My mom fussed at me yesterday and this time I fussed right back.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mom loves me and I hope to goodness she knows I love her. 

Nevertheless, we disagreed disagreeably yesterday.

My friend Lucky says the only good partner is a dead partner.

I think that’s what Mom and I fussed about: we do business together, but it gets mixed up in our familial relationship and vice versa.

I don’t like fussing with Mom (I don’t think she likes fussing with me) and most of the time, I just swallow hard and take it.  After all, she’s my mother and we do that 10 Commandments thing and honor our forebears.  It’s what a good Southern boy does.

All of which is to get to the topic partially covered the other day when I wrote about the end of the world.

I have some very romantic notions that I hold dear that have deep roots in our society but which cannot, upon close examination, be defended intellectually.  Those notions include the ideas of honor, duty, the whole trope about passion and being a personal hero.

It’s that “knight in shining armor” thing.

Intellectually, I’m a situational ethics kinda guy.  A relativist.  A humanist.

Perhaps because I’m emotionally stunted, I retain lots of childhood notions that I picked up reading Robert Louis Stephenson and Rudyard Kipling. 

I believe that there are times that simply because you CAN do something to help another, you have the DUTY to perform the act.

I cannot defend that proposition, but I’m intent on living it.

I believe we owe respect to our elders just for the fact of their longevity — they have experience which may make them “right”, at least from their perspective, that we perhaps cannot see because our perspective isn’t as broad.  This is a big change for me from the 60s, when I believed you couldn’t trust anyone over 30. 

I believe in the truth.  There is a radical impossibility that there is such a thing as The Truth.  Yet, I remain in a state of fidelity to telling and seeing and seeking it.

I believe in true love.  I’ve looked for it all my life and, yet, intellectually, I’m quite sure such a thing does not exist, at least not in the romantic state I imagine and that we see portrayed in films and on television and in books.

“We must act as if there is a God despite the radical impossibility there ever was one,” Sartre wrote. Yet, I believe in a supreme power in the universe, albeit not one with a long beard as seen on the ceiling of the Vatican (and at Flip’s, oddly enough.  Why would Adam have a belly button?).

I’d like to continue this, but apparently I’m required to play fetch right now.

TTFN