teaser from chapter "revelation" Warehoused...

I drove home with the tires on the old Ford squealing on the hot asphalt. Ronnie lives back in Collington Harbor on the water, and the road to his house twists and turns like a mountain road. We have both spent lots of time driving in the mountains so we love it, but most people around here fear that road because they drive drunk. Most people around here like to close one eye when they drive and that type of idiocy is better reserved for a straight road. None of this makes sense. I tried explaining to Ronnie the concept that I was trying to drive home, the ideas that kept me writing the night before last for nine hours straight; what if we humans really got it all wrong when we started attempting to battle disease, cure weakness and natural decay? From Loius Pasteur finding penicillin growing as bread mold or whatever back then, or the Chinese artificially creating a virus through hybridization that has actually made good old Bird Flu airborne, and transmittable without the need for sick birds; what in the ham fat have we done? I talked on about this book I am trying to write and Ronnie started talking about his sick tomato plants. He said that a few nights before he and a friend had been talking about the connection between the plants you buy and the products you have to buy as a result to make them grow and stay healthy. It isn’t really a surprise that when the company that genetically manipulates the seeds of the plant you purchase to do what they want the plant to do also produce the chemicals you need and have cornered the market on sales. We are beaten at every turn; bigger fish own the whole of the human game. There is no such thing as a human race or a rat race anymore, no more than in any pure illusion. We are all pawns now in the human game. Some of us may rise to the status of King or Queen, but we will still be participants; pieces necessary for the game to continue, or might we learn a different way, a more expansive, conscious and multi-dimensional way to play the game? We all do it as individuals whether we can acknowledge that or not. Some seed-of-the-earth types call it lying. Other people use their game manipulation to break rules and seek to justify, but as we play, the ones who awake from the bounds of the board are able to consciously watch the game as opposed to participate in the game. As Ronnie and I sat and talked I watched a Mallard land on the water in the deep canal behind his house. Ronnie had just shown his neighbor how to tie a particular knot for fishing rigs, a Palomar knot. While I watched the duck a Martin came and lighted on his dock. “Look at us” I exclaimed, stretching my sternum outward and shoulders back, “we are living in Paradise…people from all over the world come here just for a week and here we are, living, without a dime in our pockets.” I laughed as a few boats of fishermen headed out towards Kitty Hawk bay in the growing mid-morning summer heat. Ronnie and I had smoked the herb a bit earlier and I hadn’t smoked a thing in months. I asked him to let me light his Nat Sherman cigarette as I haven’t smoked one since making the call to a quit program months before. He refused to let me, saying that he would need me to be strong for him in a few weeks. He had also made the call. As he chatted with is neighbor about building an addition on her dock and the cost in American human dollars I watched the Mallard as the neighbor caught a small pin fish. Ronnie walked over to show the neighbor how to rig that little bait fish onto a popping cork rig to hopefully swim around for a while and attract a dinner sized fish. It’s what neighbors do, sometimes. It felt good to just sit there on the blue bench, my left leg immobilized. I thought of what it would take to kill and eat that duck. I would have to buy a gun and some ammunition, get a license and while I waited for the approved days to shoot and kill the bird I would spend many hours on practicing to kill it, talk about killing it, and then eventually with the slightest squeeze of one finger on a trigger, kill it. I would have to use some method, either dog or gasoline powered boat to retrieve it and then gut it, pluck all of the feathers, skin it and butcher it for a couple of leg quarters and two small pieces of breast meat. It didn’t make sense there for a moment. I have no problem with hunting for eating, I just don’t do it myself; I mean, it was the foundation by which we as humans began to evolve from our primitive ancestry. It is recognized and solid science that a human’s ability to consume more calories through protein led to the advances in the human brain, and thus so called civilization. Where did we stop evolving and begin devolving? Maybe vegetarianism is a more evolved thought process and I am a still a meat eater and maybe that is my problem. I don’t know. Finding meat, stalking it, moving and living with it as well as idolizing it was the work of the day for my paleo-ancestory. There were no jobs, so your job was to practice the art of killing to sustain life. Now a select few of us have begun the practice of killing our ways of living as their forms of sustaining, manipulating, and controlling global wealth.