Toltec and How My Brother Shot Me Twice

I.

Looking at Toltec art, you see a cheerful, yet somber, brightness and darkness. It is emblematic of the schizoid attitude.

There is a debate about what anthropologists can offer--that their guesses about how people 'were' in the past can't overcome anachronism. Yet artwork and artifacts really don't need overcoming. The reaction to the artwork of these lost people is all that counts.

What is striking is that what today we call a "severe mental illness" was the very world view of some peoples. It is quite insidious because it is one thing to fight a war with a culture and kill it off, and another to diagnose a culture as "ill." Hence in this perspective, psychology, for some, represents a clinical murder of a way of seeing the world. For those from the dominant culture, of course, psychology is an aspect of the culture, and strengthens the culture and its world view. But cultures have always been at war. Perhaps they were always fleeing and attacking, rarely getting along.

The dominant class has performed admirably: there is only on form of happiness; let the marginalia be called mental illness.

II.

Riding home from a hill workout, I stopped by a truck. $1000. The old man invited me to his porch and I leaned the bike on the wall and we started her up. "Give her a test drive. I've got your bike." It drove fine.

The main issue was passing inspection and we discussed strategies. He invited me in to see his pistols and holsters. One of his Chihuahuas sat on my lap. He has a pistol belt buckle that held a tiny 22 revolver. One of the screws on his laser sight was stripped and was taking a trip to Kyle to have it fixed.

"My wife passed away in June, and I don't need two trucks and a car. I also have an RV, a 16-footer, and I just sold my other RV to my neighbor. I don't need all that."

We walked down the street and he showed his neighbor's driveway and the RV he had just sold. We talked more about guns. "I'm gonna show you what I'm really into." He connected a power chord to a light, and unlocked his workshop. "Each one of these is a dye for a different caliber." There were about 30 dyes. "That's for polishing the brass. I use walnut husk powder and I let the machine work for 2-4 hours depending on the condition of the brass."

There was an electronic scale for the gunpowder, a bench for the dye press, and boxes and boxes of shells ad bullets, and jars upon jars of gunpowder in its various manifestations.

It was beastly hot inside the workshop, which he doesn't use in the summer. "You die in the heat," he said, "plus you can't have on a fan while your working with the gunpowder."

We sat on the porch and the fan was refreshing after the hot workshop.  "I've got two bullets in my leg. My brother shot me twice."

"Your brother shot you?"

"By accident, of course. First time he was going under a fence and I had come out first. When he ducked in, he shot me in the calf, right here. But our mother would take away our rifles if she found out, so he took out his pocket knife to fish out the bullet. But that only made it worse so now we were forced to go to the doctor, but mother didn't take away the rifle, as I had suffered enough.

The second time the shotgun was laying across my belly. My brother saw a bird and as he grabbed the shotgun it blew off my coat and shirt and I was certain I was a mess of guts and bound to die. But I peeled away the clothes and nothing, not a shot."