

Which was basically true; we were poorer than many, helped out any, and the impoverished regularly found their way to our door when our food had not yet found its way to their mouths via our giveaways or, in testimony to our family’s desire to share with the poor laboring class no matter the vehicle, church soup kitchens and faith based community meals.

Self-interest necessarily makes a stupid people, since our self-biases betray our self’s best interest. Gramspa responded when I asked him his opinion about the Libertarian Party, as we sat underneath our Sitting Maple, in the dark, listening to peepers and watching fire flies. The sovereign self is not free, but abandoned to the autonomy of their ignorance. his tone, lit with a penumbra of compatriots huddled in conspiracy, was one of solemn resolution heavy with an ancient truism, like he had not only thought about, but also discussed this idea many times before.

‘Individualism is the opiate of the idiot.’

When Mom painted that in Gramsci Garden, we all laughed.

‘Religion is the hallucinogen of the stupid.’

When Mom painted and hung out that message, the Evangelical (Garden of Feedin’ behind Soup N’ Greens) and Pentecostal (Divine Love Shack next to the Post Office) soup kitchens informed her that they would no longer be needing our free food donations. Some concerned christian informant had seen the sign, while enjoying the restive aspects of shade, scent, and succulence provided by our ‘gardens of unbelief’, and thought it was their christian duty to purify the supply chain of the churches, regardless the effect upon the poor.

We have all the free food we need. stern, sanctimonious lips made their pronouncement to Dad, when he and Mom showed up, as usual, on Friday morning to drop off casseroles of eggs, cheese, and potatoes for the weekly free breakfasts, as they had for the last five years. Unfortunately, that day our casseroles joined the food scrap pile, albeit much to the pleasure of swine and poultry.

Nina laughed so hard she cried in anger, when Mom read the churches’ joint missive to us.

Well, apparently what you’re all out of is Free Thought. Dad quipped at them in Ingersoll fashion. We have plenty of that too! he canvased a smile, but to no avail.

Free thought is the devil’s playground. one door slammed on them.

Without a sense of humor, the people perish. Mom screamed at the solid wood deafness.

And we all laughed until we cried ourselves hysterical with mirth, after Gramspa convinced a little over seventy percent of the people he shared Mom’s saying with that it was from the Book of Proverbs, including the local prosperity preacher and his congregation at New Wine Ministries – none of whom seemed to have any sense of humor. Gramspa, by way of testing the gullibility of the average believer, also had thirty percent of regular church-goers, who passed our flower and food cart way, convinced that ‘a self-justified people are a stupid people’ came from Proverbs, while one hundred percent of ‘not religiously affiliated’ folks thought it should be. But Sofi and I knew it was not because we would have to recite –

A self-justified people are a stupid people.

– whenever we were attempting to excuse our acts based upon some intuitive presupposition, like, ‘We just thought it would be okay.’

It’s easy to think,.. the family would say to the offending party, whomever it might be, for everyone does it often.

But it’s hard to know. the ‘dunderhead’ of the day would conclude, as they accepted whatever consequence their self-justified self-interest had produced.

And even harder to understand. Gramspa perpetually reminded us of the difference. Which is the footbridge to wisdom.

I sit for Francis Scott Key, but stand for Beethoven.

– Nina

Are you Tony’s....

No Alma Maters, just brothers and sisters. was Nina’s refrain to any query of ‘Are you x’s y?’

Don’t call me wife, mother, or grandmother, just Nina. Nina would recite when meeting strangers.

And they would laugh awkwardly.

Nina was a Spanish revolutionary, which, when converted into American radicalism, means she was more Black Panther and less female suffragette.

In the Barcelonian commune, men and women wore the same pants. I haven’t taken that equality off since. Nina said to Mrs. Walters at a Town Hall meeting in 1951, when Mrs. Walter’s asked by way of statement, ‘Nina, you have no Sunday best dress?’

And that was true. Nina always wore pants, brown pants with any top fit for working in.

I’ll break out the rainbow colors when the revolution is over. Nina vowed to remain in workers’ garb until the revolution’s resurrection and the instantiation of a ‘worker’s world’, bka the common good for the good of all.

When I heard Angela Davis referred to as an angelino on TV news during the 1978 Jonestown debacle in Guyana, I started calling Nina, Angelanina, in honor of them both to each other. My Mom, ‘coincidentally’, had been wearing a ‘Free Angela Davis and all political prisoners’ button on the day of my birth, as she, millions of others, and a California Dairy man posted bail, protested, and waited for Angela’s ‘not guilty’ acquittal on aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder charges of a judge, that eventually came in May, 1972. It is the only other sobriquet Nina ever replied to and always with that wistful indulgence of, ‘May someday be’, which had been the salutation of her and her comrades’ throughout the tumult of the revolution.

Maybe someday. Captain Capital, Sofi’s comic creation, would falsely promise to the latest version of the disprivileged.

May someday be today. Angel Nina would whisper her encouraging and empowering motto into the nearly-defeated’s ears, in what eventually grew into Sofi’s series of anti-hegemony and ‘revolition’ themed adolescent stories, whose working title was, ‘The Day is at Hand.’

Angelanina Fini! we would call out when looking for her for whatever reason, for the melody of her name was reason enough.

Fini was their, my, our last name, but it did not exist as a family name until Gramspa and Nina chose it when they declared themselves to be husband and wife on Ellis Island, so as to avoid separation in a strange new world. Coming over as war refugees, the lack of documentation was unsuspicious and many ‘sacred vows’ were instantly consecrated by one’s own fabling word. Then and there Gramspa and Nina enjoined a union symbolized by a shared name, not either’s, but a new one, to represent their next attempt at a community, a revolution, a better world – in whatever order they might come.

‘May someday be today.’ we would say in response to ‘Happy New Day!’, when the need for last stance defiance was imminent. The insistence, ‘May someday be today’, also hung as apocalyptic threat when the oppressor laughed in your face, as bullies always do, while rubbing your face in their privilege and power. As such, ‘May someday be today’ can nauseate like a prayer, rancid with