“Well, I suppose I’d have to blow your brains out.” I grunt and shift my weight from side to side in a futile effort to get comfortable. The thing about sitting with your back against a tree, is that you can never get truly comfortable. You just have to sit there with bits of bark poking in your back, and fake it for the pleasure of the nature freaks.

I wave at the park keeper who drives by on his scooter spreading seed. He waves back with his straw hat in hand. All friendly. I’d normally be much too reclusive for even this minimal contact… but hey, I’ve got to set an example.

“Oh Really?” Jacob asks, not at all comforted by this response. I can hear him moving his feet from branch to branch in the tree above me. I’d yell at him to get down from there and tell grim stories about people falling to their deaths, but I don’t because it would only make him climb higher. That and you can’t go through life afraid.

“Oh yeah… I mean, I’d have to go through the motions before I pulled the trigger. I’d probably kill all the henchmen in your mansion, free some prisoners. Then I’d get you out on a roof… probably raining now that I think about it.” I brush a bug off my arm.

I really wish we could just gene engineer nature to be more amenable to sitting down in its midst. I’d like to just lay down in a field of grass if it weren’t for all the bugs crawling on me.

“Yeah, definitely raining.” I murmur once the bug leaves.

“Why is it raining?” Jacob asks, climbing down a little bit from the tops of the tree where he had “run away” to not more than fifteen minutes ago. I have no idea what it was that made him so pissed off at the world, and it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is the way I react to it, and the way he sees me react. If I get angry, he’ll bunker down and get defensive. If I stay calm, I can make it all a game.

“Well, it’s raining to increase the drama. It’s one of the rules.”

“Is one of the rules that you have to shoot me?” Jacob sounds doubtful, and I imagine his little eyebrows going down and his little frown making his dimples disappear. Oh honey, I think, if you only knew how much I love you, but I can’t look up, not yet. You still need to laugh over how silly I’m being. You need to giggle, and when you see that being angry won’t get you my attention, I’ll give you all the hugs in the world.

I sigh, because sometimes being ridiculous is hard. “Buddy, you haven’t been paying attention at all. I said I would have go through the motions first. You can’t just kill someone. What’s the fun in that? Where’s the story? If you ever became an evil dictator, the military would of course approach me to take you out… we can cover all that in the first thirty minutes of the movie… but it’s not as simple as just shooting you. There’s a whole bunch of stuff we’d have to go through first. Like me killing everyone in your evil mansion and me getting you alone on the roof.”

“While it’s raining?” He reminds me, sounding very glum.

“Yes.” Good, honey. Play along with the silly game. You can’t be angry if you play a silly little game.

“I don’t believe this. Who made up these rules?” Not a question you would have asked before you turned ten, I think. Nope. Questions like “who made up these rules?” are the first sign that you’re not a child anymore.

“Michael Bay,” I reply.

“Who’s Michael Bay?”

“The greatest story-teller since Shakespeare.”

“Well why does he get to make the rules?” Another question he would never have asked when he was three, and I had to tell him not to stick his hand on the stove top.

“Because when Michael Bay was born he did a shoulder roll out of his mother and was immediately followed by a column of fire and a time distortion that caused the whole thing to happen in slow motion.”

“What? That’s made up!”

“It’s true. I read it on io9. Did you want to hear the rest of the scenario or not?”

“No!” He emphatically responds. He’s climbing back up in the tree again. He’s angry at himself now for playing along. He probably feels like he’s betraying his principles. Anger is “true.” Happiness is not. I’ll have to make him unlearn that. Stubborn boy.

“Well, okay. So I’ve got you on the roof, and it’s raining. Let’s see… you’ve probably just killed somebody that I love… not romantically though. Hmmm… yeah if you’re my little brother in the film it would be inappropriate for it to be a romantic interest.” Buddy starts saying “la la la” over and over again with ever increasing volume. “Let’s say we have a zazzy cousin that flies the chopper that brings me into your Southeast Asian country. Okay, you’ve just killed her.”

“BC, you’re a big fat liar!” I’ve been called worse names, but never by the kids. Usually I don’t care what anyone says, but coming from him it hurts more than a little. Not that I’d show it.

“Thank you. Okay, so you’ve just killed her, and then I’ve got the gun on you, and then you beg me to shoot you. You tell me I don’t have the guts yada yada yada. And I want to shoot, even though it’s breaking my heart, but at the last minute I decide it would make me no better than you. Then I turn my back, you go for a gun, and I turn around… and then it’s lights out. After the fade to black we see that I’m the only one standing, and then we do a boom shot way up in the sky and realize how alone I am in the great big world. Roll credits!”

“See, I told you! You don’t love me!” Buddy would climb higher up in the tree, but I can feel it swaying and I know he’s too scared to go up where the branches thin out.

“Well, you asked me what it would take for me to kill you and I told you. You’d have to become an evil dictator in Southeast Asia, repress a community of honest farm folk, and kill a zazzy helicopter flying cousin that we don’t have.”

I look up at Jacob and smile, now or never. He’s frowning down at me. Again, I sigh. Ten is a tough age. All those boundaries that you’ve got to figure out, and everybody snaps at you for testing them. There’s no temperance to the procedure, or at least now when I was young. He’s itching for a fight because with every ounce of his little body he needs to be to know his limits and be prepared for when he crosses them.

“You don’t love me.” Heresy, I think.

I followed you on your mile long hissy fit from the house and I have spent the last fifteen minutes under this tree that you’ve climbed talking to you. Why do you think I did that? The complete and total lack of love?

Instead, I say “You want to see Transformers tonight? Michael Bay directed it.”

“Well then it’s probably terrible!” and he gives me a raspberry.

“Yes, but I’m sure it will be very entertaining. It’s important not to thumb your noise at entertainment. You only get the one life, and it’s a good idea not to get world weary before you’ve had some fun.” Of course I am the worst of all possible messengers for this sentiment, but when I am with either of the kids I believe it whole-heartedly.

“I’m not coming home! I’m going to live here!” He announces.

“Good idea. You’ve got plenty of leaves for a roof, least-wise till winter comes. Shame it makes you a monkey though. Did you know everybody used to be a monkey way back?”

Buddy now plays the game where he’s going to say “No!” to everything I say. Better than the silent treatment, but not by much.

“It’s true.”

“No it isn’t.”

“A guy named Darwin figured it all out. Called it Evolution. We’ve talked about this before.” We have. Several times.

“No.”

“Well, a long time ago we lived up in trees, and then some of the other monkeys kicked us out of trees. Or maybe it was climate change and all the trees we lived in died. Who knows? Anyway, we got kicked out of the trees and we had to figure out how to walk upright, probably because we had to move somewhere with lots of tall grasses.”

He keeps saying “no no no” over and over again.

“Well I don’t think Buddy’s a butt face.”

“No!”

Then it’s like his tongue has tied itself in a sudden knot. Yes, Buddy, I know a trick worth two of that. I was a boy once too.

“And I don’t think Buddy’s a doo doo head either.”

“You’re not fair.” Yes, that’s a boyish sentiment. Fairness. I mean to see you keep that for the rest of your days.

“What are the parts of a tree?”

“No no no no!”

“Sounds about right. I thought that was it. You’ve up and become a monkey and that’s why you’re up in the tree. No wonder you don’t know the parts of a tree what with being a monkey an all.” It’s time to stand up now, and I make a quick circuit of the tree, talking about cambium, xylem, and phloem. Apical meristems, chlorophyll, and how branches grow and why they grow some places but not others. I keep talking like he’s not even there, and he’s stopped saying no.

I hold a leaf for inspection not too far from his foot. I talk about how plants take in carbon dioxide, how they combine it with sunlight and water to make sugars and how they exhale oxygen. I tell him that the oxygen actually comes from the water, not the carbon dioxide. A lot of people don’t know that, so he should remember just in case someone asks. I invite him to inspect it, and I’ve been talking for long enough without anger that he forgets the whole reason he ran up in the tree is because he was angry at the world and he bends down and stares at the leaf.

I could reach out and scoop him up so easily.

If my mother or step-father were in my shoes they’d probably take the opportunity to grab him and drag him back home. Destroy all the trust just like that. But I’m not stupid. So I just keep talking about why chlorophyll is green, and about where colors come from. And when he goes to put his foot on a dead branch that would snap, I grab his ankle and guide it to a safe place. Building our trust back up from square one. Touch first, talk, and then maybe a hug later. I invite him to investigate the dead branch.

I ask him why he thinks it died. I give him a couple of reasons it might be. Then he asks me why, and I tell him I don’t know either. I’m no botanist. It’s okay not to know everything, but you should always be curious.

“Are you curious?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Do your feet hurt?” He left the house without shoes, walked across some hot pavement and I bet that tree-climbing wasn’t too good for them either.

“Yeah,” he admits. I pick him up and sit him on his butt on a low hanging branch. He gets to keep his dignity, but he gets to be off his feet.

“BC, what happens to people when they die?”

That is perhaps the least child-like question he could possibly ask.

“Where did you get a question like that?”

I’m taken aback, because for all my cynicism the only people I can never imagine dying are the children.

“I was just thinking about it today.”

“Is that why you wanted to run away?”

“No.”

But it’s probably part of the reason. He’s asking the big questions now, trying to find answers, and that means pushing boundaries again. That means running away from home to experience the way the world feels when you have no place for safety. That means wondering about death.

And I’ll have to be honest with him now, that’s going to hurt. No more “Well, you were somewhere before you were born so it makes sense you go back there when you die.” Just the honest: No one has any idea.

“Well, no one knows. Except the dead, and they aren’t saying much about it. It’s good that you’re curious though. It’s good to ask questions.”

“BC, Dennis said you didn’t believe in God.” I can see that this has been troubling him.

“I don’t. People are allowed not to believe in God. You can believe in God if you want. Or you can not believe. I’ll love you either way.”

“But if there’s no God what happens when you die?”

“I don’t know, Buddy. Maybe nothing. Maybe something else. Nobody knows.”

“I don’t want there to be nothing.”

And that is the fear of the adult. The fear of oblivion. My little boy. My darling little boy, would that I could take such terrors from you.

“What do you want?”

“I want to come back. Someone at school said that when you die you get to come back and be someone else.”

“Then believe that, honey.” I scratch his hair. Such big scary ideas for his little mind, and there’s not a single thing I can do but help him think about them. Can’t protect him from ideas no matter how hard I try. Best just to help him grow along and face them.

“Do people who believe in God believe that you get to be reborn?”

“People who believe in God believe in a bunch of different things.” His little eyes are closing. He’s tired. I pick Buddy up and put him on my shoulders, and oh Christ is he heavy. I may not believe Jesus is divine, but he’ll always be the man I curse by.

I take a few steps, and am surprised to find I’m not going to be able to carry him like this for much longer. I’ll be surprised if I can carry him all the way back to the house. Just when the hell did that happen?

“BC, what religion are we?”

“Mom’s Lutheran, but you can be whatever religion you want.”

“But Dennis is Mormon because his parents are Mormon.”

“No he’s not. Dennis is Mormon because he chooses to be Mormon. If he wants he could be something else. His parents may not like it, but it’s up to Dennis.”

“Like what?”

“Like a Buddhist.”

“What do they believe?”

“Reincarnation. That’s what you were talking about earlier. Dying and coming back as someone else. They also believe in something called Karma, and that’s when you…” I have to pause to take a breath. It’s hot, and god damn do my shoulders burn. “Sorry, Buddy. Karma is when you do good things and good things happen to you.”

“What about bad things?”

“Works the same way.” And I pause for a while because I’m huffing and puffing, but I power through and we make it home. I put him down in the grass.

“Would you really shoot me, BC? If I did something really bad.” He asks this when we’re back in the house, because the house is safe. Maybe he could believe I would shoot him in the outside world, but not inside the house. No, not in the home place. The safe place.

I give him a hug. My little boundary tester. My little path-finder.

“Who is my little guy?” I ask, our ritual.

“Me.”

“Who loves you?”

“You.”

“How much?”

“Infinity and beyond.”

“Then if all that’s true, how could I ever possibly shoot you?” I give him a kiss on the top of his head and tell him he’s not too old for naps. But first we eat some watermelon, and Buddy is surprised to find that the seeds are the plant’s children. Yes, they have babies too. Everything has babies Buddy.

And he snuggles up on the couch and sleeps, and I wonder for how much longer he will still listen when I speak. And I bend over and touch his head, and wonder how long I can protect him.

Oh my little boy. My little boy, how much longer will you be small enough to keep? And when will you outgrow your cage?

BC Woods

I have heard rumors all my life, repeated by strange specters throughout my schooling, of a place where the books are free and the women are cheap…. A place where everything that is known, can be known if you just know how to look.

The truth is something else entirely.

Now, the books aren’t free in the sense that they can be taken forever, and the women aren’t cheap in the sense that they will have sex for you for very little money.  It’s more along the lines that you can borrow a book for free, and the people involved in this genius profit scheme make very little money and thus live a frugal lifestyle.

In either case, I have found this place, and it is called “The Library.” Today, I got my official “Library Card” which is what I understand they give to intrepid explorers, such as myself, to take back to a room full of British thrill seekers so we can place it on the wall next to the elephant tusks.

Anyway, now that I have ventured to this magical kingdom, and fought its weather beaten hobos, senile old people, and frigid sex-hating librarians: I have a request.

So, my readers and my friends, any good books you’d like to recommend?

BC Woods

Introduction

A young woman meets a man at her father’s funeral. They share an immediate rapport. She spends the whole service crying into his shoulder, knowing from that from now on she can no longer think of herself in terms of “I” but in terms of “we.” This man is now bound to her. They talk all night. They talk all through dinner.

They sleep together and both think that the act of love-making has never been so wonderful or fulfilling.

She’s so goddamn head over heels for him that she doesn’t even realize she forgot to ask for his name until it’s the next day and he’s already gone back home.

She’s in absolute despair trying to figure out his name. No one can remember, and she’s gone through the whole guest list twice. Nada. Worse still, the funeral is nowhere near her home and she’s going to have to leave soon. She has no idea where the wonderful young man may live, and he certainly has no idea of where to find her.

That evening she kills her mother.

Why’d she do it?

Well, if you’re a sociopath you’d know right away that she killed her mother so she could see that nice young man again. It makes sense that he’d come back for the mother’s funeral, right?

Or at least that’s what I was told the first time I answered this question.

The person who asked me, my college RA, even told me that it came off a test scientifically designed to measure sociopathy.

I immediately called bullshit.

Why? Well, it’s not because I’m not a sociopath. I just think there are much better ways to tell whether or not someone is really and truly disconnected from other human beings than a stupid question about killing someone we don’t even know in the context of the story.

Hell, the mother might even have had it coming in the long run. Did you ever even pull your head out of your ass long enough to think about THAT?

What if the mother had molested the daughter her entire life? Am I the only person that finds it odd that this hypothetical woman is so screwed up in the head she’s chosen her OWN FATHER’S FUNERAL to find the love of her life? Talk about attachment issues. Or maybe the mother just stood by while the father sold out the daughter’s body for drugs when she was younger? No, we’re just supposed to sit back and assume that Mother = Good. How good could she have been if she raised a murderer?

Sure, the daughter probably IS killing her mother just to meet that young man again. But if the mother was the sole reason the daughter is fucked up in the first place, then I don’t really mind the daughter killing her to get one fucking CHANCE at happiness.

Like I said, there are much better ways of telling how disconnected someone really is from the collective human soul.

I have compiled the following list of three things that all truly human people share in common. If you are able to go against any of them, you are without a doubt a sociopath. These are universals, that apply to all humans of all cultures.

Dare I say it: they even apply to space aliens.

1. Can You Commit A Violent Act While Listening to Enya?

There is a sound in the universe that controls all harmony. No, it is not the mystical name of “Muad’Dib” from David Lynch’s 1984 science fiction film classic “Dune.” It is the music of Enya.

Don’t believe me? Click on the Enya video I have encoded here. Now imagine the person you hate most in the world, and then try to imagine just beating the living fuck out of them. Think about bashing their evil fucking teeth in with your computer monitor.

Can’t do it can you?

That’s because Enya, as Adam Carolla has observed, is like a magic wood sprite. No one knows what country she comes from. No one has ever said “Oh dude, I was out at dinner yesterday and guess who we bumped into? Enya! That bitch loves spaghetti!”

No, Enya lives in some kind of magical palace made of wood bark and moss on top of a rainbow bridge. Her sole purpose is to create intellectual spaces in which violence can not exist.

If you can think violent thoughts while listening to Enya, your name is Charles Manson.

2. Do You Mist Up When Witnessing Montages In Which People Age From Infancy to Infirmity?

I don’t care what birth defects you have. I don’t care if you’re Hitler. If you show me a picture of you as a child, with pictures showing your gradual growth from infancy to infirmity, I will break down and cry.

Why? Because time ravages rich and poor alike. It is the one thing that connects us all, and villain or saint, you are a human being. You have a human story. All humans are suckers for human stories.

Watch this video and tell me you don’t get sad.

The person in the video isn’t even real!

Especially when you see the montage involves combat in WWII. Any time an American hears about another American dying in WWII we are obliged to feel very sad and reflective about our own life.

That’s why at the end of “Saving Private Ryan” when we see Matt Damon turn into an old man begging his family to tell him that he’s lived a good life it is totally okay to make a tea kettle whistle sound as we break down and just cry like the living fuck.

That’s right. I said “cry like the living fuck.” That is how powerfully you’re allowed to weep.

3. Do You Enjoy Abba?

I’m mostly Croatian. I am genetically designed to believe that the only hope worth having, is the hope that you will die in your sleep. I could walk behind a ox with a plow all day and never plant a single seed. Want to know why? Because I have no internal mechanism that tells me things should or can get better. I don’t believe that hard work should be rewarded.

You get to be miserable and then you die. Happiness is fleeting, and we’re all going to be dead in fifty fucking years anyway. Who really gives a shit?

Yet I am sometimes pulled away from these harsh truths by the joy of a “Dancing Queen” or a very strange song that somehow manages to relate a young girl’s surrender to love to Napolean’s surrender at Waterloo, or another song about two people remembering the Mexican Revolution (Seriously? What the fuck is that? Doesn’t anyone else ever get bumped by that?)

Oh sure in my personal life I condemn Abba has “gay tripe.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on a construction site and said “Wow, this song is so gay!” Only to nod my head in time to the beat of “Super Trooper” as soon as I rounded the corner.

There is only one kind of person that truly, deeply hates Abba.

The kind of person that hates life itself.

BC Woods

Last night, I staggered into the break room and hurriedly turned on the news. Since it was late, no one objected to my taking control of the television. Mostly because no one else was there.

Obama was speaking at the “Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner” I watched, hand in mouth… waiting. He finished speaking, and then… they switched over to analysis of his jokes.

I was ever so pissed, because that meant I had to miss the greatest public intellectual of our age who was scheduled to speak immediately after.

BC Woods

I woke up yesterday feeling like someone had been banging two iron skillets together inside my head for several hours. I’m not really prone to headaches, and I don’t drink, so I was at something of a loss to explain this.

After a few minutes I realized that I was physically unable to stand up, eat, or drink. I also had a fever, and felt like I wanted to throw up. That’s when I finally said “Oh… I’m sick!” after which I promptly went back to bed.

I estimate I slept somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen hours yesterday, although I can’t really remember waking up people told me I did. I have no recollection of it, but I apparently left comments on several blogs and figured out how to reset my twitter updates. I had changed the password, which caused some technical hiccups, but apparently my subconscious self is a freaking genius and set that aright.

I’m still feeling relatively crappy, but at least I can type now and remember what I write. Anyhow, now that I have regained the power of memorable communication, how shall I use it? Let’s go ahead and talk about centaur sexuality.

In the past couple of days, I posted the following question on twitter:

bcwoods “Are centaurs ever cross gendered? (ie woman body on top with giant horse penis on bottom)”

Which got the following responses:

DJWebcomicGeek “That’s a disturbing thing to think about. I would have to say possibly. Like hermaphrodites. This requires further investigation.”

sedated2000 “have you ever seen a male centaur’s genitals to begin with?”

DonitaH “Sexiness.”

AnnieVigilante “I can only hope.”

My guess on this issue would be that all genetic variation is possible, and in a centaur population of significant size, you would see cross-gendered centaurs. However, the interesting question is this: where do centaurs get pregnant? Do female centaurs carry the baby in their human womb or their horse womb?

My guess on that: It would have to be the horse womb unless centaurs had a really crazy birth canal. Which makes you wonder if female centaurs have even retained their human wombs.

I also asked the following question:

bcwoods “Would centaurs even be turned on by breasts? It seems they would be too far away during copulation to care.”

davidcgarcia “Yes. Yes they would.”

kittenbottom “Maybe they still play with them while making out?”

Emperor_Gum :assuming that humans are more sexual animals that horses, I believe they would. Huh, and centuar sex is my first update in 9 days.”

sedated2000 “You’ve really been thinking hard about this centaur issue, huh? Centaurs would probably not care too much. None wear shirts.”

Descartes1 “I think it’s the other end of a centaur that would get the most attention”

DjWebcomicGeek “I doubt they would find them too sexy. I don’t recall seeing many covered centaur women so it’s like they’re desensitized to boobs.”

My thoughts on this are that centaurs would be very European about breasts. As DJ so kindly pointed out, I’ve never seen a centaur wearing a shirt, so right there that takes away the whole taboo aspect of breasts. Then there is the fact that a centaur cannot physically fondle a female centaur’s breasts during copulation because they are simply too far apart.

Which leads to yet another question: Do centaurs finger bang? Aside from the obvious “Is the hand even big enough to stimulate a female centaur?” There’s also the issue that in horses that particular canal also has a lot of other things coming in and out of it that would present some unavoidable hygiene issues.

The question I now leave you with is this:

“Do Centaurs masturbate?”

My guess is yes, even though they obviously cannot do this in the traditional human fashion because of distance issues. Given their near human sexuality however, it is likely that they would find some way to masturbate without using their hands by constructing some kind of masturbation device.

BC Woods