Manifestly dangerous destiny

So I've been thinking about this some more. What is it about guns that is buried so deep within the American psyche that despite our being the only high-profile democracy with a massive shooting-death problem, we will never, ever ban or even meaningfully restrict them?

I would have said 'highly-evolved' or 'highly-developed' democracy rather than 'high-profile,' but sadly that would not have been true. In 1789, when our Constitution was finalized, we might have been called one of the highly-evolved democracies, in that there weren't too many of us and at least we'd put together some paperwork. And in the 1950s, before special-interest lobbying and donor corruption had become so prevalent and destructive to congress, our democracy might have been called highly-developed. But now we are just famous. Appropriate, but not edifying.

What's the obsession with guns and the resulting violence problem all about? Do Americans glorify gun violence more than other nations? Or do we just have more guns to act it out in real life? Do we have more undiagnosed or unmedicated mental illness, or do we just have more freedom to opt out of treatment and opt in to other pastimes that keep us quiet, like violent video games and television?

Looking at the origin story,  since there were people here already when the Europeans 'discovered' America, the settlers/invaders needed to use force to conquer. Back in Europe the average citizen/resident did not need to invade or conquer in order to establish residence, and so did not require weaponry. Therefore the ownership and use of guns on this continent by European settlers was directly related to their role as individual citizen-conquerors, and represented a marked difference from how they had lived in the old world. Without those weapons, people on the frontiers would not have been able to defend their homes against those whose lands they were appropriating, since it would have taken days or weeks for the closest sanctioned cavalry to arrive. The earliest, most enterprising Americans, the pioneers who 'made this country great,' depended on weapons for their continued existence.
So, weapons played an enormous role in making the country great, and helped forge a different path to greatness from those that had existed back in Europe.

On the frontier, there was no democracy - there was only individual enterprise and defense.  I've noticed that the people who fight loudest and longest for guns seem to be the ones who think that guns are the only thing that will allow them to stand up to and fight back against  'the government.' If this is true, it's a huge chink in the armor of our vaunted democracy. The point of democracy is (kind of) that everyone gets a say, not everyone gets the right to shoot people if they feel their rights are being impinged upon. But if you identify as a patriot with the pioneers who made America 'great,' then you haven't really made peace with the idea of democracy, since there was no democracy on the frontier. 

So maybe that's it. America is built on the use of guns to overtake a continent of people who had lived here for centuries, and the only rule of law was who was armed and who was the quicker draw. Freedoms of speech and religion didn't really matter when there was no one in charge. And deep down, maybe Americans believe that since guns are what helped make this country what it is, restricting the right of anyone to own and use them is to take away an important piece of what it means to be American; what it means to be different from the cultures and societies we left behind (no matter who much they have each evolved since that time); what it means, on the frontier, to be secure and free. 

World End

I've got a little more to say about the purported 'end of the world.' The Mayan empire was slowly decimated by Spanish conquistadors, and the new habits, preferences and diseases they brought with them. The Mayan people began to lose their faith in their deities and their communities and as a result were subsumed into the culture of the Spanish colonists. It was a case of the imperial efforts of one civilization out-gunning the empire of another. Over the last 13 years, since 1999 and Columbine, we've grown used to the periodic news of madmen (usually men) committing mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, movie theaters and universities. It's horrific every time, but it grows less shocking with each occurrence. It's awful but no longer surprising that mentally ill people have access to guns and violent images to inspire them. After Newtown, only 16 days ago, I thought 'well maybe there is something to this end of the world stuff,' because who shoots at small children and teachers (apart from the shooters in primary schools in Dunblane, Scotland and also in Lancaster county, PA, both in the last 15 years, of course). Then we had news of someone setting a fire and then shooting at firefighters who came to put it out. Followed swiftly by a second incident of this kind. And now I am convinced that we are officially a empire and society in rapid decline. We are arming our own killers, and in the end we will all be gone. I fear it is too late to make meaningful change - this is a country built on the freedom to own guns and carry then around and shoot them at will. It's only a matter of conscience that keeps gun-carriers from shooting at people, and that's a very thin line, one easily crossed as mental health declines. For military veterans, that conscience has had to to be worn away and in some cases erased, especially over the last 70 years, in which it stopped being clear who our enemies were in war zones. So now we have people who have seen incredibly traumatic things, which can directly result in mental illness, even in people who have not suffered previously, who have had the stigma against shooting people rubbed away at until it's nearly gone, who are trained gunmen and usually weapon owners. Somehow, so far, the people these men (mostly men) seem to kill the most are themselves. In 2012, more service members died from suicide than in combat. The silver lining here is that combat deaths are clearly down, but there are far too many suicides amongst the combat survivors. How do we stop such senseless violence and death? We will all die anyway - why would we want that end hastened? All of the people killed, by others or by their own hands, had the power and in many cases the desire to help others get through their time here with less pain. But we continue to fight for the 'freedoms' offered centuries ago, in a different time and society, and we will apparently fight for them to the death.

New Year

2012 ends tomorrow, and lacking anything better to do I've been taking stock of the year and thinking about things I want to keep or change for 2013. My friends and I do a little ritual around this time where we write down the things we want to be rid of for the new year and put them in a blue fire (epsom salts and rubbing alcohol). While it is cathartic to watch things like 'anxiety' burn to ashes, and it does help to remember the vision several hours later when sleep still hasn't come, I have to remind myself that this 'year-end' business is just as irrelevant as the 'world-end' nonsense was on December 21. We all laughed at the people who took it seriously, because it's not like the Western world has observed anything else in the Mayan calendar ever; but our calendar is equally arbitrary. December 31 and January 1 are just Monday and Tuesday this week, and in real time, unrelated to calendars, they are one and two planet-spins from now. We've assigned importance to these days based on the number of planet-spins that occur as the planet completes its revolution around the sun, and the months and days of the week were named by the Romans, which is pretty recently in the large scheme of the universe. So while it's great that people make resolutions about changes and think about things that didn't work in the past in order to do things differently in the future, in actuality you let go of things when you let go of them; things end when the end. I think I find this comforting because it's nicer to think of life as an unbroken line that ends when it ends, rather than a set of goals to reach in a certain amount of time. If we're all here in order to do the work we're doing, whatever it is, for however long we have, I'd hate to think of it being chopped up like that and marks being given for effort and achievement. With all of that said, at this time of year it's nice to remember that no one can make you happy but yourself, and the more you do things because they are expected of you the less they mean. If you do have to do things in order to get by, own them, so that they feel like choices and not obligations. That's the only way we take the helm in our own journeys.

Joy

I started this blog five years ago and despite its title it seems to have articulated more sorrow than joy. This is mostly due to the circumstances of my life in 2007-08, which is when most of the posts were written. Since 2009 things have improved markedly (cf. wedding post from March 2012), and I suppose I haven't seen as much of a need to work things out here. In light of the better circumstances and the title of the blog, I'm now making the change to include two 'joy' posts for every one 'sorrow' post. Joy for everyone.

Getting married is a grownup decision, and ought to be a grownup affair

Watching a Taylor Swift video this morning, in which she wears a long white linen dress and wanders across an empty countryside, at times with some dead foliage in her hands that she might have pulled off a bush (it's a tie-in song to the Hunger Games), I began thinking about the semiotics of weddings and whether western society's wedding obsession really is as ridiculous as I've long imagined. I suspect it is, but am willing to explore the idea to some length before ceding to my original point. In planning my own wedding, an event agreed upon mostly to satisfy the wants of others, I've consistently struggled with the many wedding-specific symbols and rituals that seem important to everyone else but carry no meaning at all for me. After being talked out of a red dress, and into a not completely outrageous white strapless affair that makes me look like I am attending a 1962 prom, I've drawn the line at such staples as bridesmaids, flowers, a cake, a photographer, to say nothing of a color scheme, a personalized cocktail, favors and all of the other features that seem to have become necessary in everyone's minds. I'm closer to 37 than 36; no one is 'giving' me to my betrothed apart from myself. My friends are all my age, and most are married, some divorced, one widowed - the bloom is well off the bridal party rose, and while I was happy to serve as a maid in some of their weddings, I've never had a need for several women to be dressed alike in outfits of my choosing. Flowers are very pretty, but when they are cut they die sooner than they would have if left alone, and it makes me sad. I was never going to carry a bouquet, but even the centerpieces are just bamboo plants and a small lantern. If people want to take any of them home at the end of the night they should feel free, but I don't understand why people have recommended we have the lanterns inscribed with our names and the date. If someone wants a lantern for their home, why the hell would they want our names on it? No one's got a sweeter tooth than me, but making a decision about and paying for a cake was just one decision too many for us. There'll be a dessert tray that I am certain will be able to satisfy the sweetest molar. And in this era of camera phones, I didn't understand why we would pay thousands for 500 photographs of ourselves, only perhaps three of which we would ever look at. I know that I've seen some wonderful photos taken of my friends and family by professional wedding photographers, and I'm glad to own some of them. But I have to believe that out of the 88 guests with camera phones (my father and grandmother excepted), someone will get a decent photo of us and it will go into a frame to commemorate the day. So in spite of actually having a wedding, the important aspects of which for me were vows, rings, dinner, and dancing, I'm clearly trying to sidestep what I consider to be nonsense. I keep running into opposition about each item that I omit, however, and I want to try to address that very opposition from people who ostensibly should know better, yet can't help themselves. I do acknowledge that the image of Ms. Swift in her white dress in the fields, holding what maybe used to be flowers, stirred a sense of longing in me. I wanted to be the pretty girl in the white dress and the half light too. I wanted to embody that representation of innocent beauty and possibility; I could also see it through the eyes of a man, perhaps not the one I am marrying, but I bet he would agree as well. But I think that's because it is ingrained in me, in most of us, to see that image as a fleeting ideal, like a firefly whose desirability lies in its untrappability. We like to think that each man longs to catch his wood nymph, and we want to be that object of desire - but toward what end? To be put in a jar and left to die? The wedding industry perpetrates a dangerous misrepresentation of womanhood and marriage under the guise of innocence and a hoped-for connection to the natural world. Brides have not always worn white - not all societies have insisted that women be virgins before marriage, and white does not represent innocence in all of the societies that do make this stipulation. We have taken this idea of a young girl, running wild through the woods yet dressed to go to at least to church, if not to a party, and transposed that onto a ceremony in which two people make a very adult commitment to one another. The dress, no longer remotely simple, is still in a shade of white to represent that unlikely, and unreasonable, purity. It signifies the bride, distinguishes her from the others - other women in the party are chastised for wearing white on another women's wedding day. The flowers appear to represent that long lost connection to nature and the wood nymphs. The bridesmaids were originally dressed like the bride, in order to create confusion in the event that the bride might be a kidnapping target amongst enemy tribes, but today only the idea of making them dress like one another has survived. The cake I suppose represents the sweetness of the day, as well as the promise to care for and nourish one's partner. The photographs exist to remind you of that one special day in which you were presented so perfectly and everyone showed up to celebrate you. Likewise, the favors are gifts to your guests, to thank them for joining in your personal celebration and to give them a reminder of this wonderful day to take home with them. This is all making me a little nauseous. My society is one of grown men and women making their own decisions about whether they will marry at all, whom to marry if they do decide to, and how their own lives will connect to nature, if at all. Thank god we are long past the days of parents paying older men to take young girls off their hands, so as to have fewer mouths to feed, and for the man to have a servant he does not have to pay, who will, he hopes, bear him a male heir to take care of him in his old age. We would like to be better connected to nature than we are, but the practice of cutting flowers and carrying them around in order to signify this connection has outlived its sustainability. And we have a reached a time in which cake is so prevalent that its place at celebrations is nearly an afterthought. We can eat cake whenever we like, and most of us have eaten too much of it in our lives already. It is no longer so rare as to be offered only on special occasions, and therefore has lost its value, if not its celebratory significance. And while I am certainly in favor of documenting as much of our lives as we can, in order to preserve the images for posterity to enjoy the way we enjoy those from before our own time, the staged, unworldly nature of wedding photography is something I can't assign any meaning to myself. However, I do not wish to begrudge others, in this time of everything, the opportunity to take meaning from these symbols, particularly in the absence of any other symbols that might have more resonance in this modern existence. By all means, perform the rituals, if it gives the commitment you are making to one another more symbolic import. If feeling 'like a bride' will give you the confidence and drive to be a wife, then it is important for you to feel that way and you should - however that expresses itself through you. Please leave me to my own symbols, however, and allow me to decide what is important on this occasion! Left to my own devices I would have preferred to engage in a much smaller, yet heavily ritualized, ceremony, such as washing one another's feet or toasting a marshmallow for each other over an open fire, followed by an exchange of rings and vows, and possibly the signing of a document. I would not have involved any members of my or his family, nor our friends - this is a decision we are making with one another, and we understand that this level of commitment to another person brings with it a certain commitment to their family and friends, if only for the sake of that person. I think it is interesting that as a participant, I do not understand why a greater community needs to celebrate this decision, yet as a celebrant in others' weddings I have certainly felt the joy inherent in the knowledge of a new and promising union. Therefore we are including our families in the ceremony, and exchanging vows and rings, and then opening up the party to a larger number of people and providing them a feast and dance. I love a good feast and dance, so can certainly see why this is a good thing to do. I just wish people would let us do it - and stop trying to make it something that has more meaning to them than to us!

Wonderful Christmas Time

When you finish your holiday shopping before December even begins, the two-week run-up to the 24th seems to take forever. Parties that seemed like things to look forward to now can't come and go fast enough, and having to spend 24 hours with immediate family in high-stress surroundings hardly puts you in the festive spirit. All it takes for me to get right back into it though is a quiet dark room with a lit tree and an excellent version of O Holy Night... it's not easy to bring Yule-oriented tears to the eyes of a an atheist, but somehow this does it every time.

Accidentally in love

I've found love where I didn't expect to, but then I guess no one expects it. Relationships of late have left me fearful and it's wonderful to know that I need not fear with this man.

Craven capitulation

I created a Facebook profile. I hate social networking sites. I'm ashamed. It was peer pressure. It was the sense that the bandwagon was about to jump the shark and I felt I should at least try to be along for the ride. I will probably deactivate my account again and sooner or later none of my online friends (who are also my real life friends) will want to be online friends with me anymore (but they will still be my real life friends). I know that it makes people feel good to have the sense of connection with people with whom they have no real connection. I have a real connection to some of the people I'm going to have a fake connection with on Facebook. This is so dumb. But it's the modern way.

Preparation

I've heard people say that you should prepare for the life you want to live. Unsure what that means, I've decided to figure out what life I am preparing for now, and see if there's anything else I think I should be doing.

I seem to be preparing for the life of someone with healthy teeth, gums and bones, moderate strength, endurance and flexibility, no children, and a lifelong dependence on prescription nasal spray. So far this is okay with me. I'm also preparing for the life of a financially independent person by saving for retirement and not buying anything until I can afford it. So far I haven't prepared to be a homeowner, aside from maintaining good credit, but I think that's because if I own a home I want to really love it and so far that opportunity hasn't presented itself. So I'm preparing to be someone who commits to her home. I can usually move in one large car, although I've recently got a nice mattress that I might want to take with me next time I go. In this way I seem to prepare myself to jump ship at a moment's notice; this is not a preparation for a settled life. I have not 'invested' in anything, aside from my IRA - not jewelry, not a good suit, not a great pair of jeans or boots or even a digital camera. I found that when my hard drive died I was sad to have lost some of the songs I'd downloaded and some of the photos, but not too sad.

I've been through therapy and am still working on things, but I am useless in relationships because I try so hard to never cause any problems and to just accept everything. Or I go out with people I don't really like and treat them however I want. So far I am still in the early preparation mode for a successful relationship.

So I'm preparing for a life of good health, few attachments and the possibility of eventual commitment to a place, and even further eventually to a person. I could be making more of an effort in my professional area, but nobody's perfect.

Except my grandma.

I have enough friends

Every time someone bails on me I feel I should be thanking them for doing me a favor, because their presence does me more harm than good and I wouldn't have whatever it takes to push them away. And then I get angry at them for pushing me away, but really I must be angry with myself, right? For not respecting myself enough to flick them from my skin like so many mosquitoes.

Moody!

Good...bad. Good...bad. Baaaaaaaaaad...better.
Today I bailed on a massage job opportunity, mainly because it seemed like a bigger hassle than it was really worth to me. I know I run away from everything that smacks of commitment, anything that impairs my freedom to run away or make plans at the last moment...but I'm torn over whether this is an egregious example of that character flaw.

Stay Frosty

I'm fighting the urge to say this to my brother every time I say goodbye to him. He won't find it anywhere near as funny as I do.

He's frosty but he's cute too - look at him with his nephew:

When it's over

I look forward to change - once it happens I'm not usually thrilled with the result, but there's always the hope that it will be better, and sometimes it is, at least for a little while. But I wonder how I'll feel about death, when it looks like it's coming soon. It's not really change for the person who's dying - it's the end of change. It usually represents a big change for those left behind, though. Both of my paternal grandparents are nearing the end now; my grandmother has been unwell for years now and has made it clear that while she loves all of us, she's ready. But she's stuck in a hospital room attached to oxygen. Her husband of 71 years fell two weeks ago and broke his hip - since then he's been not in his right mind and is now refusing to eat. They are both in their 90s and have lived long and interesting lives, much longer than most. I was sad earlier thinking that when one of them goes the other one will likely not even be aware of it - but then realized it's probably better that way for them. It's only bad for those of us watching.

I don't know what to do about my moods - I'm angry, so angry I'm clenched and shaking, with chest pains, and then once that's over I'm crushed, just completely sad. I have no ambition and no direction, and neither of those things even seems like something I would want. This is why change is attractive to me: something new is always good when you don't have any real drive - when you have nothing to lose you don't really mind leaving things behind and starting fresh, because maybe this is where happiness finally lies ('lie' being the operative word there - you can't find happiness in a new place). But how long can I go on like this - and how long before the end of change starts to seem more attractive than yet more change itself? The drugs don't work.

Sadly, Girls Rule

I've been reading Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities and today was struck by the realization that I've never felt like a woman. I'm 33, financially independent and sexually active and I feel like a girl. From a physical standpoint I know I don't present as a woman: my body isn't particularly womanly, my face is youthful (although my hair is greying), and with today's culture only clothing options being frumpy, manly or girly, most of us choose the third.

Because that's exactly the problem: this culture. Wolf talks about other cultures in which a girl is systematically and often ritualistically taught how to be a woman, and only when she has proven herself to have completed her education is she considered a woman. She is taught not only how to fuck, to please both herself and her partner, not only how to cook or dress, or take care of children, but how to see the world through the filter of grown womanhood; to no longer see herself as a girl.

Not only has American culture failed at this practice since its incipience, but it's only gotten worse in the last quarter century. Now there are no women. Everyone is a girl, no one wants to get old, no one wants to be boring or matronly or unsexy. No one has received any education that would convince them that womanhood does not have to signify any of these things, and can offer wisdom, security and self-possession besides.

I want to be a woman. I think it's time. I want to have confidence in myself as a grown female, and I think it's something we should all be working toward. Whether or not we ever manage to create an ideal, equal society, women will still have a specific role, and even those of us who don't plan to procreate play at least a part of that role. Things will go a lot smoother if we can all stop feeling (and consequently acting, dressing, talking) like insecure 14 year olds in the face of the quarterback's attention or derision. We are not conditioned to see our sexuality as our own, but instead as belonging to the beholders. Lacking a firm sense of adult identity, we look for it in bed and later in marriage. How can society be expected to function properly if half of its membership (the smarter, more reasonable half) suffers from such insecurity and lack of identity? We fight for our causes and do great work at our jobs and still go to bed at night empty if we haven't got anyone there with us. We run companies and raise children and still worry about whether we're attractive or thin or young enough, whether it will be enough to get or keep a man. Of course we want to enjoy comforting and cozy personal lives, but we should be able to enter them as women who know what they want and what they won't put up with, not as girls who are pretty sure they don't want what they're getting but are afraid to do anything about it for fear of being left alone.

We should have been told long ago that society needs us as much as it needs men, and not only as conception vessels. That our individual identities are too important, both to us and the rest of the world, to submerge in an effort to be somehow more lovable, or just acceptable. As much as anything in human existence can be said to matter, we matter. But we have such a hard time thinking we do, and therefore we are just not confident enough to call or consider ourselves women.

Backformation

Linguists use the term backformation to indicate the creation of one part of speech from another when the first should have followed on the second. A personally egregious example of this is the new use of the verb 'to impact.' There has always been verbal meaning to 'impact' - stuffed into a small space with no exit, e.g. molars, tonsils, colons. But the noun 'impact' means 'effect,' and more recently has come to mean 'greater than normal effect.' With an eye toward making an impact, then, marketers and other business jargon users have created another meaning for the verb impact, 'to affect,' and more to the pragmatic point, 'to affect in a big way.'

Backformation is common, and its enemies tend toward pedantic purism; therefore I pause in my resistance to this instance of the phenomenon. I think what I hate most about it is the laziness with which the jargoneers have latched onto it. Much like with 'amazing,' 'make sense,' and 'throw ___ under the bus,' the problem is not with these words and phrases but with the frequency with which they are used, to the exclusion to all other options. I understand comfort with one's vernacular but vocabularic complacency drives me insane.

Bottle it

So in spite of the sedatives I've recently been prescribed (favorite pharmacologist line: "you don't have a history of violence, do you?"), I've felt nervy, jittery, on the edge between collapse and flight all day. My stomach's been dodgy and my hands have occasionally shaken. Were it not such a dangerous high (if taken too often), I would wish that delicious anticipation could be bottled.

Today's anticipation lasted well into the evening, and only slowly stopped bubbling over, as if moved to low heat, once I realized the connection I'd looked forward to was not on the cards for tonight.

The buzz is wearing off at last, helped along no doubt by convenient pharmaceuticals. I can't take it personally; I know him, he hasn't avoided me - he's fallen asleep. I can just hope to see him tomorrow night instead...because no matter what, I have felt it and will do what is required to feel it more, again, more again.

But it seems such a shame to let this effervescence go flat, or evaporate. As though something, sometimes the one thing, delightfully sweet in me has been allowed to fizz and fall out.

Amaze me

We've got to stop using 'amazing' to describe everything from childbirth to a studded belt. And by 'we' I mean you, because I don't do it. I do overuse 'awesome,' however, which started as an ironic throwback to my 80s childhood and remained constant mostly out of vocabularic laziness, so in truth I have no leg to stand on regarding the other 'a' word, but I don't care. Because 'amazing' is more annoying, as are the people who use it. They are the same people who own their own yoga mat bags and buy $30 'eco-friendly' shampoos. You know who you are: financially-solvent (is there any other kind?) hipsters.

Rich, liberally-educated white kids: put your parents' hard-spent cash to use, and deploy those overprepped brains in the service of something important: start looking around for synonyms. There are lots to choose from, all of which carry the same general sense of overstatement of greatness, but that's where we are as as society anyway: nothing can be just 'fine,' or 'good,' or 'acceptable;' employment of such lowballing adjectives smacks somehow of settling, and Americans don't do that. So let's starting making more of an effort to spread the love! 'Cool,' 'great,' 'fantastic,' 'wicked,' 'smart,' 'mental,' 'excellent,' 'very fine,' super' and 'edifying' are all patiently awaiting your attention. Allow 'amazing' to fade away quietly, and one day it too will return to its rightful place amongst underused overstatements, and you'll be the first oldie at the senior living facility to refer to your 'amazing new walker.' Until then: unmaze me.

Back on the Market

I've had it with my job. I'm older than half of my 'superiors,' smarter than 80% and capable of more than scheduling conference calls, taking minutes on those calls and getting yelled at because the agenda that it's not even my job to send out didn't go out in time. So nine months after my last job search began I'm back on the career sites, sometimes feeling the ephemeral and usually misleading excitement of finding a position that seems to fit my qualifications (and doesn't feature the words 'administrative' or 'assistant'), but mostly the familiar dull sense of 'is this all there is' - a job is a job and even if it's something I'm good at, at the end of the day it's likely I'll get fed up and jump ship. Again. Some more.

But in the meantime I'm at least having fun with it. Since I don't have the immediate desperation usually present in my work quests, I can afford to take risks, applying for positions I'll never get and sending the most audacious cover letters that aim to at the very least put a bemused smile on the face of the reader. Having been in the position of reading these mostly pointless documents on more than one occasion, I can attest that a well-written cover, even or especially from a totally unqualified applicant, is much appreciated.

And maybe it will work. But more than likely I'll ditch the the current dead-end with no immediate prospects and spend the next few months trying to persuade a family member to pay for professional school, because this time I'm serious, this time I'm really going to use that degree/certificate/training. Honest.

Greatest Team Ever? Just Enjoy It!

I am so sick of all of this nonsense about whether the 2007 Patriots are the Greatest Team Ever. Leaving aside the fact that changes in physique (and 'supplements') make it impossible to compare individual football players of different eras (cf the whole stinking controversy about baseball doping - it's only because the nerds want to be able to say someone was 'the best ever' and they need to know that no one cheated in order to do that), what is gained from all of this comparison and speculation? You can't make the past fit into the present, and if there are degrees of impossibility then it is even more impossible to make the present fit into the past. What we are witnessing is a great time in football - we are watching a team of excellent players working very well together in a quest to go an entire season without a loss. When their opposition is subpar, their flawless execution is beautiful to watch, and when someone makes a game of it, wondering how they will pull this one out remains exciting. We need to exist in the present and love this moment for what it is worth, and cease the endless chatter about 'greatest ever.' They are the greatest team right now, and we need to sit back and bask in it.

The drugs don't work

The sun's gone dim, the moon's turned black; for I loved him and he didn't love back.