Welcome to the Cirrhosis Motel

The Toilet

2011-04-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

I can’t recall when my toilet first started talking. I don’t remember hearing it say anything for the first few years but that is understandable as one wouldn’t normally be alert for that sort of occurrence. Anyway at some point I found my attention being suddenly drawn to a soft but clearly audible ‘swoosh- whoosh’ sound that was sort of halfway between a flush and a sigh. It usually began with a short muffled ‘whooshing’ sound that filled the house. At first I found myself listening for it on a level that was somewhere below awareness but as it continued my curiosity and interest became more focused. It was a second hand toilet which I thought could have something to do with it. I called a plumber to check for a leak or disconnected line, anything that could account for it but he couldn’t find a thing wrong. The odd thing was the sound itself. I gradually became convinced it was not without meaning. It was usually declarative, even slightly intentional, like wind going through a tunnel but occasionally it would be more questioning like wind before it finds a tunnel, kind of a searching sound. At first I entertained the thought of ghosts but I’d never heard of a toilet being haunted, but then I thought who’s really to say that there aren’t ghosts wandering around with low self esteem. Then one day, suddenly and rather unaccountably, I turned to the possibility that it could be something trying to make contact from a parallel universe. After all the toilet does sort of resemble a small wormhole and what makes us so complacently sure that contact from aliens will always come from a spaceship in the sky or some rhythmic mathematical logarithm of prime numbers on a government oscilloscope. Besides there was often a faint but frequently suggestive tone of hostility in the sound which if you thing about it would be perfectly understandable if someone was always flushing into your universe. But then if that was the case you would think the response would occur fairly frequently after flushing but it didn’t. Of course that doesn’t prove anything since for all we know the other universes could be as peppered with passive aggression as ours is. To be honest I didn’t really know that it was talking to me. It could have been a public announcement and I wasn’t able to figure out what it was trying to say or make any sense out of it. I mean it’s sort of ridiculous to expect that you could understand a toilet when most of us can’t even communicate with each other. It was just miracle enough for me that it talked. Anyway, as absurd as it seemed to me I couldn’t get the idea of a parallel universe out of my mind. It was some time after that before it finally occurred to me that if something was trying to make contact perhaps I could also try and communicate from my side, in fact it gradually began to seem to me that I as least had an obligation to try. I waited till my next day off and after breakfast I picked up the straight-back reading chair from my living room and set it a foot away from the toilet and, feeling a little self-conscious, sat down and then lifted the lid in that matter of fact air with which I would customarily lift the phone receiver to my ear. It seemed that I should begin in a formal manner and then I remembered about prime numbers. I decided to flush the toilet numerically in prime numbers so I began with one flush, then two, then three, and then five, followed by seven and nine and then I moved my chair a few inches closer to the white porcelain bowl and lowered my head so it was right over the opening and then projected loudly, “Hello, my name is Dennis. I speak to you in peace for all mankind.” I felt a sharp thrill surge through me, kind of like what Alexander Graham Bell probably felt when he first spoke into his new telephone wire, “Mary had a little lamb.” I waited a few minutes not really expecting any response while I started to think about what I should say next when I saw a tiny bubble rise from the bottom of the toilet. I tried to suppress a small irrational excitement inside. I realized that it didn’t prove anything scientifically even though the fact that it was only ‘one’ bubble made it a prime number bubble. I continued looking into the toilet somewhat expectantly but nothing further followed so I decided to increase my efforts. I lowered my head just inches above the bowl and said sharply and clearly, “I’m speaking to you from the planet Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy,” and then in an attempt to give a kind of cosmic latitude and longitude said, “We are 2.2 million light years from the Andromeda Galaxy which is our nearest neighbor galaxy. Ours is a blue green planet, the third from our Sun and one of nine that circle it.” I continued, “We are a fairly recent species and basically friendly in a sort of self interested way if not threatened or frightened and everything is going well.” I didn’t want to tell them how Anne Frank had said we were “basically good at heart” and then have them find out what happened to her or how we treat the homeless. This seemed like a time to put your best foot forward. I was ready to take a break when I saw the three incredible small bubbles rise up in quick succession from the bottom of the bowl. Three! they were prime number bubbles! I lost my balance on the chair. Christ! I couldn’t believe it. I just sat there dazed for some time letting it sink in. I watched for over an hour but didn’t see any more bubbles so I lowered the lid and closed transmission. The next morning I got up at nine o’clock feeling excited. I went to the toilet and lifted the lid and looked in. Nothing! Nevertheless I gave three flushes and then after a half an hours silence I decided to go shopping and do some errands. I returned at noon and opened the front door just in time to hear the last part of an ‘oosh’ sound. I rushed to the toilet and lifted the lid but nothing followed so I sat down next to it in my chair and watched diligently for about thirty minutes and when nothing happened I got up and fixed a small lunch and then distracted myself with some needed housework. It was while I was running the vacuum that I was suddenly struck with the realization that I had been gone on my errands exactly three hours. My earlier prime number flushes had been answered in three prime number hours! They had probably sent the prime number two hour transmission while I was gone. I unplugged the vacuum cleaner and ran back to the toilet and sat down with a tingling excitement in my stomach and chest. I didn’t know how I was going to contain the sharp edged excitement running through me for the remainder of the next three hours. There were still, of course, shallow pools of doubt circulating through my mind. I knew Stephen Hawking would jeeringly dismiss it. It all seemed too wildly improbable but then I thought so was last nights dreams and the Hippopotamus and Betty Lou Heltzel’s breasts on our second date. Besides a deeper sense told me I was close to pushing the laws of probability beyond chance. I knew something utterly remarkable was happening. An anxious anticipation took control of me. I had always been nagged by the sense that I was a part of something I could not see. A restless corner somewhere in my left hemisphere was always trying to make sense of tumors and ice cream sandwiches, new born kittens and missing children. It all seemed too thoughtlessly brutal and buoyantly playful to be merely thoughtlessly brutal and buoyantly playful. I felt on the edge of knowing something large and unimaginable. I occupied myself with cleaning till about five minutes before three went and sat down in my chair by the toilet. Three o’clock came and went without a sound or bubble. I told myself they didn’t have to be absolutely punctual what with time dilation and light speed being relative and all but as the silent minutes lengthened into twelve and then twenty my concern changed to a sharp disappointment and by four o’clock I settled into a quiet despair. I got up and went back to cleaning the kitchen feeling a little foolish and finally grateful that I had not told anyone about it yet. I was scouring the sink when a sudden sharp ‘whoosh’ filled the air. It startled me. I looked at the time. It was exactly five o’clock. I stood there a few minutes confused, uncertain what to make of it. Then it came to me like a revelation. I had miscounted in my excitement. They had already sent the proper transmission an noon. Five was the next prime number after three! I was struck with a wild joy. I dashed to the toilet and returned five flushes and then laid on the couch to let my amazement sink in. After a while I tried to sit down to dinner but the continuing churning excitement inside diminished my appetite. I kept thinking what if it happens at seven, what if it happens at seven! I had over an hour to wait and decided to calm myself by laying down on the couch. reading. The next thing to enter my awareness was a deep throated growling sound filling the air. It began in a low register bass note and then a treble and then flowed into a sharp loud ‘swoosh.’ I looked at the clock and felt the hair rising up on the back of my neck. It was seven o’clock! “Jesus Christ,” I yelled, “Holy Mary!” My heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird. I could hardly catch my breath. It was clear to me now that I had passed the laws of ‘probability’ and ‘chance’ and was dealing with an event of staggering significance. I didn’t know what to do. This now felt to big to keep to myself any longer. I had to talk to someone but I couldn’t think of anyone safe. My neighbors were deeply religious and I couldn’t take the chance of my toilet ending up as focal point for ‘rapture’. Then I thought of my friend from work, Merle Hadley but I remembered he was somewhat unstable and would probably call 911 as he frequently did when he got excited and I didn’t think that would be a suitable place for a news leak. I finally settled down a bit and eventually decided that it would be judicious to keep this to myself for the time being. Then a new dilemma presented itself to me. I felt the rather urgent need to pee but somehow it no longer seemed appropriate to use the toilet. It‘s odd how seeing something in a new light can force you to alter your habits. I tried to reason my way around it but it was no use. I had experienced a paradigm shift with my toilet and could no longer bring myself to use it for its former function. It was a considerable inconvenience but I knew I’d have to drive the three blocks to ‘Chucks’ all night Texaco. After I returned from ‘Chucks’ I was sitting at my desk writing some notes on the recent events when I began to experience a creeping uncertainty of fear. It gradually occurred to me I had no idea who or what was trying to contact me or where it would lead me and then I quickly recalled the horrible experience I’d had just answering the personal ads. Then my mind wandered to my physical safety. My God, I’d just been walking up to the toilet as thoughtlessly as a child to a swing. Suddenly my mind’s memory banks began swiftly searching through my fear files. I saw those hideous screeching long-limbed creatures that came to destroy us in H.G.Wells ‘War of The Worlds’ and I remembered Spock saying to Capt.Kirk, “We are being pulled into a zone of darkness by an unknown force.” I hadn’t even considered that I might be lowering my head into a porcelain event horizon and flirting with the deadly crushing ‘Singularity’ at the center of a wormhole. I had a moment of terror, imagining how many missing children on milk cartons might have been swallowed up like little Hansel and Gretal’s into dark toilet ovens. I made my way over to the couch and laid down and did some deep breathing exercises until my wild fears disappeared. I began counting down to eleven o’clock which I knew could erase all of doubts lingering shadows. A few minutes before eleven I sat down next to the toilet. My shirt was damp with sweat under the armpits and my pulse was racing. At 10:59 my eyes fixed on the second hand. I watched the steady sweep of its movement as it passed four, six, nine, ten, then eleven and then it hit the twelve as the astonishing double ‘swoosh, woosh’ rose up out of the perfect white hole. I sat there trembling in a state of nervous joy and ecstasy that was beyond excitement or amazement. It carried with it a kind of absolute knowledge that seemed to exist outside the mind, prior to the mind. Now I simply knew. I stared into the toilet with a mixture of reverence and awe, a kind of ‘grand unified theory’ feeling that Einstein must have felt. Then, finally collecting myself, I flushed the toilet eleven times to confirm having received transmission and said, “This is Dennis. I am going to bed now and will resume in the morning.” Then I added, “Good night.” I went upstairs to bed exhausted and fell quickly into a deep sleep. I was in the middle of an unsettling dream in which newspapers could speak and were blaring out the news of terrorists attacks and stock market fluctuations from eve newsstands when suddenly I woke up inside the dream to a voice that felt un-tethered to anything. It said,. “Your soul is still stubbing its spiritual toes on pebbles. However you are not entirely to blame. Just as there is no end to prime numbers there are infinite universes and yours and the one next to it are being used for reverse, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies." The voice paused and then continued, “Haven’t you ever wondered why perfection is always in plain sight and just out of reach ? Your greatest spiritual achievement are your balloons, which you use to sell cars. When you cease using balloons to sell things we will return.” I awoke instantly as though commanded back to consciousness. I knew there would be no more messages. I got up in the dark night and put on my bathrobe and went downstairs and sat by the toilet for a while in silence, an altar in an empty church. A deep formal quiet came over me. I got up and walked outside into the back yard and looked up at the immense stars above me.

2011-04-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

American Suicide: A Story Problem You have multiple problems as you approach middle age: crippling arthritis, an artificial hip that confines you to a wheelchair, you have a history of clinical depression, you are laid off your job at Meier & Frank (a Portland department store) after eighteen years due to downsizing cutbacks; you can only find temporary jobs that do not provide health insurance so your savings are drained to pay for health care and prescribed medication. You are living in continual exhaustion. You are being evicted. Your van is being repossessed, and you file for bankruptcy. But you are a resourceful, independent person surrounded by wonderful support from family and friends. Solution: A week after having your role celebrated as a contributory family member at Thanksgiving dinner, you “choose” to kill yourself. There is a suicide every 17 minutes in the United States.* This suicide statistic entered my awareness around the time I happened to run across an article on a local suicide in our state’s most prominent newspaper, The Oregonian. The treatment in the article’s coverage rang some immediate alarm bells for me. It seemed to lack an expected measure of journalistic inquiry in addition to containing some rather questionable assumptions, and I found myself prompted to read it again with more focused attention. William Temple once accurately observed that “unless all of existence is a medium of revelation, no revelation is possible.” This essay is my attempt to reveal that, despite the passage of time since the story was originally published, what happened to one women’s life was not irrelevant, but deeply revelatory, and its resurrection is an attempt to illustrate its importance for us; to slow down, contemplate and even arrest briefly the accelerating speed of our own transience, the insistent gathering weight of our own irrelevance. Imagination is our fundamental moral faculty. It is central to grasping the nature and meaning of a significant event. The American poet Richard Hugo pointed out, “our great failure is our inability to imagine the suffering of others.” These reflections are dedicated to the real people who every 17 minutes make their premature departure. This was the headline on Nicki Dyer’s suicide in the Sunday Oregonian in December 2004: “Independent to the end. In pain and jobless, but refusing to lean on family and friends, Nicki Dyer chooses death.” The headline had all the qualities of a star-spangled American anthem, including the stoic oath of silence. All it lacked was musical accompaniment. The article presented us with a real trooper, with her “dignified resignation” and “self-reliance” who finally “chose” the stiff upper lip of death. Something seemed buried above ground in this tragedy. The article would have you believe that self-reliance and pride in the self is expressed in choosing to kill yourself, that independence of spirit is manifested as suicide, that somehow it was her strength of character that destroyed her. With such strength, who needs weakness?! When choice is examined more closely it becomes complex. To choose freely is far different than to choose under duress, negating what the spirit of the definition of choice implies. Do we choose what we’re going to choose? Choice is more a concept than a fact, and a fuzzy one at that. You draw your bath water to a temperature that is comfortable to you, not to one you chose to want. We are not radically free, after all. In addition the term choice is too often used to dignify where we have landed, or to blame others for where they have landed, as a tool for manufacturing a plausible and rewarding narrative about reality, life, self, and our place in the universe. This helps us to lessen and tolerate the insecurity and chaos of life, avoiding awareness of the variety of trap doors we’re all standing on. The disturbing questions move in like an ominous weather front hanging over everything about Nicki’s story, but the largest and loudest is the absence of anger over what was happening to her. Where is the outrage, the indignation from those who knew and loved her? It is not the overall absence of any trace of justifiable rage in the Oregonian article, but chillingly, even from Nicki herself (excluding a single emotional outburst at work). Why was everyone consenting to what was happening to her? According to the article, Nicki Dyer possessed the character traits of independence, self-reliance and pride, while also surrounded by a wealth of supportive family and friends. These are the ingredients for buoyant optimism—a recipe for having a nice day and a nice life to boot—not for suicide. In fact, Nicki’s suicide seemed a non sequitur. The article was not covering a minor problem like her failure to adapt to a style of living different from the one she was accustomed to. The hidden truth was that Nicki Dyer dissolved in plain sight, in front of everyone she was close to. Pride is about what you value, what you want to display. Suicide is the polar opposite of pride; it is default control; the individual’s powers being inadequate or insufficient to meet one’s own needs. It is about the soul not receiving its due. The article’s illogical treatment of Nicki’s painful story described a matter/antimatter do-se-do square dance of tragedy, pushing the limits of common sense into a gradual tsunami of reason gone mad, turning the crucial accuracy of language into a crude stone tool. Isn’t the purpose in all of our “purpose-driven” lives to be alive, to live? Worse, as disturbing as the article’s spin was on this particular suicide, having it go unchallenged in the largest newspaper in the state of Oregon—was even more so. The truth is that as far as pride and self-worth are concerned, we’re all hard-wired to avoid the rejection of losing face, of not living up to the standards of those who have the power to withhold love and caring, or to affect self-esteem. No one’s comfort zone extends too far beyond a sense of personal safety. Ultimately we’re all wimps. No one climbs Everest naked, and pride and independence can serve as barricades against fear, failure, complexity, despair and death, just as suicide can. The place where we are most equal is in our fundamental powerlessness. In his book The Soul’s Code, James Hillman observed that “The very ground of relationship is dependence, not independence; it is the very ground and motive for what authentic relationship requires.” Contrary to the article’s headline, “independent to the end,” Nicki was dependent on a necessary measure of comfort and safety, a sanctuary that enables us to feel that life is worth living. She was surrounded by support that was, in reality, inadequate or insufficient to meet a need that all her independent determination and self-reliance was also unable to provide. In fact she was dependent to the end—on someone to actually get the message that she was in real trouble. The irony is that we’re all dependent to a significant extent on others for our autonomy and independence. We tend to think that we are the sole authors of our thoughts, opinions, ideas and feelings; that they come out of a “nowhere” somewhere inside us, emerging by magic from a “self.” But the facts of reality are that feelings—like the impulse to commit suicide, or the complex forces underlying individual “character”—do not happen in a vacuum, but are produced out of the context of a large, webbed network of relationships, comprised of one’s biology, personal history, family, friends, community, race, country and culture. We have less control over who we are and how we think of ourselves than we think we do. Underlying all ethics and morality is the sense that we matter, that what happens to you as an individual matters and that leads, by some hidden mechanism, to a truth in the head and heart that others also matter. We send messages to each other all the time even if we don’t want to or aren’t aware of it, and much of how we value ourselves comes from the messages we receive from friends, family, community and country. What is ultimately allowed to happen to us can be one of the strongest messages conveying if and how much we matter, often driving us to insist too strenuously that we do matter, sometimes with too much distorted “pride” or “independence.” Nicki couldn’t afford health insurance. The deeper irony is that no one really needs health insurance. All we really need is health care. She was given the message that her health and welfare were not of intrinsic, irreplaceable value, a message coming from a culture and community currently existing in a human ethical coma. It is easy to understand how society’s recruiting officer for self-reliance and independence is so successful when there is such a deep and legitimate desire for independence in all of us. Who doesn’t want to lace their own shoes, butter their own bread? It is easy then to make the leap to thinking we are, or certainly should be, in command of our own fate. We completely buy into such an untenable position even when it is obvious that the three wolves of nurture, nature and economics—whose formidable powers are ultimately beyond the control of the individual—can huff and puff and blow our coherent, orderly straw houses down, a fact that should, by itself, call our simplistic beliefs of choice and independence into question. Such facile concepts are not just a leap of faith, but a leap of ignorance. One of our most important critical faculties—maybe our most important—is the ability to distinguish between what is inadequate and what is sufficient, and suicide points to a profound absence of hope. What if the source of hope and optimism is limited to oneself, and one’s resources the only really acceptable place to seek it? Imagine carrying such an overwhelming burden of hopelessness and pressure in your psychic backpack that you wanted to end your life—and then not being able to fully reveal it to those closest to you? Nicki’s refusal to grasp the ropes or lifelines thrown to her begs the question: why did she not reach for and grab them? The words choice and independence do not supply an answer, but instead point back to the question: what was really offered at those private exchanges between family and friends, and in the context of what personal histories between the participants? What were the lifelines that were actually thrown to her, were they within her ability to grasp, were they insubstantial or thrown too late? We seldom jeopardize our own survival. After all, the Titanic’s survivors rowed away from the people in the water, not toward them. But aside from that, there are excellent reasons for being hesitant to ask for aid. To reach out and really ask for help is to call enemy fire to your position. To even consider being deserving is to invite a direct hit of that criticism, of the shame and fear that is reserved for anyone with the inevitable scarlet “V” on their breast: anyone viewed as a victim or who has failed the self-reliance test. And this despite the truth that Nicki had contributed to the best of her ability. Nicki’s story contains not only a heroic display of individual determination, but also an indictment of an invisible virus in our culture that seems intent on encouraging self-destruction in order to salvage an acceptable sense of self. In such a culture, our innate need for a sense of our own independence and self-reliance is turned against us, creating a painful, isolated reality others cannot or will not acknowledge or even care about, and where we must endure and face far too many challenging situations and conflicts in solitude. Serious research is revealing how our emotional states impact the way our brains process information; we think differently under the sway of different mood states. It is easy to imagine how it could take far less than the significant sustained stress that Nicki endured for life to change from a promise to a threat, to make one lose the small degree of actual freedom and self-sufficiency that we do possess, to feel there’s no place outside of the “independent” self to really turn to. It is beyond the farthest reaches of reason to assume Nicki was feeling anything other than emotionally feral; buried alive on the day of her death, or even the weeks (months, years?) leading up to it. We don’t think so much as we feel, and to live without an income adequate to provide basic, vital human needs is to live in a continual urgent emergency that over time becomes a form of drip-torture. By casually suggesting that Nicki “chose” suicide the article assumes a degree of autonomy that is unrealistic for someone experiencing her pressures and circumstances. Suicide usually reflects (excluding the legitimate assisted suicide issue) the opposite of choice, the absence of alternatives. The act’s awful power is that you don’t go to it, it comes to you. When we cannot adequately respond to an assault on our dignity, our failure deepens the indignity and indignation. Instead of feeling free to respond with honest feelings of fear or frustration or even anger, it is easy to understand Nicki feeling compelled to show gratitude, to acknowledge a gesture’s thoughtfulness rather than its inadequacy. If we put ourselves in Nicki’s place, we can see how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to permit herself to even feel anger—much less voice it—to those who were always there at the edge of the swamp with condolences and praise for her “independence;” those whose version of support was well-intentioned and consistent with the forms we are taught to recognize as representing support. It is hard to scream, “where is the lifeline?” even when it seems obvious that, neck-deep in quicksand, support has no right to appear in any other form but a lifeline. All of this is not even to mention the hidden anger one harbors for being forced to turn the arrow of blame back at oneself. Neither Poe nor Kafka could have devised a torture as clever and subtle as having the victims of cruel circumstances victimize themselves by accepting entire responsibility. It is unfortunate that anger has become so suspect in our age of “anger management.” There is much interest and counseling on how to control and dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, talk it away, reason it away, educate, meditate, pray, love, or medicate it away—even gene therapy or taser it away—anything but how to listen to it, much less validate it. And what is the “red badge” of self-reliance, anyway? What is it about “unable” and “disabled” we feel so compelled to disgrace, to reserve for the cellar of shame? We all have limits in a surplus of varieties—psychological, emotional, social, sexual and financial—so why do we insist on avoiding them, as though the human spirit is somehow excluded from functioning within anything resembling limits? There are many ways I could justify and rationalize the Oregonian article's point of view on Nicki Dyer’ suicide, but I can't accept or excuse it, or give it my consent. It is too important to be framed in the lame plea of the “serenity prayer” for help in accepting those things we cannot change, or to be viewed in the sanitary pastime of a moral debate, or as an ethical or political lapse of judgment where it can sneak in under the radar clothed in the respectable convention of traditional values, which do not trigger the mind’s defenses or draw the gasps of shock or horror that tanks or teargas or terrorist’s bombs would. For me or anyone to sanction this article’s spin gives a pass to a laziness of sympathetic imagination that impairs our humanity. The thinly veiled hysteria that surrounds our love of “independence” and “self-reliance” is fool’s gold viewed through a carnival mirror, a deadly recipe whose ingredients would only be chosen if one were coerced by harsh circumstance and the absence of authentic support alternatives. There are cruel illusions involved in overestimating the degree of control we have over our lives, while ignoring and discouraging any examination of the overall systems in which we live our lives, those forces outside of our control. The Oregonian's article inadvertently evokes comparisons with Rachael Carson's classic “Silent Spring” or even Jack Finney's “Invasion of The Body Snatchers” by illuminating the slow but growing erosion of that elusive something which is central to what it means to be a human being. Without that we lose the ability to allow what is most vital about us to play a role in how we perceive and treat one another; we lose touch with those things that make our individual and collective importance possible, like the relative measure of comfort and safety we require to feel life is worth living. By itself, Nicki’s death asks the question of whether there really is a social contract that exists outside the criminal justice system, that covers the welfare of the village inhabitants, or does it respond only to those suspected of misbehaving? Community of meaningful connection is only possible when we can openly share our lives with safety, when we can protect the intimacies and fragile security which we are genetically driven to need. When we can’t it increases our separation as well as our anxiety, mistrust and suspicion. The pendulum that swings in our lives between independence and dependence is regulated by a sense of trust, in feeling comfortable and confident that our own efforts can be effective in meeting our needs, and should we fail, that others can be relied upon to assist with or help provide for our needs, to preserve the integrity of the self. We live in a country and culture where the pendulum is stuck, rusted into a dangerously unrealistic position of self-reliance that socially engineers tragedy. It doesn’t take a global positioning satellite to locate the dead end of Nicki’s life. She was a victim of repeated doses of devastating bad luck and crucial disappointments. How was she to believe she had innate worth and value outside the proud, reinforced confines of her own mind, to feel she was more than a human hubcap, when all the efforts of her life’s checks were returned for “insufficient funds”? To try to rationalize and explain away her tragedy is to explain away our own humanity. If we can advance the concept of death with dignity, why shouldn't we begin to explore the complex of tangibles and intangibles that constitute life with dignity? We have become a warp drive, super speed, digital culture of high tech rationalists and realists whose batteries are too weak to show us the way, to illuminate the surrounding dark.. This is not just about a “political” position we can “agree to disagree” on. If we cannot find our way out of this dark empty box, we’re all going to die inside it. It really doesn’t matter what flag you wave or what anthem you sing. If the critical needs of the people in a country don’t come first, the needs of the country do not deserve consideration. They are not worth even a backward glance. This tragedy is not only about the fate of Nicki Dyer but about an abandonment which is systematically woven into the fabric of a culture that has surrendered the idea of anyone being of intrinsic and irreplaceable value. A human being, an American, one of us was destroyed through acts of omission and commission, in a culture we are creating. Her story demands and deserves to be looked at closely because it points back to the heart of our culture, the health of our social values, our way of life as “the greatest nation on earth.” It is not just another story of someone falling through the cracks, failed by the system. It is a story of an individual’s free fall through the system itself, in the quicksand of the public sector as well as the private sector, a landscape with no human sector, revealing it to be one big, wide-open abyss, waiting for anyone.

2010-01-07T16:25:00.000-08:00

god talk God Talk God Talk“We are the leopards. Those who follow will be Jackals and Sheep and each shall think themselves the salt of the earth”Guiseppe di Lampedusa ‘The Leopard’Each night before I sleep I turn to Jesus. I say, I’ve failed again. Then I turn to Buddha, I wink. Dennis McBrideGod groaned, shifted uneasily, pulled the cover up and turned slightly onto his left side back into a shallow sleep. Labored breathing preceded a small cough. He turned to his back and a weak smile turned into a grimace, which only partially faded. After a while he inched over to his right side, the corners of his mouth struggling, and then in the middle of a deep sigh, he coughed, sputtered, and abruptly rose to his elbows, his hazel eyes flying open. “Huh! What!” he muttered. He stared blankly for a minute, then relaxed as he realized he was in his familiar futon bed under his favorite quilt with the picture of Bambi and the great Stag. He lay back down and leisurely glanced over at the cosmic digital. It said l99l. He felt an annoyed confusion rise up to threaten his usually limitless calm. He knew he’d set the alarm for 2875. “What the hell’s going on?” he said, louder than he’d intended. Then it hit him sharply. “They’ve been praying again,” he said suddenly to the empty room, “God damn it, they’re all praying again! The damn fools have started another necessary war in my name. Where the hell...” The door opened slowly. Biman Chan, the century clerk, entered quietly, “So sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to see if you, too, had been disturbed.” “The others, too?” God inquired pointedly. “Not all,” said Biman, “Just Allah so far. I haven’t been able to check on Buddha, but I didn’t hear any sound passing his room.” “Well, you needn’t bother,” said God, “He never gets inconvenienced. There’s a lesson in there about choosing your words carefully when it comes to job descriptions. All that emphasis on Karma and the Void worked out just ducky for his sleep. Well, where is it this time?” “I’m afraid it’s in the Middle East, “ Biman said quietly. “It seems there was a dispute about land and oil and… “Christ,” God interrupted, “I just don’t understand it. I left more than enough of everything for everyone. All they had to do was limit their numbers, wait for the next harvest, and divide things up. Instead, they’re strangling the soil, turning my blue air brown and reproducing like lemmings hungry for the sea. Be fruitful and multiply does not mean screw your way to mass suicide. And this abortion thing is becoming a luxury dilemma. They’ve got to get a handle on this, this... what do they call it?...” “Fucking,” said Biman softly. “”Yes, fucking,” said God. He started to continue, but Allah appeared at the door, dark, stern, aloof, then bowed perfunctorily and entered. “I, too, was awakened for the same reason you were and could not help overhearing your voices. Personally, and though I mean no disrespect, I have always felt that Jesus committed a few significant errors with his slight-of-spirit performances. I mean, what could the poor multitudes think, being fed with next to nothing, the lame and blind cured by command, even the very dead raised. What could they think but that there was no real need to conserve, abundance was behind every bush, within eventual reach of all. No! They need to be told they’re in the hard place, and they need to be controlled severely to survive in it.” “Excuse me, did you say ‘Lord’s place?” inquired God happily. “No. Hard place. I said hard place,” Allah replied sternly. “Oh,” said God sadly. “Anyway, I just don’t understand why they’re so afraid of running out all the time.” God rose from the bed, went to the closet and picked out a dark brown bathrobe with green trees on it (the closet revealed a fondness for earth colors, extending even to brown underwear) and started back to the bed, then hesitated, took the robe back to the closet and picked out a rare blue one with polka dot stars on it, then returned to the bed. “I mean, I told Jesus to tell them there was nothing to fear, you know, to take heart, so to speak.” Allah eagerly interrupted, “But even Jesus despaired when he was there, and again, I mean no offense, but you may remember we discussed this at that first department meeting before the beginning, the one where Buddha came up with that idea about desire causing suffering. I recall him saying that he had reservations about just how much the mind should be allowed to...” “...know of a future without seeing it,” said Buddha, entering softly. “The mind is a dangerous place for a tree house, especially when the vision is impaired,’ is what I believe l said, and in all honesty, I’ve yet to be convinced otherwise. And, incidentally, I was misquoted on that ‘desire causing suffering’ thing. I said it’s not getting what you desire that causes suffering. You can see how sloppy quoting can put a whole wrong spin on things, and if you doubt that you can talk to Jesus.” His wonderful eyes searched the room and lighted upon a soft wide satin sofa which he eased himself into. “And incidentally, Allah, you’re wrong. I believe the messy fact of the matter is, they’re not going to survive, and they desperately need to be shown how to do that.” He turned to God. ‘You put them in time and kill them with random abandon, and you wonder why their main suit is scarcity. I try to teach them to relax, to steer them inward toward abundance.” “Oh, is that what you call it?” God interjected, his voice rising. “I go to all the trouble and no small expense to come up with a stellar sparkling creation, and you teach them to ignore it. What’s the point in a parade if no one bothers to look? Meditation, hogwash!” “You’re taking this much too personally,” said Buddha. “I was merely trying to teach them to cope with your creation.” “Cope,” interjected God angrily. “Life is a gift, not a chore.” “Evidently you haven’t read the latest Stanford studies showing rather conclusively that mildly depressed people see reality most accurately. It turns out that your dubious gift of thought is used mostly to sustain positive, self enhancing illusions about the self and its fate. And then there are the one hundred thousand suicides a year, by conservative estimate, I might add, since you refuse to release the books. Evidently the mind is a dangerous thing to take for a walk.”“Which simply shows,” interjected God, “That they’re not seeing reality at all.” “Exactly my point.” said Buddha. “You’ll remember I was in favor of full enlightenment at the start. None of your frantic evolving schemes. But no, you had to give your little soul things a mind of gradually increasing awareness, which is a recipe for a mess at best. And, as if evidence was needed, the twentieth century is exhibit A. One hundred million of them killed by their own hand.” “All right,” said God. “I admit their faith seems to have faltered a bit, but...” “Faith,” said Buddha, frowning. “You forget how little your little people are. They can’t see that far. Do you thing it’s a coincidence that your impetuous little land mass America puts ‘In God We Trust’ on their money? There’s your faith, and as for your sacred world and nifty Nature, they’ve turned it into a dollar and they are spending it. You’ve been sleeping through much of this century-- when the gods are away, the people do not play, they destroy. It’s what your attachment to them blinds you to. It’s the suck and pull of the want. They can’t handle it.” “That’s really quiet nearsighted of you,” said God. “You forget they’re still in infancy, learning to walk, so to speak. The brain is still a planted seed, mind is just starting to sprout mind, they don’t even know what it’s for yet, still using phrases like heart and head, thought and feeling.” He shook his head back and forth sadly, then picked up a tray on his nightstand full of macaroons and daisies and ate one of each, then offered it to Allah, who politely declined. “I’m fasting this week. I’m afraid the war took more out of me than I’d realized, so many losses.” “They were just being obedient to your will,” God gently prodded, reaching for another macaroon before offering the tray to Buddha, “Which, if you don’t mind my pointing out, is a bit humorless.” “A bit too uniform and severe is the point, I believe,” interjected Buddha, refusing the tray of macaroons and daisies. “In fact, you might want to look into the connection between the severity of your image and the magnitude of the losses that have so grieved you.” “I see nothing improper in my image. After all, I’m merely trying to keep up with God,” responded Allah, his aloofness unraveling slightly. “I refer only to some of the more extreme measures you’ve taken,” replied Buddha.“The cutting off of hands for stealing, killing for adultery, applied only to women, not to mention the general enslavement of the female half of the species. My heavens, that’s Middle Ages psychosis. What part of sick is it that seems to escape you? Want and need, food and sex, that’s the very fuel of your cherished magic show. You punish people for being obedient to the deepest vital impulses of your manifest will. I fail to see even a hint of heart or a trace of understanding in your attitude...” “That’s just because,” interrupted Allah, “you are so cavalier about the gravity of existence. On closer examination your celebrated compassion turns out to be a thinly veiled stoic indifference. It is because the conditions of their existence contain such strong and terrifying forces that severe regulation and control is called for.. And besides, God started it all with that Old Testament rhetoric, ‘plucking out eyes that offend’ and such. And then I heard about those Commandments, a whole list of things they must and mustn’t do. Well, I could feel a morality and fear gap developing. All of his people were scared straight and I was falling behind. What else could I do?” “Don’t throw the blame back to me,” yelled God, putting down a half-eaten macaroon. “I was merely trying to set examples, a kind of guideline for good behavior.” Buddha cleared his throat suddenly, did a small swift clockwise swivel of his stomach, then deftly lifted his majestic weight off the satin sofa and ambled over to the tray of macaroons and daisies. “On second thought, those daises look irresistible, I mean almost irresistible. Now, as far as this talk about proper behavior, I’m partial to the poet who said, ‘Those who worry about morality ought to.’ What was his name, Hugh, Hewitt, something like that?” “Hugo, Richard Hugo,” said God. “Frankly, I’ve never entirely understood poets; silly alchemists always trying to turn gold into Gold. Hugo was often subject to dark spells of irreverence. Still has them, refuses counseling.” “Good,” replied Buddha. “Squirrels and poets should stay away from counselors. Their urgent ways are attendant to their needs. They require support, not correction, which is the problem with much of your ethical hygiene, too antiseptic. Remember that fellow, the Christian missionary and ornithologist, I forget his name, tried to publish a book entitled “Good and Bad Birds of North America.’ Well, you get my point.” “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said God, slightly irritated. “I think you’re treating a serious matter rather lightly.” “On the contrary,” responded Buddha, “You’re the one who has made a relatively light matter deadly serious.” “Life is deadly serious,” said God, his voice rising, “I made it that way. Life is a masterpiece, a great painting that...” A voice from the hallway interrupted him: “...That was painted by a blind man in a wind tunnel with Alzheimer’s.” It was Janis Joplin. “Pardon my intruding, but I can’t resist souls in heat or anything else for that matter, which by the way is why I so loved the Big Bang, the whole universe in heat. Radical theater, a bit pretentious, but delicious fun. Incidentally, Buddha, I quite agree with you about the counselors and I would add gurus and prophets to the list. Like I used to say, never listen to people who tell you what you are doing on the physical plane, they are not on it.” Janis sauntered in, -small, olive dark and cat-electric in a blue aqua low cut with brilliant rainbow-colored pearls. She walked quickly over to Buddha with a puppy-like incessance and brushed his soft white cheek with her red lips. “Hi, hon, was passing this way and just decided to stop off and spend some of this interminable time with you.” Buddha’s soft cheeks glowed with the color of red blood coursing through live veins, his serene eyes sparkling with the joy of seeing what one wants to see. “What a dear, dear surprise,” he said, elated. “Come sit here by me. You’re a jewel in the void.” Pleased, she sat next to him. He continued, “I was just discussing the demerits of artificial decency. It’s always deadly in prescribed doses.” “Yes, I overheard you in the hall and rather agree with you,” said Janis. “Do you mean to stand there and tell me that you don’t believe in morals?” said God accusingly. “Precisely. I can only stand bad taste when I’m in love, and at present I’m not.” Janis replied tartly. “The ones who cause most of the trouble down there are the ones who never go off the block, whose souls never go to the deep, frightening, wonderful, unnamable places, never let themselves have any experience unless it can be talked about in public, to approval. The cowards in the dirty white hats who made it all the way to death without having a near-life experience. I recall Jesus saying after he returned that there were people down there who should never have been people.” Buddha continued, “It is true that he was just not himself for a long time when he came back, taking that bottle of Jack Daniels to his room and not coming out for a week. Never really has returned to form. Still wanders the halls at night muttering something about ‘hopeless damn fools’ under his breath. He took the whole thing too seriously, too personally.” “Frankly,” said God, “It wouldn’t do you any harm to take things with some personal investment. Your airy indifference is annoying to more than a few. ‘Cosmic cop-out’ is how you’re referred to behind your back. I ran into Abbie Hoffman in the mess hall a while back, and when your name came up he said something about ‘the sensitivity of a dead Republican.’ You should be more concerned about your image.” “Abbie is like so many heavenly activists,” said Buddha, “Still bitter because their cause died before they did. Anyway, I think you confuse indifference with detachment. They’re not at all the same.” “Frankly,” said Janis, jumping in, “I think you’re both kind of stingy with your sandbox, all your ‘do’s and ‘don’ts and taboos. At least Brahma and Vishnu throw in a little novelty and spice things up, though I admit, Shiva gets carried away sometimes.” She stood swiftly and performed a crisp twirl, then went hurriedly into a one-two-three, one-two, two-one variation resembling a fused fox-trot- jitterbug-waltz, stopped suddenly and bowed from the waist. “Reality is a filthy tyrant in tight pants, and now I’m late for my nails appointment. See you around campus, ta-ta” She did a hop-skip through the door, down the hall, humming a baroque blues version of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ Allah arose with a ceremonious disgust, “I find such displays disrespectful and disruptive. She should remember her station, which reminds me, I have a department head meeting with Mohammed. Seems he’s worried this women’s movement is getting out of hand, and I quite agree. Good day.” He straightened his dark tunic, turned stiffly and left. After allowing the silence to linger a while, Buddha remarked, “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but he’s always had a problem. He’s so...so...” his hazel eyes turned green and scanned the ceiling, “I don’t know, so religiously joyless. Must have been something in his childhood. “ Buddha shook his head and sighed as Biman Chan entered hastily through the door. “Pardon again, please. I was asked to convey a message from Talowa; could lower your voice, they’re having a meeting in conference room C, down the hall.” “Talowa.” Who the hell is Talowa, and who are ‘They” said God. Biman blushed slightly, “Talowa, Tanka, Kithcie Manitou and Waken. They are American Indian Deities--the Lakota, Iroquois, and Ojibway tribes. More are due to arrive shortly.” God looked suddenly disturbed, like a janitor who’s just had his mop bucket overturned on work already done. “Well, tell them to keep their door closed if they’re so fussy.” “Very good,” said Biman, turning to leave. “What are they meeting about?” said God in a matter of fact voice, trying to mask his curiosity. “It’s concerning Reclamation, sir,” said Biman. “Reclamation?” said God abruptly. “What’s that?” “Well,” said Biman hesitantly, “it seems they feel that you have received preferential prominence of late, and they want a fairer representation. ‘Affirmative Action’ is what they call it these days. It seems they feel things were in better shape down there before the white man brought in (Biman’s voice trailed off as he mumbled) your presence.” “Pure ridiculous insolence,” bellowed God. “It’s just that something more controlled and responsible was needed than that ‘Great Spirit’ stuff. They’re just being adolescent. They can caucus all they want as far as I’m concerned.”Biman heard him mutter ‘pesty savages’ under his breath as his voice trailed off. “Very good,” said Biman, bowing. He turned to leave, then remembered something, paused and turned back. “There is one other thing. The Archangel Michael is requesting a leave of absence. He’d like to return to earth.” “What, again? He was just there. I distinctly recall...” “Uh, that’s just it, sir,” interrupted Biman. “It seems he’s, well, sort of fallen in love.” “Love! Love!” said God indignantly. “My archangel? What ridiculous nonsense ? He’s supposed to be there on divine missions, not playing around in their tragic romantic mud puddles.” “All I know,” said Biman, “is that he said something about finally finding genuine innocence, an absence of, I believe he said, toxic sophistication. A woman he met in a bar, something about having rabbit ears on her TV and fake paneling on the walls; knotty pine, I believe he said.” “Well you tell him I want to see him up here first thing in the morning,” said God firmly. “He’s become as attached to the world as a drunken Buddhist. No offense to you,” he said, turning to Buddha, “it’s just an expression.” “Very good,” said Biman. He turned to leave and bumped into Janis, who was absent-mindedly inspecting the backs of her nails as she entered the room. “Excuse me,” said Biman, embarrassed. “Oh, don’t be silly,” Janis exclaimed, smiling, “especially in front of Buddha. ‘No accidents,’ you know.” She winked at Biman as he hurriedly left. “He’s really very cute. Wherever did you find him? By the way, I heard Lucifer is in the house and may stop by,” she said, beaming mischievously. “That’s enough” said God exasperated, “I do not have to put up with him. He is not welcome here. We have to retain our standards, our professionalism.” God rose and began pacing nervously back and forth in front of the picture window, fidgeting with his bathrobe belt. His right eyelid began twitching spasmodically. “He can go somewhere else. There’s plenty of nice...” A solid clear transcendent voice halted his. “I believe you’ve confused the kingdom of Heaven with Alabama l955.” It was Lucifer. He appeared suddenly at the door and stood firmly under the transom, tall, slender, and serenely self-assured in a smooth maroon suit with a purple silk shirt and lavender vest. He moved in with a casual authority toward the most seductive soft chair. An old unending smile teased around his lips, revealing a kinky tenderness, a religious, sensual, tranquil greed. He owned his will, and he relished the possession. He sat down. “How are the good old Gods this delicious day, everything under control?” God felt a painful hate rise up inside like molten lava, but managed to subdue it into a feigned curtness. “I’m quite well, thank you, I always am.” “Good, good,” said Lucifer loudly, “I wouldn’t want it otherwise. I just stopped by to pay my respects.” “Well, I’m thoroughly delighted,” said Janis, her face flushed with excitement. “”You’ve always been a kind of psycho-spiritual Zorro to me.” “Thank you,” said Lucifer growing taller. “Well, I’m not interested in your respects,” said God adamantly. “Frankly, “I’m not interested in your company, or in having anything to do with you,”“Oh come now, don’t be so modest,” Lucifer responded casually. ‘Light and darkness, goodness and evil; I, the Lord God, do all these things.’ Isaiah! Ring a bell?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied God awkwardly. “Dear Buddha,” Lucifer continued, switching his attention, “forgive my delayed acknowledgment. How very good to see you.” “Likewise, I’m sure,” said Buddha graciously. “You always add to the festivities.” Lucifer gave an appreciative nod and continued, “Now where were we? Oh yes, perhaps God would assist me in shedding some light on the dark subject of Shadow.” “What Shadow? What are you talking about?” said God, still annoyed. “Well,” said Lucifer, “let’s start with the fact that I can never seem to find a room here at the Royal Parnassus. I was told by an inside source that it is a result of your instructions. If that is the case, I don’t know what to think. It’s either pious posturing or very bad manners. In either case, you should be ashamed.” “Ashamed!” exploded God. “I don’t have to listen to this blasphemy, and I would add, since that sort of brings up the subject of bad manners, you were not invited here. I would not want to be where I was not wanted.” “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” said Lucifer happily. “I’m used to serial denial and rejection; it’s my favorite invitation, though it usually centers around sex and money.” “Sex is sacred, and you’re right for once, you’ve done enough damage in that area.” said God accusingly. “Sacred! Damage!” said Lucifer, amused, “I’m just adding balance to your sloppy sanctimonious creation. While placing yourself at the center for top billing gives you excessive prominence it also creates confusion. They take their cars to a mechanic, their pipes to a plumber, their clothes to a tailor, their shoes to a cobbler, pets to a veterinarian, money to bankers, hair to a beautician, teeth to a dentist, bodies to doctors, their minds to psychiatrists, their souls to priests, but they’re shamed into hiding their sexual needs from commerce. That’s not merely irrational, it’s controlled hysteria. “That’s disgusting,” said God indignantly. “Well, you’re entitled to your opinion,” said Lucifer, “Which, by the way, is more than you gave to your poor little humans.” “What do you mean,?” asked God sharply. “I mean Freedom” said Lucifer. “Your Christian thing has made most of them emotionally and spiritually frozen. I know a woman in St.Louis who has spent most of her adult life at home. Won’t leave it. Thinks she’s escaping your omniscience. ‘Santa Claus God’ she calls you to her therapist: making your list and checking it twice. But we’re getting back to shadow again. What I mean to say is that most of the lives down there have all the risk, adventure and dull excitement of a Christian taffy pull.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about with this incoherent babble,” said God, his voice starting to rise. “Furthermore, I don’t have to be ashamed of my treatment of you. There is no delicate way of putting this, but as things worked out, I’m Good and you’re Bad.” God stiffened abruptly, straightened the collar of his bathrobe and looked out the picture window. “I do not have to have anything to do with you, nor do I....” “Excuse me,” said Biman, entering sheepishly. “Begging your pardon again, but the Muse is outside and would like a moment of your time.” “Now?” said God, annoyed. “You mean she just showed up unannounced? Have her come back in the morning, and next time see that she calls for an appointment.” “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Buddha. “If you’ll recall, that is part of her job description. She has an inherent aversion to schedules appointments and reservations. I humbly advise, if you want to know what she has to say, you’d better receive her when she comes. ‘Now’ is all she understands.” “Oh, very well,” said God dejectedly. ‘Ask her to come in, but just for a few...” Before he could finish, she simply appeared, barely visible in a long quiet dress of white silk and soft blond woven straw, her amber eyes glowing from out of short brown hair and fair skin. She spoke with a calm assured firmness. “I won’t detain you long, as my business is brief. I just want to turn in my resignation, effective immediately. Things have not lived up to my expectations, and I’ve decided to move on to larger pastures.” “Larger pastures! Resign!” said God, incredulous. “What’s the meaning of this? It’s...why, that’s absurd, irrational. I insist you see one of our therapists before we have any further discussion,” “I’m sorry,” said the Muse in a soft sure voice, “but my mind is made up. I have no need of a therapist. Psychology is to experience as diagramming sentences is to poetry, not without application, but essentially irrelevant at the deeper levels. You see, one day I just stopped and looked at myself in the mirror. I saw my soul’s scar tissue in the sagging skin and sunken eyes. I knew I just couldn’t go on any more on anti-depressants and dying hope, its simply no way to live. The worst poverty I’ve found is of the imagination. I mean no disrespect, but you’ve either made a tragic oversight or there is a significant problem in your quality control. I’ve only been able to get through to one-tenth of one percent. For the rest it’s all a frosting Hallmark hustle. You should see the dreadful picture of Jesus that hangs in sixty three percent of the homes. He looks like a cross between a chairman of the board with a perm halo and a well-behaved hippie.” She moved wearily over to the ornate dining room table, sat down sadly in a straight-back chair and continued. “One typical evening last week, before I made my decision, I was in Des Moines, Iowa, and made a random stop at a home in the suburbs. I found the father sitting in the living room with the children. I went up to him on the couch and whispered slightly behind and below his right ear where the tunnel bone to the mind is. I said, “You’re alive,” pause-nothing. I raised my voice, “You live now, you breathe in and out this minute and the time is coming when you won’t.” Pause--nothing. ‘The woman next to you with the small small child who anchors you to this world; loosened, all loosened and lost.’ Then I waited and watched, watched for a sign, just a hint of awareness, a flicker, a small twitch in the ear, anything. Slowly something began to happen inside him. He opened his mouth and said, ‘Honey, would you switch the channel, Jeopardy is on channel eight!’ “From there I went to a college dorm and found a sophomore in his room alone. I whispered in his ear, ‘When the wind blows the trees argue.’ I went around to see the front of his face -- nothing. I lost my temper and yelled, ‘You idiot! There is summer on earth, be amazed!’ Still nothing. His mind returns to his last basketball game. I realized he was as good as hopeless. It was hopeless! I could make it snow gold and they would just worry about driving in it. It seems everything has gone from bad to desperately bad. And after this last war, a ‘desert storm’ mentality took hold in the popular culture, creating a kind of widespread pathetic sub-species. It was shortly after that when I made my decision.” “I just don’t understand,” she continued. “Their little clay-baked reality is so much shorter and homelier than fantasy’s alternative twirl. I’m beginning to think you may have made a mistake in not setting them free from the knowledge, I mean the rumor of you. I think the imagination’s poverty is tied to not being able to get to their own experiences, to find their own truth about their own experience. They are instructed, urged, and threatened how to think, feel, and behave from the beginning, so that in the deep layers of the mind they mistrust and fear the self. Their authentic heart is stillborn. What could be a vital alive radiance becomes a cold gray unsure ness. They end up trying to take cues for existence from others. Culture finally overwhelms them. The price they pay for staying huddled around the campfire’s group safety is not to know the wonderful unexplored forests of the self. When they wander away from the warm fires and the insecurity rises up, they feel the fear as a weakness rather than a call to deeper strength, and they scurry back.” Slowly the Muse rose from the table and walked over to God, who was sitting on the side of the futon, his head between his knees. She tossed an envelope next to him. “I hope you will not take this personally. I know things take time, but I can’t wait any longer. My self esteem is at minus two-hundred and falling, and I need to attend to that before the damage is beyond repair. I’ve written an acceptable cover story for press release, so you needn’t worry about the publicity, and I’m sending you one of my new grad students to take over. Mira. She’s my favorite understudy, long dark hair and eyes that flash bright sparks.” She looked out the window at the constellation Orion. “Well, I see that I’m late for an interview. I have to run. I’ll keep in touch. Good-bye.” With a flurry she vanished. Biman had remained motionless in a corner of the room while she spoke, trying to be invisible, but now began to feel a self-consciousness as silence filled the room following her departure. He made his way to the entrance, stepped out, closed the door quietly and stood in the hall shaking his head in a slow back-and-forth motion. “It is no wonder there is such confusion and sadness down there,” he thought. “They have been parented by dysfunctional Gods. But then, they, too, haven’t had it easy, to have to do it all from nothing, no role models. It’s really a miracle that it works as well as it does. Still, it is sad. Perhaps if he hadn’t made them in his image, or at least waited until it was improved. But then, they are still evolving down there. I suppose you have to start somewhere. I guess you just have to have faith that it will work out eventually. Faith is trickier here, though, when you’re face to face. It’s not good to see too closely. That’s a blessing I think they’ve overlooked down there. True mercy is not knowing. Oh well, it’s not my worry,” he thought gratefully. “Two thousand more years and I’ll be retiring. Get a little cottage over on Alpha Centauri, out near the edge, quiet and peaceful.” He looked at his watch. “Almost time for the late movie,” he thought. “ ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ tonight--been looking forward to that, always lifts my spirits; Atticus, that good lawyer and father, on the porch with Jem and Scout, shedding gentle wisdom.” Then he thought of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. “Life should learn to imitate art better,” he said softly, out loud, shaking his head sadly. He continued walking quietly down the hall talking to himself in a low voice. “I think I’ll get a dog for the cottage, an Irish sheep dog or one of those little brown and white terriers. And maybe a cat. Yes, I’ll get a cat too.” Posted by Dennis G. McBride at 4:25 PM 0 comments if (window['tickAboveFold']) {window['tickAboveFold'](document.getElementById("latency-8337808677688900035")); } Saturday, February 26, 2011 essays 1-Predicting the Present in America--2. An American Suicide Predicting The Present In America Notes from a Non-Participant in The Front Lines of Ignorance Introduction I didn’t actually learn about the events of 9/11 till nearly three months after the event. Through a combination of circumstances of both accident and design I found myself with an opportunity to conduct an experiment—namely how to be a modern day ‘information’ Robinson Crusoe’ without an island, in fact in a rather large metropolitan city. All I knew was that something somewhere had happened and I decided under the urging of some perverse inner imp, to see how long I could maintain that virginity. I would eliminate radio and television, avoid the newspaper headlines in stores, wear earplugs in public and deliver stern warnings to friends to say nothing to me about ‘IT.’ I woke up slowly around noon on the day of ‘9/11’ and still lying in bed called the mail order Co. to see what had happened to something I had ordered more than two weeks ago. They put me on hold to check my order and had me listen to the broadcast of their choice. It happened to be news. Before I could protect my mind the searing image of something about terrorists and people jumping out of the windows of burning buildings was engraved into my memory. A sudden force of emotion rushed through me. I threw the phone down in rage and kept it at a fairly inaudible distance till the lady returned and I finished my business. Next, I called the phone Co. to check on my last bill and heard a recording saying that they were closed due to the National emergency. I resisted the impulse to turn on the radio or television. I did not know who had committed the act or what the act was, or what their motivations were for doing it, but it suddenly seemed to me that they had released something that had been silently residing and growing both within me and the world, a loud scream of frustration, anger, and rage, that had finally become articulated into visible tragedy. The first uncensored feeling to rise up in me was, ‘Maybe, at last, everyone’s in the same boat. Maybe we can finally get America’s attention off the ‘business as usual’ stock market (that Frankenstein creation which doesn’t cope with ‘uncertainty’ any better than its creator) and onto human agendas? Maybe a thunder and lightening voice has parted the clouds and yelled down angrily, “nobody needs health insurance, all they need is health care”! While I was lying there wrestling with curiosity and the urge to turn on the TV and contend with the spin cycle of emotions I knew that would generate I found myself suddenly interested in the space I was occupying, its feeling. It began to feel like the vitality of my awareness was being enhanced or sharpened in some way, imagination given access to new possibilities, a cocoon containing a kind of infinite permission that had formerly been hidden. There was a kind of giddy lightness in this novel ignorance, an almost illicit sweetness that seemed to carry within it new aspects of reality ordinarily denied to us. I decided to continue my quarantine of ‘current events.’ What I didn’t know suddenly seemed as important as what I did know, just as negative numbers have a function in math. It felt as though I had discovered a secret form of occult happiness that hovered in those dim borders at the far edge of imagination’s yearning, teasing me like a ghost wind. I began to feel like a spy in reverse, carrying an important secret without content. On the third day, while I was taking my daily walk, someone stopped me in his car for directions, asking me if he was heading west. It surprised me somewhat when I had to tell him that I didn’t know. After he drove off, it occurred to me that the only west I knew was what was west of me, where my west was, and as I turned, so did it. I felt suddenly thrilled that the universe had placed a private little subversion inside of me, my own unique unnatural center in the natural order of things. I began to see how tissue thin the mind’s autonomy really is: how often we were pushed, pulled, and directed by remote control, reducing the intellectual freedom over many parts of our lives to that of a Wells Fargo security guard, a plastic, inflatable, all purpose human being. Our mind is continuously being subtly raped, involuntarily violated, seeded by other people’s thoughts, ideas, events, music, or random conversations. I remembered back to my childhood years as a church acolyte when they told me things about a God and a Jesus I could not know they could not know. What a rare and precious thing it is, and how hard won, just to know ‘what happened when you left your room and how it really felt.’ The powerful pressures which surround us, both intentionally and unintentionally, tell us which way to go and what to do when we get there. They would rather ‘your’ life not be the focus of your life. They want you to substitute appropriate response for authentic response, to get on with your life’ by leaving it behind, to simply fit into the world as it is, like a carrot or head of lettuce or a chair. we all have our own private map of what makes us feel sad or happy, nervous or relaxed, excited or bored, along with our own private ‘treasure chest’ of fantasies. They are our ‘true north’ and if we lose touch with them it is not a small loss which is why the continual struggle to be the author of our own experience is so vital. ‘Author’ means authority, authorizing your own response to your own experience, becoming your own Pope, Judge, Mailman, News-anchor, and President. For example, I have been patiently waiting through the interminable dreariness of sports to see one real miracle, just once. I wasn’t waiting for the last place team to upset the first place one, the weak hitter to hit the home run with bases loaded, I was waiting for that player who would suddenly turn with the ball in his hand and put it in the opponent’s basket, someone who would say, ‘what the hell we’re forty points ahead,” or just “why not!” I went through the library’s entire history of sports journals, newspapers, and biographies, even Ripley’s ‘Believe it Or Not’ and there wasn’t a mention of anything even remotely suggestive of such a miracle. I haven’t seen this miracle for the same reason you don’t see people in the bowling alley trying to leave as many pins standing as possible. In many ways it would be a more challenging game, requiring more refined dexterity, but they aren’t aware that tradition and unconscious competition have programmed them. It’s literally ‘unthinkable’ not to compete, partly because you never feel the chain collar around your neck till you move away from the stake and you won’t move away from it because ‘the most skillful manipulation always appears as choice to those who are targeted.’ The only way you’re taught to play the game is to win or lose. No wayward, spontaneous, playful impulse ever whispers in your soul’s ear. Still, there is no future in giving up so I’m still waiting patiently for the miracle and as long as imagination is part of us, there is hope, because that’s its job. The imagination is always running a concurrent, alternate history to what is going on around it, like that girl who lived up in a tree to protest logging. The best part of us is often up in a tree somewhere refusing to come down. I realized I’ve never felt proud or possessive about my country, that I do not live in a ‘Country’ I want to be mine, but in a fiercely competitive urban landscape that generates tension, conflict, and anxiety as efficiently as if it had been designed for it. Personally I am sick of our serious Gods and serious Devils, our serious Democrats and serious Republican sitting in their serious Roman Senate refusing health care or housing to their citizens, who are unable to see, acknowledge, or care about realities that others live in. I’m sick of people assuming they have the right to conscript me because it’s the place on the planet I happen to find myself trying to survive in. I am sick of our obsession with ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence,’ of always needing to ‘blame’ or ‘excuse’ and of the surplus of contemporary hazards surrounding living and loving and needing in a society preoccupied with an overly sanitized version of emotional- psychological hygiene and fears of co-dependence, sick of a culture that can’t seem to do anything well aside from weapons, microwave ovens, and surveillance technology, whose taste and offerings in nearly everything from the erotic to politics is mostly unfriendly, hostile, alienating, or just plain bad, and I’m sick that I’ve had the misfortune to live into another period in our country when the ‘scoundrels refuge’ of Flag waving has become the political equivalent of the Hula-Hoop. America is a ‘business warrior.’ It is in a hurry and its power is real and thoughtless and frightening. Its response to those who can’t keep up is the small, inconspicuous plastic containers for donations at supermarket checkout counters. The inadequate always seems to be sufficient here. Three times as many children are committing suicide now as compared to thirty years ago. They see people living in shopping carts and tents, executions challenging football as the national pastime and only competing for our attention with the race to seduce and manipulate consumers, or build more and bigger prisons. These children see a medical system that is not organized to simply deliver health care, but rather a confused nervous system that can’t decide if it wants to check the blood pressure in bed 5 or the day’s receipts. This is the fact and the evidence, what America wants them to swear allegiance to!? wants God to ‘Bless – an America that is handed back and forth between family dynasties, from ‘Roosevelt’s’ to ‘Kennedy’s’ to the ‘Bush’s’ like it was some kind of ‘Bonanza’ ranch that Ben Cartwright was going to pass on to ‘Hoss’ and then ‘Little Joe;’ an America where elections are sudden death business transactions, business ‘Gunfights at an O.K. Corral,’ It is not Okay. I recently organized an event for children who were reading poetry that they had written, and a nine year old boy named Wes Bently read his two line poem, ‘The Empire,’ ‘Ask the repetitive Empire for food. It will answer “no.” What had really happened on 9/11? Literally not knowing I decided to compound my ignorance by hazarding a guess. The famous attorney Clarence Darrow said his job was to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Well, apparently the comfortable have been afflicted. We have been attacked I presumed by some members from a neighboring tribe, whose serious God did not like our serious God partially because out God was richer, stronger, and more powerful. Someone said accurately that, “we can only be as savage as we are absolutely serious.” As I walked about I saw flags flowing in profusion decorating sorrow’s random parade of anger and fear. The anger and fear are not new but now they have taken shape like a newly formed team with bright uniforms that has just found a worthy and needed challenge. But all this begs the question- Was everything OK the day before this happened? Where was our attention directed the day before, besides Wall Street? What was our anger directed to, besides the few remaining ‘Welfare’ recipients? It seems somehow important to separate people who die in any country from that country, to eliminate connections that are not deeply central to the powerful event of death, or at least make them peripheral. A songwriter recently wrote, “someone’s dying in Canada, and the leaves are drenched with rain.” What’s important is the dying and its echo of leaves drenched in rain’ not the accidents of geography. Shouldn’t flags everywhere be flown at half mast everyday for those everywhere who perish from less overtly violent, less deliberate, acts of commission or omission that range from exposure, homelessness, malnutrition and hunger, uncovered illness, to the infinite, invisible effects of poverty, which are an undeniable product of our ‘Democracy in action.’ I happened to learn later that the President said, “You are either for us or against us.” The President needs a lens adjustment. If, between wars, any young soldier were to go to a nearby phone booth and call this Veterans Dept. and inquire if he and his ‘sacred’ family would be guaranteed health care in the future, following his service years, he would be told ‘No, it’s not part of the plan.’ The soldier is really just defending a large corporation that doesn’t offer benefits. Such a country with its obsessive ‘narcissus’ anthem chanting ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the greatest nation of them all’ is not really a homeland at all, it is just another land mass where those without stock options or adequate income are trying to survive amid flag waving that is the political equivalent of the hula-hoop. To ask only ‘what you can do for your country’ and not what it does for its citizens is an idiots quiz. My deep feelings about any country with such a ‘plan,’ a country that wants it citizens to serve it but refuses to serve them is anger, as it would be in any uncaring abusive relationship. Unfortunately ‘anger’ has become suspect in our ‘therapy age.’ There is much counseling on how to dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, ignore it, talk it away, reason it away, educate it away, meditate it away, pray it away, love it away, and gene-therapy it away, anything but how to listen to it. And terrorism, where does it live? Terror arises when we are exposed to either subtle or stark threats to vital areas of our well being we can’t respond to adequately or prevent, the mind and body’s absence of shelter and privacy, repeated frustration or blocked access to needed health care. It is not only what happens to us but what seems likely to happen. - the recurring cancer of worry around problems without solution,’--- “ I can’t pay the rent,” “The letter says they’re going to shut the heat and water off,” “They said we aren’t covered,” “Regret to inform you that you don’t qualify,”... Are not all the mental and emotional states of pressure, stress, and hopelessness which those conditions produce a drip torture form of terror?! Then what about ‘rage?’ Can’t most rage be ultimately traced back to a deep sense of powerlessness, loss, or humiliation in some form or another, of having eaten Alice’s mushroom that makes one smaller. Anger, violence, rage -- aren’t they all loud, searing messages of pain or wounds that have gone unacknowledged, damaged lives that have not been seen or cared about? Violence is nearly always a response to an intolerable situation, to love that has been denied in some material or spiritual form. While violence and rage and anger is not the face of love that we have been taught to recognize, it is, nevertheless, love speaking, loudly, from its other face of profound, intolerable disappointment.

Elephant Batters Train

2007-07-01T21:27:00.001-07:00

DHAKA, Bangladesh - An elephant whose calf was knocked down by a locomotive blocked the next train that passed and pummelled the engine until it could no longer run.

After banging her forehead against the engine for 15 minutes, the elephant walked off into the jungle, leaving about 200 passangers stranded for more than five hours, reports said Sunday. The incident occurred Friday night at Vanuygach, 120 miles northeast of Dhaka. The extent of the calf’s injuries were not known.

Boy In The Back Row, Baseball Cap On Backwards

2007-07-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, I told you I’d return,
but that’s all I said, remember!
Nothings really changed,
except the money changers are everywhere
and everyone’s fallen into step,
Homo-erectus become Homo-homogenous.
Well, this is it, I’m back, and that’s as far as it goes this time.
No walking on water, no healing, no disciples, no mountain sermon.
What did you expect anyway, with me hanging on that cross
bleeding to death? And you, what did you do? Weep and pray!
I didn’t want to start a religion! just get the nails out,
take me down, mend my wound, a little common kindness.
No! This time I’m going out for shortstop,
and I’m going to be so fucking good
you won’t believe your eyes.

Hating Walt Whitman

2007-07-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

“the only modern poet not to experience discord when he encountered the world.”
(overheard at a literary cocktail party.)

Article in the paper says, ‘Little league manager hangs self’
He had written to his wife that,
‘It wasn’t over my jealousy of Gehrig or Stengel, or Ruth.
It was that son of a bitch, Walt Whitman.
It doesn’t have to be explained, and if it has to be it can’t be.’

on page 3
‘Man found dead in empty lot.’
A note in his jacket pocket read,
‘Dearest Jim, I will never take my love away from you.
--P.S. I want you to come in my mouth.’ Love, Debbie.
Next of kin said he had been despondent since a woman had
left him for a celebrated scholar of Walt Whitman.

on page 8,
‘Woman jumps to death from fairgrounds Ferris wheel.’
Friends said she was an un-recovered alcoholic and had been
depressed after reading a biography of Walt Whitman.
The couple in the chair behind her said
‘she just kept rocking back and forth repeating
‘Lincoln, lilacs, and liquor’ over and over
and muttering something about ‘Dooryard’ and ‘Bloomed’ and ‘a blooming idiot’
and then she just jumped.’

In the obituaries it was noted that
‘Reginald Waters, famous local author of romance novels
died Monday of what was an apparent heart attack.’
He was found slumped over the unfinished transcript of
his latest novel in progress, ‘Rape, A Romance.’
He had evidently been working on the dedication page
which read, ‘to that god damn spiritual adept, Walt Whitman,
may he rest in anything but peace.’ His publisher declined comment.

An article in the celebrity section reported ‘Valuable manuscript found.’
“A diary of the late Dorothy Parker discovered by relatives.
opened in character with, “its easy to know fairly young
that you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with
T. S. Eliot but it takes a lifetime to hate Walt Whitman.”

(For Spaulding Gray, Dick Sanders, Verlena Orr, Pat Thomas, Kurt Vonnegurt)

Knowledge

2007-07-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

(for Andrea Yates)

They pointed at her,
“Witch,” they said.
Sarah was not a witch,
did not know anything about witches,
but the people who had always known her
who knew what she looked like, where she lived,
knew that her name was ‘Sarah’
said Sarah was a “Witch”
though they knew nothing really, absolutely nothing,
about being a witch or what a witch was,
except that it was the right name for their fear,
and they knew nothing, absolutely nothing,
about what it was like being Sarah, the way nothing,
absolutely nothing, can be known
about being another from seeing another,
by saying ‘another,’ saying ‘Sarah,’
but those who had no idea what a witch was,
who could not by themselves have imagined
one single thing about a ‘witch’
nevertheless believed she was a witch,
measuring the circumference of her guilt
with the tape of their ignorance
and those who called her witch, (and so) made her ‘witch,’
the way God made light saying ‘Light,’
said she had to be put to death by fire.

They did it because they could not feel the fire
the way you cannot feel it when someone
else’s hand touches the hot fire.

Sarah is given a last glass of water before the fire is lit.
She puts the glass to her open mouth and swallows.
Of the water and of herself her mind can follow either no farther.
She does not know who she is, where she came from, or where she is going.
She does not know what the water is,
or what it does inside her body,
her body, which she knows, really,
nothing about either,
except that the water she is swallowing
will not put its fire out.
She knows that.

Rehabilitation

2007-07-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

Humpty Dumpty
sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty
had a great fall.
All the King’s horses,
all the King’s men
tried to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again
so they could put him
back up on the wall,
where he was miserable,
where he had his great fall.

Victory at Iwo Jima

2007-07-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

I met a cognitive behavioral
psychologist in a tunnel.
I recognized the snapping fingers
and smart whistle,
the dry socket
where emotion had been.
“What’s your hurry?” he sneered.
“Childhood,” I replied. “Infancy.”
“Would you like to earn some money?”
“How?” I asked.
“I want to buy your personality,”
“What would you use it for?”
“Fill dirt,” he said, “It works great.”
“Why don’t you use the gravel in your heart,” I said.
“That’s what I made the hole with.”

Communion

2007-07-01T20:56:00.001-07:00

The Reverend Lon Whiteside stepped out of his car to stretch his legs at the Chevron station while waiting for his gas tank to be filled. he happened to notice that his neighbor, Franklin Skefield, one of his parishioners, was at the pump in front of him. The Reverend casually approached the open window of Mr. Skefield's car with a smile of friendly recognition and then opened his mouth to speak, bit it was birdsong that came out; precisely the call of the Maine yellow breasted thrush warbler.

The two men looked at each other in a startled awkwardness. The Reverend opened his mouth again and found himself articulating the high-pitched thrill of excitement he had experienced the previous night as his wife's hand had touched the tip of his penis. the sound of his rushing orgasm leaped toward his frightened parishioner. The shaken Reverend tipped his head politely toward Mr. Skefield and weakly escorted himself back to his own car. His small king of consciousness shook on its tiny island.

He pulled out of the gas station hurriedly and headed toward his church, intending to go over his notes for the next sermon, but he couldn't get away from what had happened. He didn't know what to tell himself. He frantically leafed through the index cards from his left hemisphere for a rational explanation, but could find nothing that reduced his anxiety, the terrifying suspicion that he was having a nervous breakdown, that he would begin hearing that dreaded phrase, 'Mental problem' whispered politely among the congregation. The Reverend turned on the car radio and scanned for the network news to distract himself. There was a presidential address about to begin, “...and the President has just entered the room flanked by his Secretary of State and is approaching the podium.”

There was a short silence and then he heard, “ladies and gentleman, the President of the United States.” Reverend Whiteside listened through another short silence and then heard the slight but unmistakable sound of a chuckle come through the radio. It continued and slowly grew into a louder, somewhat awkward sustained giggle, which then turned into a deep, uncontrolled, bizarre laughter, which grew in pitch and intensity into something maniacal. It had a quality about it that recalled something distant but familiar to the Reverend's startled mind. Then it struck him. It was the throated malicious laughter of the hyena. The radio interrupted with a message about experiencing technical difficulties, and then there was the sound of soothing background music.

The Reverend drove right past his church and headed home. He just wanted to crawl into bed with his wife's familiar body. When he arrived home, the lights were out and he quietly let himself in and then gratefully headed upstairs to their bedroom. He went inside and felt a rush of relief and then excitement at the sight of her laying on her right side, peacefully asleep. He took off his clothes, eased himself under the covers next to her, and placed his arm reassuringly over her, letting his hand fall onto her breast. A sound rose slowly out of his wife, a harsh, rumbling growl, a fiercely muted, threatening hiss,
feral, savage and wild.

Resurrection on the Romance Express

2007-07-01T20:53:00.002-07:00

You were radiant as a stained-glass Baptist window
when you held out the empty plate of your hungry eyes
for me to fill with the returned sign of my offering.
You said I placed in it only small change from the quarter of my heart,
trembling like a straw man before the risk-filled fires of desire,
not even enough to buy you one night’s lodging in a cold manger
“You’re not leaving me on a lonely cross for one,” you said,
handing back the nails with, “thanks anyway”
then climbing down from travail’s trite transcendence
to continue your search for someone who wasn’t
picking his nose during your 2nd or 3rd or next ‘coming.’
The heart must find the courage to make its choices.
Tonight I’ll rent ‘Trixie and Bubbles Fuck for Fun’ video
then go down to the Nob Hill tavern for
a fish sandwich and a plate of fries,
a meal I can afford,
that will fill me up without threatening,
because you were no angel either
‘counting the ways’ you needed me to shine
like your own private pearl.
But tears aren’t enough to fill anyone
and nobody’s perfect,
even Jesus found it quicker and easier
to resurrect the dead than the living,
besides there ought to be more signs posted
so you know where the hell the
church is and when you’re in it.

Rebuttal to e.e.

2007-07-01T20:53:00.001-07:00

Somewhere I have unfortunately traveled, sadly beyond
any experience your eyes have their cunning,:
in your most frail gesture are things which implement their plans,
and which I cannot touch because they are too slippery

Your slightest look easily will undo me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always wound by wound myself as the cell door opens
( slowly, cruelly, absolutely ) at first bell

or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very obediently, sharply
as when the heart of this prisoner imagines
the sharp blade above him carefully, descending

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the lethal beauty of its sweet hemlock,
rendering death forever with each moment your nearness has abandoned

( I do not know what it is about you that closes
and cuts; only something in me understands
the swift fury of your blade is death to all roses )
nobody, not even the rain, has such small, sharp, claws.

A General Theory of Hate

2007-07-01T20:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Gretel:
You took our bread crumbs
and left me in the forest.
Finally I understand why
you had to shit on me,
manure is necessary for growth.
You had to shove another child out of your nest,
get on with your new life of becoming a teacher
filling the off time in your search for the sacred text
by teaching me a lesson.

Now you won’t fuck me any more
and you don’t give a damn about me,
Helen’s face didn’t launch a thousand ships,
hell they were just trying to get away from her.
They’d learned their lesson,
those weren’t sour grapes, they were poison.
It really works doesn’t it,
this wisdom and growth thing.
Best Hansel.

Love in Five Easy Pieces

2007-07-01T20:49:00.000-07:00

Love is a poem in rough draft,
a half truth in second draft

love is red in tooth and claw
a blind sea creature on an ocean floor
riding the ebb and flow of the nearest
body like an ancient urgent carousel,

an arranged marriage
of need and illusion
sent by a delinquent God
in cruel jest like
the miracle of life
He gave you that you
may stand before the broken crowd
and say, “Hi, I’m Joe and I’m an alcoholic,”
or ride into the village
naked on horseback with lantern
shouting, “The English are coming,”
only to hear the voice from the tavern
shouting, “This is England, you idiot.”
Love is a joke in final draft.

Rain

2007-07-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

Rain, rain,
softly falling rain.
Strong rain, friendly rain,
serious rain, sideways rain,
September rain, October rain,
November rain, sentimental rain,
yellow raincoat rain, falling red leaves rain,
trolls under the bridge rain, wet sloshy earth rain,
lazy rain, busy rain, call in sick rain, stay in bed rain,
don’t go outside rain, let go rain, there is no hurry rain, do
nothing rain, have a shot of apricot brandy in morning coffee rain,
hold your sleeping cat rain, read book rain, watch Perry Mason rain,
think of others working rain, laugh rain, sing rain, make hot-soup lunch
rain, smoke tobacco rain, laugh at death rain, tell the truth rain, tell others
how you would never want to be stuck in an elevator with T.S. Eliot rain,
tell truthful lies rain, tell why you want to shoot the mayor rain, enjoy all of
your mental illness rain, invite someone soft over rain, whisper together rain,
look deep into each others eyes rain, I remove your blouse rain, you take off my
shirt rain, I kiss your soft lips rain, you put my hands on your breasts rain, I lower
your skirt rain, you unzip my pants rain, we lay down rain, release rain, lovely rain.

How to Make Love to a Woman

2007-07-01T20:45:00.001-07:00

First you must alchemize desire into love
by changing molten lead into gold
(this will take a little practice,
some lying, and a sleight of hand).

Remember, she knows the lips of her closed doors
hide the generous delights you cannot resist,
that you need to return to, to open, to come
into again and again, till you come apart.

Let her know it is her face that draws you,
it is the face her face makes when you
cup with your hand the round mound that
parts her, far below her face.

If her intelligence is important to her you
will have to seduce her intellect's heart.
If not your responsibility will increase
to insure, solely, her heart's desire.

If she is a poet she will be taking notes.
If she is not a poet
your peril will increase,
she will be entirely there.

This is not a
class you can audit.
She is not a substitute teacher.
You are going to be graded.

Do not quote from the Bible
or have one on your bedstand
and do not mention
free introductory offer.

Reinforce her naive belief that
it's easy to have a penis,
that its prime virtue is patience.
that it's not a fire engine going to a fire.

Expose your jugular
(before your penis)
and let her be on top
to show submission.

When you enter her do not tremble,
she knows your fear but
does not want to see it right now,
or have you quote the poems of ‘Rumi’ or ‘Mary Oliver.’

Do not begin till desire's
thick truth is stronger
than fear or shame,
it's intention firm.

The “Force That Through The Thick Fuse Drives” The City Skyline

2007-07-01T20:42:00.000-07:00

( Paraphrased from Dylan Thomas)

Some things have to be said quickly,
“Franklin Roosevelt died today,”
“Will you take your clothes off ?”
but we say them because we must,
because of what happened,
because of what we want to happen.
But it won’t happen the way we want
like a plate of spaghetti ordered from the waiter,
because everyone knows about
the boundary problems of the penis,
about that silly putty thumb,
because when sex is naked it wants
to take off its Sunday clothes,
close the hymn book to psalm 23,
climb back up in the trees and
do it swinging limb to limb,
because when sex is naked it will eject
even women pilots who crave to
sit in the cockpit of the B-52,
it will unsettle heads of state who
believed their propaganda of safe sex
and Sinatra singing “I did it my way.”
Sex is the jazz of love,
sex is the singer and the song,
sex is pro-life and pro-choice,
so I said quickly, “How much?”
and she said, “ One hundred and twenty dollars”
and removed her blouse and dropped her skirt
and I chose “Okay” for my next word
and when I saw her naked my
hardness pointed at the right choice.
It was a wonderful choice, a powerful choice, the only choice,
improvising people, families, and skylines.

Heaven and Earth

2007-07-01T20:38:00.001-07:00

Last night I watched the astounding silver comet
passing overhead in the black satin sky,
streaking past this startling life on earth
like an urgent message from a succinct God.

But it wasn’t. It was from my dead friend Randy
who always said, “Some people are just so fucking hopeless
they wouldn’t know how to be astonished if you
sent them directions in a comet.”

Where the Years Lead

2007-07-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

After the Dinosaur, and Neanderthal
Homo-sapien-sapien,‘the wise one’
stands alone in the center of the
circus ring in a black tuxedo
holding the flaming circle
with the dying flame.
The lions have left
and the people
are gone.

The Psychology of Human Behavior

2007-07-01T20:35:00.001-07:00

The President died suddenly, naturally,
of fairly serious but uninteresting causes.
The country did not have a deep feeling.
They knew He was just another department head.
The funeral had to go on anyway,
for hours and days and miles and television.
The First Lady had to pick out a dress
for the long, long occasion,
“Do you think it’s too....” she said.

Mustard

2007-07-01T20:32:00.002-07:00

I’m tired tonight.
The wrists and mind are weak
and there’s so much to do.
I think of all the dirty windows of the world,
the lost keys to locked doors,
and I drift toward the longing of
a slightly burnt hot dog with mustard
like a single engine plane on empty
looking for a sure place to land.
My dog Alfie and I are still alive
and I know this is a miracle.
He’s twenty-one years old.
That’s a hundred and forty seven
In human years.
But sometimes, when he’s chasing a grasshopper,
he forgets that and his arthritis vanishes.
It is good to desire what you don’t have,
even lilacs come back again and again.
Suddenly he’s four and a half,
following something inside
the dark cave of his mind,
glittering and sparkling.

Eve's Song

2007-07-01T20:32:00.001-07:00

So I told God, “No”
I said, “I want to dance with the Devil,”
and I look and I find him,
in the sex place, dripping,
and I ask, “May I have this dance?”
and he answers, “Yes, you may,”
and we twirl and sway and twist and dip and drift;
never have I felt so free, and
he loosens the tie to my red robe
with one look, and with
the next smile steps out of his
scarlet vest and maroon pants
and we do it right there,
between the piles of tobacco and sugar,
“heavenly shades of night falling.”

(Note: last line borrowed from the song “Twilight Time” by The Platters)

Utopia

2007-07-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Prayer in school,
sex in school,
no school in school.
Sweet grapes and lilacs
by every bed.

Physics

2007-07-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

(or a Requiem for a Pre-Postmodern Poet)

The first snow is falling tonight
each flake coming down
to where it is going to be
deliberately lovely
as Einstein promised
all the fields
finally unified and grand
without a theory.

A Paragraph on the Pillow (A Small Anatomy of Attachment)

2007-07-01T20:16:00.000-07:00

I saw the pillow on my walk—laying against the tree where I had left it two days before.

My eyes fell on it from a block away as I was approaching it. The thought that it would probably still be there had passed through my mind with negligible notice like the thoughts that followed that one but when I saw the pillow it appeared with a kind of shock, all at once. It was a discarded artifact, without a history, a meaningless digital cast off and this was accompanied by the strange feeling of contradiction as though in seeing the pillow laying against the tree, abandoned, I was looking at, rather than hearing, an actual lie and this occurred simultaneously with the oddly astonishing sudden realization that it was I who knew it had a history and just what it was, like a parent stumbling upon a lost child. It was my history: ‘me’ was laying against the tree. I was amazed and a little stunned and then deeply moved at its sudden possession of meaning, with the fact of my suddenly knowing that its history was mine and then for a while Elizabeth’s and mine. It was me and then us laying against that tree. It was not a sentimental response at all which detours around the authentic experience of an event and so obliterates what is real in it, instead this was the simple sudden impact of something unexpected but radically true and which came at me to quick to dodge or evade with mental or emotional maneuvers.

I picked it up and carried it back home which is where I felt the first small contaminating presence of a small element of sentiment enter into the previous epiphany. Now it sits on my front porch where it accrues the mysterious weight of meaning, that grows from the seed of attachment into the only bliss that bondage contains.

Romance and Reality

2007-07-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

The Mythology of Outlaws & the Search for Bill Miner
Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation and Quit My Job

Do you believe the dead can enter and alter the lives of the living? That’s what ghosts are about; that’s all they really do. They perpetuate themselves through the lives they lived right into yours and alter it. They live a myth just as you do. The life they lived was a tale, a story; and that’s enough to do the trick. All that’s required is for their myth to enter yours. That’s how the real Immaculate Conception takes place. The power of Jesus was in his story. So it was with Bill Miner, an outlaw, known to the world as the Grey Fox. Contrary to popular belief, myth is not a lie. It is lies’ deepest opposite. Mythology is truth. Find out what you are in your heart and head. That is your metaphor your story. There only remains a difference of degree. I was an outlaw in metaphor. Bill Miner was an outlaw in real life. He robbed real trains of real money. We both share the same myth. He just took the metaphor more seriously.

Bill Miner is dead. He was born in Kentucky in 1859. He lived most of his adult life in and around the small towns of Princeton, Tualameen, and Coalmont, in the sparsely populated, softly beautiful southern interior of British Columbia. It was there that he gracefully presented himself as George Edwards, a southern gentleman in search of “peace of mind.” It was there also, at about the age of sixty, that he began to gently rob trains, following the dictates of his personality, economic circumstances, and aptitude. His quixotic and cordial manner gained him a quick following of popular support and earned him the title of “Gentleman Bandit.” To those who knew him as George Edwards, he was equally admired and respected.

I’m alive. I was born in 1943 in Portland Oregon, a large provincial town of about four hundred thousand, located eighty miles inland from the northern portion of the Oregon coast, and have lived my adult life there, most of which was spent in rather bland compliance on the safe side of the law with the exception of a few minor detours mothered by the necessity of adolescent peer pressure. It wasn’t until the plot of my life began to thicken that the ghosts of Bill Miner began to haunt me.

Whether you have a parachute or not, sometimes you just have to jump. I just couldn’t stand it any more! For five years I had been seriously flirting with the terror of leaving the hospital and my career, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The sustained rage of the last few months had left my mind and stomach raw and bleeding. I was taking tranquilizers to go to work. I saw a therapist. With deft insight he told me I was in a reactive state and personalizing too much. I saw another who told me I was suffering from a sense of humiliation and powerlessness (he cost more than the first one). Driving to the hospital each morning I felt like I was in my own funeral procession.

Yet what choice did I have? I was forty five looking at fifty with a savings account that translated into twelve weeks survival and looking for another livelihood at middle age, with no other negotiable skills but the ones that were killing me, is not an American recipe for reassurance. I knew what had happened to people who had lost their entrepreneurial ‘service smile and skills kit’ in this country and it terrified me.

Part of what encouraged closer to the edge was the realization that, approaching middle age with no retirement or saving, my situation was irresistibly romantic and I could over come the charm of romance only with superhuman resistance, which I was emotionally depleted of. But spring was here. That, and my tax return, together with my savings would last me about four months-more than enough time to explore the careless rumors of a friendly universe. But that wasn’t enough. I was confused and unsure; I’d always had one foot in the ‘real’ world and one foot out and had never been able to decide which was the real trouble maker. As strongly as I disapproved of them, the city fathers were embedded in my psyche. “This profession is a tightly knit community and word of your poor attitude and peculiar behavior is getting around town. Remember your references will follow you.” But that voice was being increasingly opposed by an equally insistent one: “Life is in the living” and “a coward dies a thousand times.”

Nevertheless, I couldn’t find the courage to walk away from a life that had turned dangerously bad. I awoke feeling trapped and depressed. There was no way out. The thought of going back to the hospital was unbearable, yet the thought of leaving seemed impossible. The despair stayed inside me all morning and grew. Finally, seeking diversion I found myself outside digging a hole for a fence post. And then it happened. All of a sudden I seemed to strike something deeper than my fear. I saw instantly a sharply resurrected memory from a film I had seen about Bill Miner.

It was the wood ruins of the outlaw’s turn of the century cabin, set back in a small clearing of tall pines. It lay hidden among rolling hills about ten miles outside the small community of Princeton, in northern Canada. A current of release and escape shot through me as sharp and urgent as my instinct to survive. My life had to matter. I laid down the hole digger, went inside the house and called the hospital. “I’m gong to quit. I’ll write you up something on Monday.” “Okay,” was the response ( no love lost), “but you have to give two seeks notice.” “Start it now” I said. I went back to the fencepost in a state of shock and began to dig deeper, looking for further instructions. There were none. I was really free!

Every decision and act is in some degree a mistake that is made with insufficient date. My decision to quit my job was a mistake it would have been a mistake not to make.

I had begun to feel a growing disenchantment with the institutional medical environment in general which had deteriorated fro m a cooperative attitude concerning the subject of patient care twenty five years earlier, into a competitive, territorial, and economic atmosphere. The term ‘Patient Care’ had become mere rhetoric masking the deeper, louder voice, “How are they going to pay?” and “Do they have insurance?

It began to seem to me that physicians, the professional high priests, were becoming increasingly primitive about their altar ceremony. Money, territory and power had gradually become a primary pursuit skillfully hidden beneath the respectable veneer of healing. It was the real theme in this thick, glamorous plot; the direction at the center, backstage. Only here, the patient was part of the production without knowing it. The physicians did everything but lift their legs to urinate on the patient’s door to mark their territory, and I was as bad as the rest of them.

My treasonous observation s gradually gave way to a daily release of freelance cynical commentary, like Hawkeye in a stateside M.A.S.H. unit. Only I soon discovered I was without his immunity. This was real life, not a movie set. They took their roles seriously. My evaluations and the random reactions I received were not unlike those you would receive from your neighbors if you were to display a Soviet flag from your front porch on the 4th of July. My heresy was in not believing in most of what I was doing and much of what they were doing. My attentions shifted more and more back to a recurring voice that said, “Heal thyself.” But how? I was beginning to realize that most of my adult life I’d felt like a galley slave in leg irons.

I cannot recall now what impulse first pulled me into that dark neighborhood theater to see a low profile release called ‘The Grey Fox’ about an elderly outlaw who robbed trains, nor did I fully realize when I left that I’d had an experience of the imagination that would change the story of my life. All I remember is a feeling of becoming slowly enchanted, as though someone were casting a spell over me. There up on the screen sporting a gray old west mustache and a softly rugged countenance was a geriatric Gary Cooper exuding a relaxed warmth and eyes sparkling with a secret glee reserved for those who have discovered where they’re supposed to be in the universe. He took his sister Jenny into his arms and said with quiet dignity, “I’m just no good at work planned out by other men.” I watched him pursue a silver screen romance, tailored to his own design. I saw the graceful courtesy with which he robbed trains; the orange gently handed to the little boy at the train station like loving advice from a father, the cautious but genuine respect he bestowed on all other lives. He took money from those who had it, but like a Zen master, only when it was clearly the right thing to do.

A dimly understood sense of excitement and joy took root inside me and began to grow. I went back to that dark theater five times, and each time he was there, riding a coal black mare up into solitary rolling hills and free wind amid aspen, hemlock and white birch exploding into fall golds and reds, quietly courting his own strength, seeking his own counsel. I recalled the testimony Christians gave of having been born again. It was true, salvation was possible. I had been shown the wary. Only, instead of Jesus, my savior was an elderly train robber named Bill Miner.

It was on a Friday that I entered the hospital for the last time. I walked past the preposterous marble statue of a cross-shaped stethoscope at the entrance and hastily advanced through the fiercely guarded economic territories of Radiology and Emergency and headed toward my department. I wasn’t fast enough. “They need you in bay 5, Dr. Tower wants some blood gases, a 12 lead EKG and a ventilator. Dr. Tower’s interpretive skills with blood gases and a EKG usually produced results akin to involuntary manslaughter. He had graduated Harvard (Class of 1809) and was still bravely trying to get the knack of it, usually settling out of court.

A wave of cynical anger engulfed me. Somehow I made it safely through the day. I realized I was starting to lose my balance. I felt the need to exile; to vacate from everything I’d ever known, loved, or hated.

My camper was loaded: clothes, books, beer, maps, popcorn, and several varieties of lethally preserved chips. I waited and grew anxious. A sense of panic began to build inside me. Something would go wrong. I’d never get out of the building. They’d catch me at the last minute. But they didn’t. Then it was my camper that fueled my fear- a flat tire, something invisible in that mysterious steel block called an engine wouldn’t work, the windshield would pop out, the wheel would fall off. My mind continued to race, No, I thought, not the car, the tire, the wheel. My heart! Some little margarine plaque in the ascending coronary artery would dislodge, float upstream and quietly dam up a crucial bend in the river. The marvelous little beating red center would suddenly cease. The tent would collapse, the circus would be over.

But no as Mark Twain observed, “I had many problems, but most of them never happened.” The clock struck three. I took off my sacred white coat, walked through the door and left the building. My camper started, the tire and wheel held, and my heart beat flawlessly. I turned the key and pressed the pedal. The big machine moved out into the cement inner city. I worked my way into the asphalt vessels and found the major artery leading out and into the asphalt vessels and found the major artery leading out and into the clear, free Columbian river gorge.

I was still tense. Even after ten minutes and ten miles I sensed they could still get me. Twenty miles and I began to feel my stomach and chest loosen and relax. It was a little after an hour that I felt the first surge of escape shoot through me. I had done it! I had escaped the gravitational pull of my old orbit. I rolled down my window. A rush of delirious laughter shook my body and burst up out of my chest. I stuck my head out the window into the wind. A sharp, irrational joy surged through me. I had left Rome and no longer had to do what the Romans did. God damn them! God damn them all.

It was early September and I still had several hours of daylight left. I used it all to increase my distance and continued east. The lavish thick green of the northwest slowly transformed into a desert cradling the great Columbia river on either side beneath bare Egyptian hills pasteled in gold, white, and brown lavender that lay high up and softly away from me. Monolith cloud shadows rolled gently over them as though searching for a lost home. The earth beyond seemed distant, unreal, and irresistible. Like Matisse when he discovered paint, I felt ‘transported to a paradise, free, quiet and alone.” The last thinning layer of pine trees dotted the hills like dying echoes.

Checking my map, I followed green signs with white numbers as if they were leading me to lost treasure. Highway 730 at Boardman will lead you to Umatilla, Yakima, Walla Walla and Waitsburg. I pulled into, found a quiet street just off the main one and stopped. I opened the door and put my feet on the ‘sea of tranquility sidewalk and began taking giant steps. I walked for an hour, intoxicated with a calm elation in a new world. I had landed right in the center of Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe’s America and they were right, there’s enough sad beauty to tear your Hindu heart out. I walked through a landscape of empty corner lots, back alleys, and streets all gracefully lined with crippled tall oak and elm trees that fronted rows of softly decaying rural houses. There were grocery stores with wood floors, rusty welding shops, dilapidated diners, backyard clotheslines with all the clothes fit to print on them, worn pool halls and lonely city parks. There were taverns and forgotten bus stops and two story corner brownstone apartments with old ladies cats lived and an Elks Lodge with lingering veterans of foreign wars just waiting.

I went back to my camper, got in, and drove on. There were small towns with large Indian populations driving big old Buicks down long empty roads, no where to go, wearing Levis and shopping at Safeway, nothing to do, making the best a bad long situation. I had the hospital and they had America. I had been luckier, I could leave

I stopped at the Whitman Massacre site, where a century before a group of self respecting Indians, ungrateful over their introduction to measles and the white man’s God promptly sent them back to him. They knew a Safeway at Yakima was around the corner. I continued driving. The road stretched out straight and flat through acres of green hushed farmland. The sun was falling behind me in a clear twilight. Ahead, thick brooding storm clouds collided in a gold gray sky. I passed a field of motionless horses quietly eating purple clover in an eerie silver light.

A little after seven I saw a sign ahead on the right hand side of the road. It said ‘Welcome to Idaho.” I pulled my camper off the road. I got out and walked back and put my lips in the middle of the ‘O’ and kissed it, then continued on, determined to make Lewiston by dark. I began to feel slightly anxious and uneasy, like a truant, furtive schoolboy. Probably what Bill Miner felt after leaving a train with a bag of money.

By nightfall I had settled into a small quiet RV park just outside the city limits of Lewiston. The night was dark, a deep clear enveloping black. I poured a glass of herbal tea and one of beer and drank them and slept the sleep of the joyous.

I awoke to the large dusty American town of Lewiston set at the bottom of gigantic bare hills. I had a wonderful breakfast of cold lemon water and cheez-its, and then started my camper and headed up over the huge sentinel hills. I climbed steadily up a sharp ascent for twenty minutes to a plateau of level land and passage north. I glanced back down the flat dullness of Lewiston its barren lunar valley and then out the window ahead of me at cows and horses chewing on taller, greener grass. And trees, one-two-three-four-five evergreens, and small rolling sharply contoured hills in a gold brown green quilt of earth colors. North was happening right in front of me.

Ten miles outside of Moscow, Idaho a black State Police car pulled out of a dirt road and followed me like an idle Darth Vader crow monitoring aliens. My chest tightened till he turned off. Then I relaxed and continued on to Moscow, a small quiet grassy knolled town with rolling lawns and tired elm trees. I made a random turn and found myself on the campus of the University of Idaho. It was a bright crisp fall Sunday and I drove slowly among ivy-covered brick buildings holding their safe knowledge, cloistered away form the real world. Several young students emerged from out of a two story grey house labeled ‘Sigma Alpha Epsilon’ and walked aimlessly across a large manicured lawn clutching books on Plato, Western Civ, and advanced economics, unaware of what it could all lead to, even if they were careful.

The route out of town led me past St. Mary’s Catholic Church which was busy preparing for eleven o’clock mass. I pulled over to marvel. A steady procession of people dutifully moved up the sidewalk and climbed the solemn stone gray steps. A tall priest in a green and gold robe gathered them in at the door as though insuring against any last minute change of heart. I saw two men, still fresh from riding the rails in their late 50’s or 6o’s. Their clothes were makeshift and dirty and they were in line, a secure ritual in itself for them. I saw the priest take note that they were not of his flock, but dutifully accept them. Out in front, at the right of the steps, sat a six foot high marble tomb stone with the Ten commandments chiseled on it. As I was pulling out to leave, I happened to glance at a vacant lot adjoining the church. There, in a sunlit silhouette, two eight or nine year old girls were safely truant, playing in a deeper grace. My faith; restored, I drove away.

I coasted into Coeur d’Alene two hours later. It was a large city like Portland, too large. I felt the crush of law, Medicine, Education, conventions, sermons and city ordinances. I didn’t even stop. Bill Miner would have understood. He didn’t want to break laws, just abandon them; workplace work ethics, local laws, city laws, state laws, federal laws. The equally taxing laws of in-laws; the laws of culture, tradition, ethics, and religion. I hurried on until I was safely back in the company of horses, cows, coyotes, trees and hills.

I hit Libby, Montana at five o’clock. It seemed that the nightmare of my life in Portland was light years away. I awoke the next morning to a dead battery and enjoyed it. Feeling the need for symbolic resurrection I bought a new one at Jake’s Auto Parts. My horse was re-shod. I was on my way again heading north on highway 37. The sign said 48 miles to the Canadian border. It was blue skies and mountains all the way. I passed through Rexford, the last smallest town in America and crossed into Canada smiling.

I spent the night at a near deserted campground a mile off the road near Fermie, British Columbia. I built a campfire near the bend of a small friendly river and sat under quiet contented stars. I was dizzy with a scenic sensory overload; a good tired rested inside me.
The small towns sprinkled like utopian confetti passed through my mind: Klickitat, Kennewick, Pasco, Walla Walla, Prescott, Pomeroy, Waitsburg, Yakima, Troy, Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry, Eureka, Crowsnest, Creston, and Cranbrook. The bicycled children in side streets and parks and back yards with ever patient dogs tethered by invisible cords. And the people in stores, gas stations, taverns, churches, and Laundromats hugging to their home base. I thought of Thomas Wolfe, “The pity, terror, strangeness and magnificence of it all. “

I awoke Tuesday to a Canadian late fall morning with sun just hitting the mountains high above the river. I jumped out of my bag, dropped my shorts, ran out barefoot naked, peed, shivered and breathed in the sharp edged air. I ran back and leaped into my bag and watched the morning thaw through my window.

Looking over my map I saw the town of Kamloops where ‘The Grey Fox’ had been filmed. I ate, cleaned, and departed with a sense of charged purpose. I arrived in Kamloops near dusk. Coming down out of the mountains in a long steep decent I gazed upon the flat sprawl of a Mexican looking border town of rural poor. At the first gas station I got directions to a campground located on an Indian reservation just on the edge of town. I was beginning to feel an odd mixture of disorientation and uneasy excitement. Driving through downtown Kamloops, I saw a middle aged Chinese man come our a back alley looking lost and misplaced. A sudden fear fell on me as if I had just broken loose from a lifelong mooring I’d never noticed. A subtle terror swept through me in a wave. All the people in all the small towns I’d passed through now seemed like nomads, wandering refugees of life’s general disorder and confusion. It suddenly seemed as though the most unadventurous bank clerk, locked in his teller’s cage, was rooted in pure dice like random chance; we were all firmly securely adrift. I finally found the campground and settled down in the strange darkness to an anxious sleep.

I awoke in a clear morning light. Last night’s demons had vanished back to their deeper origins. I looked around and saw a nearly empty park that lay on a short rise above a wide river that ran past the whole town. There was only one other camper about a hundred and fifty feet away. We both rested in three roped off small wide open fields which hosted several clumps of hundred foot high maple trees that towered up and made a canopy over us. Patches of bark were worn off the trees, and there were large areas of old yellow grass that had been brushed flat by the passage of tires. A few stone circular pits with the charcoaled remains of past fires were scattered unevenly like ancient sores on a tired earth. Its look hinted at poverty but the feeling was clean and good and unpretentious. There wasn’t a trace of despair in the whole campground.

I ate a bowl of shredded wheat, raisins, and bananas and headed down the embankment toward the river. I sat on a small sandy beach and felt the morning sun rise and warm the cool air. Several canoes passed soundlessly nearby. High overhead a parade of geese followed, making distant announcements. A calm elation came over me, a moment of being utterly satisfied. I wanted to stay right there with the sun and the sand and the river forever. I knew it didn’t get any better. I sat there for an hour with my hands and feet buried in the warm sand.

I walked up to the office and found the proprietor, a short heavy lady in her early fifties sitting leisurely in a rocker, looking comfortably used and friendly, like a read and discarded Sunday paper. I asked about Bill Miner. “Yes, I believe they have a whole thing about him, a display or something at the downtown museum.

I found it easily. There, inside an oak case were weathered handguns and holsters and some clothing artifacts he had been caught with. I stared in astonishment. He was real!

I found the archives room where a young woman sat me down at a table with an armload of information on him. It was unbelievable! There he was in celluloid, sitting upright in the buckboard between the sheriff and two deputies bringing him back form their capture as Aspen Grove like big game hunters. He was described as kind, soft spoken and considerate, possessing a genuine fondness for children and animals. What impressed one reviewer was Miner’s gentleness despite his having spent a quarter of his life in the harsh prison system of his day. I learned that he spent most of his time around Princeton and Merrit. I got up from the table and thanked the lady and went back to my car and got out the map.

I arrived in Merrit several hours later and directed by a man at the Chamber Of Commerce to a Christian book store several blocks away. “Go talk to Pat Allen, he knows of him.” I found Pat, a heavy balding man of stern clean piety, and he wasn’t talking. “I don’t approve of adding to the legend of a man who did not contribute to society.” He was staying safely on the side lines, a devout umpire. As I was leaving he relented a bit and said Miner was known to have stayed overnight frequently at Aspen Gove, a small roadside junction between Merrit and Princeton.

It was about then that I began to separate from my ordinary sense of reality, to feel the ghost of Bill Miner begin to filter into my life and alter it. I was no longer directing the course of my day. Something was pulling me toward the life of this dead outlaw.

I headed south toward Princeton and stopped at a small diner in Aspen Grove run by an elderly couple who’d lived there for forty eight years. They said they knew Miner had a cabin somewhere nearby. They’d heard others tell of it but didn’t know where it was. They told me to look up Jerry Harker in Princeton and gave me directions to his farm.

I continued on a two hour drive to Princeton down a winding two lane country road. The autumn sun was brilliant and sharp; there wasn’t another car on the road but me. I knew that he had been here, right where I was, that his horse had moved through these hills and rolling fields and had stopped to rest among the scattered clumps of trees. I began to feel like a Christian entering Jerusalem. But there was no Calvary here. I felt his happiness, the quiet contentment of his freedom.

I found Jerry Harker standing among a small patch of corn and tomatoes with a garden how in his hand. He was a thin man of small stature with a ruddy face and a small beak nose. He dropped his how and gave me a lively handshake. As soon as I got out the name Bill Miner he let out a yelp of delight and his face lit up. “Well I’ll tell you the truth I knew his sidekick Jack Budd very well, worked with him all one winter up at the cabin but I only saw Miner once. He moved around quite a bit and that winter he was mostly gone. I learned he spent a lotta time with friends over on Chisler Hill. One of the woman whose gone now told me Miner was a real gentleman and had a special warmth for kids.

The last one who knew him was old Mrs. Thomas an she passed on five years ago but she used to tell that Miner would give dancing lessons down at Hadley where he used to go to check on gold shipments. She said he was quite a ladies man and especially loved the waltz. Story has it that old Jack Budd had a gold brick hid up near his place and people have come from all around to look for it but none have ever found it. Jack used to have a woman friend named Hilda Hatch that ran a whorehouse down in Chilliwack and she swore to the gold brick was on Jack’s place but they’ve dug up every fence post and looked down every hole but never found it. I heard the story so often I got up my nerve one day and asked him. He just gave me an odd smile and said, “Jerry, if I had a gold brick do you think I’d be living like this?” well between you an me, I think he would of and I think he had the gold brick but I can’t prove it. Some say Jack was in on the hold up as Aspen Grove where they caught Miner but I don’t believe it. If he’d have been there they would have had fresh horses and wouldn’t have gotten caught.

I stood there listening in a dazed awe. I asked him if he could tell me how to get to where the cabin was. “Well it’s up on Bald Mountain. The old place caught fire some years ago and I don’t know how much is left.” He gave me directions and I headed east up winding rocky roads and a succession of endless yellow wheat hills. I continued to climb feeling a wild exhilaration but after three miles I began to wonder I ‘d gone the wrong way. My camper had a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it and I didn’t even carry a wrench with me and even if I’d wanted to turn around the road was too narrow now. My former exhilaration turned into a slowly rising sense of alarm. Then my thoughts turned on me. What was I doing in these remote Canadian hills chasing the wake of this dead train robber? Why wasn’t I back in my safe hospital with my safe white coat. An adrenaline rush forced my foot down on the gas and I moved ahead faster.

I drove another hundred yards and rounded a sharp bend when the magic struck again. There it was! The tall trees vanished into a clearing shaped like a baseball field. Stark and alone out in the center field in a prairie of yellow grass, stood the charred ruins of the old cabin. I stopped the camper, got out and stood there staring at it in a loud silence, feeling this dead outlaw’s life cascading and tumbling into mine, rearranging it like a design in a turning kaleidoscope, in the absolute romance of reality.

Only parts of the north and east wall remained. I walked toward it slowly and quietly. There were low bare hills that watched over it from behind. It was perfect. They could have seen anyone coming either from those low naked hills or approaching form the front, as I was, out of the trees. It was solitary and free, they had been completely exposed and at the same time safe and protected.

It was smaller than I’d imagined. There was only one twenty foot square room but it had a feeling of weight about it, a heavier hidden significance coming from something unrelated to its size. I remembered the first time I’d held a real gun in my hand. I was nine years old and playing at Bruce’s house next door. His parents had gone to a movie and left us alone. He took me into their bedroom and brought down a shoe box from a high shelf in their closet. We sat on their bed and he removed the lid and handed me the gun. My hand dropped several inches when he laid it in my palm. It felt serious, something belonging to larger consequences, at once more remote and more real, like the stone axe from a prehistoric cave I’d once seen in a museum. The cabin like the gun introduced me to new dimensions, to lives lived in larger actions, of an existence unlike mine. Romance and reality kept seducing me and I still couldn’t decipher their boundaries. Like wave and particle, caterpillar and butterfly, they kept changing uniform.

I lived the next several hours of my life there. I didn’t want to leave. There was something there I would need when I returned to the city and the remainder if my life. Standing next to the cabin I remembered being in the center of the huge cathedral of Westminster Abbey where I was encircled by massive stained glass windows, rows of reds and yellows and orange and green and blue pouring down to the floor in a sunlight radiance.

This was the return point in my journey. I had been given a vision of sanctuary and it was just out of reach. I was going back to routine, to another job somewhere, to the absence of joy. A futile will to resist rose up in me briefly then disappeared. I walked back to my camper and got in and turned around and drove away. The cabin shrank and disappeared in my rear view mirror and I went back down the mountain, to the past and the future, strangely nourished and newly deprived.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

2007-07-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

For Elizabeth

They took the little dead girl away from across the street several days ago. She had been there under the billboard for some time, ever since I moved into my house summer before last. She frightened me at first. I was afraid it would worsen my depression having to look at her every time I left the house but I gradually became used to her and then, after the first few months, I began to find a kind of comfort and reassurance in her steady presence. She was something I could count on, something that was stable beyond change. I learned that her name was ‘Nicole.’ The neighbors said that she had been run over by a drunk driver. It bothered me right away that she was just laying on the cement sidewalk so I always made sure she had something soft under her head. At first I used old shirts of mine but eventually I found a sofa repair shop that gave me all their used foam and that held up better under the weather.

After a while I began to talk to her. Just small things at first like ‘Hi’ when I opened my door to leave and ‘Goodbye’ when I drove past her then after a while I began addressing her as ‘Nicole.’ It’s strange how a little thing like that can make you feel a lot closer to someone. I began to tell her where I was going and how long I would be gone. Just knowing she would be there when I got back began to give me a kind of settled feeling when I got to where ever I was going. After I began to feel more secure in our relationship I started telling her where I had been and what had happened, not in detail, but just sort of sketchy.

Right at first I noticed something different about talking to her. It felt different from talking to other people. Other people can sometimes be like black holes, if you get too close to them you can disappear and get replaced by someone that looks like you but is really made up for the occasion but with her I began to realize that it was going to be okay when I told her something so I began to tell her more specific and revealing things about me, secret forbidden pleasure, things that I had done or that had happened to me.

It was very odd to feel that safe talking to someone. It was the exact opposite feeling of what I got from going to confession at church. This made me feel somehow larger and more free than I’d ever felt. I never got an unkind or indifferent response from her and though one could say that was because she was no longer capable of giving one, it was nevertheless, if you think about it, a rare and very prized response. Even though it was a message from the dead to the living it was a very generous one and besides lots of the messages we receive aren’t really sent intentionally to us anyway. People are always telling me things with their bodies or eyes or even their absence that they weren’t aware they were telling me and clouds can send clear messages to me without knowing I’m alive and even rocks tell me that they’re there and that I have to lift my foot if it’s a big one right in front of me or a parked car tells me that I’m temporarily safe from it, that it’s not moving right at me.

Since they took her away there has been a hole in my life. I had begun to feel very close to her like sometimes at night, after it was dark, when I would cross the street and just sit somewhere nearby and smoke my cigarettes or play soft music on my tape recorder or read to her from a book. Over time I began to tell her more about myself. That always makes you feel closer to someone, more a part of them, of something other than just yourself, and that makes you do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do.

We don’t get much rain here but on nights when it was a little cool or damp I would take something over across the street to slip on top of her. Of course I knew it didn’t matter to her, but it wasn’t just that I was being sentimental, its just that like I said, when you feel close to someone everything can change, especially what’s real and what isn’t.

I once put some of those glow in the dark stars on the bedroom ceiling above my bed. There are hundreds of them crossing from one corner of my ceiling to the other and it looks just like the milky way at night. Your mind knows they’re not real but if you don’t think about it they feel real, nor only real but close too, I mean the kind of closeness that’s comforting, not frightening like real stars are. Most people just look at real stars without imagining them so they never see their terrifying distance and indifference. Real stars are amazing but they’re not very comforting and its hard to feel close to something that isn’t really comforting, even if its real.

I got lots of free clothes for her from the Salvation Army and even though it was usually stolen off her within a day or two I could get plenty more. Maybe stolen is too harsh a word since it doesn’t really seem like you can steal from the dead. I finally realized that whether they were on her or someone who took them they were still being put to good use, I mean someone had the anxiety about a need in their life lessened a little and that gave me a peace of mind and in doing that it was put to another good use.

Anyway, no matter how I looked at it the whole thing seemed to bring a kind of a spiritual or religious calm. I mean isn’t that what the spiritual or religious should do, put things to a good use, take people to a kind of calm peaceful place. She gave me a new kind of strange patience, a gradual and wonderful ease that seemed to settle over everything like gold dust. It was partly the way she was untroubled by the traffic that rushed by her or the weather that changed on her or the people that took the salvation army clothes off her. It was like a message from her saying, “See,! This isn’t so bad” to anyone who was able to look. I mean just stand on any street or freeway at rush hour and watch the faces in the passing cars. It’s just a big trouble parade.

More than once I thought about somehow getting her across the street and burying her in my back yard but I knew my behavior was not going unnoticed. I had seen the quick swishes of my neighbor’s curtains and the glances of familiar faces through car windows as they passed slowly by when I was sitting with Nicole and what with the stiff penalties you can get for displaying generosity or decency or any other kind of suspicious act these days I didn’t want to risk it, especially with her uncertain nationality. Still it would have made me feel safer to have her at my house, a kind of protection against the neighbor’s surveillance, against all the uncertain dangerous things that can fall on you out of the sky, all those people just waiting to see you weakened with a cough or walking with a sudden limp, waiting for you to stumble and fall.

It’s strange that we don’t bury our loved ones near us, in our own yards. We have flowers and trees and pets but there not really as important as someone you felt close to. I think it must be the fear, I mean having someone you were close to who is now so far away be so near.

I just consoled myself that it wouldn’t be the same, I mean I was used to her being across the street and knowing that she would be there when I returned. I wanted to be able to talk to someone I could see. It’s important that what’s important to us remain more or less the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. Even the people who are risk takers, the people who climb Mt. Everest and quit their jobs and leave their marriage want to do it with roughly the same personality they had yesterday, or roughly the same number of teeth, and exactly the same number of hands and eyes and ears as they had a day before or an hour before.

I can’t stop worrying about her. I’ve been worrying about her ever since she went away, wondering what happened to her, where they took her and what they did to her. Just think of the things the living do to the living and then how easy it is not to care at all about the dead, like they were just matter that doesn’t matter to us anymore, like they don’t even exist when the truth is that’s when you’d be concerned and worried the most about someone you cared about, when their so far away you could never find out how they are, so it’s not really odd at all to worry. What’s strange is that we ever stop, even for an hour.

After they took her away they put up a public service billboard about the importance of Organ Donation and what number to call for information and even though there is some kind of sameness between that and Nicole, it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill up the hole. The only thing that fills up the hole is the loss but that’s not really odd because its real and I guess anything that’s real is spiritual but it’s hard to make people understand that about Nicole.

String

2007-07-01T16:55:00.000-07:00

My grandmother Gertrude, who lived with us, died when I was twelve. They took her to the hospital in the middle of the night. When my mother came back in the morning she told me her lungs had broken and she drowned because she couldn’t breathe. I went over to my friend Dennis’s house and told him and we looked at each other through our separate awkwardness and then laughed. She had been stern and I felt a hidden shame mixed with the joy of freedom. I wouldn’t have to stand before her inspection anymore in the morning, in my underwear and show her my washed hands and clean ears before finishing dressing.

The year after that a boy in our scout troop who was dark skinned and tall and thin and quiet and had a strange misshapen mouth died. We all had to go to his funeral and walk past his open casket. He had his scout uniform on and was lying still in the same strange face, with the lower jaw protruding out an inch beyond where it should have stopped. He had always been apart from everyone else and unimportant and now he silenced us with his new power.

On a warm summer night in l961 when I was seventeen, I was standing alone behind an old world war one military barracks on George A.F.B. at the edge of the Mojave Desert. I do not recall now what brought me there that evening but I know that at that moment I am talking about I was doing nothing. I remember that it was dark and I was aware of the enormous stars overhead. There was a small square wood building the size of a garage. A light was on inside and the door was partially open letting the light and occasional soft voices filter out. I walked up to the door and looked in at an angle where I was still safe from view. The man lying on the long table was surrounded by three men in white doctor’s coats. He didn’t have a head and his right foot from the ankle down was laying off to the side hanging by a piece of unsevered skin. His small penis was still, slanting slightly to the left. I stopped breathing and some place inside my mind threw up and then I looked at the white tarnished scholars trying not to chew what they had bitten off. His listless, inert body was a pale, bluish purple, the color of the body drained of color. It looked like a big piece of working clay.

Two years later a fuel cargo plane crashed in Wichita, Kansas where I was stationed. It had taken off from McConnell A.F.B. on a quiet May morning and then something went suddenly terribly wrong and it went down in a poor residential black neighborhood incinerating 36 people. When I got there I saw a small Hiroshima, what remained of the people who had been people. Someone had been starting a car- a frozen ash skeleton, leaning slightly foreword, with the right hand still on the key. In one of the half standing houses a smaller ash figure was stopped getting out of the bathtub- one foot still touching the dry floor. They put stakes in the ground and stretched a thin rope string from post to post circling four square blocks as though to keep such a possibility separate from those of us on the other side of it.

When I was seven years old my green kite caught in a burst of wind and rose straight up fast till it passed clear above the stadium apartments where I lived. It went sideways going higher and higher and then it stopped and my breathing stopped. I looked at Uncle George. “Keep going, keep it going” I said. “We can’t, were out of string. If I let go we’ll lose it. I hesitated. “Let go”, I said and it stopped stopping and went up and up as it became part of the sky and then it became a small green marble and then I couldn’t see the color any longer and it became a small black dot and disappeared.

Yard work, Salal, and the Kindness of Strangers

2007-07-01T16:53:00.000-07:00

Even at an early age I realized that pleasure was serious, that it came way before the top ten of anything. When I was young pleasure was just unavoidable, it was everywhere, my head on my pillow, leaving the dentist’s office, watching a dog sleeping on a sidewalk in the sun, the golden brown syrup pouring onto my waffle. I think when we realize that the world means business we just complicate pleasure out of all possibility but a fugitive part of me always knew it was still here so even when I grew up I did not ‘put away the things of the child.’ Even a quick glance at the world of grown-ups told me they had nothing comparable to it.

It is strange how beginnings never seems to begin at the beginning, just the way things don’t really seem to happen till a while after they have happened. My beginning, or rather the tardy recollection of my tardy beginning ( since my real beginning, though mine, was denied to me, as to all of us ) began with the sight and smell of sea salal. All of my attention shrunk its focus to those thick, sharp, dark green, oddly lush bushes that surrounded the sidewalks of the small seaside town I found myself deposited in. Even my mother exists in their background. When ever I recall her I see salal. I don’t know where she is now, she’s been dead for some time.

That is, some time for me. For the dead I imagine it must be like you’ve always been dead, outside of time, which is why the peace passes understanding, all of life being so sudden and all.

It is strange also that I cannot remember my first memories though I know they’re there, my startling introduction to the world and then to me. They are buried in the labyrinth of the neuron’s synaptic maze. My earliest recollection is but the third or fourth car in the locomotive’s long torn trailer. It is there in those first few dim cars that the inscrutable instructions were laying down the narrow tracks on which I was to travel through the wide world, all the way to today, to two hours ago, when I buried the one I had lived with for eight years in my back yard next to the wood pile.

The reason I did that was not, of course, a reason at all, but the fugitive forces of those first forgotten filaments of being. I buried her for the simplest purpose, she was dead and I have an intrinsic disinterest in ceremony, not because, again, of some reason but because though the force of those ghostly filaments is forgotten, their form and frame remains, commanding, outside my intention, my every action. Perhaps free will is merely the somewhat delightful awareness of consciousness’ masquerading its action as choice.

I just forced the shovel into the ground and displaced the earth and then I did it again, and then again, until a grave, through the gradual disappearance of earth, appeared as cleverly as though it was the result of my complete, discreet action rather than a combination of unremembered influences which had accumulated as invisibly and effortlessly as lint.

I may get caught and have to explain from the beginning my ‘how’ and ‘why’ like God did in Genesis, and my answer will be as ultimately unsatisfying as God’s was, when, after all, the question is merely begged again. Philosophy, like prayer, may be one of the final expressions and confessions of human powerlessness but unlike prayer philosophy or explanations power is limited to the reach of understanding, the way a walk on a fishing pier is limited to the length of the pier.

I always hated having my beeper paged on the way to the cafeteria when I was in the Hospital. That day I was particularly hungry and the ‘Jesus Christ’ that slipped out of me at the sound of my beeper was louder than usual drawing disapproving glances from two nurses walking down the hall twenty feet in front of me. “Respiratory call 3 south intensive care 311.” I stopped at a wall phone outside the cafeteria and dialed. Susan King the para-military marine cleverly disguised as an ICU charge nurse commanded in language cleverly disguised as a request that I come right away and look at the young girl in bed 2 who had been coughing up a little blood from her tracheostomy. It was queen to drone. I hung up the phone and headed to three south.

When I arrived I pulled her chart. She was a 19 year old MVA who had been transported from the Dalles two days ago for multiple internal injuries. They had done a spleenectomy yesterday and she’d had an unremarkable post op course and was expected to recover nicely. Home Health was already working on her discharge which was planned for the end of the week. I saw that she had had a bronchoscopy in the morning and told the nurses that the bleeding was probably secondary to that. I called her attending, Dr. Elsin and told him. He agreed but asked me to change her trach as they has put on of the old metal ‘Morsch’ tubes in her at the Dalles. We agreed on trying a number 8 Portex.

I went into her bedside. Her mother was sitting in a chair beside her knitting. I told them that I was going to put in a newer trach tube that would be much more comfortable.
Her mother rose and set her knitting down in the chair. She said she was ready for a stretch and would go down to the cafeteria for a quick bite. She looked at me, “How long a bite should I take.” “About 15 minutes including dessert,” I said. She gave a squeeze of her daughters foot at she passed the foot of the bed and pointed at her knitting, “Watch my masterpiece,” she said and sauntered out.

I went and got the trach tray and laid it out on the bedside table. “You looking forward to getting back to the Dalles,” I asked. She nodded with a glad look and flashed me a thumbs up alongside a slight look of nervous apprehension. “You’ll like this tube a lot better, you can talk with it.” I said. She raised her eyes in a delighted smile.

I raised the head of her bed to about 35 degrees. “This will be real quick but it might make you cough a little when I put it in.” I said, “I'll just cut that string around your neck and its ‘out with the old, in with the new.’ She gave a small anxious ‘what ever’ sigh with her eyes then reached for her pad and pencil and wrote, ‘cliche's make me cough.’
I laughed and cut the string. “Okay, I'm just going to put this suction catheter down for a quick vacuums job and bring them both out together” I said casually.

The suction catheter caused a strong spasmodic coughing spell. I pulled the trach tube out quickly and had the new one half way in when a sudden force of blood flooded through it and around it. I put the suction on ‘high’ but it just kept coming in larger pulsating streams. My stomach tightened as the small alarm in my mind started going off. I noticed her eyes quizzically monitoring mine for signs of an ‘it’s nothing to worry about' reassurance. A sudden gusher of bright red blood forced the new trach tube out onto her gown. I tried to put it back but with the steady pulsating gushers of projectile blood I couldn’t even see where the surgical stoma opening in her throat was then finally forced it in with a frantic thrust.

The suction couldn't keep up with the rush of her blood. I avoided her eyes which had moved from a trust in me, in my white coat, in the Hospital, to a small sudden suspicion of ‘something wrong’ then to an involuntary animal fear. The terrorizing thought ‘artery’ turned the knot in my stomach into cement. I kept inflating more air in the cuff of the trach tube but it didn’t even slow the rapid increase of rushing blood. I yelled out “Nurse, I need help now!” and two came running in, “Get another suction and get the house surgeon here stat.” I turned my head back to her again. The blood was flowing slowly out of her nose and ears and the corners of her eyes. I froze. We locked eyes for an instant, an accident, the panic in mine delivering a terrifying knowledge to her and through her back again to me, a knowing beyond comprehension yet somewhere within it.

That was the last time I looked at her. I never saw her again. The surgeon arrived. I left. I went into the break room behind the unit and sat down on something. The surgeon pronounced her in three minutes. He came back to me and put a hand on my shoulder, “Innominate artery, nobody could have done anything. I’m on call all night, you need to talk, come to me, you understand !”

Fear. That was all I felt. Just fear for almost the whole month afterwards. I forgot about the Mother. I didn’t even remember her for several years. Now she’s there in the oddest places, at street intersections when I’m waiting for a red light, or in the dentist chair, or stepping into the bath, or raising a fork to my mouth. I can’t remember her daughter’s face. Not at all. I thought for a while it was because we were really just strangers but then so was her mother and I can see her as clear now as if she were sitting in front of me knitting.

A circumference of knowing

2007-07-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

“The horror of the 20th century is the enormity of event and smallness of the reverberations” Norman Mailer

It is eerie and strange with what disturbing certainty you can know things about people you don’t know, have never met, have never even heard of. Like those 1400 people lost when that ocean liner sank last month, all lying on the bottom of the ocean right now, who had no more intention of being there than you or I do. For example they each knew secret things about themselves that no one else knew. They had each once scratched an itch on their body and even if you narrow it down to the legs you still have the slightly reduced but nearly absolute certainty that you can’t live even a year without scratching or briefly rubbing at an itch or annoyance on your legs, you can even narrow it down to the left leg and still be left with the disturbing certainty of nearly knowing and then there is the nebulous but absolute knowledge that they had each farted when alone and further that at one of those moments they were also gratified that they were alone and then of course it is absolutely certain that each had once also withheld or suppressed a fart when in the presence of others and even though it cannot be know what each of them had thought or felt about balloons it can be known with certainty that they all, each, had knowledge of balloons, had known the moon and ocean and stars, the cat, horse, cow, and dog just as it can be known that at some point in their lives they had all had that mysterious sensation of a sudden sense of well being that sweeps over one like a sharp draft of wind from a window and leaves as swiftly.

They had almost certainly known love’s shadow boxing dance spiraling indiscernibly but definitely into lust and we know that each person on the bottom of that ocean floor had picked their nose, looked at themselves in a mirror, known a sharp ache of acute disappointment, the slapping stab of humiliations. Each had known angers eruption, each had surrendered gratefully to sleep. They had each known degrees of hunger and the satisfaction of eating, degrees of thirst and the satisfaction of drinking. Each had experienced fatigue, the rush of energy, the surprise of surprise, the shock of shock, and the exhilaration of exhilaration. They had all known reds and yellows and blues and greens and browns and oranges and purples and blacks and whites by sight and knew the alphabet, months and the season’s weathers by heart. We know with disturbing certainty that they all laughed, laughed lightly with it hardly entering into awareness and erupted suddenly with surprised deep laughter that momentary released them from the weight of life, though as for crying our certainty must be more cautious, as grief and loss are more circumspect and demanding in their criteria and conditions for access and display.

The most hidden of displays however, the layered mystery of simultaneity–that brought them all together in a tragic coinciding of time, place, and situation, mostly without notice by them because such coinciding entirely escapes our attention, like the people standing in the grocery store checkout line that have each come from their separate conceptions in time and place, through a perilous infancy and a dangerous succession of traffic intersections to be strangers, all standing together in their mature quest for groceries unaware of the actual mystery and their precarious participation in it that had been somehow unknowingly purchased by each of them just as was, we can be almost certain, that final strange congregating of the 1400 strangers finally lying together, on the bottom of the ocean floor like family.

Tell Us About the Angel of Death

2007-07-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

1.

Once a year, one by one,
they take a single candle’s solitary flame,
down to the lake’s quiet shore and
set it adrift in the small boat of the heart.

It is a ceremony for the souls of the departed.
It is about the other side,
but it is not happening there,
on the other side,
it is happening here, on this side, now.

And it is not candles, it is not souls
drifting away on the enormous, endless water.
It is the ones who married the wrong person,
burnt the roast, fed us, and set us adrift,
who spilled spaghetti on their good clothes
and laughed and died and left us.

2.

The day when Thomas Merton
stepped out of the bathtub,
wet and naked and
touched the fan and died,
the day Jesus said “It is finished.”
I think of when the birds are so still
they might not be there and
you’re not yet aware it is quiet,
that they are not there.
Or maybe like the freeze frame,
there, but stilled, while in motion.
Or perhaps a prison, kind of sad alive,
a there with no other there.
Maybe after the ending breath we’ll be
rewarded for finally cleaning our plate,
be given that importance inside silence,
perhaps a kind of room or field to wait in, to meet.

3

Virgil Davis died yesterday, sudden.
Thirty eight years old, a big six-foot
something, employed, mostly happy,
black hair, family, etc. Wasn’t
AIDS, muscular dystrophy, cancer,
some decent lava disease.
It was death. Killed him.
No disguise, flyers, nothing even
about being in the neighborhood.
Just came right up, said,
“Leave it all, everyone, now.”

4.

Doris Farmer was thinner
when I came to call.
The broth and peas were
cold and still in the
bowls by the bed. “They
said six months but
I feel weaker by the day.”
After a while her
dogs, a blond one and
a dark brown one,
walked alongside me
to my car with
their happy tails. I drove
down the street
to where a school bus
was waiting, its
long red arm held out
to the side that
said, “Stop.” Two small
girls and then
a little boy stepped
down onto the
big road and crossed the
street, empty lunch
pails in their small hands.

5

The great giant boat,
moving slow through the starry dark
moving slow through the north Atlantic night
moving slow to the waiting edge of ice.
Then the jarring tear like God groaning
from the furnace in the Earth’s core
that shaped the swift terrible knowing
to form the final cast of the mind.
The unbelievable water is immense,
the great boat tips upward--
T-I-T-A-N and half of an I can be seen--
then slides down backward
fast, like a decision,
into the black ocean, and then
only the voices of the drowning dying,
rising together and utterly separate
in an immense terrible chorus,
rising and falling from the floating heads,
lifting up to the thousand silent stars,
to the small receding lifeboats
where the living are leaving.
And the heads, one by one, disappear,
the cries diminish and shrink into the growing stillness
as each slips two miles down to
settle and lie near the great giant boat,

6

In St. Louis, Missouri,
one week after the dead girl is found in the park,
a forty-seven-year old Chinese man
is being lowered into the back seat of the police car,
his hands handcuffed behind him.
His face is without feeling.
"I just wanted her to be quiet," he says.
"I told her to be quiet."

7

The wet fingers found a pelvic bone
and it frightened them.
They found it in the bathtub,
it belonged to them.
Now loose skin moves
over the knuckle of bone
like it was something separate,
never intending to stay.
The wrinkles say
we will follow time,
leave bone behind,
be afraid, then not.

8

Maybe it’s a small thing,
like light that leaks out under the door.
Maybe you’re just lifted up out of formation
like geese with new orders.
Maybe the world shudders,
the horizontal flickers,
senses, all senses, fade.
The night, the dark light appears.
The soul’s curved play comes into sight.

9

She is not mad at you.--She does not want to hurt you.
You are not in her way.--She is not going to put you
in a room alone, forever.
It is not about your dead friend’s blue
tennis shoe you keep on your dresser.
It is not about the struggle for Europe,
the cruel posse chasing the poor werewolf up the mountain.
You are a sweetening of her desire,
a fondness she has that is inexhaustible,
to remove your tight shoe.

10

A child in America,
a small boy three and one half years of age
turns his head hurriedly to follow the darting dragonfly.
It is bright crimson and yellow and blue.
He has never seen such a bright yellow,
such a sharp blue.
He does not think about them.
He does not think yet.
He only sees that yellow and blue can fly.
He does not know they are yellow and blue.
He does not know yet.
He lets them undo him.

October, Sunday, 10:37 A.M.

2007-07-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

In Detroit a child is dying in the hospital bed.
We do not know what he feels.
The parents sit quietly nearby where
the light streams in through the window.
We know more about them.

In the grocery store checkout counter in Albuquerque
the boy in adolescence has lost the check his mother gave him.
He sees the seven people behind him listening to his dead grandmother,
“You never pay attention, what’s the matter with you?”

In Wichita, Kansas a young woman is putting a man’s penis into her mouth.
It is the first time she has done this.
Not her heart, but someplace close to it is thrilled, she wants it never to end.

In Portland, Oregon a blind man is
waiting for the 10:37 bus with the seeing eye dog.
the bus comes up the street and the dog moves
the man toward it. There is a kind of caring in the
slowness of the movement, and then the dog sees the black
lab coming up the street and something different begins to move
up the muscles of his legs and into his chest and he turns his head and
shoulder and stops and moves one foot away from the bus and looks at
the lab, takes two more steps toward the bus, stops again and turns and looks,
then something bright goes out of his eyes and he takes the man onto the bus and the door closes.

In Gary, Indiana a man is putting his penis into a woman’s mouth.
She does not want him to.
Not his heart but someplace far away from it is thrilled,
he wants it never to end.

They are in high school biology in Des Moines, Iowa.
He is fifteen. She is sixteen.
He told himself he would not look at her today.
She is soft orange like a peach or a cat.
She is wearing the tight gray cotton dress,
the one with the hem just below the knees.
At l0:37 she walks across the room to the pencil sharpener.
She takes his eyes away from him and they follow
the dress that follows the round bottom
halfway down where the upper buttocks are outlined,
but the true wonder, where they begin to curve back in,
where his breath stops, is hidden.
Then she turns and walks back toward her desk
and her face, the place of pure pollen, weakens his
last power and draws him finally
to love's dark shining center.

In Ft Lauderdale, Florida
the woman with the shopping cart
warms herself under the morning sun
on the green park bench away from
the large crowd of eager observers
come to see the space shuttle lift off.
She does not know what day it is,
what state she is in,
what her age is,
she does not know her name.
She only knows about God.
At l0:37 her head turns toward the loud thunder.
She sees the fiery behemoth lift toward heaven.
She is glad someone is finally sending a message,
she is glad help is coming.

In Los Angeles, California
a small girl, six years old
sits astride the new blue bicycle
her left foot on the ground and her
right high on the thick black pedal.
She turns the handle bars a little to the left.
She does not know that we found an atom and
split it and made a bomb and dropped it on girls on bicycles.
She rolls the bike slightly foreword and backward a few feet
then pushes down hard with her right foot at 10:37 and goes round
and round fast in the joy of not knowing, in History’s circle of mercy.

In Seattle, Washington two middle aged lovers,
David and Marie are lying in bed together in the morning.
They met on a computer.
He is from Illinois, she is from Saigon.
Once in Pnom Penh he hid in
quiet terror in a bush waiting for the
gunned boots, ten feet away, to find him.
Marie’s brother Kai Tim fought with the Viet Cong.
Last night he left his newest child with them for the night.
Her name is Thaila. She is thirteen months old.
Now she rolls between them in endless delight,
not to the right and then the left which she does not have,
but first to one of them and then to the other.
She touches David’s beard and then Marie’s ear,
she shrieks with laughter.

In New Jersey a 56 year old bachelor
sits in the back aisle at the concert hall
for a Sunday morning symphony of Mozart’s ‘Requiem” mass.
He is wondering how he will die.
Behind him, one seat to his right, an
8 year old girl distracts him with her fidgeting.
She does not yet know Death
as the insistent visitor in the mind.
She knows it only as a distant guest
who lives somewhere else and
will never come to her parties.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says,
and then, “My arm hurts.”

In Montgomery, Alabama,
eight year old Isabelle and nine year old Michael
drink the blood of Christ at communion then
turn around, walk quietly toward the last pew
and continue on quietly past it out the door.
They hurry down the stone church steps,
turn left and run across the grass into the woods,
their chests pounding.
Isabelle stops. "Okay, this is good. "
At 10:37 they drop their pants and squat down
and then grunt hard as the brown mounds
fall out of them onto the earth.
As they stare at the astounding steam rising up
they look at each other, laugh,
then turn and run fast.

In St. Louis, Missouri,
one week after the dead girl is found in the park,
at 10:37 a forty-seven-year old Chinese man
is being lowered into the back seat of the police car,
his hands handcuffed behind him.
His face is without feeling.
"I just wanted her to be quiet," he says.
"I told her to be quiet."

A child in America,
a small boy three and one half years of age
turns his head hurriedly at 10:37 to follow the darting dragonfly.
It is bright crimson and yellow and blue.
He has never seen such a bright yellow, such a sharp blue.
He does not think about them. He does not think yet.
He only sees that yellow and blue can fly.
He does not know they are yellow and blue.
He does not know yet.
He lets them undo him.

Un-Pleasantville

2007-07-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

America is a nation of laws. America loves laws, almost as much as its God loves commandments. America likes laws so much that it can’t build new prisons fast enough to keep up with its new laws and the mathematical odds of getting through a normal life span without violating one of them is virtually impossible. In fact it has now become a feasible idea that, starting at adolescence, we should all be required to do periodic voluntary prison time on weekends or during our spare time so we could build up an account to draw from when we commit our eventual, inevitable crime. It could be a kind of civic duty like the peace corp. We could call it the ‘crime corp’. You could get tax credits for it. We’re going to need something like that now that America has leapt at the limitless opportunities that exist in limitless terrorism for more limitless laws. We’re going end up with one big Sack’s Fifth Ave. shoplifting satellite camera looking down on all of us, watchfully monitoring for misdeeds.

America is an optimist, it is always looking on the bright side of things in astonishing indifference to any appearance of distress--'Katrina who? America likes ‘limitless.’ Like all adolescents America possess an enthusiastic and optimistic belief in limitless possibilities while at the same time being blissfully unaware (also like adolescents) of limitless poverty, hunger, uninsured illness, and limitless homeless camps, all of which are an undeniable by-product of our brand of ‘Democracy in action.’ Any attempt to direct attention to this is met with the limitless anesthetic of indifference. America is something of a ‘cruel eyed optimist,’ a country resisting all efforts, indeed prides itself on ignoring any real concern or interest in the welfare and well being, the health, food or shelter of the people who make up the ‘family’ and ‘community’ that the country sanctifies. It is a country whose chief source of self esteem is the orgy of self love reflected in the recurring ‘narcissus’ chant of its obsessive anthem: ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall who is the greatest nation of them all.’

Such a country is not really a ‘homeland’ at all, it is actually just another land mass in which those without stock options or adequate income are trying to survive, a homeland where the homeless are viewed as having failed the self reliance test in their inability to take advantage of the limitless equal opportunity. To call such a place a homeland is really a very skillful reinvention of the meaning of propaganda. It doesn’t matter what flag you wave or what anthem you sing, if the needs of the people don’t come first the Country’s needs should come last. Such a Country is not worth a backward glance. Not to ask ‘what your country does for you but only what can you do for it’ is an idiot’s quiz.

‘Love is blind’ is tied tightly to the ties that bind, a subtle secret in the success of abuse since it is in the nature of attachment not to criticize but to attach, just as an unsheltered, poorly fed, neglected dog, suffering from malnutrition and open untreated wounds will wait patiently with blind and tragic loyalty in front of any closed door his master has long ago disappeared behind. If the dog could be taught how to wave a flag- he would. At least a dog would have the good taste not to turn it into a political equivalent of the hula-hoop.

An American Suicide

2007-07-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

A Story Problem:

You have multiple problems as you approach middle age: crippling arthritis; an artificial hip that confines you to a wheelchair; you have a history of clinical depression; you are laid off your job at Meier & Frank’s Department Store after 18 years due to downsizing cut backs, and you can only find temporary jobs that do not provide health insurance, so your savings are drained to pay for health care and prescribed drugs. You are living in continual exhaustion. You are being evicted; your van is repossessed and you file for bankruptcy. That’s certainly enough to cause one to miss out on ‘having a good day,’ but you are a resourceful independent person surrounded by wonderful support from family and friends.

Solution:
A week after having your role celebrated as a family member at Thanksgiving dinner, you “choose” to kill yourself.

There is a suicide every 17 minutes in the United States. One senses that behind and beneath the tip of this bare statistic lies an iceberg that could pierce the hull of that fragile Titanic of the personality everyone is traveling on. The indecipherable variables that result in anyone taking that fateful voyage are unknown, often even to the voyagers themselves. It is an uncharted territory, and the reports from those who take that voyage are sketchy at best and ultimately inadequate in give a satisfying account for such an enormous event.

The suicide statistic entered my awareness around the time I happened to run across an article on a local suicide in our state's prominent mainstream newspaper, and I found myself prompted to read it with a more focused attention. Using the article as a springboard, I decided to look into the subject and the story closer suspecting that no suicide 'is an island entire unto itself' and thus might contain clues to commonly shared ingredients between other suicides. In addition, the treatment in this article's coverage rang some immediate alarm bells that seemed to go beyond the customary sound bite that attends many newspaper stories, indeed after digesting it, I decided that it inadvertently begged deeper questions and stimulated the need for further probing. In fact, the article even provided added impetus to the need for such inquiry through its own lack of journalistic inquiry amid its rather vulnerable assumptions.

These reflections are dedicated to the real people who every 17 minutes will make a premature departure.

“The deeper you go in researching the causes of the ‘Homeless,’ one discovers the same story over and over again. You begin with an ordinary life; then an event occurs which is traumatic or even catastrophic to that person’s world--smaller events follow which he or she would have once been able to handle or successfully negotiate but now are unable to, and more importantly, are also unable now to explain this inability satisfactorily to themselves, thus starting a slow erosion into the sense of self that had formerly supported them and from there into varied degrees of shame, silence and withdrawal. But what you are struck by continually in your research is something unique to American life, the absolute isolation involved. In what other culture would there be such an absence or failure of real support from familial, social, or institutional sources?”

‘Helping and Hating The Homeless’ Peter Marin

“Your red blossoms amid green leaves are drooping
beautiful geranium but you do not ask for water.
You cannot speak. You do not need to speak.
Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,
yet they do not bring water.
They pass on saying, ‘the geranium wants water”

Edgar Lee Masters ‘Spoon River Anthology’

Imagination is our fundamental moral faculty. It is central to grasping the nature and meaning of a significant event and as the American poet Richard Hugo pointed out, “our great failure is our inability to imagine the suffering of others.”

This was the headline on Nicki Dyer’s suicide in the Sunday Oregonian in December, 2004:

“Independent to the end. In pain and jobless, but refusing to lean on family or friends, Nicki Dyer chooses death.”

It pushed every button in the mind's 'proper behavior ' patriot act. The headline had all the qualities of a star-spangled American anthem, including the stoic oath of silence. All it lacked was musical accompaniment. The article presented us with a real trooper - the “dignified resignation” and “self reliance” and finally “choosing” the stiff upper lip of death. Something seemed buried above ground in this tragedy. The article would have you believe that self-reliance and pride in the self is expressed in choosing to kill yourself, -that independence of spirit is manifested as suicide-that somehow it was her strength of character that destroyed her. With such strength who needs weakness?

According to the article Nicki Dyer possessed the character traits of independence, self reliance, and pride and was also surrounded by a wealth of family and friends. These are the ingredients for buoyant optimism, an American recipe for having “a nice day” and a nice life to boot, not for suicide. In fact, suicide would be a non-sequitur. This article was not covering a quaint problem, something that could be addressed by attending a motivational seminar, like Nicki's failure to adapt to a style of living different from one she was accustomed to. As extreme and unusual as suicide is, it is not an anomaly, it is a transgression of human limits and the hidden terror of this article is the truth it conceals while reporting the facts, the truth that she dissolved in plain sight, in front of everyone. Pride is about what you value, what you want to display. Suicide is antithetical to pride, it is the polar opposite, it is default control, it is the individual's powers being inadequate or insufficient to meet one's needs. It is about the soul not receiving its due.

It was the kind of article my mind just couldn’t move on from. There seemed to be a nonsensical kind of sense that challenged credibility in the treatment of this painful story, matter and antimatter dancing an American do-si-do of tragedy, pushing the limits of common sense beyond human sense into a gradual tsunami of reason gone mad and where the crucial accuracy of language had been turned back into a stone tool. The purpose in all of our 'purpose driven lives' is being alive, living. As disturbing as the article’s spin was on this suicide their license to do it unchallenged in mainstream press, the loudest loudspeaker and largest smoke signal, was even more so.

The truth is that pride and self worth are deeply connected to outside influences; we’re all hard-wired to avoid the rejection of losing face, of not living up to the standards of those who have the power to withhold love and caring or effect self esteem. No one’s comfort zone extends too far beyond 'safe.' Ultimately we’re all kind of pansies; nobody climbs Everest naked and pride and independence can serve as barricades against fear, failure, complexity, despair and death, just as suicide can.

The place where we are most equal is in our fundamental powerlessness. In his book 'The Soul's Code' the author James Hillman observed that, “The very ground of relationship is dependence, not independence; it is the very ground and motive for what authentic relationship requires.” Limits and areas of incompetence are not a darkened showcase of our personality failings, but more accurately the personality’s psychological “fault” lines, the Achilles heel in us all that makes us human, and where that protective version of pride and independence is not needed, where shame is irrelevant and has no function.

Contrary to the article’s headline, “Independent to the end” Nicki was dependent, like every one of us; dependent on a necessary measure of comfort and safety, a sanctuary that enables us to feel that life is worth living. She was surrounded by support that was inadequate or insufficient to meet a need that all her independent determination, and self reliance was also unable to provide. In fact she was dependent to the end—on someone to actually Get The Message—that she was in real trouble. The irony is that we’re all dependent to a significant extent on others for our autonomy.

We tend to think that we are the sole author of our thoughts, opinions, ideas and feelings, that they come out of a nowhere somewhere inside of us, emerging by magic from a 'self', but the facts of the reality are that they, like the impulse to suicide or the complex layers underlying 'character' do not happen in a vacuum but are produced out of the context of a huge webbed network of relationships with history and society, including one’s biology, race, personal history, family, friends, community, country and culture. Even in that last ‘Alamo’ of psychology, behavior we have less control over who we are and how we think of ourselves than we think we do.

Underlying all ethics and morality is the sense that we matter, that what happens to you as an individual matters and that leads, by some hidden mechanism, to a truth in the head and heart that others also matter. We send messages to each other all the time even if we don’t want to or aren’t aware of it, and much of how we value ourselves comes from the messages we receive from friends, family, community, and country. What is ultimately allowed to happen to us can be one of the strongest messages conveying if and how much we matter, often driving us to insist too strenuously that we do matter, sometimes with too much distorted pride or independence.

Nicki couldn’t afford health insurance. The deeper irony is that nobody really needs health insurance. All they need is health care. But she was given the message she wasn’t worthy of it, that her health and welfare were not of intrinsic irreplaceable value, a message coming from a culture and community existing in a human ethical coma.

It’s easy to understand how society's recruiting officer for “self reliance” and “independence” is so successful when there is such a deep and legitimate desire for autonomy in all of us— who doesn’t want to lace his own shoes, butter his own bread? It is easy then to make the leap to thinking we are, or certainly should be, in command of our own fate.

It is curious that we ever buy into such an untenable position when it is obvious that the three wolves of nurture, nature, and economics whose formidable powers are ultimately beyond the control of the individual, can huff and puff and blow our coherent, orderly, straw houses down, a fact which should by itself call our simplistic concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ into question. It’s not just a leap of faith but a leap of ignorance.

The disturbing questions move in like a weather front hanging over everything about Nicki’s story, but the largest and loudest is the absence of anger about what was happening to her. Where is the outrage, the indignation from those who knew her and loved her? It is not only the overall absence of any trace or feeling of it in the article, but chillingly, even from Nicki herself (excluding her one stressed outburst at work). Why wasn't anyone refusing to consent to what was happening to her? This was not 1933 Berlin.

One of our most important critical faculties, maybe our most important, is the ability to distinguish between what is inadequate and what is sufficient, and suicide points to a profound absence of hope. What if the source of hope or optimism is limited to oneself and one’s resources as being the only really acceptable place to seek it? Imagine carrying such an overwhelming burden of hopelessness and pressure in your psychic backpack that you wanted to end your life and then not being able to fully reveal it to those closest to you (closest!)?

Nicki's refusal to grasp whatever ropes or lifelines were actually thrown to her begs the question of why she did not reach for and grab them, which the words “choice” and “independence” do not supply but instead point back to the question... to what was really said and offered at those private exchanges between her family and friends, and in the context of what personal life histories between the participants. What were the lifelines that were actually thrown to her, how close were they thrown, were they not thrown close enough for her hands to grasp, were they too thin to do any good, or thrown too late?

When in quicksand you can’t throw yourself a rope or lifeline, someone else must do it, and that deepens the drama with fear’s complicity. We seldom jeopardize our own survival. The survivors in the Titanic’s lifeboats rowed away from the people in the water not toward them. But even aside from that there are excellent reasons for being hesitant to ask for aid. To reach out and really ask for help is to call enemy fire onto your own position. To even consider being deserving is to invite a direct hit of that criticism, of the shame and fear that is reserved for anyone with the scarlet “V” on their forehead, anyone who is viewed as a 'victim,' or who has failed the self reliance test. And this, despite the fact that Nicki had contributed to the best of her ability, carrying obvious physical and mental disabilities. Add in those hidden attendant messages usually surrounding requests for assistance from friends, family, community, and country, the silent and not so silent messages that really dampen the courage to ask for help ( “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” ).

It can create a lot of confusion when all the correct dots are connected (the birthdays remembered, the cards and calls, Christmas and Thanksgiving invitations) and you still find yourself with insoluble problems so isolating that the only solution seems suicide. Even a clear signal of indifference to her welfare would have allowed her to get a more accurate bearing on her position than the illusory ones she was getting. In such a culture, our innate need for autonomy and self reliance are turned against us, creating a painful isolated reality others can’t or won’t acknowledge or really care about, and where we must endure and face too many difficult situations and conflicts in solitude.

Nicki’s story is not only a celebration of independent determination, which is there to be celebrated, but also an indictment of an invisible virus in our culture which seems intent on encouraging self destruction in order to salvage an acceptable sense of self.

While it can be said that there are many causes for suicide, that no two are alike, it can also be said that are all alike in that they are all a need and a tool for release. Suicide is a response to intolerable circumstances by someone who feels powerless. By casually suggesting that Nicki “chose” suicide the article assumes unrealistic properties of autonomy to her mind, especially someone experiencing her pressures and circumstances. If you have a healthy apple in one hand and a diseased one in the other and choose the diseased apple, doesn't that suggest something is amiss, Watson! Suicide usually reflects (excluding the legitimate assisted suicide issue) the opposite of choice, the absence of alternatives. People don’t commit suicide, suicide commits them. The act’s awful power is that you don’t go to it, it comes to you. It is what you lean on when you can’t find anything better to lean on.

When “choice” is looked at closer it becomes more complex. Do we choose to choose what we’re going to choose? Actually 'choice' is more a concept than a fact, and a fuzzy one. You draw your bath water for what is comfortable to you. You did not choose to want that certain temperature, rather you choose the temperature you want. We are not radically free.

The term “choice” is too often used to dignify where we have landed or to blame others for where they have landed, as a tool for manufacturing a plausible and rewarding narrative about reality, life, self, and our place in the universe, which helps us lessen and tolerate the insecurity and chaos of life, to avoid awareness of the variety of trap doors we’re all standing on.

Serious brain research is revealing how mood affects and our emotional states change the way the brain processes information; we think differently under the sway of different feeling states and it is beyond the farthest reaches of reason to assume Nicki was feeling anything other than emotionally feral, buried alive on either the day of her death or the weeks (months, years!) leading up to it.

Actually we don’t think, so much as we feel, and to live without an income adequate enough to provide basic vital human needs is to live in a continual running emergency, which becomes a drip torture form of terror.

It is easy to imagine how it could take far less than the significant sustained stress that Nicki endured for life to change from a promise to a threat, to make one lose the small degree of actual freedom and self sufficiency that we do possess, to feel there’s no place outside of the ‘independent’ self to really turn to.

When we cannot adequately respond to an assault on our dignity it deepens the indignity and indignation. If we put ourselves in Nicki’s place, we can see how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to permit herself to even feel anger, much less voice it, to those who were always there at the edge of the swamp with condolences and praise for her “independence,” whose support, however inadequate, was well intentioned and consistent with the external forms we are told to recognize as representing support.

Instead of feeling free to respond with honest feelings of fear or frustration or even anger, it’s easy to understand Nicki feeling compelled to show gratitude, to acknowledge the gesture’s thoughtfulness rather than its inadequacy. It is hard to scream, “where is the lifeline?” even when it seems obvious that when you’re going down in quicksand support has no right to appear in any form but a lifeline.

All of this is not even to mention the hidden anger one harbors for being made to turn the arrow of blame back at one’s self. Neither Poe nor Kafka could have devised a torture as clever and subtle as having the victims of cruel circumstances victimize themselves by accepting entire responsibility.

It is unfortunate that anger has become so suspect in our therapy age. There is much interest and counseling on how to control and dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, talk it away, reason it away, educate, meditate, pray, love, or medicate it away, even gene-therapy or taser it away-anything but how to allow it or listen to it, much less validate it.

And what is the 'red badge' of self reliance anyway? What is it about “unable” and “disabled” we feel so compelled to disgrace, to reserve for the cellar of shame? We all have limits in a surplus of varieties - psychological, emotional, social, sexual, and financial so why do we insist on avoiding them, as though the human spirit is somehow excluded from functioning within anything resembling limits?

The pendulum that swings in our lives between independence and dependence is regulated by a sense of trust, in feeling comfortable and confident that our own efforts can be effective in meeting our needs, and that should we fail, others can be relied upon to assist with or help provide for our needs, to preserve the integrity of the self. We live in a country and culture where that pendulum is stuck, rusted into a dangerously unrealistic position of self reliance that socially engineers tragedy.

It doesn’t take a global positioning satellite to locate the dead end of Nicki’s life. She was a victim of repeated doses of devastating bad luck and crucial disappointments. How was she to believe she had innate worth and value outside the proud, reinforced confines of her own mind, to feel she was more than a human hub cap, when all the efforts of her life’s checks were returned for 'insufficient funds.'

A Human Being, an American, One of Us, was destroyed through acts of omission and commission, in a culture we have created and continue to sanction. Nicki's tragedy offers us an opportunity to alter the culture we are creating. Her story demands and deserves to be looked at closely because it points back to the heart of our culture, the health of our social values, our way of life as “the greatest nation on earth.” It is not just another story of someone falling through the cracks, failed by the system. It is a story of an individual's free fall through the system itself, revealing it to be one big wide open abyss, waiting for anyone who falls into it.

By itself, Nicki’s death asks the question “Is there really a social contract that exists outside the criminal justice system, that covers the welfare of the village inhabitants? Or does it respond only to those suspected of misbehaving?” Community or meaningful connection is only possible when we can openly share our lives with safety. Shutting the door to that only distances us further from the intimacies and fragile security which we are genetically driven to need, increasing our separation, as well as our anxiety, mistrust and suspicion.

There are many ways I could justify and rationalize the Oregonian article's point of view on Nicki Dyer’ suicide, but I can't accept or excuse it, or give it my consent. It is too important to be framed in the ‘serenity prayer’s lame plea for help in accepting those things we cannot change, or to be viewed in the sanitary pastime of a moral debate, or as an ethical or political lapse of judgment where it can sneak in under the radar clothed in the respectable convention of traditional values, which do not trigger the mind’s defenses or draw the gasps of shock or horror that tanks or teargas or terrorists bombs would. For me or anyone to sanction this kind of spin gives a pass to a laziness of sympathetic imagination that impairs our humanity.

The thinly veiled hysteria that surrounds our love of “independence” and “self reliance” is a fool’s gold brand viewed through a carnival mirror, a deadly recipe whose ingredients would only be chosen if one were coerced by harsh circumstance and the absence of support alternatives. There are cruel illusions involved in overestimating the degree of control we have over our lives, while ignoring and discouraging any examination of the overall systems in which we live our lives, those forces outside of our control which directly and irrevocably affect us. Such faulty nearsighted assessments only result in our targeting ourselves as the primary source of our own failures and pain.

The Oregonian's article inadvertently evokes comparisons with Rachael Carson's classic 'Silent Spring' or even Jack Finney's 'Invasion of The Body Snatchers' by illuminating the slow but growing erosion of that elusive something which is central to what it means to be a human being, the silent subjective center of experience. We began circling the mind's wagons with the advent of the information age, the assault of relentless information on our senses along with the more visible urgent threats to our well being, but the circumference of the wagon circle is becoming too small to meaningfully include what most deeply makes us (even those inside the circle) 'us,'.

When something as central to our humanity as the weight and validity of our psychological and emotional experience begins to erode, we lose the ability to include what is most vital about us to play a role in how we perceive and treat one another, we lose touch with those things that make our individual and collective importance possible, such as the relative measure of comfort and safety we require to feel life is worth living. We forget that we need to face human size problems, situations where we feel our realistic efforts can affect our circumstances for the better. It is a situation that seems in synch with our digital age.

In 1769 Philip Thickness, a British military officer with a social conscience published a horrifying account of 4 people who were starved to death in a poor house in England. It brought an emotion new to politics-sympathy-an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty, and suffering.

As a culture we seem to be going in the opposite direction. In our present climate of moral vertigo we should be very reluctant to open the door any wider than it already is to our casual habit of neglect, not to mention our philosophical and even celebratory acceptance of death and dying. If we can advance the concept of death with dignity, why shouldn't we begin to explore the complex of tangibles and intangibles that constitute life with dignity?

We have become a warp drive super speed digital culture of high tech rationalists and realists whose batteries are too weak to show us the way, to illuminate the darkness that surrounds us—with the result that we too boldly and too courageously accept and explain away other’s suffering and in the process cheapen our sensibilities as a culture, reinforcing a “better dead than disabled” mentality. This is not just about a 'political' position we can 'agree to disagree' on, If we cannot learn to think and see and feel and act outside of this dark empty box, we’re all going to die inside it.

The search for certainty and answers in this tragedy are complex but it must ultimately fall back on the truths buried in the heart of human nature and the nature of the human heart. It really doesn’t matter what flag you wave or what anthem you sing, if the critical needs of the people in a country don’t come first, the needs of the country do not deserve consideration. They are not worth even a backward glance.

Our concept and use of money –for it is a concept and our use of it is arbitrary and not absolute and the uses we have adopted for it guarantees we won’t all be in the same boat—it amplifies our perception that we share radically different fates rather than the ultimate root ones we all share. Nicki Dyer's story is finally about the cost to everyone of accepting the unacceptable. Suicide is a choice to the extent that it is a perception that dying is safer than living. It is when the untenable really becomes untenable.

When looked at closely and honestly, Nicki’s suicide has to be called an American suicide, one that happened in the quicksand of the public sector as well as the private sector, a landscape with no human sector, where it is better to run out of life before you run out of money. This is about abandonment—and not only of Nicki Dyer. It is about an abandonment which is systematically woven into the fabric of a culture that has surrendered the idea of anyone being of intrinsic and irreplaceable value. To try to rationalize and explain away her tragedy is to explain away our own humanity, to further add to the shredded remains of what little is left of our social soul in an environment where we are often little more than social lab rats with a social contract that is not worth signing.

Predicting The Present In America

2007-07-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

(Notes from a Non-Participant in The Front Lines of Ignorance)

Introduction

I didn’t actually learn about the events of 9/11 till nearly three months after the event. Through a combination of circumstances of both accident and design I found myself with an opportunity to conduct an experiment—namely how to be a modern day ‘information’ Robinson Crusoe’ without an island, in fact in a rather large metropolitan city. All I knew was that something somewhere had happened and I decided under the urging of some perverse inner imp, to see how long I could maintain that virginity. I would eliminate radio and television, avoid the newspaper headlines in stores, wear earplugs in public and deliver stern warnings to friends to say nothing to me about ‘IT.’

I woke up slowly around noon on the day of ‘9/11’ and still lying in bed called the mail order Co. to see what had happened to something I had ordered more than two weeks ago. They put me on hold to check my order and had me listen to the broadcast of their choice. It happened to be news. Before I could protect my mind the searing image of something about terrorists and people jumping out of the windows of burning buildings was engraved into my memory. A sudden force of emotion rushed through me. I threw the phone down in rage and kept it at a fairly inaudible distance till the lady returned and I finished my business. Next, I called the phone Co. to check on my last bill and heard a recording saying that they were closed due to the National emergency. I resisted the impulse to turn on the radio or television.

My sudden rage was directed at a form of creeping terrorism that feels closer to home and is growing steadily. It has been gradually breaking through to me that something is very wrong with our lives, that they are suffocating, psychotic, and preposterous with priorities imposed from outside which are rushing at us in a swelling tide of unavoidable information. I have been feeling over stimulated for some time, either from the agendas of others masquerading as mine, or from the surplus of random misfortune that deserves my attention. There is a metastasized tumor of ‘attention deficit disorder,’ from having too much to attend to and it creates a kind of static interference that limits my ability to focus my feelings. I have trouble even taking in ‘information,’ of simply assigning meaning to information which is continually competing to reshape the territory of my perceptions with its own, thus threatening the very borders of the self, obscuring my ability to even recognize what is my own experience.

What 30 years ago were small unnoticed erosions into my sense of control over my life has turned into an avalanche. I only have to be on the freeway of any modern city or stand in the middle of any shopping mall to feel the shifting of those internal tectonic plates that stabilize the sandcastle of the personality, to feel that fragile sense of ownership at the center of myself either overwhelmed and swept away by the massive undertow of so many other urgent, rushing lives, or simply lost in an exploding world whose numbing numbers have become a brutal arena of billions of competing agendas.

Our challenge is becoming how to take our life and what happens in it seriously, how to value our own joy and pain which can be lost or disfigured by outside interference and either dwarfed or surpassed through merely looking in any direction or picking up any newspaper. How do we dare to assign real importance to our emotional lives? Perhaps mainly by insisting and by knowing that not valuing your own experience devalues everyone’s.

Central to that is a need to preserve the source of originality in ourselves, the continual struggle to identify and claim our own individual experience and still remain social beings, members of a class, race, and country.

I felt a sharp desire to be clearer about my perceptions and experiences, to explore the Co. of the ‘self’ from any angle that was available, to find out if I was the major stockholder, to wrestle back ownership of that precious place we call consciousness. Exactly where was this ‘I’ located and what were its dimensions? Just what is the circumference of ‘self’ and what are its boundaries and how far do they extend? Could they be made to extend? And who says?

I did not know who had committed the act or what the act was, or what their motivations were for doing it, but it suddenly seemed to me that they had released something that had been silently residing and growing both within me and the world, a loud scream of frustration, anger, and rage, that had finally become articulated into visible tragedy.

The first uncensored feeling to rise up in me was, ‘Maybe, at last, everyone’s in the
same boat. Maybe we can finally get America’s attention off the ‘business as usual’ stock market (that Frankenstein creation which doesn’t cope with ‘uncertainty’ any better than its creator) and onto human agendas? Maybe a thunder and lightening voice has parted the clouds and yelled down angrily, “nobody needs health insurance, all they need is health care”!

To live without adequate income is to exist in a continual running emergency but the competing messages from our culture are, 'I do not see nor want to see it' or 'I see it but it is not relevant to our social agenda.' It is sickening and obscene at election after election watching us turn our backs with cynical and callous indifference toward the endless combinations of 'have nots' in this country, to watch those 'unfortunate' women and men and children who have failed the 'self reliance' test pushing their shopping cart houses through the public and the private sectors without raising a decibel of protest or public outrage from the human sector, a sick picture of emergency and indifference, urgency and silence.

The world is not round but flat. People fall off the edge of it every hour of every day.
In fact, one of our most astonishing acts is the casualness with which we let anyone we love or need out of our line of sight, as though death would not prevent us from reaching them with a person to person call in case of an emergency, a new feature of our cell phone service. We are always standing on a trap door and there’s a timer on it and we don’t know what it’s set for. Isn’t that more than enough to handle?

It is becoming harder and harder to ask ‘for whom the bell tolls’ when it’s become a continuous tolling message of grief and misery that never stops. Now this tireless messenger from evening news-anchors who usually have the emotional presence of a disinterested third party, want to bring me another message of pain and grief, another version of Cortez and his un-merry men slaughtering more Aztecs and a place in me just wants to scream, ‘God Damn it, Enough.! Stop it, stop it,!’-Our God sheds the blood of his Son and -the Aztecs shed the blood of their citizens to their God and we have more or less followed suit ever since. Why not read something, why not think!

While I was lying there wrestling with curiosity and the urge to turn on the TV and contend with the spin cycle of emotions I knew that would generate I found myself suddenly interested in the space I was occupying, its feeling. It began to feel like the vitality of my awareness was being enhanced or sharpened in some way, imagination given access to new possibilities, a cocoon containing a kind of infinite permission that had formerly been hidden. There was a kind of giddy lightness in this novel ignorance, an almost illicit sweetness that seemed to carry within it new aspects of reality ordinarily denied to us.

I decided to continue my quarantine of ‘current events.’ What I didn’t know suddenly seemed as important as what I did know, just as negative numbers have a function in math. It felt as though I had discovered a secret form of occult happiness that hovered in those dim borders at the far edge of imagination’s yearning, teasing me like a ghost wind. I began to feel like a spy in reverse, carrying an important secret without content.

On the third day, while I was taking my daily walk, someone stopped me in his car for directions, asking me if he was heading west. It surprised me somewhat when I had to tell him that I didn’t know. After he drove off, it occurred to me that the only west I knew was what was west of me, where my west was, and as I turned, so did it. I felt suddenly thrilled that the universe had placed a private little subversion inside of me, my own unique unnatural center in the natural order of things.

I began to see how tissue thin the mind’s autonomy really is: how often we were pushed, pulled, and directed by remote control, reducing the intellectual freedom over many parts of our lives to that of a Wells Fargo security guard, a plastic, inflatable, all purpose human being. Our mind is continuously being subtly raped, involuntarily violated, seeded by other people’s thoughts, ideas, events, music, or random conversations. I remembered back to my childhood years as a church acolyte when they told me things about a God and a Jesus I could not know they could not know. What a rare and precious thing it is, and how hard won, just to know ‘what happened when you left your room and how it really felt.’

The powerful pressures which surround us, both intentionally and unintentionally, tell us which way to go and what to do when we get there. They would rather ‘your’ life not be the focus of your life. They want you to substitute appropriate response for authentic response, to get on with your life’ by leaving it behind, to simply fit into the world as it is, like a carrot or head of lettuce or a chair.
The fact that we share a common language can lead us to the easy misconception that we share identical experience but we all have our own private map of what makes us feel sad or happy, nervous or relaxed, excited or bored, along with our own private ‘treasure chest’ of fantasies. They are our ‘true north’ and if we lose touch with them it is not a small loss which is why one’s authentic experience is so crucial and often so threatening to others and why the continual struggle to be the author of our own experience is so vital. ‘Author’ means authority, authorizing your own response to your own experience, becoming your own Pope, Judge, Mailman, News-anchor, and President.

For example, I have been patiently waiting through the interminable dreariness of sports to see one real miracle, just once. I wasn’t waiting for the last place team to upset the first place one, the weak hitter to hit the home run with bases loaded, I was waiting for that player who would suddenly turn with the ball in his hand and put it in the opponent’s basket, someone who would say, ‘what the hell we’re forty points ahead,” or just “why not!” I went through the library’s entire history of sports journals, newspapers, and biographies, even Ripley’s ‘Believe it Or Not’ and there wasn’t a mention of anything even remotely suggestive of such a miracle.
I haven’t seen this miracle for the same reason you don’t see people in the bowling alley trying to leave as many pins standing as possible. In many ways it would be a more challenging game, requiring more refined dexterity, but they aren’t aware that tradition and unconscious competition have programmed them. It’s literally ‘unthinkable’ not to compete, partly because you never feel the chain collar around your neck till you move away from the stake and you won’t move away from it because ‘the most skillful manipulation always appears as choice to those who are targeted.’ The only way you’re taught to play the game is to win or lose. No wayward, spontaneous, playful impulse ever whispers in your soul’s ear.

Still, there is no future in giving up so I’m still waiting patiently for the miracle and as long as imagination is part of us, there is hope, because that’s its job. The imagination is always running a concurrent, alternate history to what is going on around it, like that girl who lived up in a tree to protest logging. The best part of us is often up in a tree somewhere refusing to come down.

I established a fairly easy routine of being able to avoid exposure to anything relating to
‘it’ and went about my way with less vigilance but I couldn’t help noticing the flood of American flags that suddenly appeared almost everywhere and seemed to carry a feeling of ‘congratulations’ issuing from an inner circle of easy membership. Yet they also seemed to be masking a deeper public display of a social ‘white cell’ syndrome, our mind’s social antibody finally sanctioned, released and amplified, under the auspices of unanimous approval.

I saw a red convertible pull up along a sidewalk flying a large American flag like an erection. Two young men safe in their prime years jumped out and onto the street. They got out wearing tee shirts that said in large bold letters, “Solidarity against Terrorism,” as if in answer to others somewhere who were wearing tee-shirts saying, “Solidarity for Terrorism or Gang Rape.” I sensed that a terrifyingly complex human tragedy was being reduced to a cultural, communal, bumper sticker.

I have been wondering what America’s soul is about lately. Since this began I have found myself reflecting on my feelings about my country with a sharper focus than I had before. What did I really feel about living in America?- because, in the last analysis, we don’t think, we feel. It’s the only radar or compass that can give us our most vital bearings.

I was born and raised in America and have never been outside it, even during my four years in the Air Force so I have no basis for comparison but I can still respond to the environment I live in. While I like its material comforts that my deeper response to it has been largely one of distaste. It has felt like the bully on the playground who, for the most part, was lacks any real sympathetic regard or sensitivity for anything outside its primary functions of business, profit, competition, conformity and its stern, judgmental God. America has always really felt like a big football game to me, with harsh referees, an intimidating, suffocating super bowl that only has room for winners and losers.

I realized I’ve never felt proud or possessive about my country, that I do not live in a ‘Country’ I want to be mine, but in a fiercely competitive urban landscape that generates tension, conflict, and anxiety as efficiently as if it had been designed for it. America is a ‘business warrior.’ It is in a hurry and its power is real and thoughtless and frightening. Its response to those who can’t keep up is the small, inconspicuous plastic containers for donations at supermarket checkout counters. The inadequate always seems to be sufficient here.

I can only draw conclusions about a ‘Country’ from the actions and messages of its institutions and leaders A week before ‘9/11’ I watched a national evening ‘news-anchor’ report that there were ‘6000 homeless teenagers in Seattle’ without changing his expression. Children are continuously absorbing messages from the world around them and one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the strongest messages coming at them are deeply disturbing: Three times as many children are committing suicide now as compared to thirty years ago. They see people living in shopping carts and tents, executions challenging football as the national pastime and only competing for our attention with the race to seduce and manipulate consumers, or build more and bigger prisons.

These children see a medical system that is not organized to simply deliver health care, but rather a confused nervous system that can’t decide if it wants to check the blood pressure in bed 5 or the day’s receipts. This is the fact and the evidence, what America wants them to swear allegiance to!? wants God to ‘Bless – an America that is handed back and forth between family dynasties, from ‘Roosevelt’s’ to ‘Kennedy’s’ to the ‘Bush’s’ like it was some kind of ‘Bonanza’ ranch that Ben Cartwright was going to pass on to ‘Hoss’ and then ‘Little Joe;’ an America where elections are sudden death business transactions, business ‘Gunfights at an O.K. Corral,’ It is not Okay.

I recently organized an event for children who were reading poetry that they had written, and a nine year old boy named Wes Bently read his two line poem, ‘The Empire,’
‘Ask the repetitive Empire for food.
It will answer “no.”
What had really happened on 9/11? Literally not knowing I decided to compound my ignorance by hazarding a guess. The famous attorney Clarence Darrow said his job was to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Well, apparently the comfortable have been afflicted. We have been attacked I presumed by some members from a neighboring tribe, whose serious God did not like our serious God partially because out God was richer, stronger, and more powerful. Someone said accurately that, “we can only be as savage as we are absolutely serious.”

As I walked about I saw flags flowing in profusion decorating sorrow’s random parade of anger and fear. The anger and fear are not new but now they have taken shape like a newly formed team with bright uniforms that has just found a worthy and needed challenge. But all this begs the question- Was everything OK the day before this happened? Where was our attention directed the day before, besides Wall Street? What was our anger directed to, besides the few remaining ‘Welfare’ recipients?

The headlines say, ‘America Attacked,’ and flags are flown at half mast for those who perished, as they should be. Still, I find it necessary to separate people who die in any country from that country, to eliminate connections that are not deeply central to the powerful event of death, or at least make them peripheral. A songwriter recently wrote, “someone’s dying in Canada, and the leaves are drenched with rain.” What is important is the dying and its echo of leaves drenched in rain’ not the accidents of geography. Shouldn’t flags everywhere be flown at half mast everyday for those everywhere who perish from less overtly violent, less deliberate, acts of commission or omission that range from exposure, homelessness, malnutrition and hunger, uncovered illness, to the infinite, invisible effects of poverty, which are an undeniable product of our ‘Democracy in action.’

I happened to learn later that the President said, “You are either for us or against us.”
The President needs a lens adjustment. If, between wars, any young soldier were to go to a nearby phone booth and call this Veterans Dept. and inquire if he and his ‘sacred’ family would be guaranteed health care in the future, following his service years, he would be told ‘No, it’s not part of the plan.’ The soldier is really just defending a large corporation that doesn’t offer benefits.

Such a country with its obsessive ‘narcissus’ anthem chanting ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the greatest nation of them all’ is not really a homeland at all, it is just another land mass where those without stock options or adequate income are trying to survive amid flag waving that is the political equivalent of the hula-hoop. To ask only ‘what you can do for your country’ and not what it does for its citizens is an idiots quiz.

My deep feelings about any country with such a ‘plan,’ a country that wants it citizens to serve it but refuses to serve them is anger, as it would be in any uncaring abusive relationship. Unfortunately ‘anger’ has become suspect in our ‘therapy’age. There is much counseling on how to dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, ignore it, talk it away, reason it away, educate it away, meditate it away, pray it away, love it away, and gene-therapy it away, anything but how to listen to it.

And terrorism, where does it live? Terror arises when we are exposed to either subtle or stark threats to vital areas of our well being we can’t respond to adequately or prevent,
the mind and body’s absence of shelter and privacy, repeated frustration or blocked access to needed health care. It is not only what happens to us but what seems likely to happen. - the recurring cancer of worry around problems without solution,’--- “ I can’t pay the rent,” “The letter says they’re going to shut the heat and water off,” “They said we aren’t covered,” “Regret to inform you that you don’t qualify,”... Are not all the mental and emotional states of pressure, stress, and hopelessness which those conditions produce a drip torture form of terror?!

Then what about ‘rage?’ Can’t most rage be ultimately traced back to a deep sense of powerlessness, loss, or humiliation in some form or another, of having eaten Alice’s mushroom that makes one smaller. Anger, violence, rage -- aren’t they all loud, searing messages of pain or wounds that have gone unacknowledged, damaged lives that have not been seen or cared about? Violence is nearly always a response to an intolerable situation, to love that has been denied in some material or spiritual form. While violence and rage and anger is not the face of love that we have been taught to recognize, it is, nevertheless, love speaking, loudly, from its other face of profound, intolerable disappointment.

The Silence of the Bells at Notre Dame

2007-06-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

(for Bruce)

We met once briefly over a year ago
at a small convention of tired friends
and today our mutual friend called
to tell me you had stopped
your own running life.
If you could come back right now
we would likely not recognize each other
even if we were both on an elevator
but after I was told I remembered
that tiny hour when you were alive
and how you had run
all the appropriate social errands,
father, male, husband, friend, grown-up
for everyone in the room,
everyone except the hunchback
who needed the Cathedral’s absolute sanctuary
and couldn’t find it anywhere

Bruce the poem ends there, but “why ?” the nagging ghost hovering over our “now,” wants to go on, not the journalist’s or psychologist’s “why,” or the neighbors and co-workers indifferent wondering “why,” not the “let’s get to the bottom of this” judges, police, and prosecuting attorney’s “why!” and certainly not the “shirking responsibility” or “cowards way” theorists shouting from the bleachers of their humanity. No, it’s God’s “why,” not that cultural goon we’ve been given but the good one of infinite possibilities in the child’s eyes, who doesn’t understand why there wasn’t one safe manger for your pain or why our relationships are not built to be a refuge of joy for us rather than a general store for our shopping list of demands, the good God who doesn’t understand why we can‘t be caregiver, cathedral, carnal carnival, and comedy theater for each other, who wants us to go on until we get it right.

Eminent Domain

2007-06-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

I saw the small flying insect while I was peeing. It was stuck on my hairbrush, on the shelf next to the window in the bathroom. One of its thin wire legs was entangled in one of my old dead hairs and it was struggling to free itself. It had come all the way from conception through its perilous infancy to the mature quest for light. In my haste I tore one of its legs off, mistaking it for a hair, but I finally managed to separate it from the brush head carefully and it flew up and away like a happy helicopter.

I got the hairbrush just before we bought the lot to the build the house on. I remember because I had to go to four Fred Meyers to find that model, which had been discontinued. And build a house! Pop was 9l and I didn’t think he had any business building a house but he insisted, so we had the foundation poured for a small A frame and then finished it over the next two years. I remember the morning we put the shelf there, in the bathroom. I wanted it under the mirror above the sink but Pop said it would be better under the window near the light. “It would be a nice place for flowers” he said, so I gave in, thinking I would change it later.

The night before I got up to pee at 6 a.m. I had decided to quit smoking. I was going to try not to drink beer because that would make it easier not to smoke, but I was reading a Walter Mosley murder mystery. And after I was into it a bit a beer just seemed too perfect, so I nursed a Miller’s cold filter draft and it was perfect, so perfect that on chapter ten I had another one and on chapter twelve one cigarette, then feeling partly proud I went upstairs to the attic bedroom and slept. When the urge to pee roused me out of sleep at 6 a.m. I lay there unable to decide if I wanted to go all the way downstairs or use the urinal next to the bed. I decided on the urinal and lay there waiting for sufficient force of motivation. When it came I raised myself quickly off the Futon and then, in one of those sudden swift reversals of mind, headed downstairs, thinking how nice it would be to come back to bed after the expenditure of effort. Then there I was standing next to the toilet, my right arm supporting myself on the shelf, when I moved my elbow a few inches to push the hairbrush away and saw the silent struggle going on in the other universe. It felt right to see it fly away. It was not a small feeling -- it was absolute, without dimension. Nothing should be where it doesn’t want to be.

Last Days

2007-06-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

The gas station attendant’s
smile didn’t really mean it and
he didn’t even know,
we’re all in for it
when the gas is gone
and that bread on the Safeway shelf
has nothing to do with hunger.
The possum lying dead
in the rushing street lives,
a roadside marker for poets
always resurrecting consequence,
a metaphor for mistake,
his teeth pointing at the last
perfect day on earth
passed doing sixty.

Another Modest Proposal

2007-06-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

I propose that money and all forms of currency be given a sliding scale value as opposed to a fixed scale for those below the poverty line ( especially concerning items that relate to basic human needs ) in order to level the unplayful vicissitudes of the playing field. This would swiftly and decisively alleviate incalculable suffering, significantly reduce social strife and tension and delight the business community who would be the elated recipients of the increased buying power. Since all this could be simply accomplished without a direct redistribution of the wealth, no one worthy of the name ‘Human’ should object.

Drs. Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer Go for a Walk

2007-06-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

“It’s a fine day, Wayne.”
“Yes, it’s a perfect day, Depak.”
“You’re right. Perfect is what I meant. How have you been?”
“Fine, Depak, never better.”
“How’s your wife, Wayne?”
“She’s fine. They did a biopsy. It’s malignant. Spread like a wildfire. Said they can’t do anything for her -- but she’s got six months left.”
“Hope she’s not too upset, Wayne.”
“Well, I explained to her about positive thought and living constructively in the present. True freedom is being totally disinterested in what happens to you, you know. I’m trying to show her what a great opportunity this is. By the way, how’s your daughter doing with the leukemia, Deepak?”
“Not as well as I’d hoped, Wayne. I tried to tell her about detachment, about being in the world but not of the world, and about how we choose our karma on the physical plane, but I don’t think she fully understood. She muttered something about ‘going for a swim without getting wet,’and actually became resentful when I tried to explain about choosing your attitude.”
“Well, she’s still a child, Depak. She’s too young to understand about perception being reality. These things take time. If it would be of any help, I’d be glad to give her a copy of my new book.”
“That would be very nice, Wayne. What is it about?” “It’s called Do Not Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls. It Doesn’t.”
“It sounds nice, Wayne. We’re very lucky to know these things, aren’t we? Active mastery. Never let your happiness be determined by anything outside yourself.”
“Yes, Depak, for that matter, anything inside yourself. On a deep level, the self is
just a fiction, as we know. We breathe the same air as Jesus and Buddha did, and our bodies are made of the same star stuff theirs were.”
“Precisely, Jim.”
“Excuse me, Depak. It’s Wayne.”
“Sorry, yes, Wayne! right. We’re just one body exchanging the same molecules on this divine garden of Earth. It’s really intoxicating when you stop to realize that....Ohew--God! (Deepak suddenly grabs his right foot and crumples toward the ground.)

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Depak! Forgive me. I wasn’t looking where I was going,
I didn’t see our toe. Here, let me help you.” “No! I think my ankle’s sprained. I can’t move. Damn!”
“Well, listen, there’s a phone booth back there. I’ll go call for help.”
“Okay, but hurry. It’s starting to swell. Jesus Christ!”
“I’ll be right back. Don’t worry. We’ll be okay. Be happy!”

Evolution

2007-06-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

People are funny
about sex and money
and the mirror says be vain.
Who thought the ones
to follow the dinosaur
would speak of good and evil,
dance, wear hats in the rain.
Birds above cross borders
displaying higher order.
People below carry passports,
will do anything to a chicken.

Vertigo on Mt. Parnassus

2007-06-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

It was there, right in the front page of the society section. Lillian Highbrowski, noted American poet and author of 38 volumes, talking about Frank, her ‘third and best husband,’ the state of contemporary poetry, and her appearance at Parnassus University for a weekend workshop and lecture on the ‘Expanded Canon of American Poetry.’ Here it was--that ‘window’ the astronauts talk about, the one in a million chance, like that ‘62 game of eight ball I got to play with Minnesota Fats back in Pittsburgh. Sure, it didn’t lead to anything; I was only sixteen, too young yet to know my game. Now I can see it was the poetry really, even back then--the craving for the corner pocket, the sad destiny of the bank shot. I didn’t even care where the ball went; it was just the glory in the sound of the sharp ceramic clicks. But this poetry thing, this was serious, I could tell. The pool was just sex--that old two-way ticket. But this word thing was like holding hands, even when there was no one there. I called the Texaco and told them I was too sick to come in on the weekend, then I called the University and got directions. I was going to the well to drink of the same water.

I arrived a little early on Saturday, found an aisle seat in the amphitheater and sat, expectant. All day images had chased through my mind like children: ‘A heaven of safe trout,’ ‘The hallowed trunks of elephants,’ ‘Quiet as boulders between cigarettes.’ I was ready to soar in my new craft. Finally she arrived, was ushered in, introduced, rose to the podium, and began to speak like it was all familiar territory. She was small, assured, and to the point. “I’m going to talk today on ethno-poetics and the neo-conservative movement as it relates to the expanded canon of American poetry.” I felt a small dis-ease begin to conceive somewhere below my stomach.

“Poetry exists now only in the classroom and university, and that is the best place to conserve it. We are not old romantics anymore, I hope. We’re lovers of literature, intellectuals, writers. Let’s not be hypocrites. Let’s define our terms accurately and move to where we need to go within those boundaries.”

Something was wrong. My heart speeded up. I wanted to raise my hand. She had to know about the Texaco and Arnie’s Billiards. It was there, too; not just the university. But I didn’t do it, not there in the amphitheater. What if there was a small furry hypocrite hidden inside me that hadn’t defined its terms? Fear quietly advanced its foothold on me.

I briefly relaxed as she said, “I want poetry that takes risks, breaks new ground.” But then added, “Not that old-fashioned dark vision, one that we are all familiar with, which does not move ahead as the 20th century demands.” Now I was confused, like a wild animal just released from captivity, but into another steel cage. How could I risk, break new ground with a whole hundred years demanding its due?

And then it happened, without any real hint or warning.

"I want you to imagine a diagram,” she said, “In the shape of a T with the liberals on the left and the conservatives on the right.”

There I was, defenseless. It was awful. There were no windows that damn diagram could get out of. It just kept hovering around and careening off the walls back into my mind. Then it got worse and spread like a cancer, picking up ‘ethnopoetic,’ ‘cultural archetype,’ ‘mythic interpretation,’ and ‘neo-romantic context,’ like dirty lint. Where was the heaven of safe trout, the death like gold ice?

My earlier dis-ease had become a quiet panic, my desire to soar a need to breathe. I had to open a door, get to a window, but a sad paralysis had taken hold. I couldn’t move. Unfortunately she did, to another subject, her opinion of poets.

“I have never cared for Rita Dove. Her work does not expand the canon of good poetry at all.” Then, “Gluck is a poet I have long disliked; all that neo-gothic romance and the allusions to the mysterious, the unknowable. A backward-looking 19th century desire for an innocent and natural world.” And, “Jeffery Harrison’s work is immature... ( the 20th century’s demands weren’t enough; now I had to struggle under the weight of a larger infirmity: the mature personality ) ... and written in those three-line stanzas suggestive of people who don’t know anything about metrics, but want you to think they do.” On to James Merrill whom she mercifully just ‘hated.’ “The rich should not write at all or write only great poems.” Finally, “Sue Chang is just not a good poet.”

The ‘expanded canon’ had contracted, exploded. I heard a woman behind me say in a tone of subdued respect, “She sure doesn’t pull any punches.” The same sentiment, I thought, shared by Genghis Kahn’s men in the mess hall.

She finally concluded her talk and retired to an adjacent room where she entertained an informal aftermath. I remained in my chair, thinking of bank shots, ceramic clicks, and corner pockets, letting my sad aftermath pass through me. Maybe it’s not all like this, I thought, as I went down for refreshments.

On the way to the punch bowl, I overheard Ms.Highbrowski’s voice trail off to two attentive undergraduates, “The experimentalists are just trying to avoid the personal ness of voice.”
I drank my punch quickly and decided to take the cookies outside before she passed judgment on them: “...Improperly baked by 20th century standards...”

On my way out, someone asked me if I was going to take my poems to her afternoon workshop. “No, I don’t think it’s a safe place for trout,” I said ( Maybe six months public service cleaning the tragic apartments of fetal poets aborted in the first semester would soften her ).

Well, it’s still not too late, I thought. At least I can still go back to the Texaco on Sunday. I got in my car and drove off, looking for an empty Catholic church. I found one, got out, and went in. I lit two candles. One for my sins and one for Ms. Highbrowski’s first two husbands. Then I returned to my car and headed downtown. There must be a pool hall open somewhere, I thought.

A Beginner's Guide to Shoplifting

2007-06-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the exciting world of shoplifting.

First I want to congratulate you on your entrepreneurial attitude and adventuresome spirit which is so necessary in today’s fast paced and ruthlessly competitive world. With the continually rising stock market, unbalanced budget, and falling standard of living it’s more important than ever to have alternative potentials available in your survival portfolio. One iron in the fire is just not enough anymore.

Whether you’re looking toward shoplifting as a vocation or just a hobby you will find the rewards equally satisfying. It’s hard to think of another activity or avenue of interest where the returns so outweigh the investment unless you’re lucky enough to win a lottery but when you learn the proper technique to safe, secure shoplifting the odds are all in your favor.

In fact the first myth I want to dispel is that shoplifting is dangerous. It’s really as safe as driving a car. You just have to remember a few simple rules of the road; watch for shop keepers when shoplifting and never DRINK AND SHOPLIFT! There is no point in asking for trouble.

The biggest mistake beginners make is attitude. I feel I need to emphasize this point because you can’t expect to be successful in life with a bad attitude and since this activity is loaded with negative social imaging you will probably have some of the same bias in your own thinking which can contribute to developing a bad attitude.

It is unfair that you should have to start out with such a handicap, especially since we all want to start a new venture with our best foot forward but it is important to remember that other great Americans also had to overcome handicaps before they achieved success, like Richard Nixon and Larry Flint and Madonna and you can too.

Now let’s talk about right and wrong. There is a right and wrong way to do everything. If you do it the right way you will make it easier for everyone involved whereas if you do it the wrong way and get caught, you will create unnecessary trouble for everyone, especially those who catch you since they are just drawn into a conflict which they are unconsciously programmed to respond as a dog is to guard the home he happens to be in.

As you begin to develop an increasing appreciation of the hazards and dangers in this new addition to your life skills you will see why it is important that you approach it seriously and maintain the high level of efficiency and skill that is present in all who take pride in their work.

Now let’s talk about dignity. In all relations dignity is made possible by a sympathetic understanding of another. This is complicated in shoplifting due to most people’s misguided need to criticize the act and hastily jump to judgmental labels. They are evidently unaware of the damage done to the beginning shoplifter who, being new to the field, has enough uncertainty and self doubt to contend with without being made to feel more vulnerable by such shortsighted moral posturing.

We all want to be appreciated for our efforts but because of his near-sightedness the shop keeper feels justified in casting the stone, totally losing sight of the fact that the market place he is being so territorial about, the market place that men and women have fought and died to protect all over the world, is called the ‘free market’.

So as a beginner it will be to your advantage to turn the other cheek and develope the patience and tolerance that is so lacking in those who are critical of your work. Besides animosity serves no one, so if one of the shop keepers glances at you suspiciously just give them that nice relaxed vanilla smile that reassures them you’re just another ordinary manipulable consumer and tell them to ‘have a nice day.’ After all, you are.

Now let’s focus on the bright side. It helps to keep in mind the positive benefits of one’s working conditions. At first, as in any new endeavor you can expect to feel somewhat nervous so start your on-the-job training with small, modest items like the new superpack ten flavor lifesavers or the popular favorite, Gummy Bears. A good practice here is to break the pack open immediately and let them lie free in your pocket or purse. That act is assertive and says ‘ownership’ loudly. You will immediately begin to feel your confidence inch up. As you graduate over time to larger ticket items like apparel or the jealously guarded electronic products of technology you will feel your self esteem grow in leaps and bounds. You will be surprised what a great self help tool shoplifting becomes as its mental health side benefits become apparent- freeing the inner child, increasing your sense of entitlement, and resisting that socially implanted prosecuting attorney whose life blood is shame.

Creative visualization is especially useful here. Imagine it is the first day of spring. All the fruits of the earth are a free bounty. There is no price tag on the quiet majesty of the Pine tree or the feminine grace of the Willow. The hillside and field offer up the smiling Azaleas, delicate lilacs and the Wild Roses’ gratuitous fragrance while free Wildflowers dance amid the bright Dandelions, glowing like a shower of dazzling suns. Now take a deep free breath and let it fill your lungs and mind like a cream filled affirmation.

Eventually other positive benefits will begin to surface. The dress is informal and the hours are totally at your discretion. And how many people have such a varied work environment? There is a new one in practically every neighborhood, not to mention the job security that comes with never being laid off or having to put up with abusive power relationships such as with a boss or the I.R.S.

Of course one of the major benefits of shoplifting is financial. In these difficult economic times when you’re trying to stretch that dollar as far as you can shoplifting provides some welcome elasticity. Whether you’re buying a used, older car, cutting down on expensive restaurants, foregoing exotic vacations, or going to matinee movies there is no reason to exclude shopping from your economizing efforts, especially since it accounts for one of the larger portions of your budget, and what better way to economize than by not paying for one of those many items that are overpriced for profit rather than real consumer need. It is time to send a clear signal that this can no longer be tolerated.

(After all merchandising should be priced on a kind of sliding scale, as anyone who has been short of money could tell you. Such a reasonable arrangement would help to ease the burden of those caught in the cruel cycle of welfare dependency that the fortunate are always complaining about.)

Gradually you will begin to develop an increasing awareness of the spiritual facets in your new practice as you help to tear down those false divisions between people, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. It helps to remember that you’re helping to stem the tide of the mean love of money whose thick heels are goose stepping their march through life on earth. Also when one is engaged in a religious practice it is sometimes very helpful to consecrate the act by dedicating it to something special like the former Soviet Union not because of what it was, but because of what it was supposed to be, which we are not-one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

A CNN News Bulletin Update

2007-06-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

In a shocking announcement today at the World Science Conference in Copenhagen scientists from the world’s twelve leading research institutes released a joint statement revealing the findings of a study drawn from over three million years of data which concludes that ‘Reality’ contains a lethal element that will eventually prove fatal to everyone. They are adding it to the periodic table under the name ‘Ignoranium.’

The findings were presented to a startled audience of government officials and news correspondents.

Scientists have long been puzzled as to why the standards for ‘Reality’ are so low. why, Homo- -Sapien’s can be so technologically advanced and yet, by any standard of civilization, remain so far behind for example, the Bonobo monkey’s of east Africa who have managed to effortlessly substitute sexual play activity and socialization for competition, conflict, and war, or how a leading world power can pass its country back and forth from one family dynasty to another, from the Roosevelt’s to the Kennedy’s to the Bush’s, and convince its citizens it’s a democracy, not to mention how it can change its mind every four years about what direction it wants to go, or even the largest and most challenging mystery of how the human mind, which is capable of producing an Einstein or a Mozart, can be rendered inert and virtually destroyed by putting any kind of uniform on it. As one scientist was quoted as saying, “as clearly remarkable as it is, ‘Reality’ doesn’t seem to have been really thought through in advance.”

Now, with the discovery of ‘Ignoranium’ scientists are hopeful of finding answers. They say the new element has already been linked to connections between aging, diminished immune activity, herd instincts in voting patterns and the blissful ignorance that cows and the nightly T.V. news anchors exhibit. The Center For Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia has confirmed their findings and requests that everyone limit their exposure as much as possible as the search for a vaccine has so far proved fruitless.

Dr Bruce Morrisey, the Director of the CDC went on to say, in a tone of slightly self-conscious embarrassment, that the only methods of treatment that have proved any effectiveness in reducing the severity of the symptoms for this syndrome have been ‘marijuana,’ ‘laughter,’ ‘sex.’ and occasionally ‘love’ although he went on to say that the latter has proven ultimately unreliable due to its idiopathic or mysterious origins and unpredictable patterns of development or prognosis adding that a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ antidote is not advisable as a therapeutic modality.

Dr. Morrisey said the CDC is referring to this new illness as C.A.R.D.S. for Chronic and Acute Reality Disease Syndrome and they are issuing a warning that everyone try to limit their exposure to the chief carriers of this disease, which seems to spread most rapidly among political parties, formal religions, author’s of ‘optimistic’ self help books, motivational speakers, lawyers, judges and policeman, some members of the Mental Health profession to include cognitive- behavioral therapists, Jungian Depth psychologists, and psychiatrists who believe in ‘free will’ and grown-ups who believe they have completely left high school. The CDC advises that contact with any of these groups should be kept to a minimum.

Among the chief symptoms, Dr. Morrisey said, are prolonged periods of seriousness, usually manifesting with a heightened belief that one is totally responsible for ones actions and extending that ‘responsibility’ to include even the consequences of one’s actions in advanced cases which, as one clinician observed, widens the ‘play-less’ playing field to dangerous dimensions. Also conspicuous is a significant decrease of profanity and other spontaneous idiosyncratic behaviors in favor of safer, sanctioned or authorized ones. Dr. Morrisey cited ‘patriotism’ as an example. He was quoted as saying, “There should always be cause for concern for those who use flag waving as the political equivalent of the ‘hula-hoop.”

He went on to say that there has been some hopeful research recently among groups that tend to show increased resistance to this disease. These groups include vagrants, people who have enjoyed losing their virginity (however those who are trying to lose it for the second time should be avoided as they tend to be acutely serious) free-lance transients and loiterers- clowns, circus midgets, children or adults with a significant degree of arrested development since childhood, most transsexuals and cross dressers -- the Bonobo monkey’s of east Africa (not those in captivity), laughing hyenas, possums, porcupines, flying squirrels, raccoons and ‘porn’ stars. Also some recent studies from New Zealand and the Antarctic may add closet heterosexuals, borderline personalities, certain forms of dissociative reactions and penguins to the list.
Dr. Morrisey said the CDC may have also stumbled onto a newsub-set group of host carriers, that is people who themselves are symptom free but pass it on to others who are vulnerable. Some who have been identified so far include conservative republicans and Libertarians, democrats who go under the designation ‘new’ democrat ( these are highly contagious spreaders ), fundamentalists of any kind, news anchors, TV and radio talk show hosts, H & R Block employees, anti-sex feminists and the majority of Pharmaceutical and Insurance CEOs.

Also included were warnings to avoid groups or activities that are noticeably lacking in humorous irreverence or carefree levity such as drug treatment centers, stop-smoking support groups, Jesus rallies, and somewhat sadly- the music of Bach and Bach fan club meetings. They further advised that ‘crop circles’ and crop circle researchers should be considered highly suspect until there has been some evidence of either cartoons or dirty jokes in actual crop circles.

Dr. Morrisey added that further recent studies have indicated additional character traits to be watched for among carriers of C.A.R.D.S. citing the fact that they seem to have a very limited ability to experience authentic sympathy or concern for others, tend to be humorless, and are also, for an as yet unidentified reason, unable to scratch their own itches.

The Director of Homeland Security has asked everyone to be on the alert for anyone in public or social settings who asks someone else to laugh for them or scratch an itch for them. However critics of this approach point out that it’s very difficult to catch someone in the act of scratching another’s itch and equally difficult to distinguish it as something other than an ordinary friendly or intimate gesture, and determining whether someone is laughing for themselves or someone else takes a highly trained professional eye.

We’d like to close our nightly report with an upbeat item. Lisa Simon of Sarasota, Florida is being awarded the American Medal of Freedom tomorrow in a special ceremony at the White House. Lisa, a catholic and mother of seven was left to raise her family by herself when her husband ran away because he couldn’t stand the financial and emotional pressures. She said it was a lack of faith not finances and she got a job as a swimming instructor till she suffered a stroke at age 30 but she wasn’t about to let that stop her, “I’m not a whiner,” she said. She started her own business teaching victims of strokes how to relearn driving a car and masturbating. She lost that job when she lost both legs in an automobile accident but she immediately started another business making roller carts for leg-less people using special hand-made wooden oars she designed herself. When asked why she didn’t have them motorized she said, “I’m from Idaho, we don’t do things the easy way there.” When General Motors came out with cheaper motorized versions she went bankrupt and moved into a shelter with her seven children. She said, “the past is past, I’m moving on.”

She lost three of her children to suicide. “God is their anti-depressant now,” she said and moved on. This indomitable spirit supported herself on the rodeo circuit as the first leg-less woman to ride the bulls. She began drawing big crowds to flag waving applause then she lost her right arm above the elbow when a bull got lose and ran into the bull she was riding but she continued riding with just her left arm to even greater applause, larger crowds, and more flags.

She finally consented to putting a motor on her roller but misfortune continued to dog her when the motor got stuck in high gear and when she tried to stop it with her one arm she fell under it losing her remaining arm. When she was told she could get welfare this resilient mother of four replied proudly and loudly “I’m not a democrat, I don’t take other peoples money. I’m only 38 and I’m still an attractive woman and God gave me a good body and for a woman that’s still a negotiable possession, ask any married man. I’ll work on my back.” Undaunted she started the first escort and dating service employing disabled, sexually challenged women which she documented in her best selling book, ‘I had an advantage, I’m from Idaho.’ The rest is history, she went from there to “Oprah’ and then on to become the first armless leg-less Playboy Bunny centerfold and tomorrow afternoon the American Medal of Freedom will be handed to her by the President who praised her for exemplifying the self reliance of the American spirit

Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow

A Tradition of Values

2007-06-28T20:54:00.000-07:00

“Every time I hear a political speech or read those of
our leaders I am horrified at having, for years, heard
nothing which sounded human. It is always the same
words telling the same lies. And the fact that people
accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed
these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that people
attribute no importance to the way they are governed.”

-- the journals of Albert Camus,
August 1937

Nancy Rinehart, the respected A.B.C. news anchor and moderator, sat poised and proper at the table on the far right of the stage awaiting her cue from the three TV camera crews who were busy running through their last-minute preparations.

The audience was seated and still, its collective silent, attention focused intently at the two figures on the stage. Ms.Rinehart noticed that the two camera crews nearest her had accelerated their movements in a last-minute flurry of activity.

Sarah Winright was occupying herself by giving the appearance of making penciled corrections on her notes while Morton Neargood took a more direct assault on image, choosing to stare directly at the entire audience, arms firmly forward, masculinely fondling the podium, trying to radiate a quality of subdued magnificence.

The 10-second light began blinking; they were live. “Good evening and welcome to tonight’s broadcast, Candidates’ Encounter, a live unrehearsed debate coming to you from downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Before we begin I’d like to thank the local chapter of Citizens for an American Universe for sponsoring this event and now I will toss the coin. Heads will give the opening statement to the incumbent Morton Neargood and tails to Sarah Winright.” The coin is tossed and allowed to drop on the table. “It’s heads. Mr. Neargood, you may begin.”

Morton looked serenely and confidently out into the audience, straightened to his full six feet four inches, paused at the end of a slow deep breath and then said crisply and clearly, “What a nice day.”

A number of heads nodded approvingly.

After a short silence Sarah Winright took a step forward, embraced the podium and said with a soft calm assurance, “Etiquette, proper etiquette.” This was greeted with a light scattering of modest applause which subsided quickly.

After a brief moment of introspection Morton Neargood responded earnestly, “The American people,” he said, “The American people!” This seemed to strike a responsive chord with the audience as the applause began to quicken and was slightly sharper, though it fell off quickly also.

Deciding to take advantage of what she sensed to be a warming audience participation, Sarah Winright followed quickly with, “Community involvement,” which received a tepid, rather lukewarm response. She regretted her choice as soon as she’d said it, realizing it would be perceived as having been patterned too closely to his previous statement.

Sensing that he had edged onto higher tactical ground, Morton tried to cement his momentum. “Honest hard work,” he said, his voice rising and resonant. This was greeted uniformly and somewhat enthusiastically with a short burst of applause. Feeling a cautious optimism, he felt himself ease up and relax a little.

Sarah Winright felt an early sense of panic begin to develop in her stomach, “Daily hygiene,” she blurted out, sensing herself starting to lose control. But to her relief this was received with a somewhat sharp respectable response and even a few positive scattered murmurs.

Sensing opportunity, Morton followed without hesitation, “Clean air and water,” which brought forth a moderate chorus of approving applause and even a noticeable amount of nodding agreement. His posture remained erect and his countenance deliberately manly as he continued to milk his eye contact with the audience. He was caught slightly off guard as he heard in a clear, strident voice from across the stage, “Education.” This was followed, disturbingly, by a burst of spontaneous vigorous clapping and even a few foot stampings. He felt his anger rise at the theft of the word he had planned on using. Quickly he shot back, “Universal health care,” which garnered him only an obligatory polite response.

The audience anxiously began to shift, sensing a growing intensity. Their excitement was rewarded as Sarah Winright projected loudly, “Reproductive rights,” and Morton echoed, “Equal pay.” Sarah continued without hesitation, “Gross national product.” “Competition,” he countered.

Sarah Winright considered pausing here but felt the audience’s insistent rhythm, like an ardent lover, urging her on. “Family unity,” she said louder than she’d intended.

“Respect for property and authority,” Morton said matching her volume. But before he finished the last syllable of “Authority,” his voice was drowned out by the audience which, unable to restrain itself, burst forth excitedly in unanimous and sustained applause-- the ardent lover was aroused. The candidates themselves now became caught up in the frenzy of adulation. While the applause was still subsiding, Sarah Winright yelled out, “War on drugs, gambling, and sex,” and then, realizing her excess, moderated, “Illicit sex and pornography.” This reignited the still-warm embers of the audience and the sound of applause rose again.

Morton Neargood added, “Law and order,” which further fanned the heated audience,and then, caught up in his own fervor, forgetting that it was his opponent’s turn, he continued with loud reverence, “Liberty and freedom.” The audience screamed.

“America,” shouted Sarah Winright, nearly breathless. This brought forth a loud chorus of

“Ah’s” and yells, mixed in with foot stamping and still raucous applause.

It was then that Morton received an inspiration that seemed to shift the center of his gravity. “God!” he screamed, clutching the microphone in both hands. The audience, unable to restrain themselves, exploded. They rose to their feet screaming, yelling, and clapping with a thunderous, deafening tidal roar. All semblance of decorum was lost. The camera crews began hurrying their equipment through the exit doors as people scrambled like terrorized elephants across a burning field, down the aisles, across the orchestra pit and toward the stage. Several people fell to their death from the second floor balcony seats, and one woman went into early labor and delivered a brand new American baby boy in aisle 5, whom she would later name “Morton.”

The last televised glimpse America had of Morton Neargood was of his back hastily disappearing through an exit door amid a flurry of insecure security guards.

Why I Want to Shoot the Mayor

2007-06-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

It was the woman with the shopping cart. I saw her when I was driving over the railroad tracks down in the industrial river area. It was an early December evening, cold and wet and dark and the wind was blowing hard. It was that kind of cold sharp rain that blows sideways right through you and makes you want to get away from it right now, immediately, to stop it with anything you can, a car door or a quickly arriving bus or a hundred dollars.The woman was just standing in it under the lamppost light. She didn’t have an umbrella in the cart. She was staring up at the light, shaking her fist and yelling angrily. She was mad at it. The only relationship she had had turned bad on her.

I drove on and left her there because it seemed there was nothing I could do for her, or rather I didn’t know where to begin, what to do, or how to do it. You see, in the first place I didn’t have a degree which is a kind of mutant gene of our culture but without which you are hardly fit for survival. I know the woman under the lamppost light didn’t have a degree. If she had she could have worked out her relationship with it. She would have known about conflict resolution theory and co-dependency insights. I thought about how the homeless advocate Mitch Snyder had spent his life trying to help them and all we did was make a crummy T.V. movie about him. He didn’t get anywhere close to what Martin Luther King did for his people and he was killed for his efforts and then I thought how even the whole Soviet Union had tried to save the woman under the lamppost light and failed so what could I do, where could I begin, an unemployed middle age man without a degree.

Anyway, it was then I realized all I could do was shoot the Mayor, which I really didn’t want to do, what with the season and all. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I didn’t want to kill the Mayor, just a flesh wound, a modest act really. You see it’s mainly that it ruins my evenings when I have to pass the people with the shopping carts on my way home to my warmth and shelter and privacy. It tarnishes the joy I get from my toilet and bathtub and bed and I just want somebody who is supposed to be, to be responsible, to care, someone who represents us all, the human people who live here in our city.

If I was the Mayor and had a degree I would be worried sick about people who had been that far away from good fortune but the Mayor like me, drives past them to a warm home and is seen smiling and happy in the newspapers and on T.V, only the thing is the Mayor is not like me, the Mayor has a degree and ought to be doing something about this immediately, right away. So that is why someone should shoot the Mayor only I can’t because I’ve had a history of depression and had to go see someone with a degree and you know what the media would do with that. They would take this civic minded act and trash it. They would say I was deranged and unstable. The whole thing would be diminished and ignored.

So it would be better if a city council member did it. Someone new and popular and clean, one of those Frank Capra, “It’s a Wonderful Life” kind of people. Or even better, a Governor or Senator should shoot the Mayor, someone with a clean record and a degree. If I were a Governor or a Senator and had a degree and drove past people who were cold and wet and had unhappy relationships with lamppost lights I would shoot the Mayor.

The Triumph of Science

2007-06-25T22:06:00.000-07:00

The people began to feel restless and uneasy. It had been forty-five years since the first lamb, Dolly had been cloned and twenty-five years since Sally and Bob, the first couple, had been cloned and fifteen years since the Pope had been put on Prozac and only ten years since NASA had first received an extra-terrestrial transmission in response to the gold record message that had been sent into space. It was loosely translated as “We are unable to take your call at this time. If you wish to listen to the menu again push the number nine and then the pound sign.” It was a disappointment. The NASA officials looked at each other with blank stares. Their funding was cut a week later.

It was shortly after that that a New York Times editorial piece first voiced a discontent with having to put up with the darkness at night. Somehow this touched a responsive chord among the populace and a ground swell of bottled up resentment began to build, until finally the President was forced to organize a special commission to investigate options. After several months of indecision there were renewed cries for action. Bitter debate raged on Capitol Hill with the conservatives accusing the liberals of wanting to keep the night in order to pursue their unchristian agenda of wanton self-indulgence and licentious pleasure under the cover of darkness where they would not have to be held accountable for their actions and the liberals accused the conservatives of wanting perpetual daylight so that they could increase surveillance of the ACLU and prolong daily work hours to maximize the national productivity.

Finally Lauren the barber voiced his anger to Hank the mechanic and they went back to their wives who went over to their neighbors and the neighbors went to their co-workers and eventually there was a popular uprising of marches and demonstrations across the land. Retired veterans and impotent husbands and angry anti-sex feminists began taking the law into their own hands. People bought hand guns and semi-automatic rifles and formed community organizations and draped themselves in white sheets and began holding nightly vigils where they would fire up at the night and still the darkness came and the peoples anger at this intransigence grew until it was out of control of even local law enforcement.

Eventually the President was impeached and former President Reagan was called back into office and he called it a national emergency and called up the national guard and the 101st Airborne and the stealth bomber and launched operation ‘LIGHT’ and they attacked from all sides and still it grew dark and then the President called for a pre-emptive nuclear attack and all the sleeping Minute Men missiles rose up in deadly silence from their dark caves and the President spoke to the nation and urged everyone to pray and be patient and he assured them that this nightmare would soon come to an end

Pilgrim's Progress

2007-06-25T22:05:00.001-07:00

On his way to work Harold accidentally stepped in a pile of mud which resulted in complicating an ankle sore that developed into an infection which he could not afford to have treated.

He told his priest about it who said, “that’s God’s way of punishing you for being so careless in the direction of your life and showing you that behavior has consequences. “

He told a philosopher friend about it who said, “that’s the universe’s way of telling you that you have to be more aware and attentive to your environment. “

He went to a Jungian therapist who said, “It reflects a deep seated self hatred. There are no accidents. You led yourself to that mud and you have also mismanaged your financial portfolio so badly that you can’t even afford to pay for your legs medical treatment.”

Distressed he consulted a friend who was a ‘motivational’ speaker and author of best selling ‘self help’ books who told him he “must learn not to use his personal wounds and misfortunes as currency, that he should simply have removed his foot from the mud and moved on with getting a life”

He went to a Zen Buddhist teacher who said, “you are getting closer to enlightenment but the path to it has many pitfalls and is filled with suffering----- You must resist identifying with the mud.” Then he added, “the poet Robert Frost told us that he came to a fork in the road and took it and that made all the difference.’ It remains a mystery how Frost knew that the road not taken was the one not taken since he was at its beginning and had not yet taken it. However you must find the ‘road not taken’ and take it, remembering that once you take the ‘road not taken’ it becomes the road taken which has an elusive significance I haven’t figured out yet. Also, always look through the mud for any pearls that may be hidden in it.”

Finally Harold went to his Senator who sent him to a social worker, Mrs Jennings who told him, “your situation is not included in the ‘social contract.’ Remember you’re not supposed to ask what your country can do for you only what you can do for it.” Harold heard her mumble ‘sucker’ under her breath as he left the office.

Wearied and disheartened by his research on the incident, he stopped in at a tavern for a beer on the way home. He sat on a stool next to an dirty unshaven old man who was staring mutely into his half empty beer glass. Harold ended up recounting his story to the old man who, after several long moments of silence, said,“ we have an irresistible need to manufacture an endless variety of plausible narratives and stories to explain our place and fate in the universe to ourselves.” Then the old man stood up, drank the last of his beer down and headed toward the door. He looked back at Harold as he went out, “Way I figure it, mud happens” he said.

The Road Traveled, A Short Essay on the Fart (based on a true story)

2007-06-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

At 4am on December 30th, 1999 in a small city about a hundred miles inland from the pacific coast of North America a single man who was lying asleep in his over sized twin bed was awakened from his sleep by a slightly urgent need to pee. As he slowly swung his legs over the bed onto the floor and stood up a small nearly noiseless little fart escaped from him adding immeasurably but definitely to the earth’s atmosphere. It can be said and even forcefully argued that this was, in the large scheme of things, an insignificant event, unnoticed as it was by himself and the rest of the universe, but that would be incorrect. That position would be wrong, that statement would be false. It would be in fact to miss the importance of all of existence, for it is not ‘the road not taken’ but the road traveled and all the events that occur on it that makes all the difference. The tiny silent fart screams the existence of its event which has really only one dimension, the enormously heavy, concrete, nebulous, invisible dimension of being. The giant sequoia tree, the whales mating song, the dandelion seed afloat on the wind and the small fart are all high Karate, sharing equally in the achievement of event, echoing throughout the universe with the joyful ecstatic cry I’m,' overflowing with the acreage of its importance alongside the peace and quiet of the remotest star.

Why I Read Reader's Digest

2007-06-25T21:58:00.001-07:00

I suffer from a serious affliction which society harshly stigmatizes as ‘shoplifting.” If you have to have an affliction shoplifting is better than oral herpes because you can hide it and you’re better off in this world if you have something that can be hidden ( just ask Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton ). I have always had attendant symptoms of guilt with it which I have recently tried to alleviate by reading a book I found on the‘Spirituality of Human Imperfections’ and using affirmations. This initially offered some relief but I eventually developed a tolerance to the affirmations and had to increase the strength of the message to things like ‘God loves shoplifters most’ and then because I wanted more non-judgmental love I increased my shoplifting which resulted in an increased frequency and intensity of guilt. I realized it was time to try tough love on myself so then I resolved that everytime I shoplifted I would call the owner personally and apologize. Well, I will not even repeat some of the rude responses I got which only aggravated my already low self-esteem. At this point I felt at a loss for what to do and then I found myself browsing through the magazine section at Safeway when I saw a Readers Digest with the lead article emblazoned on its cover- “Stop Feeling So Guilty.” It’s amazing how God always leads you to what you need. No one was looking so I slipped it into my pocket and took it home. It was a wonderful article and has made a major change in my ability to live with my condition without crippling guilt while at the same time reminding me about the importance of not giving up. I understand now why the Readers Digest is the world’s largest selling magazine, it’s very helpful.

Money-Air

2007-06-25T21:50:00.001-07:00

There has a long period during which the amount of money was fixed and inadequate and then at
a specific moment in a specific hour there appeared an excess, a flood of money. I did not change throughout this period. In other words the amount of 'me' remained constant as an entity, there was no weight loss -no change in height or eye color -food preferences or other of my likes and dislikes, no increase or decrease in I.Q. or personality. No, it was only the money that increasingly decreased and then suddenly avalanched in increase. The effect of the sudden increase was for the most part that of a low level but continuous feeling of muted euphoria -accompanied by the quiet rush of a sense of release and freedom and then on the second day steadily growing kind of confusion and imbalance which felt secondary to the mind and body rushing about in a form of moderately controlled delirium in pursuit of a limitless cascade of possibilities, the sudden availability of numerous wishes and plans previously stalled and frozen and now all competing simultaneously for immediate realization, a delayed Christmas wish list of seizure size desires suddenly dumped on my door from a dormant out
of shape disoriented Santa Claus.

I had slowly adapted to a continual mental landscape of worry and frustration and anger that occasionally heightened into a perceived crisis and then back to worry, frustration and anger again.
I had lived for so long with the gradual accumulation of decrease -of being unable to be able to generate movement and finally its subsequent cousin, motivation, that a part of me had lost the memory and reflex of how to use those powers that connects the mind to its belief in itself, in its ability to engineer the outcome of even moderate desires through simple willing and this, combined with the intoxication of the now dizzying surplus, produced an odd vertigo, as though I'd climbed to high too fast, the room of the universe was spinning with possibilities, giddy with wanton glee, yet pregnant with an ominous sense of imminent nebulous peril. How odd that the fruitful should fragment.

I had lived for an extended period during which I internally observed the gradual erosion of the sense of self that comes with watching your teeth fall out, the utility shut off notices pile up, and the wolf packs of my countrymen circle closer and closer to my house; to see and feel the disappearance of the invitations to the party of life happen as my clothes and general appearance became frayed at the edges and worse than any of it, not being able to share the whole misery of the experience with present or former 'significant others' who were still basking under the sun of good fortune, to see their embarrassed awkwardness at the slightest leakage of my situation, not to mention, any hint of rage which would bring forth immediate behavior correction, self control or moderation advice, effectively deleting the notion that your deepest human emotional response to your situation has any useful currency.

And then, as if the result of some playfully perverse 'presto' - a drunken Wells Fargo security guards error, a bag of gold coins falls off the stagecoach from having the horses take too sharp a turn and the money appears in an account in my name. 'Presto,' I am magically restored to my rightful title, from profligate to prince, insufficient to sufficient, fit to not only kiss Snow White but to sweetly fuck her senseless. I am again a citizen of the world, I suffice.

And all the while my attention's fascination has been fixated and focused on the simple absurd mystery of money. There isn't a drug known that can rival it for the silent stealth of its absolute dominion over human behavior. And its all in the mind's mind, we are the ultimate pusher, money is our Machiavellian Moriarty.

Borderline Personality Bedtime Thoughts

2007-06-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about borderline personality diagnosis and its subset, those with borderline personality traits. In the first place its not a nice thing to say about anyone. It implies a deficit, something that will limit your success in life when its become recently clearly apparent that you can even rise to President of the United States. On the other hand it doesn’t seem so bad not having a whole personality because its fairly obvious that you have to be dysfunctional in significant ways to be really functional –nevertheless its somewhat distressing to have only traits of the whole complete borderline personality, not enough for full membership, to be only half of a half. As far as that goes I don’t know why borderline personality isn’t considered a whole personality anyway since you have to fully meet all the conditions and requirements to qualify for that borderline status just as any for other.

Then I thought 'why does the whole get to call the half a half,' I mean a half has to be a whole half to qualify as a half and for that matter why can’t the half call the whole an excessive personality disorder. God knows there’s a surplus of them around but no, its always the under privileged that get the short straw. Those who are more tentative about their sense of entitlement get the scarlet diagnosis of passive aggressive while those barracuda bullies whose aggressive assertiveness intimidates the entire playground escape derogatory labels, mostly because those are the ones that end up running the show and handing labels out. Take astronauts who climb into a vehicle the size of a Volkswagen bus and go the moon because they were told, “its all been worked out on paper.” If that’s not risk behavior or impaired judgment I don’t know what is but they’ll get medals and respect.

Anyway the more I thought about it I couldn’t see why, that being the case, that borderline personalities should have to pay the same price for a loaf of bread as someone with a whole personality, who came with batteries included, who contains the complete resources and ingredients necessary for securing the price of the bread. No, the person without the whole personality should pay only half the price and someone with only traits of a half should pay only traits of a half price. We have to stop giving the advantages to those already advantaged. Its like that thing I was always told about ‘the hero dies only once but a coward dies a thousand times.’ Why does the hero get the red badge of courage. No, it should go to the coward because having to die 1000 times is obviously 1000 times more heroic that dying once.

No--the borderline label should go to the true borderline people, those who are running the show.

There. Feel Better?

2007-06-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

It wasn't just the rainy night, it was the rain's sharp cold wetness making the black of the night's darkness feel 'in my face' threatening though I knew it was heightened by the second Utility shut off notice I'd received that day. Driving back home I began to feel pushed by a vague urgency for refuge and sanctuary and then I saw the homeless man standing quietly still under a naked leafless tree like a statue with no options and a sharp fear stabbed into me delivering a swift horrifying vision of the vagrant destiny that was hiding like a sniper in every destination, the terrifying truth of being in the universe I was in. In a brief flash its complete cloaking device failed and changed to transparency revealing its true predatory mission--the sharp, jagged, steel teeth, ankle traps that were hidden under the manicured lawn of its beguiling garden. I saw with horrible clarity its absolute and ultimate truth slamming into me with the force of a missile and instantly demolishing the minds fictional shelter of safety, leaving only the rubble amid the after quakes.

When I reached home my body even failed to respond with its customary relaxation to its familiar shelter. It knew the house was tissue paper and delivered that damage report back to the mind which contributed its own disaster inventory beginning with the crushing gravity of my age and the rapidly diminishing possibilities before me along with the cruel futility of my pathetic life efforts so far. The roof of my mind collapsed exposing a sinister curve, how had I gone from the promise of a once strong horse with good money on it to barely managing to hold onto last place. Then right on its heels, buried alive and active, was the gold platted fools gold of guilt, not the negotiable kind from a clear transgression but the nebulous time-release variety that says innocently, 'you forgot to take the garbage of your life out dear,' or , 'are you still holding onto that self serving fiction that your poverty conceals an integrity of character.' Finally, the mind's prefrontal understudy filled its cart with remaining gems from Bartlet's Famous Republican Quotations and hitched it up to the crippled pony of anxiety for the unforgettable and endless trip down memory's masochists lane with its roadside scenic views of the heart's repeated clear cuts and those tragic, slashed prices garage sale, Inspector Clouseau, sexual 'Strangelove' furtive frustration fucks that might as well have happened on Omaha Beach or the campus at Kent State, cherished American landmarks. My mind finally concluded its treasury of terrors with, of course, a swift review of every card and call of my entire life that had conveyed the comforting sign off of "Love Ya."

Finally Class was out but complaisance was not as I was assured my misery medley would return after a very brief pause during which time I'm free to attempt rebooting my serenity with a visit to my naturopathic theme park of harmony, homeostasis, and sanitary toxins; my quick yoga practice and a lump or two of cream-filled affirmations, followed by the first chapter of my newest self help book, “There, feel better?” Now you can crawl to bed for a Bob Newhart rerun and your favorite Porn. Some days there's a whole fucking hour that's acceptable. And, oh! don't forget to love yourself. Go ahead, just try...

Emily Dickenson and The Neanderthals

2007-06-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickenson said, "To live is so startling it hardly leaves time for anything else" and that got me to thinking about Neanderthals. Emotionally I am a Neanderthal. I like them, I feel close to them.

They didn’t stray far from the familiar, liked routine, predictability, a permanent home site ---- didn’t desire to expand and had no interest in colonizing Mars. They generally distrusted change, novelty and innovation. Lacking the optimistic warrior’s insensitivity and its positive expectations about outcomes, they had a reluctance to compete. There was restlessness enough within their mind without crossing continents in search of more. They just wanted a comfortable cave to gaze out over the Savannah and muse, to let the mind drift, imagine and make connections between things. They were properly startled, cautious, and fearful—my kind of people.

That made me wonder if those characteristics were somehow connected with some of us; how and why they lasted so long. Recent evidence strongly supports that there was interbreeding at some point between us and that seems to suggest that the traits of introversion, diffidence, and depression in some of us, of feeling overwhelmed by diversity in general could be just be a long genetic echo. But that didn’t seem enough by itself to account for such a gap of difference in our evolving fates. What was it that really distinguished Neanderthals from ourselves, who in a comparatively short time, despite our superior gifts, are on the verge of self destruction. What did they possess that we lack? No sooner had I asked the question than I realized the answers.

First and most important, they were graced with possessing the lack of a language, of not being able to talk to each other. They couldn’t communicate their differences and disagreements as elaborately as we can. They didn’t have to endure the dominance- submission chess games of conversation with all their submerged agendas. With the sharpening of the stone tool of language Homo Sapiens found it increasingly difficult to say something without saying something else—those slippery meta messages that emerge from submerged agendas, those power dynamics of territory, food, love, sex, and status.

It seems obvious that there had to have been less tension in their silence and more peace in their nervous systems than we have. Finally but not of small significance, they possessed the absence of therapy-they didn’t have to get in touch with feelings, not even ordinary feelings, let alone ‘authentic’ or ‘real ones.’ Also it should not go unnoticed that they didn’t have mirrors which lets them off of another rather large hook. So if you think about it, I mean-being generally reclusive, not wanting to leave your residence and having all that time to just sit around and muse about it all I think its pretty convincing evidence that Emily Dickenson was a Neanderthal.

How Not to Kill Yourself, or What Is a Tautology?

2007-06-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

Well the thought had been building for years-----if you were like me it would have with you too because well, you would be pathetic like me--I think that's a tautology but I can't be sure because I’ve never, never been able to understand what the fuck a tautology is but I hate them because that's what a pathetic person can do, we can hate what we don't understand. We're not limited to hating what we understand or think we understand-take boundaries for instance --and I would develop and expand that analogy except I don't have boundaries and so don't have any understanding of them but I can hate them anyway, again, because of the special qualities the pathetic posses.

You see people - I mean everyone in the village-are always raising the bar--that is their bar, and their bar is always higher because it is their bar and their bar is the 'saint' bar and any other is the 'sinner's bar. Anyway they'll raise that bar as high as heaven just to watch you fail at reaching it so they can then correct and punish you and what is more pathetic than failing to reach their bar is us pathetic people trying to in the first place as though their bar was the sole possessor of magic and, honestly, who does not want to be seduced and swept away from the famine of reality, from this long field trip on the mysterious bus of life to a place called death, the front where all is quiet, the front that is always in front of you, the journey with a destination that cannot be known on a bus with no brakes, that cannot be slowed or stopped—and to top it off the journey is overflowing with absolutely unavoidable mistakes. Bypassing the initial mistake of living there are the mistakes intention, of ambivalence and certainty, the mistakes of indifference, the mistakes of action and inaction-- idleness and industry, of caution and impulsiveness, the mistake of passion, of feelings, love and desire, anger and joy, the mistakes of speaking and of the mistakes of silence, the mistake of appropriateness and in-appropriateness, the mistake of marriage and the mistake of celibacy, the mistake of forget-fullness and remembering, the mistake of staying and of leaving, the mistakes of vocation, the mistake of allegiance and loyalty, the mistake of honesty and the mistake of lying.. So all in all suicide can become a pretty attractive roadside rest area, a permanent pit stop of peace on the long, unbearable, but frustratingly not entirely unsatisfying journey. So it can become very challenging to find valid reason not to not to kill yourself and it is a fortunate irony that I was sharp enough to listen closely to the voice that told me to kill myself because that was what saved me. After all who would follow the advice from someone so pathetic. Only a real loser.

PS—just an extra anti-suicide tip for those of you who are not pathetic. Just decide not to kill yourself until you find a good enough reason not to and because you won’t find one you won’t be able to give yourself permission. Good luck and have a pleasant tomorrow.

The Cambrian Incident (Cambrian; referring to the first explosion of life in the early Paleozoic)

2007-06-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

A small man in a large chair behind a large desk in the spacious office of a tall building smiled gazing at the mission statement on the wall, 'More Is Better.' He pushed the intercom button to this secretary. "that bright young man in research who was talking about something called cable television. Send him up here."

Seth Angstrom appeared nervous and excited at the door, "Come in, come in! Sit down. I want to hear more about this cable idea of yours." Seth walked over hurriedly and sat down across from the desk.

"It’s really very simple. You see there is really no limit to the number of channels technology will allow us to have. We don't have to settle for what there is, we can have seven more or seventy to compete with them. The man in the large chair behind the large desk smiled, "Competition, that's what I like to hear. Always brings out the best in everyone. I want you to draw up a proposal and have in on my desk first thing next week." Yes sir. Thank you," Seth said as he got up and hurried out past the secretary who was muttering under her breath, "Why can't the existing ones compete for quality."

Seth Angstrom's depressive brother Bernard had tried to caution him at the time against the Pandora's box he was opening but Seth, the green light in the family had considered the source, Bernard, the familiar family red light, and ignored it.

Bernard was frequently depressed but had become more so recently. It was not just because he had always had the sex life of a bear in hibernation; he knew there were just as many people who were happy because of the absence of a sex life as there were unhappy people because of the presence of one. It was because the importance of living had gone out of his life.

Sitting in his recliner in his small apartment on an early September morning Bernard found himself recalling the incident as he surfed sadly through the Sunday morning paper's litany of misery. Reflecting back Bernard could see that the subtle horror confronting civilization had begun innocently about 1958 or 1960. He found a dark symmetry in the awareness that the 'nice days' has started disappearing right around the time everyone started asking you to 'have one.' There had been an invisible silent invasion that had been effective precisely because of the disarming subtlety of its appearance, the innocence of multiplication, the slow, gradual, exponential, cumulative assault which commerce, in cooperation with its first cousin, competition, unleashed upon the fragile homeostasis of the human nervous system like an unstoppable virus.

Bernard had first sensed it when they came out with the Old Gold filter King 100's. It was an excess, an adding on to what was adequate. He was not aware that it was an omen but he later felt he should have seen it when his city opened the first Mall in the country in 1960. Commerce's first cousin competition had stuck its right foot in the door. Even though a small alarm went off inside him he was misled by the novelty like everyone else.

He had actually noticed it sometime before that when Ford made the first ''Thunderbird' and Chevrolet made the 'Corvair,' the first murmurings of our infinite desire for infinite variety. Then the new car with the funny name 'Toyota' appeared but by then he was smoking the Old Gold 100's and shopping in the mall so he didn't really pay too much attention. Bernard could not have foreseen that the small free verse poetry of the road-Packard, Plymouth, Ford, Chevrolet, Hudson and Desoto, with all their odd individual shapes and charming peculiar styles were going to become extinct before the next evolutionary stage of Acura, Integra, Infinity, Lexus- a scientific slaughter of the motor arts which would breed a swarming horde of indistinguishable sleek, streamlined steel pea-pods, each with the same look and feel as the other which would not stop coming till they had taken over every garage, street, highway, and parking lot in sight, coagulating into giant metal clots clogging the natural flow of life and movement. Just as innocently three new television stations appeared around the same time that the innocuous looking Honda car was introduced. They were received as eagerly and enthusiastically as a dog being tossed three new bones next to the two he already had.

Sometime during this unnoticed expansion it metastasized to baseball. The two familiar friendly American and National leagues just weren't enough anymore. It was decided to separate the Leagues into different Divisions in each League and add more teams. Soon even the members of the teams themselves, the reliable recognizable family line up of familiar names were gradually replaced with strangers, the teams fell apart as players were tossed and traded faster than balls in a professional ping pong tournament. It became impossible to keep up with who was with what team. It was an orgy of cancerous growth that kept amassing in size to a magnet cry of 'more' till finally the players became virtually indistinguishable from each other, pouring out from an endless invisible assembly line of farm clubs like fresh duplicated Xerox copies. There were just too many players, too many games, too many home runs, too many commercials selling too many cars and too many fans eating too many hot dogs. Bernard finally stopped watching after another xexor copy hit over 120 home runs. There was no longer any joy in Mudville. Mighty Casey had not struck out, he had simply disappeared among the tidal wave of players and teams.

Then it spread to the movies. There were more and more films chronicling more and faster disintegration and more mall theaters to hold more and more people eating more mall popcorn while partially watching the tidal wave of new films that poured out like bullets at a firing range sending lots and lots of limitless entertainment, delivering everything except the psychological and emotional space to see or process them.

Even the health care system was not immune to this tsunami. It wasn't a health care system. It was a nervous system that just didn't know what it was supposed to do anymore, check the days receipts or check the low blood pressure in bed 5. There were just too many health plans offering too many exemptions from coverage (coverage was the only other commodity mysteriously remaining small and even shrinking).

Bernard couldn't understand why there was such a loud insistent vocal campaign to ban smoking which co-existed alongside a chronic indifference to a national health care plan. But it didn't matter really. At some invisible tipping point in the invasion we had simply become matter that no longer mattered. There was simply too much disease, too much physical illness, too much mental illness, too much domestic violence, too many car accidents, too many industrial accidents, too many ecological accidents, too many missing children on too many milk cartons, too many criminals, too many policeman, too many homeless people pushing too many shopping carts through the public sector and the private sector without raising a decibel of protest or outrage from a uniform political voice reflexly allergic to any agendas vaguely surrounding the issue of 'assistance.' Bernard felt that he was living in a famine of plenty.

And Books, books, books. There were too many books. They just kept coming, pouring our of that peculiar insatiable fecundity, the writer. The display of 'New Arrivals' were quickly moved to 'sale' display tables to make room for more 'New Releases.'

Bernard looked down at his newspaper at a full page add for a new best seller, 'How To Keep Your Brain Active and Alive.' He thought only someone without a brain would want to do such a thing. He rose dejectedly from his recliner, threw the paper on the floor, put on his coat and headed out of his apartment into the gray September morning on west 54th. He started walking the three blocks toward the corner grocery store and was nearly run over six times by two cabs, three SUV's, 2 kids on bicycles, and a shopping cart. When he arrived at the store it was vacant. A sign on the door said, "to our valued customers. We regret having to end our many years service here but this block is being demolished to make way for a six story parking garage and mall.”

The growing despair in Bernard reached a critical mass and right then something inside him caved in. He decided finally to end it all. He walked twelve more blocks to a new gun shop he'd seen in the neighborhood. He hesitated briefly outside the door then went inside where he found himself instantly paralyzed by the endless shelves of guns, there were rows and rows and rows of guns, hand guns -rifles-machine guns- A-K 47's to A.K. 547's. He just stood there looking, unable to decide, there were just too many guns. Overwhelmed he turned around and left. He was walking dejectedly back toward his apartment when the thought of 'pills' struck him like a revelation. He would use the pills that he had. He felt an odd rush of muted happiness at the certainty of his imminent release. Nearing the apartment his pace began to quicken fueled by an odd brisk buoyancy as his mind reflected on the cupboard above his bathroom sink that was full of bottles of pills, lots and lots and lots of pills.

The Tropic of Cleocatra

2007-06-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

She was a kick in the shins of accommodation, an antidote to toxic optimists, a sharp and indelible fart in the history of reassuring expectation. Like other members of that special group who incarnate within the female genotype and phenotype she was a catastrophe to anyone who tried to approach her with the casual assumption of easy intimacy that is so common to those who have placed themselves on the elevated office of higher life form but who had not yet been informed that they had not yet been admitted within the select circle of her whimsical grace. With Cleocatra, unrequested advances would prove to be not only a careless assumption but a costly one for those who prefer pleasure to pain. She did not respect, honor, or accept the blank check of obligatory bonds or appropriate social cues especially as regarded that commonplace mass of higher life form that displayed such arrogant insensitivity to her mood disorder. As far as she was concerned they could wear their ignorance on their sleeve alongside her claws comment on their wrist.

Cleo was not a happy cat. Some cats have churches and bars inside them they can go to when the world becomes too big or too small, too friendly or unfriendly. Cleo’s ‘catcher in the rye’ was Pat who rescued her from the frantic tornado of her early street life which left a legacy in the complex moody template of her personality, from a soul that had gone un-rewarded in ways that were crucial to her. So she was not the outgoing curious playful cat running for public office, preoccupied with putting her paw print in the superficial cement of the world, but then she was not interested in mental health, only in mental truth and she would not have brought her special awareness raising gifts had she spent her life in heaven. But Cleo didn’t rise above her early experience, she had been more than just marginally there and so became a witness making her paw impressions in more important cement.

Her psychology was not the product of a mean spirited conservative nor the sometimes casual indifference to consequence of a liberal both of which it could initially be mistaken for. No, it was something so rare and astonishing as to be virtually unrecognizable among higher life forms. It was the unique appearance in captivity of integrity, an integrity that was absolute and effortless, the ability to navigate and react directly and instantaneously from a center that is absent of ambiguity, to deliver a fresh fierce ‘fuck you’ with feline felicity when ever the occasion called for it. Her feelings were not designed to conform to the world but to comment on it.

All cats have this quality in varying degrees but she was a heavyweight, even to other cats.
They would just stare at each other and point to her saying, ‘that’s a cat.’ Higher life forms cannot really comprehend such an exceptional degree of honesty, we can barely approach it in our imagination so it is difficult for us to appreciate Cleo’s accomplishment, the degree of comfort with which she possessed complete possessing of the self, a state most of us only experience when we are in close proximity to unconsciousness.

Many people underestimate the angst in a cat’s life as I did when I first met Cleo. I don’t remember the exact date but she insisted I remember the event. She was as aloof toward me as the couch I was sitting on. I got up and casually sauntered over to her with my careless assumption of easy intimacy which she quickly translated into something to the left of rape, launching a pre-emptive surgical strike with the claws of her swift left paw. I thought she was just having a bad day but over the next 16 years it became apparent that was not just that one but the following 5,840, which surpasses being a streak of bad luck and becomes philosophy. She was simply able to assess and respond to life as an unavoidable misfortune and one which did not require adding the further insult of false optimism to the already abundant injury of living itself. She disdained dogs with their subordinate, submissive slavishness and ignorant energy, waving their dumb happy tails in a cemetery. They lacked what Cleo most strongly possessed, a proper sense of futility.

How often I tried to get an interested, excited response from her, to arouse her from that lofty internal perch of regal indifference she usually regarded me from but I nearly always failed to succeed while she always succeeded in failing to notice me. She was very pro-active in cultivating that failure, in fact she was steadfast in maintaining a pro-active hyper-vigilance to insure her success at failing to acknowledge me.

Her self-esteem was solid. She didn’t just rest on the seventh day, every day was Sunday to Cleo. She would not relinquish one inch of the ground of serene disinterest she claimed for herself. It was not laziness; it was the deliberate choice of sustained idleness and the sanctuary of sleep. In this she was the first lady of fidelity. Even in the celebrated category of feline curiosity she would never go beyond a quick look or disinterested glance, she never transgressed into the effort necessary to understand what she was looking at. That involved work, which she regarded as being outside her area of competence. I know this because Cleo never stopped revealing to me that, as “D.H. Lawrence said, "effort is the ruin of all things’.”
Many of her areas of competence were finally outside of the competence of my awareness but the honesty with which she inhabited her world was an object of my envy, setting a standard that shames me.. Now she’s gone on to another area of competence that is outside of mine. She always did like to ‘one up me

The Pathos of Pascal

2007-06-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

Poor Pascal, the sheriff’s penis, is depressed and does not feel good about himself. Pascal has, in fact, a long history of mood swings and clinical depression. He is confused and sad. Because he does not understand law and order, the sheriff thinks Pascal is bad and keeps him in his small dark room. He is only let out for very short periods, and then only because he creates such an urgent fuss and as soon as he’s done, he’s thrown back into the dark dungeon. Sometimes Pascal tries to console himself by thinking of the similar fate of the fire engine, but it only makes him feel worse. The fire engine gets to rush down busy streets in public, where people point and stare with admiration and excitement, while Pascal is confined to solitary toilets, dark bedrooms, and back alleys.
How did it come to this? What went wrong? Pascal remembers long ago when the sheriff was young. He used to be taken out and played with regularly, and he thought the world was bright and wonderful, then the sheriff started going to church and it began to change. Oh, he was still taken out but not as often, and there was a loss of joy and a lack of vitality in the play. The former eager touch now became furtive and hurried; he was no longer valued and treasured but began to feel unwanted and ashamed. The sheriff began listening to the terrible things they said would happen if he let Pascal have his way. And so Pascal was accused, tried, and found guilty without the benefit of defense counsel, and left to carry out his solitary sentence.
Then came the fifties, with Mamie and Eisenhower, Arthur Godfrey, and Lawrence Welk. Everyone was wearing ‘I Like Ike’ buttons and pledging allegiance to the flag. The sheriff began watching ‘Dragnet’ on TV and following the Republican Party. It was dreadful. Pascal was hardly ever taken out, and when he was it was always for business, never pleasure.
Then came the sixties and the happy bird of hope perched in his soul. He heard delicious stories blowing in the wind about Woodstock and acid and lovely love-ins. The carnal had turned carnival and Pascal wanted to go, but the sheriff had just received his first bright badge and would not go.
Now the sheriff stays home evenings watching “The Fugitive” on TV. Poor Richard Kimball, a doctor, now escaped convict, is wrongly accused of killing his wife. The sheriff believes Dr. Kimball is guilty and his heart beats wildly each week as the police net closes in. But Pascal knows he is innocent. Poor Dr. Kimball, who deserves respect and receives humiliation,. He only wants to reveal his true self without penal confinement and punishment. Instead, he has to hide and give false names and motives to his actions, the way the sheriff does about Pascal after he’s introduced him to someone. He drags the stay out interminably with guilty small talk about love and meaningful relationships.
This is very distressing and embarrassing to Pascal since he has never been able to be anything other than honest and truthful with his simple vocabulary of Yes and No.
Yes, Pascal knows the pain of life without liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and he feels sorry for the doctor, who only wants to enhance pleasure and ease pain.
So the Sixties came and went and Pascal’s hope dimmed. If only he’d be let out to socialize more. Even brief visits are to his liking. He likes to travel and meet new people. But instead, it’s the same old pattern of disregard, and his depression deepens. Life has begun to seem like a busy, exciting intersection with a broken traffic light that will not let him enter. Only yellow and red works, caution and stop. There is no green.

Poor Pascal. How sad that the promise of puberty should lead to Prozac just because his environment failed to meet his needs when those needs were paramount. One’s important needs should be met in predictable and considerate ways. To be fed when hungry, to sleep when tired, to play when one is lively, and to get clean when wet and dirty. But Pascal is treated as if he hardly exists. He is kept awake when he wants to sleep, put down to sleep when he wants to play.

He has been picked up, held, fondled and placed here and there totally at the whim of others.
The world seems an incomprehensible and unpredictable place ruled by capricious giants.
Pascal is blamed for the world’s ills; sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, and broken marriages. He feels the shadow of judgment hanging over him like the sting of a criminal history.
It is like receiving an electric shock every time one sits down to dinner. The sacred family that he has helped to make now points its sanitary, pious finger at him. So when he finally does get to meet someone, it is never healthy sunshine play but gray, overcast and cloudy -- a low-fat, sugar-free, NutraSweet play.
Sometimes, when the sheriff steps out of the tub, he sits on the couch to watch television and
let himself drip dry. That’s how Pascal happened to see Madonna. He instantly recognized in her a kindred soul and tried to get closer to see, but he couldn’t get more than a couple inches closer.
The sheriff tried to help by pulling him up and closer, over and over. Pascal knows from the sheriff’s church experience that this is called masturbating. He thinks that is a mean and harsh word to call the wonderful imagination in the pursuit of pleasure.
Sometimes Pascal imagines all the sheriff’s church angels up there looking down on all the people masturbating in New Delhi and Zaire, Leningrad, Lower Manhattan and New England (New England is the best to imagine, especially in October with all the pretty leaves falling on the immaculate little towns). He thinks of how sweet and odd it must look to the angels, all those small faces busy building urgent little fantasies. Sometimes he wonders how many were doing it in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted and ended all their pleasure. This thought is very sad to him.
Pascal thinks about God sometimes and about what the sheriff read in the black leather Bible. He can’t understand why all the Bibles are such an unhappy color to begin with. He doesn’t think people have any business having spiritual experiences. From what he can see on television, there is enough disagreement and fighting about what people can see and touch without fishing for sky fish.
Pascal decided long ago that the God thing was too big for him. It is enough that there is soap and water, friendly bodies, nude beaches and electric blankets.
He wishes the sheriff could find someone nice to settle down with, someone like Madonna or Daryl Hannah. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request. It’s not like he is asking for Laura Dern or Sigourney Weaver.
Once the sheriff introduced Pascal to a nice woman he met in the personals. She was very friendly. She even kissed Pascal over and over until the current of electric joy flooded through him.
It felt like what the church people called being born again. Yes, she was different from some of the other women Pascal had met, the ones with hearts like crabs and arms like pincers. Sometimes Pascal feels completely misunderstood by women.
They don’t seem to know that it’s the face he makes love to, it’s the face that really moves him.
But Pascal is not ready to give up hope. He still believes in the hidden pleasure of life. He knows his dysfunctional ‘family of origin’ issues have been unkind to him, but he tells himself it could have been worse. He could have belonged to Kafka or Billy Graham, or even Jesus or Woody Allen. The sheriff isn’t all bad, either. He takes Pascal for rides in the police car, and sometimes he turns on the siren for him and spins the pretty colored lights above the car, a lovely erupting red and blue carousel. Then Pascal feels the old hope of excitement rise and he rises up and tries to see what the excitement is. Though he can’t get quite high enough, he tries, tries to see, tries to get a small peek out the window, just one. Maybe it’s a fire engine, he thinks. Maybe there’s a fire.

Vertigo at the County Fair

2007-06-25T21:19:00.001-07:00

I finally found a use for August. Who would have thought there was so much fun in fecundity. It was the rinse and spin cycle of life. There was an exhibit of pygmy goats next to the booth for the Republican Party and baby Republicans hugging their iron teddy bears and Buddha cows like five hundred pound valiums unattached to their blue ribbons and a small pen of sheep who were glassy eyed and dazed not knowing who to follow where. Over at the rodeo Marlboro men and women gone mad were taking the S curve at LeMans at one hundred and forty miles an hour on wild bulls and putting their horses into four wheel drifts around barrels. I left and went looking for real courage, a pharmaceutical salesman with a Prozac booth. Real courage is rare, it wasn’t there. But smack in the middle, too good to be true, life everlasting- the vinyl siding display right next to the pro-life booth, the slip of the collective unconscious showing. This was better than a U.F.O. encounter group and a Baptist prayer meeting combined. There were horse shoers with beards and suspenders, mountain men who couldn’t keep the wolf from the door so just kept shoeing and moving on. Next to the rest room, inside a booth with a large sign that read, “Are you going to Heaven, two question test reveals the answer,” sat an old expressionless couple like a stoic Gospel gothic. I wanted to show my cards and raise them one, “This is heaven, where do we go from here” but I didn’t want to chance turning cement to loose gravel on such a nice day. Out at the edge of the fairground in two small spaces was a Democratic booth next to the ‘Alliance for the Mentally Ill’ who were handing our iris bulbs to plant. I took one to plant but didn’t because I couldn’t tell which end of the bulb was up and it would have deepened my depression to think of that poor iris growing down into the darkness away from the sun. I wanted to get this into a poem and I tried but I couldn’t do it. I realized the fair was just too big for a poem. There was a booth for everything but the blind making love, everything but that “god” fuck everyone was in search of, that we all came for, that was only fair.

Gardens

2007-06-25T21:15:00.000-07:00

There are gardens of love where you can hear the ringing sound of happiness, and cansee the mighty walnut tree shake one of his walnut covered branches so the squirrel can have dinner and can feel the love.

There are gardens of sadness where you can hear the pear tree grieving the loss of her son, where you can see the pear rotting on the ground, and can feel the pain.

There are also gardens of hate where you can hear the rose bush tearing apart the defenseless dandelion with her deadly thorns, where you can see the tall rose bush daring the little dandelion to dig one of her roots into the rose’s soft soil. Where you can feel the hate.

There are many gardens and everything contributes to each.

Mary Margaret McClaskey, age 12

What if I were a car and had
pennies for wheels and no brakes
and went straight and straight never
knowing when I’d reach home.

Ariel Stone, age 8

The Future of Rome

2007-06-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

Let’s say having increases hunger,
that light makes it harder really to see.
Then suppose, like me, you don’t have eyes,
suppose you don’t have ears to hear
and there is no nose.
Imagine, like me,
you don’t even have a mouth
to put the sweet soft black berry in.
But suppose there are Red and Green and Yellow,
that you feel them.
Then suppose you had a lamp
bigger than you to lean against,
a dark maroon red carpet to sit on
and a blue teacup large as your chest.
Then imagine, like me,
you were made of gold,
that you were willing to be idle
and were the one to come after Man.
Think of having only to sit,
of the heart’s thoughts,
of fear leading finally to safety,
speech to silence.
Think of enough.

The Woman Who Loved Gorillas (for Dian Fossey)

2007-06-25T21:05:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it is covered
with black hair and
stares at you with eyes
that are wholly other,
eats nuts and leaves in
mountain jungles in Africa and
requests that you abandon reason,
anger nations, court excess.
Sometimes it asks that you starve
yourself for most of a life to
draw you to its distant table,
has you leave Louiville for Rwanda,
forsake Kentucky for Karisoke
and sit silent with it
in rain forests for years
refusing all offers.
Sometimes it asks that you
go far away and lose life,
but then you will lie
in the tall grass of
a mountain meadow with
the hair of its hand touching yours.

Birds in Search of a Poem

2007-06-25T21:03:00.001-07:00

When the galaxy of South American swallows
returns to fill the Anchorage evening sky
with their swift black constellations,
this is not the poem.
But have you seen them!
I mean the million birds expanding and contracting
for real, on the edge of chaos,
right up there above you,
neck-bending, head-looking-up real
and then also in the sky of the mind --
the mind that knows only the small facts of migration,
where they are from, where they are going.
The mind that is reduced to the mud-star wonder of it.
It! This hundred thousand million birds
shooting and swirling and darting
above the giant grade school chimney
awaiting the soft signal of dusk to descend into it
like a million black sky rabbits disappearing
back into the magician’s large stone hat.
This is not the poem.
But when the last five become the last one.
When the inscrutable instruction
swallows the last Swallow into the giant mouth.
When the great stone chimney
is silent and still.
This is the poem.

Anatomy and Physiology

2007-06-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

The dollar deposits a nickel
as it leaves the left ventricle into
the aorta, bribes the white cells
with a quarter and smug smile,
transits the ascending arch,
then descends to the lungs, where
it leaves another nickel
in the left middle lobe and
continues on confidently to
the alveolar capillaries, where
it diffuses ten cents and moves
on, assured, to the diaphragm,
which demands, “Fifteen cents.”
“That’s outrageous,” says the dollar,
“how far can I get on forty cents?”
“Take it or leave it,” says the diaphragm.
So he pays and angrily continues on to
the stomach, who barks, “Twenty cents.”
“That’s highway robbery,” he screams.
“Times are tough,” replies the stomach,
“I have a body to feed.”
“All right,” says the dollar, defeated,
“guess I’ll grab a bus and head home.”
He finds the nearest vein,
grabs the first red cell that passes,
“That’ll be twenty cents.”
He pays and sinks sadly
into a seat near the back.
He gets off at the inferior vena cava,
knocks wearily on the red valve:
“That’s twenty-five cents.”
“But I’m broke,
I don’t have any more money.”
“That’s too bad,” replies the heart
and stops.

2007-06-25T21:00:00.001-07:00

Patti

(one)

Fat Patti the Adventist,
that sweet tub, big as seven days,
with the diseased fur coat and rotting teeth
is at my Sunday door again with Scripture.
Her game plan is grace.
Good idea in good weather, I think.
We talk, but communion can’t be bought.
There are always differences.
I have to be truthful with her:
“I haven’t let go of my first, early God yet,
a red bicycle with thick black pedals,
the first ground my feet ever owned.
I’ve tried but I can’t do it.”
She tries to let me down easy,
agrees it’s a tough one, smiles,
gently reminds me there’s only one God.
I think about this and wonder
if it will jump-start my heart
like the red bike.
I tell her my main interest in Heaven
is what the soil is like: are there bike paths?
Patti says she’ll look into it and get back to me
and I believe it, I have faith in her.

Patti

(two)

Patti stops by with a pamphlet,
more ‘good news’ about
that damned Appointment.
I’m not in the mood but
I wonder what she’s wearing.
Honest to God, tennis shoes,
a tent-sized burlap dress and
a narrow black hat piece
with artificial cherries on it,
the kind Ida Lupino wore in ‘46.
She hands me the pamphlet.
There’s a picture on it.
It says, “Your peaceful new world.”
Men with smiles of smooth lumber
build a seamless house on a pastured hill.
In fields of bright vegetables
clean children from each race
play together politely with the
nice Lion, Bear, and Gorilla of choice.
Smiling mothers with unwatchful eyes
pick happy strawberries while geese
fly single-file over their heads like acolytes,
there isn’t a cloud or crow anywhere.
It’s an idiot’s bounty.
Patti says something about there
being plenty of room for bike paths
but I’m looking at the men, women, children.
Then I blurt it out, “Do you think,
I mean, is there sex there?”
A startled look and then dismay
crosses her face, and then it falls.
She is disappointed in me, I can tell,
the way she says she doesn’t know,
the way she walks away from my door.

Patti

(three)

Patti’s back. It’s Sunday.
She’s arisen and returned
fresh as a new promise in
a blue sack dress with white flowers.
I don’t answer the door this time.
I’m thinking of my Uncle George
toward the end, after the cancer’s deciding
cells had voted against him.
“Well, I have someplace to go,
better get on with it,” he said,
like it was another B-17 mission
with an element of risk.
I was twelve, but I saw his face.
There was no mission,no orders for anything

MBA

2007-06-25T20:57:00.001-07:00

My dog Alfie has a master’s in business. He teaches me sound investment. Outside, I can find his left ear at half-mast almost any time listening to tips in the free market; insider trading is his second nature. His real loyalty is for the wind, what it brings him; he likes safe risks that pay off. His sure tongue goes for the profit of air, unable to resist the appeal of high yield, liquidity. Impatient with hope, he harvests the horizon for movement. He was never interested in my false promises; words just make him hungry. Years of my betrayals and years of his forgiveness bind us in a perfect union. He’s in this for the long haul, knows there is nothing lasting to be gained by separation. His eyes always say, “There’s no room for remorse” -- and, besides, he’s not counting, so we can go on together. Between deals, there’s always love and food and walks in the sun. And even if we lose everything, his tail consoles me, saying, “Suicide is stupid; dividends are overvalued.” His nose will always find employment in the earth’s skin.

On Cows

2007-06-25T20:56:00.001-07:00

All cows are brown, black, gray, white, and overweight.
All the cows in the world are between
Portland, Oregon and Lewiston, Idaho.
Cows are here to eat grass
and the sides of all hills.
Cows only eat and digest
and get wet and dry off,
everything else they will not do.
For cows, no one has ever died
and no one ever will.
In their calm bliss
cows will not fall in cow love,
worry about a supreme court cow nominee,
or herd together to listen to a cow pope.
God blesses cows.

Green

2007-06-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

Green was lying down
all green and
bright. Green was born
green and green
was green’s life. Green
rose from the
ground in the early green
light. Green
walked through the town
and over all the
green lawns, Green rode
in the sky in a
large green kite, Green
came to my room
to hide from the night,
Green left in the
morning on a lovely green
bike. It does
not want ever the church
pews dark dark
brown. Green has a per-
fect commitment.
It does not want brown,
It does not need
brown. Green can dress
itself.

Blue

2007-06-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Blue is usually in bed,
almost pale, one would say,
but, “No,” Blue assures,
“Just waiting, waiting for
what was it?”
Blue does not recall
and does not mind at all.

In the pool, Blue prefers
to dress as aqua--
aqua is so easy
no running, no diving, no horseplay.

If the truth is known
Blue would rather be alone,
just prefers it.
“I do not go as well with
Red as White thinks.”
Blue simply feels best by itself
floating in the air
at leisure in the water
where nothing is the matter.

So often Blue’s in bed
not because of illness or sadness
(Blue is seldom blue)
but because usually
Blue only slightly cares
with its lazy, lovely view.

But sometimes,
when Blue must speak
of life to the living,
Blue deepens and darkens
and is brilliant and beautiful.

Red

2007-06-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

I am not relative,
I am not theory,
I am Red and
I hate the rose.
Pink is propaganda.

I warn you before you start
I am too big for your poem
and do not need it.
What are your Axe, Wheel, Gunpowder, Words--
your feeble boasts, next to me.
All who attempt me (even Rilke) fail.
I only ask that you leave
what you do not love.
I am in love with Black.
Bring me your fear and I will kill it.

None of your plans matter.
You may covet aberrant Orange
and the gold blood of Yellow,
but not with impunity,
even Vincent and Gauguin
paid with madness, syphilis. It is not jealousy,
I was meant to possess the eye.

I married the rose for respectability,
its pink pension, the neat garden,
mistaking mistake for opportunity.
What could the rose know of passion,
the bullseye of the target’s heart!
the little girl’s red, red socks!
Blood (my deepest voice) that
holds the hands of life and death.

I am the children’s quick voices leaping
from the school’s dreaded doors.
I am not the genie in the red fire extinguisher,
the patient breath awaiting the wayward flame,
I am the flame.
The fire engine that roars
through the rushing streets
does not say ‘fire,’
it says Red! Red! Red!

Directions for Substitute Teaching

2007-06-25T20:50:00.001-07:00

You need to learn to trust.
When Pink says “Hello,” say “Hello.”

When Blue wags its happy tail,
say, “Beautiful Blue, beautiful Blue.”
When it lifts its lovely wings and leaves,
say, “Goodbye, Goodbye.”

When Red says,
“It’s hard to run in the sand
but I am the fastest,”
say, “Yes, I know.”

When Yellow waves, wave back.

When Orange says, “Yellow is so obvious,
whoever could have thought of me!”
say, “No one, never.”
When Black speaks, saying
“I have been to Benares, the city of the dying,”
say, “Yes, I saw you there.”

And when Green answers,
“I was there also, beginning beginning again.”
say, “Yes, that was good.”

If Purple sits alone,
silent in her high station,
do not scold, it’s her way.

If Brown is absent,
don’t be alarmed,
he’s outside waiting.

When White tells its old, old tale,
“I am the truth, the whole truth,”
say, “Liar, Liar.”

When Gold buries
its bright treasure,
find it. Say,
“Mine, all mine.”

A Playboy Interview with Yellow and Brown

2007-06-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

PB: I’m going to jump right in and go straight to your relationship. You’ve managed to keep it somewhat secret and I’m wondering if that has been intentional?”

Yellow: “Well, the truth is, Brown and I have never made any attempt to hide anything, it’s just that we seldom draw attention when we are together, which we prefer. It seems that once you’re noticed it all gets predictable. Look what happened to two and two, doomed to four forever. We like not knowing where the day will lead.”

PB: “I’m interested in when, or should I say how, it started. Would you talk a little about that?”

Brown: “Well we had known of each other since the beginning although we did not formally meet till Lascaux, the caves in France, and then it didn’t become serious until the Cathedral at Chartres, although Yellow remembers it differently.

Yellow: “Yes, I still say it was Turner’s landscapes. That was where I first sensed the possibility of something.”

Brown: “In any event we had known for some time and it just kept quietly growing the way those things sometimes do. Then at some point shortly after Vincent and Gauguin, on that we agree, there was the sense of something that will not be avoided, when the wanted releases itself.”

Yellow: “In truth, we were infatuated in the Mesozoic, when the first flowers appeared, the magnolias.”

Brown: “Yes, before that there was only the forest, just Green and I. It was assumed we would always be together. Who would have thought of Yellow! Anyway, Green and I are still close. I guess we just wore each other out. No one knows why these things happen the way they do, why anything ends when it does or why it begins even, or what comes after.
“Anyway, after Green, I tried a short detour with Red on the old opposites-attract theory, which turned into a modest disaster. Red only has eyes for Red, doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Only one who can put Red in its place is White. Does it by simply ignoring. It’s brilliant really, drives Red crazy. I like White actually. Bit of a strange bird though, goes with everyone but still remains a loner.
“But, as I was saying, after Green I gradually withdrew into myself. You see I’d never found anyone who could understand what it was like for me, so there just didn’t seem any point and in truth I became quite content. I began to find a warm strength in the ample pleasure of the tree and soil and the fur of animal and after a while that settled inside, something solid and yet soft. I became utterly glad to simply relax into the basin and range. Then, when Yellow happened, I had to leave that. I was sad at the loss of my solitude at first, but I was too buoyant to remain where I was.
“I guess it started with the night. You see, I’ve never really liked the night. It brings on a kind of anxiety. I think it’s the loss of the light. I feel like I’m disappearing. But that first time with Yellow when we stayed together and darkness came and put on its black clothes piece by piece, Yellow just laughed, and the darker it got the louder grew the laughter. I’ve never been bothered by the night since.”

Yellow (erupts with a soft smile): “Yes I remember that, although in truth there is also some personal history involved with that story. Brown and I both benefited from our encounter with Black. You see Black was my first, that is before Brown happened. Black always tried to intimidate me, thinking that because it had worked with others it would work again, but it didn’t and we drifted apart. But at least in the beginning, Black was a new and wonderful sensation for me. I was suddenly beautiful in a way I hadn’t seen before. I became intoxicated. Seeing myself with Black released a kind of radiant, radical potential in me I’d never experienced before. It took my breath away. I didn’t know I possessed such brilliance, an almost reckless brilliance really. A sense of spectacular possibility came over me, something resembling freedom, but beyond it. I was like a child, able to run, laugh, leap and shout while believing in nothing. Variety replaced limitation. I had never known what it was like to have a true lust for existence. Even Vincent and Gauguin didn’t do that for me.
“It’s been different with Brown, a sort of calm steady ecstasy. None of the ups and downs like with Black. It’s odd but I think I know what perfect means now. It’s not wanting to leave. That even if what comes tomorrow is what was there yesterday, it’s enough. It’s patience, I think. With Brown I finally feel patient. I don’t need to need.”

PB: “What are your plans for the future?”

Brown: “Oh the future is always here. It’s even back there. I don’t mean to be glib but what you call time or soul or personality or even Life and Death are really unclear to you.
You don’t understand yet. Your life is a sort of fiction you’re still walking through intensely, as though it were fact. That’s one of the things we’re here for. Not just yellow and I but the others too, Red and Blue and Purple and Orange and all the rest. To clear up your confusion, to offer you the absolutely lovely. There are places we go where there are no plans, where the clouds are dark and light browns and it rains yellow. We love it.

Meditation

2007-06-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Master said, “Sit, be still,
close your eyes, let things pass,”
and I tried. But Karen came,
“Quick, a sun, it’s rising”

The Master said, “Breathe, be still,
close your eyes, let things pass,”
and I tried. Then Debbie said,
“Look, there’s a red sparrow and
the butterfly is crimson and orange”

The Master said, “Sit, close your eyes,
let things pass.” But Pat appeared,
“Hurry, the sky, it’s black and
the stars are thousands”

The Master said, “Breathe, be still,
close your eyes, let things pass,”
and I tried. But Ursula said,
“Quick, it’s snowing on the moon”

The Master said a last time,
“Breathe, be still, close your eyes,
let things pass,” and I vowed I would,
but the Muse came, she spoke,
“There are wildflowers and I’m naked.”

War and Peace

2007-06-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

“My cat went into the bedroom when I wasn’t looking, knocked the bird cage over
and ate the bird. He dragged it out to the living room and ate everything but the head
and wings. I had to get a replacement bird before Kevin got home from school so
I put it in the trunk of the car and drove down to the pet store. I was in a hurry but
I remembered it had to be turquoise on the chest, and when I got there all the turquoise
ones had yellow heads but I couldn’t remember if his head had been yellow. Then I
remembered that his head was in the trunk so I went out and, sure enough, it was
yellow. So I went back in the store and bought one of the birds with a yellow head
and got home in time to put it in the cage in Kevin’s room. He didn’t notice. Sometimes love is like that. I keep trying to remember to put the old bird’s head in the garbage but I keep forgetting. You know how that is.”

Waiting for Googolplex

2007-06-22T17:51:00.001-07:00

(Googolplex: The largest finite number.
Written on a piece of paper
it would fill the known universe.)

One sat talking to Two, “Just think how far we have to go before we can rest.” “Yes,” said Two, “but it’s best not to think about it. You know, the longest journey and the first step, all that rot.” “I know,” said One, “but a thousand, just think of a thousand! It will take months and months before we’re even halfway there, and it’s not fair really.
I mean, there’s nowhere else to go -- no sideways to a mountain or ocean, no Sabbath to rest in, and then after we’re there, well, there’s fourteen thousand and a hundred thousand. And even if we can talk Three into multiplying us, we’re still nearly forever away from one million and twenty eight million, and even then there’s no guarantee that Four won’t get petulant and perverse and come along and divide us, or Eight have a psychotic break and go into subtracting seizures. I mean, Christ, have you ever stopped to think what some deranged, depressed hand calculator could do to us from the second window of a book depository?”
“I know,” said Two, “it’s all very distressing, and even after it’s all over and we get to the end, so what? Big fucking deal.”

Vertigo at Trappist Abbey

2007-06-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

At forty-six, single, heading west on 99
a sharp right turn at Bill’s Market
will get you to the small white room
with Jesus staring down from the cross
on your little spartan cot with his sad reminder.
I’m here for a change but it’s the same old trap,
not two soft breasts within miles
and a Gideon consolation to tease the old ache.
Outside there’s a wind in the maples talking to
that higher advertised self it’s supposed to all be about.
The monks are at vespers--belted, robed, sandled, safe--
but I’m in my room at my little prayer desk
under the Last Supper reading an axe murder mystery,
Death and the Good Life.
I sense this inner realignment isn’t going to work,
the ball joints and shocks are too far gone.
Then it hits me, there aren’t any dogs here. Where are the dogs!
A slow fear begins to rise in my stomach like baking yeast,
like the time Henry Fonda was lost in the woods berry picking in
Golden Pond and found his way back to Hepburn, running scared.
Relax, it’ll get better after dinner, I think--but it doesn’t,
you ever try to mix polite reverence with a stomach screaming meat.
Remember Bogart in The African Queen
when he’s eating dinner with Hepburn and her missionary brother
and he tries to stop belching at the informal formal table?
Well, Bogart isn’t here, and you couldn’t beg a belch with a prayer.
It was the old hand in the lap trap.
My Uncle George always said, “If you find your hand in your lap,
excuse yourself and run to beat the devil.”
It occurs to me there are no children’s voices,
the main color is white and the smiles are a kind of off nice,
like at Hanson’s Funeral Parlor where we took Aunt Ethel.
I heard the biblical echo spoken above her stillness,
“Love not the world, nor the things of the world,”
but she did and so do I.
I don’t want a gray heaven of starched hymns and formal feelings,
to sit forever in an itchy wool suit.
I want cement sidewalks, oil stains, yellow paint, and real butter.
I run for my life back to my suitcase,
take Jesus and the Last Supper out of the desk drawer,
put them back on the wall and check out.
My Toyota starts like Lazarus and I push the pedal to the floor
the way James Dean did in the car race in Rebel Without A Cause.
I fly down the road past gold green prayer fields to
Bill’s Market where signs like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs
lead me back to Ed’s Expert Auto Repair, Grist Cafe, the Spot Tavern (topless).
My eyes begin to water before Honda, Zenith, Texaco, Century 21.
Off to my right at a small airfield I see a twin engine skywriter lift
its moving wheels and rise from the ground.
I want it to fly high, high into the air above the blue earth
and say in the sky, Open! Honey! Free!

Geography, Furniture

2007-06-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

The bad luck just kept coming,
my mother’s face changing into winter,
her hair gone red to white
just like that. The rutted skin hardly
covers her cheek bones anymore,
she thinks the roses just grew in the vase.
Doesn’t even recognize me.

And Pop, all I got left of him
are the Levi coveralls lying on
my basement floor where he
fractured the hip. We both knew
when he couldn’t move he
was as good as dead, our eyes
looking for the nearest exit.

Now Susan has called
after all these years.
There’s a lump in her breast and
the old pain hasn’t even healed yet.
The God damn dog won’t stop barking,
even at night.

Thirteen Things that Frighten Me

2007-06-22T17:45:00.000-07:00

1. The morning
2. Getting up in the morning
3. Watching people vote
4. Two women talking
5. Two men talking
6. A man and a woman talking
7. No one talking but the blinking light on
my message machine saying someone did
8. The criminal
9. The policeman
10. Closet heterosexuals
11. People who liked the movie “The Exorcist”
but didn’t like “Bambi”
12. People wearing T-Shirts and bumper stickers
that say, “No Fear”
13. The number thirteen

Moon

2007-06-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

If this were a poem
you would climb
the long attic steps up to
the bed alone. You

would be stopped on the
last step where
you would see through the
high window the white

white moon absolutely still
in a swath of blue clouds,
the dark wide craters you
could step down into, I

would show you the place
inside, seventy thousand
years ago, when you looked at
it in the europe, eight

hundred and twenty thousand
years ago in asia, three
and one half million years ago
in africa. If this were

a poem, you would know why
the sad man in the mall
shot twenty three smiles dead.

Stones grow. The heart and
mind can sink together, at
once, under the weight of

them in your pockets. You’ve
carried them there since
the beginning.

Tibetan Monks Chanting

2007-06-22T17:42:00.001-07:00

I wanted, of course, to understand
but it’s a sound -- not a word.
It was not about my I, or their I, or our I.
It was not about understanding,
but that’s all the mind knows
so it kept trying.
It tried looking
at their quiet masculine bodies
in the red and gold robes,
at their steady expressionless faces
under the large crown hats
and still it could not know,
so it returned to the sound
that was deep and strong and male
like wood oak and stone and steel
altered and sent to a purpose beyond itself,
that kept going and going, past sadness and joy,
beyond anything Mozart would have recognized
and I thought about the long stretches when
I had been without the body of a woman to lay with
and how it had hurt and
I wondered if they ached too
or if they were beyond even that
and what was there
and I wanted to say, “No, wait!
as I will when I have to go there.
So I left and went out into the summer evening.
A young boy was playing on his skateboard
under a deep blue U.S. Bank sign.
He was only using one foot.

Breakdown

2007-06-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Winter morning in seventy-eight,
only the cold knew what to do correctly,
the smell of grief like burnt meat
patrolling the living room.
Pain came steady as rain, let up for crying.
The air hurt, apples tasted dangerous,
water wasn’t for drinking.

Stoved demons roasted red,
the sky leaked yellow and white
behind the windows alongside the young.
Even the angels wore black.
And the chickens, they were just
decorating the wind, poor bastards.

Satellite

2007-06-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

Last night I turned out the lights
and went outside under
a thousand thousand stars.
I looked up to see one moving,
but no! It was not a falling star,
just us looking down at us.

Maybe the God that talks to some
will talk to me tonight, now.
But no! There was only the
satellite, and me, and the stars,
which we keep looking at
and can’t understand
and don’t need to.

Chapel

2007-06-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

the small chapel
is so still and empty.
I can’t see the white, white clouds
or the high blue sky.
it is a strange place to worship.

the loud louts from the Bowery
are not here. that is good.
the thin hearts of the family
picnic aunts are beating
or not somewhere else.

on the cloth altar
an open Bible
holds out its large insistent hand
to the living who are dying.

where are Mary Margaret and Michael?
have they gone to the park swings
again without me?
I miss them when they are gone.

when I am gone
don’t scatter my ashes.
in the morning
hold them in your hands,
put them on your bread.
take me with you.

Carousel

2007-06-22T17:36:00.001-07:00

Two by two,
the quiet horses
circle above the ground,
quick red, blue, and brown.
So extravagant. So heroic.
Front legs raised, high heads thrown back,
the eye of the eyes still defiant
the mouth ready finally to speak.
The wound muscle’s intention clear--
first the long fields, then mountains, then sky.
But then to be turned to wood
at the moment they were most insistent.
Now loud children ride the punished horses
as the happy music turns.
Up and down the
still horses go
around.

Not Being Buddha

2007-06-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

Not Being Buddha

1. The small boy in the store just took it,
the little plastic yellow gun.
He took it when the want turned to need
like the wave and particle when they change uniform.
The cashier saw it, she turned him in--
not because there was a need
but because that place where the look in her eyes came from
wanted to, to tell her boss, point the finger, say “Jew.”

2. I first saw it soft at seven in forty-nine.
It came to the kitchen table on Broadway,
the one with the red plaid tablecloth
where I’d eaten every dinner I’d ever known.
My mother brought it to me that night,
put the pancakes and eggs on my plate.
Something unnatural unleashed in the air.
The breakfast I would not eat did not belong.
Why did mother do that,
saying,“This is dinner tonight,”
make the night not right,
turn the world strange in my chest?
What was it?

3. It was there in daylight near the garage,
the man wearing levis, the
one with the thumb hooked over the belt,
talking to his neighbor, the other man,
working on his Plymouth axle.
The man under the car, nearest the axle,
is farthest from it and least afraid
(any old cross will do).
But the man talking to him was sent by it;
his words like yellow jackets from the hive in his stomach
want to still it, feed its hunger, quiet the thing.
They say “pipe wrench,” “three-quarter inch,”
“over to your left more,” and “five-eighths.”
What is it?

4. I saw it in the middle of night.
The black spider brought it to my bedroom,
yoga-kneed joints jetting its thick metallic center
across the dark desert under my desk.
It knew I was there, knew I was looking.
It froze in the flashlight’s gold crucifix,
died suddenly when the shoe’s heel
scattered the hair-legs into afterthoughts.
There was nothing to still it, feed it, quiet the thing.

5. But at the border crossing
we talked to each other,
the man in the booth and I.
He just wanted to see if it was near,
“Do you have any firearms,? Where are you from?
How long do you intend to stay?”
But we both had countries,
a booth in his, a car in mine.
It was stilled, fed, quieted.

6. And then this having to mate
like a nail needing wood,
asks of her nearly sacrifice,
will not wait for snow to melt.
And when it is denied again and again
the weight of sadness grows
like an avalanche
that does not threaten only
but subtracts.

7. It was the man who ran
down the steps of his house,
his furious face swelled red,
the voice shaking rage.
It had just happened.
“They battered the door in,
tore the God-damn lock off.
Sons of bitchs smashed the glass,
took the twelve-gauge,
damn near half of everything I own.
I’ll kill the bastards,
next time I’ll kill em.”

8. But see the great giant boat,
the white man’s perfect arrogant hope
moving slow through the starry dark
moving slow through the north Atlantic night
moving slow to the waiting edge of ice.
Then the jarring tear like God groaning
from the furnace in the Earth’s core
that shaped the swift terrible knowing
to form the final cast of the mind.
The unbelievable water is immense,
the great boat tips upward--
T-I-T-A-N and half of an I can be seen--
then slides down backward
fast, like a decision,
into the black ocean, and then
only the voices of the drowning dying,
rising together and utterly separate
in an immense terrible chorus,
rising and falling from the floating heads,
lifting up to the thousand silent stars,
to the small receding lifeboats
where the living are leaving.
And the heads, one by one, disappear,
the cries diminish and shrink into the growing stillness
as each slips two miles down to
settle and lie near the great giant boat,
the white man’s perfect arrogant hope
still on the quiet ocean ground.
And there were black men and women
in St. Louis, New York, Harlem,
East Chicago and Los Angeles, and they heard.
They heard the unsinkable elegant ship,
was just another sunken boat.
And when they heard, they
joined long hungry hands together;
to know finally what they had known,
but needed to know -- the white man
unable to walk on the deep water.

9. It’s the bright penny’s terrible power.
I saw it in the thin scared smiles
of small Asian immigrants
wandering dogless catless streets.
Their hungry eyes hover over
half empty stomachs like street lamps.
America is just another land mass.
The few dogs now know,
the cats always did.

10. Small, wary Australopithecus,
what in you was not made for stillness, for staying?
You gaze uncertain onto the African savanna,
your left foot still safe in the dark forest,
your hand lingering lightly on the tree limb
you’ve come finally to leave.
Why did you begin, to walk,
walk three million years
into the altar of open field,
to look up, to speak, say “Universe.”

11. It’s half that the heart was meant to stop,
half that we will not have it,
it’s the little dead girl,
drowned by mistake,
the poor man who
cries by the lake.
He loved her blond hair,
she loved to be awake.
It’s this treasured light.
It’s this I, almost sufficient,
like a source.

Premature Response to a Poetry Assignment (it happens to men as they age)

2007-06-22T17:29:00.001-07:00

1.

Christ! It’s been over an hour and still
no poem. Sometimes I just want someone
to know and I want them to tell me and
then I remember they can’t -- and then
sometimes I just want money and a
cellular phone so I can be safe, then
I remember I’m not. My dog, Alfie, is
twenty years old. He is going to die soon.
Then what will I do. I don’t know the
difference between a starling and a sparrow.

2.

Christ! Three days and still no poem.
I try to hitchhike one, but they just pass
me doing sixty in their stingy safe seat
belts and perfect teeth smiles.
But I do not care,
I have my rye crisp and ale.
Then there are dark days in
the bowl when the black shark
eats all the gold fish and I remember
that God favors the saved,
is not good all the way through,
notes each sparrow’s fall,
but lets it fall
without a trace.

Resurrection

2007-06-22T17:23:00.002-07:00

I am lazy and afraid to die.
I want the poem that will not begin to begin
while I eat popcorn and pecans,
think warmly of those who love me,
joyously grieve at how my passing will hurt them,
not seriously, but in a needed way, permanently.
How turning a corner, standing at the oven, or
leaving a theater, they will think of me.
How, one by one, they will cry.

The Lost Cat

2007-06-22T17:23:00.001-07:00

The lost cat is not missing.
The lost cat is only looking and listening.
Nothing began or changed or ended.
He just crossed a street,
then another, and then another.
He does not worry, he does not hope,
he is not lost, he is not orange,
there is no reward,
no one is looking for him
and everything is provided.

November

2007-06-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning the tall
clumpy maples out-
side the bedroom window
shed their gold leaves.
One comes floating down, a
big one, then absolutely
nothing and then the nothing
lengthens. I mean
there are six or seven groups of
them over a hundred
and fifty feet high, a whole sky
acre of leaves and not
one letting loose, just the nothing
going on over and over,
then one small leaf falls fast
right near the middle
and way up the old frail one
twists and spin in the
smooth wind, you’d put all your
money on it and lose.
Then come two at once, medium
size, followed by another,
then nothing, stillness again, the
wind and leaves tug a
warring over a minute and a half,
the whole nothing stretch-
ing out and widening. It’s un-
believable! amazing! non-
sense! Then a large one, brilliant
yellow, big as an elephant’s
foot, drops fast right in front, comes
straight down ten to twelve
feet then glides to the ground in wide
circles like a wise man
dancing.

Poetry

2007-06-22T17:20:00.001-07:00

There are days I know I don’t know
and that no one else does
and that we all flirt with it too casually,
this not knowing.
And then there is a kind of knowing,
slippery, shifting, mist-covered, absolute,
and when I wish to come to It,
when I’ve tired of disapproval, of disbelief, of freedom,
then I’ll come to You, your voice,
the one behind it.

Smoking

2007-06-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

First, the soft sweet knowing
of what’s coming, like the
scarlet thrill of sex
before you begin and end,
the body’s mind poised on
the edge of pleasure.
Then the parchment to the lips,
the act of fire,
the swift silent pull,
the sudden rush of altered air,
all ashen and rust-spiced.
Then the smooth margarine spread
added inside by the craved wind.
And finally the glorious gray smoke
going out.
And then
to get
to do it
again

The Hunger of Heaven

2007-06-22T17:03:00.000-07:00

It is a part of the making of sense
the simple desire of the angel
to ascend down to the smart earth
among the yellow bee
and the salty lips of the senses

To taste the sweet citrus
on the other side
of the bite of the apple
to wade deep
into the warm wet
on the other side
of the parted skin

It is a part of the making of sense
to stand under
the winter street lamp
and to hear stillness
louder and louder
beneath the silent
slow falling snow
coming down
and down
not forever
but till everything is
patient in the white coat

To leave the smooth dumbness of eternity
for the dark ache of the tooth,
the love of the urge to lie,
is a part of the drive that drives
the angel’s simple desire
to ascend down to
the sharp burst of the touch,
the honest hunger of the eye

It is a part of the making of sense
to leave diaphanous wings and
the clear weightless gown for
the green paint of a park bench
next to the secret sadness in
the old man with the dirty coat,
who watches the hands of lovers,
who takes his one strong hand
to the bed of his one room to
guide his need to their feast

To see once,
when you stand alone
in silent wood,
the brown deer, still,
in the scent for water

It is a part of the hunger of Heaven
when one has tired of
the light’s teasing, the
sticky lust of the will,
the heart’s fear,
of love,
to find a way back
steeper than the wood animal.