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Letter to …

Mum died about ten years ago, now.

It’s the way of things. If we are ordinarily fortunate, we all become orphans eventually.

Before she died, when she was living in Woy-Woy with her third husband-ish person, Mum decided to write a little autobiography. She had joined a writers group, but I suspect that it was wanting to write about her life that prompted joining the group, rather than the other way around. I kind of get it – I have wanted to do a similar thing for a long time.

She gave me a copy, of course. I never read it. The reason why, well, I think it was mostly anger. Decades-long, icy anger. I’m a cold, angry, unforgiving person who holds lifelong grudges that affect no-one but me, and there’s reasons for that. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven anyone, ever. Well, maybe one. Stewart – who you don’t know – pointed it out a few years ago. I was impressed. But that’s another story and will be told another time.

I didn’t read Mum’s biography because it was possible it might change my ideas about her, about events in the past. I didn’t want my ideas changed. She named it “Standing on The Rock”, and you would understand that I also didn’t particularly want to subject myself to a bunch of Jesus stuff and “I pray every night that Paul might find his way back to our Father in Heaven”.

Anyway. Like I said: she died about ten years ago. I was … I was looking for spare vacuum-cleaner bags to deal with the ants nest in my water meter-box, and the book was there tucked away in the closet. Next to that one painting of hers that I took from the house when we emptied it out. Like other pending jobs on my fridge, the time had come to deal with it.

It didn’t change my ideas. Or didn’t it? I was a couple of paragraphs in it – the one kid who “never gave her any trouble”. She glossed over a lot, of course, respecting my privacy. There was no come to Jesus in it. But – I was going to say it didn’t change my ideas, and it has, a little. Mum was a person dealing with lifelong, crippling ADD. I had already kinda worked that out, but hadn’t understood that it had conditioned every facet of her life. Right from her childhood in the 1920’s. I mean, I still think that she was a profoundly weak and useless person who ought never to have had kids, but now I understand better why. Maybe I’m on a path to forgiving her, too, alongside Dad. It doesn’t change anything. But I feel a little better about it all.

You should read dude’s message to you, man.

I wasn’t going to say anything, was going to just hang back and observe. But that’s just making the same mistake.

Are you worried that reading dude’s message might change your ideas? That makes no sense, you know. The potential you an hour from now who has read the thing is still yourself, and nothing that that person thinks is anything that you would disagree with. Not reading it is a self-limiting, self-sabotaging move. You are cutting off your own options – why? Because you don’t trust yourself? Because you think it might do emotional damage? 1d4 to Wis, or something? How long do you want to stew in anger, anyway? 20, 30 years? Like me?

Knowing is always better than not knowing. And when all’s said and done, it might change nothing at all.

I’m not a particularly good friend, as a few people have discovered over the years. Not very good at it. My own biography will be another tale, like Mum’s, of someone crippled by lifelong ADD and more than a pinch of Schizoid Personality Disorder. But if you came to my place hoping for a little advice, then that advice is to just read the fucking thing.

Sincerely,

City boy

Another time, another place, a possible future or past …

Sam Monday &co stride into town. A brief conversation, and each go their separate way, agreeing to meet later. Sam wanders about, taking the temper of their new temporary home. A nice, law-abiding place – hardly any pickpockets, streets swept. Market, government and temple district, cheap homes for the poor. All as it should be. Not a lot of work, except the occasional divorce case.

Sam finds a quiet corner, out of the breeze, and lights up a cheap cigarette. Under cover of taking a smoke break, he lets his senses expand.

The town – what you’d expect around these parts. Quiet and law-abiding because over all hangs a presence: cold, reptilian, old to the point of agelessness, and underneath it all utterly uncaring of the tiny lives scuttling about on the street. Vain and selfish. Yeah – a dragon town. Everyone knows they each only live on sufferance, but it’s mostly ok. People will put up with a lot coming from a dragon that they would never put up with from a mere mortal tyrant.

But there’s something else. That pub – The Sailors Arms – why does the sailor on the sign out front have crab claws? Why does that building have a front door opening out onto empty air on the second storey, and why does it make some strange sense? Where from this feeling, this inkling that there’s a logic to it? And why is that wall over there completely blank? No ornament, no features, no nothing at all. A brief glimpse of the Dark Tapestry, of the spaces between the stars.

And from somewhere, an odd odour. An alchemist might recognise it as some sort of organic solvent. To Sam, it seems sweetish, an unnatural chemical scent carrying the message “this will definitely give you cancer if you keep breathing it”.

It’s not one thing. It’s nothing definite. It’s a dozen little things, a thousand little clues, all overwhelmed by the normal activity of everyday life. Yeah: above, the dragon. Definitely. But below, something alien. An unnatural intelligence making its influence felt.

Sam stubs out his cigarette. “Aberrations,” he thinks. “Something intelligent. Why couldn’t it be demons? Demons are easy.”

For a moment, a brief impulse to keep his cards close to his chest. An old, ingrained, hard-earned habit. But no, he’s working with a team now. They are going to have to know what they are dealing with.

Name	Sam Monday
Class	Ranger
Class ability	Primeval Awareness
Favoured terrain	Urban

The USA and The Poor

Let’s talk about the United States of America and The Poor.

But first, let’s talk about The Bible. It’s an easy segue – a lot of americans are christians. Evangelical, denominational. Notional. Heck – 2% are Jews, and we’ll kinda be covering them, too, when we look at the Old Testament.

One of the big things in the OT was the sacrifice system. 10% of the increase of agricultural produce gets offered to God (capital G, we are using the word as a name for a particular person). That’s a lot of grain, a lot of meat. Some of it was burned as burnt offerings, but that was not the majority rare – burnt offerings were for specific sins. No, most of it was simply cooked. The altar, let’s recognise, was a BBQ. The grain was offered as a “wave offering”. They’d just wave it before the altar and that constituted offering it.

So, what happened to all this produce? What happened to the cooked meat? Sure the priests ate their fill, but we are talking about 10% of everything produced by the entire nation. What about the rest of it?

What happened to it was that it was given out to the poor.

We see this in the New Testament, where St Paul discusses if it is ok to eat meat that has been offered to idols. He concludes that idols are fake, so it’s perfectly fine. But why were christians doing this in the first place? Because if you are poor, that was where you’d get meat. The greek and roman religion worked exactly the same way. In India, they offer milk to Ganesha by pouring it over his statue. What happens to the milk? Is it just left to run on the ground? Of course not: the priests collect it.

The church has for millennia been a society’s welfare department. Even up to the early 1900s in Britain the church tax, the poor tax has been a thing. Still is, in some places in Europe.

Why are there church hospitals? Why are there church schools? Because there always have been. For as long as there has been civilisation. While the wealthy and powerful concerned themselves with trade and war, it was the church of the day that built schools for the commons, infirmaries for the poor, mental asylums for the poor, orphanages for discarded children, that registered births, deaths, and marriages of the commons. The government-sanctioned church has always been the welfare department, part of the government, with power to levy taxes, to make laws. Not to say that it always worked, or even worked well. But it was the church that did this stuff.

(Note, incidentally, what a nonsense this fact makes of the evangelical claim that christians ought to tithe to their churches today. The preachers just trouser the money, because there’s no structures in place to do what should be done with it.)

With that context, let’s look at the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And there it is. Right from the very foundations, right in the constitution, the guys in wigs and knee-breeches declare “we ain’t paying for that shit”. It was a young country, with fruited plains, and surely no-one was trapped in poverty. After all – becoming a land owner was just a matter of shooting a few natives. If anyone was poor, it was their own fault.

What I’m saying is: it’s not new. The plight of the San Fransisco drug addicts, the structural barriers to the government doing anything about it, are not new. The dismissal of the mentally ill, the disabled veteran, the pregnant young woman as being any concern of the government is not new.

Most of all: it’s not conservative, in the sense that conservativism is to do with religious values. Quite the opposite: it’s to do with liberalism. Economic liberalism frees the well-off from being obliged to have concern for people less well-off. Right from the very beginning.

It won’t be fixed. It can’t be fixed. Disdain for those that don’t “make it” is part of America’s DNA.