Were It Not For The Annoyance Of Waking Up

this is another repost. call it an early anniversary republication, the original date of birth having been 10 february 2014.

Last night, I acted on a promise, I announced a dream come true.  Change.

I wrote to a beloved:

i'm trying to change myself -- overnight.  that's correct:  tomorrow, a new me, a new attitude, no fears, no woes, as much appreciation of the beauty in everything as my spirit can take, and large movements of big muscles.   

and learning.  i need to learn.  travel with some one or some thing to a mutual smile. 

no, i'm not on more pain meds!  and i mean what i am saying.  i've no expectation of obliterating my faults, finding god, becoming good or saintly.  in fact, eliminating those subterranean poofy pink desires, choking them out with some living vegetation, would be a relief.

Believe it or not, so far, so good.  I got up with the dawn and baked.  The batter, itself, was enough to satisfy my pissy pickiness, the evident enemy in all of my attempts to accomplish.  Accomplish, yes, without a direct object.

I learned about curling, with a man who ran quickly to his coat closet and found a supremely cool Norwegian cap, a gift someone he'd had business dealings with had tossed into one of their uber-serious business boxes. He then proceeded to decipher the mysteries of curling as the United States men battled the Norwegians, in their flag-coded, wildly paned pants (held up with a white belt).

In between the workout of blending and stirring and pouring and lifting, and the revelatory moment of the blue circle, the stone guided there by sweeping fools and ice chips, I slept.

During the night, I fell into music, a string of dear songs helping the trip to the other side of bed-shaking spasms.  When necessary, I brokered peace between Buddy the Maine Coon, beset with jealousy and insecurity, and Marmy and Dobby, who both have a hunted, haunted look, and have tufts of their hair scattered over the living room rug.  Buddy knows no other way.  He can only feel loved if he is the only available cat.  The look of confusion on his face is upsetting.  The damage he can do to other cats (and to my forearms) is remarkable.  

Punishing a cat is pointless.  I tried giving him a quick swat, and the bewilderment that resulted taught me to never do that again.  It's love, all the way, or nothing.

Fred the Wise sighs over my efforts to create peace.  "Let them work it out," he says.  He who rarely witnesses the violence.

I prayed for Syria and that felt like a waste of time.  I meditated, mindful of Syria, and left it "there," and that was infinitely better for me, though it did nothing for Syria.

To the same beloved, I shared my greatest Olympic memory, one he should have witnessed firsthand -- an account of Brother-Unit Grader Boob and his amazing physical mimicry:

once he hit 6'4", he perfected an impression of a ski-jumper that was astounding.  size 13 feet firmly planted on the good earth, he'd launch, then actually bring his body, pretty much in a straight line, almost parallel with his imaginary skis, forming a perfect V with body, feet, and floor. hands floating at his side.  then he'd execute that lovely bent knee landing... complete with whistling wind noises. 

Were it not for the annoyance of repeatedly waking up, these would surely be my final days.

© 2015 L. Ryan

One Selection Sunday, Almost Seven Years Ago

NOTE to the FAITHFUL READERSHIP:

This is a repost. If you don't "blog," whatever that has come to mean, I beg you to keep a journal or to hang on to annotated date books. Sometimes an accidental look back can take your breath away and deepen the tints, light, and shadows of your presetn day. 

The original date of composition was 15 March 2009. I see now its many faults, my errant romanticizing of some things basically horrific. 
And then there are the many moments when I repeat the fictions I was force fed, and believe the fictions force fed my kin, as well.  

Forgive me it all, for I had just fallen in love.

Be well, Dearest Readers.









Selection Sunday.

UConn is #1 in the West, Memphis #2

The Pittsburgh Panthers are #1 in the East Region.
Inexplicably, wrongly, in a profoundly turdified decision, Duke is #2 in the East (first round against Binghamtom, #15 -- their NCAA post-season début)
FSU = #5 in the East, first round against #12 Wisconsin

UNC-CH #1 in the South, #2 is Oklahoma

Louisville heads up the Midwest, with Michigan State taking the #2 spot

At my age and intellectual maturity, you'd think I could navigate the intricacies of "family" better than I do. All parties are emotionally stunted; None of us have a clue how to relate to one another; Only a few of us will admit to love; Everyone is permanently estranged from one, or several, very important primary relationships.

Never mind some of the more awe-inspiring tales of assinine stubbornness and convoluted recollections. Never mind the child who hasn't spoken to his Mother for 42 years. Never mind the child who thought perfectionism would be protection from parental malevolence. And certainly pay no never mind to that child who loved everyone overly much, for his was the Kingdom of No One.

Never mind, never mind!

Still, on Selection Sunday, I find it hard not to think about the two family members most dear to me: the Brother-Units -- TW and Grader Boob.

TW and I were separated for an unbelievable 39 years. I am wrong to assume that I knew him at all before he "left" the family way back when. Certainly, any claim I make to know him now should be equally suspect. TW went missing during the Summer of Love. We lived north of San Francisco at the time and life chez nous was nothing if not turbulent, tense, and sometimes downright emotionally brutal. I think I went into a fugue state from which I have yet to successfully emerge.

TW stands for Tumbleweed. It is hard to call him that, as I knew him as someone else, and then created a whole imaginary persona during his 39 Long Missing Years. Honestly? I still call him by his childhood nickname -- and struggle to remember not to use it when I email or telephone.

Okay, okay. So we have only spoken once by phone. I just can't do it. I have phone phobia as a matter of course -- but this is an entirely different animal. I am afraid he won't like me, won't have anything to say, or that he'll find me slow-witted and boring. The one time we did speak? Perfectly wonderful. Incredible. Sweet. I sucked on the end of a pen and ended up with inky lips. He was drinking Scotch, I think.

It was almost exactly the kind of conversation that Grader Boob and I have been enjoying for decades -- hysterically funny and intense.

He told me about his daughter and her mother, about eating out of trash cans, getting shot in the gut. He told me about the woman he loves, about becoming a grandfather!

He wrote me later that I "give good phone"!

We email with regularity and that has occasioned much hilarity, too, but more than that, his letters make me cry. Okay, so maybe it has become more like sniffles -- I sniffle a lot. How do you apologize for having left, and on purpose, too, a child alone in the world? Our Father told us that TW would join us in our new home overseas, that he was coming in about 3 months time, and oh! won't that be GRAND?

He never came.

I remember sitting on the porch, all fugued-out and reading Tolkien, watching the afternoon rains head our way, relishing the cool breezes that announced the line of showers. Grader Boob, who had sprouted unexpectedly to a manly 6' plus, came into view on my right. Something about the air changed, and it wasn't atmospheric pressure. Dad came into view on my left. I remember that he had nothing on but a pair of boxers, starched and eerily bright white.

It was a train wreck.

[....]
[Whole section of original post, blown up, out, and away -- to smithereens!  You are welcome!]

And that was that. 39 years.

Today, TW is many things. I imagine that he has worked hard every day, one way and another, since he "left" us, at a variety of jobs, both legal and illegal, interesting and dull. At the moment, in order to "pay for cat food," he divides his energy two ways: he is a tour guide for trekkers to the Grand Canyon (indeed, if you go to one of his blogs, he posts nothing but photos of The Canyon along with the thoughts inspired there) and, of course, he is a bookie of long standing.

The photo above is his.

This is one of his busy times -- the conference championships, the NCAA basketball tournament. I really want to learn more about betting and gambling and odds and busted kneecaps, but get the distinct sense that this brother of mine doesn't suffer fools... He recently described the dyspepsia he suffered when the umpteenth elderly couple in a matter of hours approached him, saying: "We've never done this before. So how does it work?"

Grader Boob went on to become what is known as "A Fine Young Man," and "A Good Person" -- although each remark of praise was usually followed by a heartfelt "if only he would cut his hair."

I really shouldn't get started because I tend to go nuts on the superlatives. Truly good, is he. Smart. Kind. Funny. Compassionate. My hero.

There was an occasion -- it was 1978, I think -- when simply the sight of him saved my life. That was also the day he turned me on to Bruce Springsteen, and didn't make too much guff over watching me drink a beer.

(An amazing piece of Grader Boob trivia: He has never had ANY alcohol or used ANY illicit drug. More awesome? He's never had coffee. Something {whistle, whistle} convinced him early in life that potentially mind-altering substances were evil. He was, for many years, quite the athlete, and that played into these decisions, too.)

It's unfair to Grader Boob, though, to pigeon-hole him so. He is wounded. He is scarred. He is so fearful of the possibilities of change that after he got his undergraduate degree, he stayed at the same university for his grad work, then his years teaching... and now, all these years later, he is still there. Unhappy, and stuck. Growing up, what he loved was repeatedly snatched away. As an adult, he hunkered down, determined to stay where he was, and to keep what, and whom, he "had." I love him so.

He's a marvelous professor, a fan-fucking-tastic Brother-Unit!

When I "found" TW a little over a year ago, I was trembling in my haste to call Grader Boob, to share the news, to rejoice and be glad. It felt like a punch in the stomach when he instructed me to not provide TW with any information about him. When I managed a breathy "why?" -- he pointed out that we had not been hiding, that we could have been easily found at anytime. In my head, a voice chanted "so-fucking-what-so-fucking-what?" but, of course, I lacked the courage to challenge that logic and step out of my role as Little Sis. I wanted to ask him how he might have felt, were he The Abandoned One? Would trust really have been that strong in him? Gee, I think I will try to find the splintered nuclear family that left me alone on the friggin' North American friggin' continent. TW desperately wanted his Mother, also, we tend to forget -- but she was busy making babies with someone new, and, again, she was on a completely different continent, a third continent, as well! It almost looked like a game -- how far away from the young TW can we get? Like playing RISK, with a twist.

du calme, du calme...

Anyway -- I am the only available touchstone for TW when he thinks of Grader Boob. And should Grader Boob change his ponderous mind, I am ready for that, too. I am the liaison between the Mother Unit and her first set of sons. Neither son wants any contact with her, or allows even the sharing of an address, or an assessment of happiness. Sometimes, I am afraid to speak due to momentary confusion of who allows what.

So what is it about today, Selection Sunday, that makes me think of these dear doods to whom I am, purportedly, related?

All day, I've been emailing the Grader Boob, and simultaneously getting *this* close to picking up the phone to confer with TW over the teams I am selecting for my prognostication entry, then finally settling for electronic communication with him, too. I am getting confused in these similar conversations, as the Brother-Units start to blur and blend in my mind.

D'you know that the two of them have nearly identical writing styles and vocabularies? Senses of humor? Intransigeancies?

What is a sister to do?

At the close of our first and last conversation, TW asked me to ask Grader Boob "to forgive [him]."

Please explain to me why this man, treated like dirt and left behind, surviving only by luck and wit, needs anyone's goddamned forgiveness?

I did as he asked and had to report back, of course, that Grader Boob wanted nothing to do with him, and found no way to say it but to blurt it out, pounding these keys. TW answered:

discretion being the better part of valor,[GB] has done well to shunt my overture to a siding. i admire his compartmentalization survival mechanism for the quite rational response to unsolicited life clutter that it is. there's every chance that the unknown might subtract more than it adds. i hope he blossoms, flourishes and triumphs beyond his wildest imaginings. it was never my intention to get all touchy-feely, nor to cloy, nor to impede anyone's progress through this world. hell, i have made such a pariah's garbled hash of things that when you eventually weary of me as well i absolve you entirely in advance. until then, dear heart, i am so very grateful to have you to talk to. you sew back on my fraying shadow, [Retired Educator] darling.
D'you see what I mean?

I wonder what the odds are for a Duke v. Pittsburgh match-up?



© 2015 L. Ryan

Sunday Phone Calls: When Even Death is Funny

It's been a rough week, the kind where the best communication turns out to be reminding the people whom you love that you do, indeed, love them.  It makes for a shorter phone call, a blink-of-an-eye visit, and calls for just a tiny greeting card, though the cost of postage does not change.

Growing up, Sunday was the day for obligatory phone calls to family members living far, far away.  Granted, it was usually my immediate family that bore the responsibility for the distance issue.  We tended to be overseas, or living somewhere inaccessible to even those relatives who enjoyed travel.  Or I could be honest and say that no one really gave a crap, and the Sunday telephone ritual was just another thing to check off the list.

I managed three calls today.

Those Dear Readers who've been with me a while know that my use of the telephone is, itself, miraculous, as I find it the least endearing mode of communication of the many modes we have in this technological age.

For instance, Grader Boob, one of my two beloved Brother-Units, is now so weak that his voice does not carry efficiently to the telephone receiver.  He prefers "Lumpy" now to GB, but that's just trivia.  And a lie. He has no sense of humor discernible any longer, cancer's gift, pain's offering.  As for his voice, part of it is also, I am guessing, change brought about by impingement of various nerves by those nefarious Lumps about which we so want to joke.

He could out grim the Grim Reaper, and will, I hope. Grumpy Lumpy seems to be so intensely in a snit because his life has been destroyed in what must feel like an overnight happening, despite what hindsight now reveals as a vine-like underground creep over a decade, culminating in Kudzu's blazing speed once that first tendril found the sun.

His pain is unimaginable, even to me, the Queen of Pain. His perennial lack of social graces, once endearing, now has the edge of a feudal samurai sword, his made to accommodate one-handed lunges. It's just a matter, really, of a shorter grip.  Maybe a tanto grip with a freaking 4-5 foot ōdachi blade.  I carry a small antique tanto in my obi, as do all my female friends.  Bianca Castafiore, we all know, is never without her 06 F.A.S.T. from Gerber.  She swears by the G-10 handle.  In a nod toward beauty, my dagger handle is a subtle, but distinctive, teal-green silk cord and black samé -- ray skin -- topped with a black iron tsuba bearing a dragonfly motif.

None of us bother with saya, or scabbards. Marlinspike Hall's women are famous for our mastery and obsession with fabrics of incredible tensile strength, and their artistic draping, which most men assume comes from a lurid obsession with shiny, metallic, decorative threading.  Yes, we live for the glint of reinforced brocade on a clear, hot summer day.

"The effect is elegant and rich without becoming fussy. "

Lumpy's issue is the same problem that turned the ōdachi into a ceremonial thing, a spiritual weapon.  The answer, I think, to the obstacle of how to carry his very particular sword, and successfully draw it, lies in providing him with a trusty steed, though that might attract undue attention as he canters about the hallways of higher learning. Better might be an unobtrusive trusty sidekick.  Like a dedicated sister in a wheelchair. I could pass off six feet of sword as a stylized assistive mobility device, no problem.  Who better to have his blessèd back?  Plus, I can help with any grading duties, and be the one to chuck chalk at any undergraduates who dare nap during class.

And here you thought a samurai sword reference was to end in its metaphorical stage! We are a knife-wielding clan, we are.  You should see some of Fred's knives. His nonchalant explanation for seemingly artless features -- a notch here, an odd finish to the metal, a strange blunt affect -- can chill my blood. He and Abbot Truffatore do not so much resemble Boy Scouts comparing five-tooled pocketknives as handy camping tools when they extricate their shiny toys from humble scabbards and lay them on felt-covered table tops as they seem men under the ancient enchantment of war.

So, though weak in body and voice, this Brother-Unit remains obstinately militarized, and determined to try teaching this semester -- two courses in person and one as an internet prof.  I want him to succeed;  I know he won't.  And so pardon my fantasy of squiring him à la Sancho Panza, ready, in the end, to do wheelies and behead the archaic administrators who failed him, impale the students who worked him into weakness, slash the desks and podia that his university maintained instead of providing health care for those who sat and leaned there.

I hate these Sunday calls.

And then there was the dear sister, caring for a waning mother, blindly navigating the end-of-life barriers thrown in their way by that same health care system that has failed the rest of this fucked-up family.  Mom is unaware of the obstacles she dodges, her memory gone, or maybe that stealthy faculty forces her to relive each trouble more than is useful.  The Sister-Unit has become a faithful nurse, tending three bed sores, feeding a weak 81-pound matriarch.  Her partner has leukemia -- that's some punchline, eh?  He is doing well, however, though they are smartly close-mouthed about it.  He's a Prince, a Peach, a Pear, which is the highest accolade of my people.

I did not even consider asking to speak to Mom.  In my mind, likely as confused as hers, I am an abstract construct to her.  The child who caused so much trouble.  The child who said "thanks, but no thanks" some 24 years ago, and by letter, not phone.  I'd had enough, enough doublespeak, enough lies, enough suppression, oppression.  I was careful to express my real gratitude for the raising, for the good times, for the afternoon on the sailboat, for the tea and toast, for the tips on dumping drinks into potted plants at cocktail parties, and the admonitions to stand up straight and be proud of my height.

She taught the art of thank-you notes, of indexing social debts (keeping a tit-for-tat list of Christmas card recipients and a neat list of who attended what party and what outfit she had worn to each). She taught the power of obligation, the complexities of generations.  She was, too, a teacher. Of little ones, but they are the most precious of all.  I did a brief stint as a substitute in a second grade classroom and was more terrified than when I faced a room full of savvy, educated, bright-as-the-moon, inquisitive young men and women.  It was Mom's influence that tainted my university teaching with the same urge to protect and defend that comes so naturally on behalf of six-year-olds.  (Sometimes that was a problem.)

I wished the Sister-Unit good courage and good luck, as she fights for some semblance of coordinated care, hires nurses, and deals with an overfed dog now prone to urinary incontinence.  Oh, and a doctor who opines only the glaringly obvious and does not return her polite phone calls.  It's not his mother, what does he care?  Oh, I take that back.  He's perfectly competent.  There's nothing to do but muddle through.

The other mother, the biological Mother-Unit?  I don't call, or not often, and cannot face it today.  She's likely to make a perfunctory inquiry about her first set of boys, and I cannot spit out the perfunctory lies, not today.  Maybe I should call, but have ready the most non-perfunctory of retorts.  "Lumpy? After winning Wimbledon, he took a brief rest in Monte Carlo -- you know what a gamer he is -- before sporting the yellow jersey on the Tour.  Right now, he's gearing up for a stint as Compositional Inquisitor.  He gets to wear flowing robes and a pouffy hat, Ma.  Isn't that grand?"

Of the other sweet Brother-Unit, I could just wow her with the truth, but her dementia, like her normal state, won't admit too much of the stuff.  So I'd say something like: "He still proudly marches to the beat of his own drum and radiates compassion and equanimity into the wavelengths of the universe, Ma, just like I told you last time."

The third call?  To an evangelical busybody who delights in telling me what to do and then, in undermining my efforts.  This week she taught me a valuable lesson about trust, as in:  Don't do it.  So the third call was harsh but easy. Her proselytizing had brought her no Godly approbation, just the stench of manure spread on burning sulfur. That may be overstating the matter.  I'll let you know.

How am I?  How do you think?  I'm in terrible physical pain, my right hand and foot have seceded from the union, I cannot eat, barely drink, sleep in fits, spasm at the whim of invisible cattle prods, and am returned to the days of fever and sweats, lethargy. Despite that, I take my cue from my siblings, a hardy bunch, smart enough to know that the only way through is through. That there is still music, and that even death is funny.

I cannot bear much more of this, but we all know I will.  My piddling troubles are as nothing. I still recognize beauty and humor -- but they must be either exquisite or of admirable kitsch.




© 2013 L. Ryan

Memorial Day

This is a repost of my Memorial Day 2009 publication. It resonates, as Grader Boob faces great struggles, and could give a hoot about tennis this year. I miss our annual Brother-Sister exchanges over the various Opens and Wimbledon, etc. But I look forward, as well, to renewing that old tradition next year, and starting some new ones this year.  

Turn, turn, my wheel!  All things must change
To something new, to something strange;
  Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,

  To-morrow be to-day.
-- Longfellow, excerpted from "Kéramos"

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



[do you recognize the racket to the right? my first, my favorite!]

It's that time of year again, hooray!

Men's Singles Draw

Women's Singles Draw

The greatest joy, though, comes in the form of communication with the Brother-Unit known as Grader Boob. Some siblings talk every Thanksgiving Day, or on birthdays -- The Grader Boob and I arrange our lives around tennis Grand Slam events.

Of course, it is also Memorial Day. (Please to ignore the grinding sound of my shifting gears.) A day of remembrance "of those who died in their country's service."

There are so many ways of dying, but I won't belabor the obvious -- nor mention the scrambled grey matter of the walking brain-injured, the stress-disordered, the illusionless.

When I was in high school, the adults around me thought I was a phenomenal writer. No, I was a phenomenal people-pleaser, terribly hyphenated.

We had to write an essay for English class, and "the best" was to be submitted in the local VFW lodge's Memorial Day Essay Contest.

I wrote something that was very good, that was quite facile, as all discussions of war and death ought to be. It's not the most subtle of things.

Not Crispus Attucks, killed during the Boston Massacre -- not anyone whose name we know and parrot -- just someone -- that's who figured in my essay. SumDood. Killed -- and Killer -- in the Revolutionary War.

He's not "just a boy." He's not a white-haired geezer. He is intelligent and understands the theories and desires behind the idea of revolution (but not the red coats and ramrod-straight lines of his purported enemies).

Reality is a lot like a very bad movie.

He faces off, squares his body to the face and the body mirrored back at him -- though he has no bayonet, he is just as well-equipped for this ridiculous point-and-shoot exercise -- fish in a barrel.

There was a lot of lyrical writing at that point, ephemeral and awful.

I brought the boys, the men, to the moment of firing their guns. Muskets. Weapons.
Water Balloons. Slingshots. Whatever.

Not bullets, but balls.

The average soldier armed with a smoothbore flintlock musket was expected to fire off a shot every 20 seconds.

What was he doing in those 20 seconds? A lot.

According to the Continental army training manual, there were 13 steps to firing a musket. In short, a soldier had to get a cartridge, tear it open with his teeth, put a little bit of powder in the firing mechanism, put the rest of the powder and a gun ball down the barrel, ram the ball and powder home, cock the musket and fire.

The musket was not an accurate weapon, so even after all that work, the soldier didn’t have the greatest chance of shooting his intended target.

I've always loved the mathematical notion of The Limit, and felt it could find no better bastardized application than that of an ever-approaching, never-arriving bullet. Ball. Buckshot.

Whatever.

Death by some projectile or other, tossed about by generally nice young men, scared, but not scared enough. Those wise enough to not be found in front of a gun were safely closeted somewhere, designing the raids, envisioning the massacres, ordering the taking of a hill, a lane, a town, signing treaties, drawing up important documents, sometimes weeping and proud. Yes, but.

Yes, but probably more mindful than your average war-mongers, the cause being just and all.

We certainly are thankful for the sacrifice.

My essay did not so much end as fizzle, extinguish, tire of the wait. In it, the two shooters actually manage to see one another, to wonder -- a bit -- at the other's world. In my essay, one shot was enough to kill -- but the moment managed to stay an eternity.

In that same moment are men and women dying today -- and I am forever out of high school, undefeated on the tennis team, voted most improved at almost everything, french-kissing that enlisted boy with the cystic acne (in the park across from school, remember the smell of autumn leaves, a smokey sky, the unfiltered Camel), making out with the pitcher on the baseball team the very first night of Junior/Senior weekend (sloe gin fizz), happy as a clam, they tell me later, running running running into the surf, screaming because I always knew The Limit was just a construct for snotty kids hiding behind an education.

Please God, don't let it be my "way of life" or "freedoms" for which they fall.

Please don't allow that Crap Thought, that neat turn of phrase, to gain more of a hold.

I so look forward to speaking with The Grader Boob, to laughing, to bolstering my picks for the semis, for the championship. To forgetting the shrunken men at the VFW lodge, long dead now, who called me "honey," and gave me a $500 U. S. Savings Bond.

news from the front: "this should cheer you up..."

Today is 14 May 2014.  The blog post below was published on 22 November 2011.  A testimony to my infernal eternal pertinence!  It remains as relevant today as it did some 2 years and 6 months ago. Note also that we are smack dab in the middle of graduation ceremony season, that the Belovèd Grader Boob, one of my Brother-Units, is foremost in my thoughts today, and you can see that I am cosmically required to republish the darned piece.  The Universe has Its Ways.

we are gearing up for the aspiration under fluoroscopy early this afternoon.  good times.  i am in a world of pain and haven't slept in "i-don't-know-when."  well, that's not true:  i slept soundly between 1:30 am and 2:15 am, at which time i sang out a joyous "good morning" to various people who were stumbling off to their beds.

a professor of my acquaintance sent me something to lighten the mood.

oh, okay, it was my brother-unit, the grader boob.  it's all starting to get to him, dear readers.  the proof?  he forwarded an actual paper from a current student... to me, of all people.  it kills me not to be able to just publish the darned thing, but that would be... wrong.

so i'll just pick out select phrases.  the odds of this young woman landing on this blog?  astronomical.  but it could happen, and while her presence here would be more than welcome, there might be some initial discomfiture over the fact that her freshman comp paper has been featured for its general awfulness and horribleissitudèdness (for which my google auto-suggestion thingy would prefer "horticulturalist").

grader boob explains the assignment to which this student is responding:

This should cheer you up.


I’m sending along a copy of a student draft for Project X, an assignment nobly called “Rhetoric in Action.” It’s the final major work and it aspires to get the students to see that they can apply ALL that they’ve learned from the two Comp courses and go out and affect the world. (It’s really just a variation on the classical argument proposal—intro, background, proposal, justification, refutation, conclusion—but one can get in trouble for noting that point!)


[...]


(And XXX is nothing if not a social activist haven—our Occupy XXX group went from 100s to 5 to 2 over the course of three clear days/nights.)


In the attached, the student is arguing that students should not be forced to take General Education courses, for they’re coming into college better prepared than any group before them. From the first line, you can just watch the paper fall apart—for her logic, and her grammar, is impeccable. I especially like her refutation section which notes that students should take the courses so as not to deny teachers the opportunity to attain their dream job, teaching Comp classes.

hey, my temp is 101 and it's only 11 am!  oops.  it's 11 am and i am still sitting hunched over in my jammies, my legs probably fused with the wheelchair (i know my butt is... ouch.  ouch.  and -- again -- ouch).  somehow i have been reading in this hunched position, immobile in this god-forsaken mobility device, for over 8 hours.  my limit before the onset of terminal edema and general misery is... well, much, much less than 8 hours.

i am telling you this as a feigned excuse for behavior that i know is inexcusable.

you know you want to read the whole composition.  i know i want you to read the whole thing.  if you have to ask why, then you are a big bad meanie.

why?  well, largely, because the unbelievable must be believed. students can easily exit a public education by means of graduating from high school --where they took advanced placement classes, even -- yet not be able to think coherently, construct a simple argument, or express themselves persuasively using a level of grammar and spelling mastery acceptable to a beginning college student.

why?  (for you rick perry fans, this would be instance number 2)  because it illustrates some of the daily frustrations faced by teachers, especially those teaching students on a collision course with college, whose very placement defies any attempt to remediate, to fix what has been broken and duct-taped together for far too long.

why? because this student  raises some good questions about university education, though not the questions she intended to posit.  clearly, she was feeling feisty and competent, and we all hope that this spirit stays with her as she knuckles down and learns, giving that stance some legs on which to stand.

grader boob also wrote recently that the argument surfacing in his upper level writing courses, wherein the students insist that their chosen field of study and future employment (chuckle::guffaw::snort) does not require them to write well.  he responds with stories from his best friend, who runs an academic medical research laboratory, who hires and fires frequently on that specific basis.  the students, he notes, are unimpressed and think he blowing smoke up their derrières (my google auto-suggester would prefer -- i kid you not -- "derrida" or "derrick"!).

[uh-oh, i think i love it:  to blow smoke up the derrida, the old derri-dada, ha!]

if you should ever find this post, composition draft author, i hope you understand that i wish you well.  there are things that will become much easier over time, things that you mention, like time management and research know-how.  you're intelligent and clearly motivated, so i am betting your future will be a bright and accomplished one.  this composition, though, points to some problems about which my brother and many teachers grow frustrated -- but by which they are not cowed, because -- without fail -- they will continue to show up every monday, wednesday, and friday, hoping to make a difference.

though, as you point out, they are also keen on raking in the dough.

thank you for your work -- and enjoy the heck out of your college experience!


Careers Now


Six years of elementary school, three years in middle school and four years in high school is what an average student spends in school by the time they graduate high school, which comes out to be a total of thirteen years we spend our lives in school. Ever since elementary school students we have always heard our teachers lecture to us about that what they are teaching us right now is going to prepare us for college one day, and ever since then we have heard that same phrase until we received our diploma from our principle. 


Considering that most of our childhood years are spent preparing us for college and helping us get into college, so then there should be no reason to why we are paying money for classes that we already took in our thirteen years of school in our first year of college. As college students we should be able to start on our dream careers right away without having the annoyance of picking out classes that won’t help you in your career.


Many universities in the state of X have the policy of freshman college students taking
prerequisites there first year in college and believe it or not XXX has the same policy. As stated by the article of the XXXXXX Time Newspaper, “Preliminary figures show that enrollment is up 1.5 percent across XXX's four campuses compared with a year ago, topping out at 45,585”. Many of us
XXX students are just starting of at XXX and just graduated out of high school this past June of 2011 and went into either the summer school XXX had to offer or just started in the fall time of 2011 With us just getting out of high school we are wanting to start our new lives and work on our future because we all felt like high school was just a bunch of busy work that didn’t have anything to do with your career, so by the time we graduated from high school we thought we were done with all the busy work the teachers wanted to give us, but then we went to orientation and scheduled our classes for the fall time and found out that we have to take pointless/ busy work classes all over again. Many XXX students have taken AP classes while they were in their high school years, many of us have taken it because we want to get the college credit so we don’t have to waste our time and money on a class that doesn’t even bother with the career I’m going into. These high school AP courses were free, the classes were free and the test that we had to past at the end of the course to see if we get the college credit was free. Since college courses in high school are free, college classes in a student’s freshmen year should be free as well considering they are the same exact subject and topic but just taught by a professor and not a teacher, and it may be filled with a room more than twenty students.


Many of us go to college with money that is either from financial aid or from scholarships that we
have received in high school. Many of us don’t have a full ride or pre-paid plan for college, so the way we spend our college money is very important so that we have enough money left for us to finish college and get out degrees. All of us college students start out as freshmen in college at one point and there are over a thousand of new freshmen coming in every year, just imagine how much money XXX is making each year just from freshmen alone. To me that money is a waste, it’s such a waster that it should be applied to other little or pointless things on campus like the chalk that the student government writes on the sidewalk with, or supply paper to the XXXXXX (XXX’s newspaper), which no one’s seems to read. I believe taking prerequisites are and that they are just a big waste of time and money.


Life is short and money is tough to come by in this economy these days and with that being said we
as college students and young adults should have the chance of proceeding with our life and not being held back by taking high school classes all over again. With us being this young and starting our lives completely over again we are learning different ways of approaching time management skills and being independent. Also with college being so different compared to high school there are a lot of things we need to get adjusted to and get adjusted to it right away so we don’t get held back in our classes because of not knowing the skills we need to know to use our time efficiently and effectively. This was even stated by College Board stating that “Almost all colleges have core requirements to ensure that students explore subjects outside their major. These requirements range from math and history to philosophy and lab sciences. The number of required courses, and subjects, varies from one college to the next. You should fulfill these requirements as soon as possible so that you can spend your later semesters concentrating on courses in your major” (College Board). That’s why we should be given our classes for our major the first year so we know how are classes are ran and what is to be expected of us from the professors.


Even though preqrequites could be a hassle for both us students and suck out a lot of time and
money out of us but we are helping other people that have already been in our shoes and graduated
with a degree in Composition I or II because that’s what they’re interested are in they are interested in writing and teaching other people how to write and use English grammar correctly. By us taking those classes we are helping out a teacher/ person that had put their time and money to their school just so they can get there dream career. We are helping them finical wise and there effort and time wise.


We as students have earned our way to XXX through lots of hard work and time and effort. If we want to stop wasting our money on classes that we don’t need to be taking for our major then I say we protest!! We will all gather up around the Student Center and protest for a week or however long it takes to the admisntration of XXX. We need to save ourselves ad save the next upcoming freshmen’s from wasting their time and money as well. Taking prerequites does help other people get there dream goal and dream career but that’s a lot of money out of the thousands of freshmen each year just for those classes. I say let’s do will out the busy work classes and start doing work for our career!!

Noblesse Oblige

One of the Noble Professions?  It doesn't feel that way.  Now it's more of an accusation.  I was just reviewing some of the fond recollections left at an online review site for some English prof to whom I am happily related, and came across an oldie but a goodie:

complete and total dick. thinks english is the most important thing in the world, and like most professors, has his own take on what is good. It will take you the first two C papers to figure out his style and he will fail you on the last paper for over-doing it.

That's okay.  I'm sure such reviews hold no sting for Brother-Unit Grader Boob, particularly given that professing is most ennobled by poverty wages and enriched by a systemic dearth of benefits.

Then, too, there are always the Warm Fuzzies arising from student appreciation.

Grader Boob is a great teacher, funny, caring, and with high expectations.  But, yeah, it's true:  He does have his own take on what is good. Like most professors.


Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Grand Theft, Sibling Style: 35 Months Since the Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi

My eldest brother is my wisest one.  He also has the kindest heart and the most natural, unpolluted concept of living well and peacefully in community with one another and the Earth that is our gracious home.

I haven't ripped anything off from his blog, American Idyll in what seems like YEARS but is actually months.
Tonight, I'm scratching that itch, I'm cracking my knuckles, I'm gearing down for a casual five-fingered discount of digital thievery.  Ah, but thievery rich with attribution!  Go to American Idyll, browse, travel, dream, and learn - laugh, point, giggle, fall into awed silence the way you once were able to collapse into a bean bag contraption (and get up again).

He's democratic by nature and virtue, and so I'm hoping he won't hitch a ride on Elvis the Crow, leading a bazillion of the pointy-beaked creatures to peck on my head for violations of propriety, property, boundaries.

Not many of the voices raised or calmly modulated to float over the chaotic cacophony of the Fukushima accident and subsequent disasters are being heard.  Who wants to hear that stuff?  Unfortunately, the righteous question remains:  How dare we continue to play at being deaf, and prove our stupidity and arrogance, even if those attributes are the natural afterbirth of fear?  Fear is fueling our history of poor decisions, and our poor decisions are fueling the death power of these ecological man-made radiation disasters.  My brother-unit seems to recommend that we educate ourselves on what happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant as well as what is happening at nuclear facilities around the world by staying abreast of this news via Energy News.

Hot off the presses at Energy News, by just minutes?

Radioactive cesium levels “never seen before” at Fukushima — New record as totals nearly double in under 24 hours — Officials admit ‘there may be a new leak’ — IAEA urging for ‘resumption’ of dumping contaminated water into ocean; ‘All options’ need to be considered...

The IAEA suggestions, by the way, are being roundly criticized, though I cannot discern, with what little I've read, what viable alternatives are being offered.  Here are, however, some of the reactions to the UN agency's proposals:

AFP, Feb. 13, 2014: Fukushima should eye ‘controlled discharges’ in sea: IAEA — The UN nuclear watchdog on Thursday urged Japan to consider “controlled discharges” into the sea of contaminated water used to cool the crippled reactors at Fukushima. [...] “This would require considering all options, including the possible resumption of controlled discharges to the sea.” [...] local fishermen, neighbouring countries and environmental groups all oppose the idea. [...] The agency also called for a careful assessment of the company’s plan to create a subterranean “freeze wall” to prevent radioactive groundwater from leaking into the ocean — an ongoing problem that has stoked fears about dangers posed to marine life and the food chain. [...]

Shanghai Daily, Feb. 13, 2014: TEPCO is still eyeing dumping toxic water into the Pacific Ocean as it fails to contain in makeshift storage tanks [...] a massive daily influx of water needed to cool the battered reactors, while nuclear experts believe that other methods need to be traversed before contaminating the ocean. Dumping radioactive water into the ocean is of grave concern to local fisheries cooperatives as the potential for radioactive materials to spread to marine life remains a distinct possibility, despite TEPCO’s assurances the levels of radioactivity will be kept well below the government’s and regulator’s limits. [...] Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) Chairman Shunichi Tanaka [...] said that even though three years has passed since the reactor meltdowns at the plant, TEPCO is still utterly inept when it comes to taking accurate readings of radioactivity [...] and “lacks a basic understanding of measuring and handling radiation.”

NHK, Feb. 14, 2014: IAEA: Consider discharging contaminated water — [The IAEA] advised [Tepco] to examine all options to treat contaminated water. These include resuming controlled discharges of radioactive water into the sea. [...] [IAEA's Juan Carlos Lentijo says] the situation remains very complex [...] the IAEA team believes it is necessary to find a sustainable solution to the problem of managing contaminated water at the plant. It says that this would require considering all options, including the possible resumption of controlled discharges to the sea.

Xinhua, Feb. 13, 2014: [TEPCO] said Thursday that samples of water tested contained radioactive cesium at levels never seen before by the embattled utility. TEPCO [is] admitting there may be a new leak at the site of a well located just 50 meters from the adjacent Pacific Ocean [...] The utility has failed to locate the source of the leak, in another major failing [...]

Tepco Handout, February 13, 2014: “The highest dose among the results previously announced” — 130,000 Bq/L of Cs-134, 137. Previous record set the day before at 76,000 Bq/L of Cs-134, 137.

I'm proud of my brother's voice joining with other activists' ways of speaking to the world.  But, as sisters do, I think his way of leading us to the information is gentler, and inspired.  (This is the part where I steal his post, all the while reminding you, Dearly Beloved Readers, that TW is its author, the artist who makes these beautiful collages of words, photography [his own], and subtle spell casting.  And maybe, right here, lost in all my verbiage, I can slip in how very much I cherish him, love him, and wish to sooth his brow.)

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

The mysterious manner in which this growing sense of unity commingles with a sense of utter goodness is worth noting. It arises by no effort of mine; rather does it come to me out of I know not where. Harmony appears gradually and flows through my whole being like music. An infinite tenderness takes possession of me, smoothing away the harsh cynicism which a reiterated experience of human ingratitude and human treachery has driven deeply into my temperament. I feel the fundamental benignity of Nature despite the apparent manifestation of ferocity.
Like the sounds of every instrument in an orchestra that is in tune, all things and all people seem to drop into the sweet relationship that subsists within the Great Mother's own heart.
--Paul Brunton
A Hermit in the Himalayas: The Journal of a Lonely Exile

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

AMERICAN IDYLL  AMERICAN IDYLL AMERICAN IDYLL   AMERICAN IDYLL

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2014

A Highway Of Diamonds With Nobody On It

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding
I saw a white ladder all covered with water

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warning
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazing
Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-going back out before the rain starts a-falling
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I’ll know my song well before I start singing
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

IT HAS NOW BEEN 35 MONTHS SINCE THE WRETCHED DISASTER AT FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI OPEN-AIR NUCLEAR POWER PLANT BEGAN.
STAY INFORMED.

the email story of five poems

the email story of five poems

originally "composed" on Feb 10 2013.  forgotten.  dug up a few minutes ago.

PART ONE:
I have two brothers.

One left our family (he was the intelligent child) when I was about eight.  It might be said that the family, in whole and in parts, left him.  We found each other three or four years ago, and it's been a hesitant love fest ever since. (He gives good phone. He's funny. Kind. Wary. A friend to the Earth, a spiritualist. A good'un.)

The other is an English professor, also positively brilliant, and with whom I've enjoyed an uninterrupted lifelong love fest.  I love him, not for his brilliance or his own impressive feats, but for his compassionate soul. He may curse at his students and drop the F-bomb in class, but he labors over what his writers write with a care that would make them weep.  (I threw chalk at sleeping students, or even wide-awake ones, and graded very rapidly.)

The two of them, who love one another in a way I cannot describe, do not speak, do not commune in any way.  For all those missing years, the professor has felt the pain of being left behind, the pain of brother love and a brother believed dead.  And now he will not relent to communicate, will not call, type, lift a pen.
Though youngest, I have always been the muddled middle.  Not your usual peacemaker, no. I've cursed both the naturalist and the bookish boy grown old.  In the beginning, a beginning of just three (or four) years ago, please hold in mind, I would occasionally try to trick them.  That never worked, because as youngest, I am, perforce, the dumbest.

So now I've taken to writing them both emails, blind-copying them both and letting them know so.  The canyon trekker is an accomplished poet and writer, and, well, what can you say of an English professor? (I'll pretend I did not hear you think that.)  I got tired of composing emails that expressed the same thing except for their separated minutiae.

Since I've recently become active at a neighboring joint dedicated to poetry, I fired off one of these double-blinded emails, begging my brothers for help.

PART TWO:
This is how my email went:
i'm trying to make certain dead areas of my brain surge back to life, or at least elicit some sort of neuro-spark, and one of the ways i've chosen is poetry, the reading, writing, and critique of it.   pretty much the moment i discovered george oppen ("i discovered george oppen," chuckle), i stopped reading anything new.   would you recommend some "new" poetry?  maybe regional, maybe obnoxious, marginal, or so popular that one'd be tempted to snub her just because?  just please don't list anyone rising from the detritus of vanity presses (i am struggling to get over a recent encounter with such a poet who used me to beat upon, i assume because he does not know me.  i had entered his "round robin poetry contest" without doing due diligence into his overwhelming dickhood, his quintessential dickiness.  he punished my questioning of just what constituted a "round robin" poetry contest, once the arbitrary nat! ure of the rules began to slowly seep, like used motor oil, from his dickified mouth.  for the first "round," the 25 entrants were surprised to discover that we were to vote for our "top ten." i defended a man who, without any doubt, wrote the best poem but dared to ask if we might vote for ourselves... anyway, it got ugly, and i ended up making unavoidable references to the rampant spread of "the browning of the nose" among the broader contestentry.  both the very nice, best poet and i were promptly eliminated, despite both receiving mostly "votes" of between #1 and #10.   i am -- what is the word? oh yeah, i am all broken up.  bereft.  désolée.   but the fun is reading new poetry by people unknown to me, most of it god-awful (and you know how awful god can be!) but some of it embedded with those moments, though with all of us what's constant is our inconstancy.     so in the 20 years since i've seriously read poetry, what have i missed, what should i rea d?  not looking to emulate, no, as i said, i'm looking to shock brain parts back to life.   everything in me wants to run back to ronsard & du bellay, sweet l'il louise labé or even la chanson de roland.  villon! the draw of mallarmé... and lamartine as much as baudelaire. weirdly, you now couldn't pay me to read huysmans but i'd pay you for the ability to concentrate for an hour on georges bataille or blanchot. people change -- who knew?   i've not read near enough of h.d., stein, WCW, pound.  whitman.  dickinson. stevens, lowell. wilbur.   oppen, oppen, oppen.   so, five poems i ask of you.  that's all -- five measly poems.   oh -- the other part of my attack upon cognitive decline:  mahjong solitaire.   i know you are busy earning the money required to live, as well as pursuing life, liberty, and happiness -- so please take your time.  i'm feeling confused a lot, and there's familiar evidence -- the way i keep (do not keep) my checkbook, the drying of clothes before they're clean, these familiar markers.  little, very little, sleep.  too many medications, though we've cut as many as seem prudent.     maybe prudence is over-rated, maybe we are fools to think ourselves prudent.  i dunno.     sorry to always be desperate, but i am. it's no fun being alive. poetry might help, or at least obfuscate things enough that i'll forget the silliness of expecting fun at all.   i love you so deeply, respect you so deeply --
moi

PART THREE:
I had serious doubts that this story -- well, not a story, more of a profound historical record of the sort people used to bury in cardboard boxes kept in unventilated attics, or in the corners of damp unfinished basements, back when people could afford homes -- would develop a third section.

So it is with joy that I transcribe, changing only what must be changed to protect myself, the flurry of emails between myself and the brother-unit who professes English.  His first volley shocked me, for he has been the source of many gifts of poetry over the years.  Now that I press my leaking sieve of a memory, however, I remember that he usually chose his gifts with precision from a list that I provided.

You see, we were both the confused recipients of strange offerings from an unrelated great-step-aunt, a very wealthy aunt who married as an old woman the publisher of a group of major southern newspapers.  Sara, herself, was a hoot, a ringer for Aunt Clara of Bewitched, and so, of course, she outlived her filthily-lucred one-man dynasty of a husband., and dedicated herself to the preservation of his capital.  She closed off the upper two stories of their mansion, and most of the first floor, too -- because who needs three kitchens?  We loved her for herself, for her insistence on stopping at every street corner, no matter the existence of a stop light or stop sign.  We enjoyed traveling through three lanes of oncoming traffic as the best way to enter McDonald's by its clearly marked exit.  I often slept on a plush and ratty chaise longue in the anteroom to her boudoir in the mansion because she was scared at night.  I was scared at night, too, because every bit of every wall was covered by gilded frames holding the dead, posed faces of rich strangers.

Her kin folk, again, all step-kinfolk, but lovely people, both hungered to inherit her money and also loved her a lot and took good care of her (like sending me over to sleep on the plush and ratty chaise longue to stare at the dead, posed faces of rich strangers all night).

My point, clearly, is that she gave us strange gifts.  I remember a Christmas gift wrapped in official Belk's paper, nestled in crisply folded tissue paper, with Belk-approved ribbonry.  The treasure at its heart?  A plastic comb, complete with a sample hair, and a pair of stained, pastel pink underpants, about 20 sizes too large.

So the professor and I became strict list adherents.  It seemed the safest way to celebrate the birth of Christ and our own trips around the sun in a world of such biohazards.

The train of my thought?  The train of my thought?  Oh, yes.  My request for 5 measly poems. Although the first to reply, my F-bombing Classroom Leader led with an effort to evade:

Howdy-- I have to chuckle at your request for poetry recommendations. I stopped reading poetry in grad school and my only exposure since has been to whatever is included in those 2,000 page anthologies that departments make the students buy for 1102. I realized I'd not be reading any more poetry in 1990 when I bought my first CD and couldn't read the liner notes or the lyrics! Had to chuckle at your idea of putting the painting on the piano--tres chic. Any concert recommendations from Wolfgang's Vaults? Love to thee and thine.

A few words of clarification.  Our father died last July, and since then there has been an insurgence of little clown cars spewing forth relatives we never knew we had.  One was my father's brother, who recently shocked us with the revelation that he had held in trust, for almost 50 years, an oil painting of our mother, commissioned by the aforementioned dead father, and delivered to our uncle upon the occasion of our father's remarriage.  Most men, my brother and I agree, would have chucked the thing in the nearest dumpster.  Well, someone had to say "oh-yes-that-is-something-I-cannot-imagine-living-without" and we all knew that someone had to be me.  So we've joshed a bit about how outright freaky it would be to hang it over our recently acquired scuffed up, duct-taped upright piano.  (As it turned out, it was a beautiful portrait and I sent it to her daughter to return to her.)

And if you are unfamiliar with Wolfgang's Vaults, well, look it up -- a very cool site for those of us who may still have vinyl stashed in blue plastic milk cartons, and who, while no longer being able to afford concerts, adore the sound of live music.  (I neglected to tell you that my other beloved brother-unit was a bona fide Dead Head, having followed the band and made superb recordings of beaucoup concerts.  His silence in the face of my 5 Poem Demand is not surprising, as he takes things very seriously, or not at all.  His life, after all, has been "a long strange trip..."  Also, as eldest, he's perforce smartest.  But we've covered that, already.)

You can see the Deflective Tactics hard at work chez the Professor.  Who would believe that a former undergrad who drooled when given the chance to be in the same room as the earliest known transcription ofBeowulf would walk away from poetry based on sucky lyrics and worse liner notes?

And so I responded in bull-by-the-horns fashion:
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 4:54 PM, The Professor @juno.com> wrote:
"Any concert recommendations from Wolfgang's Vaults?" 

not until you name a poem.

I may have been youngest but you can only play coy for so many decades, you know?  No longer do I play far, far right field ("a little farther, a little farther, and behind the fence would be best!") or when Seeker in Hide and Seek, discover that the brothers left for town hours ago....

He knew there'd be no value in making me cool my heels, so I received this seven minutes later:

Alright, but the only poems I can recall always start with "There once was a man from Nantucket..." So we have a standoff then! (I wish I had something short and pithy, almost poetic, to say...)

I went to bed with smug thoughts of progress, much as I used to think each year, on my birthday, that I was catching up in age to these reprobate siblings of mine.  Surely, one poem at least was within my grasp!
A mere four hours ago, I found this vibrating in my email box:

Poetry in motion--take a look on the Rolling Stone web site at the video clip of Queen performing at Live Aid. A rousing 25 minutes. I'd never seen that before. (Poetry in motion with mass adulation--just the sort of set up Dickinson was after! Not.) Never was a fan of the band but that was quite the "poetic" set. (Note how often I'm trying to fool you with the constant repetition.) 

Okay, I admit to feeling on the losing side of a subtly waged war of attrition.   I do think, however, that with the aid of near Silent Treatment, that while he may not give me the recommendation of a single poem, I may unnerve him just enough that he might write one.

PART FOUR:
[This story will conclude once I've received a sage response from the other Brother-Unit, who may be feeling tapped out, as his last gift box to me contained the complete works of e. e. cummings along with huge bags of homegrown and dried organic jalapeños and habaneros, sunny tomatoes, squash, and green peppers.  Never has poetry been so sweetly scented.  This dear gardening pilgrim, I hope I've mentioned, is a poet.  That means extra cunning.  Also inevitable self-deprecation.  He's a good'un, I say again.]


© 2013 L. Ryan

REPOST: in a moment

Odd.  I have many things to write about, several amazing articles and speeches (the articles new, the speeches old, but new to me) to go on about and reprint.  There have been some funny developments in the Walmart Pharmacy saga (O, they are so screwèd!) and I spent the day with medical types, so you know I have an overloaded brain.

And yet, I saw that several readers had called up this post, originally published on 28 June 2011, when I was in the midst of my last shot at a CRPS "cure," via subanesthetic ketamine infusions.  It was a hard time, confusing, rushed, painful -- and then there are all the things such a chemical does to the brain and mind.

From that came this, which, frankly, has left me weepy.  I don't remember writing it.

So, Dear Readers, I give you -- again -- "in a moment"":

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

There is an assisted living facility that we drive by frequently, a very neat and pleasant looking place, in front of which is a sign announcing a "special neighborhood for the memory impaired."

I figure Fred and La Bonne et Belle Bianca will push me out of a slow-moving Ruby, the Honda CR-V, with however much cash might be necessary to buy into that special neighborhood pinned to my lapel.  Fred will have written my name in my clothing with a Sharpie Rub-a-Dub® Laundry Marker.  For her part, Bianca will make sure I've several kilos of beluga caviar, carefully wrapped in my garment-dyed organic cotton tees. Oddly, her enormous cache of the stuff predates the September 30, 2005 importation ban from the Caspian Sea, and the October 2005 ban of the sturgeon roe from the Black Sea basin.

Anyway, they love me each in their own way.  Fred will make sure I've the comfort of my own clean clothes, something familiar when my mind wanders. The Castafiore?  Fish eggs.  *Old* fish eggs.

Bless their bones, I've plum worn them out.  Our lives together were supposed to only nominally be about really, actually, taking care of one another.  It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Anyway (my fallback segue) --

Technically, Ketamine leaves the body very quickly. My point being that I was told there are no lingering effects from the infusions in "normal" people.  Never mind that researchers give subanesthetic doses to elicit symptoms of schizophrenia, to mimic mental illness -- handy, I guess, on that day when we run out of actual schizophrenics amenable to study. 

I know, courtesy of doctors, nurses, and choice literature, that the psychosis and cognitive dysfunction that I simultaneously experienced, explored, and was terrified by, resulted from that one drug running through my veins.  I know that all deleterious effects officially ceased within minutes of stopping the drip -- despite the experiential evidence of dizziness, nausea, confusion, fatigue, and visual disturbances that linger and recur. Despite, despite, despite...

Still -- here I am, five days out from the last high dose treatment, downright obliterated, my sluggish, sloshing brain wrapped in the cotton candy fuzz of Ketamine's metabolites.  Except that that cannot be.

It's hard.  I'm looking and hoping for positive results from this recent approximation of Dr. Schwartzman's Ketamine protocol in the treatment of CRPS (as communicated by Dr. Schwartzman in an email, as delineated in published papers).  I am trying to be objective though that's a much tougher thing to approximate. 

On the up side?  My overall level of inflammation, and its attendant discomfort, is much lower than it was two weeks ago.  My feet and lower legs are less swollen, as are my joints in general.  Whether or not that's at all attributable to the Ketamine infusions, I don't know.  I was overdue a break in the cycle of what I call Red and Blue phases of CRPS, having been in the Red phase for a good while, and tired of it.  People kept enlightening me with helpful alerts like "Wow! The heat is just pouring off of your body." 

So now my feet and lower legs are blue, considerably smaller, and scary cold.  I've entertained giving socks another chance but then couldn't tolerate the weight of a sheet, and so end up slapping the nearest cat and joshing, "Golly Gee!"

I am working on a suitable chortle.

The pain is just as bothersome, though different.  Blue phase CRPS pain, for me, is an unrelenting burn that makes me, if possible, even more wary than usual of the touch of... *anything*.  I start doing all the weird things CRPS patients do -- going to ridiculous lengths to avoid the touch of ridiculous things.  Cringing and crying out just at the sight of one cat chasing another through the room.  Folding the edges of clothing, carefully arranging covers and quilts.  Making the constellation of pillows a task requiring advanced degrees.

Blue phase CRPS -- and again, this is my terminology, and not a generally accepted notion -- is fuelled by fear, heightened anticipation.  Much too much thinking and worrying, with fits of frustration that often involve throwing phones, remote controls, paperbacks, and a slew of assistive devices (like handy-dandy "grabbers"), because inanimate objects migrate, on purpose, threatening to bump hands, arms, feet, and legs.  One day, I will try to explain the peculiar, building, and sinister sensation of *potential* touch.

I can write about This Schtuff here, even as I am actively trying to deceive my Manor Denizens and Mavens.  The first wave of my effort involves biting my tongue instead of using it to mold the shape of my screams.

Yes, I have stopped screaming.  In the same vein that, yes, I have no bananas.*

It wasn't such a huge leap from that to a general shutting up, after all these weeks of methadone and percocet withdrawal, and the attendant chatter:spaz:chatter::scream::scream::chatter:spaz:chatter.

Having been the cause and nexus of so much worry and effort around Marlinspike Hall, I dedicate myself now to the cultivation of a very false front.

The cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
drawn by John Tenniel (1820-1914) in the 1866 edition.

The Crooked Grimace becomes the Modest Smile that morphs into a Cheshire Grin.

(And why not invoke Lewis Carroll as one of the Authors of My Being? **)

The Cheshire Cat and the enormity of his grin, companion piece to the Mona Lisa's pursed and lippy near smirk: They aren't exactly lies, more like essential commentary, a reminder that little is as it seems, and if you don't want too much pain, it helps to revel in these snivels of diversion and repression.

[I tried to rewrite that last bit but feel honor-bound to leave it.  It may be that only such a tight sentence will be the key to my exit from the Special Neighborhood for the Memory Impaired...]

Wikipedia notes that "A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue by Francis Grose (The Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged, London 1788) contains the following entry: 'CHESHIRE CAT. He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of any one who shows his teeth and gums in laughing.'"

That'd be me. Toothy. Like my long dead grandmother's fierce and false good cheer, though, my laughter seems more a cackle now, mirth so unfunny

I enjoy Wikipedia entries that ache for supporting citations. Next to making scads of money by writing back-of-book blurbs and wine label spots, I'd love a life of writing detailed and mostly true Wikipedia entries just squirrelly enough to want a footnote or three.

Remember: The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.

The only thing I enjoyed about my Ketamine hallucinations were snapshots of interwoven longterm memories, no matter how illogical their relationship with whatever visual or auditory wormhole encased the whole affair.  Memory was the touchstone of sanity.

It was also much more pleasant to dive into deep still waters -- a very pretty blue -- than to lie there struggling to remember my middle name and the city, my last address, the date.

Last Thursday morning, down in Cubicle 2, my brain held a slide show, complete with the clicking noises during view swaps, complete with the electrical whir of an old-fashioned projector's vibrating motor and fan. 

How my brothers each came to be such excellent photographers is something of a mystery.  In the years they spent together, and those years were, sadly, not many, there weren't many occasions for shutterbugging, and certainly the evidence from those years is kind of pitiful.  Overexposed.  Underexposed. 

I remember TW shadowing some polo-shirted man with a pot belly, which must have been the summer he spent working as a caddy at the country club.  It wasn't even our country club, as it wasn't our country. Also, TW'd rather die than acquiesce to the foundational notions of the intensely racist area of the world in which we were temporarily housed. We had been foisted upon our grandparents for the summer, at the end of which we three were to fly a few thousand miles to unite with an add-water-and-stir new family.

Brother Tumbleweed made money hand-over-fist, I remember some grown-up clucking.  I don't know TW well, never did, but I doubt he's ever been the least bit subservient, so I assume he really needed the bucks.  I think he saw himself as the sardonic twist in an anachronism, a modern white slave boy ripping off the institution, sticking it to The Man.

Anyway, he's standing slightly behind and to the left of the white polo-shirted pot-bellied man, his head at a jaunty angle and what had to be a very funny joke floating in the vapor before his pursed lips.  It would make sense that he'd have on a hat, but he didn't.  I love his hair because I have his hair.  Curly, a mind of its own.  People were always chopping off my hair so as to make it, and me, behave.  My father used a ruler to measure his sons' efforts at sideburns and the distance between a hair's end and a collar's beginning.

I spent that summer obsessed with a bird -- a baby Blue Jay pushed from a high nest by its mother but lucky enough to land on a soft bed of pine straw in the yard of a beloved neighbor, Dr. Ramsey, who promptly brought scrawny thing to me.  That was my I-wanna-be-a-vet summer.  My grandfather and I nursed him, taught him to fly, and just generally made up rules for the bringing up of an Honest Bird.  He went out during the day, played games with us, followed us around the garden and the woods, and then would come inside the house at night, when called. 

For the life of me, though, I cannot remember where in the house he slept.  (One of my favorite mental exercises is to trace the layout of every house I've ever lived in, sometimes even stretching the parameters to include any house I've ever visited.  I find this richly relaxing, enlivening.  It is my version of one of the Pythagorean Brotherhood's disciplines of memory.  That's what I like to believe, so if you've another suspicion, keep it to yourself, please.  No matter your opinion of the calisthenic, you can see, can't you, how not being able to place this bird within the architecture of that summer's night time is a barbed and sticking point, a cause for anxiety?)

You'd think my jay bird would have been a prime target for homegrown photography, but I only have one picture of him, and it was taken by a features photographer from the local paper.  Word got out about our charming boy when he decided to go to church with us one Sunday, rapping with his beak on the sanctuary door, and creating a hell of a racket.  He pitched a juvenile fit in the presence of those investigative journalists, the Maharidge and Williamson of that region and day, then flew up into the highest branches of the dogwood by the back porch door, and refused to come down.  Actually, he put himself in a pickle, because he didn't quite know *how* to get down, by gradation, branch to branch.  At that point it was still pretty much an all-or-nothing affair when it came to flight.

What we all liked most about Squawky (What can I say?  I was a kid.  The next bird I "rescued"?  I dubbed him Potty Pigeon and stuck him in a shoebox.) -- What endeared Squawky to those of us hanging out on Coffee Road that long hot summer of fly balls and mortgage-buster tomato sandwiches was his dedication to driving my grandmother crazy. 

Grandaddy and I were relieved when Squawky grew out of needing our unique mixture of baby bird formula.  It involved collecting the finest and freshest of morning's beetles and worms, local produce, though probably not completely organic.  I also gathered some (bedewed) berries, swiped some generic birdseed, added a dropper or two of some smelly liquid vitamins, and carefully mashed and ground that yummy goodness in a small white porcelain mortar and pestle that was meant to lend the goo an air of maternal predigestion -- again, all under the tutelage of my sweet pharmacist of a grandpa.  We'd hydrate it a bit so that a Kimax pipette could be put to use to plug up the gaping, griping maw at the center of the then very ugly bald and squawking creature.

Grandmother -- we called her Nana -- kept a clean house.  Our culinary efforts on  behalf of the baby bird about sent her around the bend, but she soon learned that our fine raw cuisine was infinitely preferable to the bird's own feeding habits, once he was over the formula stage.  Squawky loved to snack, it turned out, and didn't trust his humans to collect or store the juiciest of tidbits.  In anticipation of late night munchies, he snuck contraband into the house during those stupefyingly hot afternoons when all we thought he wanted was a bit of shade, and company.  He was a clever little cuss.

Nana's "living room" was more a salon.  It was uncomfortable and full of ridiculous fine furniture, and we were all obliged to sit in it for some prescribed period of time in the evening -- after dinner, after the washing-up of dishes, after ice cream on the dark porch, but before baths and other ablutions, and defionitely before bedtime books.  She was in her element at night, was Nana.  The woman could author and promote all kinds of conspiracy theories as she hustled from bathroom to bathroom, bedside to bedside, as she washed and you dried, as she propelled herself like a wild locomotive even into a child's fledgling sense of privacy.  She'd press folded, sweaty dollars into your palm, her face turned in the opposite direction, the better to disguise the Love Bribe.  She out-Cassandra-ed Cassandra -- condemned to see and know the future, and to be believed, even, but never in an actionable way, never in a way that told her we cared about her information, her future.  Doors you swore you'd locked flew open, and she'd give fierce directives about the disposition of her jewelry after her demise as she scrubbed your already clean back with a stiff brush of boar bristles.

It's from that tiny woman that came my many phobias centered around sleep and whispering -- two things that ought to signify intimacy and privacy.  If you need to witness abject terror, just allow me to fall into a safe, comfortable, deep sleep (*those* were the days!), then whisper my name. 

After which, you'll need to scrape me off of the ceiling.

Anyway, despite various family strategies for defusing the Nana Factor, it took a bird to take her down. I'm not sure how he did it, because I kept a very watchful eye, as well as a pocket full of paper towels to scoop up any juicy bugs or offerings of bird poop. 

Squawky hid bugs -- big ass bugs, we're talking -- precisely where finding a bug would drive Nana insane.  In her austere antique-y salon, under needlepointed pillows and oval doilies, in jugs, midst dried and powdery gray-green eucalyptus. [You've no idea  how much I want -- have, indeed, long wanted -- to reference antimacassars as well as doilies, but no one in that house ever rested the back of their heads on anything but monogramed pillowcases atop improbably tall and postered bedsteads.  In this modest country home, she maintained both clichéd and uniquely weird citations of chinoiserie -- that is, chinoiserie twice-removed -- in her faux Persian rugs, scattered black lacquer pieces, chinese-esque vases with young crackled glazes, but mounted on carved ebony pedestals that had the ring of truth.

Nana had an impressive assortment of cloisonné that lacked the space necessary to its appreciation. I remember thinking that I'd have had a leg up in my career if only she had dabbled in an orientalism both better and spread out over another 1,000 square feet.

Maybe it was the decor, the tiny insects and flowers, the small birds, like oversized bees, fairly buzzing in that cramped overheated room -- something made it the perfect place for a teenaged Blue Jay to strategically stash the kind of munchies that only a teenaged Blue Jay would stash -- avian Twinkies and nachos, topped with slightly smooshed malted milk balls.

Brother Unit Grader Boob didn't take pictures of people very often.  His best works, in my opinion, were vertiginous close-ups of leaves, tree trunks, new wood invading old.  There always seemed to be a swirl, and a question.  I know he recently took his camera up to Morehead City, to Atlantic Beach, to that pier I walked and stalked as a teenager, from where I made my first phone call as an honest-to-God Sovereign Person to my mother, just returned to the States.  It was a hangup.  Meaning, I hung up, my heart in my throat, a man with a bucket of bait slinking past, stinking.

But GB has taken remarkable portraits, nonetheless, particularly of the aforementioned Grandparental Units.

A good ten or fifteen years after that summer of our billetting, he showed up at their door at the end of a casual 500 mile bike ride, the last bit of it ascending the Blue Ridge Mountains, and his hair long, sporting cycling gear that made him even more foreign and therefore undesireable looking.  Of course, they didn't know who he was -- Grandaddy being quite blind from glaucoma by then, and Nana caught up in visions of rampaging hippies.  Good sports, though, they allowed my brother and his gang of bicycling friends to hang around for a few days.

They had the best water in the world there, from their well. 

Sometime the following day, when the place must have been looking like a freaking commune, what with those ne'er do well college students wandering around in a tomato sandwich haze, GBoob snapped a few frames of Grandaddy sitting atop the well cap, timing the pump.  He used a telephoto lens, taking the shots from right where the woods get deep.

Grandaddy lived in "gardening clothes," a uniform of khakis and long-sleeved cotton shirts, the whole topped by his old pith helmit.  He had a thin, austere face.  Patrician.  My memories of him are of a gentle man who was not particularly effusive, but who was essentially good-natured.  That is to say, you weren't going to get him to pose with a plastic smile at the ready.

So it is quite the coup, the smile that my brother caught.  He is lanky, even seated, elbows on his knees, one arm clasping the inside of the other.  He holds his face to the sun, relaxed, smells the growing vegetables, thinks, maybe, of his many bird houses or maybe how he's going to mow a few acres of grass later on, blind as a bat, and smiling like a fool. 

I look to a copy of that iconic photo whenever I ponder the accusations of my aunt, an honest and enlightened person, who tells of him beating her mercilessly, dragging her out from under one of those high postered bedsteads where she had hoped to hide.  "Grandaddy?" I ask.  He persists with that peaceful, laconic smile, counting, I suppose, "one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand," waiting for the well pump to kick in.

All of that was there last Thursday morning, though some of it was a hold-over from Wednesday afternoon. 

There was a photo of Grader Boob that served as some kind of place card in the sequence of tripping images.  He played a lot of baseball that summer.  He was pitcher, and so his team photo has him looking sharp in pinstripes, rearing back, getting ready for the wind-up and kick, just as soon as he sneaks a peak at the runner on first. 

You've got to keep those runners honest.

Well, that's all I can remember, and more than I want to know.  Sleep well, don't forget to turn your brain down before you go to sleep...

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

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

* Yes, We Have No Bananas!
[Folk Song written by: Frank Silver and Irving Cohn (1923)]

There's a fruit store on our street
It's run by a Greek.
And he keeps good things to eat
But you should hear him speak!


When you ask him anything, he never answers "no".
He just "yes"es you to death,
And as he takes your dough, he tells you...


"Yes! We have no bananas
We have no bananas today!!
We have string beans and onions, cabBAges and scallions
And all kinds of fruit and say
We have an old fashioned toMAHto
A Long Island poTAHto, but


Yes! We have no bananas
We have no bananas today!"


Business got so good for him that he wrote home today,
"Send me Pete and Nick and Jim; I need help right away."
When he got them in the store, there was fun, you bet.
Someone asked for "sparrow grass"
and then the whole quartet
All answered:


"Yes, we have no bananas
We have-a no bananas today.
Just try those coconuts
Those wall-nuts and doughnuts
There ain't many nuts like they.
We'll sell you two kinds of red herring,
Dark brown, and ball-bearing.
But yes, we have no bananas
We have no bananas today."



**I read some of Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno late this afternoon.  Time was on my mind -- how very mutable it is, and how,  if it flows like a river, it's no river of my knowing.  You know, the basics, what almost any drug-based trip will teach us!

Walking along in the "real world" of Chapter 22, The Earl tells The Narrator (The narcoleptic "Historian"):

"I have yet another theory for adding to the
enjoyment of Life--that is, if I have not exhausted your patience?
I'm afraid you find me a very garrulous old man."


"No indeed!" I exclaimed earnestly. And indeed I felt as if one could
not easily tire of the sweet sadness of that gentle voice.


"It is, that we should learn to take our pleasures quickly, and our
pains slowly."


"But why? I should have put it the other way, myself."


"By taking artificial pain--which can be as trivial as you
please--slowly, the result is that, when real pain comes, however
severe, all you need do is to let it go at its ordinary pace, and it's
over in a moment!"


"Very true," I said, "but how about the pleasure?"


"Why, by taking it quick, you can get so much more into life. It takes
you three hours and a half to hear and enjoy an opera. Suppose I can
take it in, and enjoy it, in half-an-hour. Why, I can enjoy seven
operas, while you are listening; to one!"


"Always supposing you have an orchestra capable of playing them,"
I said. "And that orchestra has yet to be found!"


The old man smiled. "I have heard an 'air played," he said, "and by no
means a short one--played right through, variations and all, in three
seconds!"


"When? And how?" I asked eagerly, with a half-notion that I was
dreaming again.


"It was done by a little musical-box," he quietly replied.
"After it had been wound up, the regulator, or something, broke,
and it ran down, as I said, in about three seconds.
But it must have played all the notes, you know!"


"Did you enjoy it? I asked, with all the severity of a cross-examining
barrister.


"No, I didn't!" he candidly confessed. "But then, you know, I hadn't
been trained to that kind of music!"

This I add in the spirit of "for what it is worth."