THINGS THAT AMAZE ME
A Seasonal 2000/2001 Musing
R. S. James
1.. Skeletons of dinosaurs that lived 200 million yrs. ago. Both the size and age amaze
me. Or a mummy that was alive 4000 yrs ago. Wow! I hope no nosey bastards are looking at me 4000 yrs from now commenting……“notice the primitive brain”…
2.. People that give up a comfortable and safe life to help others in some unsafe,
unhealthy, decrepit environment. They are better than I.
3.. Sex. The diversity of human sexual inclinations, drives, and practices amazes me.
What is it all about anyway?
4. The insignificance of self. On an expressway or at an airport I just gaze at the mass of
humanity, all scurrying hither and thither, each one trying so hard to believe their life is important, each believing in different ways to the same or different God, that they matter. It just makes one wonder.
5. The fact that Jesus and Confucius and Buddha and Muhammad and perhaps other
religion founders never wrote anything. All their teachings and laws were written by others after they were gone. It just seems strange.
6. The inability of our society to understand the quickly approaching consequences of
overpopulation stress on the environment. It can’t be stupidity, just some sort of inherent necessity for denial.
7. That a complicated finely tuned human body can live so long. I mean, there are so
many possibilities for malfunction resulting in death, and yet most of us live a long time.
8. While most all of us strive so hard for money and fame, most of those who achieve it,
rarely, judging by their biographies and autobiographies, ever achieve much
satisfaction. They seem unusually tormented. This seems so strange. Perhaps our goals are misdirected.
9. The vast number of people in the world who live in misery with nothing---no money,
no property, no job, no security. How can they stand it?
10. The unfairness of life. Like my birth gave me my religion, my economic
environment, my looks, my town, state, country of origin, my peers, etc. What saved me from being born in Kosovo or in Palestinian territory, etc? The smartest thing I ever did was choose my parents carefully. Sure. A lot of what we are proud of is just good fortune.
11. People who survive tornadoes when their house is smashed to smithereens. Almost
all survive when it seems almost all should be dead.
12. Looking at a tree that is 2000 years old and still alive. Or that the early pioneers
actually cut such trees down just to watch them fall.
13. Treating drug abuse as a criminal, not a medical problem and then launching a ‘war
on drugs’ which creates an illicit drug trade which suckers the poorest of the young into selling drugs, then throwing them in jail, leaving their kids fatherless, turning their communities into violent war zones, overcrowding our jails, and leaving us with the world record for the highest percentage of citizens in jail. It is simply madness and has accomplished absolutely nothing.
14. People who torture other humans or animals. I can’t relate to the motivation behind
this at all. A person must have an awful lot of pent-up anger to do these things.
15. Computers and computer chips. I have difficulty visualizing how a car works---but
computers? Oh my!
16. Humor. I’m glad I laugh at so many things, many of which others may not, but how
come only humans laugh and why do we laugh? Keisha never laughs. Neither did
my mother at some really funny shit.
17. The earth. They say the earth has existed 4.6 billion years. Where was it before
that? Didn’t something at some point have to come from nothing? This is the question that drives home to me how helplessly limited my mind is.
18. Sleep. What is it anyway? I like it, but what does it do? And why is it now that I
can get as much as I want, I seem to need less? Is this some kind of joke?
19. Birds migrating thousands of miles and returning to the same area next year. Not
only is it brilliant mental activity of some sort, but how does a little bitty bird manage it physically, sometimes over oceans? Don’t they get hungry?
20. How the pioneers made it through the winter.
21. How the pioneers could live with 10-12 people in a little 1 or 2 room cabin. The lack
of privacy would drive me insane. And really, I need, just for me, 13 rooms for all my ‘stuff’. Nobody had much ‘stuff’ back then I guess. I wonder whether pursuing all this ‘stuff’ has anything to do with the fact that there are 5X more homicides/100,000 population today than in 1900? I, of course got good ‘stuff’. Some of your ‘stuff’ is witless.
22. Abraham Lincoln. Everything about his life, his intellect, his personality, and his
physical uniqueness is so intriguing and mysterious from so many aspects. Few that ever examine his life very closely do not get pulled into the Lincoln ‘cult’.
23. Love. Most movies have love as a major theme, and it seems so neat, but looking at
most couples it seems different, a little less neat. A lot of couples seem less like love birds, and more like trapped antagonists in a tenuous truce, each treading warily about the other, like any minute a skirmish could lead to open warfare.
24. Death. If there is no afterlife what could possibly be the reason for living? I don’t
fear death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
25. Salvation. Something strange and incomprehensible here. Like the playing field is
not level. We pretty much inherit our religion and the deeply religious are often the most intolerant and rigid souls on the face of the earth. It doesn’t make sense.
26. Gun nuts. Like how can they get so ballistic over any suggestion that, in these times,
maybe gun ownership should be an earned privilege, not a sacred right. Guns mean so much to them, yet any true tales of how a gun saved anyone’s life is a rarity. If I decide to nail their ass I doubt I will do it while they have a cocked gun aimed at me; more likely through the window as they doze in a chair. On the other hand, I feel safer with my 2 guns in the house. Amazing two-faced antagonist here.
27. Presidential races or being President. Where do these guys find the time and stamina to deal with all these issues and all these people? I think to relieve tension and retain my sanity I would need more than one ‘Monica’ kneeling in the wings. Tom Dewey, having been told he won the Presidency over Truman, commented to his wife: “How will you feel having sex with the President of the Country?” The next morning, when it was clear Dewey had lost, his wife asked: “Is Harry coming here or am I going to the White House?”
28. Crediting any President since Eisenhower with a quality quotation. Since Presidents
or Presidential contenders no longer write their own speeches why the hell do we credit them with the quotation? Shouldn’t it go to the speech writer who put the statement in the speech? “Ask not what your country can do for you”……. Now some of these mental midgets go down in history as having said some pretty admirable things, when the truth is they just read what somebody else had written.
29. People who go on shows like the Jerry Springer Show and make an ass out of
themselves. I guess some people will settle for attention of any kind. If I make an ass out of myself I do it in a musing to a restricted number of people.
30. The number of times we can laugh at sex jokes. Like perhaps after laughing at sex
thousands of times we should no longer find the subject funny. There must be a circuit built in our brain that says whenever the conversation is about sex, laugh. I think if you just blurted out in a group the word “sex”, everyone would just automatically laugh. Try and say something serious about sex in a group conversation---I think it would be nigh impossible: “My wife was very tired last night so I just masturbated”. Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha. “My husband has a urinary tract infection and so it is painful for him to have an erection” HA., Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha. Sex is a comedian’s best friend.
31. The fact that the most vulnerable citizens, in need of the most attention, rarely vote.
So the distance between the wealthiest and poorest in society just grows and grows and grows.
32. That anyone would bungee jump.
33. How Minnie Pearl could say “How-dee” a thousand times and each time get a laugh. If I say “Good-dee-biii” and wear a funny hat can I make a career out of it? Maybe I am on to something, is Hee-Haw still on television?
34. That people spend big bucks and an entire day to attend a football game in frigid
miserable weather seeing less, getting no analysis or play by play or rerun of plays as they would if they stayed home and watched on TV.
35. Addiction to anything. What makes us so compulsive about certain things, like
running till we drop, or eating till we become a whale, or drinking till we become an alcoholic, or working till we have a nervous breakdown, or fucking around till we die of AIDS? Is there something wrong with us?
36. If Jesus never sought an elaborate building to preach in, or had his audiences sing
hymns, or play bingo, or form social clubs (youth groups, women’s groups, prayer groups, etc), or collected money, why do we? Maybe we are smarter.
37. That people are so different from each other, not just in looks, but in practically
every other way too. What is the matter with the rest of you?
38. The physical or mental abilities some people have. It makes me feel so limited.
Some people can talk about a subject in such a way that I have no idea what they are talking about, and it won’t do any good for them to repeat it either.
39. How well behaved all my cats have been and I’ve had cats since the 60’s. All the
things broken or damaged in the house have always been by me. The cats have never damaged anything except for one broken glass and one roll of toilet paper. Is this some sort of record?
40. That something so funny to me can be so unfunny to others. What is wrong with
some of you?
41. That a movie I thought was so funny when young can be so unfunny at an older age.
They say a person never really changes, but we do, I for the better, you for the worst, and Rick just stays below scale.
42. How marriage can either be the greatest thing in the world or the worst thing to ever happen to a person. It seems like the happiest in the world are the happily married,the most unhappy are those in a bad marriage or after a bitter divorce, and the most peculiar are the single, myself the exception.
43. The human brain. Ask any physiologist to explain an original thought and it will be
a short discourse.
44. That logic so often betrays reality. Who put all this together anyway? Is there
something wrong with God? Did He die? Did Bullet eat Him? Maybe God looked at what He created, saw it was a blunder and walked away. I have been looking for Him, but there are so many places He could hide. Maybe if we sacrificed Rick, God would come back. Better yet, all of Texas. But I think God likes me, the rest of you kind of irritate Him so knock it off.
45. That human males are not totally exhausted. While a typical human female produces around 400 fertile eggs in her lifetime, a human male produces billions of sperm. Even when a male looks like he is just sitting doing nothing he is really churning out thousands and thousands of sperm. This is hard work, not to mention the effort required to set sperm free. Bill tries not to produce sperm during a church service, but his restless squirming indicates otherwise. Women stop producing eggs around 45 years of age, but males, the more stubborn and optimistic sex, just slow down, but never stop. I always reprimand elderly men on the street: “Just stop it you dirty old man, stop it.” Rick even does it in public, even on the job, even at the kitchen table while his mother is eating. When Rick was younger his mother used to yell: “Don’t stand there generating sperm with a smirk on your face while I am talking to you!”
46. That issues, which determine whether the next generation will have a good life, are rarely discussed by citizens or their politicians, while the private sexual capers and peculiarities of politicians, which have zero bearing on the affairs of the nation, the world or the future, become the subject of tiresome commentary and investigations.
47. That most of the vociferous pontificators about private sexual behaviors are riddled with past or present sexual peculiarities/indiscretions/hangups of their own,
or are themselves least comfortable with, or fulfilled by, their own sexual self. So there we have it, we laugh about sex all the time and then use it to hit others over the head, never of course, showing any interest in any public discussion of our own sexual life, as boring or as weird as it might be or not be. Perhaps we need a law whereby anyone who wishes to talk publicly about another’s sex life ought to be required to provide full and equally detailed public disclosure about their own sex life. That would at least give us more laughs.
Seasonal best wishes and may God, in his infinite kindness, give you the patience to
understand me, and the good fortune to have the best of New Years for both you and those you love. But only if I am included. Otherwise I hope God strikes you dead and a pack of stray dogs drag your body through downtown Chicago. Oh, just joking.
