Bread & Circuses - The Price of Entertaining Mexico

Bread & Circuses

The Price of Entertaining Mexico

It was one of those mobile Barnum and Bailey-type venues that at one time caused people to bundle their kinfolk into wooden wagons and search for electric sermons in the rustic reaches of America. A century ago tent revival meetings were popular.  Many considered them the moral calisthenics of a healthy soul.  Others just saw them as entertainment, an agreeable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The smell of straw, warm canvas and stabled animals were all part of the ambiance.  Today, most of these elements have been replaced by diesel rigs, trailers, pickup trucks and cars.

There had been no leaflets or flyers advertising this particular event, just a slow-moving ball of dust with a car at its nucleus, shrilling hyperboles from a bullhorn mounted on its roof. If you didn't understand Spanish you were invited to stare at your feet in bewilderment.

Open-air speakers had been mounted at the ejido’s soccer field, about five miles north of San Felipe. By late afternoon they were reverberating boasts and superlatives that belittled every other form of entertainment in the Republic. The doors were scheduled to open at eight o'clock that evening.  A half hour before show time, semi-regular bulletins began counting down the minutes.

HypnotistSeven minutes before time’s arrow reached the target, I fetched my camera and sallied down to the big tent, which was only a short walk from my residence. There was a solitary pickup truck parked about ten yards from the venue’s flamboyant trailer. Two young Mexicans, painted by shadows, stood beside the rear fender.  They were passing a delicately smoking doobie between themselves, aka weed or more locally, mota (the nose has its own in-built spectrometer).

I asked them where all the people were. "Adentro",  came the reply. I took a few photographs of the trailer's art work and walked up the entrance ramp. An announcement said there were three minutes left and urged everybody to purchase a ticket while they still could. Presumably after three minutes everyone’s arms would suddenly become too short to reach their wallet.

Twenty pesos bought me passage past a swarthy Whistler's grandmother in a straight-back chair.  I stepped into a capacious blue tent, relaxed into long, languid swags over a Rubik of metal poles, cables and ropes.  A hundred militarily aligned chairs focused on the jutting jaw of a small green stage, partially veiled by a lurid red curtain. Perhaps fifteen people formed a tiny hive of animated heads and voices near the center of the phalanx.

I sat quietly at the sinistral extremity, a castaway on a raft of empty chairs, and for five minutes listened to ranchero music stampede from enormous speakers on either side of the stage. Suddenly a bass fiddle voice mercifully, but only briefly, interrupted the rustic aria to assure us of imminent entertainment.

Five minutes later the announcer swore a sacred oath that Mexico's most memorable and unrivalled theatrical spectacle would commence in thirty seconds. Meanwhile two small children had been ritually interloping, entering from the trailer door and walking up the aisle, mounting the stage, then ducking behind the curtains. They did this several times. Finally, after a tremendous fanfare from the self-important speakers, the curtains parted and the same two children stepped out, the girl now dressed as a suburban adult with lips as red as begonias.

A painfully loud Mexican ballad brayed from the nervous sound system and the girl, perhaps six or seven years old, began lip-syncing the words of the song. The lyrics decried her unhappiness with her husband. She didn't love him anymore. She was tired and fed up with their marriage. Then, to my astonishment, she began to bitch slap the little boy all over the stage. She reached out and yanked his hair, twisted his head like a radish on a stem, and cuffed him mercilessly. The boy was utterly stoic throughout the ordeal. The audience was delighted.

Much of the song was unintelligible to me, and I was grateful for that. There was something haunting, even harrowing, in the way the girl portrayed the shrill harpy. The manner in which she was able to distort those little ruby lips of hers into a series of loathsome grimaces was truly frightening.

When the song was over and the two players made their exits through the florid curtains, the girl gave the boy a tremendous kick in the middle of his back, which transformed him into an anatomical pinwheel as the fabric closed behind them.

There was a longish high decibel interval before the next act appeared. A mature woman stepped through the curtains with a microphone. She was followed by a tiny girl, perhaps four years old. As the woman began to speak, a sudden voice thundered from behind me. It came from the entrance and I turned to see a man slowly walking up the aisle. He wore a multicolored hat and shirt, a large red tie and scarf, a red nose and the outline of a white deflated tire around his mouth, all the conventional symptoms of a clown. The loutish Punchinello climbed onto the stage to join the woman and child.

As the two adults began to banter the woman announced she was wearing a variety of perfumes. The man expressed a desire to sample one. She offered her hand and he sniffed her wrist, rolled his eyes and waxed euphoric about the aroma. He asked what it was called.

"Forty lights in the heavens," she replied, or some such grandiloquent name. He lifted his own hand and told her to inhale. She breathed and her face pinched into a scowl.

"What do you call that?" she complained.

"One hundred pounds of pinto beans in a canvas sack," he replied.

PerfumeThe two proceeded to smell various parts of each other's anatomy, the woman associating her fragrances with poetic-sounding labels such as "Evening Song Bird" or "Angels' Breath" while each time, in response, the clown attached his own odors to names like, "A pail of Malecón fish heads."

They made their way down to the groin area and he turned his back on the audience, told her to smell his. He promised it was very special. When she tentatively approached, he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head down to his pelvic region. The audience howled.

Another interlude of stentorian music separated us from the next act. Finally a man with a greasepaint mustache and sideburns ambled through the curtains and placed a small green accordion at center stage. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a stringless banjo and grinned like a village idiot. Then the boy who had suffered the fury of his 'wife' in the first act appeared, holding a toy electric guitar. The music began to squawk as they both jumped like sand fleas, mimicking yokel musicians. Suddenly another man, balanced under a fright wig and straw cowboy hat, joined them. This one held a battered guitar, also without strings. The two men mouthed the lyrics as they pretended to play their faux instruments, sometimes speeding up to follow the increased tempo of the recorded song, sometimes slowing down to glacier motions as the music distorted to a garbled crawl. At odd intervals the little boy would walk behind one of the men, reach up through the adult’s spread legs and grab his penis, or send the neck of his toy guitar arcing up between the man's legs. Occasionally one of the men would bend forward in time to the music and mime, with an elevated leg, a trumpet of recorded flatulence.

In ancient Rome, playwrights had to please the roughest and very probably, the most stubborn audiences in the history of live theater. Spectators were chiefly men of low social standing. Very few were native citizens. Most Romans were serving abroad as soldiers or colonists as Roman cities became filled with rustic riffraff, strangers, uncouth barbarians, prisoners of war, and freedmen. They were an ignorant and brutal lot, knowing just enough Latin to make it the lingua franca. Any delicacy or subtlety of form was wasted on them. No jest was too gross or too violent to amuse these brutes, whose principle entertainment was the blood sports of the arena. They were uneducated people with uneducated tastes.

Today, with so much historical distance between us and the ancient Roman Republic, one hopes for a certain amount of decorum in public entertainment, if only to insulate the very young from an early indoctrination into the baser flavors of our 'civilized' palette for amusement. And really, it is the very young who pay the price for this kind of entertainment. They are pressed into service and often enact scenes and spectacles that are more properly the domain of people who should be serving as moral compasses. The truth is, rural entertainment in Mexico pretty much adheres to the ancient Roman formula. In a culture oppressed by corruption at every level, where the population is aggrieved by monopolistic service cartels that control electricity, water and communications and do not provide even the meagerest level of support or quality, Roman bread and circuses would appear to be the appropriate fare for their intervals of leisure. But is it necessary to conscript children for such diversions?

A common sight at our local Carnaval parade is a queue of minikin five-year-old girls dressed as Vegas dancers, bumping and grinding to erotogenic music. Sexualizing children is a policy that generates a number of serious social problems, the worst of which is an increased interest in pedophilia. A litmus test applied to very nearly any Mexican town will render a positive reading for the presence of child pornography and pedophilia. Even San Felipe has, per capita, offered up a rather startling number of transgressors. Sadly, very few were introduced to the inside of a penitentiary. There are just too many slippery loopholes and weak links in the web of Mexico's judicial system. Most apprehended predatory fish wind up in some other pond where they are free to molest fresh, unsuspecting minnows.
In countries where third-world veneer-democracies are overlaid on foundations of despotism and education habitually washes the feet of dominant 'party lines', corrupt nepotistic legal systems often blunt the teeth of local justice.  This creates fertile fields for sexual predators searching for a place to sow their crimes. Mexico has long been a haven for them.

Mexico has a history of protecting its rotten apples. And owing to the country's strong links to the Vatican, this protection has become fortified by the Church's rigorous indifference to its own culpability. Like Nixon, the Church assumes an above-the-law stance, practicing unilateral judgment of its own numerous transgressors. In 2002, John Paul mandated that all charges against priests were to be reported secretly to the Vatican and hearings were to be held in private, away from any press or public attendance, a procedure that directly affronts state criminal codes. Rather than being defrocked, many exposed pedophilic priests are advanced to well-positioned posts as administrators, vicars, and parochial school officials. Despite being repeatedly accused by victims and their families, the Church's felonious subalterns have been routinely promoted by their superiors.

Take the case of Rev. Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera of the Tehuacan diocese, a priest now in the wind and on Mexico's federal most wanted list. In 1987 Aquilar-Rivera was attacked at his parish, probably a direct reply by one of the congregants to his pedophilic activities, and was consequently relocated by his superiors to an East LA parish. After just a few months, he was again reassigned to a South Central Los Angeles parish, likely in response to his sexual proclivities. In December of 1987, two young men informed their parents of the priest's sexual misdeeds. The parents reported the incident to the archdiocese. The Church did not inform the local police, but rather confronted Aquilar-Rivera in private. The priest fled to Mexico. One of the young men, Joaquin Aguilar Mendez, secured lawyers who filed a lawsuit against Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, the powerful head of Mexico City's archdiocese. The lawsuit accused Carrera of conspiring to protect Nicolas Aguilar, in response to letters written by Mendez and mailed to both Nicolas Aguilar and Carrera. Since 1987, there have been at least 60 testimonies against Aguilar by children aged five to thirteen.

"We hope this will inspire more Mexicans to overcome their fear and denounce their persecutors," said Eric Barragan, a spokesman for SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), which sponsored the lawsuit. The group was formed in 1989 and opened its first office in Mexico in 2007. Since then it has identified at least 65 priests in Mexico involved in sexual offences, none of whom have gone to prison. More than a hundred priests in the US who have been accused of molesting kids have fled to Mexico. If this isn't an endorsement of Mexico's acceptance and tolerance of the sexual abuse of children, what is?

Fear of consequence dogs the citizens of Mexico and even today many or most sexual abuse crimes go unreported. When there is a vast distance between social accountability and judicial redress, who you know becomes more important than what you've done. Damaging acts of irresponsible self-gratification become lacunae within the culture's social diary, redacted by corruptible power brokers or made invisible by the hidden hands of influence. For those who attempt to expose these vices, as in the case of Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho of Cancun, arrests, death threats and assassination attempts become familiar companions.

Mexico has been a member of the United Nations for almost 70 years. The UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into effect in 1990, would appear to reside inside one of Mexico's many moral blind spots. Although Mexico has joined a long list of nations that have ratified the document, the country's uncritical devotion to the Church provides a comfortable level of impunity for its ecclesiastical sex offenders. Interestingly, the USA is not among the 194 countries that have ratified the convention. They are allied with Somalia on that account.

The sucrose that attracts the rapacious pedoflies to Mexico is undoubtedly the nebulous quality of the Republic’s jurisprudence.  Like a mirage over hot sand, it is difficult to molecularize any statute into sharp focus.  Grey areas and loopholes litter the dry expanse of Constitutional law.  One legislation always seems to contradict another, and it often seems a ruling is merely a matter of disposition or mood, at best, or the result of the time-honored incentive of mordita, at worst.  When you add to this the destabilizing effects of almost constant law reforms, cultural culpability becomes only theoretical, impossible to enact for the same reason physic’s principle of complementarity is impossible to resolve.
Extra seasoning is thrown into the goulash with Mexico’s tendency to recognize tradition and custom, --the rules, principles, and norms formed along a gradual but uniform passage of time.

The rock of tradition has always been too burdensome for a child to carry.  But because adults revere its weight and believe it is in the best interest of a culture to entrust this outdated baggage to their offspring, they make a gift of the payload.  Unfortunately this benefaction attaches a number of cobwebish attitudes to itself.  For example, in most Mexican states, the written and unwritten legal age of sexual consent is 12 years.

In the Republic, victims have only six months in which to report sexual abuse crimes, another tacit acknowledgement of the country's tolerance for pedophilia.  And legal changes that benefit individuals appear at continental tectonic paces.  For example, the state of Jalisco only recently raised its age of sexual consent from 12 to 15.

The sad fact is that Mexico’s populist-level amusements dovetail nicely with the country’s reputation as a safe house for pedophiles.  Preconditioning children to mimic actions of social reprobates only dilutes their future response to aberrant experiences.  It is easier for them to accept the unthinkable actions of a pedophile if they have been previously introduced to overlapping sexual motifs.

Mexico’s recreational choices are engineering a generation of Rabelaisian children, existentially jaded by the time they are touched by the fatherly hands of their priests.  Billing this process as ‘the greatest entertainment in the Republic’, or ‘unrivaled amusement’ only boot-straps and self-feeds the industry.

If the criterion for what constitutes inappropriate behavior toward a child is not part of a school’s curriculum, then Mexico’s youth will certainly become educated in the other direction by what passes as public diversion.

BRINGERS OF GODSPELL

Why is it there are so many people who feel compelled to lead their hopelessly befuddled, spiritually addled brethren to Truth, as they see it?  Who are these bringers of godspell and what lies behind the ever-incessant push of their ideological mainsprings?  What makes them tick?

I personally know a few of these demagogic voices in the wilderness.  They walk around with small Franklin stoves burning inside them, stoked by the scriptural fuel of the Pentateuch, books of the prophets, Judges and a match-head's fever to ignite a prairie fire in the dry heart of a lost or friendless passerby. 

These hard-bark Ezekiels make no bones about their mission, -they are here to offer you SALVATION.  Whether in the name of Jehovah, Christ, or a god unknown, their purpose is one of impeccable sacrament.  And they are happy to do it for you.  Fervently so.  They'll tell you it is a mandate, a commission accorded them by God himself.  And they'll tell you about their visions, so obviously conforming to their deepest desires. 

Now how does God want them to disseminate his message?  Well, many of these desert holy men hang their shingle on the Internet.  This is quite ingenious because, by and large, the Internet seems to be a wasteland of rudderless, collapsing psyches, -a support system for avowed loners whose ebbing self-esteem gives them the license to post web pages with 3-D marquees that read, "Hi, my name is Bobby Abbeville, click HERE for my hobbies... And here is a picture of me and my cat Socrates..."

Someone with that kind of spiritual vacuity is easy prey for a modern day prophet who can command the cyber elements and muster for an accidental tourist a veritable barrage of multimedia persuasions.  Exotic, textured backgrounds vaunting parades of semi-transparent Pre-Rafaelite patriarchs in attitudes of savage serenity over which, in a 12 pitch italicized blue Britannia font, the voice of redemption is chiseled in Rosetta stone.  Streaming audio and video, Flash animation, Shockwave, Java-scriptures, Facebook, Twitter, all surrounded by clouds with a cherubim wreathe.  It’s the trumpet of too much spare time and it sings out the designer's fullness of soul and self.  The oracular concatenations of the verses, the vociferous judications of the author all but show him standing on a pinnacle of rock with outstretched arms, long hair snapping in a Red Sea breeze, staff angled toward a diseased carpet of Philistines struggling to escape his righteous wrath. 

A weak mind is one that has nothing of value stored in it.  It is a penurious void that thirsts after some kind of wealth, and the easiest way to breach this empty deposit box is to pointedly expose the very thing that created its weakness –its vacancy. 

The desert prophet is a vessel without scuppers, swamped to the beams by Old Testament chapter and verse.  He is so far from being empty, so filled with purpose and destiny, that his gravity digests the uninhabited acolyte.  Those skeptical enough to resist his embassy invite a hair trigger explosion, fetched by a progressive word, aberrant clothing, a knowing glance, a liberal bumper sticker, or any of a thousand modern conventions that have no analogue in the books of Moses.   

Ego and authority is a Janus god that protects man’s nucleus of fear.  They are a double-backed mirror that reiterates itself and creates the vast pecking order of social survival.  On the Janus thermometer, those whose temperatures are high, who burn hot with the fever of selfhood, subsume others with more moderate or cooler egos.

But the weak are not abandoned.  The desert prophet steps forward to offer his guidance.  He will be their lodestar, their shepherd.  He shakes the cascades of his beard and strikes the pose of perennial father and confessor.  And after a course of time, when his followers have studied his message and learned the truth, they will become his apostles.  They too can wield the staff of esoteric knowledge and bridge the void of their empty lives with the playthings of a mind filled with the scions of Fear. 

Don't doubt it.  The scribbling and howling of every ancient and modern prophet are born straight from a deep well of psychological fear.  It is not by accident they appeal directly to people who suffer the same malady.  Shared guilt and dread is the glue that bonds people into nations, whether geographic or religious.

In the 21^st Century, modern prophets have assumed micro-corporate dimensions and in all aspects are not unlike the rags-to-riches rock stars of the past few generations.  As in any ‘art’ form, self-promotion is the enzyme that catalyses the aspirant into the clover of public adulation.  Religious prophets, initially lacking agents and managers, must fill these offices with a high degree of Philistine cunning and ruthlessness.  Like fiction’s Elmer Gantry, or the very real Jimmy Jones and Sun Myung Moon, a carefully honed ability to sound and appear utterly sincere, or better yet, a genetic mishap that withholds the common-sense-filter that polices a balanced mind, is an absolute necessity for a guru-in-waiting.  The former is the preferred affliction, -there is always the possibility of a dine-and-dash libretto which leaves the victims merely financially sober and religiously disillusioned.  The latter option is the dangerous one.  A committed prophet (or, depending on your point of view, someone who has escaped being committed), will not quit.  Ultimate disillusionment often occurs only moments before wholesale self-annihilation.

It’s been said genius is the ability to surround oneself with talented people. This can be borne out by the lives of prodigies like Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and any goalie for the Canadian Olympic hockey team.  Once the religious zealot has established a tax shelter (aka a church) and finds an audience sympathetic to his or her brand of spiritual polemic, statistics happily steps in and supplies exploitable talent.  Mathematically speaking, a guru will collect an above average person for every six that clot around him, a superior one for every eleven.  So in theory, it wouldn’t take much of a crowd to find a decent sampling of talented people.

The nice thing about fanaticism is that it has a large extended family.  Relatives like obsession, resolution, fixation, dedication, habituation, enthusiasm, bias, and a hundred DNA-related kin, relegate every ounce of their enthusiasm to the cause of an alpha demi-god. And in any religious uphill climb, nothing pushes with greater ground-covering results than a forest of talented hands.

The average Church of the Crying Wilderness Voice eventually has production problems and logistical constraints to resolve.  The roster of required talent is long.  Accounting, transportation coordination, crowd control, housing, sound and lighting, public relations, advertising, television, internet presence, door-to-door proselytizing, performance artists, personal trainers, writing, camera work and countless other purposeful departments need to be energized by the vitamin of talent. 

Whether the oracle is a sole proprietorship or the focus of a corporate hive, the end result is a cult of personality.  The prophet’s appeal could be friendly, paternal or wrathful, it doesn’t matter.  There are plenty of people who thirst for any shade of promise, rivers of followers whose inner antenna will obsequiously vibrate around any flavor of authority.  And some of these followers will have talents.  A latent Noah Dietrich, Josef Goebbels or Colonel Tom Parker will slave quietly in the background for the reward of the prophet’s hand on their head behind closed doors.

The true Wilderness Voice is one firmly grounded in religious fundamentalism, the kind of steam so aggressively practiced by William Jennings Bryan in the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925, couched deep in the biblical heartland of Tennessee. 

As Darwin noted in his autobiography, skepticism and rationalism are tools of the educated elite.  In America these tools have been dramatically blunted by a long and successful campaign to dumb down the general population.  How dumb have they become?  Within a year of its appearance on store shelves, 1.5 million people purchased a ‘Pet Rock’.

Fundamentalism walks with long strides down the avenue of the public’s diminished mental capacity simply because its roots are in simplicity, the easy answer to a problem.  When the problem is Universal Fear (these days, the US cultivates fear like a cash crop), the answer is an appeal to the protective arm of a heavenly patriarch.  Other countries, just as skeptically and rationally challenged, invoke their own arm of protection.  Some call it Allah, others name it Yahweh, still others label it Vishnu.  They are all warrior gods, supreme symbols of authority.  And they have become basic and ready answers for irrational and nonskeptical populations.

The gladiator image has become a modern icon, whether  masquerading as a juvenile wizard or represented by a weaponized, muscular soldier of fortune.  Hollywood’s not-so-subtle campaign to elevate violence to the status of art has opened the throttle on extravagantly barbaric images whose only nod to aesthetics is that the scene’s blocking, lighting and expansive time lag imbues the carnage with a ballet-like elegance.

Violence is another simple answer to a problem and has often been an avatar of religious delusion.  The aberrant actions of cults such as Jonestown, the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians illustrate the latent turmoil at the core of any religion that sustains a living, centralized authority.  It’s always been more effective when a guru is deceased and has attained a mythic or legendary status.  He can no longer behave in a way that might abrogate his teachings and any guilt attached to questionable conduct during his lifetime has been expunged, extenuated, acquitted or redacted by his followers.  

There have been several medical studies that suggest there is a link between schizophrenia and emphatic religious thinking.  This is possibly due to the empowering nature of religion.  Schizophrenics, like many diagnosed mental illnesses, suffer from depression, stigma, feelings of control-loss and low self-value. 

In a psychiatric center in Toronto, Ontario, fifteen schizophrenic out patients participated in life history interviews.  The taped data was analyzed for emergent themes.  It revealed the patients struggled to maintain or regain personal power.  They were challenged by stress and pressures created by perceived social expectations, concerned about their ability to connect with other people, and suffered angst because of discrepancies between the self they wished to be and the self they actually realized.  Aren’t these the very symptoms that are moderated by a religious environment?

At the very least, it is empowering to believe in an omnipotent personal god who cloaks you with paternal affection and care.  And it is enabling to grace the splendor of a divine surrogate, the prophet who includes you within his chosen circle to survive the end-of-days. 

The purpose of fundamentalism is to preserve the promise of this empowerment. For many it is a shield, a safe harbor, a reassuring paradigm, a medicine cabinet against the sickness of modernism, a sleeping giant that will one day vindicate itself.  None of its adherents see fundamentalism as either the source or the product of a troubled mind.   

Freud viewed religion as a kind of universal obsessional neurosis. Is there any proof that, as a tribe, founders of religions were of sound mind?  Auditory and visual hallucinations are common to schizophrenics.  By definition, schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder characterized by a difficulty in recognizing reality, regulating emotional responses, thinking in a clear and logical manner and behaving in a socially acceptable manner.  Doesn’t this describe every prophet and holy man since the discovery of fire? 

The bringers of godspell have been with us a long time.  They have managed to divide a shared human neurosis, the need to believe in a powerful protector, until over time a simple consort like Christianity has suffered over 30,000 divorces, each a benefaction of some holy man’s message.  

For the one in seven who warm their hands at the flame of skepticism the question remains, -why do great masses of humanity follow apocalyptic voices, both living and dead?  Because skeptical thinking is hard work.  Because religions have talented agents and PR men.  Because a carefully engineered bovine public will always buy a ‘Pet Rock’.  And because after all, that’s what keeps the cults of prophets and profits in business. 

 

Written by Randy Kerr (JWR Kerr). Read more about the author at Google+ or Amazon.

 

REMEMBER ME?

 

When you get to a certain age your body begins to entertain a race between your brain and your skin.  The object of the race is to see which one will lose its memory first.  I reached that age five years ago and the race has so-far remained pretty even, although my mind is now showing signs of wanting to spit the bit and my skin is definitely on the back stretch. 

It’s disturbing when you look down on a sunny day and see someone else’s arms hanging from your sleeves.  When you were younger you fussed about a contusion or a new scar.  Now the scars are the only reliable landmarks on my limbs.  Everything else is constantly changing.  I go to bed with a lifelong freckle on my shoulder and wake up the next morning with a sepia tattoo the size of a doormat.  I twist my wrist to look at my watch and my forearm suddenly imitates the belly of a man who has recently lost 175 pounds, bending to tie his shoe.  It’s disheartening.

And the mind doesn’t fare any better. 

Two days ago I was at a department store admiring a two seater sling swing.  This is a contraption designed to parrot a vintage porch glider but can thrive on a lawn or an open patio because of its integrated surrey roof.  I was slowly rocking, gently imbibing idle thoughts, when a passing woman abruptly stopped and turned.

“Randy!”

Being called by name at high volume in a public place is naturally hostile to idle thoughts and I glanced up at the source of the outcry.  A woman old enough to have children with Ph.D.’s was staring at me with a face annotated by age and recognition.  This is the moment one’s mental Rolodex is supposed to appear before the inner eye and scroll to an appropriate match.  But all I saw was a blizzard of blank index cards.  It was as if the place where my mental archivist kept his files had been bulldozed to the bone.  I was getting nothing.

“Oh, hi!” I responded.  Most current dictionaries now list the word ‘OhHi!’ as an expletive and offer the following meaning: usually uttered by a person in a state of befuddled remorse when he or she must respond to a greeting from a friend or acquaintance.

The habitual sufferer of fugues and micro-amnesias, in a situation like mine, does exactly what I did, --try to hide their pagan ignorance behind a blank expression.  A blank expression is not to be confused with an innocent expression, which strives for a beatific look of inexperience and purity.  A blank expression is more like the sole of a hiking boot worn smooth by wanderlust. 

As I looked at the woman and, inwardly, at the unsympathetic Rolodex,  I could sense she was searching my face for the light of recognition, always useful for reaffirming one’s place in the cosmos.  She had no idea that in my case, wires to that particular light had been shorting out for years. 

“How did everything work out?” she asked me.

“Everything went just fine,” I assured her, concerned my floating settee might suddenly collapse under the added burden of my hypocrisy. 

“That’s great.”  If awkwardness were sheep, this poor woman had by now struggled into three wool sweaters. 

“Great to see you again,” I told her, simply because something had to be said.   She nodded and mercifully walked toward Garden Supplies, where she presumably had a more satisfying interaction with a tulip bulb.

Names elude me.  They have ever since I realized humanity was an evolutionary dead end, just another of the hundreds of millions of species that have and will become folded into the history and prehistory of this planet.  I am somewhat better with faces because I believe facial recognition uses an older part of the brain, a part that subscribes to the usefulness of remembering landmarks and enduring tonal qualities.  But this woman’s face didn’t ring any bells.  Her hair hung like damp Buffalograss and she had a large phalanx of melanocytes bivouacked on her right cheek.  You would think a square facial mole would be a helpful mnemonic, but no.  The mental Rolodex was an empty crypt. 

Typoglycemia is a new word that relates to the innate ability to reconstruct printed words from scrambled letters.  Time has a bad habit of scrambling facial features, -enlarging the nose, drooping the eyes, sinking the cheeks, pursing the lips, yellowing the teeth, puttying the skin and a hundred other dreary entertainments.  You would think a kind of typoglycemia might come to the rescue of someone unable to place a face so typically juggled by the traffic of calendars.  But no luck.  The aptitude to reassemble a time-worn countenance into the nursery of a high school graduation photograph has sadly eluded me. 

Aging is an accelerating process of stepping over thresholds.  More accurately, it is losing one’s ability to maintain a tight hold on one’s threshes. 

My sister just had a birthday party.  At some point, birthday cakes become one of those thresholds we step across.  It happens the instant a single large candle symbolically represents a handful of smaller ones.  No doubt this is a practical solution to a problem that has bedeviled Hong Kong for so long.  It also avoids unnecessary fire hazards (fifty campfires surrounded by a dozen haycocks of wrapping paper is a portrait of a misspent insurance deductible) and can save air conditioning expenses.  But still, it is one of those subtle indicators one is approaching the Halloween stage of life. 

It’s a strange thing about fading mental faculties, -the mind remembers its earlier ability to recall what has now gone missing.  I think the first cosmic mercy of aging should be a complete ignorance of having once possessed the memory one is now groping to recover.  The second mercy?  No one’s face should change with time.  Barring that, everyone should wear name tags with printing large enough to read from a fake glider to the nearest department store aisle.

Written by Randy Kerr (JWR Kerr). Read more about the author at Google+ or Amazon.