Can you imagine killing another man with a 2.2 pound broadsword, watching his blood spurt or trickle out to mix with the dust beneath your noble feet? Can you conceive of giving birth in a cave? At whatever given time, folks took these things for granted, just as we take for granted the 5% of our every purchase that goes to Visa or Mastercard or some nameless war somewhere we've never been. Can you imagine killing another man with your 2.2 gram credit card? Setting dictates our perception and bias, our notion of life, death, happiness, sorrow. Speed is not convenience. What was lost when the scribe died on a cross-tempered by technology's steal [sic]? How many of us feel anachronistic and satisfy it with something simply complex like role playing games or science fiction or speculative fiction or fantastic sexual escapades we charge on our 2.2 gram Delta Sky Miles Visa? What do we lose when our snipers kill a man from three football fields and two pints away as opposed to hand to hand combat? What do we lose by pressing a button instead of galloping a horse? More lives, more blood, more distance. Gradually we remove ourselves from the consequences of our actions, lost are those most valuable of lessons learned from the dark side of real. Distanced are our ethics from our hearts. We throw up digital barriers and economic divides, pretending that life is on our side instead of theirs.

So many strange thoughts I would not have had if I had not become a father. Or would not have had for several decades. This quickening of biography caused by fatherhood boggles my addled brain. Hagiography (try that one on for size) fascinates me now, as does heredity, lineage, war, tradition, blood. I wish that my own meant more to me than it does. Damn our culture for eclipsing and negating that most holy of lessons, the lesson of family dashed on the rocks of a greedy consumer culture and a patriarchal, militarized, nine-to-five routine, lost amidst a sea of useless lessons crammed down our throats by father "figures" because we barely know our real fathers, never got gifted the time or circumstance to come to know them. And so we hide behind masks of ourselves, acting as if we know who we want to be but not who we are.

Progressivly drunk. That's going to be my party platform. Forgive any trasgressions I may have unwittingly uprooted. But know that I will plant or bury them given enough time.