The weekends have acquired a routine.  I wake up, read the newspaper, and despair.  Then I head outside, take a walk, and get saved.

The bleakness I don’t ascribe entirely to my meds.  There’s a line between genocide and suicide, and, in festering conflicts abroad and at home, we’ve crossed it.

But in the mountain park above my backyard yesterday, a different line has been crossed – from cocoon to chrysalis.  Butterflies popped from the drying grasses like puffs of bright smoke.  So many and in such variety I had to come home and look them up.  Checkered and Yellow Sulphurs.  Cabbage Whites and Melissa Blues.  Even a pair of “Mormon Fritillaries” — who wouldn’t want to see THEM mate!  Above me, Tiger Swallowtails wheeled like drunken raptors, and squadrons of dragonflies – Hoary Skimmers, Electric Dashers and Paiute Dancers, striped in racing black and neon blue — rose to the call of a clean-washed sky after a week of rain.  When Kaisha and I walked again at evening, the insane zigzag of insects had given way to an insane zigzag of bats.   June may have been the month of blooms, but August promises a month of wings.

From my human perspective, this pageant is as peaceable as a kindergarten field trip.  But I know that in their own eyes, these creatures are fighting, killing, feasting on each other’s entrails and struggling against resource limits, just as we are.  Had they powers of speech, I shudder to think what epithets and slurs they would invent for each other – the bats especially!  Still, whatever traumas they suffer and inflict are blown away on the morning breeze; whereas humans are condemned to remember past wrongs as deeply as the names of our children, and to sort victims and perpetrators into taxonomies as precise as any lepidopterist’s.  Conversely, when it comes to envisioning the future — even so far as seeing where our tightening circles of vengeance and re-enactment will inevitably lead us — we tend to be as blind as, well, bats.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in remembrance.  But I believe more in recovery.  And I believe our debt to the future is greater than the claims of the past.  To pay it, we’ll need to move beyond fetishizing what kind of bug we are.

I’ve decided the side-effects of my anti-convulsants aren’t really all bad.  My whole life I’ve struggled with the relentless compulsion to be “nice.”  Now, I’m exploring the joys of being a committed bastard when circumstances warrant.  Of course, Beret has reminded me that our house is not a place where circumstances typically “warrant,” so I’ve begun to look for other venues to use my new powers For Good.  Last weekend, a choice opportunity arose; we received our latest “bundled” telecom bill. I decided it contained enough excess, outrage and malfeasance to justify an in-person Monday morning visit to the nearby branch of our provider.  I loaded up the dead cable box we were still paying for, the creepy home surveillance kit they forced on us, our last three months’ bills, and my best can of medication-infused whup-ass.

The “next available agent” looked a perfect match: square-built, no-neck, and enough testosterone to withstand my abuse without inducing guilt.  I informed him that none of this was personal but that his employer was a fraudulent, racketeering outfit on a par with the Medellin Cartel, and that I wanted the offending items Off My Bill.  He initially resisted, so I got enthusiastically irate.  By my third stanza, the rep (I’ll call him “Troy”) had gone docile, punctuating my tantrum with an occasional “fine,” and waiting for me to stop.  He removed all the offending charges without further argument or much comment.  Finally calming down, I looked, for the first time, at his face.  It was ashen – in fact, miserable.

“You look like you’re in pain.”

“Yeah, man, it’s my back.”

“Really?  My wife is dealing with that.”

“Oh, it f**king hurts.  Four years of linebacker at Chatfield High.  5A football.  I used to clean-and-press 350.  You know — all that pressure on the spine?  I had no idea.  Now my discs are all blown out.  Five of them.  They give me the epidural shots, but nothing works.  And what am I — like, 38 years old?”  As he spoke, the mass of his once-ferocious physique bulged out of his flimsy company shirt, and he rolled compulsively from one buttock to the other on his flimsy company chair.   Troy was in agony, and it was only 9:15 a.m.

“Look,” he pleaded. “I can do everything you want.  And I’ll even take an extra 30 bucks off your bill for your aggravation.  But –” he paused – “You’ll have to take HBO.  The company won’t let me go down in service.  It has to keep going up, no matter what.  It just has to.   I don’t condone it.  But it’s just . . .”  His eyes met mine, flat, waiting for another tirade.

I had no heart for it.  “I appreciate your admitting it, at least.  I mean, that’s where we all are, right?  We all have to keep going up.  OK, I’ll take the HBO.”

I rose to go, having saved $70, which I knew would be cut back to $40 if I called back later to eliminate the unwanted service, or else jacked back up the same amount in three months if I didn’t.  Troy smiled, weakly grateful.  “One more thing.”

“What?”

“You’ll get a call from my supervisor later today, asking about my service.  Could you rate me a 5?”

I said sure.   I guess my dosage still needs to go up several more notches before I can properly play this game, when the other side makes such clever use of human shields.