Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2015

• How Inhuman (How to Destroy a Human Being) Part Two

  Posted at 1:58 am by kayewer, on August 30, 2015

  Last time we talked about how inhuman we are, so here is a continuation of that thought. It won’t be liked by everybody, but ideas that stir thought rarely are.

  So you’re having a baby (or two) and it’s time to think about names. If you’re the father and have been reluctant to marry the mother of the bearer of your genetic future on this planet, be sure to complain about it all the time. Both of you should look to the family trees or your favorite sitcom or celebrity, and come up with a name which will be hard to spell or pronounce, or which can be turned against your child by bullies. If spelling has never been your strong point, don’t bother looking it up: just wing it on the birth certificate.

  When your child is growing, make sure they see everything that happens on this planet, from G to NC-17. Don’t bother hiding anything from your child, including domestic disputes and unhealthy habits. Impose your strange habits on your child, especially if it will guarantee that they cannot integrate with anybody outside your home.

  Throw discipline out the window and let your child be a barbarian in public. If you’re miserable, project that misery onto your child so they never smile, either. If you were raised in an abusive household, be sure to pass that down to the next generation so nobody else gets away with not being wretched.

  As your child learns to talk, encourage obnoxious behavior or teach them to cower before your authority, or make sure they know how to beat the living daylights out of anybody who disses them; depending on how you know you are, you’ll recognize which of the above is right for how you raise your child.

  Raise a son to be a macho womanizer. Raise a girl to be a privileged princess or a submissive wimp. Remember that only the freaks on the other sides of the normal curve will make a history for themselves worth remembering. If that history puts them in prison or in some other danger, that’s not your problem.

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• How Inhuman Part One

  Posted at 1:50 am by kayewer, on August 23, 2015

  The biggest plague of humanity isn’t a virus or contagion, nor is it a natural event like global warming or drought; it’s ourselves. We are wayward monsters on a self-destruction binge which may obliterate the other guys first but ultimately will kill us all. It starts with the destruction of the human spirit.

  So how do you start destroying a human being? Let’s start from scratch.

  Step One: whether you have planned on giving birth to a human being or not, make sure you have messed yourself up prior to pregnancy so that your unborn child will have roadblocks before construction even gets under way. Smoke like a chimney, drink like you could down enough of the stuff to fill a community water tank, avoid anything that seems healthy and don’t go to the doctor until you’ve paid off last year’s bills.

  Step Two: immediately assume that your child will be just like you. Get the word on the gender right away and either buy pink for a girl or blue for a boy, or fit in your lifestyle with some goth or sports team onesies or a babies’ room themed like your favorite television show. Come up with a name you think is unique but others won’t be able to pronounce or spell properly, or name them after some obscure historic figure.

  Step Three: Make sure that when you are comparing pregnancy notes with other parents that your ideas are the ones which inspire the most awe and respect. Make sure there is no deviation from the established norm for your core group.

  Now of course there are a bunch of folks out there who are not starting families, so there are some different steps for you:

  Step One: Be sure to make snide and cruel comments to pregnant women. You can either choose to try to get them to drink or smoke, or remind them that they’re not part of the core group anymore because they went and got themselves pregnant. Remind them of how less prominent or overly prominent their bellies are compared to you or those you’ve known who are or were pregnant. Scare them with horror stories about pregnancies gone wrong.

  Step Two: Pick apart all the choices the expectant family makes regarding baby names, clothes and room decor. Be sure to make snide remarks about prices and quality and how much better people you know did when they did their baby shopping.

  Step Three: Get out of town or do everything you can to make yourself unavailable when the due date is imminent. Turn your back on low income families and turn up your nose at those richer than you. Only the way you got through your growing family matters, and nobody else is worthy of your invaluable help.

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• Stories of Yore

  Posted at 1:45 am by kayewer, on August 16, 2015

  My mother was telling me a nostalgic story this morning about her childhood, when the neighborhood revolved around Stypa’s store. Back in her time, the corner store was the hub steering the entire neighborhood across generations and ethnic lines, and there was an abundance of all of those.

  The children took pleasure in the penny candy, in the days when a penny got you a handful of selections and you wouldn’t think of having a bagful all to yourself. The men visited the store for tobacco and the basement pool table. The women picked up their sundries.

  It was also the only place with a phone. Everybody gave out the phone number of the pay phone in Stypa’s store, and when a call came in for a resident, either the owner’s daughter or a neighborhood child would run to the recipient’s home to announce it (and the runner–if it wasn’t the daughter–would receive a nickel).

  Neighborhoods were more unified in those days, in spite of a multitude of languages, probably because socioeconomic status was equal in those neighborhoods; everybody cherished the value in a penny when you could get five pieces of candy for one of them.

  Our elders can still smile at the memories of penny candy, soft pretzel wagons and cones of yum yum. They remember keeping a bucket handy to retrieve the manure left on the street by the passing wagon horses (great for the rose bushes), and watching for the occasional bonus ice chips which fell off the ice wagon during deliveries (back when a block of ice kept your freezer cold), and which could cool off a summer day in the absence of money for yum yum.

  The generation with those memories are nearing the end of their time on this earth, and we don’t always listen to their stories with much interest. That’s a shame. If we ever see an ice wagon or food of any kind for a penny, it will probably be under much different circumstances.

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• Not to State the Obvious

  Posted at 1:42 am by kayewer, on August 9, 2015

  Lately it seems as if we human beings are acting like total screw-ups. Well I think we’re not seeming to be screw-ups: we just are. We’re designed to overthink and under-plan. We try and fail, and try the same thing again and again hoping to get a different (non-failing) result. We learn from some mistakes and don’t learn a thing from others. To quote a certain insurance company’s tagline, it’s what we do.

  After we mess up, we go public and show off how screwy we are. The videos on YouTube are massive in volume and popularity, and somewhat strange. Who knew everybody could be so readily armed with cameras to catch that fall or shot to the shorts so nicely. We even have programs like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” which are just collections of our human errors competing for cash prizes. That’s us: rewarding the strangest things.

  For the non-visual human error aficionado, there are the politicians running for public office to assault your ears. Just ask a politician a question and keep your finger on the microphone mute button while waiting for the gem of stupidity serving as their answer. In a world where a second of silence loses your audience, nobody seems to think before speaking. A moment of care can prevent a lifetime of regret, but of course it doesn’t make for good campaign entertainment.

  Persons behaving badly, be they public officials or celebrities of any other kind, hide behind embarrassment or the cover language of their legal representatives. Wouldn’t it be a great teaching moment if one of them actually came out and came clean about exactly what they did and why they think they did it? One celebrity in particular comes to mind who could do the public a great humanitarian service by fessing up, even if this person’s public image is beyond repair. It seems some of our brightest and most admired people, when their reputation is found to be less than stellar, go to ground and hide, when instead they could just come out and talk about it. People like Paula Deen, of course, who admitted to human error, lost their reputations anyway, but at least we heard the truth.

  When it comes down to the basics, we’re all human. In terms of good and bad, we all take that roller coaster ride of sanctity and sin, and none of us can be considered incorruptible. We just can’t give up trying, and sometimes we just have to laugh at those little shots to the shorts on television.

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