On the hotseat

For violating the one-week rule, Gus requested something not-Blacksburg and preferably positive:

I allow myself to be a child. I sit cross-legged on the floor and pound my fists on the rug, grunting and with my face twisting up. I shift forms and rock forward, dipping my forehead further and further, faster and faster, to the floor. The urge to move intensely fades. I sit on my shins, hands limp on my thighs, and stare into distance. I laugh when I realize that my forms are not ones I had expected from the issues that felt hot to me earlier this day or this week; I welcome the deep wisdom of my subconscious for knowing my priorities better than does my conscious mind.

Another active form; I sit on my side, with most of my weight on my right hip, and pivot. This urge fades and I return to sit quietly on my shins.

While sitting, I visualize myself twisting and rolling forward to lie on my back. I resist for a few moments, but commit to entering the new form. I lie on my back, stare at the ceiling, grin, and twist my hips. The rug reminds me of the carpet in the kitchen of my family's house from my elementary school years. I imagine my mother's presence, standing above, looking down at me with disapproval at my silliness or frustration that my imagination takes me places she can't or won't follow; but between me and her presence stands a pane of emotion-polarizing glass or a wad of emotional cotton. I lie on the floor and grin because these are right for me to do, whether approved or accompanied or not.

(In the now of writing the previous sentence, I feel a loosening in my stomach).

I feel calm and grounded in myself. My tribe tests me by asking about the issues I presented as hot at checkin. The issues remain but drained of heat and more susceptible to the problem-solving abilities of my mind. My tribe asks me to show completion of my forms. I sit cross-legged, drum my fists, and rock forward, but without heat; I enjoy the forms the way I enjoy a repetitive, non-strenuous exercise. We check my session out.

Frozen Four recap

Before Gus tags me for violating the one-week rule....

We went with our friends Paul and Amy to the Frozen Four in St. Louis last weekend. Liz and I also took the off-day to visit my brother and sister-in-law near Springfield, MO. Some quick thoughts:

• Springfield (pop. ca. 200k) looks almost like a real city now, a far cry from it during the '80s. Instead of Waldenbooks in Battlefield Mall and Hooked on Books on S. Campbell, now a Borders and a Barnes & Noble almost face each other across Glenstone.
• We had lunch with Curtis at the finest Mexican restaurant in M'field. And M'field is no longer dry! Have the Baptists been outvoted or the bootleggers switched their business to meth?
• St. Louis has long struck me as the westernmost eastern city. It reminded Amy of Baltimore. There's something to this: a wintry downtown? Dingy brick buildings throughout the city? Anyone have thoughts?
• Maybe I'm spoiled by Toyota Center in Houston, but Scottrade Center in St. Louis seemed very dingy (the concourses are clad in slate blue restroom tile) and dated (the colors under the roof are teal blue and yellow--who decided against Blues blue?). Of course, the arena is, what, 15 years old? Time to tear it down!
• We toured some wineries near Dutzow and Augusta, MO (about 40 miles west of St. Louis). Blumenhof has a red with the taste and mouthfeel of port that Liz and I enjoyed. Plus the hills and winding roads reminded me, in an enjoyable way, of growing up in the Ozarks. That doesn't happen very often!
• Along I-44 westbound around milepost 110, someone a few years ago put up a homemade billboard, "If Cardinals build highways, we'll build stadium." The homemade billboard is still up even though new Busch has been open for a year and, as I understand it, the State of Missouri declined to fund it. (Instead, our hotel and rental car taxes funded it, I reckon).
• Forcing Paul, a baseball hater, to walk past all three accessible sides of new Busch was kinda cruel. Though the statues outside the NW (left field) corner reminded me that baseball has a tradition and history in the US that is only matched in North America by hockey's in Canada.
• Minnesotans tended to recognize and comment favorably on our Houston Aeros sweaters, even though I wore a Fighting Sioux hat for both days of games.
• If a single male were looking for non-skinny German/Scandinavian-American girls, he could have found more than his share.
• North Dakota lost on Thursday to Boston College, 6-4, driving Amy into a funk.
• Worst fan award: the BC fan sitting in Sec. 303, row H, who left the championship game after Michigan State went up 2-1 with 18.7 seconds remaining. A goal in 18.7 seconds is very possible! Plus, it's the championship game! Even if you think the refs and the TV producers are biased against you, stick it out!

Swedish tyranny

Though all tyrannies are ethically odious, there are gradations within the scale of ethical odiousness based on how far the tyrant and/or his apparatchiks reach into human relations. Any garden variety tyrant will interfere with the political sphere of human relations, in order to safeguard his position, his palace, his mistresses, and his Swiss bank account. But in some, the urge to be an alpha male, a silverback, gives way to the urge to treat his subjects, not as competitors in a status hierarchy, but as pawns to be maneuvered in instantiation of the tyrant's delusions. The suppression of truck and barter, of freedom of conscience, and of scientific inquiry represent a greater tyranny than ballot-box stuffing or indefinite detention of political opponents.

But most odious of all, at least until neuromic engineering will let the tyrant unlock the individual's mind, are those tyrants who interfere with the relationship between parent and child. From Pavlik Morozov to Luke 14:26, the greatest tyrants and aspiring tyrants have understood the most stubborn, mule-headed, anti-Year-Zero human institution is the family. The human tendency to privilege one's genetic relatives over all of the tyrant's other subjects is the stratum of granite underlying the sandstone of society; people will never sacrifice for non-kin at the rate and to the degree that they will sacrifice for the kin (at least until neuromic engineering, of course). Yet the worst kind of tyrant refuses to admit this; refuses to admit people are not blank slates on whom he can write his algorithm.

And for this reason, I condemn as the most vile and odious tyrant the official of the Swedish National Tax Board who issued an edict forbidding Michael and Karolina Tomaro from naming their daughter Metallica.