The use of “they” as a single pronoun for trans kids, victims and crooks who are difficult to identify, or those who’d rather you didn’t know who they are, is something I find damned annoying, because it makes it difficult to read an article or story if I don’t know whether “they” refers to a single person or a group. 

[I tend to get on my grammatical high horse about such things, which is peculiar, because at the same time I love the idea of grammar being flexible enough to morph with time and need; after all, the nitpicky grammatical rules I grew up with sprang from snotty academic types in the 17th and 18th centuries.]

In fact, this particular dilution of the plural is a modern culmination of a long linguistic tradition.

“You” was originally plural, but became singular as well to help chase “thou” into oblivion – because “thou” became too tightly tied to romance and religion. [Much the same happened in French, where the informal singular “tu” was kept for friends, family or lovers, while “vous” became the “formal,” unweighted second-person singular.]

Yet, “you” in English remained plural as well as singular, and also has the possibly unique position of a third, indefinite function. Think of a sentence like, “This is what happens when you mix chlorine and ammonia… [Hey, don’t even think about it, it dissolves your lungs!]” “You,” in such cases, addresses the indefinite listener – “anyone” – so is neither singular or plural.

Who’d think that a puny three-letter pronoun from near the end of the alphabet would have such oomph?

But de-pluralization is happening with nouns as well, in part because almost nobody studies classical languages.

“Media,” a Latin plural, now almost universally takes a singular verb in English reporting, even when referring to a diverse group [“social media is responsible for the decline of civilization”]. And just about nobody uses “criterion” today, using the plural, “criteria,” as singular.

While it’s not surprising that “data” has become singular in conversation and reporting, it’s also begun to sneak into science. Similarly, “bacteria” has become so fuzzy that it’s now, in much research, become an indefinite noun, which is shameful.

Ah hell, it don’t mean shit. But I enjoy being bugged by it.

*   *   *   *

Interesting article about a major fossil collection discovered under a schoolyard in Los Angeles. It includes rare complete fossils of wee trilobites from 8.7 million years ago, when LA was at the bottom of the sea.

But then, the sea will soon make its return to LA, given current climate conditions.

*   *   *   *

I’ve been reading the daily comic strips since I was about 5. It’s one of my few positive connectors across the years. Way back then, they ran in the big, burly print newspapers – the Philadelphia Inquirer and Evening Bulletin [now defunct]. Today, I have to harvest them online.

As anyone with this odd avocation knows, there’s a wide set of themes that pop up regularly in the strips: Humpty-Dumpty on his wall, clowns, mimes, Eskimos and their igloos, Bigfoot, a fly in the soup, etc.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed that the Grim Reaper with his scythe has been very popular, pacing through various strips week after week.

These cartoonists may be telling us something.

*   *   *   *

I’m going to go off-course here to point to a recent success in which I take special pride – not for the success itself really, but for how I arrived at it.

Over the past two decades we’ve had a small propane heater on the wall just inside the back door, to help offset the cold breezes of winter as we zipped in and out our main entry. It was a non-vented heater, which meant it spewed its fried gases into the room

The pollutants didn’t amount to much; nonetheless, it was a bad heater for doing this, and we were bad heater parents for allowing it to.

We’d recently had a heat pump installed, which keeps the whole house properly toasty, so last week, when the propane service duo came to do annual maintenance on the larger, properly vented heaters in Linda’s potshop and my workshop, I asked them to remove our naughty little kid.

The friendly duo leader wasn’t sure his truck held the equipment to do this particular job, and when he inspected our model, he admitted he wasn’t quite sure how it was attached to the wall. But he noted 3 or 4 hefty screws coming through the back plate, so he said the unit had been attached from outside.

Well, I knew that the wall had 2×6 studs, because I’d built it, adding half-inch ply on the outside and hemlock siding on top of that. How could anyone have gotten at the hind-end of the heater without performing absurd convolutions of thought and material?

The service boss decided that the only way to detach the heater would be to slide the blade of a reciprocating saw behind the back panel to cut those screws – but I’d built a bookshelf next to the heater, so… shrug. He packed up and left me me to find my own complicated way to wangle it loose.

I do my best thinking when half asleep. Or if not the best, sometimes the most useful. So I laid back and pictured the whole set-up… the screws sticking through looked to me like sheet-metal screws. What if, rather than holding the heater against the wall, they attached the rear steel plate to the heater? If so, I should check for the heads of screws pointed in the other direction.

Next day, I found all sorts of sheet-metal screw heads. I loosened them all. Most cinched internal parts of the heater together, but eventually, yes, the heater sagged and I could pull it from the wall. It had been attached through the interior wallboard with a few plastic anchors.

There was nothing earth-shattering in my use of a screwdriver, so what am I proud of? That I’d figured the thing out, while lying on my back, using straight-forward logic. I mean, damn, my brain really is good for something, even without knowing how a propane heater is put together.

*   *   *   *

Now for the opposite: an evening of shame.

Last Friday, outside the town bar we love, after a fine meal, with no more alcohol in me than my usual two shots of Yukon Jack, I fell stumbled and collapsed on the sidewalk while trying to get into the car – Linda was driving back, as usual. There must have been something plus the drink involved, but nothing this vile had happened to me in over 60 years.

The people outside the bar, a wonderful bunch, helped prop me on my feet, and somehow, on my own, I got into the passenger seat.

At home, I fell asleep, then woke up to find a strange, wandering thing moving across my face. Five or ten seconds passed before I mushily realized that it was my left hand… but foreign and inexplicably alien; even once I knew what it had to be, I could not recognize it.

Maybe 20 minutes later, I started to write this bit, while weeping apologies and horror to Linda. By then, my left hand had become a friend again – or at least an acquaintance – though the fingers hitting the keys were typing gibberish.

Why am I including this note here, though I feel it disgraces me? Because sending it out solidifies my need to know what happened.

And knowledge is far more important than disgrace.

Linda and I were jawing along during and after dinner when I veered off, as I too often and annoyingly do, into my “unique” childhood… not so much that no one of earth has  ever had another like it, but that of anyone I’ve read, no one has recapitulated what I recall of being a child – of hating being a child, of feeling that I had no relation to a world – the world – that I could understand.

Somewhere into talking with Linda – always a revelation  – I started to realize that, through all these too many years, I’ve consistently viewed my childhood as having held no definable self; that this internal whatever had no reality that I could pin down to anything, to measure any thing or anyone else against. That I was a cypher, an absence.

But a bit later – lights out, on the edge of sleep over which I would not plunge – I suddenly decided that actually as a kid I had a huge sense of self – an almost monstrous one that obliterated or devoured the rest of the inscrutable world. No, I hadn’t just alienate the outer world to the side, as I’ve seen it for so long: I had actively negated it.

I had feared all external life, yes, but it was less a failure to accept the outer than a failure to believe in anything outside myself.

After this revelation [or whatever the hell it was], I realized how this fits with one of the main strains – what I think is the underlying yet overwhelming strain – of my current novel: that memory makes the self, that memory is the self, that anything I didn’t personally experience as a kid was non-self, because I was no one before my memory solidified, and that may be why I am still fettered by an obsession with memory.

It goes well beyond nostalgia or what someone else [not me, ever] might consider the trauma of my youth, but the understanding that without the constant play of memory, I would not exist as self.

[I’ve written previously about the most wonderful teacher I ever had, Robert Cantor, a grad student in math who taught a summer course in calculus, totally focused on every student learning every bit of what he had to teach.

[He later shot and killed one of his math profs and himself. One press report – only one that I recall – stated he was found with a handwritten note in his shirt pocket. It had to have been taken from the 3×5 spiral notebook he always held in his hand throughout the class. The note read, “I am not who I am.” The report may have been fancy, not truth, but I believe it without reservation. Robert Cantor is one of the great sorrows and losses of my life.]

If, in my own mind, I was not real, as I looked at the situation for so long, then there was nothing I could do to change or move forward, or become – no way to interact, since there was nothing to react with. Yet, had I alternately accepted that only I exist, that would have been far more malign, a massive negation of reality.

So how do I look at it today, when the terrors of childhood have returned, in lesser form, but as a possible second childhood of terror? Is there a way out of this self/non-self confusion? More important, should there by a way out?

If only I exist, then reality doesn’t matter, because reality is a glam within my mind; but if, as rationally tells me must be the case, that outlook is haywire, what’s left? Is anything left, should anything be left?

This confusion works so well with my novel that it’s mightily invigorating, though it may seem brutal and negative. For writing – and for living whatever years remain to me – it’s a relief. I doesn’t matter which side of the trail is true, or if neither is.

I’ve never wanted to die, even when things were at their most precipitous. It’s not so much a fear of death as a fear of the world continuing without me, a world I’ll never be able to know. But should there be no reality beyond myself, I have no reason to care. Alternately, if reality is real, it will chug along without me and without my need to monitor it.

Whoops! Tigger, my all-time wonderful, wise, and superlative cat, just sauntered in to devour his evening snack: a freshly snapped-up mouse. Now, I know Tigger is real – it’s simply impossible for Tigger to be other than real – so everything I’ve written above is beside the point, whatever I might have thought the point to be..

Good night. 

My favorite Guardian columnist, Arwa Mahdawi, went on a wonderfully controlled, funny rant about Elon Musk’s latest absurdity – riding the testosterone train, a favorite obsession of the social right. Apparently, loads to testosterone are supposed to make men better than women, and musclebound men brighter than wimpy intellectuals. 

Oh, who is Arwa Mahdawi? She’s a British Palestinian lesbian journalist living with her wife and baby in Philadelphia, which should be enough for anybody, even if she wasn’t also one hell of a writer. Wish I knew where in Philly she lived, because I’d love to meet her when I get down there to buy Indian snacks and Lebanese olive oil at the International Store on Walnut St.

But that’s just one of my side obsessions. What got me to writing this piece is that I think she, as well as Musk, have the wrong take on our animalistic nature. 

The basic assumption of most social commentary these days is that warfare, misogyny, tribal and racial animosity, and internecine conflict – all the woes of  the world – arise from social imbalance.

Unh uh. That’s secondary, at best. They arise from evolution.

We’re mammals, and as such we’re going to behave like mammals, to the good and the bad. As a species, we’re part of a genus (homo) that’s part of a larger family… that’s part of the animal kingdom, that’s part of, so far as it can be defined, “life.” We’re all and each creatures of evolution, trying to establish a concept of  morality that will support our particular warped assumptions.

We behave as we do because that’s what the world’s evolutionary program demands. We protect our young, our possessions, and our territory; we allow no one else to intrude without introduction and acceptance. Today, with the world on the edge of oblivion, we behave exactly as should be expected through evolution – we deny, we fight, we wield our weapons, and we cry “foul.” But it doesn’t arise from socially imposed foulness or antagonism. It’s simply who and what we are.

[My standard mea culpa here: I’ve said or suggested much of this section some time back.] Morality is a concept which differs for each individual human being. There’s no way you can define, codify or justify “morality” on a cosmic scale, yet on a lesser scale it becomes just mind games. It’s easy enough to say “the psychopath (or the ex-president) has no morality,” but likely the unhinged obsessions of the psychopath and the ex-president occupy pretty much the same realm of certainty for them as “morality” does for the religious or the secular righteous.

Humans invented the idea of morality and raised it to a higher plane than mere rutting mammalian behavior. It then appears obvious (to humans) that having a higher ideal makes us a higher order of being. But should someone – like me – not accept religious precepts as foreordained, the “moral” outlook can have no solid basis beyond mere acceptance. [In my case, that acceptance is pretty damned high: Wielding “authority” over others to their damage is to me as unforgivable as behavior gets. But how could I prove that my response is the better one or that it is “true”?]

It can’t be determined by any scientific measure, which I think is one reason many people these days don’t trust science – it can’t provide them with “truth” the way they want it delivered. They want “truth” to be beyond human definition, imposed by a higher source on a higher level of reality.

So, to take an honest stance, you have to dispose of “truth” altogether. If you, again like me, see science as providing the proper way of determining “what is,” then the hell with “truth.” Accept “what is,” and do your best to organize it for the greatest benefit of all – as if we’d all agree on what that benefit might be. 

But what would it look like if we could change the world through social exhortation and policy, could form ourselves into an anti-belligerent species? The world would not just be a different place, we would be a different “us.” We would no longer be human beings (animal – vertebrate – mammal – descendant of hunter gatherers); we would be a signally different form of life from anything that has ever been known on earth.

Now to take this discussion in a slightly different but dependent direction:

Humanity as it exists will not ultimately survive. Nor should it. We are not worthy, and there’s no way, again, to say what will make us worthy.

What makes “worth”? Whatever we, as humans, collectively define as being “worthy.” But why should we even yearn to take such a wacky tack? Because somewhere in a tumbledown part of our brains, a slithery side-effect of evolution has implanted something to which we’ve given the name “worth.” [Circular logic? You bet! That’s something we’re damned good at as a species.]

It isn’t that I don’t think the world (planet Earth) should survive, but that I see no way to expect it to continue as a place that can support life within the range of what’s possible today. Humanity will destroy the place for every lifeform.

As a living form, we have fucked up because we were evolutionarily programmed to fuck up. 8 billion of us – ignorant, uncontrolled, uncomprehending – have chosen to live from one generation to the next without interest in consequences, because that kind of ignorance is innate to all life.

In itself, I don’t think our planetary destruction matters much. There’s a lot of universe out there that has no concern for Earth’s existence. But if someone should fine a way around what seems to me an inescapable, catastrophic end game… maybe I might be delighted.

Nah, not likely. We’ve collapsed in exactly the way our brains have been programmed throughout evolution to collapse. It isn’t that we’ve failed, but that we’ve succeeded too well in a direction that can only lead to the world’s destruction. We’ve come to the end of the line, the only possible end; it’s not just inevitable but necessary. 

*   *   *   *

Come gather round, depressives,

And a story I will tell,

Of Pretty Boy Freud the doctor,

Vienna knew him well…

*   *   *   *

Despite the many years since the name change, I wish Top Ramen was still called Oodles of Noodles