Be the Jello.

Some few years ago I was kind of seeing a charming and delightful young woman who did not want to go to Cuba with me. I have wanted to go to Cuba for some time now. She said that she was happy to travel but her rule was that she didn’t want to go to places with armed guerrilla. Her auto-correct, however, oddly changed “guerrillas” to “gorillas”, which then ultimately became something of an inside joke: her unreasonable fear of gun-toting primates.

I have been thinking about that for the past couple of hours because this morning I read this Guardian article that says the first direct flights from New York to Havana have begun flying. Personally I would rather take a boat from Miami (that just seems like more of an adventure, but one of the things on my bucket list is to jump off a boat into the ocean and swim to shore. Though when I say “into the ocean” I am referring to the “ocean” immediately off shore, preferably within shouting distance of the beach.).

Now, it should be said that I’m not actually certain if Cuba has actually had armed guerrillas since the end of their revolution and I’m even less certain that Cuba is home to any gorillas, strapped or otherwise.

I find this idea interesting though because it seems to exist out there in the world and not just amongst the sort of women who date me (though someone could conduct a fascinating study of the brain patterns of those women). 

Because I am just this sort of asshole, I went over to the student services accounting office this morning. These are the people who will help pay your registration fees for a professional conference or help you buy plane tickets if you need to travel somewhere to do research for your thesis. Well I asked the nice woman at the counter how I could get them to pay for me to go to Cuba. She asked if that travel would relate to research I was conducting and I said that it certainly could. This answer did not seem to please her. Then she said that the school actually had a list of countries that it would and would not help students travel to based on a number of factors, the primary one being “safety”.

I guess that is a good thing, but again, I am forced to wonder if this is just more armed gorillas.

I’ve never heard anyone say that Cuba is a dangerous place to visit. I mean, you know, Canadians go there all the time. If anything I would have to imagine that a Communists system, oppressive as it may be, would - for that very reason - make the island more safe to visit. What I think is interesting here is this lingering idea that in the jungles of Sierra Maestra there are still paramilitary groups roving around killing people. Of course we think that because that’s the image we have: Castro and Che Guevara running around killing people, but that image is fifty years old now and Castro is almost 90 years old.

I think what interests me here is the way that these notions and images and ideas harden like concrete in the folds of our brains.

This week I heard a British talking-head on a Sky News debate-a-thon dismissing this whole stupid Hillary Clinton email flap by saying that he found the whole thing so deliciously retro. I’m paraphrasing here, “The people who like the Clintons don’t think this is a big deal and the people who hate the Clintons will always find a new reason to hate the Clintons.” There is very real truth in this, isn’t there?

So much in our lives works this way, doesn’t it? I have a close friend who is not just an admitted atheist, but a vocal one and for some reason he enjoys fighting with people on the internet about religion as though reasoned debate is a panacea. He’s taking a knife to a gunfight if you ask me, because we tend to like it when our ideas have solidified into mental concrete. We like to be able to say, “Well, I know how I feel about this whole God thing, so at least I have that figured out.” We generally have no interest in ideas that vibrate like jello on an amp because we don’t like our ideas to be that malleable. It deprives us of the ability to ever be completely right and to cast others down into the lower moral position of being completely wrong.

For the record, my thing with religion is that I don’t care what silly thing you chose to believe, just please don’t try to make me take your pamphlet. And please stay way the hell away from politics or I’m going to revoke your tax exempt status faster than you can say, “War on Christmas”.

I recently accidentally wandered into the comments section of an article I was reading about running - let me say that again: ABOUT RUNNING - which somehow quickly devolved into an argument about NAFTA and the possible virtues of living in France and how finding virtues in possibly living in France made a person un-American because Freedom Fries. What struck me most at the time was not how stupid the discussion was, but how hugely dated all of the references were. I am now working on the theory that time travel has been invented, but that it only works digitally and that internet comments are written by people from the past.

This may be a stupid theory, but it is probably not any stupider than one of two of the things you believe in more firmly than the solidest concrete. It is going to be my version of Bertrand Russell's Cosmic Teapot.

That’s all I really have to say about all that. If I was a Zen master I guess I would say: Be the jello.

I think I am going to have that put on a t-shirt and I will wear that t-shirt while swimming to shore in Cuba. I will emerge out of the surf triumphantly and all of the locals will look at me and the sense of victory I am obviously feeling for having survived a dumb situation that I put myself into for no good reason and they will say, “Oh good, the Americans are here.”

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