Francis Meyrick

A Blip on the Radar

Part 38 B: The Fisherman’s Legacy

I posted a link to what turned out to be only the first part of this story on Facebook. I belong to the two groups, “Tuna Pilots” and “Tuna Spotter Pilots”, and I usually post a link to any new story there. I also maintain a Facebook page called www.tunaboathelicopters.org and there too I have a small but steady inflow of oddballs and derelicts, who insist on “liking” that page.
142 so far. There obviously exist a handful of mental and emotional retards out there in Cyberspace, who for some peculiar reason known only to their own mis-wired synapses, seem to read my blogs. It’s a puzzle to me, and I try not to take them or myself very seriously. But then I am helped in that regard, because I am a firm believer in the Fundamental Absurdity of Man. His logic, his goals, his aims, his morality (or not), his ethics (or not), his compassion (rarely), and his fundamental decency (ha-ha) seem to me to leave a lot to be desired. Lest that sound too harsh, I hasten to add that I have encountered some really great and humane bodies, especially the buxom female ones, some of whom unselfishly lent me a hand (and other parts, perhaps) to jolly me along when things were just not too hot. Black and gloomy, even. They were kind to me, for no hope of personal gain. They were just like that. Nice. Feeling. Good people. I thank you, where ever you now are. (Married, I imagine, with too many kids, a big mortgage, an overdraft, and hemorrhoids.)

But my most common experience of occasionally sliding down the Plug Hole of Daily Life was that it was amazing how many people came along and tried to hasten my descent. It seems to me that the joy of watching your fellow Man coming a painful cropper, right on his butt, is generally much preferred by the masses than the spectacle of your Beloved Brother succeeding and doing well. Even the cheers and the applause at your occasional successes, seem too often to be laced with the poison of the Green Eyed variety, and I learned to rarely if ever completely turn my back.
Put it another way, if an intelligent, reliably enlightened, cheerful, emotional, feeling form of Life was finally to arrive on Planet Earth, it would have to be an Alien from Outer Space. And I wonder how he (or she) (or it) would feel about the attractiveness and charm of the Human Species. We really do some stupid and wicked stuff to each other.

The point of this pre-amble is that one of my Cyber buddies is a gentleman named Timothy. Underneath my posting on September 25th, on Tuna Spotter helicopter Pilot, alerting my depraved mindset readers to my latest grammatical obscenity, he posted this comment:

” Great story, Moggy. I assume you have no other info about this? Or whatever happened?”

Indeed. I started writing a short reply underneath his, which morphed into a long reply, which morphed into a VERY long reply, which in turn started to resemble a horror sequel to “War and Peace”. With mucho War, and poco, poco peace. So then I philosophically said to myself : “Oh, bugger!” and deleted my reply and just wrote “Part 2” of “The Missing Fisherman”.
So, it’s all your fault, Timothy Trout.

The question he asks… is the right question. What happened to the Missing Fisherman?
Answer: I don’t know. I never heard anything more. That’s short and sweet. Amen.
But I’m intrigued you even asked the question. You see, I’ve asked myself that question for eighteen years. The issue has crossed the dimly lit threshold of my consciousness, surprisingly perhaps, multiple times. I even wrote a story about it. If you’re reading this, you probably read it. Part A.

If you go back to the image I used to illustrate part A, you will see a mathematical formula.
Compassion = “What if that were me? (Holy crap) (poor fellow!) (what can I do to help?)“
divided by
“I’m glad that wasn’t me (oh, well, tough titty, too bad, how sad) “.

The numerical value of this equation could be represented by a factor of 1.0 where a person was (human) averagely compassionate ( top line) and (human) averagely coldly sanguine. ( bottom line).
If you divide the two values, you get 1.0 divided by 1.0 which gives:
A compassion factor score of 1.0 Our average Homo “Sapiens” (?)
If you are very compassionate, genuinely so, say a value of 5.0, and only mildly cynical and coldly sanguine, say a value of 0.5, then the equation works out like this: 5.0 divided by 0.5 =
a compassion factor score of 10.
On the other hand, if you are pretty cold blooded, underneath a convenient external veneer of compassion, and if you really don’t stop much to worry about anything except your own goals and gains, then maybe your above-line value is 0.4 (low) and your below line value is more like 20.0.
Our formula works out this way: 0.4 divided by 20.0 gives:
a compassion factor score of 0.02
(Which basically translates into the all too common “F@#k ’em. I’m all right.”)

But what if you are a truly enlightened Alien? Where then would rank your Compassion Factor Score? What if you have lived twenty three thousand earth years already, (just a young pup Alien), you have spent your entire young idealistic Alien Life studying the Universe? And what if you have traveled around the Universe, and hold the equivalent of every Doctor’s Degree and every Science Degree known to Man? And then some? Where then would your Compassion Factor Score be? Ten thousand? A million?

And what if you had first arrived in a stable orbit around our planet some five thousand years ago? Enchanted and delighted with earth’s Blue oceans, and the teeming life, and the mellow temperature range, and the awesome mountain ranges, the lush forests, and the emerging primitive tribes?

And what if you then had departed, on a mission to Orion, making a mental note to hop back a while later to plot the progress? Because you were curious about those early hominids, those primitive subsistence hunters?
Organizing even then into more complex societies?

And what if you turned up, full of expectation, eagerly looking forward to once again seeing that beautiful, enchanting, yet fragile Biosphere that you had so much enjoyed a mere five thousand years ago?
What if you turned up… tomorrow?

What would you think? As you tuned into the myriad television stations, and the Internet, and downloaded the images and the commentary? And you witnessed war, greed, envy, cruelty, environmental vandalism, ecological suicide, and teeming slums, with desperate humans hard scrabbling a bare existence, eking out an almost brutish existence, and breeding out of control?
What would you think?

Would you empathize with Man? Truly?
Would you make your Presence known? Would you rush down from the Skies, with the cure for all Man’s ills? Or would you hide? Would you sit in stunned silence, reeling in shock at the Fundamental Absurdity of Man? And at what he has done, in the last five thousand years, and is doing, in the name of a million disparate, warring, mutually intolerant so-called sacred causes?
Would you mourn the Missing Fisherman? I think you would.

And how about the cold, callous, indifferent, shoulder shrugging that met my feeble protestations? When I insisted that the family should be notified? That every effort should be made to trace his village? That even then, that boat might represent a crucial economic life line for a small community? How would you feel about that?
Would you see Man perhaps, not as a blessing, but as a blight? A scourge? A disease? To be perhaps eradicated?

* * * * *

I don’t know the Answer to your query, Captain Timothy Trout. Kind Reader of my teeming blogs. .

But I applaud your question, Amigo.

Francis Meyrick

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on September 30, 2013, 9:14 pm