Very few words can sum up my disgust. My hatred. My anger. And with all the emotions that rise to the tipping point of what my consciousness can handle, I am left physically recoiling from the very thought of our police, nay political state. Endlessly questioning on when our cops became the true parody of Dredd, winning the tittles of Judge, Jury and Executioner. What powers have we as an American people given up to be ruled by fear and abused by authority? If our governed figureheads, time after time, choose to make examples of citizens for petty crimes, then why doesn't the unlawful murder at the hands of a cop weigh in the same? Why do we settle on only blaming the cop and not the departments that employ, teach and train them? Surely the Commissioners, Chief Of Police and Legislatures who issue leniency and minimum repercussions towards their own in uniform, gravely affect the outcome of how the following officers carry themselves - conduct their duties
Straying a little bit away from articles that are usually posted here at Sporkability, I recently got caught up with the idea of depersonalization. And so, going with that mind set, I examined curious occurrence of dreams and how they trick the mind and senses into believing something false and how Descartes Meditation theories play into this idea. Enjoy!
In our awaken state of mind, with our bodies tolling throughout the day, we rely on our senses, our conscious morally correct mind, each other and ourselves to relay back to us what we see and know. We trust in the elementary things that have been taught to us from years ago. We act on them and use them as devices to make simple and exquisite decisions. At the end of the day we retire, slipping into an altered state of mind, we dream of things that could never fully come to term if placed in this world of limitations. We wake and replay each day with only minor differences to tell one another from the last. Our senses drive us through this process; we follow blindly. We are finite. We are flawed.
I remember the first time I ever saw one. I was in the college cafeteria, and I’d never seen anything like it before. I’m sure I stared, but I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, they didn’t have anything like it back where I grew up, not that I am all that sheltered, you know. I mean, I have seen things, and I’m not prejudiced or anything. Really, I’m not. It was just a natural reaction to something so different. I just didn’t want to use it. I just didn’t really trust that that something so odd would even work. Hell, it was so strange that I wasn’t even sure how to use it. But I pride myself on having an open mind, so I tried it. I used it on the meatloaf, and it worked. And then I used it on the mushroom soup and it worked again. “I’ll be damned,” I remember saying to my friends, “this spoon-fork is pretty creative!” And then someone told me that term was impolite, that the correct term was spork!
Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. With our big brains, opposable thumbs and instinct for language we have been able to explore, conquer and populate every corner of the Earth; from the driest desert and highest mountain to the Amazon basin and the cold of Siberia; we even have people living in space!
There is a problem. An epidemic, a sickness fragmenting our societies very fiber and woefully little is being done to eradicate it. This debilitating problem, plague to sanity, endangers over a third of the world’s population; the end is not nigh. I’m of course talking about the disease of the designers.
Those words, like a festering wound, would echo through my being and cause a mental pang that left me enraged and unsettled.
I guess some would say that I was oversensitive – I mean they were just words. Silly, stupid words that I should have been able to let roll off my back. At least this is the coping advice I was given my whole life (drastically easier said than done, mind you). The memories however, the ones that crawled into my mind when I heard such words, were unavoidable and couldn’t be easily forgotten. What are you really supposed to do when words such as these, are used to define your differences?
All of my disabilities, foibles and peculiarities feed into the process.
My years of jerking cars from wrecks and hauling them across San Jose produced the mundane side of Hooker.
My being overweight, love for cooking and caring for others shows up in Dolly the dispatcher.
My year spent in a wheelchair during college shows up in the retired detective.
The biggest single event concerning both TBI and PTSD would have to be my being hit by a truck while standing on the side of the road. This was a huge shock to me, as up until that time, I was proof-positive that I was almost bullet proof, or at least invincible. Double digits of surgeries later, I can tell you that I wasn’t. Well, not quite.
One of the few things I can remember was clawing my way back up to look over the guardrail to the tiny ants below on their own road.
