August 24, 2025

eggy

When you think about it, it’s kind of funny.

The world’s most powerful, most advanced civilization let an absolute baby destroy their machinery from the inside.¹

Left the door wide open. Didn't bother to think it through.

And these were the supposedly smartest people on the planet.

Anyway, from that perspective, it’s kind of funny.

Like killer clowns are kind of funny.

LAST SUNDAY, around MIDNIGHT, I was up with an inner chill when I wrote the following:

The brain is an egg.

Not just because it's soft inside a hard shell.²

But because it can be easily scrambled.

I recently described the premise of the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to my son, and the wine store clerk in front of us wondered if I meant a novel by William Faulkner. I congratulated the clerk on his mistake. Sometimes, when we are wrong, we are right.

But to have one's brain scrambled is not such a case. Rather, when the inputs don't match the outputs, when the references slide around: calamity.

The brain is the source of all that makes us human. For if a bird flies and a snake slithers, a human thinks.

A human unable to think clearly is in peril.

This is not the same thing as not wanting to think. That is universal.

Because thinking is hard.

Babies learn to think only because they have to find new ways to get what they want. If they were receiving everything they cared for without so much as a twitch, they’d stay infants forever.

Some people do not learn to think beyond this stage. They only think of their own needs and the people around them become instruments to their own satisfaction.

Because thinking is hard, most of us try to avoid it whenever possible, by shifting that work to others, and excusing our laziness as natural or, worse, divine.

A tough man, for example, is said to be weaker when he thinks. Unless they're thinking of domination.

But domination is not a thing that thinking people do.

Because once you begin to think, you begin to feel.

To feel is to value what is given freely and thus fairly: love, care, concern. You cannot extract love, nor care, nor concern. Only signs of it.

But I digress into our national politics, again.

The brain is also an egg in the sense that it can be fried.

My brain feels fried. (Autocorrect wanted me to write My Brian is fried which, while funny, might also be confusing in this context. See also, "No, ossifer, I have not been drinking.")

And maybe a little scrambled.

First it scrambled while I was grieving for the future of our nation. Then it was grieving for my mother.

Or not.

Because my mother was my father's caretaker, I am now his caretaker. And he is a person whose brain has been both fried and scrambled.

For as long as I've known him, his brain was so. Which made my mother's profession always a bit funny. Like a joke about a baker or a butcher or a candlestick maker.

What's does the psychologist do at home?

In my case it was keep my father's often afflicted mind from affecting mine own.

In this way, the brain is like a symbolic egg: a Kinder Sorpresa as they're called in Latin America. (An egg that contains a joke.)

You never know what you're going to find inside the brain.

It's a font of mostly pleasant but sometimes also quite unpleasant surprises. That is a fact my mother studied. And I’ve gotten to know first hand.³

During the days of observation, in the ICU, I read my mother’s health records and found, of course, references to depression. The caretaker will need care. But from whom?

Nothing can prepare you for the experience of being turned inside out, which is what it means to simultaneously lose your first and perhaps greatest caretaker, and then care for a grieving, sometimes addled, never quite fit survivor.

I think we have eggs on our minds, if not in our minds, because we understand that we come from eggs.

A minor digression – and, surely, if you've made it this far, it's because you're enjoying the ride: the masculine is useless.

Yes, they can, uh, hunt. And pick things up. I guess.

But they don't make people. (Is the sperm important? Sure! Does it require much effort? No!)

This radical superfluity drives our entire society insane.

We are trapped in an upside down world where men are overcompensating all the time because they cannot accept that, at best, they can learn to mother. Or, at the very least, care for themselves if not others.

We come from eggs and we worship eggs in the sense of oneness but also transformation. (While the phrase may have fallen out of favor of late, we used to value business "incubators", etc.)

The syncretic fusion of Easter Eggs with the crucifixion, the resurrection and the messy Holy Trinity is testament to the ancient, enduring, egg-ness of Christian faith.

Why do so-called Marianists exist? Because a religious culture without a cult of the feminine is a death cult.

Full stop.

There’s likely a more prosaic reason for the reason why I’m writing about eggs.

Last Saturday afternoon, after another harrowing morning at home – a home which my doctor friend accurately described as a full-time nursing facility, and perhaps an unskilled one at that! – I took our kids to see the movie:

Boys Go to Jupiter

Reader, it's excellent.

It is one of those rare works of art where the sum is much, much greater than the parts. (Like a perfect pop song.)

Yes, it has a moment with eggs (shown above). But mostly it has many moments of tenderness and wonder.

If ever there was a reason to think, which is to say, a reason to be, it's to produce, share, and enjoy, moments of wonder and tenderness.

You can, in fact, put Humpty Dumpty together again. Not with the king’s horses. Ans certainly not with the king’s men.

But with jokes and affection.

For as I have said often in these “pages”, we humans exist to serve one another. It’s a lie that we exist to serve ourselves.

The past is a bad place.

My 13 year-old son, inferring: if my grandfather’s father was a bad father, because his father was a bad father, does it just keeps getting worse the further you go back?⁴

My response: Yes. We ignore our social history, but, if you go back just a few generations, it’s bleak.

The Bible, for example, is structured around filicide.

How is the covenant confirmed? With Abraham being asked to kill his son.

The passover, from which we derive the word pascua, as in Easter eggs, marks what occasion?

The mass murder of babies.

The Son of God, aka our Lord and Savior?

Killed. (Childless. Or so we’re told.)

Cronos eats what, again?

It’s hard to contemplate our founding myths and not conclude that queer feminism is our only hope.

But I’m a broken record on that.