Daily Instructions

Twenty-One

America does not trust its young with anything other than controlling interest in the entertainment industry. You were young once. You remember all the rules. At sixteen there is the possibility of driving and crashing your father’s sports utility vehicle. At eighteen you can leave the country, take up arms against a people who are neither foe nor friend. You can kill someone for reasons that do not concern you. But it is not until you are twenty-one that you can legally purchase alcohol. You have been drinking since you were twelve, but you take pleasure in this new ability to do so publicly and legally. This is when the problems begin, or rather, when you stop moving toward anything. You are in fact done. There are other things to look forward to. The ability to rent a car at twenty-five. Loss of bone marrow density and greater risk of fractures after thirty. The increased probability at thirty-five that your baby will be born with down syndrome. Most of prognostications for women involve fertility. For men there is baldness, erectile dysfunction. But at twenty one there is alcohol and the ability to purchase a handgun. You could always gamble or work as a prostitute in the State of Nevada. That is if you need something else to look forward to.


Lesson Twenty-Three

Prairie voles live in the central grasslands. Highly social mammals, they have become the subjects of choice for scientists interested in the biological sources of monogamous pair bonding. This is not a popular activity. Only three percent of mammals engage in social monogamy. Voles are divided on the subject. The male meadow vole does not express the paternal devotion shown by his cousin of the prairie. This causes much family strife. The prairie vole has long repeating strips of DNA dangling like party streamers above a gene linked to vasopressin. This is the best explanation they have for the prairie vole’s uncommon dedication to his mate and his young. Vasopressin is released when a body is low on water, causing the kidneys to hold onto everything it has, constricting its volume. It is hard to imagine this as pleasurable, but monogamy does not always feel good. The meadow vole lives in moist open areas and will abandon his mate, his newborn litter for the dark call of night. But if he is injected with vasopressin, he will return home quickly, the nib of his tail tucked between his stubby legs.

Researchers have identified three neural chemicals associated with monogamy. Oxytocin is a hormone released after orgasm in both sexes and in women during childbirth. If you rub your nipples you may also trigger a rush of. Vasopressin is pressure and its absence. This too makes monogamy possible. Dopamine is that rush of excitement, the nexus of pleasure and repeat performance.

When we love we are fingering this microscopic string. Another mammalian experiment of. If the DNA snippets dangle just above, we are faithful. If the vasopressin is in short supply, or the oxytocin is depleted, we are more likely to wrap ourselves up in the nearest cotton sheet and waddle to the refrigerator for a late night snack. Before departing, we will be sure to empty our pockets of everything that was sudden or elating. The night is its own intoxicant. There is a whole world yet to explore.

More Lessons in

Lesson Eighteen

Some confuse anthropology with evolutionary psychology. You know better. Homo sapiens are neither highly developed nor capable of abstract reasoning. They are in fact rather redundant. You should know, you keep repeating yourself over and over. Just last week you made the same mistake that got you into this whole mess in the first place. But it takes three to make a pattern. Until then you can pretend there were nuanced differences between the two. You can describe your life as curiously ironic. But you’ll fuck up again. Then you’ll be forced to blame it all on your unconscious. Freud would say you need specialized assistance to analyze the random associations, dreams, verbal slips. Only in this way, will you have access to the sentient force of your own will. But there are always other techniques. Crack your skull and burrow your fingers in the cerebral cortex. Somewhere in there is the source of the problem. Pluck the virulent weed.


Lesson Nineteen

Eventually your own sorrow will be eclipsed by the trauma of another. You may be tempted to conflate your situations. But this would be a mistake. Accuracy is crucial. You abandoned your family. His boyfriend died in a hospital bed. You can barely stand to sit with him, to witness the vacancy. Only his fingers move, involuntarily tapping SOS messages into the kitchen rag he holds as a child would a blanket, a doll, someone else’s hand. It is not the sound of his sobbing, though it is terrible, or the image of him, a forty eight year old man wretched and suddenly alone. It is the gravity of your choices. He chose tough love and his lover died. You chose anything other than what you had. Now you have nothing. Eyes swollen red he warns, be careful, don’t ever do anything you will regret. But you both have. What else is there to say?