held harmless

If anyone or anyplace needs indemnification, it's Planet Harm. To indemnify: compensate for a hurt or injury; or to protect one against hurt or harm. From Latin, indemnis, unhurt. Here it gets tricky for us Harmlings. Who among us can be counted among the unhurt? Exactly. No one. That doesn't mean we're on a level playing field of harm. No, no, no. Harm glides on a continuum starting from the first infinitesimal, granular speck away from unhurt or unharm all the way to the end of the harm continuum: a nightmare beyond words or imagination. Worse than that, is there an endpoint to the harm continuum? Harmlings can always go darker, conjuring up new brews of bruises and agonies. 

Then again, surely it's not linear. Our paths of harm are zigs and zags, spins and turns, halts and balks. Same with unharm.

Let's not be so bleak. If we are to think that way about the worst of us, or the worst of the inclinations of any of us, then we should go to the other end of the spectrum. When does harmless leach into harm? In other words, who says anything or anyone is pure unhurt/unharm or pure hurt/harm? And whoever said it's static or immutable?

In real life on Planet Harm, it's typically, if not always, more gray. Harm competes and blends with unharm. Unharm flirts with harm; they may have a dalliance here or there. Unhurt and hurt, harmless and harm, might sport in the same bed in some riotous rampage of intertwining. They may even breed offspring. Or it might be more subtle than that: harmless and harm might merely exchange glances, or shake hands, or briefly embrace, or catch a cold from each other, a virus of harmlessness infecting harmfulness, or vice versa.

This is getting too confusing. The point is: it ain't all black or white.

We'll end on a buoyant note, a lifting of spirits, a poetic hymn to what Harmlings aspire to, sometime somehow somewhere:

Held harmless.

In the bosom of love. In a mother's arms. A father's grip. Embraced in the night. Sheltered from the storm. Under the brooding wing. Behind the fortress walls. Held harmless. Held without question or qualification. Held without cost or payment. Beyond all doubt, merit, or fear. Less harm. Free of harm. Banished. Forgotten harm. Erased. Ambrosia d'amnesia.  

 

The Lockness Monster

You press the button on the fob. The nearly inaudible click. Press again the button with the closed padlock symbol. The horn bleep. Do it again, neurotically, the way you do, the way so many of us do. Undo it. Second thought. The driver's door gets unlocked. Click again to unlock all four doors. Third thought. Lock? The rapid-fire calculation of risk, safety, security, fear, privilege, race, poverty, wealth, bias, tree limbs, mice, rats, cardinals, sparrows, finches, crows, history, memory, future. Keep unlocked. After all, the car will be in view from where you sit. Plus, what is there to take? You have your laptop with you, which you prize more than the car, a 2016 sedan. They (who are "they"? why assume plurality? who are these contrived and conjured bogeymen from your primordial Freudian-Hegelian-Jungian dream swamp?) are welcome to the 15 or 20 returnable cans and bottles for 5 cents each. He or she or it or they can have the straw fedora sitting in the back seat, if that's what they really want. They can wear it proudly and defiantly. You will nod at them knowingly as you stroll by each other on the Parisian boulevard at midnight. Go ahead, from the so-called glovebox without gloves take the napkins, straws, CDs, condoms (unused naturally), chewing gum, chewing gum wrappers, wrench, Narcan, antacid tablets, cough drops, tampons (unused naturally), tire-pressure gauge, sanitary napkins, compass, torchlike flashlight, toothbrush, Geiger counter, gas mask, mouthwash, and her spare keys from 2016. Have at it. Have at them. Have them. You prefer that they leave the registration and insurance documents for two reasons: you'll need them; and doing so preserves the illusion that your identity has not been compromised by this intrusion. And is it an intrusion after all if the doors were unlocked? Will their defense attorney turn it around and claim your unlockedness was an invitation to browse, forage, and take? What defense attorney? No one would bother to investigate such an unheralded and low-grade transfer of goods. 

You drive home. You park in the camera-monitored private parking lot.

You press the fob twice to lock all four doors. You do it again to hear the confirmatory beep.