We aren’t curing cancer here

(

So, Mr. Yang, how do you negotiate with the Yins in yer life?

Your sig others?

What of sensibility?

What of responsibilities?

How do you bring these worlds together?

)

We do it so that when we watch Lonesome Dove

we don’t have to wish

we don’t have to wonder

we can be thought of as more than clerks, jerks, middle-management.

When the behavior is not sanctioned by national need?

not going Infantry?

not jumping out of airplanes at Airborne School?

not flying blind in one’s Hummer in the lights-out Mojave desert,

not relying only on memory and sense of space to avoid the tank traps?

When the behavior is not a sacrifice for a cause bigger than one’s self?

self-absorption

self-centricity

immaturity

denial of one’s resp’y?

What of death in this?

abandon my daughter at age 14

force my parents to bury a child

force care-taking on others?

We aren’t curing cancer here.

This is no moonshot.