In Cairo: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Visitations. The wake. What was left in a wake, after death?

Homelands. The feelings which might develop seeing a loved one die, alone.

If Abraham wasn’t strange enough, planning to kill Sarah’s son, there was the strangeness of Isaac.

In all of the years that Jacob was away, did you ever notice that Isaac never once went to visit him? And if it had been simply a matter of anger at the stolen birthright, there is never mention that Isaac had ever met his in-laws. And as a consequence, if that had been me, I think I would have questioned exactly whether my husband or whether my father loved me. One of the basic tenets of love is the witnessed pursuit. And in the stories about Isaac, there was a missing pursuit about everything.

Isaac was a badly damaged man, after what had happened to him when Abraham took the knife in the name of God to him in that moment on Mount Moriah. His growth in the way of feelings which might develop out of what had happened on Mount Moriah seemed stunted. And as the sons of Isaac surely must have come to appreciate, it seemed perfectly reasonable for any man to lose trust not only in his father Abraham, but in the God of Abraham. So this guy Isaac suffered one of the first cases of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome ever recorded in history.

Invisible. Like you never even existed at all. The feelings which might develop if you came to wonder if your father ever loved you, as if you never even existed at all. Battle fatigue. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The hostility which came to someone forced to go to war, forced to annihilate another tribe. And afterwards, note the symptoms, reflected in a form of missing pursuit like Isaac showed in the search for a wife. And were there further symptoms reflected in a form of missing pursuit of the God of Abraham? Symptoms that were felt by anyone living in a home or a homeland with someone with Battle Fatigue or Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

“You don’t care who I am.” Invisible. The feelings which might develop from the plumbing of the land, with so much Battle Fatigue Where the dead are buried like the unknown water and sewer pipes in the modern world.

Banked time: What went on here in this place in history? And as in all of these stories, to sense a lingering hostility as well as the inherited things which had gone before you. When you inherited so much in all of human history, with so many people who felt that they could annihilate other tribes.

Time quantified, neatly stacked away, wrote Louise Erdrich, banked in both history or on premises called institutions. Left in a wake, after death. Feeling loved? Was there a sense of missing love in these stories between the men – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob?

Concerning the mystery of the visitations, had Jacob also sustained a form of missing pursuit, by not ever going home? Was he bothered by having to live in a totally different environment from the one he was born into? With the feelings which might develop in such an environment. In an environment without much feeling except fear and hoodwinking.

Living in the wake. Of fear. Of mistrust. Of competition between brothers and sisters. With the pride over all of this craziness of religion — the “unbelievable most ticklish but loving form of destruction” as people quit believing in each other. To take a quote from Louise Erdrich. Chosen people who felt that they could annihilate one another. Before they considered the outside tribes.

Born into the holy land. Born into a time of annihilation, with fear of ending up with nothing in times of darkness, of war, of rebellion, of drought, of another war. What was it like waking up today in Cairo, in an atmosphere of another annihilation? There were so many badly damaged men living in the environment of war and rebellion, who wanted to extend the damage to another generation. And then there were the refugees, like the hundreds of thousand Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Kurds, all living life with their wives, as Jacob lived his life with his wives. Only now, if you note a certain irony, it was the hundreds of thousand invisible exiles like Jacob. With their dream about a Promise Land.

What was left in a wake, after death? Did you feel the same kind of invisible battle that the Muslim Brotherhood had, with their own brothers, so much like the same recorded struggle in the Hebrew Bible?

If Ibraham wasn’t strange enough, planning to kill Hagar’s son, there was the strangeness of Ishmael, per the reading on Eid-al-Fitr. Ramadan was over seven days ago. Muslims are recommended to use different routes to and from the prayer grounds on the day the end of Ramadan was celebrated — based upon the story read that day, and not for their own personal safety. When the young, when it came to the disoriented understanding of some kind of true sacrifice, an imposed sacrifice, were never going to exactly do as the elders were doing.

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Larry Gillick

 

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As the Indoor Metrodome Goes Away, What of Indoor Tanning?

Practice responsible sun-tanning: in your convertible,do not tan with your top down!

Cosmetic Tans, to grab a hold of the attention and the consciousness of a stranger, like by a sexy young woman.  And there is only this question about the connection of public and private. The public connection in private parts.

The Indoor Tanning Association notes that there are 160,000 people who work in the indoor tanning industry. In the high tech world, there are benefits to indoor tanning if you were born with a greater degree of modesty than those who come from the Club Med nations where clothes were shed for greater comfort for so much of the year – you are able to tan in the nude, without being seen by strangers.

Tomorrow is the annual August family picnic that commemorates my grandmother’s birthday. As she was born in 1900, I feel fairly certain that she never tanned in the nude nor ever thought anyone would; she won’t be physically present tomorrow to ask. Also expected to be missing is the flight of the bumblebee which has aggravated one particular aunt on so many of these August gatherings. No one is quite sure what is happening to the disappearing bees throughout the world. And also missing will be my brother-in-law.

You did not need to see all the sequels to the “Back to the Future” movies to know how much the world has changed. Fifty years ago there was no such thing as sunscreen. Twenty years ago there was no such thing as the Indoor Tanning Association that now promotes responsible sun-tanning like responsible drinking. Fifty percent of those indoor tanning centers, according to the U S Census, includes female ownership. And there was a lot of vanity that went to the sales pitch.

The sales pitch was “Our tans are better than your tans.”

According to tanning industry research, “non-tanners sunburn more often than people who tan indoors.” The professional indoor tanning industry teaches sunburn prevention — both indoors in the salon, and outdoors under the sun — “and evidence suggests that we teach this message more effectively than those who promote complete sun avoidance.”

This week Tracy Kidner, a surgical oncologist and general surgeon in Beverly Hills, California wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times. Just as the FDA is considering new regulations for tanning beds, Dr. Kidner writes, “People have to understand that there is no such thing as a healthy tan, particularly one that comes from a tanning bed. Research has shown that just one indoor tanning session increases the user’s chances of developing melanoma by 20 percent, and each additional session during the same year boosts the risk almost an additional 2 percent. One study found that when people first used a tanning bed before the age of 35, they increased their risk for melanoma by 75 percent.”

“At age 36, with two young children, my dermatologist had taken a biopsy from a small pink dot on my back, and the results now available were malignant melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. I had a potentially deadly cancer, and all I could think was, “Why me?”

“My job as a doctor is to do everything possible to cure them. But as a survivor, I also feel a huge responsibility to help prevent new cases,” writes Tracy Kidner.

What was not written about in Dr. Kidner’s piece is the suffering that accompanies one of the 76,000 new cases of melanoma in the U S each year. If you ever have had a good sunburn, you know that it is hard to laugh when you are suffering. That sunburn pain mostly is gone within three days. I have witnessed a lot of suffering over the past six months in my brother-in-law dying of melanoma. And that accompanied suffering never diminishes. Melanoma is a form of skin cancer. Irish people are not born with a lot of the invisible melanocytes which produces the pigment that forms a good tan. Yes, heredity determines how many invisible melanocyes you carried – how rich your skin, per the Indoor Tannin Association, is in melanin. It is melanin which absorbs ultraviolet radiation, diminishing the production of vitamin D.  And it is a significant amount of vitamin D that you might be seeking from indoor tanning all over your body. If this was Ireland, if people never died from skin cancer — with your pants falling down from weight loss, until you were falling down from tumors on the spine which caused neurologic deficits — the elders would be laughing.