Following is a letter that my sister Duska wrote me from Angleton, Texas, back when I was a 15 year old heavy metal fan in Tulare, California. I doubt that I had become a Rush fanatic yet. This was during my rebellion against Top 40 Ad Nauseam, just before Moving Pictures was released. There is an implication that I liked the band KISS in this letter. My response to the allegation is as follows: No FREAKIN Way!!

Duska and Tim (and daughter Alanna) had just got their precious stork delivery, Nicki, only seven weeks before.

2/3/81

Dear Danny,

Got your letter today, so I better write back
First tell Dad, Mom & everybody, that Alanna was delighted with the books and tape. She is using “The Magic Garden” for a book Report at school.
Guess I’ll switch to a pen. And the baby book is Really nice.
I am proud of all your A’s Keep it up!!
I love your list of bands.
I don’t know about our favorites but I’ll make you a semi-list-
of the bands whose songs we do (By the way I’ve started to sing again - I mean I’m practicing with the band)

ANYWAY THE LIST —–
AC/DC - “You Shook Me” “Highway to H—” (Glen Sings)
Judas Priest - Living After Midnight I Sing
Pat Benetar - “Hell is for Children” “You’e out of Touch” (Me)
Blondie - “One Way or Another” (Me)
Ted Nugent - “Storm Troopers”, “Cat Scratch Fever” (Tim sings)
ZZ Top - “Francene” (Tim) “Automobile” (Tim)
Black Sabbath - “Neon Knights” (Me)
Sue Saad & the Next - “Prisoner” Me

Well that is part of our list. We listen to almost all the bands you mentioned - and have lots of the albums - EXCEPT KISS - Don’t care for them much. But before our last bass player quit we did “Detroit Rock City” and “I Was Made For Loving You”
Tim is a big RUSH fan.
The[y] are trying to make me one of the only “Heavy Metal Chick Singers” around. It is hard on the old throat.
I like to sing “blues” and I’m trying to work more in.
Don’t worry about not having a cool guitar. Everybody starts somewhere.
Too bad you’re not here so Tim could give you lessons. He’s good.

If you don’t let mom read this tell her Nicki is fine. And her name is spelled Nichole. Easy to mispell.
I got the “CASE” of vitamins. MY GOODNESS!!! I’ll become addicted. I smell like Vitamin B!!
We are going to get GOOD pictures of Nicki taken tomarrow. She [is] so cute, talks and slobbers all the time. And she only messes her pants when we go somewhere - (Doesn’t want to stink up the house)
Alanna is fine too.
Got to go now.

Love,
Duska

P.S. What’s Allen’s address?

Georgie

This is a continuation of a thread on dogs.

Zoroastrian funerary rituals appear to indicate that ancient Iranians believed that dogs had a unique power to discern whether the life had departed from a body.

What follows next is known as the dog-sight (sagdid) ceremony. A dog, generally a “four-eyed” dog (a dog with two eye-like spots just above the eyes), is presented so that it gazes at the corpse. Although various reasons are assigned to this ceremony, the purpose in ancient times was to ascertain whether or not life was altogether extinct.

Solomon Alexander Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith

It may be due to this high regard for the perceptiveness of dogs, and not merely the loyalty and utility of dogs, that lead ancient Iranians to treat the corpses of dogs with the same care that they treated human corpses.

Not only did ancient Iranians believe that dogs could alone tell whether a human was truly deceased, they also believed that dogs guarded the bridge to heaven. They may have even believed that these dogs guided souls across that bridge into heaven.

In line with this, dog breeding is a religious matter in Zoroastrianism, and canine pregnancy is treated quite seriously:

It lies with the faithful to look in the same way after every pregnant female, either two-footed or four-footed, two-footed woman or four-footed bitch.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

The Vendidad establishes that people have a moral obligation to care for pregnant strays and the pups of strays. The book lays out—in detail—how to determine who is responsible for a pregnant stray. And upon whomever the responsibility lies, negligence is murder:

If he shall not support her, so that the whelps come to grief, for want of proper support, he shall pay for it the penalty for wilful murder.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Rough treatment of pregnant dogs is a punishable offense:

It is the third of these sins when a man smites a bitch big with young or affrights her by running after her, or shouting or clapping with the hands; If the bitch fall into a hole, or a well, or a precipice, or a river, or a canal, she may come to grief thereby; if she come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu (deserving of two hundred strokes or a proportional fine).

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Similar penalties are established for abuse of dogs in general:

It is the second of these sins when a man gives bones too hard or food too hot to a shepherd’s dog or to a house-dog; If the bones stick in the dog’s teeth or stop in his throat; or if the food too hot burn his mouth or his tongue, he may come to grief thereby; if he come to grief thereby, the man who has done the deed becomes a Peshotanu. He who gives too hot food to a dog so as to burn his throat is margarzan (guilty of death); he who gives bones to a dog so as to tear his throat is margarzan.

Vendidad, Fargard 15

Unfortunately, the attitude toward dogs in modern Iran is quite the opposite.

Another means of distressing Zoroastrians was to torment dogs. Primitive Islam knew nothing of the now pervasive Muslim hostility to the dog as an unclean animal, and this, it seems, was deliberately fostered in Iran because of the remarkable Zoroastrian respect for dogs.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians, pg. 158

Darkness swallows the East Hills almost utterly—even today, on the edge of the mammoth agri-industrial complex of the Great Valley. The startling exception to the darkness and silence is that interstate artery—I5—that seems, to a bystander or a pedestrian, to be a channel of rockets, roaring and flashing in two opposing streams, utterly enclosed in the black silence of space. Sometimes the streams will vanish. The thunderous pulses echo between one’s ears, while the void closes in. And just as the echoes are almost swept from the mind, the lights appear, and close behind, the nerve-shattering thunder.

One rocket pilot floated through the darkness, bathing in the green glow of the control panel. He reached down to his right and lifted a stainless steel thermos, and watched lights approach along the opposite stream. He reached again to the right, pressed a button, and suddenly a chattering of voices filled the chamber. Coast to Coast. Art Bell. Unidentified flying objects. Alien abductions. White light beamed into the chamber from the left, and a roar from the outside overcame the chatter, as the thunder and light rushed past. The red glow of tail lights flooded the cockpit, as the chatter resumed its dominance of the chamber.

He glanced toward the east, and noticed the sky had changed from black to midnight blue, just enough to silhouette the mountains. Ignition, he half-mumbled and half-thought. He remembered the tale the old cowboy had related on that charmed evening by the campfire.

continued …

The fire burned down from heaven upon the vast, white wastes. When stone burns, it is like burning iron: it becomes a red and yellow liquid. So it was with the white wastes. They liquefied in the sun, but their lava was blue; a deep, absorbent blue. It sucked in the fire of the sun, and the fire burned through it, washing through the blue lava in warm currents of blue flame, liquefying more and more of the frozen wastes. This it did until the entire earth was awash in the blue lava, with hot spots spattering and raining the lava onto the land, sometimes cooling and hardening—sometimes streaming down landscapes back to the blue lava sea, or pooling up into seas on the land.

A warm, Hawaiian breeze blew across the surface of the great fog.

Deep under that placid lake surface, at the bottom of the fishless, stagnant white murk, Mehrzad’s child-form lay sleeping, dreaming of koi fingerlings, slowly maturing into their reds, oranges, and blacks—flowing through ponds like flames of water.

The rain pattered and pattered on the pond surface, echoing the pattering on the roof over his head. The rain pattered and pattered on the streets, and the leaves of trees. It pattered on the canals, though the canals were already full. It puddled up around the corners of baseball diamonds, along the trails that cut through vacant lots, and randomly in supermarket parking lots. It puddled against curbs, and then it puddled against storm drains. It pressed against cellar windows, and trickled around the panes. Rivulets crept through the dusty earth in the crawlspace.

A glass fell over onto its table, and the water spilled out in all directions, covering every inch of the table, as though it were searching out every dry spot to consume.

In the mountains, the rain pattered the grassy slopes, the chaparral, the forests, and the exposed stone. Then it pattered the snow, breaking it up, pulverizing it—bit by bit, and liquefying it. The snows flowed into the rivers, over the spillways, through the canals, and over the levees.

And what were once fish ponds were suddenly fishing holes in a broad, shallow river. The koi arose from their sleep in the bottoms, following the flood into the resurrected lake.

Mehrzad sprang up from his dreams, and lept out of bed to look out his bedroom window. He turned, ran out into the hall, across the back porch, and down the back steps into the flood. He slogged through the dark water, paused, turned back, and could only see the glare of the floodlight on the surface. He turned back ahead and slogged on toward the pond. He came to the gate, opened it against the current, and saw a gold flash through the water at his side. He turned around, then turned back through the open gate, and gazed across the black, rippling surface.

Nevada Fall, Merced River

Throughout the lowlands singers sing
of your deep, feminine soul;
How reclining, you roll down your bed
amidst your veils and embankments;
They marvel at your fluent, accommodating ways,
how you slip through the world,
flowing around every obstacle,
rounding every edge, and
polishing every turn.

You compel us, it is true, down to where you lie.
Your eyes are limpid pools—it is true what they say,
and it is rumored far and wide that you mirror
the soul.

But the footing is treacherous around you. Your tender loam
gives way beneath our fingers and toes,
but your glistening bones are more hazard still.

It is true what men say, but I know you better yet.
I know you,
murderer.

The bones of old trees and bush
lie tangled in your arms.
I see your work.

Yesterday you might have been
merely a pool, and another, and another;
hung upon a sparkling, trickling necklace
virtually breathless and still
patient, accommodating
womb of a myriad, humming
vampires;
Algae multiplying,
colonizing your thickening blood.
The next day, you might be only lichen and bone.
Dry, white, crumbling bone, anchored deep within the earth—
or deeper still.
But now—
Now!

You gallop across mountains and vandalize
the sleepy canyons, tearing away the flesh and
leaving more bone drying in the sun,
your locomotive snarl,
your hissing, boulder-cracking roar!
Undulating waves, rolling and smacking,
sucking in air, mist storms exhaling!

Water the tyrant.
Water the destroyer—butcher, leveler,
Fury: skull-smashing and bone-snapping—sinew twisting;
Too murderously quick for suffocation; utterly

ruinous and
Beautiful kiss me.

This is a continuation of the What’s Wrong With Islám thread. I’m not satisfied with where I left it.

I have more than once voiced the opinion that Islám can only move forward by disposing of its idols. This, I believe, can be done by Muslims without forfeiting their religious heritage. They must simply recognize that no aspect of Islám is unchangeable, perfect, immaculate, or infallible. This recognition can be achieved within the context of Islamic belief: one need only recognize passages in the Qur’án that assert that:

• No one fully understands the Qur’án but God.
• The face of God is in everything.
• Muhammad was only a man, with flaws like any other.

If that’s not enough, there’s the generally agreed-upon point that the Qur’án cannot be understood fully without reference to less immaculate source materials such as Hadith and histories.

Based upon this, Islám can be permitted to adapt and grow, and not merely continue as a contest between moderates and fundamentalists. If Islám could be inspired by the idea that no man has a monopoly on truth while retaining its heritage of faith, it could be permitted to rise above its heritage of violence and persecution.

The problem I see with this vision is that, when I read the Qur’án, I see frequent reminders of what made Islám so idolatrous. The Qur’án is saturated with judgmental statements that draw a vast gap between believers and unbelievers. Unbelievers will burn in Hell eternally, and it’s nobody’s fault but their own. This may not mean that Muslims are permitted to mistreat infidels, but it does establish a broad moral distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is not so easy to simply see Islám as iconoclasm, because Islám is all about submission to a specific idol. Its iconoclasm is not fundamental; it is derivative. Muslims, taken as a group, never smashed idols for the sake of some lofty unitarian ideal; rather, they smashed idols for the benefit of their own idols (Alláh, Muhammad, the Qurán, etc.).

We might be able to imagine an Islám that transcends its own idolatrous legacy, but I fear that Islám would need to do more than admit the fallibility of the Qur’án; it would need to renounce the tribalistic, sectarian, violent, judgmental, and idolatrous aspects of the Qur’án. Given this, would I be right to encourage Muslims to follow such a path, when it would be more honest of me to encourage them to simply abandon the superstitions of the past and think for themselves?

I would like to see a day when the ultimate expression of Islamic conviction would be the ritual burning of a single Qur’án. That wouldn’t prevent religious violence or gender discrimination, but it might send a clear message that Islám might just be capable of being self-critical. It would be a start—but I don’t see even that happening. Maybe some minority group of Muslims might come to the fore and give us hope by committing such a criminally noble act. They would be doing so at their own peril, of course.

phone (fon) Informal—n. A telephone.
—v. phoned, phoning. To call or transmit by
telephone.

Please accept my apology

The Kiss, by Marc Demoulin

I’m sure it’s nothing there’s just a
minor misalignment between the words
and their intention.

Surely it’s a simple matter of definition.

Rest assured, no sooner had she spoken it was written,
and mapped to every match in Webster’s latest
collegiate edition.

Here be where the visitors
seek advisement in these affairs,
among the natives who—
having heard a word more often—
might be a little more familiar
with words whose sounds are similar,
having only sound in common.

Taking a moment to process some minutia of Hockett Trail history …

This early account of the rerouting of a short segment of the Hockett Trail appears to corroborate my understanding that the Hockett Trail followed the same route that Horseshoe Meadows Road follows today, only with shorter switchbacks:

From Round Valley down to where it leaves the Little Cottonwood the old Hockett Trail is almost untraveled. The shorter route now in use leaves the valley at the lower end, drops over the Big Cottonwood, descends this past an old sawmill, and crosses to the Little Cottonwood, which it reaches about fifty yards below where it rejoins the old trail, at the foot of the Devil’s Ladder.

E. B. C., Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. III., No. 2, May 1990

For anyone who’s driven Horseshoe Meadows Road, names like “Devil’s Ladder” should come as no surprise. I’m guessing that this Devil’s Ladder is the name that was given to the eastbound ascent out of the Cottonwood Creek watershed to what is now called “Walt’s Point”, atop the grand descent down “Hockett Hill.”

The following demonstrates that, contrary to what appears to be a common understanding, the Hockett Trail did not cross the Great Western Divide at Coyote Pass:

Another trail in recent use is between Mineral King and the Big Kern, via Coyote (or Quinn’s ) Pass. I think they are the same. From the east it starts at the soda spring and keeps north of Coyote Creek up to the meadows. From the west it leaves the Hockett Trail, perhaps two miles south of Farewell Gap, and is indicated by a signboard—”Poison Meadow Trail.” According to the signs, the “Hockett Trail” leads to Mineral King, and the trail to Hockett Meadows is the “Hockett Meadow Trail.”

E. B. C., Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. III., No. 2, May 1990

It may presently be one of the most God-forsaken places on our planet. The Kokcha River region of Afghanistan is good for little more than opium farming and arms smuggling today, though it was once one of the great corridors between the ancient worlds of India and Iran, long before Darius and the Persian Empire.

A lapis lazuli pack train above the River Kokcha.

As early as five thousand years ago, the Pharaohs of Egypt traded for the precious, bespangled lapis lazuli that is still mined from the mountains that are still being excavated by the River Kokcha.

It is the River Kokcha that defines, more than any other stream, the natural boundary between the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. Because of this strategic significance of the river, it must have competed with Khyber Pass for traffic between ancient India and Bactria. This is corroborated by Franz Grenet, who draws clues from the Avesta that indicate that the River Kokcha may have been the major route between Bactria and India at one time. The Avestan pattern Ragha-Chakhra-Varena-Hapta Hendu appears to draw a course from the Panj (Oxus) to India by way of Chitral, Pakistan.

Grenet also suggests that the prophet Zoroaster may have been born and raised at a bend on this river. Alexander the Great would later found his city Alexandria on the Oxus at the mouth of the Kokcha, after he crossed into Bactria from India, likely by way of Dorah Pass, at the headwaters of the very same river, at the junction of the Hindu Kush and the Pamir massif, the “Roof of the World.”

Long after Zarathustra and Alexander, Marco Polo claimed to have traveled along this same river, seeing the fabled lapis lazuli mines, on his way to China:

From Hormuz to Kerman, passing Herat, Balkh, they arrived Badakhshan, where Marco Polo convalesced from an illness and stayed there for a year. On the move again, they found themselves on “the highest place in the world, the Pamirs”, with its name appeared in the history for the first time.

Marco Polo and His Travels

Even today, the majority of Afghans are Iranians. The Tajiks, who speak Persian, are about as Iranian as anybody—”Tajik” is just another word for “Iranian”. Though Uzbeks have ruled and settled the area from time to time, the Kokcha River region is primarily Tajik country. The land immediately across the passes at that boundary between the Pamir and Hindu Kush is called Kafiristan, which may translate, curiously enough, to “Land of the Infidels”. This is a subject of some dispute. It would seem to be apropos, given the great religious divides that must have existed between East and West back into the depths of human prehistory, but perhaps more important than the divisive aspect of these geo-religious differences might be the the enlightening aspect of cultural cross-pollination between early Hindus, Zoroastrians, Greeks, and Buddhists over so many centuries.

Here are several of my favorite passages from Bahá’u'lláh’s “Most Holy Book.” I think these passages open a window into the future of Bahá’í fashion.

it is not seemly to let the hair pass beyond the limit of the ears. Thus hath it been decreed by Him Who is the Lord of all worlds.

please read this paragraph. I know your eyes want to gaze at the photo below, but please resist that temptation.

I imagine that Bahá’í hippies will not have long hair like the Founding Fathers of the Bahá’í Faith, or rather if they do, they might use those aboriginal-style ear lobe inserts to extend their ears as far as they desire to grow their hair.

The Look of Rock's Future

… or maybe those long-in-the-back new wave hairdos from the ’80s will be permissible. I remember when the guys in Rush all had their hair cut for Grace Under Pressure. I was so impressed by their kosher fashion that I sent them a copy of The Promise of World Peace! That was a little embarrassing, them looking so extremely anti-homophobic and me being such a pawn, but it hardly diminishes the wisdom of keeping one’s ears clear of overgrowth.

… I mean, unless you’ve got Geddy Lee’s ears. Yikes.

Here’s another window into the future:

God hath decreed, in token of His mercy unto His creatures, that semen is not unclean. Yield thanks unto Him with joy and radiance …

I think the inner significance of this is that Bahá’í Rastafarians of the future might glue their modest dreadlocks with semen, or perhaps when future Bahá’ís need a little mousse, they can come by it in an environmentally responsible manner.

I’m talking about hair mousse, of course.

Finally, here’s one the strikes close to home for yours truly:

Shave not your heads; God hath adorned them with hair, and in this there are signs from the Lord of creation to those who reflect upon the requirements of nature. He, verily, is the God of strength and wisdom.

Geeze. Did he really need to use the word reflect?

Observe that the Lizard Man does not shave his head.

Unfortunately, men of the future will not be able to conceal their bald spots by shaving their heads, so I suppose bald guys will cease reproducing and will go extinct.

It’s a little sad, but all for the betterment of the species, I guess.