THREE FISH

 

THREE FISH

Musing in a Waiting Room

Nyerges [www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com] 

I was sitting in a waiting room watching three golden fish in a fish tank.  The tank was perhaps 3 feet high and five feet wide, and maybe two feet deep.  It was bigger than any fishtank I ever had as a child. 

I normally read a book or magazine when I’m in  a waiting room, but something about them caused me to watch the fish. I watched them go back and forth and up and down, seemingly always looking for food. I do not know how long they had resided in that tank, but I figured that they knew the full scope of their world, every nook and cranny, around every rock and all the details of each plastic plant designed to look like real seaweeds.  I watched to see if the three had patterns to their movements, or whether it was very random. 

As I watched, I thought of the German novel “The Wall,” where this invisible wall suddenly appeared in the countryside.  You didn’t see it, but you could not pass beyond this  wall.  Because the wall kept people within certain parameters, people died.  It was a depressing novel.

Then I thought about zoos, those places where we all visited as children and loved to get close to the “wild” animals.  I’ve heard both good and bad things about zoos, how certain animals are saved from near extinction in the wild because of the zoos.  And as I continued to observed the meandering journey of the three fish, I thought about zoos and realized why I didn’t like the concept of a zoo, which imprisons animals in confined spaces so other people can come and look at them. 

From the animals’ perspective, it must feel like a life of futility and lost dreams.  Yes, it’s true that some animals will live longer in a zoo and not go extinct.  Still, I don’t like zoos.  An animal can wander freely and fend for himself and probably live a shorter life than he would in a cage, but he’s living the sort of life that nature intended.  Is the animal “happier” in the wild?  Does the animal even think in those terms?  Does the caged animal realize that he no longer can make certain choices?  What’s the solution?  You couldn’t very well just open all the cages and let the animals run free.  Some would not survive on their own, far from home.  Others would be a threat to the urban humans and their pets.

As I sat in the quiet waiting room while others read magazines or talked in hushed tones, I continued to wait my turn as I watched the fish.  It occurred to me that zoos are the partners-in-crime with modern agriculture.  Have you ever seen a modern chicken factory, with three chickens to a tiny cage so small that they cannot turn around, with lights on 24/7 so the farmer can extract the most eggs out the chickens before they are killed?  While there are some free-range farms, chickens in small cages life-long is not unusual.  It’s the price that is paid to have a surplus of eggs at every store.  And it’s why I always buy free-range, or not at all.

The fish continue to swim back and forth and up and down, and I still do not see a recognizable repeatable pattern to their movements. They do not seem at all aware of my existence, and I wonder how long they have lived in the tank, and how much longer they will live.

The door opens and the receptionist at the doctor’s office calls my name.  My last thought as I left the waiting room was that I would never want to be one of those fish.  And then, for a split second, I began to consider all the limits and restrictions and repeatable patterns of my own life.  “Hmmm” I pondered, as I go to see the doctor.

BOOKS AND CLASSES BY CHRISTOPHER NYERGES:  Go to www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com

Excerpt from "Watermelon Dreams" on Love

 

THE NATURE OF LOVE AND ITS MANY COUNTERFEITS

From “Watermelon Dreams”

 WATERMELON DREAMS: Strange Tales: Childhood’s Passage of Growing up in Pasadena: Nyerges, Christoher: 9798359334716: Amazon.com: Books

            One day in July of 2008, I went to the Coffee Gallery in Altadena and started talking with my friend Michael, who was reading a book about love. Love, one of the few topics you can study your entire life and never really “get it.”

            “The problem,” I told Michael, as if I knew what I was talking about, “is that we think about this way too much, whereas the animals – at least some animals – don’t think about it. They just act.  The basic fundamentals of what most of us mean by love – protection, providing food for the young, some training – are simply done without all the considering and evaluating and vacillation that humans are so famous for.”

            Michael nodded.  He didn’t talk a lot but he listened, and when he spoke, he asked a deep question or he had a pithy comment.

            We agreed upon certain things that every human should know about “love” and its many facets and tangents.  A man cannot have more than one woman at a time, whether wife or girlfriend. OK,  some try and seem to get away with it, and some are even involved in consentual polygamy.  But that seems to be  the exception, not the rule.  One woman at a time, period.  That works and other arrangements do not.  Even when people try to have “open” arrangements, they all seem to fail in the long run, usually due to arguments and disagreements about what “open relationship” means, as well as jealousies that inevitably arise.

 

We agreed that the Masai men in Africa might have four wives there and “get away with it,” because that is the social norm.  It is done in plain view with everyone knowing that’s what’s happening.  But it won’t work here.

 

Don’t have sex if you’re not prepared for children.  “Hoping that she doesn’t get pregnant” is not a good protective measure.  Don’t have children until you’re ready to devote the next 15 or so years to them, as a child without involved parents is part of the formula called “How to make a criminal.”

 

Michael and I agreed on some of these basics, and we barely brought up the principles in the “Art of Loving” book by Eric Fromme.

 

I realized that much of what my parents “taught” me about this subject was due to the fact that I knew I should not follow the path that they took.  Though there was rarely a show of affection between my mother and father, at least I had a roof over my head, we didn’t move around all the time, and we were all given a good education.  My father always worked, and my mother sometimes worked as a nurse.  There seemed to be little of what we would call “romantic love” there, but at least we had the essentials handled, in a more or less stable relationship.  In other words, my brothers and I received at least as good a home life as is given to their children by the most protective of animals.  Which is more than I could say for many of our friends and their parents.

 

Michael and I continued to discuss why he was reading a book about “love” in the first place, and it continued to invoke memories from my childhood.  Where, for example, did I get my idea of what “love” is, or should be?  What did I learn from my own home?  More precisely, what didn’t I learn from home that I should have learned?

Read the book for the FULL CHAPTER...

THE RICK TRILOGY: How I wrote these three books

 

THE RICK TRILOGY: How I wrote these three books

Christopher Nyerges

www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com

[BOOKS AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON]

Amazon.com : Journey Into the underground, Nyerges

I have long wanted to write a novel.  Finally, over the last few years, and culminating in December of 2024, I finished a trilogy of novels, all based around a main character named Rick.  I hadn’t originally intended to write a trilogy, but I just kept going once I got started.

BOOK ONE: JOURNEY INTO THE UNDERGROUND

This first one started as a dream I had.  I was in these underground tunnels beneath JPL that exited in diverse places in the desert to the north.  Later I called my friend who works at JPL and he gave me a tour.  I told him I was particular interested in any underground tunnels, like the one in my dream that was labeled “Tunnel 16.”  I got the tour and there was no Tunnel 16, but I kept thinking about it, and began to write the story.

Each day when I sat down to write, I would first close my eyes and try to picture the dream again.  Then I wrote as if I was describing the internal movie I was watching.  A  young Pasadena boy, Rick, discovers the tunnel behind a gas station and explores it.  He discovers that an Invisible race lives there, and Rick is called upon to settle a civil war among the Invisibles.  Yes, an odd premise, and I let my dreams guide the telling and resolution of the story.  Eventually, Rick helped resolve the conflict and tried to go back to his normal life.  I titled this first adventure Tunnel 16.

In part two, called Sinkhole 102, maybe 5 years later, Rick is a student at Caltech, one of the youngest, very involved as a physics student,  and one day a stranger asks his help in resolve another Invisibles conflict, this time in the Malibu Canyon caves.  Rick does it, but only because he believes he will be getting paid, which turned out to be not as Rick expected.  Frank Landry, the anti-spy operative from JPL who we met in part one, makes an appearance.

In part three, Mojave Caves, Rick is on a short break from Caltech, and feels moved to drive up to the Death Valley area in search of a man named Charlie who might show him some of fabled Indian caves full of ancient writings.  Rick does meet the son of Charlie, and gets involved in another cave episode at the same time the local Indian tribe is trying to fend off sales of their sacred land.  Rick meets some of the same players in this complicated story of intrigue, mystery, and resolution.

In all these cases, no one actually believes that Rick went into tunnels and interacted with an Invisible race. After all, there is no proof.  Since those who Rick told about it think he’s making it all up, he tries to not talk about it too much and just devote his time to his studies.

BOOK TWO: RICK’S TRAINING

This book was a suggestion by my friend Angelo, who told me to tell a story about how Rick learned his outdoor survival skills.  So here we have Rick disillusioned with Caltech after being one of the very youngest PhDs, and professors, and then dropping out and living with a native man in a remote desert location somewhere east of Castaic.  There Rick learns homesteading, foraging, and general survival and self-reliance skills.  In this book we are introduced to a cast of characters, most of whom have an uncanny resemblance to people that your probably know.

It’s not a how-to book, but rather intended to be an entertaining view of what it actually takes to support yourself with your own businesses, and to provide your food and needs from the land, without having to run to the store every minute.  Besides, in this story, there had been a serious economic depression and no one has money anyway. 

In this story, Rick eventually gets married, and divorced, and has moved from the high desert to Highland Park.

BOOK THREE: THE EVENT

Amazon.com: The Event eBook : Nyerges, Christopher: Kindle Store

This book also originated with a dream I had – really, it was nightmare since it seemed so real and I woke up in a sweat, feeling uneasy most of the day.  In the dream, some sort of cataclysmic event happened. It was a very fragmentary dream which repeated a few times, and I wrote down the details when I woke up. 

So I worked the various pictures from my dream into this third novel in the trilogy called The Event.  In this book, our character Rick is on his way home from work, trying to get to Highland Park,  when something inexplicable begins to happen, and he and his friend spend the next three days in the basement.  It turns out that anyone who stayed underground survived, but perhaps 95% of the population was dead after that first three days.

This then is the story of how Rick walks back to his old neighborhood to see who survived. The landscape is dark and devoid of people, and dangers seem to lurk everywhere.  He finds that his wife survived in Pasadena – they had been separated – and she chose to go into the government trucks that came through trying to get people to evacuate.  Rick carefully makes his way to Highland Park to find more survivors. The story tracks how these two groups began their new life where they had to grow food, get water, and find ways to supply themselves with all the necessities of life.  And there were dead bodies everywhere, and lots of  people who wanted to rob or kill you in this very dark world.  You meet another cast of very familiar characters, and the two developing communities are learning to get food, water, and organize for protection.  You begin to feel that there is hope in the world, even in these dire conditions.

 

ALL THREE ARE ABOUT 1000 PAGES, and you can purchase them individually from Amazon. 

Journey into the Underground, Rick’s Training, The Event

A great literary experience