Richmond: Space Acts and Space Weapons

Part the First:

On October 2, 2001, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced HR 2977, a bill “to preserve the cooperative peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States, and to require the President to take action to adopt and implement a world treaty banning space-based weapons.” The short title was “The Space Preservation Act.”

As is usual in the American legislative system, the bill was referred to House of Representatives committees under whose purview it seemed to fall – in this case, the Committee on Science and the Committee on Armed Services and International Relations. The bill had no co-sponsors – in other words, none of Kucinich’s colleagues had officially signaled their support for HR 2977 by listing their name alongside his on the bill. Not unusual, but a bill typically has to have co-sponsors to have a chance at passage.

The verbiage of the bill began by establishing the legitimacy of its mission by quoting the 1958 Act that created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “It is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” The ban specified by the bill required the removal of all US space-based weapons and termination of all research and development of space-based weapons. Further, it required that the President of the United States work toward implementation of a “world agreement” banning space-based weapons. Every three months, the President would be required to submit a report to Congress on progress being made along these lines.

However, the bill also specified it was not about the US pulling out of space altogether. Space exploration and research, development and deployment of civil, commercial or defense technologies could continue, as long as it wasn’t related to space-based weapons or systems.

What is a space-based weapon? According to HR 2977, the term encompasses a variety of mythical technologies taken straight from the land of late-night talk radio: electronic and directed energy weapons, ELF and ULF (extremely- and ultra-low frequency) beams and various psychotronic technologies aimed at “individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of information war, mood management, or mind control of such persons or populations.” The list of “exotic” weapons systems also includes “information weapons; chemtrails; high-altitude, ultra-low frequency weapons systems; plasma, electromagnetic, sonic or ultrasonic weapons; laser weapons systems; strategic, theater, tactical, or extraterrestrial weapons; and chemical, biological, environmental, climate or tectonic weapons.”

Conspicuously absent from this list, of course, was the mention of any possibility that a small group of people armed with box cutters and basic flight training could deliberately fly a fully fueled-up jetliner into a skyscraper. Introduced shortly after the 9/11 attacks that stunned the nation, it was not surprising that HR 2977 got no traction on the legislative agenda. What was surprising was that it got introduced in the first place. The exotic space weapons listed in the bill were familiar territory to people familiar with fringe UFO and conspiracy subcultures, but very much newcomers to the national policy conversation around space, war and weapons.

Chemtrail activist Lorie Kramer deemed the inclusion of chemtrails in HR 2977 to be a huge step forward for her cause. Circa 2002 she wrote, “By its conspicuous appearance in 2977, the term ‘chemtrails’ received a form of credibility with the official government process never seen before . . . the simple fact of their inclusion in Kucinich’s 2977 list of weapons systems was deemed a major breakthrough by tens of thousands of citizens and researchers across the country.”

HR 2977 was re-introduced in the next legislative session as HR 3616, also called the Space Preservation Act. It won nine co-sponsors, possibly because all references to “exotic” weaponry had been excised. Kramer wondered why HR 3616 was so different: “So, what happened here? Did someone have a ‘friendly chat’ with Rep. Kucinich? Did the Congressman inhale a bit too much aluminum during his morning job [sic]? . . . It remains a mystery as to how the word ‘chemtrails’ appeared in HR 2977 to begin with . . . Who actually is authoring these bills? Why such an emphasis on ‘exotic weapons’ in HR 2977 but then nothing mentioned about them in HR 3616?”

The concise answer, given by Metabunk.org admin Mick West here, is that HR 2977 was “written by UFO enthusiasts Alfred Webre and Carol Rosin, who were trying to:

1.       Nullify a vast conspiracy by the ‘military-industrial complex’

2.       Allow the use of suppressed alien technology for free energy

3.       Avoid accidentally shooting down (or scaring away) visiting aliens.”

In the same piece West goes on to ask, “So what’s Kucinich’s involvement in this? It’s difficult to say. Kucinich is an anti-war, so perhaps that’s his motivation. He does have lot of new-age, UFO-believing friends, but he’s also running for president. When he was made aware of the nature of the ‘exotic weapons’ language in the bill, it was re-written, and when questioned about it, he said, “I’m not into that. Understand me. When I found out that was in there, I said, ‘Look, I’m not interested in going there.’”

Those who follow the history of UFO discourse will recognize Webre under the sobriquet of “father of exopolitics” and one of the first champions of “disclosure”. Exopolitics (our relations with aliens from outer space) and disclosure (the government finally revealing the truth about aliens from outer space and the technology they have brought to earth) are both sacred touchstones in UFO discourse. In 2001 Webre, along with UFO activist Carol Rosin, founded something called the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS) in 2001. Its mission was “to educate decision-makers and the grassroots about why it is important to ban space weapons.” [rationalwiki]

If Webre and Rosin meant HR 2977 to demand some form of government disclosure of UFO and alien activity and technology, they didn’t seem very serious about it. As soon as the successor bill HR 3616 was introduced, co-author Rosin claimed that chemtrails, psychotronic and other “exotic” weaponry had only been mentioned in the first bill as an example of what MIGHT happen if the bill isn’t passed. By 2011, Webre had left ICIS to advocate full-time against HAARP, which he held to be a form of exotic weaponry and later hooked his wagon to time-traveling Canadian lawyer Andrew Basiago’s star.

Neither version of the Space Preservation Act figure in any of the periodic campaigns for disclosure that are mounted by the UFO community. If disclosure advocates were unmoved by Kucinich’s legislative efforts, chemtrailers found in them renewed hope. Chemtrail activist Lorie Kramer wrote online, “By its conspicuous appearance in 2977, the term ‘chemtrails’ received a form of credibility within the official government process never seen before.” Fellow believer Bea Bernhausen added, “Bill HR2977 brought chemtrails and mind control to the attention of thousands of people who had never heard of them before, as well as revitalizing a sagging chemtrail community.” [Italics added]

Berkeley

In September of 2002, Kucinich was set to visit Berkeley, California in order to speak against what the Berkeley Daily Planet described as “Star Wars, a proposal to put weapons in space.” City Council member Dona Spring put forward a resolution to support Kucinich’s Space Preservation Act, which passed. The Planet reported, “the city’s resolution to side with Kucinich’s cause is the first formal support the Congressman has received.”

Actually, after HR 3616 in 2002 with its nine co-sponsors, there was HR 3657 in 2003 with four co-sponsors and HR 2420 in 2005 which won 35 cosponsors. Kucinich clearly continued to work the bill in the normal legislative fashion and had been successful in getting support, at least among Democrats. In contrast, the Berkeley City Council’s resolution in support of a bill that had never actually passed into law was largely a symbolic measure.

The Daily Planet article quotes Spring as saying that the resolution was a model for the country because weapons in space are a bad idea, escalate the arms race and makes the nation less secure. Also, they pollute. The article goes on to quote Rosin, the original bill’s co-author, who warns that without such legislation “Every weapon you know about will be up there . . . along with many you can’t even imagine.”

In 2008, an article about gang stalking and targeted individuals was published in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times. Terms like gang stalking, mind control and targeted individuals will be somewhat familiar to most consumers of fringe discourse. They all connote an intense paranoia in which everyone in a person’s world is actively colluding in trying to control and/or harm that person. The terms emerge from fringe discourses and often invoke imaginary technologies held to be real by such discourses. Sharing Their Demons on the Web described online communities of targeted individuals – victims of gang stalking and mind control – and talked to psychiatrists about what it all meant.

Targeted individual Derrick Robinson is quoted as saying, “It was a big relief to find the community.” One online victim community had started IRL meetings; in Missouri, a state representative had agreed to call for an investigation into mind control torture. As far back as 2008, then, we see that activists around mind control issues are concerned about getting their issue onto a legislative agenda.

On the other hand, Yale psychiatry professor Ralph Hoffman warned, “The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be constantly fed. If you don’t feed the delusion, sooner or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is that it needs to be repetitively reinforced.” Assuming that targeted individuals are almost certainly people with untreated mental illness, which is my belief, enabling rather than addressing the illness can have serious consequences.

GOOD MORNING BROOKSIDE!

GOOD MORNING BROOKSIDE! brings you . . .

Your Daily Disturbing Moment

I was on my bike and a little late for work, so it was around 7:00 in the morning when I finally turned down Brookside Drive. If I wasn’t rushing, I probably would’ve noticed the subtle change in air moisture that happens once you start down the road running between Wildcat and San Pablo creeks – both major local waterways into the Bay. This morning, all I noticed was that Kennedy Park was once again unusually pristine.

A short, narrow strip of lush grass adorned with several picnic tables, during the day Kennedy Park is usually filled with what looks like a block party. One co-worker who lived nearby said it was all drug users, which seemed possible. All I knew for sure was I wouldn’t feel comfortable going into the park. It didn’t seem like you could just go over and sit on the grass to read your book as long as the others were around. On the other hand, it did seem like they would welcome anyone willing to sit at one of the tables to chat or even share whatever was being passed around.

The thing that always struck me about the park was that it was usually decisively trashed when I passed it on my way home in the afternoon but as pristine as a Scottdale golf course by the time I went by it on my way to work the next morning. This morning was no different. The picnic tables were bare, the dirt around them free of trash, and the verdant grass shone in the early morning light.

As I approached, I saw a large, colorful “freebie” item someone had left in the middle of the otherwise empty lawn. It was one of those self-supporting swings you sit a baby or toddler in so they can bounce up and down and play with the various brightly colored toys positioned around the swing. There’s probably a name for them, and I’m positive they’re not approved of by Head Start. This one was just sitting in the middle of the park.

It was a little odd. Clearly the item was relatively new and in good condition, but if it was a giveaway, shouldn’t it have been put closer to the sidewalk and street, or at least near the picnic tables? The circular toddler training toy had been plopped down in the middle of an expanse of grass the usual park denizens rarely visited. Right where I may have lay down in the grass to read a book, in fact.

The plastic colors of the item stood out against the green grass. I was tempted to stop and photograph it, in spite of running late. The park clearly had its own culture, and this overnight relic must have its own story to tell.

Then as I wheeled by, I recognized the large, white object lying against the base of the toddler gizmo as a full jar of mayonnaise. Suddenly, I no longer wanted to know the story.

Yours truly,

GOOD MORNING BROOKSIDE!

This has been your daily discomfiture.

Notes on an Unexpected System Failure

I’m getting tired of that feeling you get when you realize you could have died, but didn’t. Instead, you’re standing there unharmed and everything is fine. Until you start shaking all over and crying.

We all know those moments where life changes in an instant. A death is announced, fire takes a house, a relationship is laid bare. In those cases, there is usually something concrete to point to and say, “That hurt me.” But the moment when you recognize you just avoided a catastrophic loss or messy death is harder to pin down. No harm was done, so why get upset?

To be specific, a probably fiery death in an out-of-control car being pinballed by other vehicles on Highway 4 is very far down on my list of acceptable ways to die. I just know I would not have been graceful about it. I would have been frightened, upset, and very, very angry. As it happens, I dodged that particular bullet (for now).

As it happens, I have an older car that is very easily stolen and, as it happens, I have not been able to afford the major work it needs to be safe to drive for more than short distances. I considered going car-free the last time it was stolen, but then it was returned relatively unharmed. I was caught: pour money into fixing up a car that could be stolen at any time? Get rid of it until I could save up money and locate a good used car?

I had planned for the possibility of losing the car by purchasing a bike and commuting equipment so I could always get to work no matter what happened to the car. Financing all that was a campaign in itself, since I had been living below poverty level for several years and had only just gotten a job that would allow me to pay bills and start to plan for a future again.

I opted to keep the car for the time being. I bought some devices that would make it a bit more challenging to steal and asked my mechanic to install a kill switch. A kill switch is supposed to be a toggle switch hidden somewhere; it has to be toggled on in order to start the car. My mechanic wanted to hide the switch in the glove box, but I knew from all the times my car had been broken into that the glove box is the first place they rifle, so I asked him to put it somewhere else.

When I picked up the car, I saw he had installed a large and obvious toggle switch on the driver side dash panel. At first it worked fine, apart from being large and obvious and therefore sort of useless. It was also sort of in the way of my legs when I went to get out of the driver seat, and I bumped against it several times before I learned to avoid it.

At first, I would toggle the switch off whenever I parked, but after a couple months I noticed it wouldn’t always toggle back on when I wanted to drive. At that point I had redundant security systems anyway, so I just left the switch toggled on. At some point after that, I began to have trouble starting my car at all. This wasn’t anything unusual, since I had been deferring necessary maintenance for years and was used to things going wrong. But I did notice this new problem seemed directly related to the kill switch, even when I wasn’t using it to toggle off the power system.

Nevertheless, I kept on driving, fueled by a mixture of hope and reality checks. My automotive maintenance checklist at this point consisted of the following points:

·         Do I still have a car? (Visual check at curbside)

·         Will it start? (Ignition check)

·         Whatever. I have a bike.

Incidentally, it was during this time that the job I had recently accepted specifically because it was local - even though it was in a kind of dangerous and shitty location – announced I would now be required to work at a location requiring a 50-mile car commute.

Today was the day I was finally going to take the car in to the shop for the some of the big-ticket work it needed. I had been saving for months, a few hundred dollars at a time. (Weird thing about me: I’m working on paying down debt, not taking on new ones). There was the usual trouble starting the car, but I got it going and aimed it toward work. I had planned a complicated car-car-bike-bike-car commute between home, work and the shop. My bike was hanging out of the trunk and I was checking the tie-down carefully in my rearview mirror.

A short way out from home on the main drag, all my dash needles dipped, rose, then went dead. I realized my engine had turned off, as in completely off. No steering, no brakes, nothing. One level of my brain was, what happens now? That whole stream of events played out. I knew I had to get out of traffic and park along the curb in a safe place. Amazingly, there was no traffic – very unusual – and I was able to steer out of the leftmost lane of a two-lane road into a safe place at the curb. At this point, it was just momentum of the car and steering by force that got me there.

Once at the curb, I was able to start the car again. Like a goddam idiot, I then proceeded to continue driving to work. The back part of my brain was still running scenarios, though, and started to shout down my cerebral cortex, which just wanted to be at work on time. “DO YOU REALLY THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA, SUE?” I heard it yelling. “YOU ARE IGNORING A SIGNIFICANT MALFUNCTION OF YOUR CAR THAT EVEN THOSE DUDES IN THE CORTEX CAN SEE COULD EASILY BE DEADLY.”

At that point, I decided to drive directly to the shop and turned down a side street to retrace my steps in that direction. I would just have to be late to work. Gasp! The car lost power several more times as I drove slowly and carefully, and then it just wouldn’t start at all. I was able to drift to a safe parking space along a curb in front of a house. I dialed AAA and said, “I’m going to need a tow.”

A very large flatbed truck out of Alameda, some distance away from Richmond, turned up in under half an hour – well under the predicted time. The driver set about winching my car up onto his truck. I called my mechanic and told him what had happened. This was not the repair we were going to do today. This was a job he did that went bad. He said he would make it all right and he was on his way to the shop now.

It was early enough that when we arrived there no other vehicles were parked on the normally busy street in front of the shop. The driver rolled my car, still completely dead in the water, off his truck and set it along the curb. The other businesses along 23^rd Street were starting to open. A homeless guy had been sleeping in a recessed shop doorway nearby and was just getting up. The marine overcast was loosening in the wind and the sun was starting to hit the pavement and buildings enough to warm the morning up.

I got my bike out of the back of the car and started to transfer stuff into the pannier so I could ride to work after delivering keys and car to my mechanic. Homeless doorway guy had started packing his stuff up at the same time. I could see that he had his packing down to a science and was moving everything to the curb in an unhurried, methodical fashion. I looked at my car. He had his things, I realized, and I had my things. We all have things. This car was my thing; I was standing where I was because of it, just like homeless guy was carefully moving his stuff around. We all have things and because we have them we have to take care of them. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have to worry about them. But as long as we have them, we have to take care of them.

Does that make any sense?

I stood there next to my car and my bicycle as the morning sun slowly warmed up the sidewalk.  Homeless guy helpfully said to me, “They usually open up around eight.” I couldn’t tell his age or ethnicity very exactly, just that his face had some beard stubble and seemed relaxed and relatively at peace. I told him I had already talked to the shop owner and thanked him for his concern.

My mechanic arrived about 15 minutes later. I basically just gave him the keys to my car and rode off to work on my bike. I told him I didn’t necessarily need the car back by the end of the day. I felt like I could use a little vacation from taking care of my thing.

Space Weapons: Preamble

During grad school, I was lucky enough at one point to find work in a professionally relevant position doing qualitative research. It was a three-year project exploring factors involved in shaping US federal alcohol policy development. The research team consisted of about a half dozen people from a variety of backgrounds. Because I was into postmodernism and the sociology of knowledge, I took on the “role of research in federal policy making” paper.

I have a vivid memory of presenting the results at one of the institute’s brown-bag talks. Our team had focused on a handful of major policy efforts (for example, establishing a .08 blood alcohol level as the drunk driving threshold) and conducted dozens of interviews with stakeholders both inside and outside Washington.  The brown-bag room was lit dimly enough that I could click through my PowerPoint slides while people sitting along the table stretching between me and the screen could still see to eat their lunches.

I explained that it was clear that getting any policy initiative enacted can take decades, even under the best conditions – for example, even when the proposed policy had strong scientific support. Then I got to my most significant finding, that most of the people we talked to said research was not very important to getting a policy passed. In contrast, an evocative image, or the right “optics”, was crucial.

I remember holding the clicker in my hand and looking down the table in the dim light as I talked about my finding. I saw the woman who was the head of the institute and host of the brown-bag program drop her head into her hands at that point. Thinking she was bored, I tried to put a little more drama and animation into my voice as I finished up the talk.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that my most significant finding was also one that seemed to undermine the very reason for doing social science, let alone holding brown bags, writing grants or heading up a research institute – as well as any hope for rational policy-making in this American life. At the time, I was just excited at having a clear finding. It took me awhile to understand how more experienced social scientists might view my finding.

About a year ago, I started to look into some of the more unusual candidates and activities of my local city council in Richmond, California. A North Korea supporter who had also written a 9/11 Truther web article was being advanced as the candidate favored by the ruling progressive majority. I was interested in conspiracy theory believers and wanted to follow her career if she won the seat (she didn't). Chasing that white rabbit, I ran into the infamous incident of the Richmond City Space Weapons Ban of 2015 and ended up diving into the one place I always promised myself I would never go.

I feel bad that my research findings back then made the institute director drop her head into her hands in despair. But I’m here today to tell her, and you, it gets worse. Much worse.

North Richmond: A Dangerous Magonia

When I ride my bicycle to work in the morning, it’s dark. The last leg of the journey is along Wildcat Creek, on a path that has intermittent overhead lighting. I depend on the fact that I know where I’m going and even enjoy passing underneath branches that occasionally blot out the light and leave things in mystery. It may be a paved public trail just a few yards away from the road, but it makes me feel as if it may lead to Magonia.

I had an extra-long lunch break and thought I'd use it to take a bike ride around the neighborhood where I work in North Richmond. There's creeks and trails and stuff like that. I like creeks and trails. The air was thick with smoke from the wildfires. The roadsides were lined with scattered garbage. Every so often there was a mound of garbage 10 or 15 feet high. Most of the trails turned out to exist only on Google Maps: they were County-owned land, but fenced off - at least to people who pay attention to fences.

Where a trail did run along a creek, it was obvious the creek beds were routinely used to dispose of more garbage. Wildcat Creek near Verde Elementary School is apparently the go-to place for illegally dumping tires (outside of West Oakland, that is). Three or four massive piles of tires stood along the public creekside trail, in plain sight of the school playground.

I suddenly realized I had grown up in paradise. I had a creek and an elementary school, but those were different.

Still in explorer mode, I looked for a way to get down to Wildcat Creek itself. Then I noticed a guy walking along the trees lining the creek. He was definitely not a birder. He wasn’t obviously homeless, but what the hell was he doing? Another guy emerged from the trees and started following him at a distance. I rode by on the path above the floodplain, clearly visible. They both disappeared back into the trees. I thought, "This is a dangerous place. I need to start thinking about bike safety in a whole new way" and didn't try to find the creek bed.

Thinking back on it, could it have been a couple of gay guys hooking up? Both of them definitely looked much better than your average guy who suddenly appears out of nowhere in North Richmond. I want to think they were gay and enjoyed a steamy, satisfying sexual encounter along the barely flowing creek as flycatchers flitted overhead snatching bugs out of the air.

I want to think that, because I’ve never NOT enjoyed riding my bike in my life until I spent half an hour riding around North Richmond. All I could see there was garbage, environmental degradation and suffering. I should never have started to read “To Place Our Deeds,” about the history of the African American community in Richmond, and then gone for a ride around North Richmond. I should never have started to learn about North Richmond and its history at all. I should never had cared. It’s tears all around.

Riding home, I passed the park along San Pablo Creek where people who use drugs like to hang out and socialize. They were whooping it up, and then I realized I couldn't actually tell if they were having a good time, were fighting with each other, or just didn’t know the difference.

The Oz Factor and the Freeze Response

 There are certain tropes that come up again and again in personal accounts of paranormal and/or alien encounters. A major one is that the person having the encounter has been rendered docile and/or mysteriously numbed, presumably by some advanced technology or extraordinary power wielded by the Other they are encountering.

You can find examples of this by listening to almost any Art Bell show that focuses on UFO encounters, but it was British ufologist Jenny Randles who noticed and coined a term for it: the Oz factor. Randles carries some weight as a writer and thinker on anomalous topics, so if she says she perceived a pattern in accounts of experiences, I’ll take her word for it. Although, not actually having any of her own books at hand, I’ll quote Lewis (2017) quoting Randles’ explanation of the Oz Factor: “a sort of inner tuning, as the percipient’s mind blocks out attention to all external sounds in order to note the message that is about to bombard his or her consciousness.”

Lewis goes on to say that in other writings Randles extends this into putting “forth this idea of Synchronistic Reality Mode and the ability for the human mind to take in this anomalous information in a parapsychological way and create a virtual reality telepresence experience.” I don’t really understand what that means and I don’t know if it’s a fair reflection of Randles’ own thought, but I do want to point out this: the Oz factor seems to involve a special mental mode which allows communication and contact with undefined, anomalistic Others.

People have bizarre, traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. But people also have completely mundane traumatic encounters they can’t understand and struggle to explain to others. A lot of peoples’ stories about UFOs focus on how they can’t get any one to believe in what happened or take them seriously. The same is true, though, about a lot of people’s stories about experiencing sexual assault or domestic violence. I’ve always wondered how ‘special’ the experiences of UFO experiencers are compared to normal human reactions in other extremely taxing, liminal or transgressive situations.

At this point I’d like to introduce Rory Miller, a veteran corrections officer and martial arts teacher who has written several books about the sociology and psychology of real-time violent encounters. In Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, Miller describes something close to the Oz Factor as one of several types of freeze responses a person may experience when faced with a sudden threat. Miller calls it the hard-wired freeze response and writes, “Know that the hard-wired freeze response is triggered by fear, but it usually doesn’t feel that unpleasant, kind of warm and floaty with a sound in your ears like the ocean. People who have been so terrified they couldn’t move have described this state and decided that they weren’t really afraid so they weren’t really frozen. It just seemed like a good idea at the time not to move.” Which is pretty much exactly how the Oz Factor is described on all those Art Bell programs.

I found Miller’s books after I experienced threat-induced altered sensory functioning during a community “Force Options” training held by my local police department. After classroom time studying use of force policies, hearing real-life stories from officers and discussing events unfolding nationwide, community members had to go alone into a staged scenario with a fake weapons belt and decide how to respond to a call. For real officers in Richmond, if they fail their scenario test, they lose their job.

Before I entered the scenario, a detective prepped me by telling me exactly what would happen and what I should do. “Distance is time. Remember that! You will get tunnel vision and not be able to see. You will stop hearing anything. To break out of that, move your eyes right and left. Then you will be able to hear.” I thought to myself, “That’s bullshit. I know how my mind works under stress. I’ve never lost hearing before.”

The detective pushed the door open and I went into the scenario. All I saw were two guys fighting. I told them to stop and advanced on them. One charged me. I fumbled over the weapons on my belt – OC spray, Taser, gun, baton. By then the guy attacking had come in too close for anything other than baton which, as a student of Filipino martial arts, made me very happy. I was now in my comfort zone - except for someone kept tapping me on my shoulder and another guy was in my face repeating, “It’s over. The scenario is over!” The guy yelling in my face was my role-playing attacker, and the guy tapping on my shoulder was the detective. He had walked beside me and I hadn’t even seen him.

Afterwards, the detective debriefed me. He told me what I had failed to hear. One guy was attacking the other, yelling his intention to kill him. The guy being attacked was yelling for help. I hadn’t heard any of it, although I had heard yelling. My hearing and vision had been restricted and I would have been completely unaware of what I was missing without the post-scenario feedback I got. It was a fascinating and sobering experience.

Is the Oz Factor the same as the what Miller calls the hard-wired freeze response? Possibly. Miller is not the first to write about the psychological and physiological effects of confronting violence and dealing with the Survival Stress Response. USAF Col. John Boyd, by observing thinking and response to combat conditions, pioneered the OODA loop model, showing how physiological response happens and where thinking can get hung up. UFO writers tend to think in silos where the experiences they report on are so special that there can only be one explanation. I submit to your consideration that the Oz Factor is in fact the Freeze Factor and that traumatic encounters with the paranormal work by the same rules as do life-threatening encounters with the normal.

Which brings me to a point made by Jack Brewer in his chapter of the book Robbie Graham edited. Reframing the discourse around UFOs to make it of greater general relevance would require addressing and taking seriously the trauma that experiencers undergo. “Demonstrating a willingness to acknowledge the relevance of trauma shows commitment to accuracy, concern for witnesses, and helps create an atmosphere more conducive to authenticity and good quality of discussion.” (p. 45)

UFOs: Reframing the Debate (2017) Robbie Graham, ed.

Facing Violence: Preparing for the unexpected (2011) Rory Miller

Crimes & Dog Whistles

Like so many others, I've been swept up in the true crime craze and immersed myself in books, podcasts and documentaries. Along with doing martial arts and the sheer fact of having survived until now, that's one of things that have made me reflect back on what I learned about crime and deviance in grad school.

My thinking has changed in significant ways since then. For instance, I'm reading Samenow's "Inside the Criminal Mind". He's a psychologist who works directly with offenders and describes their world view. At one time I would have felt his approach too essentialist, whereas now I find his observation-based conclusions valuable. (He also explicitly warns readers against putting an essentialist interpretation on his work.)

So the other day when a headline about "what criminologists get wrong and why" or somesuch popped up in my news feed, I read the article. Hoping for, I don't know, a thoughtful reappraisal of the field, some lessons learned, and possibilities for the future? I know, I know! That's not the stuff news feeds are made of.

The article started off reasonably enough and had me nodding my head at first. There was a misfire of logic here and a bit of a sweeping generalization there, but it cited academic literature, which is always good for seeming legit. It's true there's bias, fashion and fad in academia; social factors shape what counts as knowledge, which is something I've always found fascinating.

About half way through the article, though, it became clear that the author's analysis was very simple. Liberal research was biased and therefore wrong; it had largely silenced conservative research - which is unbiased and therefore right - for political reasons. So much for nuanced, thoughtful, or for that matter even informed reappraisal!

But there was more. Now that conservative voices were coming to the fore once more (Hi there, alt right!), there was hope for returning criminology to where it should have been all along in terms of theory and research. For instance, looking at factors like intelligence –

I'm going to stop right there. The mention of intelligence is classic racist dog whistle dressed up in cap and gown. A very old and tattered cap and gown in this case, because the scientific battle whether intelligence can be linked to race was settled a long time ago, and actual science has long since moved on (spoiler: race is a social construct). To mention intelligence as an important variable in studying crime is not just to highlight the fact that you're probably not conversant with the contemporary academic scene; it is to specifically reference a period in history when race, intelligence and criminality were all linked together by eugenic "science." Hence: dog whistle.

I finished the article, but came away with a distinct sense of having contracted a case of morgellons by reading it. The sad thing is that anyone who didn’t have my knowledge of that particular field might be taken in by the use of citations, miss the dog whistle and take the article as legit - while those who hear the dog whistle will see all those cool citations and think their opinions are now based in science.

There is still a valid question to explore in how the assumptions and biases of academe have shaped the field of criminology. (What I find most thought-provoking in this regard is what I see as the emerging field of the sociology of violence – which covers everything from the true crime craze to stuff like Rory Miller’s books to the course on Understanding Terrorism running on Coursera right now.) In the meantime, I like to think that persuasive arguments based on

~ Rejection of science
~ Disavowal of history of scientific discoveries up until now
~ Obvious promotion of a political agenda
~ Hope that no one will notice any of the above/counting on stupidity

are ultimately doomed to fail, and hopefully doomed to fail before they destroy the United States.

Former EPA head Christie Whitman in the NYT:

"The red team begins with his politically preferred conclusion that climate change isn’t a problem, and it will seek evidence to justify that position. That’s the opposite of how science works. True science follows the evidence. The critical tests of peer review and replication ensure that the consensus is sound. Government bases policy on those results. This applies to liberals and conservatives alike."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/how-not-to-run-the-epa.html?mcubz=0

Dudley Patterson & the Trail of Wisdom (Apache)

One day Dudley Patterson, a Cibecue (Western Apache) horseman, was talking to his anthropologist sidekick, Keith Basso. Basso had been hanging around him asking dumb questions for a long time, which is what anthropologists do. Basso had been asking “What is wisdom?” for a few days and finally Patterson said:

The trail of wisdom – that is what I’m going to talk about.

I’m going to speak as the old people do, as my grandmother spoke to me when I was still a boy. We were living then at Tak’eh Godzige (Rotten Field).

“Do you want a long life?” she said. “Well, you will need to have wisdom. You will need to think about your own mind. You will need to work on it. You should start doing this now. You must make your mind smooth. You must make your mind steady. You must make your mind resilient.

“Your life is like a trail. You must be watchful as you go. Wherever you go there is some kind of danger waiting to happen. You must be able to see it before it happens. You must always be watchful and alert. You must see danger in your mind before it happens. If your mind is not smooth, you will fail to see danger. You will trust your eyes but they will deceive you. You will be easily tricked and fooled. Then there will be nothing but trouble for you. You must make your mind smooth.

“If your mind is not resilient, you will easily be startled. You will be easily frightened. You will try to think quickly, but you won’t think clearly. You yourself will stand in the way of your own mind. You yourself with block it. Then there will be trouble for you. You must make your mind resilient.

“If your mind is not steady, you will be easily angered and upset. You will be arrogant and proud. You will look down on other people. You will envy them and desire their possessions. You will speak about them without thinking. You will complain about them, gossip about them, criticize them. You will lust after their women. People will come to despise you. They will pay someone to use his power on you. They will want to kill you. Then there will be nothing but trouble for you. You must make your mind steady. You must learn to forget about yourself.

“If you make your mind smooth, you will have a long life. Your trail will extend a long way. You will be prepared for danger wherever you go. You will see it in your mind before it happens.

“How will you walk along this trail of wisdom? Well, you will go to many places. You must look at them closely. You must remember all of them. Your relatives will talk to you about them. You must remember everything they tell you. You must think about it, and keep on thinking about it. You must do this because no one can help you but yourself. If you do this, your mind will become smooth. It will become steady and resilient. You will stay away from trouble. You will walk a long way and live a long time.

“Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dried up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. People will respect you.”

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (1996) University of New Mexico Press, pp 126-127

Everything You Know About Tibetan Buddhism Is Wrong

But you'll go on believing it anyway.

I just came across Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Donald Lopez, Jr, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. This is not the first book I've read about how Western intellectuals got aspects of Asian culture wrong. It is, however, a decisive take down, with detailed notes and references, of the basic image that Westerners have of Tibetan Buddhism. Including me. Ouch.

Lopez traces the historical and ideological record of the term lamaism, a derogatory label for Tibetan Buddhism, and shows how Western labels came to be used even by Tibetans. He shows how the West came by its translations of the Book of the Dead, which turns out (surprise!) to involve the exploitation of a native culture bearer to serve the ideological agenda of Westerners.

Lopez also reviews the fascinating case of a British ne'er-do-well who pulled off a publishing coup in which he described his life as an especially gifted Tibetan sage. He goes on to excavate the philological history of the famous mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" and in doing so once again proves the point that Westerners were more than happy to make up definitions when language or cultural barriers threatened Western thought boundaries.

I feel so lucky to live at a time when, even being poor, I have a collection of some of the world's best English translations of Chinese classics and Buddhist literature on my shelf. These were translations that simply were not available until 20 or 30 years ago. In that regard, we can't blame all these progenitors for seeing things their own way. We're just the same - and all better, I think, for the continuing efforts of the translators.

How Creepy is Woody Allen?

So today there was another story in the news about Woody Allen denying he was a child molester. I happened to have time for a good long read, so I clicked through to some of the linked articles.

I never went to see a Woody Allen picture in the first place because his humor, based on what I knew of it, struck me as somewhat trite and obvious. After the abuse allegations surfaced, I forswore his movies on principle. (Well, to be honest, it probably wasn’t until after he married his step-daughter — which happened like almost immediately.)

The situation was very similar to events that were unfolding at the time with a family member of mine who had married someone with more money and status that had turned out to be an abusive, controlling psycho. In that instance, I was stunned and devastated to hear that psychospouse had actually tried to kill the family member and, having failed, was working hard to make them homeless and take their child away.

There was no doubt in my mind that if such incredible events were unfolding in my life (Ha, ha! back then I was so naïve!) there was no way in hell anyone who said the least little thing against someone like Woody Allen would have a snowball’s chance of being heard. There just wasn’t any question in my mind that this guy was getting away with molesting kids because he was a rich, well-connected celebrity.

Now, for the record I would like to say that, like everyone else, I have made a lot of assumptions throughout my life and have learned from experience that my assumptions are generally wrong. That is, if I am lucky. If I am unlucky, they are generally wrong, wrong, WRONG. I should have been wrong about Woody Allen. For decades, this guy has gone around shrugging off accusations of child sexual abuse; for decades, journalists have been asking him about it almost as if the question was pro-forma.

In my head, it was obvious this guy was guilty of probably much worse than had ever hit the news and was using his white boy privileges to buy his way out of accountability. In the news, it was just, like, “Hey, how about those child sexual abuse allegations!” like they're the Mets or something. I, on the other hand, with my powers of assumption (and not unlike people who have never been abducted by aliens yet can make up a believable story about that time they were abducted by aliens) could have told you exactly what happened in that weird celebrity family I actually knew nothing about.

Like I said up top, this morning I had time to indulge in a long read. I clicked a link in one of the pro forma questionings of Allen at some film festival somewhere and landed at one of Maureen Orth’s profiles of the Farrow family in Vanity Fair.

I fucking hate it when I’m right.

After reading a short while, I couldn’t leave the story alone, if only out of the sense that someone must stand as witness when this kind of thing goes on, even if that someone is a nobody. The full story, as reported, matched every single assumption I had ever made about the case, except my picture of Mia Farrow as a person. I’m not into movies and assumed she was just some rando starlet with one of those celebrity things for adopting enough kids for a rainbow. Mia Farrow actually comes across as a fucking hero.

And Woody Allen? How creepy is Woody Allen? Serial killer creepy?

“You can’t say his own therapy failed,” quips Mia’s lawyer Eleanor Alter. “He might have become a serial killer without it.” (from Orth’s 1992 Vanity Fair article)

And people say therapy doesn’t work! Assuming there is no one missing and no bodies waiting to be found, how creepy is Woody Allen? Pedophile sex cult creepy?

If you look at a pedophile ring like The Finders, after emptying the contents of your stomach you will undoubtedly notice that THEY TRIED VERY HARD TO HID WHAT THEY WERE DOING (and apparently succeeded, for the most part).

Allen didn't. Instead, he bought as much credibility as his wealth would allow in the courts of law and public opinion.  He has, I assume (!), bought people in his chosen profession by the bushel. What he has not tried to do is hide his actions, apart from a few see-through lies.

There are any number of ways you can get out of being punished for child sexual abuse if you are rich and famous. Adopt a disguise, move to another country, buy a fake passport, I don't know. It's not really my area of expertise. Or you pull an Allen and not even care enough to hide it, counting on your money and prestige to buy you the way out.

That's some kind of cold shit. It goes past creepy and into the land of actually dangerous. Dangerous as in, I don't care what effect my actions have on others and I don't have to because I'm rich. Said another way, I'm highly delusional and my wizarding powers are so great I can make my delusions real. So how creepy is Woody Allen? Is he Donald Trump creepy? Why or why not?

I leave it for you to consider.

Mia's Story (1992)
Mia Farrow's Story (2013)
10 Undeniable Facts (2014)
Open Letter from Dylan Farrow (2014)
My Father, Woody Allen and the Danger of Unasked Questions (2016)

Edit 9/6/2016: I remembered that my relative had said the lawyer hired by their spouse (named Alan) was also Woody Allen's lawyer. Which would explain why the issue  comes up on my emotional radar long after.

In terms of the How Creepy contest, though, I have to admit that Warren Jeffs and the whole FLDS (and Mormonism as well?) far, far outrank Allen. Which is not a good thing. 

Acariya Mun’s UFO Experience

Acariya Mun (1870 – 1949) is a famous Theravadan monk who lived in Thailand and is credited with reviving the Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition. He is widely held to have had considerable what we would call psychic powers; specifically, the ability to know exactly what was going through anyone’s head and the ability to converse with nagas, devas and others.

The Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition is a rigorous, ascetic and only loosely institutionalized form of Buddhist practice that focuses on training one’s awareness. This is a form of Buddhism perhaps most closely mirroring Buddhist practice as it was during the Buddha’s lifetime and shortly thereafter.

It just so happens that there’s a very readable biography of Acariya Mun available for free in English. The book is fascinating from perspectives anthropological, mystical, historical, Buddhist, and so on. The author, Acariya Nanasampanno (‘Acariya’ is an honorific), one of Acariya Mun’s disciples, has a very natural, direct, engaging way of telling a moving and incredible story. I especially appreciate that he always mentions where he got his information – if it was from Acariya Mun himself, another disciple, local villagers, or what.

In the first chapter of the book, Acariya Mun is still a young man experimenting with and striving to perfect his technique of meditative practice. This is when he had what a Westerner might interpret as a UFO experience.

“Acariya Mun’s citta [roughly, attention] converged into a state of calm and a vision arose spontaneously. The mental image was of a dead body laid out before him, bloated, oozing pus, and seeping with bodily fluids. Vultures and dogs were fighting over the corpse, tearing into the rotting flash and flinging it around, until what remained was all scattered about. The whole scene was unimaginably disgusting, and he was appalled. 

From then on, Acariya Mun constantly used this image as a mental object to contemplate at all times … he continued in this manner until, one day, the image of the corpse changed into a translucent disk that appeared suspended before him. The more he focused intensely on the disk, the more it changed its appearance without pause. The more he tried to follow, the more it altered its form so that he found it impossible to tell where the series of images would end. The more he investigated the visions, the more they continued to change in character – ad infinitum. 

For example, the disk became a tall mountain range where Acariya Mun found himself walking, brandishing a sharp sword and wearing shoes. Then, a massive wall with a gate appeared. He opened the gate to look inside and saw a monastery where several monks were sitting in meditation. Near the wall he saw a steep cliff with a cave where a hermit was living. He noticed a conveyance, shaped like a cradle and hanging down the face of the cliff by a rope. Climbing into the cradle-like conveyance, he was drawn up to the mountain peak. At the summit, he found a large Chinese junk with a square table inside, and a hanging lantern that cast a luminescent glow upon the whole mountain terrain. He found himself eating a meal on the mountain peak and … and so on, and so forth, until it was impossible to see an end to it all. Acariya Mun said that all the images he experienced in this manner were far too numerous to recall. 

For a full three months, Acariya Mun continued to meditate in this way. Each time when he dropped into samadhi [meditative absorption] he withdrew from it to continue his investigation of the translucent disk which just kept giving him a seemingly endless series of images. However, he did not receive enough beneficial results from this to be convinced that this was the correct method. For after practicing in this manner, he was over-sensitive to the common sights and sounds around him. Pleased by this and disappointed by that, he liked some things and hated others. It seemed he could never find a stable sense of balance. 

Because of this sensitivity, he came to believe that the samadhi which he practiced was definitely the wrong path to follow. If it were really correct, why did he fail to experience peace and calm consistently in his practice? On the contrary, his mind felt distracted and unsettled, influenced by many sense objects that it encountered – much like a person who had never undergone any meditation training at all.”

Acariya Nansampanno (2003), Biography of Acariya Mun, pp. 8-9

Acariya Mun concluded that directing his attention to external phenomena like the translucent disk is a flawed method and from then on centered his investigations on his own body.

I’ve read fairly widely in English translations of various Eastern mythological and esoteric traditions and this is one of the more stand-out accounts of something that might count as a Western UFO. Translucent, hovering disk that shape shifts (or reality warps) and can float you off in a basket? Check, check, and check. Acariya Mun doesn’t exactly call the phenomenon self-negating, but it is described as an endless series of images which even as you chase after them keep changing. Maybe I’m projecting, but by the end of the story it sounds to me as if he decided the whole hovering translucent disk thing is just a waste of time.

Anyway, if you are up for a taste of something new, check out Acariya Mun’s biography. Bhikkhu Dick Silaratano’s English translation is very accessible to non-Buddhists and there’s some good stories in there (like The Hypercritical Naga).

One of many ways to read the book

Watch My Mum Talk to Aliens

My Mum Talks to Aliens is an Australian documentary that came to my attention after it was posted as an Amazon (prime) video. It’s a video I’d watch again because it represents a new genre in UFO films, where UFOs are put in their social context. This lends a great deal more general interest and in-depth richness to the story of UFOs as well as related phenomena, both explained and unexplained.

In the case of My Mum, the documentary unfolds as if it’s a battle of rationality between a skeptic and a believer, who just happen to be son and mother. Then you see how rationality and logic line up against social and familial bonds. The son is grossly offended by his mother’s lack of rationality, until her lack of rationality is publically insulted in a debate with a skeptic. At that point, he begins to want to defend her, and maybe expands what he considers to be the range of normal a tiny bit in order to still be able to include his mum among the sane.

It’s a very nice illustration of what the sociology of knowledge and science is all about – how what we believe and even why we believe it is, to a considerable extent, influenced by social forces. In My Mum, the son moderates his position about what is normal slightly in order to maintain a social bond with his mother. It’s an object lesson in how people categorize obviously wrong things as acceptable or not (yes, I am positing that obviously wrong things exist) that doesn’t carry the price tag the same lesson might if one of the players was of a minority race or lower income. Ufology is all love and white light that way.

Practicing Martial Arts

This weekend was two for two.

ONE

I've slid through most of my life without habitual physical confrontations, which I attribute largely to my demographic attributes. However, for two days in a row now, I've had the dubious pleasure of putting my training to use. In fact, the first thing I did at martial arts practice this morning was to ask my classmates' opinions about how I had handled an assault situation I encountered in a Berkeley park the previous day.

I was helping out the SF Mime Troupe by guarding their stage setup; they were doing back to back shows in the same park over the weekend. I had the late afternoon/early evening shift on Saturday. A white homeless guy saw me reading all by myself near the stage and started harassing me. I was more annoyed and angry than anything. I mean, I knew I was going to be spending time in a Berkeley park; of course I came prepared. Still, I didn’t want to have to hurt anyone.

I told Homeless to go away. He went off to sit with another homeless guy about 30 yards away, where he kept talking about me in a loud voice. His hapless audience – who had, until then, been napping in the sunshine – eventually got irritated (judging from his tone of voice), picked up all his stuff and left the park to his more irascible counterpart. A short while later, Homeless returned in my direction with a different homeless man in tow. They were headed directly for me as I sat on a bench near the stage, reading my journal. Homeless was talking loudly about how I needed company and how he and his friend were going to provide it.

All this took place in daylight in a park full of people hanging out on the grass or playing with their dogs, right near a playground full of children and parents. While I felt like I could effectively prevent things from escalating to actual assault given those helpful conditions, the insensibility Homeless demonstrated to taking such factors into account did make me think of him as more dangerous than his physical appearance would otherwise suggest. In other words, he might not know karate, but there seemed a good chance he was conversant with ka-ra-zy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to stand my ground. Dude was a sexually harassing, misogynistic asshole who was violating the sanctity of the commons and MOREOVER did not recognize me as a badass who would show him a thing or two about what women are really like. In order for the world to be a better place, he needed to be taught a lesson!

But here’s the thing. The journal I had been reading while sitting on that park bench was from ten years ago when my life was very different. I was basically reading about how much of an asshole I had been due to the fact that I thought I was right all the time. Even when I had actually been right, I had managed to significantly misread the situations I wrote about in the journal, and ended up paying the price for that. I know this because, of course, I know how the story turned out now! Back then, I just knew that I was right, and I thought that was all that mattered.

I train in Filipino martial arts and had at this point supplemented the items I was carrying on my person that day with items that I had put in my backpack that morning “just in case” and other items I always keep in my car and had retrieved from there. I also had the keys to the SF Mime Troupe truck parked a few yards away; when the volunteer coordinator gave them to me, she had said, “If there’s any trouble, lock yourself in the truck and call the police.” I decided those keys were my best weapon in the situation.

Going to the truck, getting in and locking the doors was sort of difficult. I knew that I was right and Homeless and his sidekick were wrong. It felt wrong to retreat, but it also felt like the right thing to do.

Once I was inside the truck, I realized another thing. I had been very angry at Homeless and, from a Buddhist perspective (I’m a Buddhist), you don’t want to let yourself be driven by feelings of anger. In this case, I had successfully not reacted to feelings of anger, but it dawned on me that this is the kind of thing guys, and particularly my martial arts brothers (because they are ones who care enough to make the effort) have to deal with all the time. It was a revelation to me, because when I get angry it’s mostly self-directed (which is a common Western female pattern).

TWO

So when we convened for our usual morning martial arts practice in a local park the following day, I was interested to get feedback from my training partners on how I handled the situation. The males immediately commented that this kind of slow-moving assault is not how confrontations happen between males; guys just walk up and hit other guys. There’s no slo-mo, there’s no stalking and talking, there’s no trying to hide violence behind the verbiage of intimacy.

Interesting, I thought. The day before, my focus had been primarily on not letting anger and/or pride drive my response. I wasn’t thinking as much about the gendered aspect of the situation, fraught although it was with gender power dynamics. I briefly wondered if telling Homeless he was exercising White Male Privilege would’ve made him feel better about himself and his position in society. It was Berkeley, after all. There was a good chance homie was a fellow sociology doctoral dropout.

We had a nice, late-summer-morning class featuring mainly wrist locks and stance drills. Towards the end of class the teacher put each of us through our paces on a six-count spada y daga (sword and dagger) drill. Spada y daga typically involves a short rattan stick and a large training knife, but we dispense with the knife so as to practice the trap hand instead. Not long before the end of class, an angry, older white male approached us.

We knew there was a Hostile Neighbor very upset with us for using the local park for our martial arts practice. Our interaction with him had started earlier in the year, when he began screaming at us from his yard across the street. The stick part of our practice made too much noise and woke him up, apparently. HN called the police, but after chatting with us the officer who responded to the call assured us that we were using the park legally. To be courteous to HN, though, we started delaying stick practice to the second half of class, typically after 10 am, and moved the class to a part of the park where hopefully the sound would not carry so much.

Today when the angry, older white male approached us, it was pretty clear this was Hostile Neighbor in person. He asked to talk whoever was in charge of the group. Me being always right, I’m thinking analytically, “Well, that’s either Rey, or I suppose me . . .” and then I start reading the situation. By then, we all turned from the drill we were doing to look at the guy, standing together. This is, after all, Filipino Martial Arts.

Hostile Neighbor started ranting, barely feinting at making a rational argument. In fact, his goal seemed to work himself up into a further state of quaking rage, and he succeeded. I’d seen the same thing years before when I took shelter with family members who turned out to have a secret history of domestic violence. Back then, I theorized that this kind of shaking rage was a precursor to actual physical attack, but I hadn’t stuck around to test that theory. I wasn’t particularly interested in testing it today, either.

There were enough squirrely things about Hostile Neighbor’s behavior in this encounter that I think we all arrived independently at the conclusion that he posed a real threat. For instance:

Instead of approaching our group directly from where his house was across the street, he took a circuitous journey around the park, indicating fear and anxiety, as if he wasn’t sure of the ground he stood on.

He asked to speak with the group’s leader (wait . . . Filipino martial arts groups have leaders? Come on! You must be thinking of Aikido!) but, instead of starting a conversation, he launched into a harangue. The only time he listened to what anyone else said was when he demanded to know where each of us lived, insisting if we weren’t residents of Pinole (the city in which the park was located) we didn’t deserve to use the park. HN being an angry white male and our group, reflecting local demographics, being diverse in terms of skin tone and cultural heritage, I couldn’t help thinking we might be talking to a Trompette. (Trompe (Fr.) meaning deceived, deception; Trompette being a play on words)

After several attempts to speak with Hostile Neighbor, we finally started telling him to go home. It seemed the best possible outcome. He began to walk away, ranting back over his shoulder. Then he took exception with one of us smiling, turned around and started walking back toward our group, verbally asking for active conflict.

I do not know what script was playing in that guy’s head, what twisted, dumbed-down, 21^st century version of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty. That some shred of logic was still working in HN’s head was indicated by the fact that when he approached the group again he walked past the teacher (1975 Lightweight Karate Grand Champion of the Philippines) and basically anyone who was tall and/or holding a stick to go chest-to-chest with the shortest member of our group. I know this because I was standing three feet away, flipping my stick. Seriously, dude? You think I’m not gonna fuck with you if you touch my friend?

Fortunately, we were martial artists, half a dozen people with some pretty significant training between us, which in this case resulted in doing nothing. There were no karate chops, no leaping kicks and or ki-ai’s. We stood, waited and watched as Angry White Male deflated his chest and went home, possibly to run a loving hand along the length of his gun cabinet. After a brief consultation, we decided that Meadow Park in Pinole had become too dangerous to use for recreational purposes.

It was just like the day before. Dude walks up full of incoherent anger. It’s messy and illogical and it’s not doing him any good, but if I have to hurt him I want the reason to be right. I want it to be a form of skillful means inspired by some bodhisattva who had perfected all the wisdoms and all the techniques and is also perfect in appropriate use of force. I want to be like Kanzeon, Kuan Yin and Avelokiteshvara, just whipping that frond of mercy out of a vase filled with the waters of compassion and waving it around to making stuff all right. But instead I have nothing, and can only get into the truck where at least it’s less likely I’ll harm another person. And next week we’ll be practicing in a different local park.

Internet Famous circa 1994

According to Google, when I can be distinguished from other people of very similar name I'm most famous for being acknowledged by Debbie Nathan in the forward to her book Satan's Silence and second most famous for . . . well, just type "Feline MPD" into Google. Apparently my article is still the first result. 22 years and going strong! Back then . . . well, say "PINE Is Not Elvis" and say it like you MEAN IT! Back then there were no tab characters; we had to type all our spaces by ourselves. It was terrible! At least PINE brought line wrapping, and somehow we all survived until html was invented and the first conspiracy websites went online. 

I was also into university tunnels and urban exploration, apparently. And of course intellectual analysis of the TV program The Prisoner. Such innocent days!

Possessed Dogs

Being fully awake and alert at 3:30 in the morning, there are a number of projects on which I could productively use my time. I will write about possessed dogs instead.

Dog #1

Four of us were practicing martial arts in the park, and by practicing I mean mostly standing around and talking (“tongue fu”). Every so often the teacher would demonstrate something on someone, one of us would grab a partner to try something out on, or someone else would test out a stance or strike. To any observer it would be slightly more interesting than watching grass grow.

A very tall young white man with head shrouded in a grey hoodie appeared at the edge of the park being led by a tiny pouf of a dog. People walk their dogs there all the time. This dog was particularly adorable. It looked like an ambulating hand muff (anyone remember what those are?) with two large, bright eyes. And when it saw us it went nuts. It stopped, it stared and started pulling on the leash. The tall, sleepy-looking owner walked along the edge of the park. As they passed by, the dog, its head on a swivel, gazed at us with rapt attention. You could feel it from yards away.

The young man passed by where we were throwing out our desultory punches and stances and started to exit the park. The tiny, bright-eyed dog would not follow him. He was straining at the leash back in our direction, still staring raptly. His owner paused to let him look. By now all of us were aware of this dog’s fascination. Someone commented he must have been a warrior in a past life. Although something along similar lines had been going through my head, it surprised me to hear this particular guy say something so mystical.

Now we had all stopped to look at the little dog who was so fascinated by us. I felt bad for it. It knew what martial arts was, it had found some people who were doing martial arts and it very, very badly wanted to do martial arts with them. But it couldn’t, because it was a dog.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should cease from evil and try to do mostly good: so you won’t be reborn as a dog who can’t do martial arts.

I called out to the tall young man that his dog wanted to take the class, he waved at us and then the dog accepted the fact he was just a dog right now and they went on their way.

Dog #2

We were in the same park, which is just down the street from where the teacher of our small martial arts group lives. One of his dogs had died the previous week, a dog I had known from being at the house either to practice or help out with carpentry stuff. Yuki was a very big, very happy, very loving dog, all white with round black spots on his ears. It was impossible not to like him, and he was very attached to my teacher. He was big, he was awkward, and he liked to hump my leg as I was using power tools but he was very, very lovable. However, he got old and died.

My teacher’s son, who had grown up with Yuki, was really upset and I questioned my teacher closely about his state of mind too. I know he and the dog had been close. My teacher grew up in a different culture than me but has always been happy to answer my questions about how he sees things compared to how I am used to thinking about them. He didn’t have a problem with Yuki’s death and told me exactly how it happened, with Yuki’s head on his lap. I wanted to cry just listening to his story. He was very matter of fact: “He was old. He died. That’s what happens.”

However, a week or so later we were at the park down the street from my teacher’s house doing our martial arts class as usual. Five or six of us were lined up doing various stances and drills. A pair of free roaming dogs trotted by on the sidewalk (unusual in this suburban community) and one, when it saw us, raced over to our little group with wild abandon. It greeted me like I was an old friend, leaping with joy, and then made a beeline for my teacher, jumping up and circling around him like crazy. It was definitely unusual behavior, but unusual behavior of a nice kind. The dog was ecstatic, jumping and licking at Rey, and all I could think was that Yuki had taken some existing dog’s body to deliver a final farewell.

We just kind of laughed it off. I probably said something about Yuki’s spirit saying farewell, but it was a very odd event and you couldn’t say anything for sure. In the end, the dog ran back to rejoin his companion who had remained outside the little park and they trotted off together down the sidewalk.

Dog #3

For the record, I am more a cat person than a dog person. But I guess you could call me ecupetical. (Ecumenical, ecupetical, get it? Never mind.) Several years ago and a different martial art school, I was sitting on a low wall outside the building chatting with another student before class started one evening. This was near a major route in a small urban community, so cars were going by and pedestrians were not unusual. What was unusual was some dog that came racing up to us from nowhere – I mean, came out of the dusk at full tilt toward where Zack and me were sitting talking on the wall waiting for someone to unlock the dojo.

It happened so fast I didn’t really have time to react, which is a hard thing to admit if you claim to be a martial artist. This was a young, strong pit bull that came out of nowhere, leaped up on the wall next to me, sat down and then leaned hard up against me with its whole body. It was extremely affectionate and happy, like I was some kind of long lost love. I put my arm around it, checking for collar and wounds. It was definitely wounded, but that bothered me more than it did the dog.

Long story I don’t even remember all that well now short, the young pit bull belonged to a local man and had gotten bloody probably climbing over the fencing around his yard. The dog had tags and when the dojo was opened and everyone arrived she was the center of a highly attentive Dog Rescue and First Aid Committee. Her owner was called and came by to pick her up, expressing great relief at finding her. I washed off the blood, because blood on the mat is not cool in aikido, and changed into my uniform.

I’ll never forget how she raced out of the darkness and pressed herself so happily and wholeheartedly against me. It was joy in the night, but a quixotic one. I desire to help all living beings, but all I got was this friendly, slightly bloody teenage dog to hug briefly.