I love the way our human minds work by association. I was trying hard yesterday, for some reason I don’t recall, to recollect the name of a certain Sixties rock band from San Francisco. Jefferson Airplane? No, that wasn’t it. Not that famous. Not the Grateful Dead either. Something else, not so well known.
I was drawing blanks. The word “silverfish” popped into my head; we have some in our building and I hate them, although they’re not particularly bothersome. “Silverfish” led to “Freddie Mercury.” I was getting closer. Suddenly, there it was: Quicksilver Messenger Service!
There’s no particular meaning here, I think, except that it’s interesting how evolution has given us that ability to hop across the linguistic and conceptual pond, stone by stone. Then my mind made the leap back to silverfish. I don’t see them a lot, but when I do, I kill them, which doesn’t make me feel good. I always tell the silverfish, telepathically, “Look, I don’t want to kill you. But if I see you in my home, I will try to kill you, and 99% of the time I will be successful. So please stay away.” On the few occasions I fail, it’s because those damned little pests are really fast: they practically vanish while you’re looking at them. I once read that silverfish were “sly, secretive and sneaky” and that’s a pretty good description.
When I told my Tibetan Buddhist friend that I killed silverfish, he frowned. “Oh, no, you must not do that,” he admonished. “It’s wrong to kill anything.” I thought about that, and the next day, I saw him again. “Do you eat meat?” I asked. He did. “You criticized me yesterday for killing silverfish, and yet someone had to kill the animal you ate in your hamburger.” He replied with something along the lines that it was all right to kill big animals, like a steer, because they reproduced in small numbers, but if you kill an insect, which reproduces in, I don’t know, the thousands, you’re killing that many future lives.
That didn’t sound very convincing to me. I thought my Buddhist friend was being a bit sophistic, and I told him so. I don’t recall what he said. At any rate, my lifelong belief that Tibetan Buddhists somehow possess the secret of life was further undermined. They’re no wiser than the rest of us, and just as prone to silliness.
Well, you might have noticed today’s post has nothing to do with Oakland or politics. I like to write about those things, but sometimes, I just can’t come up with a suitable premise. I don’t want to force the issue, so I find other things to write about, as I did the other week when I reminisced about being a Yankees fan back in the day in The Bronx.
By the way, we were taught in Public School 35, in The Bronx when I was a kid, that the correct name of our borough was “The Bronx,” not “the Bronx” or, much less, just plain “Bronx.” Our teacher explained that the area of New York City called The Bronx had been settled in the 1600s by a Dutchman, Jonas Bronck, so when people from further south—from Manhattan, or Nieuw Amsterdam—would visit his farm, they would say they were going up to “the Bronck’s” place. That turned into The Bronx. The borough is actually the only part of New York City connected to the U.S. mainland; the other four boroughs (Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan) are all themselves islands, or part of islands. I can’t say whether or not that fact contributed to a certain “Bronx” state of mind we had. Certainly we were aware that, if you went far enough north, you’d end up in places like Yonkers and New Rochelle, which were the Westchester suburbs, and couldn’t have been more different from The Bronx. In fact, we Bronxites took a certain pride in being different. We felt rather like scruffy cousins of glamorous, exciting Manhattan, or the poor relatives of the Westchester burbs. We weren’t the same as Brooklyn or Queens (or Staten Island, which to this day doesn’t seem like a real part of New York City), but we were The Bronx: on the underprivileged side, not at all glamorous, slightly run-down, but nonetheless full of creativity, gusto and pride. Sort of like Oaklanders have always felt when compared to San Francisco. Some people have called Oakland the Brooklyn of the Bay Area, which is okay, but you could also say it’s The Bronx of the Bay Area, and you’d be entirely correct.