Two Anecdotes

Two anecdotes, drawn from a real, still life:

Anecdote Number One --
Having ripped off my Fentanyl pain patch in a fit of pissiness last night, and then, within the haze of all the other medications in play, forgetting to replace it, I found myself in inexplicable horrid pain this evening.  I desperately needed a shower, for example, but settled for an intense and thorough soap-and-water session in the half-bath.  Even that, however, left me weeping.

{Are you tearing up in sympathy/empathy/overwrought compassion?}

I barely made it to the bed without collapsing, but I managed to keep the wailing going at maximum volume levels.

After an unladylike collapse, a short, tiny-headed cat with enormous lung power began to pester me. He was relentless.  He pawed at my non-shoulder.  He nipped at my purple CRPS legs.  He yowled,.meowed, and came close to barking whilst pulling my grabber out of reach.

I knew for a fact that this Dobby, whom we named after Rowling's famous House Elf (such a dear, and powerful, too), had been recently fed, watered, "treated," and, most importantly to him, vigorously groomed.

"Self," I said, "This cat is trying to tell you something."

It is a rule in The Manor that if I begin crying, making big whoops out of normal whoops, and start making Pity Party plans, someone is to grab my short-acting pain medicine bottle, take out two 7.5/325s, grab my Hillary For President water bottle, and force those pills down my moaning throat.  It is not even necessary for the pill pusher to wash his or her hands beforehand.

"Dobby, you may have been misnamed," I chirped, about 20 minutes after his abuse enlightened me.  "You clearly are an angel cat."

And... scene!

Canterbury Tales

Anecdote Number Two --
My Longtime and Therefore Dearest Readers know that I spy on my Brother-Units, most recently having stolen photography from American Idyll, my brother TW's blog.

This evening, it was my other Brother-Unit's turn, the famous university prof Grader Boob -- a nickname chosen by him, not me, please remember.  I dropped by one of his class web sites, where he helps the 18-99 year olds keep track of reading assignments, paper due dates, and makes good-natured deposits of professorial wit.

Well, all I can figure is that he is fighting the flu, has been saddled with NINE college-level classes. (Four, at least, are online, although he informs me that does not mean less work.  He informed me rather... sternly). He has also been an attentive, loving support to our stepmother. (Our father recently died.)  Apparently, she's experienced some emotional lability, understandably, and has started several knock-down-drag-'em fights with our stepsister.  Her nickname is Brute. The stepsister, not the stepmother.  But that is another anecdote.

So, anyway, I cruise on over to Grader Boob's class site and see that my favorite genial educator has spruced things up with a Class Motto.  "Self," I say, "This is bound to be a keeper!" Thankfully, he has bolded it and changed the font color to a bright red, so I had no trouble seeing it with a good, close squint:


"The reason people think you're so stupid," the Sicilian said, 
"is because you are so stupid. It has nothing to do with your drooling."
--William Goldman The Princess Bride

Romney's Boss Politics

Romney Recorded: Asking Employers to Sway Votes?
(Image source: Mediaite)
BY KERRY LEARY
ANCHOR JASMINE BAILEY

A recording of Mitt Romney made headlines Thursday. The presidential candidate made some controversial comments in a June conference call. But what exactly did he say?

“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”

Romney went on to say he hoped employers would share their political views no matter which candidate they support.

ThinkProgress reports, Mr. Romney’s not the first person swaying the vote in the workplace.

“There have already been some reports of employers suggesting how their employees should cast their ballots. A CEO of a Florida resort company threatened to fire his employees if Obama won. The CEO of a timeshare company did the same. And the famous right-wing Koch brothers warned of 'consequences' of not voting for Romney.”

Mr. Romney’s suggestion is legal for the first election season ever because of the Citizen United ruling that overturned FEC laws prohibiting employers from campaigning to employees. But In The Times notes, despite it being legal,

“The conference call raises troubling questions about what appears to be a growing wave of workplace political pressure unleashed by Citizens United.”

The conference call is the only evidence discovered that attributes Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign to working behind the scenes. A writer for the Atlantic Wire has a few words for the candidate.

“Okay, Mitt. You're right. It's not technically illegal for employers to tell their employees how to vote. That doesn't mean that it's ethical or understandable or even acceptable to connect people's livelihoods with their political beliefs.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign has not commented on the conference call.


"The conference call is the only evidence discovered that attributes Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign to working behind the scenes."

Well, not anymore:





Published on Oct 17, 2012 by TheBigPictureRT
"There's some breaking news from labor reporter Mike Elk with In These Times magazine...We've seen several CEOs send letters out to their employees urging them to vote for Mitt Romney or else they may lose their jobs during a second Obama term. Now we might know where these threats started...Mitt Romney! In June 6th 2012 conference call with the NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses) - Mitt Romney urged employers with the NFIB to make it clear to their employees who they should vote for."

More Gifts From Poem-A-Day: I'm Rich

Vocabulary
by Jason Schneiderman

I used to love words,
but not looking them up.

Now I love both,
the knowing,

and the looking up,
the absurdity

of discovering that "boreal"
has been meaning

"northern" all this time
or that "estrus"

is a much better word
for the times when

I would most likely
have said, "in heat."

When I was translating,
the dictionary

was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge

that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word

for "inflatable" simply
would not stay in my head,

though the English word "deictic,"
after just one encounter,

has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost "desiccated"

for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal

of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me

in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,

not when he told me 
what the word "apercus" means,

but when I looked it up,
and he was right. 

There's even a word
for when you use a word

not to mean its meaning,
but as a word itself,

and I'd tell you what it was
if I could remember it.

My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,

laughs when I say that 
reference books are not really 

books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher

used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,

but when I did, also as a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.

Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge

that you have been living
without something,

so we try to make learning
the province of the young,

who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.

My students are lost
in dictionaries,

unable to figure out why
"categorize" means

"to put into categories"
or why the fifth definition

of "standard" is the one
that will make the sentence

in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone

can live without knowing
the word "wonder."

A famous author
once said in an interview,

that he ended his novel
with an obscure word

he was sure his reader
would not know

because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.

He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open

another, that second book
being a dictionary,

and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading

that story
(and this may surprise you)

I loved him less.


they've only two of schneiderman's poems on their site, and i like them both.  here is the other:

Graphic Credit

Sita
by Jason Schneiderman

Do you remember Sita? How when Hanuman came to rescue her
she refused, how she insisted that Rama come openly,
defeat her captor Ravana openly? She had no desire for stealth,
no desire for intrigue, and though Ravana could not touch her
for the curse on his flesh, she remained captive until Rama came.
Do you remember that she was tortured? That Hunaman asked her
for permission to kill the women who had tortured her? Do you
remember how she walked through fire to prove her purity,
even though everyone knew of the curse on Ravana? How the people
said the fire didn't matter because Fire was the brother of her mother,
Earth? How Rama was as weak in the face of his people as he
had been strong in the face of Ravana? Can you imagine the eyes
of Sita when she refused another test? When she looked at Rama,
a man she loved enough to die for, a man who was a god, and knew
it was over? Can you imagine her eyes in that moment, as she asked
her mother to take her back, to swallow her back into the earth? I think
my eyes are like that now, leaving you.

More Blogging Through Email: How to Embarrass Your Friends

hey girl.

do you know how i spent yesterday?  feeling my way around the house, running into walls, actually cooking a huge meal for fred's wednesday evening dinner with kitty (and 7 other people of the militant lesbian existentialist feminist types) -- using very sharp knives, hot oil, boiling water, the whole shebang -- while SEEING DOUBLE!

it seems like every wednesday i am supposed to double or increase one of these new meds, and whoa, nellie, does that make wednesdays (and thursdays and fridays) interesting.  "am i about to cut into this lovely dancing chicken breast or am i about to slice my shimmying index finger off?"  "is that a bouncing mushroom or the jumping bean of a wine cork?"

so... while fred was out turning on the local dykes and i was trying to watch the seven televisions in the bedroom, while petting the always multiplying number of cats ("there's marmy. there's dobby, there's buddy, there's buddy again, wait, there's dobby one more time, and look!  another marmy, no, two more marmies!"), feeling dizzy, dreading what going to the bathroom was going to be like... i ripped off my fentanyl patch, and passed on my 9 o'clock and midnight meds.  then, apparently, i passed out and slept from about 8 pm to 7 am.  if i had spasms, i didn't know it.  plus, i shut the door -- which is like putting an upside down crucifix as a sign -- open this door, wake me up, and your ass is the proverbial grass.  chasing out the dozen cats was hard, though.

and would you believe...?  i am still seeing at least one-and-a-half, if not double!  it's like everything has a visual echo. one and a half wheelchairs.  one and a half café presses to pour boiling water into...  but i can finally see well enough to type. with, praise the lord, spellcheck.

while i am gabbing about eyes -- i saw the eye doctor -- a lovely, romney-like (as in "all business"), whirlwind of a teeny woman who runs at 100 mph on the most beautiful italian stilettos, in mini-dresses, all doctored-up, of course, by a long prim white coat (tailored).  her name is dr. k and she is very good.  i could kick myself in the booty for sticking with that guy we used to waste an hour on the highway to get to... and then, he would never answer my questions, and used to laugh when i asked about a plan.  the straw that broke that camel's back came when i asked him when he planned to remove my cataracts and he said, "never, if i can help it." and laughed.  so i almost ran to good old dr. MDVIP go-to-guy, begging for a referral.  i am mad at him, too, though, because for all those years i would tell him how the guy made me feel minuscule and unimportant, and that my only option was to slowly go blind. or to go slowly blind. whatever.  see? it's the blindness behind my bad grammar.  or am i confuising french weeth zee anglais?

well, now that  i AM going blind, it's largely that a-hole's fault.  he let my eye pressures stay much too high for much too long, did not track the damage to my optic nerve often enough, etc.

anyway... she does more testing than any doctor i have ever visited (and yes, i admit that impresses me, particularly because she explains -- quickly, very quickly -- what they mean), compares results, and even runs additional tests because "the data shows a tie... we must break the tie!"

she has a drably dressed female flunky, who is apparently her Scribe, who hovers behind her writing down all the numbers, parameters, and codes that the good dr. k barks out in a voice much larger than her person.
i had to visit five different rooms for the visit, no biggie, unless you are in a wheelchair and have to transfer an ungodly amount of times, in the presence of medical techs unused to people so impaired.  nothing more fun than plunking one's ass down on an unsecured rolling office chair, for example.

also, who knew that having to put your chin in the thingy, while pressing your forehead against the other thingy puts horrid pressure on the area where you used to have a shoulder?  useful trivia, eh?

BOTTOM LINE:  removing a cataract is normally a 15-minute l'il operation with local anaglesia.  "you have terrible glaucoma. everyone experiences a huge rise in eye pressure after any eye surgery... but for a glaucoma patient that can mean blindness... also, you still have this p.acnes infection in your body.  we would need to use general analgesia, and perform two surgeries at once, a glaucoma surgery as well.  and so... the decision willl not be mine [dr. k's] but the anesthesiologist's at the hospital. let me go make some calls..."

and no anesthesiologist would agree to touch me.

so... she said i could at least go ahead and get new glasses, so they tested my vision, which could easily have been a comedy routine in and of itself.  "okay, read that line for me." "what line?"  and so on...

anyway, i get to have some 9-inch thick glasses in lieu of having my cataracts removed.  she said to let her work on the anesthesiologists.  i figure all she has to do is pick a young, feisty, unmarried one, take off her white coat, and invite him out for some fresh squeezed carrot juice at the local health food store.  sit on a bar stool, cross her little legs, and show those million dolllar shoes...

now i need to figure out whether to wait until i adjust to this freaking medication increase before i go try to try on glasses and get that script filled.  hank could be my fashion adviser, i guess.  oh, god.  he gets excited when i wear something besides an oversized men's short-sleeve button-up, button-down shirt -- they happen to be the kindest tops i can wear after losing one shoulder and having the other in constant pain from overuse.  it's oh-so-attractive!  oh... and they go over neutral-toned oversized scrub pants because they are the easiest for me to put on, and kindest to my legs. so hank gets excited and compliments me when i turn up in my faded "cal" t-shirt and sweat pants!  "you look nice, honey!"

what a sweet boy.  of course, some idiot at the first existentialist church of angry lesbian feminists gave him TWELVE kelly green tees promoting the local elementary school down the street.  this thrills my snazzy dresser, and now all i see are HIS sweat pants (complete with air holes) topped by these green well-made-so-as-to-NEVER-wear-out EXISTENTIAL ELEMENTARY -- WE LOVE LEARNING t-shirts.

the good news, and i imagine you would like some:  the memantine is helping the neuropathic pain -- by maybe 20%?  and the mobic, my god, a drug that has been around forever!  why wasn't it ever offered, or even mentioned, before?  okay, so it may make me bleed to death... but that aside, it is helping at least... 30%. some days more, even, but some days not at all.

it's the dantrolene that is kicking butt. and supposed to be stopping the seizures, and it AIN'T.  but i am not yet at the full dosage.  i've gone from 25 mg a day to 150 mg (as of yesterday) and next wednesday?  300 mg.  at that point, my vision may resemble what one sees looking through a kaleidoscope.  so someone come up with enough money for a week of joints, and i will just lay in bed and dooby on down...

what else, healthwise?  my depression is better. i only think of suicide after about 4 pm.

my right leg is still leaking.  so yes, i have a huge kotex pad from the mitt-romney-50s (since holding an aspirin between my knees would accomplish nothing) wrapped around my leg at all the spout spots.  you haven't lived until you wake up and try to figure out why your bed is wet... not under your bottom, not with urine, not from a spilled water bottle, not a cat contribution, but from a leg that has sprung a leak...

hank and i are doing the best we can to be together.  he is scared.  i am scared.  so we meet in the middle of scared.  and joke around a lot, which -- if we have any brilliance to us at all -- is our brilliance.  the presidential race provides a lot of material.  i know, i know, you are either a republican or a libertarian (my bet is libertarian) and i am a socialist, and hank is mr. independent (he thinks)... so i should leave politics alone.  but really, when you can't see and you're about to perhaps lose your health coverage AGAIN, and you are descending wayyyyy into poverty -- along with your fellow 47 per-centers -- and after 4 pm you consider applying a dozen fentanyl patches and taking 500 mg of baclofen?  2012 amerikan politics is your friend!  i do have to stray from foreign policy because then i just get overwrought.

so.... HOW THE HECK ARE YOU? are cindy and amber still on The List?  and would you come deep clean my bathroom (no one should be allowed in there...)?  ruby the honda needs help, too.  whenever i climb insdie ruby the honda, i start grabbing tissues and wiping... which does nothing beyond make fred give me the stink eye.  "i know, i know," he says.  then he forgets, forgets.  i scrambled in there last week, for the eye appt, and it REEKED of pesticide.  he said he got in the night before and there were ants everywhere.  duh.  he eats in the car and i just cannot figure why ants would be all over my dear baby ruby.

okay, who knows when i will be able to write again.  i will try. and i send you love and hope, love and hope.

profderien

Sending a sundial to Mars - Bill Nye

Published on Oct 16, 2012 by TEDEducation

View full lesson:  http://ed.ted.com/lessons/sending-a-sundial-to-mars-bill-nye

"Bill Nye, otherwise known as The Science Guy, inherited his father's fascination with sundials. And so he campaigned to have sundials aboard the Spirit and Opportunity Mars exploration rovers. A look at how a small device reveals big implications as to our place in space."

I'm a sucker for Bill Nye.  Smart AND sexy, that rare combination.

Since I am now taking one of the very few Alzheimer's meds, I've felt a growing imperative to do what I can to help my forever demented brain, so I am watching one TED session a day.  Coming as I do from the truly Ivory Tower of Liberal Arts That Will Get You Exactly Nowhere, most of this stuff is new to me.

Say "TED" to the likes of moi, and I think ugly, white, restrictive, painful, medical hosiery.

Fred can laugh all he wants.  (Because he is smart AND sexy, too.)

Oh, and someone has gotta tell me whether it is true that the Mittster had to have debate practice time on how to sit on a bar stool!  My favorite piece of trivia thus far.  Romney: not smart, not sexy.  I don't know if the magic underwear includes TED hose, but I bet it might...

when that funky magic underwear gets all a-twisted

Charles Bernstein's Placards, 2008 and Beyond

A Sampling... See them all HERE.

Poor People Make America Strong  Protect Income Inequality Citizens United for the One Percent

June 9, 2012

 

The Right of the Few to Govern the Many Citizens United Paid for by Bloomberg, Koch, Koch, & Rove, LLC

June 10, 2012

Stop Collective Bargaining Now! Living wages slash business profits. Rally Round the One Percent  Paid for by Scott Walker for President

JUNE 10, 2012

Money Rules! Keep the Supreme Court on the Right Track Citizens United for Plutocracy

June 10, 2012

preserve tax cuts for the one percent income inequality is a necessary safeguard against democracy

June 10, 2012

voter suppression  the last safeguard against Godless democracy

June 24, 2012

in these uncertain times ensure a darker tomorrow Vote Republican Our America Not Yours

July 19, 2012

Don’t emasculate America Support the NRA On Election Day  GUYS LIKE GIRLS WHO LIKE GUNS

July 27, 2012

Support the right of rapists to have their children. Vote Ryan-Romney Paid for by Sex Offenders Against Choice.

August 13, 2012
reprise of Fall 2008 placard

Rapists have always been in the frontlines battling a woman’s right to choose. We hail Todd Akin and Paul Ryan and support the Republican Party’s 2012 Platform criminalizing abortion. Sexual Offenders Against Choice Our America Not Yours

August 22, 2012

Citizens! Be Vigilant! our nation's core values are threatened Don't Let America Slide into Godless Democracy support voter suppression laws our America, up yours paid for by Racists for Voter Suppression Republican Party, USA/2012

August 23, 2012

Legitimate Rape The Bush-Romney-Ryan Economic Agenda

August 26, 2012

Tax Primer I redistribute  You redistribute  He/she/it redistributes We redistribute  You redistribute  They profit

October 5, 2012

Mitt Romney America’s Putin Not to say Rasputin

Ocotber 5, 2012

Vote Ryan-Romney

Twist and Shout! Squirm and Yowl!

I apologize if my blog has become a subspecies of MSNBC, a sad-sack simulacrum of policy wonkiness, a frizzy and frazzled, very fuzzy firewall of feminism, a wailing wall of brother worship, and a kibble-driven, scratch-behind-the-ears yowling orgy of feline fascination.

I'm so sorry if my blog showcases personal fixations on heroic bald scarred kids -- though I draw the line at any mention of "angel wings" -- and on Fred, himself heroic and scarred, but defiant of baldness.

Do I weep with regret for forcing you to read abject descriptions of even the most minute cattle prods of CRPS spasticity?  Do I sniff and snuffle for stuffing my pain into your brain?  Am I embarrassed by the profusion of photography of purple feet?  O!  I do, I do, and I am.

Apology, regret, and red-faced shame:  Check, check, and check.

Who says I don't get through my daily To-Do Lists in an efficient manner?  It's the Etch-A-Sketch version of blogging.  Or is it more akin to a good Catholic confession?  Shake it up baby now... Hail, Mary!

Uploaded by BeatlesCentral on Mar 31, 2008

There.  Ah, the bearable lightness of the unburdened soul.

Now that the evangelical, conservative wing of My Dearest Readers has been appeased, can I get on with it?  Because things are just going to shit around Marlinspike Hall and if I cannot vent with wild abandonment, my head will explode -- and how many times can that happen before it leaves me somewhat neurologically impaired?

Okay, so I retired my CRPS quilt.  It was a lovely hand-stitched thang, washed twice a week for ten years of so, and therefore softer than any damn baby's butt.  However, the loose threads and disintegrating batting became an obsession for my little OCD feline, Dobby the Runt.  I've swooped down upon his nibbling little head and extracted a good 10 inches of thread from his tiny esophagus.

You'd think that defeating this dangerous compulsion would be a good thing, pure and simple. I found online, and on sale, a twin-sized quilt of all cotton, made in India (where they know what to do with cotton), pretty (but not in an obnoxious quilty way -- it recalls a forest floor more than a hunter's cabin), and soft as all get out, even before it's welcome home dip in the washer.  What I really wanted, but could not afford? A quilt made of recycled saris. But I know my place among the 47%... and buying a quilt made of recycled saris might upset some numbnut's understanding of poverty.

I know, also, that cats are creatures of habit.  I get Dr. Jon's newsletters.  I read the best vet columns.  We have a boatload of pheromone sprays that purport to "calm your cat" in times of change and stress.  You know, like when you retire a ratty quilt and replace it with one that doesn't put your animal in danger of intestinal obstruction.

Her troop being on sabbatical from crazed touring, and having moved from our supply of fine merlot toCaptain Haddock's collection of heavy, square, green bottles of rum, Bianca Castafiore has taken to burrowing her ample derrière into my favorite arm chair, snug in one of the few corners in our round bedroom here in the West Wing private apartments of The Manor.  She's fascinated with animal behavior.  She also hums and mumbles that damned signature aria of hers, incessantly, loudly --

[Comment n'être pas coquette?        

Comment n'être pas coquette?]     

Ah! je ris de me voir  

 si belle en ce miroir,   

Ah! je ris de me voir  

si belle en ce miroir...

which doesn't help a whole lot.  The Castafiore somehow encourages the current rampant insanity that reigns among the Feline Triumvirate regarding this new quilt.

I try to drown Bianca out with combinations of television, radio, and my preferred musical choices, none of which come close to Gounod's Faust.  My head aches from the noise.

But worse than the brain pain are the aches, scratches, and bruises I am sustaining from the well-planned blitzkrieg attacks on the new quilt, under which is curled, unfurled, and nuggled -- mine own body.  Dobby started it, of course.  

He jumped, all lighthearted and Dobby-ish, as only a Dobby can be, onto the bed and then, as if in a Romney elevator, ascended a good 3 feet in the air.  The cat was growling like a dog when he landed back on the bed, glaring at the quilt and giving me the stink eye.  Stiff-legged and goose-stepping, he approached the quilt... and sank his needle-like little teeth into a section that happened to be covering my right calf.  Then off he ran, to organize the troops.  I decided to let the blood and accumulated lymph drain freely, because otherwise I'd have to deal with the half-cackling, half-singing Drunk Diva, and my ability to resist coldcocking her was poor, at best.

Lambeth Walk -- Nazi Style (1942)

Anyway, as I've been stuck in bed, due to a perfect storm of Stuff, neither my quilt nor I look terribly appealing.  Bloody, bruised, wrinkled, subjected to round after round of coordinated feline terrorism and operatic bullying, dehydrated, and febrile...

So, Dear Readers, you may tire of my Obama-gushing, my knee-jerk liberalism, and how very much of a sucker I am for all things whimsical, but you must grant me this one outlet for the expression of the unbelievable pain and abuse lurking just beneath the sparkling, reflective surface of the moat encircling Marlinspike Hall.

Truth to Power!  Truth to Power!

I have a new quilt:::I am the Voice of the Oppressed.  Someone please call Tante Louise (and tell her to have the SWAT team bring coffee).*

*Where is Fred, you ask?  Have you ever heard of the hyperfocus aspect of ADHD?  Last I heard, he is transcribing Wagner's Ring Cycle for ukulele and guitar.  Unless the Valkyries evoke some vague memory of me -- as they did, once upon a time -- Fred will be unavailable for several days.  Help!

Obama Pride: LGBT Americans for Obama

Published on Oct 15, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom

Commit to vote: http://OFA.BO/k7d82u

Jane Lynch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Billie Jean King, George Takei, Wanda Sykes, Zachary Quinto, and Chaz Bono share why they're supporting President Obama and why Mitt Romney isn't the choice for them.

Billie Jean King shares her life experiences and why she supports President Obama.

As Billie Jean shares:

"Every generation stands on the shoulders of the generations before—just like I do. And I'm very thankful to all those people that suffered so that I could have a better life. When I was going through all my suffering I use to always imagine what I'd like the world to look like and we are certainly much closer to it than ever—and I know that President Obama is very responsible for this happening because he stood up for us."

**********************************************************************************************************

imagine... how happy harvey would be...

From The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day

{peeking out between my webbed fingers in embarrassment} I've never read ANY Edna St. Vincent Millay.  As in NONE.  Her name annoys me, her reputation annoys me.  Too much of my life time has been spent being annoyed. (Sonnets annoy me.)

But I just read her one-act anti-war play, Aria da Capo, available online thanks to the Penn State Electronic Classics Series, and loved it as I haven't loved a one-act, anti-war play in years. Head-over-heels love, I'm talking.  Never mind the anti-war treatment, neatly done in a nicely original way, she had me early on -- when embedded in her 1919 cheek we find her wiggly tongue having Pierrot say such things as:

PIERROT: [...] …. I am become

A painter, suddenly,—and you impress me—

Ah, yes!—six orange bull’s-eyes, four green pin-wheels,

And one magenta jelly-roll,—the title

As follows: Woman Taking in Cheese from Fire-Escape.

And shortly thereafter, not to overplay it:

PIERROT: Hush! All at once I am become

A pianist. I will image you in sound ….

On a new scale …, Without tonality …

Vivace senza tempo senza tutto ….

Title: Uptown Express at Six O’Clock.

Pour me a drink.

And then she won me over, completely, with this exchange with Columbine:

PIERROT: Don’t stand so near me!

I am become a socialist. I love

Humanity; but I hate people. Columbine,

Put on your mittens, child; your hands are cold.

COLUMBINE: My hands are not cold!

PIERROT: Oh, I am sure they are.

And you must have a shawl to wrap about you,

And sit by the fire.

I'd love to have known her.  In spurts, short spurts.  And only with an assured end date.  I bet the artists of 1919 giggled, nervously, and the pacifists wished she wouldn't glom too many things together ("It's confusing!") but maybe crazy, piecemeal, found art and crazy, piecemeal, found war do complement each other.

What clenches my New Deal with Millay?  The house.  The skinniest house in New York City, it is said, owned by The Cherry Lane Theatre:

Yes, so, all of this Millay talk is thanks to that annoying Academy of American Poets with whom I am linked by subscription to their "Poem-A-Day" e-service.  I'm loving it.  And this was today's offering -- and it surely holds true today, here in Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé, where the world is clearly seasonal.

God's World

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

ACTION ALERT from RSDSA

The RSDSA would like to make you aware of a petition currently before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that requests labeling changes for opioid analgesics (narcotic pain medications). Since many individuals with CRPS rely on opioids as part of their medication regimen, we wanted to bring this petition to your attention. The petition, submitted by Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), requests three specific changes to opioid analgesic labels: 1- That they no longer be prescribed for "moderate" noncancer pain, but only for "severe" noncancer pain 2- That the maximum allowable dosage per day be equivalent to 100 mg of morphine for noncancer pain 3- That this medication can only be used for a maximum duration of 90 DAYS. What this petition appears to mandate is a "one size fits all" prescribing mentality which DOES NOT benefit the chronic pain patients in general and CRPS patients in particular. The RSDSA has chosen to oppose the PROP petition on behalf of you, our members. On Wednesday, October 10th, The RSDSA sent this opposition letter to the FDA. Cick Here to read RSDSA letter. [Read it in in the post following this one -- It's too impressive not to reproduce here!] For those of you who would like to send your own individual response regarding PROP to the FDA, we encourage you to stress the specific details that your medication enables you to do that without it you would be unable to do. We suggest you use the following language to keep the message clear: My name is  _______. As a person  who suffers with the chronic and  yet incurable pain of  CRPS,  I ask the FDA to deny the PROP petition. I use opioids as prescribed by my physician allowing me to function better and partake in life in ways I would be unable to do without this prescribed care.  To send your comments to the FDA click here. The category to use for your response is Individual Consumer.

Your immediate action to this issue will make a difference. To read the PROP petition, click here. Please forward this email along to your friends and loved ones. Should you have any questions or would like to receive further information, please email or give me a call.  Sincerely, Jim Broatch Executive Vice President and Director RSDSA 877-662-7737 203-877-3790