Since March 11, 2011, I’ve watched every Japanese tsunami video I could see and many I’ve watched more than once. Besides being awed by the sheer power of the waves as they swept in, clearing the land of nearly everything upon it, I scoured the corners of the footage, often seeing drivers in cars hoping for an escape or people who were about to be caught up in the rushing water.

A telltale voice accompanied almost every video with either a bell or siren sound that became indicative that a tsunami was about to happen. The calm warning voice would continue while the mayhem of a town being washed away played out to the people in disbelief who had perched themselves on surrounding hillsides. Some of the survivors, though, weren’t so fortunate to heed the early warning and instead scrambled to the top of heavy concrete buildings that weathered the beast rising out of the ocean. Then there were those who, in their cars, homes, on bikes, and walking, likely succumbed to a liquid grave.

What I took from watching countless hours of this stuff is that there are three types of people in an emergency that could have fatal consequences for at least one and maybe two of them. First are those who are quick to react and might be called alarmists; they heard that there might be a tsunami, and they ran for the hills without hesitation, and they lived. Next up were those people who were pretty sure nothing was going to happen but measured their situation and were able to respond before the rushing water overtook them; to an extent, they survived. Third were those certain that everyone else was overreacting, and so they dug in and scoffed at those running around; they died.

Survival was what was at stake, but the far away earthquake was something that occurred in another dimension, so to speak. If you’d never experienced a tsunami before, but you knew earthquakes, why should today be the dramatic shift in reality that warranted panic?

COVID-19 is the earthquake that happened in Wuhan, China and maybe Iran, Italy, Japan, and South Korea are the first signs that something is amiss. During the tsunami in Japan and the one in the Indian Ocean back in 2004, the tide going out was the first clue that a tsunami was on its way, but people didn’t know how to read that. Without an early warning system, those in harm’s way remained oblivious to the approaching freight train.

Irrational panic comes to my mind, too, when I think of reacting to a virus that, in all likelihood, doesn’t have my name on it. I don’t want to succumb to hysteria, yet I can’t help but think that complacency might put me on the beach admiring the amazing tide pools that had never been seen before as a wall of water 40 feet deep crashes over my existence.

I can’t know if COVID-19 will become a thing where I live, even though the 5th person in the United States diagnosed with what was then still called Coronavirus was right here in Arizona. I do know that I’m not the only person thinking long and deeply about it, as in learning which types of facemasks are most effective, I also quickly discovered that N95 respirators are nearly sold out everywhere.

Even as I write this, I’m reading chatter about a growing acceptance that COVID-19 will be a global phenomenon and that people are going to need to learn how to deal without resorting to extreme measures and fear. Meanwhile, thousands wait in line for surgical masks in South Korea, and grocery stores in a region of Italy are being shopped bare as people stock up for the worst.

I’m seeing some signs that people in Scottsdale are preparing for quarantine or a panic situation, as tonight at Whole Foods, there are particular bulk products sold out across their inventory, specifically those that can be sprouted, giving people a small amount of fresh greens in case they are unwilling or unable to venture out.

There’s an undiscussed situation here in America that could make a virus such as COVID-19 all the worse, and that is, what happens when people abstain from going to a doctor due to the exorbitant bills they’ll inevitably be faced with?

Then, before I can even post this, I learn that not only do we have quarantines in San Diego but in Oregon and Michigan too. Alabama turned down using one of its military bases as a quarantine site for people coming back from one of the cruises, but there is nothing to worry about as I’m sure we’ll handle it with the same efficiency we are seeing China deal with it, right?

Maybe this is a horrible admission, but I’m obviously not alone in this morbid curiosity that leads to today’s blog post: I watch some of the worst gore videos there are on the internet.

I hate to admit this publicly, as I’m certain that a majority of people would wonder out loud how in the world I can stomach some of the atrocities I’ve seen. The reason this is a topic is that it’s dawned on me how truly perverse these gore videos really are, and they are not made more so because I or anyone else looks at them. Morbid curiosity has always been a part of the human condition, though technology has brought the ability to witness it to extraordinarily convenient levels.

One could argue that by consuming the most atrocious gore content, those consumers are fueling the suppliers of the carnage, but that would be constructing a straw man fallacy. There’s something far more interesting going on in our world, and it’s not that some people are watching beheadings, dismemberments, people on fire, or accident victims gasping their last breaths.

Consider for a moment that all around our earth, when these events are happening, there are people at the ready, armed with cameras in their phones, recording this stuff. Not just one person typically, but multiple people have their phones out and are getting up close to capture the gruesome details. At least one of those capturing the ghastly scene obviously has an inkling of where to share this footage because it seems like nothing is held back.

What’s going on in their minds that when, upon finding themselves in a situation where one might think “normal people” would recoil at the horror, these spontaneous amateur journalists move in close to find intimacy in someone else’s pain or death? It’s not like YouTube is an avenue for this kind of footage; one must have some idea that the file now on their phone has some value on the internet.

One could argue that the most wretched people are moving about, lying in wait for this kind of thing to happen so they can run to the location of the slaughter and grab it for weirdos like me who are going to watch it on one of the sites that host it allowing the purveyors of this stuff to make a ton of money from their porno adverts. Regarding the porno advertisements, nobody should be surprised by this, as would anyone expect ads from Nike or Coke?

There is no way that those recording this stuff make a habit of chasing gore; they must be average people who just so happen to be in the “right” place at the right time. Just ask yourself how often you have been at an accident scene where exploded bowels were strewn halfway across the highway. Apparently, those first to arrive where fate snuffed out people’s lives are immediately struck with the idea that someone probably really needs to see the carnage.

Maybe there are simply too many complicit people in need of witnessing such tragic sights and just as many who are ready to whip out a phone and test their mettle so they can gross out some other people.

I checked out some of the most notorious websites that deal with the worst of the worst, and it turns out that many of them are quite popular, ranking in the top 15,000 global websites. Consider that there are 1.74 billion websites worldwide and that the most horrible gore and abusive porn rankings put them above the next 1,739,985,000 websites. Another way of seeing this is that one of the gore sites I would be loathe to share a link to is about as popular as Safeway.com, while one of the fringe porn sites that might make you cry is twice as popular as the Starbucks website.

Who, then, is making these sites so popular? It’s obviously not just me, nor is it that weirdo in some dank basement you might want to believe is visiting these places? I posit that it is a majority of those everyday people around you that you’d never suspect of wanting to see a man having his genitals eaten by a dog controlled by a drug cartel seeking revenge. Yeah, that exists.

As I was describing this to the person who triggered me to explain my interest today, it got me thinking about an aspect of our evolution that might have led to this. For how long were humans relegated to eating any animal they would stumble upon? Do we want to believe that meat has always been neatly packaged? How often, due to lack of tools and a fresh kill, have we had to compromise manners and risk of illness to gobble up whatever tragedy of rotting flesh our meal might happen to be?

Going down this line of thinking, it was quickly obvious that in our ancestral memory (if something like that exists) are generations after generations of those who, without proper knives or even sharpened stones, would use teeth and fingers to tear apart and gouge at the creature before them. Now, slow down and give this some thought: you are hungry, maybe even on the verge of starving; what is the thing you can eat the fastest on an animal? You might excavate the eyes, chew out its tongue, or use teeth and hands to tear at the soft parts of the belly, breasts, or genitalia. Yeah, I know this sounds gross to modern humans who’ve grown up in an age of sterilization and prepackaged everything, but that’s not how life has been for the majority of history.

Our reliance on factory slaughterhouses, refrigeration, and clear plastic wrap that removes the image of death from our meat has rapidly seduced us away from the brutal reality of what it is to prepare another creature’s body to meet our needs for food. In the not-too-distant past, it must have been relatively common to gather around a carcass for the communal process of dismembering it. Would any of us think this was not a bloody process?

Now I start to ask myself, how does this correlate to our current place in a culture where just about everyone is aware of the Starbucks brand and that an “obscure” gore site is more popular than that iconic coffee company? So, how could it possibly be considered obscure? It starts to appear that the truth is it might be relatively normal.

Morbid curiosity appears to satisfy a kind of inherent blood lust that would have been present when people are about to enjoy the bounty of finding satiety and preserving their kind. What kind of elation would have been present in this celebration of survival at the expense of the beast about to be disemboweled and dismembered? I posit that there is a reward factor going on and that in our civil, clean, and relatively peaceful society, our deeply buried lust for carnage is not met, and so we turn to horror movies, tales of mass murderers, violent video games, and most recently to internet sites that are publishing videos from around our globe by a citizens brigade who appear eager to have others witness the bloodletting.

I live in Arizona, where we do not observe Daylight Savings Time; the Navajo Nation is the exception. I’ve been living and growing older in this state for the past 25 years. Here, at 56 years old, I can tell how my sense of things changes with the natural rhythm of the clock, even though any obvious seasonal changes are relatively minor here in the desert. Usually, in November, I start to become more acutely aware that the days are getting shorter, and initially, there’s a slight sense of loss that has me asking myself if I did everything I wanted to do during those months when my days were long. Then, only a few months later, I became aware of an afternoon brightness that hinted to my internal clock that the short days of winter were running out.

There’s a melancholy I feel over these lengthening days as it dawns on me again that I’m transitioning through another passing season. I ask myself, did I best utilize my long nights to accomplish those things that are best suited for darkness? As I mourn the long nights fading away, I can’t yet appreciate the longer days that are ahead. I do start becoming more aware of the need to make plans of how we’ll best use those 16 to 18 hours a day of sunlight that will be upon us. If we’re not careful, they’ll pass without our participation and a season will have been lost.

So what happens to someone who abruptly has to change the clock an entire hour forward or back? I can’t imagine how unsettling this is to one’s senses as I rather enjoy my circadian rhythm, having the luxury of transitioning with the seasons, in tune with the spin of the earth that dictates when the sun rises and sets. Take this photo above that I shot at about 5:30 in the morning: two weeks ago, the eastern sky was pitch black, while this morning, it’s a dark blue. In a couple of weeks, I suspect the glow of dawn will start coming on strong, but if it were time to slam the clock forward, I would simply be catapulted from a walk at night one day to walk in daylight the very next day.

Being in rhythm instead of having to suddenly leapfrog forward or back feels right as I’m getting older. When I was younger, I didn’t so much notice it as much as I muscled through the transition, but I was also a much more emotionally volatile, impetuous young man. Today, as I become so fully aware of how I transition with time, I have to say I feel it’s a luxury to allow the senses to subtly move with the natural cycle of time and that humanity will have to realize and change this archaic yet modern collective forcing of a population to abandon what will likely prove to be an important cycle we are supposed to be well-tuned to.

The brevity of awareness, fear of enlightenment, and certainty that a kind of contagion will result from knowledge are all maladies plaguing modernity. We drag fear of the unknown from out of our distant past where the dark forest-harbored monsters bent on devouring our souls. Those things unseen and unexperienced would offend our sensibilities and bring disappointment, should we waste our time and money on that which we are certain we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. This is what living in history burdens us with – combined with a short lifespan that may not wake us to the lies.

A generation born of living in the moment and experiencing immediacy has been sheltered from the outside world by parents who wanted to shield them from that which they themselves feared more than living. Then, when their offspring, unaccustomed to face-to-face interactions, adapted to their sequestered existence, parents complained that their children didn’t have the social skills they deemed appropriate. In isolating their children, they cast the mold while the negative patterns were being reinforced by their own preoccupation and titillation delivered by the anxiety engine of television and the numbing of intimacy due to online porn.

Parents gleefully supplied the multitude of screens and connectivity to their children who assimilated the worse qualities of a society enchanted by the narrowing of their focus. Then, these very same parents dared have the audacity to question what happened to a generation as though they were fully unaware of their own selfish actions having an influence on their children. We look to tradition and nostalgia with the warmth that is now unjustified in light of the circumstances of being forced into an evolutionary catapult called technology.

With this type of conditioning, we should expect a deterministic behavior where the comfort of routine is returned again and again. To expect someone to wake from this state is magic thinking at best, but this is what the Boomers and Generation X expect of the Millennials, and Gen Z. We have created computer programs based on old paradigms that require the exact same results of the software to function like clockwork.

Nondeterminism is defined as a program that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs. I’m hijacking the term here and defining Neo-nondeterminism as an idea that people need to explore the intentionality of not doing things the same way over and over. They must get off their self-reinforcing hamster wheel of routine and change the pattern. From home to work, back home, cook, clean, sleep, back to work, and back home should not be fully normalized. Throw a monkey wrench into that routine.

Start some tutorials about a subject you would like to know more about or that you never considered learning. Pick a country on the globe, find a recipe from that country, and make a new dish for dinner. You might want to search YouTube for a list of songs from the same place to listen to while you cook and try these new flavors. Go bowling in drag just because, or start a band even if you don’t play an instrument. You have but this one life to try those things that are not reinforcing the boring potential we all call routine. Stop being so rigid in the outcomes you are accepting as what’s comfortable to you. You learned to poop outside the diaper into a toilet; you can learn to stop pooping on your opportunity for new experiences.