Tag Archives: macabre

Bayonet

Bayonet: (n) a swordlike stabbing blade that may be fixed to the muzzle of a rifleDictionary B

The healthiest gift to the human race is to constantly portray war in the most hellish terms possible.

When we forget that war is hell, we start looking for noble purposes for slaying our brothers and sisters. Sometimes it takes as much as twenty years of passing the peace for us to get thirsty once again for blood-soaked uniforms.

To me, this is the message of the bayonet.

When you talk about bombs, drone strikes or even bullets, you can literally distance yourself from the atrocity of tearing into the flesh of a human being like you’re a wild beast, dislodging entrails.

After all, that is the visual on a battlefield.

People don’t die easily–they must be killed. They must be torn from their vital organs. They are disemboweled.

When I imagine war and I see bombs dropping from airplanes, I have no awareness of such macabre dismemberment.

And when I see bullets flying from the air with bugles blaring the charge of the light infantry, I’m not imagining the decapitation and destruction of human flesh.

But a bayonet is a personal murdering weapon for the soldier who thinks he has found his fortune by being considered patriotic through massacre.

A bayonet must be inserted–twisted–until the blood flows freely, seeping life from the soul you have deemed your enemy.

So in a truly bizarre way, let me salute the bayonet.

It reminds us that war is killing.

It concludes that war is hell.

 

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April Fool’s Day

dictionary with letter A

April Fool’s Day (n): April 1st, a day on which people play tricks on each other.

Most of the time, April Fool’s day is fun, filled with practical jokes ranging from the sublime to even the macabre.

I remember once convincing my seven-year-old son that I had to go off to war against Poland, because the people of that country had refused to send us our alloted Polish sausage, and it was a time to stand up for our rights and demands for processed meat.

But there was a time in my life when I pulled an April Fool’s prank which backfired seriously, because what I thought was obviously comically bizarre was accepted as true, and had to be played out.

It was about two years after my father had passed on. I was continually trying to cheer my mother up with various antics and projects. (About six months after my dad’s crossing over, I took my mother bowling, agsint her strong objections, only to discover when we got there that she had never been bowling before, and rather than being a joyous release of tension, it became an arduous task of painful instruction and embarrassments, ranging from trying to get bowling shoes on her feet to retrieving a ball she had rolled down the alley which only made it halfway.)

So I should have been aware that April Fool’s jokes involving one’s mother were not always destined for success.

There was a restaurant near our town called Kahiki. It was known to be very expensive and a posh center for those of affluence.

Thinking that it was obvious that I would be unable to afford such a dining experience, I jokingly told my mother I would take her to Kahiki that night for dinner. I walked out of the house giggling to myself, figuring that she would decipher that the whole thing was a joke when she realized it was April 1st.

About three o’clock that afternoon, my little brother came running to the door of my apartment, and told me that our mutual mother was in the process of putting on her best Sunday dress and was even wearing makeup and fixing her hair. She had intoned to the little fellow that she was so moved and so looking forward to “a night at the Kahiki.”

Somehow or another, arriving at her home and screaming “April Fool’s!” did not seem appropriate.

I spent the next two hours driving around town borrowing money from people who had told me they would never lend me money ever again, to secure the funds to take her to this lavish eatery.

Arriving at 6:30 that evening, a bit out of breath and pulling on my suit coat, there was my mother, sitting and waiting for me with her purse in her lap, tears in her eyes, so grateful for her son’s generosity.

I took her to the restaurant. We had a lovely evening. And I spent the next two months being bugged by my friends to get the payback for the cash.

I learned something very valuable: April Fool’s Day jokes always need to be very, very obvious.

 

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Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAffliction: (n) something that causes pain or suffering

Sometimes Webster is so conventional and bound by society that he (or she?) speaks words in the definition as synonyms which are not necessarily meant to be.

For instance, pain and suffering.

Even though it is a legal term, it is certainly possible to have pain without turning it into suffering. Matter of fact, most of the quality people I have known in my life do deal with some sort of affliction which causes them pain, but they refuse to succumb to the drain of suffering.

Is pain necessary? Let’s rephrase that. Is affliction necessary?

I think there are three things that go into making a good human being:

  1. Talent
  2. Perseverance
  3. Humility

I do not know if it is possible for us to gain the humility to display our persevered talent without overcoming a bit of affliction. After all, we admire the person who wins the race much more after we understand that the course was run while overcoming a sprained ankle.

Maybe it’s sick. Perhaps it’s a penchant we all have for the macabre or the bizarre. But affliction is what proves our mettle and confirms that we have overcome pain without languishing in our suffering.

Because on the other hand, if someone is in pain, and we know they’re anguish is real, after a while we grow impatient if they continually remind us of their suffering.

Affliction is what life gives us to determine our level of passion for our pursuits. It is the badge of honor we wear when taking our place on the victor’s stand. It is the proof that we were not only trained to achieve our goal, but worthy … because we endured to the end.

 

Aeschylus

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aeschylus: (c. 390 – 314 BC) Greek dramatist, best known for his tragedies Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides. Considered to be the father of the Greek tragedy.

Not only the father of the Greek tragedy, but also seemingly the parent of prime-time television and the movie industry of our present day.

After all, if we don’t insert some tragedy into the stories we tell, we risk some critic dubbing our tale “saccharine, cloying,” or worse yet–“family fare.”

There is a common aversion in today’s social strata against sharing a story with ups, downs, ins and outs, which ends up with a realistic conclusion instead of a Hollywood ending. Matter of fact, I think it would be impossible for the 24-hour news cycle to report anything that isn’t either sensational or able to be sensationalized.

And let me offer a tidbit of opinion which will probably grind the teeth of some of my readers: when there is a shooting at a school or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and we begin to hear the phrase, “death toll” introduced into the storyline, even though our better selves hope that people will not be killed, we sometimes might be a little disappointed when this running death toll does NOT rise.

We have geared the American public to be thirsty for blood–as long as it’s not their own. If their little angel sons and daughters have a small prick on the finger, they ready to rush them to the emergency room. But we will watch with a mixture of horror and intrigue as the offspring in Haiti wallow in mud, disease and death.

We are a tragic clump of clods, who honor Aeschylus by perusing the Internet for even MORE of the bizarre.

And if anyone such as myself would dare to object to the onslaught of the macabre, we have prepared speeches decrying these idealistic fools as “sappy”–or worse yet, “religious.”

To reach a point where we can stand tall and pursue our dreams, we will need to reject the fallacy of failure as being inevitable in the human experience. Not everything has to come up roses.

But why in the hell would we plant just thorns?