Month: December 2017

Commentary or Hogwash

/ Gracetopher Kirk / Leave a comment

Dominic Narratieve, an office drone at Dominant Narrative, Inc. walks in to the Coffee Cup, where Bril and RecloySo are discussing the nature of truth.

 

R – Mr. Brutt was my least favorite science teacher because he gave us so little direction.

B – Oh yes, I hated his teaching style quite a lot myself. Though it’s funny, often when it comes to science teachers my biggest complaint is that they’re not even teaching real science.

DN – Oh, so you know the truth as well! I mean, sorry to interrupt, may I sit here?

B – Oh hey Dom, yeah, pull up a chair.

R – What exactly do you mean when you say “truth” just now, Dominic?

DN – Well, RecloySo, perhaps you haven’t heard yet, but many of the things you learned in your middle school science textbooks are in fact false. You know they never landed on the moon right? And of course, they can’t even decide if Pluto is a planet or not! Ha! Typical Scientists. Or should I say, confusion-bots.

R – Ah, Dom, yes, you do seem to have suffered from the lack of real science learning that my sibling mentioned. I am sad that our society has done this to you, and to many others as well.

DN – It’s an outrage!

B – Yes, and for reasons even more sinister than you think. You think you were taught the wrong facts, but really you weren’t taught science.

DN – Wait, but I don’t get it, science is facts.

B – Our school system has encouraged such modes of thought yes, and has taught science as if it is a system of facts which are known with absolute certainty to be true, but that’s not what science is.

R – More focus should be given to the scientific method.

DN – Oh yeah, they mentioned that crap in 6th grade once. What is it, uh, ask some questions, make a hypothesis, dissect the frog, fill out the teacher’s assignment about where the heart is and junk like that. I mean, I know that’s not all the details, I did get a C in 6th grade science.

B – Well, grades are a poor measurement in most cases, but that’s a topic for another day.

R – Yeah, Bril, don’t let your ADHD sidetrack you again.

B – yeah, yeah, you see my notebook, you see my ideas bar, I’m saving for many other days to come.

R – See Dominic, the scientific method you were taught likely looked like this: <insert line down scientific method> and it’s likely that it was implied that the scientific method was a road to scientific truths, without clarifying that many scientifically tested things are theories that might be amended when further data becomes available.

B – Yeah, a better way to represent the scientific method would be like this <circular graph> because it’s a process that’s ever evolving and building upon previous work. Science is not the “facts” that we learn in middle school, but rather the process by which we’ve reached these truths.

DN – Ok, I guess your circle graph makes sense, but how does this change anything? I was still taught that Pluto was a planet, and then the scientists just changed their minds??? All science is fake! Scientists are just elites that tell us they’ve filled out a chart so they can tell us what is and isn’t true, but I’m on to their games!

B – If you believe scientists are elites, wouldn’t you want to know how to think like one?

DN – Ooh, I never thought about it that way.

R – But now you are, so congratulations! Your understanding of the world has grown! Did you know that scientists are in fact not some inhuman elite godly being creating the rules of the universe, but rather humans such as yourself or I? Did you know that even scientists’ understanding of the world is constantly growing and changing?

DN – Wait, really?

B – Really Dom! Think back to college, when we were in that intro to literary theory class together before you switched your major to business

DN – Ugh, I hated that class

B – Yes, it wasn’t my favorite class either at the time, but now that some years have passed, I’ve had time to give it more thought, and I’ve encountered a deeper truth that was there to be learned.

DN – A deeper truth?

B – Yes, Dom, I realized last summer that the beauty of academia is that there is a dialogue going on in each discipline. In intro to Literary Theories we were simply shown the doorways into several different frameworks used by those who study literature. And, you know what’s even more exciting?

DN – What’s that?

B – Even as an undergraduate English major, I got to not only observe this dialogue happening, but also actively take part in it!

DN – Wow, I guess when you put it that way, being an English major does sound more exciting.

R – Yes, and this is true not only of English as a discipline, but is something to be found in all higher learning. Facts are never simply facts, but rather an agreement reached through dialogue.

DN – But, that means that Anything I know could be a lie!

B – I wouldn’t say a lie, but yes, anything that you think you know could in fact be a misunderstanding. I believe that if our society is given the chance to continue to flourish, one day everything I know will be just as antiquated as the belief that the earth is the center of the universe.

R – You mentioned Pluto earlier, and that is a great example. When we were in elementary school learning the order of the planets, it was considered a fact that Pluto was a planet.

B – Yes, and that’s an understanding of our solar system that has evolved as astronomers compile more data and realize that it makes more sense to group Pluto with these other objects in space we now call dwarf planets.

DN – Why did I even bother learning all these fake facts!!!!

B – To have a starting point to discover even deeper understandings of the world. Think of a “fact” like a bite sized morsel, each one is not the cake, but you can’t eat the cake all at once, so you have to take bites. And once you’ve eaten enough cake, you might be inspired to experiment and find an even better recipe.

R – The cake is a lie, but only because we will continue to discover ways to make ever better cakes!

DN – It’s like, the things I knew were mostly probably right, but only for now, and everything I understood about how we decide what is and isn’t a fact is wrong. I’m so disoriented.

R – Good, it’s our reliance of the false sense of stability facts afford us that makes us so susceptible to manipulation in these times.

B – You’ve just learned that some of the who’s and the what’s you learned by rote, while still true in the sense that we haven’t found a more logical explanation to agree upon yet, are not the be-all end-all of truth.

DN – So what do I do now?

B – Start paying more attention to the actual questions: the how’s and the why’s. Answering those questions will give you a much more stable foundation in knowing the who’s and what’s of the world.

DN – Thanks, I think. Well, I’ve taken enough time on my break, I’d better head back up to work now.

B – Alright Dom, it’s been nice chatting about the nature of truth.

*Dom leaves the coffee shop

R – Oh no, he left his book.

B – “Fake News, Climate Change and Other Lies by Scientists,” I’ll see him again, so I can hold onto it for him.

R – I didn’t know Dom was a Climate Change denier….

B – He wasn’t in college, so perhaps with the right tools we can still save him from the Tangerine’s Men.

R – He’s in more danger than I realized.

B – Aren’t we all these days.

As the Year Winds Down

/ Gracetopher Kirk / 2 Comments

I began this year by falling off of a roof and breaking my back, and I’m glad I did. My new years resolution had been to find something to be grateful for each day, and looking at the world from my downstairs neighbors’ dog poop covered concrete patio, I knew exactly what I was grateful for: life, and the ability to move my fingers and toes. I knew that with that basis, I could make everything else happen. I changed my resolution ever-so-slightly that day: I resolved to approach the rest of 2017 from the perspective that I approached falling off of a roof. The universe has tested me by throwing all sorts of crazy new scenarios at me this year, but somehow as we approach the end of 2017, the beginning of 2018, I find that I’ve been able to keep the core tenants of my roof wisdom intact. 2017 hasn’t been an easy year, nor has it been a comfortable one, but I’ve learned so much. I wouldn’t change any of it.

Welding Fumes

/ Gracetopher Kirk / Leave a comment 
Satire

English 351

Dr. Herman Asarnow

Neil Kirk

The Supreme Accident Investigative Force (SAIF), the police agency that oversees the worker’s compensation insurance program has been a blessing for John Bone. He had his arm ripped out of its socket by some machinery at the sawmill, his place of employment in 1995. With his pocket knife, he cut the remaining one-inch of skin and muscle tissue. Leaving the oozing red mass behind him, the foreman Dick Cheet-A-Little guided him to the ambulance that took him to Willamette Falls Hospital.

In the ambulance the medic ….. a green moldy ham sandwich, takes his temperature and begins asking him questions. Bones groaned. The ambulance turns a corner and wine bottles floor smashing into the wall. The medic, between sips of red Ripple wine, says he needs a medical history. Where were you born? Your parents name? How long have you been working for the mill? Are you married? Do you have children? Do you have a history of mental illness? “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Bone yells.

After his recovery, Bones is given worker’s compensation benefits for his injuries. His neighbor Frank Sids, who has a face, nose, and stiff hair like a wild boar, exclaims thank God for the monthly pension payments.

Unfortunately not all workers benefit from the insurance program established for injured workers. SAIF’s goal is to deny all claims in order to increase profits.

I am greatly troubled. I would not write; but, I must. Workers are being gravely misrepresented. It is my duty as a citizen. Like my father before me, I must dedicate my life to those who are less fortunate. Even though I lack skills to write formally and professionally, I will attempt to express a few thoughts.

Unlike Mr. Bones, some victims show no outward signs. Their injuries are internal – caused by toxic waste sites and chemical exposure that effects the lungs, kidneys, liver and the BRAIN. Yes the BRAIN! Then the elite of the society says look production workers are all stupid. Of course they are stupid. Their brains have been rotted out by “techtaclicene, metphicene, claciphene, metabiphine and mega mega chiphene.”

Case Study: Max Reed

By Psychologist Curtis Kirkpatrick

Max Reed, a welder, was wearing faded jeans with holes burnt through not just his pants but light appeared through his leg. A piece of iron had burnt clear through his leg the day before. The world seemed to be collapsing around him. He saw one man leaning forward vomiting some purple slime that dripped from his lips and oozed from his nose. It looked like raspberry milkshake that had been combined with slug slime. Dogs scurry to eat the purple slime, lapping it up in seconds. Broken glass, cardboard, and bird shit covered the surroundings. Across a pile of rusted twisted angle irons, lay a tattered Levi coat, like the one Arnold Witzcaugh had worn. An Eagle was pulling something from the middle of the coat. The thing stretched out like spaghetti as the Eaggle attempted to fly. The spaghetti looking stuff kept getting longer. Reed walked a little closer. He saw a hand sticking out from the coat. Witzcaugh’s wedding band was on his finger. Reed recalled the former safety man Frank Clut, saying he was going to get caught for filing a worker’s compensation claim. No one is going to raise my fucking insurance rates Clout had said. Reed looked closer. The face was not recognizable only a scrap of meat remained on the tip of the chin.

Reed begins to feel dizzy. Not from the sight of Witzcaugh but from the heavy metal laced paint fumes he was breathing. Beheath his eyes, dark bags sagged. His cheeks were puffed out like an ever-inflated balloon. His face turned from a brownish tone to white. Other welders continued working. Flesh droops from their cheeks. Pot bellies stick out. Faces are swollen from the breathing of zinc, lead, and epoxy fumes.

Reed falls on the steel. A voice cries out. “Are you alright.” Reed nearly unconscious begins to recall Sam Klum a fellow welder, telling him how zinc and epoxy coated steel would really fuck-up your lungs. Klum, while his cotton clothes he had purchased at the Mart Fall Apart Store were leaping in flames, had told Reed just the week before that two workers at Snitzer Steel spent a week in an Oxygen tent at Emanual Hospital.

“Snitzer fired them boys because they were unable to get to work,” Klum said. “The God Damn son of Bitches were in an oxygen tent. What the fuck the company think they were going to do run straight from the hospital to work?”

It was nothing personal just a business decision, personnel director Plum Krum told the family.

Reed’s lung capacity increased to 50 percent. Two hours later, he managed to walk to his car that was parked one-hundred-yards away. He drove home in his Merc with its smoking 460 engine. The exhaust was leaking. Mice were running out from underneath the car seat, eating crumbs left over from lunch. Lice and crabs were feasting on his eye brows and the hairs around his crotch. Reed lunged forward grabbing his chest as a flaming sensation leapt from his lungs. His balls began to swell up so damn big that he had to spread his legs.

The next day he met with the safety man. The safety man was new, and his name was Harry Blunt. Blunt said, “It’s in your head. One exposure to zinc and epoxy fumes couldn’t possibly cause respiratory problems. You have asthma.”

Reed thinks that if he files a worker’s compensation claim the safety man will fire him. He has heard that the man who was vomiting had been fired after he began coughing blood. The decision to fire him was nothing personal – it was just a business decision. Reed also knew that if he stayed he could die from respiratory arrest. His choice was to die from chemical exposure or lose his job and slowly die of starvation. Harry Blunt held the cards, and Reed knew it. But Reed filed a claim anyway. It was the principle he told himself. I must file before my mind rots-out and I can no longer read – let alone think.

Blunt made an appointment for Reed to see doctor KaRupt

Gracetopher Writes Muchly

/ Gracetopher Kirk / Leave a comment

And at times I speak my very own private language, uninhibited by the rules that box in those who I met during that one foray into White Collar Society. I hadn’t known the rules, and so worried each day. But why do these rules exist anyway?

Why can’t I say muchly and still be taken seriously? This is the language that I speak. I am not trying to sound cutesy or funny, it’s just how things come out of my mouth. Have you never heard the word muchly before? Well then, gentle reader, I do pity your small existence, devoid of the pleasures that come from playing in language as children play in puddles.

Sorry, did I say children? Because at 24, I’m still always up for a good splash.

Too Many Words

/ Gracetopher Kirk / Leave a comment

People sometimes have problems hitting page or word count goals on essays, but my problem has consistently been the opposite. I’ve gutted more essays than I can count, taken literal scissors to them to cut them down to size. The essays always come out much stronger, much better written if I begin by ballooning out and end by cutting out all that is irrelevant.

The written word helps me process what is happening in life. The written slows me down, grounds me, and makes the world real. Without writing, my brain flits too quickly and too unpredictably to remember what is real and what isn’t. With writing, my brain continues to flit about so quickly that sometimes I still lose my spot, and another idea is forever lost in space.

Yes, more people would listen to me if I learned to edit before writing a massive essay and chopping it back to a verbal tweet. Yes, more people might read my writing if I kept things short and sweet. As things stand however, my writing as an art form is certainly more developed than it might have been otherwise. So I don’t bemoan my own idiosyncrasies, though I do acknowledge that there are communication strategies I would benefit from in the capitalistic, nearly post-apocalyptic, world outside my door.