I decided to take another look at my mother’s computer. It’s been down here since I brought her stuff down after her death. I hooked it up at some point and it worked for a while, and then one day it wouldn’t boot up. It just beeped at me. I did some quick research and was assured that the motherboard was fried, and I believed that. Really, the only thing that kept me from chunking a computer with a fried motherboard was the fact that it belonged to Mama. And, well, I thought that I’d eventually remove the hard drive and recover Mama’s pictures and correspondence.

For some reason, the day after my main computer died, I decided to look closer at Mama’s computer. It made a specific series of beeps when you tried to turn it on. So I looked up the model number along with the beep sequence and discovered that it was not a fried motherboard at all, but rather a memory problem. So I took the RAM out of my computer, put it in Mama’s, and just like that I had a computer I could get back to work on.

What I hadn’t counted on was how much using this computer would make me feel closer to Mama. Her e-mail is still on it. Her pictures are still on it. Except for a few minor changes I’ve had to make and a few programs I’ve had to install, the computer is just as Mama left it. In some way, it’s almost like a shrine to Mama. Not that there’s anything particularly special about this computer. It was just hers.

I’ve dreamt about Mama the last couple of nights. I don’t remember all of it, but one thing I recall is being in a big truck with Mama and just… talking. At one point someone wanted to see inside of the truck, and Mama was proud to show it off. She took a few short trips with me when I was driving a truck, and always treasured being in a big truck. She loved the adventure of it. I guess that’s what came through in some of the those dreams. Just Mama being Mama, with a smile upon her face and kindness toward everybody.

I didn’t expect that using her computer would make me feel closer to Mama. But in some way it’s given me a chance to hang out with her again, even if it’s in dreams. All of us who have lost our mothers will always treasure those moments when dreams give us a chance to hear their voices and feel their presence again. That was an unexpected gift. I think I’ll just smile and enjoy it while I can.

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We’re all waiting to watch the inevitable flame-out. It’s going to be entertaining. Republican overreach always is.

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I think some folks missed the point I was trying to make. Sure, we can get into semantic arguments over whether there’s an art to being an entertainer, but the reality is that for the majority of the most popular stars of our time the focus is the entertainment and not art.

Let’s face it, Lady Gaga isn’t going to roll out her “Hotel California” any time soon, and Justin Bieber is never going to have his “Sgt. Pepper’s”. Usher’s a great dancer, but he’s not likely to release in his career anything as long-lasting and resonant as “Stairway To Heaven”. And as much as I love Cee Lo Green, he’s not going to do anything remotely as culturally significant as John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

There was a brief time in the late 1960′s, through the 1970′s and even into the 1980′s when Art and Entertainment mixed, and quite well. But these days there’s not much mixing. It’s not about great songs and great musicians anymore. It’s about great dances and great costumes, stage production and savvy social networking.

All you really have to do to get the point I was trying to make is ask yourself one thing. If he were alive today and young, how far do you really think John Lennon would get American Idol, The Voice or X-Factor? Or Robert Plant? Or Bob Dylan? Could you really imagine a young, unproven Bob Dylan singing on American Idol? It’d be part of the joke reel they play when they want to humiliate people who are less-than-perfect singers.

In the end, that’s really the point I was trying to make. None of the people us older folks think of as amazing, culturally significant ARTISTS could get anywhere if they were starting out today. They’d be too different. Too ugly. Too odd. If you’re going to make it today, the most important thing is to look and sound a certain way. Conformity is rewarded. Individuality and originality is punished. I could post a long list of amazing artists who are making incredible music today, who aren’t getting the time of day from mainstream culture because they ARE artists with a voice and a vision all their own, stuck in a world that only wants a rehashing of everything that’s been done before, all set to a dance-able beat and hopefully set up in the package of a young, beautiful blonde girl with big boobs and, if we’re lucky, a sex tape.

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Aw, hell. You know what I mean. President Obama was a member of the same Christian church for over 20 years, but to some folks on the Right that just means he’s a deep undercover Muslim – some kind of Manchurian candidate sent here as part of some diabolical plan by that world super-villian… Kenya. But, you might ask, isn’t Kenya predominantly a Christian nation (83% Christian is the last estimate I heard)? Silence! That’s beside the point. It’s apparently a hot-bed for radical Islamists, who are diabolical enough to see the potential of a new-born child to become president of the United States that they had the foresight to spirit him off to Hawaii as a baby, where public records were manipulated to make it appear the boy had actually been born an American citizen.

Absurd, isn’t it? Well, it sounds absurd to reasonable people, anyway. But when you say “reasonable”, that doesn’t really describe the Right. The problem with basing your worldview upon baseless conspiracy theories is that you then see conspiracy theories in every little thing, and your thought-processes become so accustomed to absurd leaps of logic that there’s very little that you would actually consider out of the realm of possibility. It’s the same kind of logic that lets people use the words “Marxist”, “Socialist”, “Communist” and “Liberal” as if they all mean the same thing and are totally interchangeable.

It’s this extension of everything to absurd lengths that makes it impossible to have any meaningful dialog with folks on the Right. And it infuses every conversation I’ve ever tried to have with Right-Wingers.

What you most often face with these people is something called “reductio ad absurdum”. That’s Latin for “reduction to absurdity”. It basically refers to a common form of argument which seeks to demonstrate that a statement is true by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its denial, or in turn to demonstrate that a statement is false by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its acceptance.

There are plenty of example of the Right’s use of this technique.

The gun debate:

• First person: “We should strengthen gun laws and require more stringent background checks for assault style weapons.”
• Second person: “Your attempt to ban all firearms is an attack on the 2nd Amendment.”

Gay Marriage:

• First person: “Gays and lesbians should have the same rights as other Americans.”
• Second person: “If gays and lesbians can marry, what’s to keep folks from marrying animals or inanimate objects?”

Childhood Obesity:

• First person: “We shouldn’t serve schoolchildren sugary desserts with lunch and further worsen the obesity epidemic by doing so.”
• Second person: “What, do you want our children to starve?”

You can go on and on with this stuff. It’s absurd. Which is the point.

I’m reminded of my hometown of Kings Mountain, North Carolina. For much of my youth Kings Mountain was a “dry” town. If we wanted beer or liquor we had to go other cities to buy it. But eventually the city began to realize how much revenue it was missing out on, and some enterprising folks got the issue put up for a vote. It was amusing to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth, as local community leaders and religious clergy employed Reductio Ad Absurdum to contend that voting for the sale of alcohol within the city limits was tantamount to voting for the return of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as a vote for inviting rampant alcoholism, hooliganism, teenage pregnancy because of loosened morals and just about everything short of cats and dogs living together in sin.

Of course, the vote passed. Alcohol went on sale in Kings Mountain.  Despite the most dire warnings of the lunatic fringe, nothing much happened or changed. No drunks wound up lying in the gutters. The teenage pregnancy rate didn’t change because innocent young girls were suddenly having drunken sex with strangers. No homes were burned to the ground at the hands of hordes of drunken hooligans rambling the streets, fueled by recently legalized gin and whiskey. If there was any real result from the legalization of the sale of alcohol in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, at least for me it was a realization that some people lived in an alternate reality fantasy-land in which their preferred perception was more important to them than any kind of reality on the ground.

That’s a pattern that has held to this day. And I believe it’s at the heart of the Right-Wing’s fondness for Reductio Ad Absurdum. They cannot argue with the reality of the situation at hand, so they reduce it to some ridiculous point that they can argue with. They can’t argue with the logic of requiring stricter background checks for weapons, but they can argue with an assault on the 2nd Amendment. They can’t argue in any logical sense against gays and lesbians having the same rights as every other American, but they can argue with the contention that it’ll lead to bestiality and people marrying phone books. They can’t argue with the reality that kids eat crap, but they can argue with your motives for wanting to change that.

It’s exhausting keeping up with their leaps of logic. It’s like trying to discuss a construction project with someone, hoping to get your point across that there needs to be a better, more robust foundation than what the original plans specified, but finding the folks on the other side of the table upset because you haven’t made provisions for the fairies and gnomes. How do you talk about anything with such people?

Sadly, that’s where we’re at this country. Sometimes I think the Idiocracy is upon us, and that we’re on a slow, steady decline into absolute stupidity. How long can it really be before roving bands of morons are showing up in the middle of the night with torches to burn out the people who have salient, rational points in their arguments?

But, of course… that’s absurd, isn’t it?

Well, sure. If you’re a Marxist.

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Well, I stubbed my toe on a brick in our backyard a few days ago, and found myself exclaiming in pain;

“Belgium!”

Now. I’m not from Belgium. As far as I know my family history has no, or little, relation to Belgium. The country isn’t something a reference on a frequent basis. So where did that come from? Even though I didn’t remember where it came from, it still struck me as funny. “Belgium!” That seem appropriate. And since I dredged it up, I’m sure I’ll be using it more often.

If you must know, I did look it up, and was reminded that according to Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the word “Belgium”, when used as profanity, embodies a concept that is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy – except one, where they don’t know what it means.

That word, or the use of it in that context, wormed its way into my brain a long, long time ago and has been lying there in wait all these years for the perfect opportunity to pop out. Luckily, I was alone at the time, and didn’t have to explain it. At the time, I couldn’t have explained it, even as it gave me the giggles and I clenched my eyes to ride out the pain of stubbing a toe on a concrete block.

But this got me to thinking. How many other words have I picked up from science fiction and television shows? Quite a bit, actually, though I’d never really thought of it. “Frak” is uttered around our home all the time. “Gorram”, as well. “Dren”. There’s a list. Not an extensive list, of course. But I’ve picked up an embarrassingly wide-ranging vocabulary of science fiction profanity. So much so that I’m sure that at some point in the future my daughter will call her mom, complaining that my granddaughter has called her mother “a frelling toaster”. It’s a point of humor around here.

It all got started when I tried to cut down on my cursing. I’ve always cursed a lot. “Motherfucker” is an effective and poetic word to me. But it’s not something you can use in polite company. Unfortunately, I used to drive a truck. So I literally curse like a truck driver. I can’t help myself. While my Mama certainly tried to weed out certain impulses, I’ve always felt that certain words should have no power in and of their own. After all, if you had never heard the word “fuck”, would it still offend you to hear it? If you didn’t know what “cock” meant in the sexual sense, would you be offended to be called a cock-sucker? Of course not. But you can substitute the word “cock” for any other word (“mivonks”, for example), and if it’s clear that when you say “mivonks” you mean a penis, then the phrase is just as offensive – mivonks-sucker. Point being, the words themselves, stripped of their associated meaning, are not inherently profane. But you can take the meaning and attach it to nearly any word to make the concept profane. Sheep-shagger. See what I mean?

Anyway, it’s unlikely I’ll ever let go of certain concepts, or feel a need to express them. So what I’ve tried to do is substitute other words which aren’t inherently offensive to the general public. It’s like being proud of being Southern, but ditching the Confederate battle flag in favor of the less familiar Confederate national flag. It can still be a symbol of regional pride and express an idea, but stripped of the knee-jerk reaction many people have to the more familiar terminology.

I posted something to my dear Victoria on a private Facebook message as we talked about curse words from television shows, and she teased me into posting it to my Facebook profile.

Frell and frak those gorram fahrbot driblocks. Dren on them, cack their mivonks, loomas and nikda staight to Hezmana. We’re humped, you thoddos and tralks. So drop the borderwarks, hazmots and driblocks and let’s grapple these toasters.

If you know what any of those words mean, there’s plenty in there to be offended by. In fact, that entire paragraph is one long stream of profanity. But without the words themselves attached to specific ideas and concepts, it’s just a bunch of jibberish. Still, it’s useful gibberish.

Anyway, I got to think about how many such words I use on a relatively frequent basis. The list below is what I came up with. I won’t associate individual words with the television shows they came from, but I’ll leave explanations in place.

Belgium – from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “The concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy except one, where they don’t know what it means.” The word first appeared in the radio series, and later replaced “fuck” in the censored American edition of the novel Life, the Universe and Everything.

• borderwarks – tears, waterworks.
• cacking – slang analogous to “croaking” or “kicking the bucket”.
• crank – expletive, as in: “They blasted the crank out of me!”
• drek – same meaning as “shit”.
• dren – same meaning as “shit”.
• driblocks – a derogatory term, roughly equivalent to slut.
• fahrbot – meaning insane or mentally deficient.
• felgercarb – usage context appears to be similar to ” bullshit”.
• frag – same meaning as “fuck”.
• frak – seems to establish same meaning as ” fuck”.
• frell – same meaning as “fuck”
• frelnik – from Farscape
• godsdamn – a polytheistic version of the expletive “goddamn”.
• gorram – same meaning as “goddamn”
• grapple – same meaning as the “fuck”, as in sexual intercourse
• greebol – same meaning as “idiot”
• hazmot – equivalent to bitch
• Hezmana – same meaning as “Hell”
• humped – same meaning as “screwed”
• loomas – same meaning as “tits”
• mivonks – same meaning as “testicles”
• nikda – same meaning as “ass”
• nugget – a pilot trainee.
• skin job – term used by humans to describe the human-form Cylons.
• thoddo – same meaning as “idiot”
• toaster – term for the Cylons. Its use is often disparaging, the Cylons themselves taking the use of the word as a racist slur.
• tralk – same meaning as “slut”. Usually describes females, but can be used against any gender.

This list was certainly not meant as a definitive list of made-up profanity from science fiction. It’s just a bunch of words I’m familiar with. My only reason for listing them is that I was surprised to discover that there were so many I was familiar with, and that I used so many of them. Language is a pliable, ever-changing thing. Who knows how many of these words might make their way into the popular lexicon and become a part of our everyday culture?

In the meantime, I’ll just have fun exploring how many creative ways I can curse without pissing people off. They can’t say I curse like a truck driver or a sailor when I’m using words like “dren” and “gorram”. Well, at least not until they learn what those words mean. In the meantime, I can be just as profane as I wanna be. And let’s face it, there are times when a stream of profanity is definitely called for.

Like when you find yourself in your backyard, having stubbed your toe on a concrete block. Maybe the neighbors won’t be as upset if their little children here you shout “Belgium!”. But I guarantee shouting it out will make you feel a whole lot better.

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But he should get his due process. He must. For my sake, and for yours, and for every other American. It’s a slippery slope when you allow the government to suspend the Constitutional rights of any American for any reason. Anyone who demands an exception be made in this case has no right to complain when they find that they later find themselves detained by the government and suddenly have no access to a lawyer or a right to a trial by jury. It’s not Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I’m worried about protecting. It’s all the rest of us. If they make an exception for him, they can make an exception for you, too.

Slate has posted a great article titled, Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights? You should read it. The sub-heading sums the point up nicely. “When the law gets bent out of shape for him, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.”

In short, our fates are linked to his. And if we let the government strip him of his rights as an American citizen, it’s all the easier for the government to strip us of our own rights farther down the line. That prospect should worry all Americans.

Let’s process this bastard through the courts, and then let’s fry him if he’s convicted. But let’s not be lighting our torches and demanding vigilante justice just yet. Those who live by the sword die from the sword. Be careful what you’re willing to dish out. It has a way of coming back on you.

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I’d planned to put something together with a local drummer, built up from some of my old bass-centered songs to release as Catdaddy Pirates. One last roar of the bass player I used to be, as it were. But as time moves along, that seems less and less likely. Recording acceptable drum tracks with a live drummer is unlikely, because I simply don’t have the microphones to get a proper recording, or the resources to buy anymore. Most importantly, though, I just don’t have the time to work up the songs with a real drummer. It seems like time is my most precious resource these days. There’s never enough of it.

If I used those drum loops instead, though, that would put the whole project on the fast-track. Or, well, the faster track, anyway. Of course, I’m not likely to find drum loops that work with all the songs I’d want to record. So that might mean writing a bunch of stuff from scratch. Which appeals to me. A lot.

Anyway, I’m still just pondering the idea. A Catdaddy Pirates album will happen eventually one way or another. But whether that will be with or without an actual, flesh and blood drummer is something that I’ll have to decide within the next couple of weeks. One way or another, I want to start making progress on it, following the final mastering of Windhaven’s When The Rains Fall and before our first sessions for The Fifth Circle.

Now… if I just had more time…

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