Mooncoin & the Firemirror

My mother has issued, I believe, three tenets for me over the years, I am unsure of the specifics of the third so I have approximated here. These were not issued as actual rules but more like wishes. I have abided by them largely because it has not been necessary to move outside of them but in deference to her as well. They are:

1. No tattoos

2. No loan sharks

3. Something about trashcans and food

These were issued somewhat randomly but they were her Hamurabi’s Code of parenting. All other behaviors came down to the simple binary filter of, “Would you do that if you were having lunch with the Queen?” My mother worried a lot about things going wrong over tea and finger sandwiches at Buckingham Palace. Actually she worries about most things, which is why visits with my parents are always so revealing for my wife. This generalized and ubiquitous anxiety was passed to my mother from my grandfather a man who would cancel a vacation based on the ramifications of inconsistent tire pressure and believed on any given day his car could explode when exposed to direct sunlight if all the windows were closed.

Interestingly, sunlight caused a degree of panic for my father’s parents as well. They would cover all mirrors in the house before they left fearing an incident of reflective immolation. Apparently drawing the shades while they were not at home to prevent this common cause of house fires would send a signal attracting gypsies to rob them of every item ever produced by the Franklin Mint and their collection of any blue object they had ever seen costing less than $25. As a young boy when I suggested this safety measure was creating a haven for vampires they assured me the Oral Roberts commemorative plates adorning the walls provided a suitable defense. I remained skeptical.

As an advanced, educated culture we are smug in our thinking of how fear and ignorance regarding natural phenomena was explained in great mythological allegories by our ancestors. Right. Same fear, different object set and a great certitude in a sound math based logic.

Firemirror. Really.

Of course it always turns out some horrifyingly large percentage of these fears were well founded even at the most misguided level. The incidence of house fires in Northern California caused by folks hanging prisms in their windows now stands as an explanation for untold numbers of homeless hippies currently wandering the Haight. So my paternal grandparents were close it was just refractive not reflective—they were only off by a vowel, a consonant and a scientific principle or two. However as a result of not being robbed by gypsies because they were able to leave their curtains open and assuming my father decides not to monetize his father’s legacy, I will be fortunate enough someday to inherit a coin containing a piece of the moon. While the mooncoin is of course highly desirable, I feel since my grandfather had long ago purchased a piece of lunar real estate in my name from an offer in Reader’s Digest it is to some extent already my birthright.

Now my maternal grandfather on the direct sunlight, exploding car side, being a grousy rapscallion, if offered some acreage on the moon, would upon signing the closing documents insist on seeing it, demarcating it and posting "Trespassers Will Be Shot" signs. All after verifying there were no gypsy camps in whatever lunar hemisphere he was allowed to make his land grab. He would do this quickly and easily by retrofitting a rocket engine to his ’74 Mercury Monarch that he had devised out of a drill, borax soap and a broken wicker chair. The good news is he would take me with him as long as I wore safety glasses and finished re-caning the “perfectly good chair” he had pulled from the neighbor’s trash, which had proven unnecessary for his rocket propulsion device.

Much to his chagrin there is very little wood in most rocket engines. He was a wood guy. He was also a copper guy-holding untold amounts of AT&T stock and swearing the whole wireless phone thing was a fad. One would think this silly much as those who never believed color TV’s would catch on until the legendary McKinsey&Co report that assured AT&T there was no real market for cellular technology and to stick with the landlines. Xerox got similar advice in the 70's on the personal computer front once again proving those who can’t teach consult.

While I do not share my grandfather’s skepticism regarding wireless technology, gypsies, although I have never met a Roma, remain a problem for me. Oddly it is not the baby stealing myth I fear but their never-ending quest to apply poor quality driveway sealant in some distant land I have never seen but believe absolutely to exist because of his epic tales of such peoples and sealants. My friend and colleague of many years on the other hand does believe cellular technology and wifi to be of the devil and wears the equivalent of an aluminum foil hat fashionably disguised as something that bears a striking resemblance to a hat that very same grandfather used to wear, which I thought was only available at a certain bait shop on the Jersey shore in the 70’s. My conspiracy buff friend has also moved to the farthest point possible at land’s end to avoid wireless transmissions because as he told me, “it jumbles my thinking.” A hot plate and umbrella on a sea buoy are his next stop.

I have known him for a decade and his conspiracy theories run a 50% or better accuracy rate so I am sure the microwave and wireless radiation is indeed killing us or as I posit just another genetic modifier helping to expedite the evolutionary process in humans.

I am happy my friend has moved on from 9/11 government cover-ups and FDA denials regarding the toxic effects of the environmental estrogen released in into the atmosphere during the recycling of plastics. The former I would believe if I felt the government was in any way capable of executing anything but they have been extremely effective in convincing me they are not, but that may of course be exactly the brilliant subterfuge for which they wish me to fall. The latter I firmly believe only because of the skyrocketing incidence of man-boobs. When my wife says with some regularity, “Do my boobs look as good as his?” something has gone seriously awry.

His other current conspiracy theory is the secret Rockefeller-China war with threats of one million assassins on the China side and the use of a secret Tesla designed earthquake machine by Rockefeller. I laughed until the big China quake in the summer of 2008. Now I fear there actually is a million member strong Chinese assassins guild with a dumpling based strong hold in every major metropolis.

Thankfully fear based mythologies serving as explanatory rationales will always be with us. Humans may be able to live without cell phones but myth, not a chance. Far too much good comes from the fantasy of conspiracies or the monetization of “stunning new research reveals…” It’s just created by tech savvy paranoids, politicians or PR firms, the new tribe elders.

I just wish mythology could explain man boobs.