2018 Bloodlines Archive

Excerpts from Principles of Flight: Flying Bush Planes Through a World of War, Sexism, and Meat

by Bill Hatcher
(billhatcherbooks.com)
Published 12/2017 by Lantern Books

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This memoir a psychosocial inquiry into hyper-masculinism. It takes place in Africa and Alaska around the time of 9/11 and the wars that followed. It is that also shines light on the emergence of a new manner of consciousness.

This excerpt is of a scene in Kenya. It comes from Chapter 3: The Principle of Gravity.

The hills and bends in the road looked almost familiar when Vijay drove me to Nairobi. I hoped to enroll in flight school at Wilson Airport, but I also wanted to find a tutor so I could improve my Swahili, or Kiswahili, as the language is technically called. I had not spoken it in over five years, and if I wanted to live and work long-term in East Africa, I needed to brush up on the language spoken by nearly everyone in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the bordering areas.

NOLS kept two apartments at the Kivi Milimani Hotel in downtown Nairobi—one for itinerant instructors, and another for Peter and his family. Along with Kabiru’s flight manuals, I took with me my Jeppesen-Sanderson PJ-1 plotter, a manual flight computer, and a pilot’s clipboard with Velcro that strapped to the thigh so you could write notes and make calculations during the flight. I thought of nothing else but flying bush planes, and for once, Vijay might have been relieved his Jeep made too much noise to allow for conversation.

Vijay dropped me at the apartment. Down the street, I found an Internet café and a restaurant, and since it was getting dark, I ducked into the restaurant. The interior lighting was low and the decor cowboy-themed, with posters of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. A steer’s horns were mounted over the bar. The music of a modern African group called Simba Wanyika, or Plains Lions, played over the sound system, but the rest of the bar’s motif was imported from the United States. Around the bar, Kenyan prostitutes pawed at affluent men of every racial category, although I noticed the white men were getting more attention than any other group.

A waitress brought a menu and winked. I blushed and acted like I had not noticed. I was flattered, and she was certainly pretty, but I knew better. The risk of catching STDs, including HIV/AIDS, was not inconsiderable.

The restaurant’s menu was committed to meat: ribs, tenderloins, racks and rumps of lamb, fish (filleted and whole), and chickens’ legs and breasts. I ordered a cheeseburger with fries, or chips, as they called them in this former British colony. I also ordered a Tusker Lager, Kenya’s premium beer. The woman took the order, and I could not help but notice the motion of her hips in her black leather skirt as she walked away. She was undeniably attractive and pleasing to watch, yet it felt cheap to ogle her. I looked away, uncomfortable at what it said about me.

As I waited for my order, I noticed most men at the bar had taken off their suit coats but left their ties on and loosened while they puffed cigarettes. The women wore very little. It could have been a scene from almost any place on the planet: clothed men who fancied themselves power brokers fraternizing over meat while virtually naked women competed to serve them to earn money.

The inequities were obvious. Yet I did not perceive the deeper level, one explored by Carol J. Adams in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. In this now classic text, Adams investigates how meat and women’s bodies are cognate symbols of male power and domination. Animals are consumed literally, and women are consumed visually and sexually. Advertisements that substitute cuts of meat for parts of a woman’s body seem playful and innocuous—to the conditioned mind. Adams suggests that eating meat (and eggs and milk, which she calls “feminized protein”) is a manifestation of the fragmentation and consumption of women themselves. A manly man eats meat and controls women. This worldview is nearly universal and nearly invisible. For instance, no one objects when fathers “give away” their daughters but not their sons in wedding ceremonies. This custom is a toned-down version of a time not long past when women were considered property to be bought, sold, abandoned, mutilated, or murdered as their male masters—and male-authored holy books—saw fit. In some parts of the world, such practices persist.
Sitting in the cowboy bar, I did not see the connection between meat, women, and violence. I flew far above this reality, even though its atmosphere kept me aloft. When my waitress brought me my cheeseburger, I ate it and never gave either of them a further thought.

This excerpt is of a scene in Alaska. It comes from Chapter 26: Trophies.

“Let’s call it twelve hundred even,” said the man seated behind the desk.
Clouds covered the sky, and the fluorescent lights inside the building were turned off, which made it dim. The place smelled of oil and half-rotted meat, though the cool temperatures dampened the odors.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw shelves of tools, aerosol paint cans, and an old airplane fuselage. On one wall, an American flag hung next to a tier of trophy heads: two moose, a grizzly bear, a black bear, a caribou, and two wolves. A Mossberg rifle poster was tacked to the wall under one of the moose heads. The poster showed a man on horseback dressed in camouflage with a rifle slung over his shoulder, while a packhorse trailed behind with an impressive rack of elk antlers strapped atop panniers. Spectacular mountain scenery filled the poster’s background and reminded me of the movie Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford. Capitalizing on more recent events, the tagline on the poster read, behind every revolution is a patriot, the name of Mossberg’s newly Christened weapon.

My dad would love this place, I thought.

The wolf heads and the poster brought to mind Senate Bill 155, recently signed into action by Governor Frank Murkowski. The bill allowed hunters to shoot wolves from helicopters, which would make more caribou and moose available for hunters. I wondered if state officials realized this would weaken the ungulate gene pool. I also wondered if they saw the irony in calling aerial wolf hunting “predator control.”

At the national level, verbiage in the USA PATRIOT ACT, signed into law on November 26, 2001, made it a felony to “protest the actions of a . . . corporation” engaged in the exploitation of animals or natural resources. In the broadest interpretation of this clause, a person could be accused of being unpatriotic or even considered a terrorist if they questioned interests associated with hunting, mining, or animal or crop agriculture.

It impressed me how the meaning of the words predator and patriot had nearly merged in the American vernacular. Patriot comes from the Latin root pater for father, and patria for fatherland. Patria is also the root of the Latin patriarchalis, or patriarchal. This term is often invoked to describe male-dominated social systems, such as exist in the United States and most nations today, as well as in many religions, in particular Islam and Christianity.
The man behind the desk growled to clear his throat. Penny nudged me.

“Sorry. How much?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.” He said it slower this time before spitting chew-juice into a repurposed Coke can. His Carhartt coat was stained and frayed at the wrists, and his overalls struggled to manage his girth. Temperatures hovered in the forties, and the roller-doors on his hangar-garage stood wide open, though the man’s thick black beard no doubt insulated his face. He struck me as the quintessential Alaskan outdoorsman. However, his primary trade was automotive maintenance. In previous years, he had installed engine block heaters in NOLS vehicles and in Penny’s 4-Runner, and with winter approaching, she urged me to get a heater as well as studded tires installed on my Ford Escort.

I pulled the checkbook out of my puffy blue down coat and leaned onto his desk to write the check. My hand shook with nerves as I wrote, and I did not know why. To distract him, I pointed my pen at the heads on the wall. “I see you hunt.” It sounded dumb after I said it.

“All my life,” he said. “Moose, mostly.” A black Labrador retriever rested his head on the man’s thigh. The man stroked the dog’s head.

I signed my name on the check and handed it to him. He took it and swiveled in his chair toward the heads.

“Now that one there,” he said, as he sniffed and pointed to a moose with antlers six feet across, “the head’s about all I saved of that son of a bitch.” Dusty spider webs spanned the antlers.

“What happened?” asked Penny. She bent down to pet the dog, which had come around to investigate us.

“Oh, me and some buddies was up at Resurrection Creek.” He turned back to us, squinting into the fading gray light. “Up in the Chugach.”

Penny nodded, but I did not know the place. The dog nosed my crotch, and I pushed him aside, but he kept at it. Grizzly Man paid no attention.

“Anyways, we was up there huntin’ moose, and I got this big son of a bitch, fifteen hundred pounds, right next to the cabin we was stayin’ in. Huge bastard! But I didn’t need it all, so we decided to divvy him up and take him out the next day on four-wheelers. Until then, we hung him in a tree. Well, that night, goddamned bear comes in, big son of a bitch, and tears him down and starts eatin’ on him and maulin’ the shit out of him. So, I shot the bastard.”

Grizzly Man straightened in his creaky chair like he had just won an award and pointed to the bear’s head. “That’s him there,” he said, and cackled. The head was mounted over a large Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar that had not yet been turned from August to September. It portrayed an African American woman on a beach wearing a chef’s hat and a red bikini. She used a stainless-steel fork to turn a steak in the flames of a grill. The title at the top of the calendar read dark meat.

“Well, you do what you gotta do,” said Penny.

“Yeah, them’s my trophies,” he said, and pushed my keys across the desk, staring into my eyes, but motioning toward Penny. “I guess she’s your trophy, bud.”

I blinked and glanced up at the bear and Miss August. Penny laughed again, but it was hollow and sounded as if she had practiced that laugh for so long and in so many situations, since before she could remember, that it came off without thinking, automatically, so that even she had convinced herself it was genuine.

I had occasionally heard the term trophy wife, usually used with reference to a younger, attractive woman married to an older, wealthy white man. Like a hunter who mounts an animal’s head on a wall, the older man gets to show off the younger woman’s body and the prestige that displaying her garners him. In return, she acquires a portion of his wealth. The transaction struck me as similar to that portrayed in the photos of military men and their wives the recruiter had shown me all those years ago.

I took my keys off the desk.

“We really appreciate it,” said Penny.

Grizzly Man smiled. For a second, he resembled a teddy bear more than an outdoorsman. “Well, you know you’re always welcome around here, Sugar. Just come on back any old time.”

Penny and I walked out of the hangar-garage to our respective cars. The dog barked and capered behind us.
“Samson!” shouted the man. “Get back here!”

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Work Cited
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 1990. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.

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A Father’s Effect on His Son

by Emilio Deherrera-Martinez

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Human beings are born with five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. We use these five senses to become aware of the things around us. These senses are connected to our brain; they are what create the memories that we come to cherish throughout life. Memories are the most important things that any human can hold on to throughout their lives, although some memories hold more importance than others. Family memories tend to hold a lot of importance to me. One memory that holds a huge importance in my mind is a memory that shapes the way I view my childhood, a memory that will forever hold weight over every life changing decision I have and will ever make in my life. I can still remember vividly the sight, smells, and sounds of this tragic moment in my life. My father smoking crystal meth while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom while I watch with my mind lost in the sight of a father I looked up to throwing his life away.

The smells are the easiest sense to pick up from my memories. Reliving the memory in my mind the only smell that I recall is burning sugar on a pan. The smell was sweet, but bitter at the same time, made my taste buds tingle and my mouth began to water like the smell of your favorite meal would. At the same time, it made my nose cringe in disgust. It is a smell that I will never be able to erase from my memory. Smell is one of the strongest senses out of the five, and now anytime I smell something sweet I compare it to the smell from that day trying to find something that can possibly change what I witnessed that horrid day.

The image, the image that continues to follow me everywhere I go. The sight of my father smoking crystal meth, the image of me opening the door and looking at something I never thought would happen. The second I realized what I was looking at everything went into slow motion like in the movies; it looked like those pictures that are focusing on one specific part and blurring out the surroundings. As I stood there and looked my mind fell blank with not one single thought running through my mind, it felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, like everything was out of place and fucked up. Every time that image pops up in my mind all I see is the shape of my father sitting and my mind focusses on the tin foil in his hand, the lighter burning the bottom of the tin foil, and the most mind destroying moment of them all was whatever was on top of the tin foil leaving black burn streaks across the top of the foil. I will forever remember the sight of what I witnessed that day with vivid detail.

The sense that I can still recall but not as easily as the other two senses is the sound. Although I can recall the sounds, they are not what continuously make me think and ponder over what to do next in my life. I can recall the sound of the shower and bathroom sink running, so that way my dad can drowned out any sound he didn’t want me to hear. I can still recall the faint sound of music playing from outside of the house. All the sounds that I can recall have no impact on the memory, it is the visuals and the smells that are lodged in the back of my head and will forever be there. The sounds are background, like the music of an action movie, just to help amplify whatever is going on in the big picture.

My father will forever hold a very important place in my mind and heart, but the man I once knew isn't there anymore. I love him and I always will but witnessing what I did ruined the image I had of my father. The senses that were used in order to make this memory are always on constant play in my mind and I can’t get rid of them. This imprint that my father has left in my mind will forever be there. That’s how it works: parents are the biggest influences on their children and everything they do stays with the children throughout their whole lives. Parents are the most influential key in any kid’s life, which is why it is always important for anyone to realize the mistakes they make in front of their kids. I will forever be affected by my father's choices and I will always hold weight in my heart due to the memories.

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Sigh

by John Gilmore

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Sigh

Click

03:14:03

In a tower
In a pavilion
On a floor
In a room
On a bed
I lie

Alone

The only light
The pulsing ghost grey-green read out
Of some machine crafted by Mephistopheles
As it mutters to itself
In its alien, silent tongue

The only sound
The quiet, liquid gurgling
Of the transparent tube in my nose
As tiny, evil black flecks dance a slow conga
From somewhere deep in my gut
To some unseen see-through bag beneath the bed
My disease?
Little chunks of my soul?
Nevertheless never ending
The tube sucks dry my will to live

My head, my mind deflate
Melt and convert
Three dimensions
Now two
The last to go my eyes
From spheres to circles
To molecules that puddle and commingle
With those of the pale green sheets
And pastel blue absorption pads

My horizons rush away
Farther and farther from my desperate fingers
Like some cheesy TV camera trick

Behind me
Beyond that horizon
My last contact with any human
My last dose

Before me
Beyond all hope
Beyond all possibility
My vitals check

Beside me
Beyond my reach
Next to my ear
The call button
Big and red and shameless
It taunts

God?

Sigh

Click

03:14:04

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Yellow as the Bi-Ethnic Sun

by Tracy Bubb

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Sunflowers and lemons warming in the sunlight. This image opens up our mind’s eye to see a very distinct color, yellow. Yellow according to the Online Etymology Dictionary means “’to shine’ with derivatives denoting ‘green’ and ‘yellow.’” This is appropriate since our bright, life giving sun is considered a yellow star. So, is it nature that makes yellow so culturally important? And why does yellow have various connotations depending on where you live on the planet? For centuries yellow has simply been a color; however, this color’s definition and representation is varied from its basic primary meaning and the emotions the color evokes, to identifying classes of people.

Most people know that when we look at a rainbow in the sky, yellow is the color between orange and green on the prism color spectrum. Most may also know that to make the color yellow for computers and television, the red, green, blue, (RGB) color spectrum is used by mixing red and green light at the right intensity against a black screen; similarly, the human eye also works the same way. Bananas as well as autumn leaves contain carotenoids—a plant pigment that most know reflects the color yellow to the human eye. We see yellow all around us and how we respond to this color is a matter of preference and perception.

Yellow is considered a primary color and is the oldest color used in art. The first yellow pigment to be made into paint and used for art was ochre: “Ochre is thought generally to be red, but in fact is a naturally-occurring yellow mineral pigment, consisting of clay, siliceous materials and the hydrated form of iron oxide known as limonite” (Hirst, “Ochre is”). This color had a wide range of use for art in prehistoric times. This yellow paint could be found inside of caves and burial chamber walls as well as on pottery: “Ochre is the earliest known pigment used by humans to paint our world--perhaps as long ago as 300,000 years” (Hirst, “Ochre is”). Primarily grown in the Mediterranean, saffron is another pigment that has been used for centuries to dye hair, skin, and cloth a very rich yellow color; it’s very expensive to make as it is collected from the dried stigmas of a purple flower known as the crocus (Hirst, “Why is saffron”). Yellow must have been a special color to not only be used first for art, but also for people to spend so much time and energy on processes to create it.

The emotions the color yellow evokes are varied. Yellow speaks on its own declaring caution; for safety reasons we see yellow on signs, curbs, and select vehicles from school buses, taxis, to fire engines. Yellow is the easiest color for the human eye to recognize; on the positive, it is often associated with warmth and cheerfulness, energy, optimism, and creativity. On the negative, this bright vibrant color could cause some people to become anxious. It could cause distractions resulting in a lack of mental focus, and it could represent being sickly, full of envy, or jealousy. Any way we look at the color yellow, it is sure to cause a reaction.

Yellow defines cultures and helps identify classes of people. For the Eastern culture, yellow is considered a highly prized color, while in Western culture, yellow carries a different connotation. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, yellow as a skin color has been “applied to Asiatics since 1787, though the first recorded reference is to Turkish words for inhabitants of India.” To the Eastern traditions, yellow is the color of gold, courage, prominence, nobility, wisdom, and spiritual enlightenment. It is one of the reasons why the Forbidden City in China has a yellow roof, why Buddhist monks wear yellow cloaks, and why most of Eastern culture uses yellow in a lot of their art.

However, yellow has a different meaning in the west. Exclusive to the United States, during slavery and the segregation of the blacks, the term Yellow, as the Online Etymology Dictionary explains, is “a noun in old English meaning ‘light- skinned’ (of blacks) first recorded in 1808.” This meant one was of mixed ethnicity, specifically, African descent by using what they called the “one drop rule”. Alvin Powell, a Harvard University writer, states that “the ‘one-drop rule’ — also known as hypodescent — dates to a 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals.” The “one drop rule” meant if someone was primarily European but had just one drop of inherited African blood, he or she would be considered by society as Yellow. People who were labeled Yellow could take the paper bag test to see if the skin was light enough to enjoy white privileges (Peters). If the Yellow person’s pigment was lighter than the color of the paper bag they could participate.

Common knowledge and indigenous to western culture, to be called yellow was to be labeled a coward. We mostly hear this in our old western movies when referring to a yellow bellied lizard, which means to be scared, afraid, and ready to scurry under the rock from which one came.

Currently amongst much Middle Eastern unrest, the color yellow is taking on a new meaning. According to the TED talk, “Why people of different faiths are painting their places of worship yellow,” led by Nabila Alibhai, “optimism yellow” was the color they were given for their project “Colour in Faith.” The organization is asking terror- stricken communities to paint their places of worship yellow as “a show of solidarity” uniting them “in the name of love.” Whether it is a mosque, a synagogue, a temple, or a church, if it is painted yellow, there is no place for anger there. Alibhai says they chose the color yellow because, as “one imam beautifully said, ’Yellow is the color of the sun. The sun shines on us all equally. It does not discriminate.’” Some of the religious organizations are embracing this opportunity to unite the community, others are afraid that the bright yellow will label them a target for increased violence, while still other religious organizations have failed to respond altogether.

Yellow is more than a basic color, more than what we can see with our eyes. Yellow has been prized for its vibrancy and throughout history has been used to color our world. Contradictory in representation, yellow can mean courage or cowardice depending on where you live.  It is directly linked to the sun, made into paint or dye, used to describe the color of skin or ethnicity, and is now being used to promote peace. So enjoy this bright lively color and all of its various meanings with a bouquet of sunflowers, the sunshine, and a tall cool glass of lemonade.

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Works Cited

Harper, Douglas. “Yellow (Adj.).” Index, 2001,
www.etymonline.com/word/yellow.
Hirst, K. Kris. “Ochre Is the First Pigment Known to Have Been Used to Paint Our World.” ThoughtCo, 15 Apr. 2017,
www.thoughtco.com/ochre-the-oldest-known-natural-pigment-172032.
Hirst, K. Kris. “Why Is Saffron so Darned Expensive? Because People Are Mad about It!” ThoughtCo, 11 July 2016, www.thoughtco.com/saffron-history-and-domestication-170649.
Alvin Powell, Harvard Staff Writer |, et al. “'One-Drop Rule' Persists.” Harvard Gazette, 9 Dec. 2010,,
news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/one-drop-rule-persists/.
Peters, Bill. “Brown+Paper+Bag+Test.” Urban Dictionary, 19 Aug. 2006,,
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brown%2Bpaper%2Bbag%2Btest
Alibhai, Nabila. “Why people of different faiths are painting their places of worship yellow.” TEDGlobal 2017, Aug. 2017, www.ted.com/talks/nabila_alibhai_why_people_of_different_faiths_are_painting_their_houses_of_worship_yellow

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