Not Even Not Zen 370: Biomythography - Note 108: Werewolves of Bethesda

Wikimedia Commons (Mech, Christensen, Asa)

Werewolves of Bethesda

On an early morning in December, 2023, I turned onto Democracy Boulevard. 

Democracy runs east-west through Bethesda, Maryland. It passes through commercial areas, strip malls, a few high-rises, wooded glades with single-family homes, and denser, apartment-style housing. The road hosts strips of forested lands along both sides but it does so in the manner of a city, with buildings breaking up the tree cover. The exceptions, where the tree cover remains continuous, are the single family homes and the parks. 

The largest employers in the area are hospitals: Naval Medical, National Institutes of Health, and Sibley Hospital. All three complexes keep their spaces relatively lush with flowers and grasses. They maintain freshwater ponds with ducks, geese, and deer. The largest parks in the area are the Cabin John Regional Park, Rollins Park, Garret Park, and Rock Creek Park. Bethesda is home to countless smaller community parks and other areas of green, living space like the Congressional Country Club. 

Despite the parks and other examples of relatively-tamed nature, though, Bethesda is functionally part of Washington, D.C. It's considered one of the more densely populated areas in the United States. That's why it was a surprise to meet a wolf on Democracy Boulevard. 

As I pulled up to a stoplight, it was on my right. I didn't notice it. In the dark, morning twilight, most of my visibility came from my headlights. Off to the side, even a large animal remained a dim silhouette. As I sat and waited for the light to turn, though, the wolf crossed from right to left.

It may have taken a full second for me to become aware of what it was. 

And maybe it was a coyote. If so, it was the biggest, healthiest-looking coyote I'd ever seen. After it trotted in front of my car, it stopped for a moment in the highway meridian, turned, and stared at me. 

The proper name, most likely, is coywolf. Many years ago, probably in Maine or Ontario according to the geneticists who track such things, a wolf interbred with a coyote. The result was a lithe, slightly delicate wolf. Or perhaps it was an unusually large, strong, and thick-haired coyote. The interbreeding has happened so many times and has been so successful that the process has spawned a term to match the canid. Now the east coast of the United States has 'coywolves.'

I had seen coyotes out west. This beast was considerably taller and more majestic. Its fur was heavy and, weirdly, too beautiful for a coyote. The street lights on the other side of the animal provided back-lighting that showed the fur as a sort of ghostly corona surrounding its wolf-like body. The fur, in fact, had the patterns and shades of grey, white, and black that are stereotypical for both wolves and coywolves. 

It couldn't have been a wolf, not in Maryland. Or so I have been told. But it seemed as tall as a wolf, perhaps a bit thinner, with long legs and narrow jaw. It might have had the bushiest tail I've seen on a wild animal. The black-furred tail reminded of how sheerly beautiful and healthy some wild animals seem. Large raptors are often like this for me, awe-inspiring and impressive up close. My mind's eye recalls, with a sense of startlement, turning to notice a peregrine falcon sitting on a picnic table as I hiked by on a secluded trail, a height which brought the bird's head level with mine. It hit me with its piercing gaze as if I had rudely interrupted something. Wild horses, too, often look groomed. They're always ready to pose for the covers of romance paperbacks. 

And this coywolf, too. Beautiful. 

As I maneuvered my car towards my seven-story office garage, which took a full U-turn on Democracy Boulevard, I inadvertently followed the path of the coywolf. In a few seconds, I caught sight of it moving. It had crossed the empty highway and hopped up to the grassy border of the Marriott building. Without any back-lighting, it presented a dark, quadruped shape as it loped between the high-rises. I recognized where it was going. There couldn't be any other destination. 

At the center of four large office complexes lay a retention pond. This was a good sized body of water, a permanent fixture in the landscape surrounded by mulberry trees, a stretch of thick bamboo, cat-o-nine-tails, and signs warning passers-by that this constrained clump of the natural world was a protected wilderness area. 

For years, the geese had driven out the ducks from the pond, outlasted the herons, and had in fact, occasionally chased hikers walking along the asphalt path that ran around the office complex and through the protected area. They pooped up a storm, of course. Geese droppings were so common a hazard on the hiking path that the day-walkers, as a habit, scraped their shoes on the grass before re-entering their workplaces. There was no way to count on avoiding all the goose poop. 

I hadn't hiked through the area much lately due to the pandemic shutdowns and slow transition into hybrid workspaces. The sight of the coywolf, who had disappeared behind a wall of my parking garage, inspired me to vow to visit it. Mentally, I started to list my meetings and the breaks between them. I looked for a chance to stroll outside, if only for a few minutes. 

In my office suite, I ran into another commuter and described to her the coywolf. She didn't react the way I'd expected, impressed with nature. She had heard warnings about coywolfs in our area, particularly around Rock Creek Park. They had eaten a few, small dogs.

"Would you have thought it was so beautiful," she asked me, "if you were out of your car?"

"Huh." That was a good question. 

Before my ten o'clock meeting, I managed to sprint down the stairs and out the back doors of my building. From there, it was a short walk to the pond. To my surprise, the pond had changed since my last hike around it. 

There was almost no goose poop. It was the first thing I noticed. My approach was a double-time march and it was trouble free. Going off the trail was harder. The bamboo had grown up nearly to the asphalt. I had to patrol around the grove to the cattail reeds, then to the rivulet that ran into the pond, which provided an open space with a view. It was also the most obvious path for the coywolf. I couldn't make out recognizable paw prints in the mud, though. 

When I got a clear look at the scene, I found all the geese in the water. There wasn't a single individual on shore. In fact, the geese gently paddled close together in a cluster near the center. Instead of there being more geese, which I would have expected with fewer people around than ever, there were only a dozen visible. The birds looked smaller than in previous years, not larger. I wondered about that, too. I wasn't sure the coywolf could be responsible. The biggest geese were probably as large as the coywolf and pretty tough, too. 

And yet this is the way it was. 

There's never one of any large animal, of course. The coywolf couldn't be alone. This recent stabilization of forces, probably including the changes in vegetation around the pond, was one that had taken years for the geese and coywolves to achieve. I was lucky to have arrived to work at the right time, noticed something (admittedly, right in front of my eyes), and taken an opportunity to follow up and see the adjusted balance of nature.

Not Even Not Zen 369: Biomythography - Note 107: The Frog Rebellion

The Frog Rebellion

The rebellion was led by college students, I think. That's just a guess.

I first encountered the frogs along a strip of forest that ran alongside a stream in the park next to my home. The water came from springs and drainage pipes farther north. It burbled southwards to a tiny, concrete bridge, just twenty feet long and six feet high. Of course, eventually the stream ran under the bridge, through the woods, and emptied into Paint Branch Creek. But it was a long and marshy hike to where the waters joined. 

There had always been turtles along the stream. They liked the mixture of shade and sun. They probably enjoyed the shelter of trees and rocky ground, too, with plenty of hiding places. My friend Joe found more than I did. He usually found more of any reptile. I searched, but not in a focused way. I wandered through the stream beds, hunting and hoping for curiosities. I uncovered occasional turtles, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, and minnows. One day, I ventured into the shaded waters with my younger brother. He turned around a corner in a forest trail and sprinted back to me, alarmed.

"There's a monster frog," he huffed.

"Is it a frog or a toad?" I wasn't bothered. He should have known not to get too excited about either one.

"I don't know. It's big." He moved his hands to almost a shoulder width apart. Even at his size, a few years younger than me, he was describing ridiculous dimensions for a frog. "Really big."

"Right." I hopped up out of the stream and marched up the trail.

Part of me expected to find nothing at all. My brother had probably seen a sort-of-large toad that moved into the underbrush as soon as he turned his back. On the other side of the tree, though, I found a thing. It hadn't moved. Maybe it felt no need to move, ever. It was larger than a box turtle. It was larger than most of the slabs of shale rock.

I took a step back. It was so large, I didn't want to get close. It couldn't be natural, here.

Whatever it was, it did look like a frog. But instead of being the size of my fist, it was at least eight to ten inches long. It was almost as fat, too, seven inches at the widest part of its belly. Instead of being forest colored, this creature was brownish-green with a pale, mottled, grey-tan underbelly.

"Wow," I breathed, after a few seconds had passed and I'd caught my breath enough to speak.

"See?" My little brother hovered behind me. He wanted to make sure the animal got me first, if it attacked. He put his left hand on my right shoulder.

"Huh." My gaze narrowed. This creature hadn't moved while I'd been watching it.

Maybe it was a rubber model. Maybe it was real, but dead. I had to find out. I wasn't putting my fingers near it, though. There were such things as poison frogs, after all. Instead, I shook off my brother's hand. Then I searched around and got a stick.

"Don't leave!" my brother hissed. I knew what he meant. This thing looked weird and out of place. He didn't want to stand too close to it. And he especially didn't want me to run off and ditch him.

"It's okay." I broke the stick to make it into the right length. Then I crept forward. "I just want to see if it's real."

"Don't do it!" My brother clenched his fists. He crouched to flee, as if he thought I could set off the animal like a bomb. Maybe he was right, but it sure didn't seem to move much.

I poked the frog. The frog blinked. It breathed rapidly, as if alarmed while being half-paralyzed. I saw its throat vibrate. It took one step. After a moment, it took another. Then it settled on its haunches. As far as the frog was concerned, it had moved far enough.

"It's alive." Okay. Now I had to think.

On the way in, I had noticed clutches of frog eggs in the water. They had looked like translucent grapes with black dots in the middle. Some of the eggs had been normal sized. Some had seemed oddly large, though.

We had gotten rain a few days ago. The water level had risen in the stream. The level had receded since, which resulted in tide pools next to the banks of the stream. Most of those stagnant pools had eggs in them. In total, our stream had accumulated hundreds of eggs, at least. And I thought only some of the eggs were normal. A few clutches were huge, several times the size of eggs that our local frogs produced.

"Let's go get Joe," I suggested. I knew my best friend in the neighborhood would want to see. Besides, Joe was two years older than me and his dad was some kind of bug-collecting scientist. Frogs weren't too different. At least, they ate bugs.

When we returned with Joe - prying him away from his family at their table took effort, although we were greatly aided by our breathless urgency in summoning him to see the giants - he was awed, at first. He quickly grew bewildered, as I'd expected, but the sight of the eggs also led him to a leap of logic.

"There have to be others," he said, staring at a clutch of frog jellies bigger than two of his fists together. "Let's find them."

The chore ended up being easy. There weren't many places for the frogs to hide. We found one on the trail, plainly visible, and it walked under a bush only when we shouted and ran up to it. Another, we found under a large fern on the banks of the stream. Soon, we located another. And another.

"At least five," Joe said.

"Are they weird?"

"This is really cool," he breathed. For a second, he tensed, as if he were on the verge of peeing himself. "Really, really."

The giants seemed oddly unafraid of us. We dashed from place to place, studying them, although no individual frog seemed to be doing much of anything interesting or, indeed, much of anything at all. Eventually, we got bored and went to play games on the ball fields in the park. But we vowed to return. Joe mumbled he wanted to take eggs to grow in an aquarium.

Later in the week, after Joe talked with his father, he concluded these were most likely specimens of American Bullfrog. They were too big to be anything else.

"Someone captured them for dissection, my father says." Joe shook his head at the craziness. "But I guess students set them free. Probably at the university."

A few weeks later, I wandered along the stream and noticed it was full of tadpoles. Nearly all the deep puddles on each bank had filled up with wriggling green-black creatures with thick bodies and eel-like tails. I reached in and picked up a mid-sized individual. It wriggled frantically in my fist, so I put it down. I crouched to study a group of them in their home.

Usually, I could hold tadpoles by making a cup of water in my hands. The tadpoles would swim around in the water for a while as I got my up-close look. These specimens, though, were a bit large for that. Some of them were already longer than my fingers. A few of them would have filled my cupped hands entirely, leaving almost no room for water.

I thought about all the frogs we were about to see.

In another week, I headed into the woods around the stream for an inspection. Sun poked through the boughs above me. Mostly in the shade but in a sunny spot, too, I found a half-dozen sizable frogs, for sure younger than their bigger mothers and fathers. Some of the frogs still had their tadpole tails. They were already bigger than our normal frogs, though. And they were growing pretty fast.  

When I mentioned it to Joe, he didn't seem as excited.

"They don't really belong here." He shrugged. "That's what my dad says."

A few days later, I walked through and saw even more frogs. There were almost no tadpoles left anywhere. A while after, though, my younger brother and I hiked in another check-up. This time, we found a bunch of dead frogs. Some of them were lying on their backs. At first, I thought they were pretending.

"What happened?" asked my brother in a hushed tone.

"I don't know." I picked up a stick from the trail. With it, I poked one of the frogs lying on its back.

"Don't do that," said my brother.

There was no sign of an injury. There was no obvious killer. The first body seemed stiff. The next, which I found under a bramble beside a tree, felt mushy through the poke of the stick. Whether that meant it had just died recently or had died before the others, I didn't know.

My brother and I hiked fifty yards downstream. We saw a few live frogs, big ones, but they hopped away from us. That was good. Most of the other frogs, though, were just dead bodies.

A rainstorm swept through the next day. It was three more days before the ground got firm enough for us to hike back along the path of the stream.

"Now everything is dead," my brother murmured.

"Yeah." This time, there was a deceased box turtle among the reptile corpses. We saw dead toads, which looked awfully small and warty. We saw minnows that had gone belly up. We found a drowned mouse, too, or at least something soft, furry, and washed up against a fallen tree branch. Finally, on the east side of the trail, I stumbled upon a larger, older box turtle that was still walking. It looked sick.

The turtle's shell and even its limbs seemed speckled by pale spots. I felt amazed and impressed by its hardiness inasmuch as it had survived a severe devastation, at least so far.

"A storm never killed everything before," I said to my brother. I was trying to think of why this one had been different.

"I've never seen so many animals dead." His eyes were wide. He looked to me for answers but I felt as bewildered as he was.

We never heard a good explanation, although my parents suggested pollution. It's a possible reason. At this distance in time, there's no way for me to know for sure what killed those frogs. The foremost possibilities:

a) The park service found out and set poison to prevent the transplanted frogs from taking over

b) A factory upstream dumped something. In that case, the water was always going to kill the animals downstream and it got especially bad when swollen flood waters carried even more pollution to them

c) A disease, possibly borne by the transplanted frogs, infected most of the reptiles

d) Our local park animals ate insects poisoned by insecticide

Whatever ended it, the frog rebellion lasted only for a spring and a summer. And it was probably started by college students.

Not Even Not Zen 368: Biomythography - Note 106: Apocalypse Horses

Apocalypse Horses

I used to visit the equestrian ring about a block from our house in College Park. A University of Maryland riding club had gotten permission to build their facility in an unused sector of the park. They didn't bring horses into the place often, so I had time to explore it on most afternoons. The builders made the fences white and the roofs green. They painted the obstacles for the horse agility training with the same color scheme, green blocks and white rails. They put up a lot of fencing, too, and that was also white. All of it grew a bit dingy within a few months.

Usually I played in the dirt of the main ring or in the stalls. Sometimes, I found wood chips or stacks of straw. I found a dime once, and later a nickel. I returned to the same spot for weeks, hoping for more fallen coins.

On a day when the women and men brought horses, I stood off to the side and leaned against the fence. Every now and then, riders took their horses through the agility training course. Most of the horses seemed good, not flawless, but resilient about the obstacles and hurdles. 

I watched for half an hour or more, like a kid with nothing to do, and I was surprised to see two horses shy away from the hurdles, one after the other. The second of them refused the smallest cross-bar, basically a step-over hop. I guessed that making horses jump took training like when I taught cats or dogs at home. Cats were pretty hard to persuade, too. How the riders negotiated with their much larger animals, I had no idea. 

Most of the dressing up in burgundy jackets and participating in this weird hobby fell into the realm of adulthood mysteries, a large category to my mind, so I didn't give it much thought. Adults hardly ever explained their habits. Eventually that afternoon, the riders started packing up to leave. This was, itself, a mystery. One man seemed to do most of it. 

A young woman rode off to the side and watched her fellow riders. After a moment, she encouraged her mount to sidle up to me.

“Do you like horses?” she asked. She had blondish hair in what appeared to be a mop-top cut underneath her helmet.

"Yeah ... it pooped!" My voice rose in pitch. Her animal had relieved itself suddenly, with a great plopping sound and smell. And it had done so as automatically as a fish or a bird. It had given no thought to its rider or me or, indeed, anything at all before letting go. 

"Yes, horses do that." Her voice grew slightly tired.

I couldn't get over how it just stood there and did its business.

"But it pooped!" I pointed in case she'd missed it.

"Yes."

I rested my chin on my hand, still propped against the fence, and thought about how I would handle this at home. "Can you train it to poop in the straw or something?"

"Uh," she hesitated. "Horses eat straw. So no."

The conversation went on for a while. I'm sure I served as an inadvertent advertisement for birth control to the girl. The ways in which horses were so different from other pets seemed unbelievable to me then. I could not buy a clue about the behaviors she was trying to describe. Also, she was telling me her animal was smart. But it wasn't smart enough not to step in its own poop. 

She let me pet her horse on the nose. It shivered and gave a sort of laughing sound.

"Did I do something funny?" I glanced from the horse to the rider.

"That was a whinny." By this point in our conversation, she could meet me at my level of understanding. "She makes that noise sometimes."

Although we talked a while longer, the young woman found a way to excuse herself from the conversation. Maybe she got called away to help pack. In either case, since watching grown-ups walk their horses on leads, stack obstacle cones, drag blocks to the fence, and fix rails was only moderately interesting, I wandered off.

I returned a week later to watch another team of riders lead horses by the reins, talk to one another, walk around, tie their beasts to the posts, and start a training session. Not long after, I came back to the equine ring to watch part of a competition. This was a vastly different experience - more cars, more trucks, and more people. The contestants seemed entirely competent in a grown-up way, which I took for granted. There was a very old-looking man, probably nearly thirty, who performed perfectly with his mount as they leapt over the most difficult hurdles, every one of them, without a flaw.

I watched the training sessions and competitions for two years more. They got boring, in a comfortable way, and I stopped by to watch them less often, partly because the place was getting too popular with adults who asked questions or stood in my way, partly because for my eighth birthday I received a five-speed bicycle, a spyder with high, raised handlebars and a banana seat. As I found myself more mobile, I realized I had friends to visit, a bowling alley to lurk in, magazines to read for free at a newsstand, and more I could do on the roads beyond my neighborhood. 

Upon returning from my bike trips, sometimes I slowed down to see the horse club. 

One day as I rode out on my bike, the insecticide trucks swept through. They sprayed a heavy mist that smelled hot, like menthol but worse. It fell on the grass, the trees, the streams, and the pond - everywhere. It wasn't DDT, I realized, but it was something else the local park monitors had decided was good for us. Whatever it was, it made my lungs ache. I recognized it as an insecticide that had given me breathing problems before. I pedaled out of there. 

When I returned, I sped through the smelling-awful zone and ignored the horse trailers. I kept going west until I hit University Boulevard. I turned down the wrong way on the shoulder of the road, and checked out the next set of houses to see if any kids would play. 

The yards looked empty, so I headed back home. As I came to my house, though, I noticed whirling lights farther up ahead, east into the park. 

"You're finally back," my mother said. I walked my bike inside our chain-link fence.

"There's no kids out," I complained. "I'm gonna make a sandwich. There are some ambulances and fire trucks near the horse ring. I'm gonna go see."

"No. Definitely not," my mother said. She held the door for me as we walked inside.

"But why?"

"There's nothing to see."

"That's okay." I turned the corner into the kitchen. I headed past my father, who was at the table reading, and pulled on the handle of the fridge with the idea of putting together ketchup and cheese on wonder bread. Maybe I could grab a pickle, too. "I'll stay to the side. I'll just look at the horses."

"No," my father insisted.

"The horses are dead," my mother told me. I turned to find her only a foot to my right. She had followed me all the way through the kitchen. 

"Why?" For the moment, I put the ketchup back on the shelf. I closed the refrigerator. 

"No one knows."

"All of the horses?" My feet took me in a circle around my mother in the kitchen. She had wanted to make sure I knew this.

"I think so."

"But ..." Finally, I stopped. I tried to think of how this was even possible. 

"Didn't they spray something on the grass this morning?" she asked. The tone of her voice told me she already knew the answer.

"Yeah." It had been the menthol-hot stuff. I hadn't been able to ignore it. 

My parents exchanged a meaningful look. 

"Horses eat grass," commented my mother, arms folded.

"Yes," said my father.

"Do you think they nibbled on the sprayed grass?" she asked. The question, by her glance and raised eyebrows, was meant for me. I tried to think. I hadn't paid attention to the arriving horse trailers. I had no answer.

"All of them?" I wondered. I couldn't comprehend the totality of it.

"They must have," my father said. 

It turned out my parents were right. According to our neighbors who had gone to see the what the ambulances were doing, and according to their kids as well, all the horses at the equine competition had died. Every single one. Why ambulances had come for the horses, I had no idea. Maybe no one at the equine competition, with their animals dying, knew what to do. Someone had simply driven to a payphone to dial for emergency help. And the ambulances came.

That was the end of the equine sports club. They never met in the park near my home again.

#

A friend of mine pointed out that pesticide poisoning incidents for horses, although common enough to be noticeable (https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eve.12887 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11780282/ for examples), are relatively rare. Mold-infected feed appears to be the most common cause of herd die-offs in our modern era.

Does this mean I'm remembering wrong? In this case, probably not. The recollection is a latticework of small things. I tell the story as two incidents but, in my mental background, the incidents are supported by many, many other brief but clear fragments. I don't doubt the horse club and stables. I don't doubt the insecticide sprayings. I don't doubt the abrupt shutdown of the horse club or the ambulances associated with it. I don't even doubt my parents explaining it to me (although the dialogue must be inaccurate) or my friends telling me their versions of the news later.

What I do doubt is everyone being right about the cause of death. If the feed were poisoned that day, our neighborhood would have been likely to a) not know, and b) blame the deaths on the most obvious cause, which was the insecticide spray. It does, on the surface, seem like insecticides are still a reasonable culprit. In contrast to the superficial evidence, though, it's significant that I'm remembering from the perspective of a child. No one told me the full facts as if I were grown. And the horse club folks didn't talk to our neighborhood residents anyway. If they figured it out a couple days later and the cause was determined to be contaminated feed, would they have come back to correct the record with the kids in the neighborhood? No. So there is still a decent chance that the more common cause, bad feed, resulted in those horse deaths.

Not Even Not Zen 367: Biomythography - Note 105: Silent Summer

Silent Summer

Every spring, dump trucks drove down Metzerott Road with spray cannons mounted on top. They made a full circuit, both sides of the road, to hose down the trees. The trucks arrived month after month, year after year. Usually, they turned onto Patricia Court, too, and wetted the ornamental pear trees that never grew pears. Often, our neighborhood got weekly treatments in May, June, and July.

As a child, I felt more mystified by the concept of pear trees without fruit than I was by the spray trucks. Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I played in the spray. It wasn't fun but we didn’t let the chemical mist stop a baseball game or kickball game. At worst, we slipped in the grass and got drenched. Any other inconvenience seemed unimportant. The moist air from the trucks smelled weird but it was interesting, too. It wasn’t quite like anything else. The oddness of it lingered around the leaves of the trees and settled like dew in the grass and stayed there for an hour or so. 

When the trucks turned onto Patricia court, the neighborhood adults stood in their front yards, arms folded, and nodded at the drivers, obviously happy to have their share of the spraying. Their rows of trees harbored gypsy moths and tent caterpillars according to the adults I'd heard, so they felt they needed this DDT solution. 

In the third summer, something changed. The trucks rolled through, distributing their chemical coverings as usual but the adults reacted differently.

“Come in! Come inside!” my mother called to us from her front door.

 

"What's wrong?" I trotted in her direction. My little brother followed. 

"I don't want you playing out in the field when they're spraying it."

"But mom!"

"Come on! Anyway, doesn't it smell awful?" She wrinkled her nose. She hadn't remarked on it any of the times before. I didn't mind the smell and she hadn't until now. But she remained at the door, hands on hips, and stared at me until I trudged inside.

The next time the trucks passed through and the next, my mother's reaction was the same. She waved me indoors. Other parents called their children into their houses, too. By the middle of summer, my protests over being called in had weakened because our games were getting broken up even when I was the last to get the summons. There was no point in staying if most of us were forbidden to play. 

Later, on the south side of the house with other adults, my parents chatted on the porch outside our kitchen doorway. It was a nice day and everyone but my mother wanted to smoke in the breeze. 

"Do you really think DDT is bad?" another woman asked my mother.

For her response, my mother turned to me. I found it slightly alarming.

 

"Didn't you tell me you saw a flock of dead birds?" she asked. 

"Yeah," I answered warily. Mostly, I had seen single birds. A few times, I had seen groups of them. Once, I walked through an entire flock, a wide, green field full of greyish birds lying mostly on their backs with their legs and beaks to the sky. I had poked a couple of the bodies with a stick. They proved to be weirdly firm.

 

"That could have been a disease," someone volunteered, a man's voice. 

"I don't think it was," said my mother.

"They're spraying for insects," said a woman. "That's all they're killing. The insects." 

"The birds eat insects," my mother said.

"I thought they ate worms," said a man who hadn't spoken.

The conversation flowed back and forth for a while. I wandered down the stairs and back up, hoping to see other kids in the neighborhood playing outside. But there wasn't even a dog in view. All I had was some adults acting like adults.

Someone asked my mother if she had read 'Silent Spring.' She nodded. For the first time in a while, my father spoke up.

"Ann thinks Rachel Carson is a saint," he said.  

"I hear she died of cancer," someone murmured. 

The group puffed their cigars and cigarettes in silence for a moment. My mother scowled and turned away. My father nodded to his guests. 

#

In the process of writing this down, I seemed to remember something nonsensical. It happens in the recall process. Generally, I drop the nonsense details if they aren't vital to the story; I have to ignore them.

This time, when I pictured my mother talking about the book by Rachel Carson, I remembered her standing outside the door to our kitchen in Patricia Court. It could only have been a true, exterior door. It could only have exited from the kitchen. It could only have been placed high up, too, a full story off the ground so it required a staircase.

Clearly, such a house configuration is foolish. I've seen a lot of living spaces since I lived in College Park. In none of them have I seen an outside door attached to the side of the home in the middle of its kitchen and dining room. Who would design a space that way? Why would anyone buy into the design? Is it helpful to have an extra kitchen exit when the front door to the house is fifteen feet away? No.

Why have the side door leave the house at a full story above the ground? You'd have to turn a corner immediately as you stepped out. Or turn as you came in, bearing an armload of groceries.

And yet, when I pictured my mother talking about Rachel Carson, there she was outside the phantom-like side door next to the kitchen, talking with her friends as they leaned against the metal rails around the landing and stairs.

I doubted myself; I wanted to drive to the old family home and see. But we live in an era when that's not strictly necessary. It occurred to me I could take advantage of the most obvious alternative and browse to Google Street View. There, I found my childhood home. But the side of the house I wanted to see wasn't visible. I virtually stepped to the house next door. And turned right. And there it was, the side door of my childhood home precisely as I remembered it.

It makes no sense. It's up there, off the kitchen and dining room, one story off the ground.

#

When I was five or six, every drive on University Boulevard seemed to involve cleaning bug guts off windshields. In fact, everywhere we drove, whether to visit relatives, run errands, visit Amish country, spend a day at the beach, or go any place at all (well, anywhere except a big city), we had to clean the windshields. We did it constantly. We cleaned and cleaned. Gas stations provided good tools for it. 

Recently, on a trip through some states in the midwest that included North Dakota and Montana, I was reminded of the need to clean windshields. Driving through, we saw bugs hitting our car. I felt I'd been transported in time. Large insects have been missing on the east coast of the United States for most of my life. They stopped hitting windshields when I reached my teens. They died out so slowly, I didn't really notice. They had been a constant rain against the cars, once. But the downpour of bodies thinned out. And then it was gone. 

More noticeable than the insects, maybe, were the birds. When I was six, flocks of birds covered the sky at times, end to end. The swarms were big enough to cast checkered shadows from one side of the park to the other. Those thinned out, too, and although I still see birds, they travel in what my mother would have called small flocks.

"Very small," she would say. 

Yes, flocks are all small, now. 

#

A small detail: as I remember the house better, I can hear the clang of my feet on the steps outside the door off the kitchen and dining room. Those steps were metal. They made a ringing sound that, over the reach of decades, feels haunting - clear, memorable, but distant and forever lost. 

Not Even Not Zen 366: Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

It should never be illegal to write about daffodils

but maybe fifteen pages of verse 

on daffodils

should result in a warning from the court

instead of publication 

and eventual enshrinement in the curriculum,

that's all I'm saying. 

Maybe the poem is a metaphor for something else,

a beat-generation, wandering prose-story

not about yellow petals so much

as hookers, nuns, heroin, and blues music.

But as I'm scanning page one

I see a lot of green leaves and coronas,

floral tubes and ovaries,

tepals, pollen, and stamen.

The poet really loves this flower. 

And details.

A flip through pages two and three features 

petals hanging down or erect, 

bulbs and stems, 

stalks, sap, terminal buds

and a shotgun blast of small, round stains

where a previous reader sneezed

while drinking diet cola.

Skip to page seven, 

and, thank heavens, it's different.

We are down in the roots

in the dark, bacterial soil,

shrinking down with the bulb

full of black seeds

and maybe the the depths of the poet's soul 

or so I think we are meant to gather.

It's death and rebirth, death and rebirth,

all the way down.

Down to page fourteen, scanning ahead 

and sadly, the bud is bursting forth.

We're probably going to get a reprise of page one

as we're slipping off our

membranous tunic,

pushing away the corky stern

and seeing coronas once again,

like an acid trip without dropping acid,

full of tepals and floral tubes.

The last verse, on page fifteen, 

is still about daffodils.

There's not a broken bottle

nor a cigarette stub in sight,

not a hippie, nor an innocent child,

not even a poet,

someone to ponder life's lesson

or wonder what it's all about.

Well, it's about fifteen pages, dude.

And that's my poem

about a poem 

about fifteen pages

on daffodils. 

  -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 365: Just Another Pet

Just Another Pet

She was just another pet 

for fourteen years.

We let her have the lickings.

She served as our canine dishwasher, a job she loved

and we loved to see her take an interest in her work.

During dinner, she waited in the next room, 

studying our shadows in silence, tail at half wag,

thumping to full rhythm when I stopped by her hallway bed

to pet and hug, to let her sniff my ear and cheek. 

When the family rose from the table, she listened 

for the clink of a plate against the floor

and clambered from her cushion. 

It was as good as calling her name.

Summoning her brown, smooth body to work,

no longer hunting or herding, 

just watching the family, drumming her tail,

helping us clear plates 

- she wiggled herself all over

as she sniffed and started to clean.

Now I stand at the sink 

and every plate I pick up, I turn and look,

searching for her. 

Her bed is not empty. We have other pets.

Today, her favorite cat rests there, alone.

But I remember her. 

And I put down the plate to think. 

I have adjusted

except when I remember her job.

I sigh and rinse the dishes

and turn to pick up a bowl, unwashed,

and think of her again. 

 -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 364: Biomythography - Note 104: Riots in the Streets

Riots in the Streets

When I was seven years old, anti-war protesters flooded onto college campuses across the nation. Hand-drawn signs, long hair, people in sunglasses, and fists raised high in the air appeared in the news. I didn't understand what the protesters wanted, who the 'pigs' were, why we were involved in a war overseas or, well, pretty nearly anything. I lived within walking distance of a university, though, and I dimly understood the adults were up to something. 

"There's a riot on campus," my mother told my father one day. 

She had heard a news report on the radio, apparently, and glanced out the window. She could see the signs of a problem. 

"If I can get out to the store," she continued, "I'll never get back."

She cancelled the errand, for which I previously had been drafted. Now I had most of the afternoon free. 

"Go out," she told me. "Shoo, go and play."

After I changed into my stained pants, the ones my mother insisted were the best for outside games, I headed out to round up other kids in the neighborhood. When I marched from door to door, though, I found my friends either weren't home or couldn't come out. I hiked across the street into the park. For a few minutes, I threw stones in the ball field and pretended I was throwing strikes. After a while, I climbed the flood levees to gaze down at the fields below.

The sky was blue with light, wispy clouds. The air was warm but not hot. If there had been someone to play with, it would have been a pretty good afternoon. 

After a while, my younger brother wandered out of the front door. He was a long way off, but my house was in plain view, so I noticed him. I watched him search our yard for a while and then catch sight of me across the road. I hopped down from the dike wall and marched south. We met at the street and I made sure it was safe for him to cross.  

"No game?" he asked as we met. Together, we hopped the ditch to march back into the park. 

"Nah." I grabbed a stick and threw it at a tree. "No one can come out."

"Okay." He pointed north along the levee wall and across the big ditch to the traffic jam on University Boulevard. "What's that?"

"The riot, I guess." I threw up my arms. I wasn't sure what a riot meant, exactly, but it seemed to involve a lot of stopped cars. As my brother and I watched, drivers started to get out of their vehicles. They knew they were in for a long wait, whatever the reason.

"Can we go see?" my brother asked. 

I glanced back toward our white, aluminum-sided house. We had no parents in the yard. They wouldn't know if we crossed the dike and ditch.

"Okay." I nodded.

We trudged across the two ball fields to the north slope of the levee. When we crested the slope, I could see a man outside of his green sedan, wearing a grey suit and smoking a cigarette. In front of him, a woman sat slumped in her white convertible with her eyes closed. In the lane behind, a couple men were talking through their open windows. They looked grown up and boring. 

I climbed down the north side of the levee into the ditch and back up to the road with my brother following. He grabbed onto the tall reeds of the cat-o-nine-tails to pull himself across the rivulet of water between slopes. That looked like a good idea, so I did it, too. 

At the top, we reached the road and I headed east along the rows of cars. There was a young woman with blonde hair, flowers in her hair, and sunglasses. She looked all sorts of fashionable and cool sitting in her VW Beetle. When I asked her if she wanted to play, though, she gave me a startled look. She seemed kindly enough after that moment of surprise but she waved me further east, where a quartet of college-aged folks were kicking a ball around. 

They seemed awfully big and scary. I stopped to stare. My brother came to a halt behind me. 

After a moment to think and observe, I marched two cars further down the line, where a long-haired, clean-shaven young man had gotten out of his car. He wasn't smoking, just standing and resting.

"Do you want to play?" I asked him.

"Huh." He gave me a thoughtful look. The girl in the car in front of him waved to him for some reason, as if to encourage him. He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement. Then he turned his attention back to me. "Well, did you kids bring a ball or something?"

"No." I knocked myself in the head with my fist. My little brother had gotten a pretty great idea, it seemed, but we hadn't come ready for it. The young man frowned for a moment. Then he turned and gazed at me out of the corner of his eye.

"Can you throw a frisbee?" he asked.

"Yeah!" I hopped on my toes. Frisbees were kind of new. Not every kid could throw one. My brother couldn't. But I could. 

The young man smiled at us. He walked to the back of his car, popped open the trunk, and pulled out a fluorescent green disk. It looked battered but it was in better shape than the red one my mother had bought for me, probably because I had used mine to play with my dog. 

"Hey, you're pretty good!" he shouted as I made my first throw to him. I managed to keep a straight line between rows of cars. He caught the disk and snapped it right back to me. The game was on. The young student maneuvered my brother and I between rows of cars, motioning us to take different strategic spots. Half of the other drivers had stepped out of their vehicles. They made room for us, maybe because they saw my brother, only four and trying hard to learn. 

In retrospect, the other drivers must have gotten tired of my brother and I slamming the frisbee against their windows or skimming it along their hoods and roofs. Every time they started to shout at us, though, with one middle aged man going so far as to get out of his car, they took a look at who we were and stopped. Even the middle aged fellow sort of slumped and said, "Hey, be more careful."

"We'll move back down the road a bit," volunteered our young man, who was probably a college student.

"Good." The fellow sat back down, grumpy but mollified. 

We played long enough to switch up games, trying someone's softball, realizing it was dangerous, then going back to the frisbee again. Sometimes we paused to talk to other drivers. Around us, members of the unmoving traffic jam gave my brother sips from their soda cans, played card games standing up, talked about the news, and played music on their radios.

Finally, up ahead, the young man with the frisbee saw movement. 

"Okay," he said. "Looks like this is it. You need to get out of the road."

"Aw." My brother couldn't see the cars starting to roll. He didn't want to stop.

"Are you guys going to be okay?" asked the young man. The woman who had sat in her car most of the time got out to check on us. She wanted to make sure we stayed safe, too. 

"Yeah." I pointed towards my house. It was hard to make out across the park and the line of trees on Metzerott Road but it was still in my line of sight. "We'll just climb down to the playground."

"Wave to us from the field, okay?" said the woman. 

From that day on, whenever I heard there was a riot somewhere, I rushed to my window to check the traffic on University Boulevard. Four times more, if I'm remembering correctly, I discovered gridlock again, parked cars with people standing beside them. I always rushed out to play. That's what a riot meant to me at the time, a chance to play in the street with drivers who had nowhere to go. 

The college kids on their way to the University of Maryland would get out of their vehicles if they weren't already. They'd play guitars, throw footballs, kick beach balls, share their drinks (one man tried to give my brother and I each a beer but the other college students frowned him down), and they would generally just talk and relax. I would play until the brake lights ahead started to flicker. Then the grown men would say, "Sorry, kid, here's your ball back. We've got to go."

Not Even Not Zen 363: Biomythography - Note 103: How Does It Feel?

How Does It Feel?

Four of us hunkered down in the recreation room. Like any nine year old, I wiggled into place in front of the television, which was our steel-grey Zenith Chromacolor. I took my seat on the checkered, tan and brown footrest. That thing was a piece of furniture we never used for our feet. My brothers and I had turned it into our favorite backless chair. 

After my father pulled out the start knob, he slowly spun the television dial to channel 7, our local ABC station. For a moment, I stared at the faint, yellow glow of the station number. With a rush of static, the big tube hummed to life. The colors swirled for a moment. When they came into a faded sort of focus, they showed us a stadium with a gravel track. Runners had finished a race, apparently. They walked, half-stumbling, hands on hips. 

This was another night of the 1972 Olympics. After a two day break, the games had resumed. Earlier, I had watched announcements about how ABC was broadcasting the events live to our television all the way from Munich, Germany. The production team ran articles on the satellite technologies they were using. They were obviously proud and I was excited for them.

Mostly, in the track and field events, I focused on the decathlon. That's what my father announced as the event determining "the best athlete in the world."

After a commercial, the scene cut to a different event, a medal ceremony. 

A reporter pushed a microphone in the face of an athlete in a track suit and asked, "How does it feel?"

I turned to my parents, perplexed, and said, "Why did he ask that?"

Reporters had done it a couple of times before. Now I was noticing how irritating it was. My father took his cigar out of his mouth for a moment to answer. 

"I don’t know," he said. He shrugged. Behind him to his left, my mother grunted.

"Didn't he work his whole life for the race?" I pointed to the athlete on the television. My parents had told me most of them trained for ten or fifteen years to get this good. 

"Yes." My father nodded.

"Doesn’t everybody know how he feels? Can’t everybody see it?"

"Everyone can see it," my mother agreed.

"Then why ask?" It was such a waste of time. I knew I could be learning about how to throw a javelin, or to run faster, or take a racing dive in swimming, or something more satisfying than this, anything. Anything but this embarrassment of stumbled phrases applied to what I already knew. 

"It’s just a question," my mother said.

I thought about it for half a minute.

"Don’t the reporters have brains?" I asked her. I tried to imagine how they could fail to know how someone felt, especially when the feelings were so obvious. 

"Yeah. They think we don’t have any," my father answered.

#

The sports-reporter question of 'how do you feel' became a standard one, accepted everywhere. We hear it asked at almost every major event as if it's part of a ritual, which of course it is. It even comes with ritualized responses. We know, as an audience, that the question is meaningless and the answer is another step in the ritual. People would miss it if interviewers stopped asking it, even though everyone pretty much knows how everyone else feels in the moment. 

Not Even Not Zen 362: Biomythography - Note 102: Embarrassment

Embarrassment

As teenagers, we mostly live in a state of mortification - some of us, at least. In my teens, I couldn't bear to have people stare at me when things were going wrong. To my mind, they always were. But I also agonized if no one noticed me.

In tenth grade at Sidwell Friends, I correctly used the quip "How gauche" in a sarcastic conversation. Unfortunately, I had learned the word from reading, not from hearing it, so I pronounced it "gow-chee." This is how I said it to the son of a diplomat who was already in third year French. He burst into laughter, pointed at me, and called over other students of French and everyone else nearby so he could tell them how I'd mispronounced it. 

In retrospect, I sympathize. It’s still sort of funny, even to me. But the fact that I remember the incident is an indication of the emotion behind my teenaged self-reminders of Just Shut Up And Here's Why. Everything I said or did seemed horribly wrong in some way. 

Later, in a different school, I took theater classes, where I did embarrassing things because they were required. And I found I could do them in character, which somehow made it better. 

In my early college years, I came to a decision to let go of my desires (a process that took around three years, starting at sixteen, or seven years starting when I read Siddhartha at age twelve, or one year when I decided to really get serious about my practice). At around the age of nineteen, my bouts of severe embarrassment faded along with my desires. Then came dropping back into college, where my friends hated my lack of desires and said so, repeatedly. I considered deliberate reattachment. And with reattachment to the reasons for suffering came troubled emotions.

This time, though, I could choose to let go of them. It was interesting, a trick I tried to share in my conversations with friends. No one wanted to hear about it. The benefit remained mostly private. I continued to let go of attachments selectively. 

And I chose to lean into the embarrassment. And to enjoy it. Because I could.

In my early twenties, I stood in the parking lot outside a popular bar. I was talking to a young woman who had invited me out. And now she was turning me down. She had changed her mind three or four times during the night. Yes, then no, then yes, then no. She was the sort of person who did that, and who didn't like doing anything at all if she wasn't sure about it. This was the type of romantic experience I had once shied away from. But I leaned in. 

"I know this must be confusing for you," she said. 

"It's okay."

“Well, it’s even more confusing for me!” She wailed. And I realized that although I was enjoying the embarrassment of the situation, she was agonized by it even though she was the one calling the shots, or so I thought. (Eventually, and not in any parking lot, she explained the traumatic events that seemed to leave her so conflicted about everything.)

In college, I found myself confronted by a writing professor. 

"I wouldn't have accepted you if I knew you wrote science fiction."

He talked about how my writing was worthwhile but my liking science fiction was not. I needed to have more appropriate tastes, ones that rose to the proper level of a college intellect. I immediately agreed I would not turn in any science fiction in his class, which should have made him happy. That’s what he said he wanted. Instead, in the face of my acquiescence, he got increasingly embarrassed and defensive - although he eventually accepted me on those terms. 

And of course I ran into many more confrontations, more situations that should have seemed embarrassing for me but my leaning into it had gotten so fast, so reflexive, that I might have seemed like I was seeking out the situations.

Of course, sometimes people would confront me with the idea of shaming me about something they thought was embarrassing, most often about sex, and I would just sort of lean into the conversation and make the issue bigger and bigger, so that everyone around us felt the tension. Even the person who initially approached me would realize the situation had gotten weird and, somehow, extra confrontational.

It was always sort of funny, always sort of fun. Even now, it makes me laugh. Because I used to run away from embarrassment so hard. And at some point, I learned to lean in. It made so much difference.

If I had written about this in my twenties I would have stopped there. But after a while, I also stopped leaning into making things more embarrassing because, as it turns out, that’s just a bit mean and there’s no need. Unless someone is trying to be cruel, of course, and they're usually not, very much. 

Not Even Not Zen 361: Biomythography - Note 101: The Fourth Plane

The Fourth Plane

In the fall when I was seventeen, I lived alone in a basement apartment. The apartment sat within a mile of the University of Maryland.

This wasn't a good year for me at UMD. It was a fast-food-working year. It was full of relationships failing, college courses flunking, over-drinking, and a bit of learning. But the learning wasn't scholarly. For distraction from my various failures, I had access to a television and a radio. One afternoon, I turned on the radio while I was cleaning. 

"... the lighter side of the news."

Radio news was important. I couldn't afford the newspaper. So when the story resumed, I turned to make my bed, so I could stay close.

"When a fire broke out at an asylum in Massachusetts, the staff fled. They left the residents locked in their rooms with no means to escape the fire." The narrator paused long enough for me to wonder why this was light news. "Fortunately, a set of patients had prepared for this eventuality.

"These patients escaped their locked hallway. They went to the safe where the master keys were kept. They knew the combination. And when they opened it, keys in hand, they started freeing other patients. Because these patients, now the ones in charge, had planned well."

Again, the announcer paused for effect. He was pretty good at it.

"The patients not only freed the ones who were trapped in their rooms, they lined them up. They marched everyone out of the building and lined them up again on the front lawn. Who were these patients?"

In the background of the radio studio, I could hear the rustle of a piece of paper.

"They were the paranoids. The patients diagnosed with paranoia were the ones who were prepared."

After I finished making my bed, I got out the vacuum and started on the recreation room. I chuckled about the news until I sighed about my looming course homework.

By the end of the week, I found myself still thinking about the radio article. I started to wonder why I found the story reassuring. Maybe it was because it reaffirmed my general approach.

I had a certain amount of wariness, usually, and it likely came from the decade or more that my father crept up behind me while I was distracted. He always slapped me on the back of the head. Those years of getting hit tended to make me slightly aware, even when I was otherwise lost in my reading. I would keep a sense of the noises around me, the scratch of pencil against paper, the click of the screen door latch, the squeak of a floorboard. Often, I would react too late and get hit. But I had built up a level of awareness, however inconsistent it might be.

One of my younger brothers would launch sneak attacks, now and then. It was another reason to stay wary, especially out in the yard. In the road, of course, cars would speed through. Four times, they ran over our pets. I retained some awareness there, too, although the road would vibrate under my feet. Even if I hadn't been paying attention before, I could feel a car coming.

Awareness was useful in the woods, where I could be silent enough, sometimes, to see animals. It was useful in public school, where the football players were not able to knock my books out of my hands and I was able to tease them into giving up.

Years later, in the fall of 2001, I wondered if my background level of paranoia was normal. I stayed home from work to tend to my sick kids on September 11. I turned on the news. When I returned to the room with diaper wipes, a television announcer told me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

My response was, "Again?"

No one had driven a plane into the World Trade Center before, of course, but the place had been bombed. And bombed again. And there was another bombing attempt. And again. I had figured someone would try a passenger jet just because planes had always seemed so easy to weaponize if you could take over the cockpit. A series of hijacking incidents had, in the past generation, indicated it wasn't hard to take over.

A week later, I visited my friends Richard and Andrea. Richard had seen and felt the attack on the Pentagon that day. He and everyone around him had known the explosion meant they were in an emergency situation. But he hadn't been able to call Andrea with the airwaves clogged. His phone had turned into a useless block of metal that day. His standard modes of transportation had ground to a halt. The subway had closed down and turned away passengers. Cars had flooded the streets and halted, blocked by one another. Taxis couldn't get anywhere. Richard had to hike out from the center of the city to get home.

"What do you mean, you expected the attacks?" Richard asked me, rather reasonably, when I said I felt they were years late.

"It's just that we've been bombed before. And at the World Trade Center before. And the Pentagon is a military target."

"You weren't surprised at all?"

"Well, yes," I replied after a moment of consideration. "I was surprised the buildings fell."

That calmed Richard for a moment. He nodded.

"Everyone was surprised by that part," he agreed.

"But they used passenger jets," said Andrea. "That was new."

"Not ... really." I flashed back to all the hijackings and mis-uses of planes. Andrea was right, strictly speaking. No one had quite done this. But I was right, too, if only I could articulate the thoughts I hadn't spoken. "I've been expecting planes to get used in attacks."

"Why?" asked Richard.  

It was a hard part to describe. The pattern of attacks seemed readily evident. What about them seemed less obvious to my friends? They seemed to be constantly expressing their shock about the planes in New York, the jet in DC, and the fourth one crashing over Pennsylvania. And why did so many people forget about the heroism of the passengers in the fourth plane? 

The fourth flight, I realized, is where I automatically put myself. Even on September 11, when the news had broken late that fighter jets were scrambling toward the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, I had thought of being a passenger caught up in the battle.

Our country had been attacked many times. And we had responded with violence. And we had bombed towns. And we had supported one side or other in wars. We had done a lot of things other countries would say deserved revenge. How could people not know, in the face of so many attempts to murder us, that people wanted to murder us? It seemed incredible.

Part of our national awareness problem was that so many people lived lives of peace. War makers, then and now, are a minority. Another difficulty is the distance. It’s easy to forget about remote horrors.

But I think the main difference is a variation in our personal senses of revenge. Most people seem to give up on it after a while. They have problems believing that someone whose brother was killed by an American missile might be committed to acts of vengeance a decade later.

I remember burning with the desire for vengeance as a child. Maybe mostly as a child, although sometimes as a teen. And I had exacted it, too. I had waited for years, sometimes, to take revenge. My brothers plotted for years, too. I thought plotting for years was normal. Mostly, I planned for my defense. But I fought for what I perceived as justice. I imagined committing murders, dying in righteous battles, and more.

"If I thought Americans killed my friends, I'd hate Americans, too." I considered the problem for a moment longer. "Well, maybe."

I didn't know if that was actually true. Even when I had wanted vengeance as a child, I had wanted it due to specific incidents with specific perpetrators involved. I knew who deserved cruel, cruel justice. I hadn't often been in a situation where I didn't know the perpetrator and, in those few times I didn't, I had tried to find out rather than committing random violence.

That's why, mentally, I was on the fourth plane. I genuinely expected attacks and it wasn’t that I thought I could do anything useful about them. Sometimes in my best mental scenarios I would be caught at a disadvantage and die. But in all my plans, really, I expected to die trying. I would always attempt some sort of defense, even if the situation was hopeless.  

Between my watchfulness and my sense of how people seek revenge, I found that I had been waiting for the World Trade Center attacks for years. It made me feel like a paranoid in contrast to my friends. But in my defense, the expectation was right.

People want justice. They will plot for years to achieve it. Then they will commit injustice because they lack the social power, expertise, and sense of dispassion to achieve real justice. Recognizing this seems cynical. Maybe it even seems paranoid. But it's true.