Volume: 3

Graduation

Navigating the world's violence. Creating something from imagination.

The violence is accepted, known and predictable. "Studies show that X number of people will die on the nation's highways this holiday and that Y of those are preventable if everyone wears seatbelts." It comes on the freeways, in our homes (child and spousal abuse, television shows), in the skies, everywhere. It is accidental, intentional, spiteful, random and constant. Violence is life, part of the game. Tiny bugs across the street are finishing off a job that a cat started on a mouse. There were three life-taking plane crashes on any yesterday and on any last weekend seventy-nine people killed other people in the city of Los Angeles.

It is into this pool of violence we must daily wade. If you hide from it, violence wins by default and you waste your life. It you taunt it, you pretend that you can take on a force larger than you imagined. While the violence grows and the numbers climb, it is the numbers, their amount and randomness that we rely on to keep us safe. Safety in numbers, one member in the giant school of fish. It always happens to the other guy.

Some of us are better equipped than others, meaning we have more tools and weapons with which to keep violence away. It could be our race, our money, our location, our intelligence, our sheer luck. Some of us obtained these weapons at birth. Others figured out how to develop them (an education, for example) and therein validate Darwin.

It's a test, a long practical, oral, written, reflexive, deductive, intuitive challenge to see who makes it through each day. There is a scoreboard, but it is so gigantic that only a part of it is visible at any one time, sometimes showing only a partial number, sometimes only one LED of the millions, no, billions. The final tally can never be known, at least in this world. You've got to advance, make it to the semi-finals to see how you did in the quarters. There may or may not be a replay.

Maybe the Meaning Of Life is found in the relationships with our closest friends, the Ones we've chosen out of the masses. We conspire with each other, figuring out schemes that help us navigate the morass. We do this as habit, unknowingly. We would be far more effective at it if we huddled consciously, identifying the weakness of the enemy, locating the hole up violence's middle. Businesses practice this. They plot and scheme openly figuring ways to defeat the competition. They play the odds and often gamble and break the rules they once endorsed. That scoreboard is more local, smaller and versatile. It might post a completely new set of numbers tomorrow causing a meeting.

Some individualists pretend to take on the violent world single-handedly, but a closer examination reveals how impossible that is. The more alone you want to be the fewer weapons you can carry.

One can be defeated by random acts of violence, two can withstand it, three can conquer it.

And at home between trips: