THE OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

THE DREAD DESTROYER

Since there is a 'Thor' movie on tap for next year and he, along with the 'Sentinel of the Spaceways', Silver Surfer and 'the Champion of Darkness, the Avenging Angel of Light', Adam Warlock, constituted my favorite heroes during my span of comic book collecting, I have been looking for an excuse to make a post about this cat here. There are traits about the Destroyer that made him instantly admirable, starting with his role as a immutable force of nature.

A suit of armor that stands immobile unless inhabited by another life force, the suit has but one purpose when animated and that is to destroy whatever being it lays its eyes on. Once someone has became its focus, then nothing will stop the armor from pursuing and of course, destroying whatever it is after.

That is all that was to him. No sinister plan of world domination and no particular foe, though he faces the Thunder God exclusively. Wasn't interested in observing for a weakness because it didn't matter. He existed to do just ONE THING, and that was destroy whatever it was he saw.

One of my boxing robes that I still have from my childhood days has 'The Destroyer' sewn in script on the back. Whether I was that or not is open to question but I wanted something to define me in the way that name 'The Knockout King' defines Randal Bailey (it takes until 2:13 before you get the chance to see what the announcers are talking about in the video). Not only that, but I would like to have used the persona to alter my actual character so that I had what I don't have, a real killer instinct. He was, is and shall remain the closest personification of Nietzsche's and by association, mine, formula of happiness.

AND THAT IS THE CONFLICT

So I am sitting here thinking this out as I write because there is a competition of sorts going on in my mind. Another concept (once again, channelling my inner Mary Katherine Gallagher) that echoed from my tentative attempts to join in and be among the faithful in church, is when God (characterized by Morgan Freeman) speaks to Evan's wife (Lauren Graham). When she has doubts about what her husband is doing and is looking for a sign that he is doing what he is meant to be doing, she is told this:

Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If they pray for courage, does God give them courage, or does he give them opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for their family to be closer, you think God zaps them with warm, fuzzy feelings? Or does he give them opportunities to love each other?

Both concepts, from 'Evan' and from Freddie are what makes up most if not all, of my understanding on how to live. I don't ask that life is always 'straight'. In fact I don't believe in the doctrine of 'fairness'. How does one determine 'fairness', in a known universe of either imperfection or of one's unworthiness of the knowledge to know what is 'fair'? What I do like and believe in is the opportunity that we are given as human beings in the lottery of life. I am not a microbe nor a seagull on the Louisiana coast. Wasn't born into being a Christian in Ethiopia, an Arab Muslim in the Palestine or a Jew in 1930 Germany. When I tell you that I appreciate my life and my empathy extends to those who have made it out of horrible environments by any means necessary, I make more than a token effort in understanding that 'my blues ain't like theirs'.

THAT ANCIENT REPTILE INSIDE OF US ALL

Whenever I think of the inhuman things that we put other human beings through, I blame that part of the brain, the CPU, the static and poor reception that goes on in their amigdala, for causing people to warp. Example, there were two stories in today's paper, one about a Grandma gone in-freakin'-sane in Highland Park and another Mom who was found guilty of sexual molesting her teenage son. And please, I am not trying to foster any particular agenda, just that those were the stories that caught my eye. I see it first as man's inhumanity to man and would mark them as examples of that, first.

As an individual being, I do think that our first and highest priority is to the self. Yet in every collective of human social units, the self is the first thing that is devalued. This isn't something that I just came up with the other day but what has been the biggest fissure in my mind. What is wrong with trying to live in a bracketed by a pair of vertical lines and being valued as who you are and what you are?

Okay, okay. I get it, I really do. From studies of other social creatures and living beings, there is some purpose to connecting and maybe even the secret to the universe will be revealed in understanding how we all are supposed to live in harmony with every other living thing on Earth, perhaps the entire universe. Right now, I would be very content with understanding how to live among a few.

LIKE AND LOVE... THERE IS A DIFFERENCE, DONTCHA KNOW

I have found it hard to turn my back on anyone. That is a source of my current consternation, that I have to turn my back on my sister, the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood variety. When it comes to relationships some folks think that you can love someone without actually liking them. I don't. If I can't like you then I can't ever love you. Took that out for a test run already in my life and when practiced that there theory, held a ton of water. But that is me.

Do I think that my sister's love me? By their definition, and the definition of prolly millions of others, they do. But not by mine.

Sometimes people are more loyal to those things and people that they say 'they like' than they are to things that they love. I also think they are that way with people, too. That is why in my 'Mark-ivellian' way, I would say that it is better to be liked than it is to be loved!

This could be my opportunity to do something that I meant to have done a quarter century ago.