Pre-emrgence

The Forsythia are blooming, can crabgrass be far behind?  This homely bit of suburban lore was grafted onto my consciousness about 10 years ago.  Now I faithfully note the crabgrass patches each summer and dose them with pre-emergent herbicide each spring.

Yardwork seems to unsettle my mind.  I often hum and muse as I go about the repetitive tasks, minimally engaged with what is in front of me, and sort of free-roaming in my mind.  Todays muse is hooked-up with the internet and the global pre-consciousness.  The pieces that have stuck together in my minds filter today are our coping mechanisms - primarily coping with each other and the pain we can inflict.

I started my internet day by finishing a "National Magazine Award" finalist for best feature article of the year called "Burning Man" about an Iraq war veteran recovering from massive burns, partially with the help of immersive VR.  In it he quotes from Samuel Johnson (via a song - check the article if you really are interested) "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Who knows what demons SJ had in mind - this burnt man had plenty of his own.  There is a mythic element here that allows this image./ idea to pierce consciousness and strike deeper: I think of Beauty and the Beast, or perhaps the Minotaur.  Each had his own pain to deal with, and the recurrent pain he inflicted on those around him.  Much too much for a middle-class suburban existence to bear.
Current medical / psychiatric orthodoxy tends to medicate the deviances our sensitive souls note in ourselves and others.  I find harmony with the opinions of another blogger:  who recently writes:
The young move too fast for our comfort and we give them drugs to slow them down. The elderly move too slowly for our comfort and we give them drugs to speed them up. 

There is a middle-managerial methodology at work here: get the most done with the least cost, and whatever you do Don't make Waves.  Its not merely that we, as individuals don't want to deal with the riskier excesses of life, but that we somehow find ourselves accountable for those excesses in others, and feel a need to control them 'for their own good'.

Classicly, we are indicted for being middling - indicted like Jim Baxter is indicted by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" ' What do you do when you have to be a man?'.  Or by Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" 'You can't handle the truth'.  The fact that both of these characters are indelibly flawed does little to fog the moral challenges they raise on their way down.
So I control my crabgrass, and my dandlelions, largely because they are 'mine' in the same way this patch of earth is mine, and what I do with it effects my neighbors.  Each of us cares in some way about keeping things is order and under control.  We watch in a hundred little ways that provide a security blanket for the more vulnerable in the neighborhood.  I worry about my neighbors toads each time I apply some chemical to the lawn.  The web we inhabit, inhabits us, and everyone we touch.