journal features

we Werneburgs are too sweet

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.06.02

Mari's worried that Kenny is too sweet. He spent his first three years in gentle Japan, after all.

And now that he's here, she sees that the older kids are sometimes mean to him in little ways like refusing to allow him to sit with them etc etc. She frets that he'll be too sensitive.

I told her that you get to a point in life where you figure out how to take care of yourself. I've always been a sensitive and non-aggressive boy myself, but standing up for yourself is natural. I then related the story of waiting in my spot to turn left at an intersection. I was on my bike, and at first no one was behind me. Eventually someone drifted up behind me and waited.

But when I started up at the green light, the dick behind me decided to start beeping for some reason. I don't know what he thought was going on, because it was a 'T' intersection and I could only turn left from where I was in the intersection. I ignored him and carried on with my turn. As luck would have it, he was stuck in the slow flow of traffic next to me so I turned to give him a long look. He started beeping at me in anger (or whatever), so I flipped him off as I drifted away. That got him more angry, and he continued to honk away. With a final wag of my ass I accelerated away through an intersection as he got caught up in some snafu of car congestion.

Mari was quiet for a moment, then said, "I can just see you doing that."

"Kenny will be fine."

"Yeah."

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)