You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
Yes, today is another in a long, tepid series of Art-Day posts, but it is also about metacognitive thinking. Specifically thinking about thinking using pictures to think with. (Maybe that title should say, “Free-Thought Thinker” rather than, “Thought-Free.”)
To start with, what does a person actually see when they close their eyes? My brain does not color everything on the inside of my eyelids black. Even in the dark of night with no nightlight so that nothing shines through my eyelids, my brain interprets the dark as shapes, patterns, and colors. Hence the inspiration for this picture.
But my brain is never satisfied with raw shapes, colors, and patterns. It has to interpret ideas into them. The mass of yellow and black resolves into a butterfly, or a sunflower, or an etude by J.S. Bach. The pink mass becomes a blond girl playing the music in my head…. a girl from piano-lesson days in the early 70’s. But naked. The way I always thought about her while sitting and waiting for my piano lesson and listening to hers. How else does a boy think about a pretty girl when he is fourteen?
And as the items in the picture take shape, they do also begin to tell a story. Who is this Dr. Seabreez? Is he a shaman of the Republic of Lakotah People? Is he a white man? Seabreez is not a Native American name. The naked boy by the tent flap has a crutch, and there is a mouse silhouetted nearby. Does that make him a medical doctor? A veterinarian? A professor of Native-American Studies? The mind begins to piece together a script.
But here we see that Dr. Seabreez has set up a new practice in Japan. Again the boy near the door has a crutch and there is a silhouetted mouse near him. But now the other boy has horns on his forehead. Why horns? And pointed ears? Is he a Doctor of Magic and Wizardry? Demonology perhaps? And what is an anthropomorphized panda doing in Japan? That’s clearly a Japanese castle in the distance. The collar Kanji is definitely Japanese in character.
And now there are horns again. Three of them by my count. And another naked character. But a Grecian background. The mind is here making connections between the pictures, noticing patterns. Appreciating colors. And turning every detail over in the mind’s eye, evaluating and analyzing.
Art, especially on Saturdays, totally engages the mind. That is one of the reasons we keep art around to look at again and again. It is the purpose of art to make us see something. And not just once, superfluously. We must see it in depth, looking beyond the surface.
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
Oh, yes. It is almost complete… but for the final edit. It will hopefully be published very soon. It is filled with essays written for my blog, Catch a Falling Star. And, hopefully, I have chosen only the good ones.
But the book is not a stand-alone. It is a sequel to Laughing Blue, published earlier this year. I actually hope to reach 20 books published by early in 2021. Of course, it still requires that I don’t die too soon from the pandemic, or from any of my other problems that the Covid problem could interfere with getting medical treatment for.
Laughing Blue has five Five-Star Reviews.
Both of these books are essay collections, but the majority of the stories and explanations and comedy in each are based on my thirty-one years of experience as a Texas public school teacher, my nearly forty year association with nudists (though I can’t honestly claim to be one). my silly attempts at writing seriously bad poetry, my belief in flying saucers, and nearly ten years of being a wacky wizard. How’s that for a sentence that violates every run-on-sentence rule I ever taught any young writer?
Book number 18 is still pretty new too.
Anyway, now that you know, I better get started on that final edit. A writer has to keep his promises to himself. And maybe to the rest of you too.
has not really inspired deep abiding thankfulness in most of us. But it benefits us in no way to forget gratitude is a real and important part of every person’s heart.
2020 is the year I lost my father. I am his firstborn son. I believe it is safe to say he was grateful for my arrival in this world. I was born in the 1950s in November. This year, my father passed away from this world on my birthday. I know you may be wondering how I can be grateful for this thing that happened to us. But I am. He passed away to bring an end to five months of suffering at the figurative hands of Parkinson’s Disease. It caused his multiple strokes over the duration of his final hospitalization, and it took away his ability to remember my name, or anything about me, or even the fact of my existence. But I suspect that the day I was born was probably one of the most life-changing and important moments in his life, just as the birth of my firstborn in the middle 1990s was for me. It began a connection that defines our whole extended family and lasted for over sixty years. I am grateful that he is now at peace. And I am grateful for every part of the connection between his life and mine.
So, I find myself alone on this Thanksgiving day.
My wife and daughter went to Florida with my sisters-in-law and their daughters while my son is working the night shift for the Sheriff’s Department of Dallas County, and so is sound asleep at this moment. I am by myself and left to my own devices, having been too ill to travel and not being willing to risk death by Covid anyway. I did not really like the idea of the mid-pandemic welcome-to-America trip to Disney World, but I certainly understand that my wife’s younger sister was able to immigrate to this country right before the pandemic hit, and I know only too well you can’t argue with a stubborn little Filipino woman who daily teaches middle-school children who are taller than she is. And besides, she knows how to breathe fire like a dragon when necessary. She’s too sterilizingly hot-tempered to ever get the virus. I am grateful that she has found happiness in one small part of this pandemic. It has been far more wearing on her than it has on me. She has diabetes, but already took care of one son sick with the virus without ever testing positive herself.
And we had a dog adventure this week.
On Monday, the day the Filipino sisters in Texas all went to the airport, tragedy struck one little dog left behind. My sister-in-law who also lives in Dallas, not one of the three who now live in San Antonio, left their little fuzzy lover-puppy in my care because I had successfully taken care of the San Antonio dog, Marley, when last a trip like this one was made before the pandemic. Monte is a much tinier dog than either my dog Jade or Marley. He is a miniature poodle-mix of some kind, covered in downy-gray curls and shaky-nervous like a Chihuahua. And I tried hard to get to know him and get him to trust me, but it came time for going for a walk, and he was still super wary of me.
My dog, Jade, was no help in the matter. Any time I petted Monte, I had to scratch her ears or rub her tummy too. She was quite jealous of the little guy. So, I walked them separately. I walked Jade first. She happily toured the green-belt park and sniffed bird poo and pooped twice herself for me to bag and dispose of . Then, when it was Monte’s turn, I was bending over him and trying to get the leash attached to his collar. But Jade kept sticking her selfish head in the way. So, I swatted at her. And Monte took that opportunity to zip out the door without either the leash or me.
We had a face-down in the yard.
“Now, Monte, I need to put the leash on. Will you come here?” I said as non-threateningly as I could.
His little black, button eyes looked at the leash, and he looked at me. He was having none of it.
I took a step towards him. He took three small steps away.
“Please, boy. You don’t want to run away, do you?”
But, he did want to. In fact, he turned around at that very moment, leaped down from the retaining wall, scooted over the sidewalk and out into the road in front of the oncoming car.
I know what you’re probably thinking. But it wasn’t what happened. I shouted loudly enough that the guy in the car slowed down and looked at me. The dog saw the car and changed direction, running East down the sidewalk. I ran after him, but the last I saw of him was his fuzzy little butt working like a trap-spring to turn him down an alley thirty yards ahead of me.
He didn’t have any idea where he was headed. But he knew he didn’t want to be with me. I searched in vain for another glimpse of him. Then I went home to get help and woke up number two son. We scoured the neighborhood. We asked everyone we met if they had seen him.
One lady in the alley where I last saw him promised to keep an eye out for him, and I gave her our address in case she did see him or heard anything from the neighbors.
Eventually we went home after a couple of fruitless hours in the cold drizzle. I kept remembering the hungry coyote that came up and eyed Jade while I was walking her in the early morning. That’s what I envisioned as Monte’s fate. I went to bed Monday night heartsick, thinking we would never see that little dog again, and how it was all my fault.
I searched again the next morning. But, of course, I found nothing. The only positive thing was… I didn’t find his carcass in the street,’
Later that Tuesday I got a call from my wife in Florida.
“Somebody found Monte.”
She texted me the address. And, sure enough, when we went there, the girl was happy to see us. She put Monte back in my hands. She told us he was a sweet and quiet little dog that her aunt found hiding in her garage.
I thanked the girl profusely. Later her aunt called. It was the same lady I had given the address to in the alleyway. She had used the address to look up my wife’s telephone number. I thanked her profusely too. I’d have given them a huge cash reward, if I wasn’t broke and bankrupt since 2017.
So, in 2020, I am thankful.
I am thankful for good neighbors. I am thankful for the gift of good dogs who love you even when you don’t deserve it. I am thankful for Joe Biden… God, am I ever thankful for Joe Biden.
And I am thankful that the end of my father’s story has given him peace.
Canto 117 – The Bogey… and Probably Not Humphrey Bogart
Ged and Shen Ming walked slowly back to the Administrative Offices in Shen Ming’s Tower.
“You really can’t tell me anything more about this whole Avenger thing?”
“Ah, Ged-sensei, you know how it is for old men… especially really old men more than five hundred. You forget stuff… you have hair growing out of your ears… you fart more often than you would really like…”
“No, I really don’t know about that yet. I am older than I look, but I have not yet experienced aging as you have.”
“And you will not. If I know anything at all about Psion shape-changers… and I probably don’t know anything, you will not age because your cells refresh themselves constantly with your ability.”
Ged nodded. He wasn’t sure how much he believed it, but he knew it was a possibility that he had even sensed within himself.
“How old is Bres the Black Spider?”
“Him? This I do not know. He appeared in Kiro five years ago, having possibly come here from space in response to the White Spider Prophecy.”
“He thought he was the White Spider?”
“No. He wanted to see the White Spider killed and the Prophecy defeated.”
“I see.”
“I hope so, Ged-dono. At least as well as I see.”
Suddenly, Hassan Parker was running towards them at full speed, completely naked except for his red fez hat and his red courtesy towel.
“Ah, so… the naked child approaches,” said Shen Ming with an Alfred E. Neuman grin.
“Ged Aero-sensei! You must come quickly! There is a bogey in orbit!”
“Humphrey Bogart is in orbit?” asked Shen Ming.
“No, no… an unidentified…” Hassan had to stop and catch his breath. He dropped the towel as he panted.
“Ah, a very beautiful child. But not so very smart, I think. He never seems to remember to wear pants.”
“Take your time, Hassan-kun. Tell us what this is about.”
“…an unidentified space craft of strange design… in orbit… maybe connected to… the intruder.”
“Ah, connected to the Avenger it is not…” said Shen Ming. “Master Jai Chang has never been off this planet.”
“Who spotted the intruder?” Ged asked.
“I was sent to tell you by Naylund Smith-sama. He’s in the newly built spaceport, at the Super-Rooster on landing pad seventeen.”
“We have seventeen landing pads already?” Ged gaped.
“The Ancient Hammer of God builds things very fast,” said Shen Ming. “We borrowed it from your planet Don’t Go Here, you know.”
“Ah… Ancient artifacts again. I worry sometimes…”
“Ged you must go and investigate. This lovely little Space Nudist is a good telepath, is he not?”
“Yes. Only Sara Smith is better on this planet.”
“Very good. I will take Hassan to help me find out why Master Jai Chang put on the helmet and where it came from. You go defend the planet from terrible intruding space creatures.”
Ged hesitated momentarily. There was something concerning about what Shen Ming had recently said and done. But what he should do about it, and what it might have to do with the White Spider Prophecy… well, he was afraid to ask.
Now, during the winter of Covid 19, is the right time for a bite of elderberry pie. Or a sip of elderberry wine. Did you know, the antioxidants in elderberries are a European remedy for colds and flu from the middle ages? There is old wisdom in turning to elderberries to protect you from virus and bacteria.
And old wisdom is what you get from old berries like me. The longer you put up with my blue/black berry tartness of taste, the more likely my bittersweet wisdom is to affect you in some positive ways.
Here’s a bite of elderberry pie for you. “When it comes to taste, don’t go for too much sweet or two much sour. The road between those two valley edges avoids both diabetic breakdowns on the one hand, and old, bitter cynicism on the other.”
The middle road, down the canyon’s center, is the safest road to take. Go too far to either side, and there are cliffs with many rockfalls, and occasional rattlesnakes. (I know these are metaphorical rattlesnakes; those are the best kind. It is the best way to express the idea without actual snakebites, and I only wish the members of our governing bodies knew that.)
Here’s another forkful. “A little bit of bitter is necessary to the overall flavor.”
I could also use the trite old food metaphor about having to break eggs to make omelets, but I am trying for pie-based metaphors here. You have to take a little bit of the bad to get to the really good parts. Sometimes it seems like it takes an awful lot of endurance of the bad to get to not-enough good. The current pandemic seems to be like that. Almost too many bitter berries to get to the medicinal qualities of basically beauteous berries. But that which doesn’t kill us will make us… easier to kill next time? Hopefully not. But haven’t you noticed? The best Disney movies make you cry a little at some points… cringe a little too… but they also make you laugh a lot. And the message of the movie’s ultimate ending leaves you with a smile. And smiling more makes you live a little longer. The berries grow brighter when you can make your own sunshine. These berries are beginning to taste a bit like vinegar because maybe Mickey doesn’t cook them quite right. But bottle them for now and let them ferment a bit. Then you get medicinal elderberry wine.
“Finally, when you have pigged-out on the whole pie, you should be full. It is good to be satisfied.” Eventually you reach a point in life where you will either succumb to despair, or you will look back over the arc of your life and be satisfied. The good you have done should outweigh the damage. You are a good cook. And the whole pie of your life was worth the effort to bake it.
I know that three bites of elderberry wisdom does not seem like much. But the longer you practice berry-baking, the more you come to realize, “A little bit of hard-won wisdom goes a long way towards making you healthy, wealthy and wise.”
No, Ben Franklin never said that. Mickey did. Sorry if that means it is not the wise wisdom you were hoping for. Pie-based essays rarely are.
The year in which I lost my father has been a truly ghastly ghoul of a year. I could spend time listing all the things that went wrong for me personally, but that would be a very long list for no real gain in wisdom. I need to take some time just now to reflect on some very hard lessons we have been given by this year to deal with in a way that we might potentially learn from.
There is a chance I may live out the rest of this year and reach 2021. But it is not guaranteed. The pandemic virus, Covid 19, is an insidious destroyer of organs, attacking lungs, heart, and brain, causing blood clots and complications long after the initial infection has passed. The way it strikes people, randomly cruel to one, and presenting no symptoms to the next, has guaranteed it would be almost impossible to control, if we were even trying to control it. And we are dually blessed with an incompetent and corrupt presidential administration that couldn’t care any less if I lived even if they stood to make money off my demise. Like the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, this virus is restructuring our economy and changing our world in ways no one has as yet accurately foreseen.
Firing the salute at the graveside memorial for my father, a Korean Conflict Navy Veteran.
I have not, as yet, survived this pandemic. I have multiple risk factors that make it dangerously likely that at some point I will have to discover the hard way whether I can survive an infection or not. My middle child of the three came home infected in August from his job as a jailor for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. I managed to avoid infection then until he tested negative again, unless I had it as a symptomless carrier during our summer quarantine. Only time will tell. I have not had an antibody test. I haven’t suffered any Covid aftereffects either.
My father did not die of Covid. Parkinson’s Disease like Michael J. Fox and Mohammed Ali had was ultimately what robbed him of memories, the ability to talk, and eventually the abilities to eat and breathe. The “good news” is, I have Parkinson’s symptoms myself, and am merely waiting for a safer time to see the doctor to get it diagnosed. There is more than merely one way that my life could end before 2021 arrives.
But my father led a good life. And he passed a good life on to me. He taught me self-reliance and a respect for hard work in a way only a former farm boy and Navy Seaman could. He taught me to lay shingles as we re-roofed both our house in Rowan and our stable-turned-car-garage also in our little Iowan farm town. He taught me love classical music, especially Beethoven and Mozart, as well as Ravel, Chopin, Vivaldi, and… he always argued… John Philip Sousa. And he started his own Great American Novel. I had to sneak into his closet when I was eleven to read it. It was only about the first third of a novel written all in pencil and kept in a gray binder under the winter clothes in the box on the floor at the back of his walk-in closet. It was called Prairie Moon. It was about a very stubborn and self-reliant pioneer named Ed Adems who built himself a sod hut in the Iowa grasslands of the 1870s. So, I guess, he also taught me to be a self-published novelist. I have at this point published eighteen novels and books, with numbers nineteen and twenty already at least halfway finished.
My three kids when they were small and had goblin grins for the camera.
I hope you listened to the Mozart Requiem while you read this post. I listened to it while I wrote it. A requiem is a Mass for the repose of the dead. We honor them and remember their goodness and light while we commit them to their eternal sleep, even if we are atheists. Because there is a next life for them, no matter what you believe. They live it through us. My father lives in me. And as my hold on life gets weaker and more tenuous, I will live in my children. I have tried to teach them as my father taught me.
And as we put to rest the terrible year of 2020, hopefully there was some good in it too to carry on into 2021 and beyond. And, Dad, you kept all your promises. If you ever failed me, I do not remember it. And I pray that, having kept most of my promises to my children too… at least so far… I will pass on the light for generations yet to be born. You are a part of that too. God bless you, I love you, Amen.
Today was the funeral. We attended by Facebook Live. You couldn’t understand what the minister was saying over static and feedback. And you couldn’t see or talk to anybody who was there. My two sisters were there. My sister Mary’s husband and two kids were there. My mother was there. And twenty people attended by Facebook. My father deserved more. But Covid 19 doesn’t make bargains… or play fair. So, we make compromises with time and circumstance. We are patient and we endure. That is what my father taught us to do. And so, we honor him in the only way we can.
I was a child who grew to maturity holding a secret horror… a truly terrible secret, in my creative little brain. I was sexually tortured when I was ten. I know now that it sounds like I should blame my torturer for everything, that I should have reported him to the authorities to keep him from ever doing that to anybody else. But my mental defense system took over in ways that prevented me from ever seeking justice. Or what justice too long delayed becomes, simple revenge.
But I could never be that seeker of revenge. I had a Sunday-school faith that had to be strictly followed. First of all, although the thing that happened was never truly gone from me, my creatively evil little mind forced me to forget. Or at least bury the knowledge so deeply within that I could not answer the school guidance counselor in high school when he asked, “Michael, what is it that is causing this behavior, this debilitating fear?” I could only answer that I thought I might be going crazy. He told me that he could help if it was about something like having sexual feelings toward another boy. He was more progressive than most Iowans. But, at the time, I didn’t understand what he was suggesting. I wouldn’t really understand homosexuality as a thing until I was almost out of high school, so when we had that talk, and I was clueless at sixteen, and then he talked about it with my best friend Byron, he knew that it was not about that.
The coach had seen the burn scars on my lower back and legs during P. E. But he only saw scars. I suggested to him that it was probably from playing with the large dog next door. He had big paws and untrimmed claws. And he believed me because he knew my parents, and he knew that they would never do anything like that. And he could tell that I was being truthful when I said I really didn’t know for sure how those scars had gotten there. I didn’t realize for sure how the scars happened until my more-mature twenty-two-year-old evil little brain decided I was burning myself against the heating grate to make sexual feelings and urges go away.
Radasha
I was seriously beginning to hate myself, be depressed without knowing why, and nearly killing myself at seventeen. All because of an event in my life that I really wasn’t able to admit to myself really happened.
Then, one snowy night in February of 1974, Radasha came tapping at my window.
I realize now that it had to have been a dream, but I knew even then that it couldn’t have been reality.
He was a black-haired, brown-eyed boy with goat horns on his forehead and a deer’s tail on his behind. He was completely naked, sitting on his haunches in the piling snow on the porch roof outside my bedroom window. He was grinning at me. No larger than my younger brother who was sound asleep in his bottom bunk in the room we shared. He indicated that I needed to open the window and let him in.
I should’ve realized that it was a dream then, because in real life I could not have opened the window like I did because of the winter storm-windows dad had put up before the first snowfall in October. But the scene played out according to dream logic.
“Aren’t you cold like that? You must be freezing your peeper off if you are outside naked like that.”
“Naw, I’m not real, Sharpie. I don’t feel cold because I’m a faun. I’m mythological.”
“Oh. then why did I have to let you in?”
“I’m Radasha. I am a part of you. You can’t keep me out. I should really be inside you instead of out here talking to you.”
“What? Are you my heart or something? Maybe one of my kidneys?”
“More like your love-life. I’m a part of you that shouldn’t’ve ever been detached. You need me to live a normal, healthy life.”
“Should I even be talking to you? What if my little brother wakes up and sees you?”
“Nobody can ever see me but you. I was born in your brain. I’m here because you need me back in your life.”
So, from that moment on I was a teenager with an invisible playmate. He reminded me of all the things I had learned about the birds and the bees from Reverend Aiken, the Methodist minister. We talked about what sex was, and the role it had to play in a normal human life. We talked about what to do about girls and how I felt about them. Without consciously realizing it, I stopped burning myself.
His advice got me slapped by a girl I thought I liked. He also helped me avoid three different girls that were sorta chasing me, at least in my evil little brain. In college he would get me into and out of trouble with girls I both wanted to chase and were chasing me when I didn’t want to be caught.
When I had the assignment to create a life-sized nude portrait for anatomy drawing class, he picked out the girl he wanted me to ask to pose for it, and almost goaded me into asking her. I, of course, ended up drawing my sister with all her clothes on. And I didn’t fail the assignment. He also got me to sign up to pose for the art class in the nude. But fortunately I got the flu the week I was suppose to sit in front of all those female art students in my birthday suit… the best ten-dollar modeling fee I never collected.
My invisible faun was a kind of self-therapy, I guess. He brought the sensual side of me back to life. He healed me and made me more whole.
I seriously thought I had a lifelong invisible friend. But once I started telling other people, real people, about the sexual assault, he kinda faded away.
I have now probably confessed something that makes me clinically schizophrenic, or technically crazy. But Ra is still real to me in so many ways. I used his story as part of my book, A Field Guide to Fauns. And for me he was an imaginative and necessary cure for a very real problem.
Catch a Falling Star 
Contradictions
You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
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