Fire Slinger

1

It wasn’t laziness that did us in. We were just too damned scared.
Of course, who could blame us? Certainly not our fellow man, woman, or child. It’s quite presumptuous to ridicule someone’s choice in lifestyle or preference in long-term goals while embodying those same selections and epitomizing those steps with every personal action taken. That’s not even accounting for stigma. Just imagine the horror, the shock!, of calling out the very sins you’re guilty of. Better to just keep quiet, move along, say nothing.
So we said nothing.
Dad didn’t, though. He was the kind of fire-breathing, straight off the peaks of Olympus guy. His eyes burned with that brand of righteous zeal you used to dream about while attending an over-charged sermon, only his was the temper that burned from within, not above. He was the avatar of loud, the god-machine of in-your-face. He was at once the crazy loon on the street corner proselytizing the end of the world and the colossus, guarding the harbors of Rhodes against any fool arrogant enough to believe he could squeeze a ship through.
That was then, though.

--x--

Dad was born Norman Unus, though everyone called him Noe. Much of his earlier life, and much of our collective earlier life, is gone. Just fine, nobody around can read it anymore.
Some people told me, when I was much smaller and far more intelligent, that he had once killed and eaten a dragon, when such a thing still existed.
All I knew for sure about Dad’s earlier life was that he loved to sail and he was born old.

--x--

Dad lived and breathed in his room, his library, lined floor-to-ceiling with books. He never called it a library. He yelled at me for coming home from my first day of school and comparing his room to a library. He told me, “A library is a boring place where people talk about their favorite fluff in hushed tones, as if ashamed of the ideas that might have crept off the page and gotten lodged in the tightly-wound balls of yarn they keep between their ears. You do a disservice to every thinking, true-breathing man when you call this room a library!”
To think, five years old and I knew what disservice meant!
He took me by my little arm and held my shoulders in one great, lined hand. He dropped down quickly to his knees and looked me in the eye. I could see the soulfire going in him already, though I’d never really started to recognize it before. I just knew when he got that look in his eye he’d probably talk to witches or spooks that weren’t there, or go on for hours about the “disservice” all people were doing to… well, people. This time, though, this time that fire was aimed at me.
He was even smiling.
“No, son,” he said, “This is a war room. This is no safe haven to mewl about pulp ideas derived from this week’s issue of Slam! or to hush obvious ruminations on your flavor-of-the-week author. There is no sanctuary here. This room holds a never-ending battle of point and counterpoint; of gothics decrying the nymphic visions of the romantics, of muckrakers literally throwing shit in the face of every well-meaning political memoir out there, of transcendentalists looking over it all and laughing while well-meaning socialists look up and curse. This is Whitman’s mountain where he gave his barbaric yawp, this is the room Donne heard for whom the bell tolls, this is the hall wherein Beowulf did slay loathsome Grendel, this is the final resting place of Excalibur. That library,” at this, he spat, “is the room where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” He slapped me across the face then, hard enough to draw blood and leave a hairline scar that would serve to define my cheekbones and lead to a copious amount of female incursions in my later adolescent and graduate years. “And don’t forget it.”
I didn’t forget.
Not even when he and the room burned away, like so many snowflakes settling on an ever-changing sea.

--x--

Despite an ever-growing litany of political thriller, intrigue, and action movies as evidence to the contrary, change doesn’t happen overnight.
Would that it did! Take global warming: say you woke up on a bright Sunday morning in January only to find your East end ground-level apartment filled with ankle deep water and the air temperature at 86 degrees. I’ll bet that would get a few election-year politicians moving! Assuming they could get unstuck from the mud of the Potomac, that is.
Sudden change has never been a problem for humans. We’re very adaptable organisms (or, as Dad liked to say, “squirrelly bastards”). We get slammed with flu bacteria, we create antibodies and beat the tar out of those suckers. A bomb goes off in your backyard, you move. We react to the obvious, the loud, the immediate.
We’re also terrible procrastinators.
This is the danger of slow change: three people at work are seen coughing, sneezing, and looking genuinely unwell. The next day, they call in sick. A day later, two more people call in sick. It’s December, though, and the flu’s been going around already. Easily rationalized. You’d never guess that in five more days, the media would be reporting on an epidemic likely to kill millions.
Would you have rationalized the bomb in your backyard?
It’s easy to take this as an extreme example. You can’t go through life rationalizing everything. Rationalization of events is counter to survival instincts! Likewise, you can’t live as though every minor change is one that will lead to a calamity of mythic proportions. You’d never go outside! And that would be a shame.
Especially if the bomber missed your backyard and hit your house.

--x--

The slower the change, the more dangerous it is. History shows people won’t react to an event change until the events are culminating in something so large and unavoidably ugly that we wish fondly for the times the 800 pound gorilla was tearing ass through our string-of-pearls-structured lives.
The most dangerous is the one that took so long to arrive, you never saw it coming, and don’t even know by its limp when it has passed. The change that is with you, with me, right now. If the flu can kill millions with just a few months of subtlety, imagine a change that slunk to the forefront over 208 years!

--x--

Dad and the pundits both called it “progress,” though the former with a much bigger sneer than the latter.

--x--

If anyone who comes to this planet after we’ve wasted away cares to compile a semi-complete, mostly-authentic lexicon of human history, they will probably figure it all went to pot when they outlawed blank paper ten years ago. These future archeologists, whomever or whatever they are or how many tentacles they might have, will naturally suppose this to be the sign of End Times, or whatever archeologists comprised mostly of natural gas and space dust would call End Times. They’ll suppose this, and they’ll be wrong.

The sign it was all going downhill was not that they outlawed blank paper, but that we didn’t make a peep.

--x--

I’m writing this on a series of Plasti-lock business card backs, reams of silicon toilet paper, in the margins of Federally-approved texts, on the sides and bottoms of styrofoam cups, on plastic meal trays (in marker, pen doesn’t stick so well), and whatever piece of government non-biodegradable crap I can find, in a closet, lit by one candle at a time (long candles, and good! I only have three), and stored underneath a few loose floorboards so the zombies, when they lumber by, can’t find them. Not that they’d even know what they’d found. This could never be for them.

I’m writing for the aliens.

This is a story about my dad.

--x--