Never cry over spilled guts

2012-01-17T00:01:00.001-06:00

I can't convince my foolish friends to leave
the Hollywood casino on the Fox.
Lights, camera, action! -- crafted to deceive,
stretch out a losing streak and dull the shocks.
"Good Luck" they say, "Top Spin" and "What A Play!"
as though my skill or knowledge touched the reels
as though tomorrow's substance, spent today,
could buy more than bounced rent checks and missed meals.
The dream unfolds: bright fairies, lions, proud
young women garbed in nothing very much,
gold coins that sting my eyes like wreaths of smoke.
Lights chase themselves across as drums thud, loud
as my poor hopeful heart, command my touch
till I'm slack-jawed with longing -- and flat broke.

the right thing

2012-01-05T14:14:00.004-06:00

Yeah, a lot of times when a person does what they know is right they get shafted. That doesn't mean stop doing it. Following your conscience just means you end up with the least bad option in a situation where all the choices lead to suffering.

she does the right thing
she takes the hit for
an innocent one
they're keeping indoors
it doesn't matter who you call the patient
if the doctor's a fraud
a hero gets retaliation
from the people who should applaud
applaud, when you do the right thing

I do the right thing
I turn the beer down
I let the man talk
he's moving downtown
tells me how he wants to make me
comfy in his passenger seat
won't believe I have the will to tell him no
the right to retreat
retreat, to do the right thing

you do the right thing
you let your heart ache
prepared to live with
a loving mistake
cause if she never comes around again
you know you'll mourn for her soul
to be her lover and to be her friend
you'd even give up control
control, to do the right thing

we do the right thing
we get the short stick
we take a gutshot
like it's a pinprick
we know we got to look into the mirror
at the end of the day
cause only God is worthy of our fear
and honey, he will repay
repay, we do the right thing

lonely as

2011-12-17T23:50:00.005-06:00

My neighborhood has a program which allows local artists to display their work in the windows of vacant shops. Which I think is awesome--I love art and it makes the economic decline of my city feel more palatable. There's this one painting--I'll try to get a pic up in the next couple of days--entitled "Lonelier than God". It's a depiction of telephone wires strung from a pole with buildings in the background done in outlandish colors and the artist wants $1200 for it. Alas I don't have $1200, and apparently that's also the title of a (decent but I don't really love it) metal album by the band Blacklisted.
While the painting spoke to me, my mind got stuck on the title. It rang sort of hollow. People speak more often of God's love or mercy or wisdom or wrath, but his loneliness, to me, seems more impenetrable than any of those. He loves us and we're designed to love him back, but we usually don't. And we will never, can never understand him, can never see ourselves or anything else he's made with even a tiny fraction of the passion and possessive pride and anguished loss which, for God, are eternal and infinite.
Feel kind of...I think embarrassed is the word. Feel kind of stupid. Not about the stuff I wrote, cause it's written well enough, but about the fact that this is what I have to say.
This one goes Bm, A, C, G for each line, except the last line of each which gets Bm, G, E. There's lots of triplets which keeps the rhythm interesting. But it's still kind of reptitive melodically and clocks in at about 2 minutes. Still! It's been awhile since I wrote a song. Yay.

totally devoted
and unable to relax
constantly defensive
woman, these are not attacks
they offer what makes them feel strong; I understand, I play along
but so little of it is real

totally unable
to be more than human, weak
wish I could explain it
wish you'd give me leave to speak
for every step I have a plan to draw your hands into my hands
love's the only thing I can't steal

totally defended
oh you hold yourself so tight
your majestic architecture
does it let in any light
I don't know how to care this much and only look and never touch
God says, "now you know how it feels"

he loves us like I love the way
your eyes close when you choke the rage
back down, your laugh, your childlike smile
oh stay love, come stay for just a little while
nobody's as lonely as God
nobody's as lonely as God
nobody's as lonely as God

slake

2011-11-23T03:25:00.007-06:00

once the music gushed like rain along a gutter;
swept out, in tangles, every shredded leaf.
sky slit like flesh bled till the red ran dry
and there was only water itself, water after the end of life,
the wound exhausted.
the street drank it in till even the twigs in the cracks
grew succulent.

to an animal the rot of trees smells fresh.

so breathe like a plant;
peel back your parchment skin
and drink the sunlight raw,
set down roots in your own
dry carcass.

now the melody runs under you,
bedded in soil, in the cool round dream
that your scampering heart never let it dream.

the seasons swell your trunk,
crumpling up the concrete
like an old receipt. you stretch, a languid yawn
that takes years. palms to the shifting sky,
waist-deep in street, that thirst spools down
till it draws up crimson

and every trembling branch bursts into song.

tornado love

2011-10-25T22:10:00.003-05:00

(Reposted from Facebook cause I like this thought and want to hang on to it.)

Had big fun at the MSI today with Amber! :D We saw the Omnimax version of Tornado Alley. It was directed by, and partly starring, longtime storm chaser Sean Casey. Dude built a homemade tank for the sole purpose of driving into the center of a tornado and filming it. One of the shots early in the movie showed him fitting the tank together and you see a wedding ring. I said afterwards, "he's married to his wife, but he's in love with the tornado."

It made me think, do I love anything the way that guy loves the tornado?

After a movie's worth of near misses and a lot of good science, the storm chasing team finally dooes it. You see a brief shot of Casey's face--helpless, weeping, but filled with a kind of awe and gratitude and pure raw love that you can't fake. Like a storm, that kind of love can rip through a life and devastate it in an instant; it can gather passionate people together and send them out racing in the rain hoping to catch a glimpse of it, hoping to brush up against it.

For me, getting to see someone have an experience like that--that's my tornado. The loves we build our lives around, the dreams and passions wherein we feel a slight inkling of the kind of relentless joy God must take in his creation, must have felt to have formed it in the first place, these things fuel us and shape who we become. Your driving love in a sense is your name, the touchstone on which your being rests. Sean Casey is a storm chaser, and in the climax of that movie, he caught one.

I live to see names come true. Like a storm, I can't make it happen. But I can do good science and look for the signs and hang on through long dry seasons for the hint of a glimpse of it. It doesn't happen in a place, and it doesn't leave scars across the landscape as such. But it's getting to see in people, just for a moment, what God must have seen when he first imagined them, what they know themselves to truly be in that secret place beneath all the pettiness and worry.

How do you chase that? Where do you go to find more of it? There's no Tornado Alley for the human heart; one place, one social group, one endeavor is really as good as another. But I'm glad to have that image for it.

what it takes

2011-10-16T22:29:00.004-05:00

So I haven't actually "spilled my guts" in this thing in awhile. It really is, and always has been, my online diary, though I did go through a phase when I wanted to gain wider readership for it. Far as I'm concerned now, that's not what a blog is for. It's where I stash that portion of my poetry and song lyrics which are not too private to keep hidden away in my notebooks at home, but a little too edgy, let's say, to post on Facebook.

Forget which movie this quote comes from, but I hear in my mind some British fellow saying "it's been a topsy fuckin weird year." That about sums it up. I still kinda have no idea where I am right now. Scratch that. I know exactly where I am--my neighborhood has become a part of my identity in a way no place ever has been before, my home in the sense that I've chosen to feel it so in addition to the fact that I reside here. But as for who I am and what I'm going to do with my life, that's still up in the air. Settling slowly like leaves in a light breeze.

Note to self: "settle groundward, slow" would be a great phrase to use in a poem.

A great sign of increased mental stability, though, is that I'm getting back both the urge and the ability to write. Not quite up to my four thousand word a day habit from former days. But Mom actually gave me a great metaphor for this yesterday. I was telling her how I'd been worried because lacking the fear motive which used to drive me towards writing, as a form of release from the internal pressure, had left me sort of adrift, hard pressed to find other sources of motivation. And she said, "If you've been driving a car 90 miles an hour in reverse and you want to go forward, first you have to come to a full and complete stop. Then you can start going forward--but at first you go slowly."

We also spoke about our family and the past in a general way. And I got to say something to her that I'd been meaning to say for awhile. Forgiveness means it's over. There were a lot of dark and scary times in our lives, but whatever happens in the future, the past will never return. Even if only because we're all different people now, tempered and matured through experience, and the things which were once unthinkably scary because there was no frame of reference for them will never be new again, never again be totally unexpected.

For a good thing to be familiar makes the joy in it deeper, richer and ever new again. For a bad thing to be familiar actually weakens its power. Even if you confront a terrible event from which there is no escape, if it's something known, something you understand, there's a place inside from which you can laugh at it. Not, of course, because it's any less terrible. Rather that even the terror of it can't eradicate you, can't take you away from yourself.

This, I think, is why I've always gone running towards the things that frighten me. To know, to have made the acquaintance, of anything in life, is to understand yourself in relation to it. And with this understanding comes the experiential boundary between self and threat source, the knowledge of just what it can and cannot take from you. Ultimately everything can be taken except the naked spark. Consciousness, soul, will--names sort of collapse into it--that part of ourselves with which we choose. But the sense in which, as I see it, we are made in God's image, is that a whole self can be built from that spark, just as in Genesis the whole universe is spawned from a single fiat, let there be. And there is is. And here I am.

Even now I have a problem with this, have trouble believing sometimes that I'm really here. I keep seeking out ways to strip myself down to it, as if to reassure myself that it's still there. Which can be as disturbing to anyone who's close to me as it is destructive to myself.

did it right

2011-10-16T00:21:00.000-05:00

Feel like this song isn't finished. It rose in part from a dream I had, which was disturbing because it was (as I described it to a couple friends) my first-ever torture dream in which I was the perpetrator and not the victim.

The desire to wreak devastation on another person is what happens to the desire for interpersonal connection when one gives in to despair. When I believe, deep down, to the point where it's something I know and have tested many times and proven factual, that there is a depth and flavor of understanding which other people will not or cannot give me, there is the temptation to despair. If I give in to that temptation, then I desire to hurt others as I feel I have been hurt, to force a connection that can't or won't be given voluntarily.

I'm uncertain of the song in part because it doesn't go far enough. And it needs guitar chords. And some of the rhymes feel forced.

Also I'm wrestling with my ability to feel self-generated purpose to the degree that I'm asking myself, with some irritation, why I want to bother.

[did it right] 10/6

when the eyes roll back
when the breath croaks out
when the spine goes slack
then there ain't no doubt
when the bitch can't run
when the kid don't fight

that's how you know, that's how you know
that's how you know, that's how you know
that's how you know, that's how you know
you did it right

when the vomit's dried
when the knife grinds bone
all the way inside
then you're left alone
with the heart's last beat
though you're their last sight

at least you know, at least you know
at least you know, at least you know
at least you know, at least you know
you did it right

baby please don't speak
you'll dislodge the hose
I'm the one who's weak
I know where it goes
when you understand
you will smile so bright

cause I never let you go
never let you go, never never
never let you go
cause I hold your heart so tight
never let you go, never let you go, go
no, no
that's how I know you know
that's how you know I know
that's how you know I know you know

I did it
I did it right

what is artificial?

2011-09-04T01:34:00.001-05:00

What is natural? via Christian Taoism:

What is natural?

Anything free
of human invention.

What is nature?

Everything outside
of human intention.

All artifice is natural to us.
We sprang from flesh pressed, sweating, till it heaved:
till hers and his thrust, shuddered, let loose. Thus
are persons made, is all design conceived.
Ants march in ordered rows down broken ground,
each shouldering a mote of dust, a crumb.
Queen, servants, soldiers shelter in the mound
raised from their labors, eloquent and dumb.
So what if nature's structure's wound so tight
that schemes we build to couch it come unsprung?
Our craftsmanship's a grass-high pile of dust
riddled with tunnels never meant for light
to penetrate, nor words shaped wet on tongues.
We are. We make. We can. We will. We must.

eating out

2011-08-17T20:56:00.004-05:00

This is a Shakespearean sonnet and also a pantoum. The sonnet contributes the meter and length, the pantoum the pattern of repeated lines in which the stanzas interweave with one another.

People who are used to keeping themselves aloof, in one way or another, over time can discover they've grown fond. And the fondness, even the comfort of growing accustomed to the comfort it brings, can be an uncertain thing that wisdom dictates one dance around. Like two people treading the spirals of a labyrinth, starting at opposite ends in opposite directions, their paths draw near together and then wind apart many times before they reach the center.

we two hands circle, meeting at the twelves,
spread from the rung round which the world revolves.
we lift the cup, pay up, indebt ourselves,
and even domesticity evolves.

spread from the rung round which the world revolves,
a wave of calm strokes down the ruffled spines.
and even domesticity evolves:
a slaughtered beast, poised succulent on tines.

a wave of calm strokes down the ruffled spines.
we sit up straight in hard-backed chairs and smile.
a slaughtered beast, poised succulent on tines,
rests warm within us, cradled there awhile.

we lift the cup, pay up; indebt ourselves.
we, two hands, circle, meeting at the twelves.

destroying ontology

2011-08-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

"We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition [of the question of Being], and this always means keeping it within its limits [...]"

~ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 44

I, relentless, name only truth addictive.
Ricochet, burst open to spill within it,
then bow down to kiss what is most restrictive:
absolute limit.

I, undone, define me in opposition.
What uproots me? This, to be sure, has touched me.
All I have submits. At the core, ignition
sparks in what must be

I, inmost, ownmost, who cannot be taken,
broken, torn away from the self which shows me
to the world, and shows me a world to wake in.
Thus my God knows me.

2011-08-02T04:57:00.001-05:00

response to Dangerous Fear:

All I did was build
me cages, and like a rat
was always cornered.

2011-07-16T23:56:00.000-05:00

response to Faith and Doubt

They're parentheses,
belief and disbelief, held
open like two lips.
Life is a breath that passes
through them, arrives. Falls silent.

to all trains

2011-07-09T22:52:00.006-05:00

Holy crap, this is the blues.

Within the first couple years I started writing poetry (and my songs started to not totally suck), I noticed that it's not possible to write about something until you're outside of it. You need the perspective of time and maturation to be able to create something that totally encapsulates what you've experienced. Which means, if you can write it, REALLY write it, then it's over. In the context of this here set of lyrics that is an incredibly good thing.

This exact sequence of events did not happen as such, because this process took place over the course of a little over two months. (Although the boots and hat, yes, are real, and look totally awesome on me, though not together.) Roundabout April and May sort of time period. It was after the shockwaves from what I called "hornet's nest time" (which is not possible to describe) had finally died down. During the time this song describes, the part of myself it took all that nasty to dig up out of where I'd locked it away was more or less firmly seated, and began growing to the point where I could functionally express it through my consciously accessible personality.

The preceding paragraph is weird enough, but I'll go one step further and say this. Intentionally investing a system of symbols with the emotional force of your entire personality is not a strategy I recommend for anyone, ever. The development, alteration and application of symbolic systems is an area of work in which I've invested a great big chunk of my life, and I still almost screwed it up completely. And even given how effective it all was, I'm embarrassed to think of how everything seemed to me at the time. Of course it's very useful to keep an eye out to see whether you've UNintentionally invested a few symbols with part of the force of your personality. Whether it's a few worrywart superstitions or a great big sprawling paranoid certainty, what's actually happened (if my own experience here is at all comparable) is that you've denied reality, denied existence, to a part of yourself. Which, as long as you live, will speak to you, will stand between you and the universe howling to be let back inside. And it feels terribly alien, inherently wrong, destructively desperate. Till you stop panicking and start listening.

the trash is talkin to me
what does it say
why you gotta love
what's gettin thrown away
crushed up cans of soda
brown orange peels
motorcycle tickets
cause somebody got wheels

got wheels, got wheels, got wheels

trudgin down the alley
late to punch in
a broken baby carriage
empty bottle of gin
I'm actin immature
and I'm addicted to news
I suck your every word
like it's a bottle of booze

of booze, of booze, of booze

when I let go
I get surprised
brand new black boots
in just my size
a rhinestone heart
a Stetson hat
"this is your song
listen to that"

the trash is talkin to me
speakin my fear
"you're absolutely worthless
you belong down here"
a bag of kitty litter
a toilet seat
"come cry here by the dumpster
wallow in your defeat

defeat, defeat, defeat"

keep on across the river
the Loop in the night
inside my skin I carry
everything that I fight
my heart is like a dry mouth
covered in tape
the truth I want to speak
it has no way to escape

escape, escape, escape

I peel it back
release the sound
I lift my eyes
up from the ground
above the gate
my love, my name
three little words read
TO ALL TRAINS

there's rails that run forever
I hope that you know
all God's children
have got someplace to go
whatever words you're usin
you listen, you learn
for everything you're losin
something good will return

return, return, return

love, weaponized

2011-07-06T10:27:00.002-05:00

"Anything can be a weapon if you use it as one."
Don't know who first said that.
Thank God, though, even something that can be used as a weapon doesn't have to be.

The act of observation alters things;
Attention moves what can't be told or shown.
No wretched shame or agony can bring
More horror than the gaping deep unknown.
And so I love, for what we love, we know
More intimately than what we despise.
I will descend, and gaze up from below
What answers to no weapon but my eyes.
As stone wears smooth and spattered vomit dries,
As spasmed lungs draw down hot reek, wet chill,
I wrap my gaze, my lips, my hands, my thighs
Around what I cannot escape. I will
Remain, remember, love, accept, until
terror itself breaks, and I've had my fill.

fraction

2011-07-05T21:35:00.003-05:00

Divide and conquer: invert and multiply.

one grows, acquainted with the slow, dull ache
that holds, like woven fingers tightly clasped
around a word there is no breath to gasp
nor room between to loose the sound it makes.
there, twisted in, pressed by hot skin on skin,
the shape of things takes on the smallest groove.
with neither space to alter nor improve,
there is no foe to fight, no fight to win,
but only crooked fingers reaching in
and in and in to touch, until they pinch
that last raw nerve, which stretched but never broke.
then pain at last flares bright, and there begins
destruction, change, some fraction of an inch
through which dead years leak like a puff of smoke.

"...remember your hippopotamus oath!"

2011-07-04T10:59:00.004-05:00

Here's the full text, the ancient and the modern side by side.

One of the little quips I have about myself is that I'm a hospital.

But I'm not the doctor. I just make room, I make a room and if somebody shows up needing to be healed, all I do is make a place where it can happen, then get out of the way while the real Doctor shows up and does the impossible. Even for me.

A "room" can be anything: any form, from a poetic stanza to the shape of a conversation to a moment pooled out of a season of time. Christ said, "in my Father's house there are many rooms," but heaven isn't a building made of steel and brick. It's the place where the war is over, and everybody won. My favorite definition of magic is still Gareth Knight's, "the creation of forms for spiritual forces to indwell." There's one spiritual force who trumps all others, one name through which all other names may be drawn and the poison purged out of them. I don't have to quarantine myself away from my own life anymore because there's not a fountain of plague at the center of my soul.

It doesn't make sense and I can't explain it, but it's still true. I'm free. And the best way to celebrate that is to seize every opportunity to pass it on.

"WITH PURITY, HOLINESS AND BENEFICENCE I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent danger, I will neither treat any patient nor carry out any research on any human being without the valid informed consent of the subject or the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of that individual. Into whatever patient setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief or corruption and further from the seduction of any patient.

WHATEVER IN CONNECTION with my professional practice or not in connection with it I may see or hear in the lives of my patients which ought not be spoken abroad, I will not divulge, reckoning that all such should be kept secret.

WHILE I CONTINUE to keep this Oath unviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of medicine with the blessing of the Almighty and respected by my peers and society, but should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse by my lot."

she learns to keep a secret

2011-06-21T21:23:00.004-05:00

This is my first-ever Petrarchan sonnet. I highly recommend The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, edited by Phillis Levin. She's an amazing scholar and helped me understand the expressive power of the different ways a sonnet can be composed.

I'd always thought of the Shakespearean sonnet as "three points and a prayer", like a sermon. Its three quatrains contain three ideas, couched in a pattern of alternating rhymes, with the couplet at the end providing a summary:
abab
cdcd
efef
gg

The Petrarchan sonnet is actually an older version of the form. There are two stanzas in envelope rhyme followed by six lines in a rotating pattern:
abba
cddc
efg
efg

The shift in tempo between them also marks a change in perspective within the contents of the poem. This change is called the volta, which is Italian for "turn." Even in other patterns of composition it's possible to see traces of the volta, though of course it is the most pronounced in Petrarchan sonnets. It's possible that the poet / litigators who first invented it came up with the division of eight lines followed by six as a way to represent the Golden Ratio, a mathematical concept which in ancient Greek philosophy had much to do with the universal ideal of beauty.

What I had not grasped before was why I was not really comfortable writing any type of sonnet except the Shakespearean. It just felt better to me and I couldn't say why. Levin included a quote from Paul Fussel, who described the difference succinctly:

"If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its 'commentary couplet,' seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic and even satiric operations of the human sensibility."

So there you have it. Analytical thought is my comfort zone--even in the process of creating poems, which on the surface is a highly emotional act! Some gals get comfy with themselves and learn how to feel their own feelings, and they go dance in the rain or dye their hair purple or take up windsurfing. When I want to let my hair down and really cut loose, I write a Petrarchan sonnnet.

Oh! And this relates to one of those pithy proverby things that came up in recent discussions of life issues. Togetherness is sharing for its own sake, appreciating others in their uniqueness, but sharing-togetherness is not meant to take away human loneliness. Only God can truly see always into the center of your being. Seeking the regard of other humans as a means to protect yourself from loneliness is a futile enterprise in the long run.

The real opposite of loneliness is privacy.

white fingers tighten, firm against the glass
the sand slips past them, grain by precious grain
grip till the flesh is bloodless, but refrain
from weeping. you can't reach them; they will pass
for gravity attracts all mass to mass
you, dust-mote light stick figure with a brain
excite, but cannot hope to entertain
earth's eon dance of solid, liquid, gas
and plasma, flame too ardent to contain
even within the endless curve of sun
that spilled earth molten from its fingertips
you grasp--let slip--delight in--can't explain
what God has wrought, and you yourself have done--
smile slightly. lift one finger to your lips.

construction on a door

2011-05-09T13:55:00.004-05:00

I went downstairs to put the laundry in;
There was a hammering behind a door.
When I came back to take it out again
I glimpsed a ceiling fan, sawdust-strewn floor;
A crack of inner light spilled down the hall.
The sundered door leaned close on one-by-twos,
A frame, to build the door into a wall,
Raw yellow-gold wood neatly pierced with screws.
From elevator to washing machine,
The doors I pass, the rooms where I don't live--
Inside most of them I have never seen.
But I glimpsed into this one. Please, forgive,
Sweet resident, whose name I do not know:
My eyes beheld a place I may not go.

the feeling process

2011-05-06T11:00:00.002-05:00

I am sick of this process of learning to feel
wherein "how can I help?" becomes "what can I steal?"
where the ties which are meant to bind lightly, to yoke
wrap their tendrils round mind and emotion, and choke
when the feeling is easy, analysis springs
like a coiled lidless serpent with stainless-steel wings
your intention's comprised of the following mess:
hope for comfort, confusion, and will to possess
yes, I know I can't see the inside of your brain
but with ten seconds' lead time I'll gladly explain
in a low impact-story just how it must feel
to be inside that vehicle, gripping the wheel
as you reel from momentum that skids through the turn
and the weight of your engine shifts under you--learn
to steer into it, darling, don't panic, don't fight
nimble, dance right across the oncoming headlights
forget all I can tell you if you can learn this
hold yourself centered, steady; keep moving--they miss
but you ache afterwards for the scrape of a crash
for the scream of the frame, for the flame and the ash
for the lines of pure force traced unseen through the air
to converge on an incident--accident--there
and to me you look like a drunk driver, spun slow
down a wide icy curve on a road you don't know
I've been lost there before, I've been stuck in that ditch
as you dig yourself deeper my cold fingers itch
to climb in through those windows, your eyes and your ears
to start stomping the pedals and shifting the gears
but you're there and I'm here and it just wouldn't work
I could name you your fear and I'd feel like a jerk
I could name you your dream and thereby make it less
just by touching it, something that's mine to express
so I tell you a story and pray you behold
shining, cupped in its structure, what cannot be told
and I ache with you, wait with you, patient as stone
when you wince away from it, you leave me alone
with the knowledge of just how to get you unstuck
while you blame friends and neighbors, God, Satan, bad luck
and you look at me, guileless, with unthinking trust
that makes my machine smile with cold rage and disgust
that now, now I've begun to be able to feel
the soft heart of a child, the precision of steel
welded, woven together, all rivets and bile
ratcheting up the back of my throat, and the vile
absolute certainty that from my mouth, my hands
all the truth could pour forth, and you would understand
but since it would be of absolutely no use
I breate on you--bleed on you--then let you go loose

2011-03-30T02:03:00.001-05:00

the building, closing, opening of gates
the wheels that ring along rails with a chime
o, there are infinite transition states
and every one makes, manifests a time
I need a piece of paper and a pen
this metal raises lightning from the ground
and looses it, and calls it up again
to stab at night and wash the stars with sound
green land is pounded flat and wreathed in wire
yet it is life strung dancing in the coil
to iris, wondrous, empty of desire
and empty unspanned heaven on the soil
awakened--nameless, deathless, unalloyed--
to taste all things with pleasure, even void

the avalanche artist

2011-03-19T19:29:00.005-05:00

for Myke

he's a closed-up man,
a line drawn in the sand man,
a maze of a man.

he knows the mountainside;
it's a coat he shrugs over his shoulders
the sweep of its vista from the canyon floor
each scrub pine and field mouse, goat perched
on a crag, the heft and shape
of every boulder, pebble, cliff
etched across his back

and he lifts a questing fingertip, to touch
just so
how so

and so
the avalanche that's cradled down the slope
shakes itself awake
he loves, he mourns, he cherishes
the thundering it makes

I think he hopes
I curl around my seismograph
and think he hopes

it shudders past the boles of trees
rolls crushing over burrows; dust
drenches out the sun, the switchback game trails
brushed aside like words in dirt
swept by a broad, flat hand

but when the flung shale settles into place
the traveled stones halt under their own weight
moss to the sky
there he stands, he stands, he stands, he does not break

and there he waits

to hear the still, small whisper
which will tell him why

my temptation

2011-03-16T06:50:00.006-05:00

Think a lot of people will be able to identify with this song. One of the things I've noticed about creative works is that the more personal it is--the more a given work "has blood in it"--the more likely it is to touch something universal, something all human beings experience.
I think it's similar to the reason people like superheroes; because everyone has something inside them that's very powerful. It's got a slightly different form and means of expression for each of us. But I think we're drawn to our favorite fictional heroes, at least in part, because we hope that we'll find a way to use those aspects of ourselves for good, rather than being consumed by them.

holding it perfectly still
made it seem easy to kill
sucking the static down raw
laid over all that I saw

till I turned it to sound
sound
sound

walking down every street
everyone's ready to eat
insides are empty and cold
slaves as soon as we are told

where it can be found
found
found

it's not a game but it's a test
I watch you pull open your chest
put something wet into my hands
it drips until I understand

just where you are bound
bound
bound

no too long ago
when my spirit was colder
you weren't looking at me
but over my shoulder
don't think you can tell
that a change has been made
and it works just as well
and it makes me afraid
I may not be a gun
but my tongue is a trigger
you smile in my sights
and you only get bigger
is there no way I
can give you this perspective
you don't have to die
cause that's not my objective

so please
stick around

this is my temptation
this communication
this is my temptation
this communication

this incineration
with which I am crowned

and I'm pouring it into the ground
I'm pouring it into the ground
pouring it into the ground

doubt whispers (3/6/11)

2011-03-14T15:56:00.001-05:00

doubt whispers like a listening audience
"this woman cannot possibly be real"
in shame miles deep, in towering arrogance
oh God, I know exactly how they feel
I'm loved so well, yet dare not let love rest
upon my fluttered lips--my teeth spread, bare
this frowning welter melting in my chest
bleeds rainbows, and chokes on the very air
click, shudder--one more flung perception strikes
the truth it sought, reverberates, taut-strung
we children weep, our fingers stuck in dikes
with names too vast to swallow on our tongues
spread empty arms, dive for the ground--we miss.
doubt whispers; something shrieks bright splendor. this.

teleologic (3/4/11)

2011-03-09T15:35:00.004-06:00

that
lived-in look, that
sweater flung over a chair back
slouch, the sigh
of an unwashed mug that rolls
along a countertop
how now can I
just stop
let the trash in the can
smell itself for a change, the dust
beneath the couch drift
into motes or rodents as it will
not hold
but let
each twitching finger still.

the whether machine

2011-02-24T17:42:00.006-06:00

all my machines are made of living flesh
and tears, and blood, and breath drawn deep and slow
my duty is to harvest, heap and thresh
but my joy is to cherish what I sow
here in the garden metal screams as leaves
fold out of armor, dripping, bright with dew
slow coiled roots roar, one wet red engine grieves
for though its tendrils bend to reach for you
each wire I cross short-circuits all the rest
each branch I stumble over splinters, sways
each touch I meant so gently rakes your chest
this bone-white bloom, this telephone who prays
is of no use if I do not connect
with those I’ve given trust, esteem, respect

you can't spell COURAGE without RAGE

2010-12-29T21:53:00.005-06:00

In 06, I was working for Elmer Morris and the calendar on my desk had been purchased from the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of America. The image for the month of May, pictured below, socked me right in the guts. Another painting referenced in the poem is "Peaceful Harbor" by Jean Michalski but I was unable to Googlemance it out just now. The artist who created the painting below is a Portugese lady named Daniela Cristina Caburro; you can go check out her gallery at her website.

She makes a living as a painter without the use of her arms. This lady is a ROCKSTAR. I'm so glad I found this poem again. It's not quite a sonnet: it doesn't follow the sonnet rules perfectly. But you know what? Things don't need to be perfect. Just beautiful.

Girl Gathering Flowers by Daniela Cristina Caburro

Works painted with the mouth, slow careful strokes
show beauty, rich in detail; emphasize
though limbs hang limp from spinal cords that broke,
more than mere puppets watch from our keen eyes.
Each petal's sharp, like flowers etched in metal.
Boats, stone-fast, stand in harbors; roofs slide off
into the sky. What's solid melts, unsettled.
What floats grows petrified, no longer soft.
One little girl stands in a field of blooms,
her legs obscured by solid greenery,
her hat askew, white as a skull entombed,
her gaze rapt at what only she can see.
I see a woman twisting flowers, beneath
which blur long-lost arms, painted through clenched teeth.

a verrrry old dream log

2010-12-29T18:59:00.003-06:00

Going through all my old boxes full of books and papers turns up lots of surprises. Ran across my old bachelor's thesis, on Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", for example. This, though, is a thing all its own, written from myself to myself and put to action. It was from a brief period where I wasn't writing dates on stuff so I only know, from the other content of that yellow legal pad, that it came about in midsummer of '03. A good (though kinda freaky!) piece of writing at least, and about where my head was at, at the time. Thank God I'm somewhere even nicer now. The dream itself is followed up by a couple of short analysis paragraphs which are from the same pages.

A beach of broken pebbles and cracked clams leads up to the House of Broken Things. The door is ajar. No board in its floor is unsplintered, no windowpane whole; even the rocking chair on the front porch is missing a leg. Out from under the porch darts a cat. Feral and lightning fast, its yellow eyes seem wise though they see the mouse in me. Tufts of fur missing to scars, tattered ears--is its fur grey?--it pads before me to the door of the house whose windows stand half-open like idiot mouths. The cat's tail twitches as it slides out from under my hand. I don't think I touched it. Brass knob, tarnished, old, turns with both hands and a thunk--I thought the door was ajar?--hinges creak. One comes loose, and I think the door is going to come off in my hand.
It doesn't.
Inside I think there is only one hallway, and there is, but my vision of it shifts and falsifies: I am left with an impression of winding crazed wood angles, locked, open, half-open doorways. A glance in one doorway reveals the unchanging, a gap-toothed piano with metal threads curled up under its wing, dolls with one eye that glares smirking. Another shows an empty bed, mattress stuck with its own rusted springs, cracked leather belts and a tongueless shoe that looks violent, a shadowy closet door. A few steps forward a girl's face peeks out, thin fingers wrap the wood just below the keyhole, cheeks smeared with tear-streaked dust, eyes achingly familiar. She darts back in, covers her retreat with a slam, but by now I know better than to follow. A draft whispers over my toes; I look up to see yellow eyes in the distance. The cat blinks once, twice, and I run to follow. Walls try to whisper their ancient cackles and though I cannot close my ears I don't listen.
The last doorway is locked but not closed. As I stammer, combing fingers through my hair, the cat wanders off, crooked tail slung low. The password comes back to me. Tunnelvision, I say to the dusty wood. It swings open and I hear my heart beat: this, the monster of my dreams. Blank whiteness. Viscous like the goop in a lava lamp, moving, its bulk fills the doorway and tentacles congeal, reach for me. My mouth chock full of a scream that keeps my teeth bound together. Don't encourage it, I tell myself. Out of the whiteness eyes roll down, lidless, and lips writhe into a mouth. Now only the tongue holds its ghost, the purples and greens of a clown face--not colors but hues bent wrong. I remember the dream that freed me from this face; I remember Atreyu between the sphinxes. I step through. So simple to say.
Looking forward, forward, up ahead a narrow chimney climbs up a cliffside, the path freckled with pointed stones, the angle of ascent maybe sixty degrees. I must keep my eyes on the ground so as not to slip or step on a sharp stone and injure my feet. I climb for what feels like hours, panting; soon my only thoughts are of the next step, the next handhold, for which I am distinctly grateful. Grey stone eases its way into russet, another geological age, and overhead I hear the rough voice of a crow. A fiber in my heart loosens. It is safe now to look back, I say almost out loud, and grabbing a handhold, turn to look over my shoulder. Down and down beneath the rockfalls, between the pitted forearms of the stern-faced hillside, a tiny ramshackle thing with a half-shingled roof gapes into the wind. On the stoop a white figure, spangled in what might have been frills but at this distance looks like dirt has its face turned unerringly towards me, foolish hat notwithstanding. I fancy I can see its mouth open at the touch of my eyes, and yet I'm deeply, madly grateful its running is running in place. I turn to face forward. There, the path spikes up and seems to end in the blue sky, the crow wheeling near beneath wisps of cloud. Clambering the last few steps, I fetch up somehow on my feet.
The plateau is a valley in the center of a circle of stones, great mountains that stand in the distance and remember. Behind me I cannot find the path I came by amid the boulders and sparse underbrush, and I decide that this is a good thing. To my right and left and behind me the mountains are gathering up their skirts, evergreens here and there, and on one hilltop a ways away I think a mountain goat springs from one crag to another. Ahead, there is no path, but a wide expanse of stone worn smooth by rain and wind and the passing of many feet. I step forward onto it and see, perhaps a hundred yards off, a circle of monoliths laid on monoliths like the great circle in England. I walk forward unhurried, feeling the wind through my fingers and the sun gently pressing the crown of my head.
There seated by the nearest of the twice eleven gates is a dragon, coiled around and over himself, silver-blue and blood-colored with eyes bright as a distant star. He winks at me, this old wyrm of the earth and sky--old to my eyes anyway. His rumbling voice is like drumbeats, joyous and solemn.
About time, he says.
I got a little hung up, I reply, dashing fingers through my hair. If I was too long in arriving he forgives me, and I am glad.

---

They are fools who think surrender is defeat.
A wise person knows that any endeavor can proceed either around an obstacle or through it, and can survive retreat if it is kept in order and those involved keep their goals firmly in mind. Of course the most glorious surrender is that which marks the transformation of an adversary into an ally--but this is a rare privilege and difficult to describe. I will say that apparent surrender, that is, misdirection, is a valuable tool in clever hands and can be used to thwart even a cunning opponent. But apparent surrender is not true surrender and is no fit replacement for it. This you should bear in mind in love as well as conflict, in friendship as in enmity. For one who consistently substitutes false surrender for true is no fit companion.

---

I began looking for a way, and as I went, the path sprang up around me.

wound so tight v2.0

2010-12-29T10:42:00.004-06:00

The ending is muuuuch better than in v1.0! :D Must...arrange...recording session again soon! *wag*

panic rises up so suddenly within me
crease my brows and purse my lips and I look old
like an origami spider up a chimney
I will fall into the fire if I unfold

wound so tight
wound so tight
because everything else is unraveling

we throw away the things we own
the clothes, the books the telephone
devices we use every day
and statues we cannot display

but like a camel full of water
knowing I'm my Father's daughter
swells my back, makes me look muscular and strong
still I can't carry all this gear
I'm just a snarl of will and fear and hope
suspended from a filament of song

wound so tight
wound so tight
because everything else is unraveling

why do I clutch myself so tight?
it isn't any use
only my hands can reach inside
of me and cut me loose
all blessings wait for me if I
can find the will to choose
to let them in

only my God, my world, my loved ones
truly satisfy
the thirst in me that turning inward
would have drained me dry
I hold to all things but in fact
I do not have to try
only begin

wound so tight
wound so tight
still when everything else is unraveling

the tigress

2010-12-27T17:27:00.004-06:00

When I was over at Lexy's on Sunday, she was slicing up an onion to sautee (pasta and white wine sauce with clams! supar nummeh!) and the first line popped into my head. I told it to her and she laughed. For anyone coming out of a difficult time, working their way out of a funk so to speak, a big part of the challenge is dispelling the negative illusions in the "what kind of a person am I?" part of our thinking. This is a pretty bold and brassy sonnet--but it's supposed to be, as an encouragement and a counter to illusions. :D "You go, girl."

The kind of woman who makes onions cry
because she did not slice them thin enough;
who'll answer pat when lovers ask her why
their anxious favors met her cool rebuff.
She sleeps with novels written for her friends,
and when dreams misbehave, she cuts them loose.
I'd load my straining back to serve her ends,
but bowing, weary, to her is no use.
Bright, like a tigress throned among the sheep,
who do not satisfy, yet genuflect,
she calmly conquers but won't deign to keep
those who don't find the strength to show respect.
But for the lucky few who understand,
she'll sheath her claws, smile soft--open her hands.

more fun at Christian Taoism

2010-12-06T12:10:00.003-06:00

Odd that my last good stimulus-response thing over there was also about limits, the boundaries between interiority and exteriority. I think that boundary is always going to be an overarching theme of my work. In much the same way, and for much the same reason, that authenticity and degrees of reality are an overarching theme of Myke's.

Here I've tried to do that thing which I learned from GK Chesterton. Take a seemingly unanswerable question and turn it inside out, and more often than not you'll find the answer was simple and good and lovely and--in retrospect--blindingly obvious.

HK Stewart: Reaching the Bottom

I can see the bottom of a creek.
I can touch the bottom of a stream.
I can swim to the bottom of a river.
I can dive to the bottom of the sea.
How do I reach the bottom of the Tao?

Me:

I open, a bloom:
the honeybee lights on me,
touches the inmost.
When I receive, I'm carried
forth from myself, and give life.

ah, there is is

2010-12-05T07:12:00.005-06:00

Something odd happened just now when I posted up the sonnet I got this morning on Facebook. I'm usually fanatical about typos, but for some reason while I was transcribing it out of my notebook I made the same typo, twice. Which altered the meaning of the lines slightly without detracting from them: "there it is" became "there is is," not once but twice. Emphatically. So I think I'm going to make that accidental change permanent. And come to think of it, do it one better and change "all of it is true" to "all of is is true" in the third line from the end!

To all that passes through my hands which is in any sense alive, I wish to allow, to the extent I can, the same freedom I myself relish. And ultimately even a poem only passes through my hands and out into the world, whose citizen I am and which I love with a towering passion.

Ah, there is is, the universe again
Just when I had it narrowed to a point
Tight-gripped in thumb and finger like a pen
Round, nestled down the first and second joint
There is is now, the world again made fresh
I roll out wet upon it with a slap
To see the dreams of all I love made flesh
And hot coals heaped in our Opponent's lap
No mortal soul can match the Maker's art
What lives is dense with riches, through and through
I would be straining at the leash to start
But I am free, and all of is is true
Flung wide, all me gives thanks to Him in whom
The living live - I roar - "Make room - Make room!"

baggage

2010-12-03T12:41:00.005-06:00

Killer was the first.

Or at least the first in this little area of time, in this particular season. She wasn't, as people tend to count things, a member of the family. Just a tiny, shy gray and white kitty who lived inside the liquor store where a good friend of Pearl's works. When we visited there, she was in a bad way already. We walked down the aisle lined with glass refrigerated cases packed with beer and there she was, motionless, alone, a little bundle of fur and bones curled up against the heat vents underneath the doors. So we did the natural and proper thing; knelt down on the floor, petted and made much of her, carefully brushed the layers of caked and matted dirt out of her fur, told her she was a good kitty and a pretty kitty, said with our hands and the fact of our presence that somebody loved her.

She died a few days later, and from what I'm told she didn't die easy. I'm glad I got to see her first.

My late former boss, Elmer Morris, taught me a wonderful Jewish word: dayenu. There's a song around it that's part of the end-of-the-year holiday. He didn't teach me the song--at 96, after years of not attending religious services, he didn't remember it--but he told me what the word means: Enough. Enough for us. Both in the sense of, "it's enough, we're full, we can't eat another bite or we'll explode!" and in the sense of, "we've done all we can, given all we've got--oh God, please let it be enough."

I know just a little bit of the tune, though, the one word and the scrap of melody. And on the way home last night on the train, relieved and much healed and full of happiness, I sang it over and over when the song of the wheels was loud enough to cover it and wrap it up from other ears than mine. Daaayenu, dayenuuu...daaayenu, dayenuuu. And I smiled that smile in the darkness of the tunnel and the peace of God settled over my soul.

Shashi didn't die easy either. As soon as Amber called me up and told me to come, I could hear in her voice how bad it was. That the vet's more hopeful prognosis was almost certainly mistaken. I made it up there on the last train of the night. Mom and Amber were there for me and hugged me and made sure I ate and had tea. They'd been watching over the cat all night and did all they could, held her and tried to squirt water down her throat, even hydrated her with the IVs they have to care for the other cats. And when it was clear that she wasn't going to get better, Amber did the needful and called me up, took up the mantle once again of the bearer of unbearable news. I got there in time.

She was panting for breath, hot to the touch, like someone who'd just run a mile with a heavy backpack in full summer. When I petted her, when my hands were on her, it seemed to ease the panic a little. Her eyes were unfocused though, the third lid pulled in across the eye and bloodshot with strain, and when I looked into them she didn't see me. I looked anyway. I thought of Myke, and what he always says about the difficult things, the unavoidable suffering that comes of living in a flawed and imperfect universe: I do not look away. I do not, ever, look away.

It took more than two hours, though, and I was so tired. Mom and Amber had gone to bed--we all agreed it was best not to wake Pearl, who'd been inconsolable when her own cat died last month. They didn't want to leave me, but in a way I kind of wanted to focus, to not divide my attention, to be able not to look away. When Mom finally went into her room, hurting for me, I said, "Don't worry, Mom. Don't worry." At that hour of the night all the vets were closed. There's emergency clinics out there you can go to at all hours but a last-minute visit costs more than a hundred dollars. So there was no shot, no way to make it quick. Mercy enough that I had the train fare to even get up there.

When it got to the point where my grip on consciousness was starting to slip, she was far gone enough that even my hands on her body didn't seem to register anymore. So I took her off the cushion, lay back on the couch and held her on my chest. Every breath had a raspy little moan in it, but in spite of everything my head drooped and I started to doze. I was so tired. It startled me awake when of a sudden she thrashed, yowling for a moment as if she fought something, voided what little fluid was left in her out of both ends. I suppose that was the moment, but it almost didn't seem real. She was still as warm and fluffy and soft as ever. But when I put my hand on her body all I could hear was the echo of my own heartbeat passing through her tiny frame. After awhile I set her body down on the cushion which was on the floor next to the couch and covered it with a blanket, got up and rooted in Mom's dresser for a clean shirt, went to the bathroom. Before I went to sleep at last I had to reach under the blanket a couple times, just to be sure, for my hands to be sure; no pulse, no breathing. Real, but in a sense not real at all anymore--a body without the life in it, the living being that I'd loved. Baggage, empty of the treasure it had borne.

"All true wealth," Lois Bujold once wrote, "is biological." What lives is what matters, and while we who live are alive we are priceless. Life is the only anentropic force in the universe, the only thing which draws order out of disorder, which slows and inverts decay, which blooms and makes beautiful. Decay itself, I think, is principally beautiful because it exposes the fingerprints life left behind, shows in naked silence the glory and the victory and the majesty of what was, of what has come to pass, though not to stay. However small it may seem as people tend to count things. It is life which makes the universe a place worth inhabiting, and love which makes any life a treasure to be savored rather than a burden to be endured.

When I got home to Chicago on Tuesday, I knew my roommate Don was in the process of breaking up with, and kicking out, his second Craigslist girlfriend. Based on the hash he (and to be fair, Pennee also) made of the first Craigslist relationship attempt, I knew I was in no shape to deal with it that day. And I had already arranged with my good friend Lexy to get together and celebrate her birthday after meeting Tuesday morning with the building manager of the place where I'm trying to move. Since it was bitterly cold and we didn't feel like going out, I ended up crashing at her place after spending the whole day together. It was healing for both of us. She's been depressed and sort of away from her usual dynamic self this past while. But she's a brilliant and incredibly resilient person, who reminds me of no one so much as my big sister Amber, the sort of person who walks through mountains when the mountains fail to respond to a polite request that they move out of the way. And I've been rocked out of balance by endings and beginnings, wonder and dread, grief and joy all crashing into each other. But I love a lot and with grace and help am learning to love more and I'm good to be around. Friends are friends because they help each other. Getting back to the place I currently live and walking into that situation, though it wasn't really mine to solve, was something for which I had to prepare. And when I got back after work on Wednesday I was prepared.

Don got up in the middle of the night to grab some iced tea, and I sat him down at the kitchen table and got a talk going. He'd been totally freaked about me moving; he's part owner of the building here and without my rent he and his business partner don't really have another way to keep up the mortgage payments. And finding a good, reliable tenant during winter in Chicago--let alone smack in the middle of the holidays--verges on the impossible. That on top of his own impending breakup had knocked him for a loop and I wanted to help him out of it. I don't want to destroy anything when I leave. I don't want to leave anybody hanging in the wind. I don't want to see anybody lose, anybody suffer, any good thing die, if there's anything at all I can do. With any kind or degree or mode of relationship, however personal or economic, however large or small. I have enough, and more than enough, to live my life and be the person I'm becoming. I will do all I can in all directions at once and ask and joyfully accept the help of everyone involved and pray God it is enough that no one loses. He was comforted.

Yesterday, as today, I had the day off work, and with my new-minted equilibrium turned with a will to the task of sorting out some of my possessions. Cutting down on my own baggage. Don had cut off the internet, fearing I would leave--as I'd originally planned to do--today, in the first week of December. He'd've had to vacate the place himself if I had, and likely the first floor tenants as well and sell the building in a down market. None of that was especially real or pressing to Debra, the second Craigslist girlfriend, though. Without a phone of her own, without internet access, and without even--because Don went into her purse and took them, the cause of their big fight yesterday--the keys to the apartment to get back in if she left, she had nowhere to go and no way to get out of here either.

She's been more than depressed for more than a little while, and coming here and trying to build something with Don was sort of a last-ditch effort in a situation where all other doors seemed closed. And it wasn't working out. They bickered almost constantly and had each basically given up on the other. I was on the phone much of the early part of the day, in my room and the storage area I've got up here, sorting out all my clothes and figuring what to keep and what to give away. But I overheard her say, loud enough to carry through my door, "I will never again trust another living soul." And involved or not, my problem or not, it hit me like a rabbit punch. Later when I was off the phone I stepped back into the thought of that moment, stopped stock still in my tracks and prayed--for wisdom, for mercy, for everyone involved. For a problem that I most definitely did not have the right to impose myself upon but it hurt to watch, especially for a second time, with a person so far sunk in her own esteem she couldn't even get angry enough to fight it. She spent most of the day curled up on the couch hardly moving; after awhile she covered up her face with a blanket because, I think, she didn't want to have to look at me or Don as we walked by.

I even left the building for a time. Unlike Debra I have keys, and I really, really wanted to get to the library and use the internet there. On the way I dropped off a little bag with a blanket and some warm socks at the bus terminal. There's a homeless lady there I've talked to a time or two, pretty lucid, spunky as all get out, considering, and I figured since I'm giving so much stuff away I might as well cut out the middleman and give a few things to someone I know. She wasn't there, but I left it with a couple of other guys. They let me know her name, or rather what everybody in the homeless community there calls her, which is Mama. I know a couple times a year Don will put together a feast and bring it over there--where else is the homeless community going to get a feast?--and it cheered me up a little to learn Mama's name and that she's a known and in a certain sense respected citizen among them.

And at the library I got to send off a sonnet I'd written earlier in the day, to the hopeful comfort of its intended recipient. Won't reproduce the whole thing here, but the first line goes:
They know in hell, and they are terrified.

Much later, after Don had left to go hang out with a drinking buddy of his, Debra knocked on my door and asked to use my phone. Which was my in, though she was so anxious and feeling so unworthy that she hardly even registered how glad I was to have permission. I sat with her for a good long while and talked--I mostly listened, caught her terms and turned them over and put them in perspective. Told her lots of stories, quoted quotables, let her vent and pull up her astonishment and anger and fear and just look at them, see them for what they were and not have to run from the fact that she felt them. Sang her movin' down in the world and it made her laugh.

It helped, actually, a lot that she was so angry at Don. Drinking has been a major issue for her for awhile, made it impossible for her to stay with her son's family, made her unwilling to go stay with her parents, who are teetotalers living in a dry county. But she looked over at the fridge and shook her head and pointed and said, "That man--he makes me so angry. I know there's beer in that fridge and I'm not even gonna drink it, because I'm fed up, I've had enough of this crap, and I don't want anything of his."

The plan was for her parents--she's middle-aged, they're elderly--to drive up from Kentucky and pick her up this morning. But her son called up and said that wasn't going to work. It'd be a brutal drive, Kentucky to Chicago and back, even in daylight in nice weather, and at night in the cold he didn't want to ask that of them. He offered to buy her a bus ticket over the phone, so she could take the Greyhound down there and have them pick her up. And I watched her slip right back into panic, I watched her face pressed up to my phone as she said, "I can't. I can't." She'd have to leave everything behind, all her little meager possessions that were her only link to the life she used to have before everything went to hell. She'd have to leave the pieces of herself, worth more to her for so long than her actual self, here in this house, in the custody of a man she despises more than she needs drinking. And here I was trying to get rid of all my baggage, with another day off work coming up, and I know how to get to the bus station. I started bouncing up and down in my seat and it was hard not to laugh; she would have taken that as mockery in the face of her despair. "This is totally doable! Yes it is! We can carry it all between the two of us, and I know how to get to the bus station, and it's totally doable! Wait right here!"

I went and took a peek at her stuff, in boxes on the living room floor and in the front closet, then dashed back into my closet and got all the duffels I had, tossed them on the floor next to the boxen. By this time she was off the phone, and when I was at the door heading for the basement where I had some more duffels, she stood up from her chair in the kitchen and asked me, "I don't understand. Why are you doing this?" Till then I had passed everything off with no problem, my pleasure, not a big deal, no worries. That time, though, I grinned and bounced on my toes and said, "Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. I'm takin' it literally. As it should be!"

(Just now--literally just now, while I was typing this--the agent from the new building called up to tell me that my application to take over my good friend Nabeel's lease has been approved. :D God's timing.)

When I came back up the stairs singing "These boots are made for walkin" she had already started pulling her stuff out of the closet and taking it off the hangers. She'd gotten so very upset with Don earlier for going in her purse, it seemed wise to me to just sit at the table and let her get everything arranged for herself. I rolled cigarettes and told more stories, and she started to focus less on venting and more on the prospect of being able to escape. I copied out the lyrics to movin' down and wrote on the back of it, "It's been wonderful to know you, though I wish the circumstances had been better. This was the last song I ever sang to my father. It was sad then, but it's happy now. May there always be a road." Then I folded it up and she put it in her purse. I hope she reads it on the bus. Thinking of bus reading time--Chicago to Kentucky is a long trip!--I went in my room and got Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! which is extremely funny and uplifting, and is one of the few books I own myself rather than having had it lent to me.

She started to set aside a few things to add to my Salvation Army bags, since she did have more clothes and things than even two people could reasonably carry on their backs. And I told her about leaving some stuff in the station for Mama and about the socks, which stuck in her imagination. So we put together another little bag to leave along the way. She had way warmer socks than the ones I'd left earlier and it made her feel good to be giving stuff away to someone who'd appreciate it. She also gave me a lovely button-down comfy sweater with pockets, which is very nice but too big for her and too bulky to carry. (I'm wearing it now, in fact. I told that to Don earlier this afternoon and he said it had made her look old, but on me it looks really sharp.) And I showed her how you carry multiple duffel bags, straps crossed over the chest to distribute the weight, with a smaller bag in each hand. After getting rid of a few items there was just enough that between the two of us we could carry it.

The walk to the bus terminal was incredibly hard for her and slow going. She'd never done anything remotely like it before; her back muscles weren't used to the strain and on her tiny frame the straps kept slipping out of alignment. We had to stop and rest a few times--it's about a mile from here to the terminal--but we made it, in good time and in good spirits. The train ride down she was talking even more hopefully, focusing on getting out, getting independence, having a chance to start off all new. When we got to the stop I actually didn't recognize it at first--I'd usually gone to a different Greyhound station--but a fellow commuter pointed out the correct street to us and within half a block down it I knew exactly where we were.

There was a bad moment at the ticket counter. She had seven bags altogether, and due to rising fuel costs Greyhound's policy is that you get one carryon, one bag in the overhead compartment on the bus and one under the bus for the price of the ticket. Second bag under the bus is ten dollars, third and each bag thereafter is another thirty-five. She got a little panicked again; I could feel it rising in her. I said, gently as I needed to, "Debra. It's just stuff. You're getting out." And I looked in my wallet and I had thirty, so I took two fives and slapped them on the counter. She was flabbergasted all over again but we hunkered down, zipped open all the bags and tried to empty out at least one, consolidate some more, stuff the already packed bags a little tighter. And she took some of the smaller bags and put them inside each other to make a single massive carryon. After all that, she'd sorted out and selected a half-full bag's worth of stuff she could bear to get rid of, and I gave it to the Greyhound guy to add to the station's donation bin. He and the ticket agent said they'd give her a break, since after all it was duffels and not hard luggage, and let her have an extra bag under the bus. Though they warned her that when it came time to change buses in Cincinnati, the driver of the next bus might not let her take along all of it from there. They tagged what she had and I helped her carry it over to the line of other people's luggage waiting for the 3:40am, and I hugged her and wished her well and she thanked me again.

I hope she pitched that extra bag in Cincinnati. I hope she laughed and the wall of panic in her laugh broke suddenly out from under her and let her into that great big bright wide beyond it. And I hope she pitched that baggage in the bin and got back on the bus and rode all the way home to a dry county with a great big grin on her face and the cold air of Kentucky felt delicious in her lungs because there's so, so much of it, and it's free.

When I got back to the bus terminal Mama was there, in her usual spot on the little ledge next to the payphone. The bag we'd left behind was nowhere in sight, but some of the things that had been in it were peeking out of her other luggage and I think she was wearing Debbie's socks. And I smiled the smile again, much bigger this time, and skipped all the way across the terminal to Dunkin Donuts and bought myself a bagel. With cream cheese.

giving thanks

2010-11-26T11:28:00.002-06:00

In love there is no low or high point,
neither consciousness, nor the lack of it.
There is no leader, no shaikh, no follower,
but there are hidden ways, sleight of hand, and revelry.

~Jalaluddin Rumi, Rubaiyat 674

I wished a lot of customers Happy Thanksgiving yesterday, but I didn't post or write anything on the subject of giving thanks.

Since I started praying every day, I have tried--sometimes failed, when other feelings or thoughts intruded--to start each day by giving thanks. It is a shift in attitude which makes it possible to find and appreciate the good things in life, and pulls the mind away from worry about the future or brooding on the past. The presence of God, or if you prefer, the light of active joy which illuminates the experience of time, exists only in the present. A human being is in a sense a doorway through which change flows into the world. You are what you do, as Lois Bujold wrote. Choose again, and change.

With thanks, I open the door in myself to the best things in the world of the possible. And by choosing to rest myself in thanks and appreciation rather than blame or regret, I give myself permission to pour this possibility forth into time, to make it real. Every second I live, every moment in which blood and breath flow through my body, is another opportunity to choose, to change, to become a gate through which heaven can enter earth. That is why I give thanks every day. That is why no matter what happens, whatever grief or difficulty or challenge I must face within the circle of a day, for the time, for the gift, for the privilege and responsibility of bringing something good into the world through myself--for this I give thanks.

Today, in about half an hour, Dave will come over and pick up those possessions of his that I've been holding. We will look each other in the eye and know in person what I told him and we spoke of on the phone twelve days ago: that our partnership is over, that we are no longer a couple. I give thanks that I had the opportunity to be with him and for all that we shared; I give thanks because we are both truly much better people for having known each other. I grieve that it is over. I am sorry and I regret that I did not find ways to do more to stop what was between us from fading away as it did. At this point the best I can do with that regret is express it, and be resolved never to fail again as I did. But I still look back and give thanks that our partnership was what it was, that it was worth doing much and more to try to save, that it is worth grieving now in its end.

Honor to that which is no more. Honor to we who live and in living are given the gift of the chance to choose, to become, to pour forth, to change.

***

It's over now. We said goodbye, we agreed we were better people for having been together, and with that closure came forgiveness and mutual wishes for the best life has to offer. I will treasure the good there was in the time we had and he will do the same. When it comes to a moment where goodbye needs to be said, no one could ask for more. I give thanks.

a fool's ambition

2010-11-06T20:28:00.007-05:00

A new song, first in awhile. I have said many times and will say again that I'm a fool (as I've quoted elsewhere--a fool for love, and other things). Though that's not necessarily always a good thing, in the context of this song it kind of is. One must be at least a bit of a fool to hope for and have faith in things which are not, on the face of them, humanly possible.
This is a true rocker; it also contains one swear.

flies under glass
stomachs in line
stones in the bedspread
moments in time

a blade unbended
a scale well measured
a foe befriended
a soft heart treasured
a vast loudspeaker
a friend who listens

a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition

dreams splashed with blood
too hot to touch
I'm only human
love, be my crutch

a promise proven
a road not taken
a sight so soothin'
a true temptation
love all ten billion
keep one for kissin'

a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition
a fool's ambition

I feel like shit
just for drawing this line
but you've got to admit you can never be mine
if you only can change by tearing yourself down
love, I want you, I want you, I want you around
till the sun burns blue
till the dream comes true

a work of fire

2010-09-18T22:23:00.003-05:00

I yelled at Myke today, for the reasons listed below. He is understandably excited, as he has just gotten into the groove of writing short stories and submitting them to contests. I should--he is most correct!--be doing the same thing with poetry contests. Money can be won by this method, especially if one possesses competitively good product, which both of us do in our respective fields. However, I feel that the method he employed today to encourage me to move faster on this was...not the best method. ;D So there you go, Myke. You've been wondering why I haven't written a song about you--it's cause you hadn't annoyed me in the right way till today!

brother man, we are equal
and you of all people
ought to know
that the letters I've sent
bout my food stamps and rent
had to go
now you encourage me
next to send poetry
it is so

you say smash through your inertia
cause the past it cannot hurt ya
you say make room in your income
you will earn it back and then some
you say do not drag your stupid feet
just get your work out on the street
before the time expires

cause this is a work
this is a work
this is a work of fire

brother man, what's your hurry
you're awfully sure the
fix ain't on
I'm recording my tracks
I have piled up my back
with words and song
busting out all that's mine
at the same time
is taking too long

I don't dare to take a breather
because I don't like it either
in our sleep we grow like flowers
I would kill for six straight hours
you don't ask me what I've done, you
of all people are the one who
would name me my desires

but this is my work
this is a work
this is a work of fire

I just began to pray again
said, Lord, teach me to burn
threw everything away again
I thought that I had learned
my sparks are flying everywhere
let something catch
don't lecture me like I don't care
hand me a match

cause this is work
this is a work
this is a work of fire

the end of the world

2010-08-30T23:22:00.009-05:00

This story is true.

I love every train
for the sound of its wheels
there's an ache in my chest
that it heals

but for you
it's the sound of the end of the world

the driver stomps hard on the brakes a block early
and calls out
"last stop for the red line!
last stop for the red line!"
until all of us spill out, confused,
to round the corner on a street
flanked with fire engines, sirens;
commuters perspiring, turned away from Berwyn's gates
I gaze up at the platform, the train's gaping doors,
the uniformed men's heavy steps on the boards
they have summoned a piece of the world's end for you
our red line halts in mourning for yours

cause for you it's the end of the world

a man tells me you hurled
yourself onto the tracks
a woman, he says, old or young, white or black he can't say
no one there knows your name
and I say, it's a shame
it's a shame

that for you it's the end of the world

once I listened to Metra conductors
discussing
another world ended
by metal momentum, they said
in the moment before you were dead
you looked the train conductor in the eye
you made it her business
you made her bear
witness

and all I'll say is, it's a shame

because men lay tracks
and men build engines
and men write schedules
but God made trains
because all of his children have somewhere to go

and I weep as I walk down the street, cause I know
that for you it's the end of the world.

love's irrational

2010-08-28T04:06:00.003-05:00

Only reason sentences aren't capitalized is 'cause my n and b keys, as I've mentioned often, are broken, and I am lazy. And many sentences begin with n. The first line is something I've had bouncing around in my head for years; I'm as surprised as you at the work it finally led into.
Oh, divine desire and desire divine. That which pulls us outside of self, into eternity which brought forth time. :D And all good things.

as many names as thunderstorms have legs
what is the shape of this, its boundary?
make me a puddle, dripping, coiled, who begs
for one more drop to slip inside of me.
slit through the tape, free this multiplicand
to wriggle, slick, down every integer.
we smear out reams, but our weak, human hands
cramp, tremble. still. no sequences recur.
no rational intention makes desire
or fractions it, divides it to an end.
for this all reasons labor, yearn, perspire
till all we are is blood and ink to spend,
to pour out, helplessly demanding more.
come, reason; bring us near what we adore.

one question

2010-08-21T23:57:00.002-05:00

Amber just lent me G.K. Chesterton's Heretics. XD I'm not even finished with chapter 1 yet. Unregardless, it's sonnet time. These events all occurred, but gradually, over the past couple months in different contexts. I cherry-picked 'em to make for a cohesive group of images. That is poetic license.

I've never been there, but for what it's worth,
I've sipped its nectar when my throat was parched.
And I say heaven is invading earth,
and I exist to speed its forward march.
The bread inside the cupboard has grown stale.
The mop I drag across the floor trails dirt.
The funds I sent were stolen from the mail.
The words I said, meant to uplift you, hurt.
Let's bite down hard--we did not starve today.
The floor stands solid underneath the grime.
God grant me grace, to earn what I must pay,
and you, to launch forgiveness into time.
It falls to us to answer, if we dare,
one question. Heaven can exist--but where?

how much is left

2010-08-18T00:56:00.002-05:00

Really, I have very little to complain about. Hit the schedule jackpot this weekend--got two weekend days off in a row, which never ever happens for retail employees in a 24 hour store, am I right? Got to hang out with Dave and also Mom and Amber, and good times were had by all.
At work today, though, I was not my usual dynamic self. The negativity of people around me seemed more noticeable than usual, which I think reflects a change in me rather than them. I ended up starting a lot of conversations that couldn't quite get finished because urgent tasks interrupted. Happens all the time; today I just noticed it more.
This song obviously rose out of personal feeling, but it comes from a frustration which we all experience. When faced with many things worth doing and many people worth spending time on, how do we choose? How can we slice out a little time to relax, or to do things which please only ourselves, without feeling like we're stealing that time?

Here's how the chords go. For my reference as much as anyone's. XD

verses:
Am D
F G

chorus:
Bm(7fr) D
G(7fr) D
Bm(7fr) D
G (7fr) D B

bridge:
F# A(5fr)
D(5fr) B

Lyrics follow.

(v)I draw the meat across the blade
look at the pretty slice I made
it's perfect for your sandwiches
one thing you never ask me is

(ch)how much is left
how much is left
how much is left
how much is left when you're gone

(v)of course of course I love to be your friend
it doesn't work if I ever pretend
I want to see God's skeleton within
the personality under your skin
though I make every single second count
I never get a different amount
I want to be a friend to myself too
but cannot bring myself to say to you

(ch)how much is left
how much is left

(br)sprinkle the blood around the roots
when will my heart be soft as soil
I salivate for life's first fruits
moments before they spoil

(ch)how much is left
how much is left
how much is left
how much is left

how much is left
how much is left
how much is left
how much is left till they're gone

Johnny the Greek

2010-08-04T15:37:00.005-05:00

Kinda unsure about this one. Morally, rather than poetically. This is a real man, and a true story, but I would not say these things to him in person. Because they are angry things. To his credit, since I stopped speaking to him, he has not come over to my area to yammer at me. Which means, I think, that he gets that I am not speaking to him. This is an amount of consideration greater than zero.
Hopefully having written this, I've gotten my own frustrations off my chest. And I hope this guy finds a good way out of the place that he's in.

Head held up and back, till your chin
folds into your neck, chest puffed out
with every one of Alexander's victories, you wear
your ridiculous hats as if
you'd personally invented the Olympics, and received
a much-deserved reward.

"Oh god here he comes," groan the men,
but you're not even watching
"it's that creepy guy," wince the women,
though I doubt you would care, if you knew

When you speak to God he answers you, Johnny,
in the warm bemused tones of one grown accustomed
to hearing his own words spill from someone else's lips--
the favored son of a favored race, less to blame
for Christ's death than the Romans
(who after all did the crucifying)
and all who follow the church of Rome
damned in your eyes by,
let's call it
geography.

But you, Johnny, you
are guileless, guiltless from the get-go.
You recount with a face full of glee
the sins of those you say that God will not forgive
and fantasize his wrath
and it's easy for you, Johnny,
cause you've never trespassed against anyone.

You keep to public places.
Like the place I work.

I sling potato salad, and you serve
heaping spoonfuls of your wisdom
to everyone who fails
to make good their escape.

Ernest, who sits in the sun, smokes roll-ups like I do,
he's working on his GED, hitting the gym, and if he mutters
angrily to himself all day as the curb softens under his angles,
and I don't know the story of his scars,
he is my friend.

Aldona, who is sweet and takes a hint, wears purple, reads much
and wants to chat
all
night
and some of us run from the friendly, lonely, white-haired lady
with the shaggy dog stories, but she
is most definitely my friend.

Where you work, you say, it's all
chemicals and corpses and exacting
sanitation standards, and though I respect
you do an unpleasant and difficult job,
I bet cadavers listen best of all,
and never ever ever interrupt.

Upstairs in the breakroom, we have a television.
It is always on, always
at maximum volume, only gets one channel--
Cheaters, judge shows, Raymond, Lopez, King of Queens--
and I have to walk past and the sound won't stay down and I can't
turn it off,
and you are that television, Johnny

and I
have lost patience with you.
You bully all the world in self-defense.
You've made yourself an argument against.

And so, dear John, though I can't say we're friends
I know you will get all this off your chest
lay down among your perfect audience
and that will be the first day of the rest

no limits (response)

2010-08-03T03:26:00.007-05:00

I've been having a blast over at Christian Taoism. Go read it if the name seems a little weird--or, really just go read it. All the posts are short meditative poems, and, following the lead of the other regular commenter there, responses are most often in the form of a poem. Which is the big draw for me! You all know how I love to write from prompts. So far I've resisted the impulse repost an HK Stewart poem plus my response to it here, but this, I think, is the one where I'm just too happy with the way mine turned out to keep it off my own blog. XD
My poem is both a response to HK's poem entitled no limits, and to the concept of the lack of limits.

There are
no limits,
no borders,
no boundaries,
no edges
in your
spiritual life.

still, I have to cross a ford
where I end and you begin.
I can't name till I've explored
that strange land beneath your skin.

here are places god has breathed,
like dawn's light makes mountains gold,
spilled from silhouettes, unsheathed.
here you, rapt, tremble to hold

snow-capped peaks against the blue,
wider than you now, cool, pale.
love, we know not what we do.
love, we know we must not fail.

trust messages

2010-07-29T16:02:00.007-05:00

This despite appearances is a straight up love song. Wink, wink, say no more, as the fella says.
There's a reference in chorus 2 to a scene in Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, in which the main character, alone in the post office at night, has an overpowering vision. All the undelivered mail with which the building is stuffed cries out to be--literally--delivered. I hope it's an image I'll get to refer to again and again in many works, because it affected me profoundly.

pain is a message
that something's broken
pain is a message
you have to open
sometimes, true
you have to wait for
it to get through
to get what you paid for
get what you paid for
what you paid for

cry it out loud
you don't have to be nervous
or frightened or proud
it's just customer service
customer service, customer service
customer service

love is desiring
your lover's freedom
if they hunger for feedback
you get to feed 'em
sometimes, yes
the answer is no
that is your test
how will you say so
how will you say so
will you say so

we tremble to write
down the message love gives to us
letters at night
they all whisper, deliver us
deliver us, deliver us
deliver us

trust is a language
two minds make slowly
in tongues of fire
in pain made holy
what you give
does not reduce you
our love lives
you let me choose you
you let me choose you
let me choose you

body's electricity
run through dust
we are all that we see
laid on all that we trust
baby, whom do you trust
do you trust, do you trust
baby whom do you, whom do you trust

ode to Chicago 2.0

2010-07-20T18:57:00.006-05:00

Version 1.0 of this poem had the same first half. The end is completely different, and it's much better now.
The older version was meant to be read aloud, too. It may hark back to the days of my callow youth, when I delighted in the Old Testament prophets as my principal source of poetry. Those guys really knew how to personify a city and whip the pants off it. Metaphorically speaking.
I'm not so hard-nosed in this one.

with your Parade cake makeup
and your bleach-blonde
teeth,
dried up, double-tongued
harridan of a city
shameless, straddling a river, riding high on
commerce, baby, the starch-pressed minds
of billionaires and all their filthy
politicking, how you dote on them.

you lift your skirts up to them
like a napkin; they wipe red hands clean
of old men who shake Dunkin Donuts cups at passersby
of beggars who lack even strength to prophesy

but look as cool as you, baby,
when you pull the sheet up over
another still, small, face, and light your
slow cigarette.

I love your pigeonshit train tracks
and your crew-cut sidewalk
activists, I love
your rust-riddled bridges and the buses
that run under them all night,
the harmless little restaurants that change hands twice a year
the callous that the slicer handle left
right here

and you love me like a January sidewalk loves my ass, a fuel tank loves the letter E, leaky taps love insomniacs and rotten meat loves flies
I can see it in your eyes, baby,
baby, you love
me

open mic night postgame

2010-07-19T00:34:00.001-05:00

This waketime was my second-ever trip to my local poetry open mic. Which as I've learned since is actually the birthplace of the entire poetry slam movement, and as such attracts traveling poets as well as skillful people from around here. It's not the poetry big leagues; more on the order of a respectable AAA affiliate.

Let me briefly explain to you how awesome this place is. In a four-person poetry slam competition (grand prize: $10), I came in 3rd. Reading "composition" in the first round and reciting "residual categories" in the second. And that was a completely fair verdict! I know that I am a good poet. As the book of Proverbs says, however, iron sharpens iron. And finding a whole scene full of other poets who are themselves good in many different and magnificent ways gives me the opportunity to aim at becoming great.

This makes me inexpressibly happy. There is a place in the world where I fit in, even if I don't really know anybody yet. Where people do the stuff I do and care about the stuff I care about to such a degree that despite all the work I've put into it I'm just. about. normal. Best of all this place is not merely out there in the world somewhere, but just on my doorstep, on my bus route, within arm's reach. All I need is the occasional night off work, and the discipline to work the modest expense involved into my budget.

Oh yes. Also the nakedness of spirit to start learning to write again from scratch. Which I don't mean in the negative "ahh I'm doing everything wrong!" sense at all. It's more like the transition from classical music to jazz, or (here's where i read it) as Bruce Lee said about martial arts: "Learn technique. Practice technique. Forget technique."

There are a whole host of habits, necessities, little skills which go into writing "on paper" poetry which must apply differently to "live performance" poetry. They're still useful tools--but you use a screwdriver one way when installing a set of shelves and another when assembling a swingset, say. And there are a whole host of basic, basic things about live poetry regarding which I've just recently become aware of the depth of my ignorance.

Which, again. Awesome.

There was extra time at the end ("we didn't run long, we ran short!") so they had the band play while people randomly stepped up to the mic and said whatever they chose. As opposed to the open mic, wherein people are called up one by one according to an order the MC decides on his own.
Anyway during this last part I improv'd a thing which I attempt to reconstitute here. XD Mostly so I can give this post the "poetry and lyrics" tab.

these are the same streets
I used to go get lost in
just to figure out where the hell I was,
and I found my way
here.
I stumble out onto a sidewalk that smells of banjo music
and barbeque sauce,
glance back over my shoulder at a long low room
full of better poets than I am

and I say, "you fool! how small your world,
how small the circle of yourself!
you dared to think that poetry was dead,
when it was you who could not see
beyond the lip of the grave you dug!"

oh let me catch a smooth round edge
on a sharpened piece of someone else's mind
and dash out through these streets, laughing, naked,
unraveling the borders of my old, small self
one
thread
at a time.

2010-07-14T02:41:00.006-05:00

Sometimes
what's a prison is a cradle,
and hands on the bars
will grow.

shiny things: not shiny at all

2010-07-13T02:42:00.012-05:00

All right.

That's it.

I've had enough.

It is time for another edition of shiny things.

Today's theme: shiny things which are, in fact, not shiny.

squid hat by obeymybrain of etsy

Awhile back Pearl let me know about a funny YouTube series called The Guild. It is now apparently a Thing which people watch. I can only approve if it involves the wearing of such hats. Apparently some squid hats were specifically designed for the show; there are many varieties available. This particular one is my favorite, and while I can't conceive of likely a situation in which I would wear it, it makes me wish that I could!

I think squid, especially cartoonish blue ones, are inherently happy-making to contemplate. However, it certainly counts as fluffy rather than shiny.

There is such a thing as a liger. Think about that when things seem frustrating in your daily routine. Somewhere--perhaps nearer than you think--is a magnificent, impossible half-lion half-tiger, and it is not impossible that someone is petting it. It is also very, very unlikely that someone is being mauled by it. Petting yes; mauling, no. The classic win / no lose scenario! Which I just now made up.

Humans do all sorts of crazy things--some of them awesome, others downright terrifying--but occasionally something ridiculously unlikely to have occurred in nature turns out downright cool.

Raise your hand if you want a pet one of these!
And, ah, lots of goats to feed it.
Perhaps a vet on call with a fully paid retainer.

Unregardless! I want one.

I sincerely hope the inherent blurriness of cameraphone pictures does not prevent that nametag from being legible. It says "HELLO! My name is Superman!"

The guy in the pic is one of the courtesy clerks (read: bagger, mopper and cart patrol) at my store. He is a pretty smart and nice guy who has come up with an ingenious way to compensate for the fact that his limited English robs him of what I read to be customary eloquence. On that one you have to trust me. I talk a great deal and listen slightly more than I talk. And what people are about to say, most of the time, is at least half of what they're saying. Sometimes you can even tell what it is!

And this guy has a running joke that despite its simplicity never fails to amuse me. Or him, either, which only raises my opinion of him.

Most days of the week, he greets all coworkers by saying "Hello! I'm, today, Superman." Witty responses are encouraged but not required. The comically exaggerated expression on his face makes it virtually impossible not to laugh or at least smile.
Then, whenever someone gets on the PA to call him for bagging assistance up front, wet cleanup in aisle 2 etc., I can think "aha, they are calling superman to the rescue!"

Sometimes he'll switch it up and say, "I'm, today, Manager!" On Fridays he used to be Dracula, which lent an element of danger to the first of the ridiculously busy weekend days and gave me an opportunity to use the phrase "stainless steel scarf" in real life. Alas, one of the actual managers told him not to say he was going to be Dracula anymore, as it might creep somebody out. I say that's a shame. Anyone creeped out, rather than uplifted, after meeting Behrouz is most certainly not paying attention.

Shiny, no. Fluffy, only in the hair department. Awesome? 100%.

If you have ever washed dishes, this is something I hope you've had a chance to experience. If you've never washed dishes in a commercial sink, let me tell you, it makes an everyday chore a pretty dynamic experience. Properly appreciated, a sink such as ours can make even a day full of ridiculousness more fun. Who can say no to a high-speed jet of water, its temperature almost infinitely adjustable? Sure, it's inadvisable to spray it on floor, coworkers, salads in process etc. Yet there is a certain amount of visceral satisfaction involved in just spraying the living daylights out of stuff--have I mentioned there is also hot and cold running soap solution?--until it's clean enough for food to be eaten off of it.

This pic is from last winter, but trust me, this is a very, very important part of my day. Surfing lolcats is an occasional--very occasional--pleasure and/or vice. Surfing the internet generally, even if it's just to play KoL, is something best accomplished with the cat leaning her head over my wrist and demanding I pet her instead of the keyboard.

She may not be a liger. But she fits on my desk!

home no more

2010-07-11T01:36:00.006-05:00

This will definitely not end up on the album tentatively titled "where home is." It is sort of off in the opposite direction from the sonnets. Used to be I'd write poems about grumpy things and songs about uplifting ones; lately it seems the other way around.

Started out thinking abut all the prep myself and the roomies are doing to clear out an infestation of what turns out to be only grain beetles. Which is what I'd been saying for weeks. They're not roaches, fleas, ticks or bedbugs; I've seen all those and these are mostly harmless. Prep continues tonight and bombing is tomorrow.

At work, though, I listened to one of my co-workers break up with her boyfriend over the phone. (He was a lying fool unworthy of her and the breakup was long past time, in my unsolicited opinion. Details will not follow.) It got me thinking about problems, issues and situations and so forth. Thinking, in other words, about those times in life where I've had to wrestle with things that I really, really don't like to think about. It was hard enough for Fay to tell that louse that he was the one who screwed up, while still retaining the self control to finish out the rest of her shift. We all have to do tough stuff like that from time to time, and the feelings we want to feel about it have to be dealt with very carefully!

The musical sound was partly inspired by Jenny Owen Young's track "Clean break." Which I really, really like, and if you have YouTube you should go check it out. I had some chords worked out this morning, but they were weird and dissonant and I'm'a have to reconstitute them from scratch, alas, for I have forgotten them.

Jenny O. Y. got her start through Kickstarter, which Myke insists is a viable option for me & various willing accompanists. I feel my foster brother's estimates of time and cost involved are, shall we say, optimistic, but I do still think this thing is doable. Eventually.

now I'm moving my chair
and I'm moving my desk
pile 'em up on my bed
till there's no place to rest
there was something
scuttling across my floor

knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
cause I ain't home no more

I pull all my novels
down off of the shelf
got to find role models
some freakin where else
guess I'll pick some up next time
I go to the store

knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
cause I ain't home no more

I washed all of my clothes
with hot water and bleach
hung them up in the yard
to keep them within reach
but soon as I put some on
it started to pour

knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
cause I ain't home no more

I won't unplug the phone
in the back of my skull
but I'm tired and I'm mad
and my mailbox is full
can't one thing happen that I
get to ignore

knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
cause I ain't home no more

why don't you all come in
I will leave on the light
work it out 'mongst yourselves
if it comes to a fight
I'll be back to soothe you when you're
beat up and sore

knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
knock, knock, knock on my door
cause I ain't home no more

five sonnets on interior design

2010-07-02T14:07:00.005-05:00

1.
Now God, we say, is infinitely wise.
I pray he'll stoop to spread a dab on me
as I rub sweaty palms along my thighs
and wonder why I act so foolishly.
A word's a sword, and to the wise, enough
to unlock doors which can't be battered through.
It edges slice out calloused thoughts, grown tough,
long pressed against the frame, turned like a screw.
We fasten habits to a mighty name,
then pace round boarded corridors of "ought",
lock all our doors, and wail that no one came
to see our works and cry "what hath God wrought?"
I ask, for aching feet and empty hands,
a sword, a lever, and a place to stand.

2.
I ask for aching feet and empty hands--
to go far, and give everything away.
Replace the dragons on the map with lands
whose scents I treasure, though I cannot stay.
Let me learn each thing's name in its own tongue.
I'll keep those languages inside of me:
a rack of balanced weapons, gently hung,
drawn only to deter, to heal, to free
a pathway through the hedge of every keep
where, shaded by some wide, green, timeless tree,
the hearts of friends, like spellbound princes, sleep.
Let me then sheath my sword, and bend a knee.
This too I pray, let me remember this:
in secret places, silence is a kiss.

3.
This too I pray, let me remember thus:
what moves the world is moved by it in turn.
Why Christ's a gentleman is obvious--
why trample what he paid so much to earn?
Whom you can grasp, you'll lose without the right
to hold them, if their true consent you lack.
That voice which forged the universe with light
poured itself into flesh, to bring light back.
So do no less. To move, you must be moved;
to change a mind, permit yourself to doubt.
To earn trust, demonstrate what can't be proved.
To exorcise--first let the demons out.
Release your fists; let all you hold go free.
What fills an empty hand? Infinity.

4.
Release your fists; let all you held go free.
What's left is where you've come--and here you are.
Knit branch and leaf together; that's a tree.
And every man and woman is a star.
Sing out, however gnarled and bare your perch.
Breathe gently on new-blooming wisps of flame.
Three friends around a table is a church--
a grin, flashed up through blood and tears, a Name.
Transform your mere location to a place
where death's defied, and all things are made new:
where nothing's lost, though much may go to waste.
The power to create resides in you.
Leave all you touch more holy than before.
Where you encounter vacuum, build a floor.

5.
Leave all you touch more holy than before;
become someone whose every word may bless.
I've made my watchword stewardship, not war.
Inside me is the Earth's last wilderness.
It stares out of my mirror, shadowed, vast,
and dares me to make more than what I've been.
I will dig deep, and build myself to last,
to write upon the world what's wrought within.
I pray I'll have the strength to still my spade
when some green seedling interrupts my eye.
Let me throw over everything I've made
to leave that center open to the sky.
If God is love, and all these things are true,
then make yourself. Then make yourself anew.

expectation

2010-06-19T00:51:00.003-05:00

This poem was a birthday present for Biljana, one of the ladies who works at the Starbucks in my store. Last week I'd read "composition" to her right after I wrote it. She really liked it, and since her birthday was this week she asked me to write one for and about her. I accepted with glee! She just turned either 19 or 20 (I forget XD) but this sort of touches on most of the things she's shared with me about her life. I made several attempts at a poem for her, none of which really seemed right. On the way to work on the bus yesterday, I finally hammered this out. It ended up being from an emotional place pretty close to things I feel now too, but it's written as though she's the speaker. And she liked it! Win!

Perhaps one day I'll have enough poems by or about people or written by request to have a "poems for people" collection. That would rule.

expectations lie. I've given up
my vision of the time
when the respect I earn is truly mine
when you see what I work so hard to show
when you know what I know. I know
it's too much to expect
the same consideration
I bend over to extend. so I reject
my expectations.
maybe now we can be friends.

since everything you break, you buy,
now that I'm done expecting, I
can only hope, and try to see
in you what you won't view in me.

I'm young, but I still have the power
to fight for every working hour
to reach for love like every flower
turns its face to the sun.
don't bother getting in my face
I doubt you have the time to waste
it's my--and no one else's--place
to tell me when I'm done.

and I am done with expectations--
yours or mine, small or great.
I'll overcome my situation.
just you wait.

cherubim of the lord

2010-06-12T14:17:00.012-05:00

Seriously, this never happens.

I wrote a song about a current event. I didn't mean to write a song about the oil spill. It really is about Deep Horizon--that news makes me angry and sad whenever I think about it. But it uses that horrific disaster as a way of describing any preventable disaster, anything I in my own foolishness could have stopped from happening but chose to ignore until it was too late. In fact it was my doubleplusungood times at my new day job the week before last that got this one started. And not so coincidentally gave me the right mental state for it. Mentally, I took solace in saying to Mandy in a fantasized exit interview, "well, you did help me to realize that 'cherubim of the lord' rhymes with 'omnidirectional sword.' "

After that, though, the single line (on a single note) "cherubim of the lord" was all I had for a couple of weeks. Somewhere in there I got the "we're on the inside of Eden" couplet--yet still the song refused to gel. To crystallize, if you will. I started to worry this would be another one like "teeth of the storm", which is still my record-holder for longest time between the arrival of the central line and the rest of the song, at slightly over two years.

So I was giddily relieved yesterday morning, and indeed spent some time jumping up and down going "whee! ha ha ha!". A little three-note triplet started to sound in my head as I brushed my teeth, and five seconds into it I knew exactly what it was for. A flat, B flat, C, over and over and over. The triplet holds steady but the way the song's rhythm phases around it tranforms with every line. And not just the first four lines but all the final repetitions of "cherubim..." are all sung on G natural, so the triplet itself as well as the thundering chord changes going on behind it are totally necessary to keep it interesting. Sort of a musical representation of something the song only hints at.

Orders of angels are something I have learned about variously and sundrily, so the concept of a cherubim is a pretty robust one in my mind. (Later I will look up my previous post on the subject for more info.) Cherubim are neither chubby happy babies nor angels who appear shouting "Fear not!" Angels shout "fear not" when they want you to stay where you are and listen. When a cherubim arrives it is there to DO something, and even as the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, one of the subsidiary lessons is that when a cherubim shows up, it is wise to haul ass out of its way. The other title of this order of angels is "the strong". Not the sort of strength that comes from bulging muscles or massive metal beams, but the strong nuclear force that binds quarks together into elementary particles, the weight of the moon's mass which tugs the ocean up away from its resting place in the deeps of the earth, the forces of gravity and potential energy that pull a tree crashing over onto the forest floor even when no one is around to hear it.

This is going to be a massively difficult song to sing, play, and--unless I do it exactly right--even tough on the ear. There are momentum changes almost every line, and most of the rising action happens in a lengthy instrumental bridge between "...fruit of the forbidden tree" and "if we have no home...." I'll need either lots and lots of layered tracks or a really good piano player to make that part work. However, if I DO manage to get it exactly right and it can sound in real life the way it does in my mind, it will be amazing.

oil under the water, poison under the words
oil under the water, poison under the words
we beg forgiveness, but never alter
we beg forgiveness and are ignored
she holds and never wavers, falters
holds and never wavers, falters
holds and never wavers, falters
an omnidirectional sword

you drilled down, down to where cold blood flowed black
you built a cage for fire and turned your back
it rusted through
because of you
it gushes through
it trusted you
you know you knew
you know you knew
what would you have her do
what would you have her do

this ain't some story you're readin'
it's your breath and your flesh and your sea
we're on the inside of Eden
we're the fruit of the forbidden tree

if we have no home left to return to
it's cause we've been hacking away the foundation
god's messenger comes with no vengeance
with only momentum times acceleration

if I brought on the tempest
throw me overboard
into my own consequences

the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord

the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord

the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord
the cherubim of the lord

composition

2010-06-08T23:52:00.006-05:00

Whenever I do a one-word title, the poem is meant as both a definition and a demonstration in text.

Today was my second day in a row of working both the jobs i have right now, and since I made the mistake of staying up past my bedtime last night to play Civ (silly girl!), I woke up dead tired. First job let me out a little early, so I had time to go sit in the library across the street from the grocery store before my shift there began. I've been reading a lovely book called "The Rest Is Noise" about classical composers of the 20th century, but I didn't feel like taking it out and reading it. And checking out another book seemed like overkill when I've got one with which I'm almost finished. Tired both emotionally and physically, the only thing I could think of to do is write. Start with stream of consciousness and hammer it into a coherent thoughtspace as it goes along. In college I would have just snuck off to the woods and sung "Time" by Phil Ochs (Tori version); the best I could do here was quote it, towards the end. Homage, baby; it's a form of currency!

This time, this brief moment in my life, is a time I've been calling "everything happens at once time." Where many strands of development, growth and work all rise into manifestation together--where I find out what I'm really made of and whether the work I've been doing is substantive or foolish. What things are made of is their composition.

So I know poems shouldn't need introductions; they should be able to speak for themselves. And the weirder, the less formally structured the poem, the more that applies. This is because when you step outside conventional forms, by that act of abnegation you declare the thing you are trying to express to be greater than the form. To be worth abandoning form in order to get across. If the work itself fails to reach anyone, then you have failed as a maker. You have made something which is self-indulgence and only qualifies as art because intention counts.

All this to say, if this introduction is artistically superfluous, let's just consider it a hidden part of the poem that doesn't get read when I read it aloud. Or when you do, cause it sounds much, much better that way. Trust me on this.

before my engine starves, I'll carve,
I'll carve mind out of time
make it mine, make it fun, get it done.
like some mumbling turtlenecked composer
loops a tape of tables falling over and over
and wriggles between the cascading layers
of noise, noise, blankets himself, buries
the world in the sound
of the sound of the world buried
under its own secret structure.
let me roll over and fold a warm
coverlet over myself.

sleep is food and food is sleep
and fuel is fuel is fuel to keep
the engines in my ribs and head
primed, churning, turning out of bed

now this machine I've been seems natural
now all the regulations I ingest
seem, not assumptions, but chaste, factual
a cat which purrs, claws kneading at my chest

but some of it is lies! I spy surprise
disguised as expectation, meter bleeding into freeverse,
false assumptions buried
in true memory, unremembered things
mute, tugging at cut strings.
where is our engine now, they howl.
where is our engine now.

I said I lived to find the door
that opens, pouring out gold light
it may be true, but more, but more
true is that I must live to write

must build me a machine
build a machine in me
or one will grow soon as I turn my back
clickety-clack
clickety clack
for I know and I know and I know
I go too slow, too slow, too slow
if I let speed, vibrations shake me,
rattle me apart, I'll have to start
over again, pink, naked in a mountain
of switches and levers and cold blunt
angled metal shapes wound through
with vine, live mice in bent wheels, tangles
of wire that wave their twisted little ends
like worm-heads probing for soft
cool earth or the roots of plants in
hyperfast stop-motion. this machine lives.
even the dead parts live; it thirsts, I thirst
I am hungry and tired and I crave
every element
tungsten and water, hydrogen and sunlight,
plasma and iron and the sound of a violin
played on a subway platform in a dream.

sleep is food and dreams fuel the machine
that manufactures dreams
that I ratchet together with wet spare parts,
screwdrivers and twine, bloody calluses
and time, time, time that you love
and it's time, time, time
to pour into the ground and lay down

till it blooms

it blooms

harvest of grace

2010-06-04T00:18:00.002-05:00

My Grandma Jule sent me an awesome birthday card with a cool poem in it. I say cool because usually poems in cards are dreck, but this one was very much not dreck. It was a really thoughtful thing for her to do. All the more so because a) the pick-me-up was extremely welcome in this crazy everything-happens-at-once time, and b) she just survived a "small" heart attack and is adjusting to lifestyle changes, meds--all the stuff we all dislike medical issues for. Therefore I wrote her a poem. She'll get the original in the mail in a few days, but here for your (and perhaps her, if she gets online time) viewing pleasure is the e-text version.

Cause everyone needs a pick-me-up. Especially awesome grandmothers one doesn't get to see nearly often enough.

come on, give me a shove
so I'll do what I must
I'm one bright spark of love
gently breathed into dust

songbirds perched out of sight
and wet dew on the lawn
sing and wink in the light
and beckon me, "Come on,

don't be discouraged! Not
when the worm wriggles loose,
or the sun burns too hot
for the rain on your roots.

"There are seeds in the fields;
water deep in the soil.
We are nourished, and yield
without labor or toil."

so as I face this day
in my own little place
let me yield, and make way
for a harvest of grace.

birthday sonnet smash!

2010-05-31T15:55:00.003-05:00

This was an exceedingly good birthday weekend. Open mic at the Theosophical Society was lots of fun (Though Paula did read the entire Dr. Seuss birthday book, which made me cringe but was very kindly meant and I appreciated it as such.) Lovely happy birthday calls, and even presents of the timely and excellent sort!

This sonnet I actually started on the 26th. I finished it on the 29th, though, so it may as well be in honor of my birthday--since like all good sonnets I've written it doesn't seem to have a title. Who knows why that is! The idea for it came together on a day when I'd gotten out early from first-job. I decided to use that extra time to sit around on the sidewalk basking in the sunlight before I got on the train and headed for second job. Started out meaning to read a book, but after awhile I just relaxed and enjoyed the moment. Felt like I was sitting in my own comfy attic chair and not on a busy city sidewalk--except it clearly was a busy city sidewalk. Just felt that much at home there. Good times. Oh! And the poem quotes one of the pastors from the days when we attended Belmont Assembly of God--his name escapes me, but the saying "it came to pass--it did not come to stay" has stuck in my memory lo, these many years.

The poem doesn't quite work for Memorial Day, which is today. So instead I will hope for a solemn-but-happy, dignified and meaningful Memorial Day for everyone. May you be surrounded by living love and loving memory!

Chicago sun, bake, make my soul concrete,
which, everywhere you set your foot, you find.
Not like these stubbed-out butts which haunt the street
or old receipts with which trash bins are lined.
Here, that which holds up nothing, nothing tends.
A trainless track rusts, crumbles, leaved with grass.
What weight will rumble down me--to what end?
Wring me out. For the time will come--to pass;
it cannot come to stay--that I must hold
one shape against the weight of feet and light.
Now I rest, wet, new-poured into the mold.
Noon sun, stretch out your moving fingers. Write.
Draw out the stone within, which--secret, strong--
will hold me solid as the road is long.

my third decent sestina! ever!

2010-05-20T18:49:00.011-05:00

My first two were [Persephone and the spider], which was written for a contest on Gaia, and denizen section L. (That's 50 for you non-Roman numeral lovers. I now wonder if my teenage self was making an unconscious pun there. 'Cause denizen is a long, long poem about the descent into madness, and its section numbers go from I to L. Get it? I to hell? XD Okay, it's a terrible pun. Sartre, however, was exactly wrong. Hell is the absence of even the possibility of other people.) So, typically sestinas don't rhyme. Instead they are characterized by the pattern of repeated end-words. Each sestina has six stanzas of six lines each, plus a short three-line stanza at the end called an envoy. All seven of those stanzas must use only the six chosen words at the end--or, in the case of the envoy, in the middle, according to the following pattern:
123456
612345
561234
456123
345612
234561
2/5, 3/4, 6/1
I make them rhyme because I like to, it's harder that way, and I think a really long form poem is boring without rhymes. Homonyms ARE allowed, so bare/bear and wear/where are totally within the rules. If homonyms weren't allowed I doubt any sestina would ever be written. Oh, and yes, I did do some grammatical fudging--there's a bunch of places where I dropped an "or" or "and" without a semicolon. Still understandable...just not totally correct. I call poetic license!

As I just now said to Dave on AIM, I wrote this poem out of a combination of grandiosity and spite. Well, not spite exactly. Someone on the Ankhet forums told me sestinas don't exist, because they typed "sestina" into a search engine and came up dry.

My response was: 1) try "poetic form sestina" (link appended), and 2) was that...a challenge?

So, of course, I had to write one. :D Originally I meant it to be about the person who, ah, instigated its composition, but it ended up about me. Me-as-I-wish-to-be moreso than me-as-I-am, however. Foolish me!

[the explorer]

She took a pair of scissors to the map
till 'here' was shorn, 'there' was no longer there.
She had no ink to scrawl across the gap,
nor pages with brave emptiness to bare.
For she felt sure such knowledge was a trap,
said to herself, "Well, here I am; that's where

my world begins and ends. Should I beware
of dragons at the edges of a map
made by some fool who never journeyed there?"
And so she flung herself into the gap.
She yearned to see, to learn. She could not bear
to be told which paths led on; which were traps.

So, soon or late, she fell into a trap.
She gathered pride (a heavy thing to wear),
pounded it flat. There bloomed a bare new map:
a hint, a note, a hard way out of there.
In those closed walls she found a narrow gap,
sucked in a breath as deep as she could bear

and squeezed through, inch by inch. Until, scraped bare,
she stood outside that first of many traps,
breathless but whole. All she had left was where
that exit lay: her handmade, hard-won map.
Though more than once she found herself back there,
each time again she found that hidden gap.

And so she flung herself into the gap
time and again. And all that she could bear
out of that first and most familiar trap
was her own legend of the route, of where
her steps had wound--her own, her faithful map.
She cursed at first, then laughed to find it there.

Though she took comfort in its presence there,
each time she flung herself into the gap,
deep in her bones the landscape bloomed, laid bare
by constant travel--each wide path, each trap.
One day she found a fresh explorer there.
She laughed--remembered--gave away her map.

Use scissors there. My scrawling is a trap
till knowledge inks the gap wisdom scrapes bare
within you. Journey, earn; become the map.

inside outside

2010-05-11T23:34:00.003-05:00

Sigh. Yet another set of lyrics.
So, I have a job interview tomorrow. If that doesn't work out, I am next in line for a full-time slot on the morning shift. One of the morning ladies is moving back to the old country as soon as her house sells. Either way, my situation is likely to change in the next few weeks.

Hence, another one of those songs about making tough changes. I think it really, really, really loses a lot as just a set of lyrics. However, till I get a mic that hooks up to my compy somehow, this is what I've got. Even if it is time to leave, at least I got something substantial from all my time working with slicers and knives!

the blade is the intimate thing
nothing made is made till it gets into it,
gets into it, gets into it
the blade is the intimate thing
everything it touches is surfaces,
surfaces naked

I know you, I know you
inside, I bring your
inside outside
I know you, I know you
inside, outside

the hand feels what it's touching's touching
underneath the surfaces another layer
listens, glistens, whispers like a prayer
however hard I pound and scratch
or soft, caress it I can't catch
a glimpse of it, no splinter of it
pierces through and I can't make it

I feel you, I feel you
inside, please bring what's
inside outside
I feel you, I feel you
inside, outside

throw me in the flames
pump the bellows hard
let my every surface burn to ash
and melt a puddle from the shards
pour me in the mold
draw me out with tongs
hammer, hammer, hammer, fold
hammer, hammer, hammer, fold
hammer, hammer, hammer, fold
hammer, hammer, hammer, fold

however long, however long, however long
it takes to bring

my inside outside
inside outside
inside outside

till when struck I sing
I'm the intimate thing
the intimate thing

pop music at my store: doing it wrong and doing it right

2010-05-04T00:04:00.005-05:00

This is a post I've been meaning to do for awhile. Given that I'm starting it at about midnight (by the way--my new power cord works! my compy is back! huzzah!), it counts as both Monday and Tuesday.

At work, there is a computer upstairs which has a large playlist of songs on permanent shuffle. Most of these songs are pleasant enough. There are just a few, however, which stick in my craw. The one I have mentioned most often is a song by the band Simple Plan called "Welcome to My Life." For those of you not curious enough, or too wise, to follow the link to the full lyrics, here's the first verse and chorus:

---
Do you ever feel like breaking down?
Do you ever feel out of place?
Like somehow you just don't belong
And no one understands you
Do you ever wanna runaway?
Do you lock yourself in your room?
With the radio on turned up so loud
That no one hears you screaming

No you don't know what it's like
When nothing feels all right
You don't know what it's like
To be like me

To be hurt
To feel lost
To be left out in the dark
To be kicked when you're down
To feel like you've been pushed around
To be on the edge of breaking down
And no one's there to save you
No you don't know what it's like
Welcome to my life
---

Awhile ago Amber explained to me the true definition of "scandal". In Catholic parlance, a scandal is something which encourages others to sin.

This particular set of lyrics is scandalous, to me, in the extreme. It encourages people to feel self-pity and resentment, and to cut themselves off from others. It promotes a bitter state of mind in which a person makes the whole world their enemy because they are feeling lonely and depressed.

It asserts that when you're feeling lonely and depressed, the solution is to isolate yourself from others and sulk among your many possessions. Also, the best way to make others like and respect you more is to angrily inform them they cannot possibly relate to the emotional pain you are experiencing. Oh, without leaving any room for the possibility that others might also experience emotional pain.

For goodness' sake, the speaker in this song has a room of his own with a door that locks. He has a radio which he can turn up to scream-drowning-out volume, presumably without adverse consequences. How many of the listeners who hear--and we may assume, empathize with--these selfish assertions lack those same comforts?

That's really the irony, though. That this song whose main message is, "wah, wah, you don't understand me and I'm all alone and will wallow in my misery" is popular because people empathize with it. In other words, many, many people can understand precisely "what it's like" because they share the same feelings of isolation and loneliness. Thus the fact that the song is popular enough to make it onto my store's iTunes refutes its main premise.

Here is another song, also on the playlist at work, which approaches almost the same set of feelings but does so in a way which is much more positive. It is "Story of my Life" by Smashmouth.

---
I get to the party, but I'm too late
And I got stood up on my very first date
I listen to country and everybody goes rock
I get to the dance floor, that's when the music stops

It doesn't matter what I do, I just can't seem to win
But here I go again

And I say
Hey that's the story of my life
I had a good plan but it didn't go right
Oh no I'm overdrawn
I check my account and the money's all gone
Why me I don't know what to think
I finally get aboard and the whole boat sinks
Seems to be the story of my life
---

Here the speaker takes an almost amused attitude towards his misfortunes. He doesn't accuse others of not being able to understand his misfortunes; rather, he describes them and implicitly invites others to share in his frustration. This is reinforced by the fact that multiple voices chime in to sing the chorus, mimicking the internal voices of listeners who see their own stories reflected in the words to the song.

There's really not much in the way of instruction or even encouragement in this song--not in so many words. Instead it comforts those who are experiencing frustration and loneliness with the message that they are not alone, that their frustration is universal. Also, I like to think there's a certain amount of self-aware irony here. "Sure, I've got troubles just like these," the listener is meant to think. "Yet the guy who wrote this is a famous musician who probably has lots of money and a hot girlfriend, so maybe things won't stay this bad!"

Which is what pop music is supposed to be all about. It doesn't make you think very hard, doesn't shake up your mind or wring out your deepest emotions. It just makes you feel a little better and a little more able to face the frustrations of the day.

right-thinking individuals

2010-04-30T13:23:00.007-05:00

A quick couple things before I post up the latest set of lyrics.

My laptop may be dead. It might be the power cord, or the joint inside the computer to which the power cord connects. If the former, I've got a new one coming in the mail soon; if the latter, I am a very sad panda. XD

One of the quotes from the poem by Megan below:

Her writings back again, better than ever.
For a while there is had begun to wither.
Happiness had taken hold.
But now her heart is black and cold.

--reminded me of something I was discussing with Myke in our last email volley. It is a common misconception among writers, especially poets, and especially when they are first learning their craft. Namely, the idea that one has to suffer or be depressed in order to get artistic inpiration. Myke and I had agreed that while suffering is sometimes a catalyst to inspiration, it is not exactly necessary. Last night I was talking the subject over with Dave, and his opinion was, as usual, succinct and to the point: You don't have to be suffering or depressed "right now" in order to be inspired. But you have to have had the experience, in order to contrast it with whatever you're writing, in order to have a wide enough perspective to write well.

On to the song I'm posting today. I wrote it oh, perhaps a week ago, and for the life of me I don't know why I haven't posted it up till now.

There's an episode of The Twilight Zone called "He's Alive!" which I highly recommend to anyone, anywhere, but especially people living in America right now. The story is of a disaffected and fearful young man whose only real friend is an elderly gentleman who witnessed the horrors of Hitler's Nazi regime. When the young man begins to believe he is being counseled in his quest for political power by a mysterious stranger, the elderly man warns him repeatedly that he is traveling down a road towards evil, and that he will not find happiness there. I won't spoil the whole plot, but there are some fantastic lines in it--and some eerie echoes of some of the madness that's happening in our own country today. Evil grows out of irrational fears. Or even rational ones which have been twisted by opportunistic villains into the shape of the Other, the Foreigner, the [insert person of opposing ideology].

Last night, watching BBC news, I saw a story on a European country which was about to pass a law making full-face-covering burqas illegal. They interviewed a Muslim woman who said, "There are Taliban who say that one woman without a burqa is a woman too many. These politicians are saying one woman with a burqa is a woman too many. I see them as two different kinds of dangerous extremism." Well said, ma'am, well said. Playing on people's fears to make ordinary citizens suspicious and distrustful of one another is NOT going to help any nation in the world pull itself together in this time of worldwide difficulty. Right now, though, I just hope no other states of America follow Arizona's bad example.

Poetry might not help much, but at least if it's good poetry it isn't going to hurt anything either!
Here is a song about mob rule.

[right-thinking individuals]

right-thinking individuals
they crowd around your door
the first round left them drooling, darling
now they're back for more
the war you feared is actual
but you just pour on the charm
they're right-thinking individuals
you don't care enough to arm

right-thinking individuals
they dance to your design
their wild excesses aren't yours
say you who drew no lines
it was you who turned their soggy
mediocrity to wine
they're right-thinking individuals
you don't trouble to define

past I agree with you
and you agree with me
so let's go after everyone
who sees things differently

right-thinking individuals
march out against your foes
you wave your hands and smile at them
like you're the one who knows
what they'll do when they drop those signs
and bare their vengeful souls
they're right-thinking individuals
that nobody controls
unthinking individuals
that nobody controls

this is what passes for poetry these days

2010-04-28T02:37:00.007-05:00

Okay. This is truly one of those "more in sorrow than in anger" moments. I haven't been back to Quizilla for several years and freely admit it was silly to spend so much time there. User-generated quizzes which ask you things like "Is your favorite color red, blue, yellow or green?" and then say "You are aligned with the element of earth!" if you answer green are...yeah. They're an incredible waste of time and mostly only tell you about the assumptions of the quizmaker.

Apparently, though, this site on which I wasted far too much time while in college has now expanded into another area: user-generated poetry.

These are the most popular poems on Quizilla. Here, for um...my edification, and your, ah...amusement? is the number one top rated poem on that website right now. It is entitled "The Dark Rain of My Miasmic Sou--" oh, wait, no. That's from the Kingdom of Loathing.

Inspiration: The Words Of The Broken Heart
by alexknight629

"Nothing is more powerful than the words of a broken heart.
The best inspiration is found when you truly fall apart. "
The heart of a shattered girl written out on paper.
Written at three in the morning under the light of a single taper.
The tears she sheds as thick as ink.
As her sanity is brought to the brink.
She may not cause herself physical harm.
But for anyone who cares there is still reason for alarm.
Inside, this girl, she's so sick of trying.
Wishing that only she could be dying.
Just read her words, they're written everywhere.
Can't you see she just wants someone to show they care?
But you'll never see the pain she locks inside
All the nights she stayed up and did nothing but cried.
She'll be with you all day,
Pretending everything is okay.
But if you look deep within,
You'd see what lies underneath her grin.
The heart of cold she does not show.
No one really has to know.
Her writings back again, better than ever.
For a while there is had begun to wither.
Happiness had taken hold.
But now her heart is black and cold.
Full of inspiration, Where to start?
Her words as strong as the broken heart.

---

I've run into poetry elsewhere around the blogosphere from time to time--poetry written by adults which was nonetheless not very good. Since leaving Gaia Online, though, I've never had an example of an unpolished work by a 14-year-old with which to explain why poetry is really important. Or rather, teaching people how to write good poetry is important.

People need poetry. We freaking need it. If a human being has sufficient grasp of any language by the time that human being reaches puberty, and has spare time between work, sleep and perhaps dodging bullets to compose it, there is about (guesstimating based on my own unscientific observations) a one in three chance that said human being will generate poetry. Even if they never show it to anyone else.

Poetry is used for taking mental states--the organized structures of emotion, memory, and expectation which provide the foundation for the formulation of thoughts--and altering them. Good poetry enables the writer and reader to do this efficiently, effectively and (I aver) to some worthwhile purpose. Yes, even if that purpose is taking a horrible thought and getting it outside one's mind so as to feel less helpless in the face of it.

This poem is, as I said, not very good. It is far from excellent. It is not, however entirely bad--it uses images somewhat, attempts to make rhymes, and displays a mental state with enough clarity that one can see it to poke at it.

There are times, though, when I wonder if American people who get into poetry writing really think this is all there is. As though the really good stuff written by poets of the times of old is gone forever--or as though there isn't any difference. Dangit, I know I could be better, I know I need to keep working at it. Even though it's a tool I drag out and apply to my mind whenever I face an especially tangly emotional problem, I pay attention to keeping its edges sharp. A scalpel which leaves a jagged edge is not the best thing for delicate surgery; it's likely to promote infection and leave scars.

Is Megan going to get older, though, and just keep writing the same sorts of thing over and over, believing it's good because no one ever says "you know, that pair of rhyme words is kinda boring, maybe also think about scansion a bit"? Will she try to get better, or get bored with poetry and just stop, robbing us of a potentially rather good poet? Would we notice?

I'm pretty sure that not noticing the fact that we don't cultivate our potential good poets or notice when there aren't many says something bad about America. This could, however, just be my personal bias. Also my desire to be paid enough to live off of in exchange for teaching people how to write good poetry. I would love to live in an America, in a Chicago, where this could be the case.

Who knows. XP It's past my bedtime anyway.

poetic rebuttal to a freestyler on the bus

2010-04-25T01:06:00.004-05:00

Friday night was, unusually for me, an unpleasant day at work. Stuff that doesn't usually get to me got to me; I became flummoxed and cranky and was even emoting unpleasantly to my ladies. Very disappointed in myself. I was on my long bus ride home, trying to write a poem to work out my tension and get calm again, when a young man in the back started freestyling. This is something I've seen, or rather heard, before, and ordinarily it fills me with joy. "Poetry is not dead!" I think. "It's just here on the buses and in the streets where people can use it!" Friday, though, it mostly annoyed, because although he didn't mention me as such his words evinced a general disdain for his fellow passengers which irritated me, and was difficult not to take personally. So I wrote this rebuttal. Which I chickened out and didn't give or read to the fellow, but eh. XD At least I get to post it here. It's short as all get out, but in future if I revisit the form I'll go longer.

I have no idea what to do with line breaks, since it's freestyle style with very few pauses for breath. So don't pay too much attention to line breaks; I recommend reading aloud "for best results." ;)

so many words I heard in streets and buses
redefining who us is by the words, the verbs, they swerve
like wheels, you feel that they deserve
to flow, it takes a poet to bind the mind,
a speaker to see the weak speech
and turn it into strong, the meek gain the reach
to right the wrongs of the cold-blooded town,
old rain flooded down
into closed minds that should be open, I'm hopin'
that you find a better sound

the first slice

2010-04-22T15:31:00.005-05:00

The first slice of a meat or cheese off a deli slicer has various fates. Most often it's either thrown away as misshapen, or given to the customer as a sample. Sometimes, if they wanted a very thick chunk, it's the entire order. Other times, if I've decided to refill a tray by hand and am feeling hungry, I'll curl it up in my palm to eat later while I heap up the rest of the slices in the tray in the appealing (but difficult to unpeel) little flower-like bunches which are standard for some reason.

Edit: Oo! I changed it around and completely re-wrote a stanza. It is much more focused now, and better I think. Yay for edits.

I prayed for knowledge many times, but wisdom once, and often
now I'll ask for wisdom, light that's clear when edges blur.
Let it bear up under me when my resolve would soften,
grasp and aim my actions, so that new new things occur.

Oh, I strive to think, emote and pray with great precision,
but precision's useless if I have no end in sight.
Every hand I shake, each door I open's a decision;
none of them are evil yet I can't say which is right.

Confident and humble--sugar water, bitter lemons,
worry and ambition barely balance with good taste.
Am I Rudyard Kipling, Leonard Cohen, Samuel Clemens,
or some upstart deli clerk who ought to know her place?

Time is razor-sharp, so best be careful how you spend it.
One main chance cut open lets ten others wilt, untouched;
each untasted fruit may cry that you did not befriend it.
What you make must answer what you did not want as much.

Do something! Find out if you're a good or bad example.
Move your weak flesh forward, even if it's a a crawl.
Push the meat across the blade, and carve yourself a sample.
Taste and see if your heart has blood in it after all.

this cheese procedure

2010-04-17T21:26:00.004-05:00

What? Two posts--in one day? Something must be wrong with me. ...Or right, I supppose. You know what it was? I was feeling antsy this morning and decided to write instead of taking a book along to read on the bus. So on the morning ride I wrote this here poem, and on the way home I finished up the ballad of the RosaRing, below, the first half of which had languished unfinished in my notebook for quite some time.

Oh, quick poetry note. Rhymed quatrains fall into normal English speech patterns much, much more easily if you alternate between even and odd numbers of syllables per line. This poem goes 8-7-8-7 which is an extremely comfortable line length for your everyday poetry writing needs. Short enough that you never feel like you have to add in extra words to make it come out right, long enough that it takes only the most perfunctory vocabulary gymnastics to trim a long thought down to size.

This does not, by the way, fulfill my intention to write more poems about cheese. Certainly this poem *mentions* cheese, but it's essentially me complaining about sampling events. As such I don't think it's an especially good poem, only a couple notches above the little "buy some soup and a sandwich" songs I make up at the sample table. Hopefully, though, these are complaints with which others who've worked in retail or customer service can identify. Perhaps it will comfort or at least amuse!
Customers, bah! Who needs 'em? (Er...other than, y'know. Everyone.)
XD

train up in this cheese procedure
hold the wheel against the blade
all those corporate sponsors need your
help to feed what they have made

to each doubtful, hungry shopper
who must lay some fruits aside,
skimp on cream, or simply drop her
list to buy what you provide

train up in this cheese procedure
you'll cast orange cubes like darts
customers, pierced through by greed for
flavor, will clear out their carts

fill them up with cheese, with crackers,
all the things you're charged to sell
retail jobs were made for slackers
as some two-bit public hell

where each wedge you slice, so careful,
is inhaled by passersby
who won't stop to get an earful
of your sales pitch, or who try

hard to get your phone and address
knowing fully well you're trapped
smiling, talking, standing at this
table strewn with spit and scraps

if you once should turn your back, slip
to the fridge to slice up more
they will swoop in to attack, strip
plates or knock them on the floor

but you stick to please and thank you,
loud, bright wit and quiet tact
or else people who outrank you
will read you the riot act

train up in this cheese procedure
act as though you have a choice
maybe it's fair trade--you need your
paychecks, and they need your voice.

the ballad of the RosaRing

2010-04-17T18:32:00.010-05:00

In Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's novel Carpe Diem, there is a description of a song called "the ballad of the RosaRing". (Yes, yes, ring around the rosie. Good name for a place depopulated by a plague.) I'm pretty sure the following quote regarding the song doesn't spoil too much of the book, at least, not the really key plot points. The only lyric they write down is a couple mentions that the chorus repeats the phrase "fly on by", and we get this description of the subject:

"The audience, respectful, may have been expecting another set of rounds: what they got was the ballad, in Terran, of a pair of lovers separated forever when an experimental virus got loose on the RosaRing.
The translation they had given Hakan for the audience had the Ring a resource-rich island cursed with a strain of infectious madness--which to Miri's mind was as close as made no difference. The Ring virus had been deadly, the world it circled rich, and three rescue teams had been shot down by automatics before the fatcats had finally seen the stupid waste of it and quarantined the sector. The lover had been on the last rescue team. For Hakan--for the Winterfair--he escaped."

~Partners in necessity (3-book trade paperback) p.796

So I decided it would be fun to write the "ballad, in Terran" in its entirety. It IS pretty depressing (song spoiler alert!--everyone dies) but I'm pretty sure I stayed true to the description and kept it all Liaden-Universe-legit. :D So if Lee & Miller ever decide to do a Carpe Diem movie, this would go GREAT in the soundtrack. *bats eyelashes* Just sayin'.

the RosaRing, it circled round
a world where remedies were found
in plenty, so the Ring became
a hospital with wide acclaim
they researched every malady
from places 'cross the galaxy
so RosaRing always had need
for pilots with spare time and speed

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

there was a woman and a man
flew side by side in one tin can
they struck it rich, but had a fight
each certain they were in the right
she took off in a single ship
he partied on the landing strip
without her, nothing felt the same
he sent a message, "I'm to blame..."

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

she got his pinbeam at the port
she'd filed her flight and locked her coords
but sent back to him, all smiling
"come meet me at the RosaRing
you never know what we might find"
so he set off, three days behind
but coils all redlined, moving fast
felt each hour, slower than the last

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

at RosaRing, a lone lab tech
pain in his head, crick in his neck
let slip, let break a piece of glass
that virus hit his system fast
and scrambled up his fine young mind
he ran, and left the lab behind
rushed madly out into the hall
so many heard his footsteps' fall

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

the lady had stopped for a bite
she heard the sirens, saw the lights
that seared across the station
"viral contamination!"
she rushed to find the evac crew
but that's one thing they could not do
the plague had slid through all the vents
and would have come with if they went

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

the guns were armed--the crew's last job
the lady ducked the panicked mob
and closed her mind to the alarms
remembering her lover's arms
which he wrapped round his chest and cried
he'd landed, learned two med ships died
to Rosa's automatics
screaming out into the static

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

the stationmaster, planetside
said "we could give it one more try,
but who would go?" the pilot roared
"they lift off with me at the board!"
scraped up a fey and grim-faced crew
for each of them had loved ones too
aboard the cursed RosaRing
they signaled in an endless string

"if anyone's alive there still,
go power down the guns: we will..."

fly on by, fly on by
fly on by

when their wreckage spread across
the sky, all knew the Ring was lost
they pierced the hull and stopped the wheel
since then it's just a lump of steel

fly on by
fly on by
fly on by

graffiti philosophy

2010-04-12T03:17:00.004-05:00

There are lots of things I probably could or should write about instead, but despite events in the lives of people I know as well as the larger world, I think I'm'a stick with what's been working lately. In other words, using my blog as a kind of glorified poem and lyric repository, when I don't have anything else to say that I think is really worthwhile.

Many people come to my store for many reasons. Several days ago, I had a conversation with a fellow who described himself as a graffiti artist, and though our conversation on the subject was brief I was oddly moved by it. We all struggle to communicate with each other--sometimes even people who are very close have trouble getting a particular message across. Even though some graffiti has a social element, people indicating that a certain area is within their gang's "territory", the vast, vast majority of it is just people writing their own names. Stealing the use of other people's walls, windows, vehicles, in the attempt to get across a single message; I exist. It matters to me that you know this.
Who knows why I wrote a poem about this, rather than many other things I could just have easily written a poem about. XD I've half promised Amber I'd do one about cheese--it's harder than I thought to write a poem about cheese, but I'll get there! I guess I've been thinking about communication, messages, and social roles a lot lately. There's a reference in the ninth line to--oh, i forget who the famous dead poet was, but I'll google the quote: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
XD Oh yeah. Re-reading that poem makes me acutely aware that I need to brush up my own skills.

As if the wall I wrote across looked back,
as if the stone and plaster said, "right on,"
as if storm winds could never peel or crack
this message, and you saw me. But I'm gone
to ground. I wear a bland, familiar mask.
You smile at me and do not ask my name,
our lives walled in by each familiar task.
Yet here before these stones, we are the same.
Look on my words. You might--but don't!--despair,
though yours, like mine, are scrubbed away too soon.
We still possess the hands to scrawl them there,
and eyes to read, by streetlight, sun or moon.
Go, walk your quiet halls. But when you see
a bland face smiling, wonder--is that me?

hey, "the unheard poet"? I heard ya. brush up your skills.

2010-04-07T23:15:00.005-05:00

So yesterday, I was backreading a couple of the blogs in my sidebar--it'd been awhile since I logged in--and I came across this post over at Pleiotropy. Evolution is a touchy subject--"the unheard poet" (I believe that's his MySpace) and the career evolutionary biologist certainly disagreed--but what stuck in my craw was the actual, er, 'poetry.'

Yes, due to the fact that as Dad often said, art is what you like, this young man's typed-up wordpile does technically count as poetry. I could not help feeling, however, that if it had been me sitting at a farmer's market with a typewriter and a sign which read "Free poems!" (and don't think I haven't fantasized about it! because I totally have!) I would have written something better. Something which takes the trouble to describe evolution, or at least, the poetic idea contained within the scientific ones. Namely, this!

evolve, to lift your neck above the grass,
to glimpse fresh fields that wave a brighter green.
the herd you sprang from alters as they pass;
stems gnawed to earth, trees scratched on till they lean.

to glimpse fresh fields that wave a brighter green,
your ancestors grew strong and wise, when thick
stems gnawed to earth, trees scratched on till they leaned
struck bedrock. then they learned another trick.

your ancestors grew strong and wise, when, thick
upon the ground, their cousins froze, expired.
struck bedrock, then, they learned another trick--
that beast which tames itself can conquer fire.

upon the ground their cousins froze, expired;
the herd you sprang from alters as they pass.
that beast which tames itself can conquer fire.
evolve, to lift your head above the grass.

planter, would you sow new seeds?

2010-03-18T09:23:00.003-05:00

This is my 100th "poetry and lyrics" post! I saw that and I was like "really? only 100?" Then I remembered my tags don't go all the way back to the beginning, so maybe that accounts for it.

So this came from a couple things. My recent thoughts about wanting, and how desire makes it more apparent that the inside of me is as messily disorganized as the outside. The idea of "can you nurture the children of your actions?" and how intentions, acted out, "bear fruit" in sometimes unexpected ways. My cousin Kris's recent post. Real life, and people living it and doing stuff, makes a house messy, and pretending otherwise is an illusion! The only people you've got to try to maintain illusions with are the ones who expect you to be something other than real, who want you to live up to their ideas of what other people's houses and selves should look like. Know what? Those people are being lazy! XD Still, sometimes I suppose it's nice to "keep up appearances", even if only to be polite to people who can't, or don't have the spare energy to, handle the fact that real life is messy. It's a choice, though, not a necessity. Living life and making messes, though--that is a necessity.
Oh, and guerre-de-noms is a kinda play on words. A 'nom-de-guerre' or war-name is a code name someone takes on during war. So guerre-de-noms would be a name war, a war about names. Cause as we learned from Socrates, when it comes to philosophy, definition of terms frequently IS the whole argument.

then live up to these promises
to whomsoever made
your little guerre-des-noms, this is
your garden in the shade

how does your garden grow, Contraire?
in tangled webs, of course
if, in the weeds, are flowers there
it's through no art of yours

you pay attention to the ants
the birds, the rain, the sun
but never shout or raise your hands
to stop a single one

from nibbling berries off the vine
and peaches where they fell
you write "more sweet are fruits of mine
than water from a well"

above the gate, which, leaning wide
reveals a thicket, swarmed
with hungry starlings, beady-eyed
and branches densely thorned

because you find it beautiful
what eats what eats should live
a place to stuff their bellies full
then fall asleep, you give

but where now are the ordered rows
the pathways paved with stones
stone benches carved with stags and does
for guests to rest their bones?

there's here and there a patch of moss
beside a gnarled old trunk
a chuckling stream to wade across
where some great beast has drunk

this wild explorer's art is yours
love what you don't yet know
a garden not for gardeners,
but for the things that grow.

a moratorium on musical moratoriums

2010-03-15T23:29:00.012-05:00

I'm backdating this so it will be a proper Musical Monday, but in reality this is Tuesday, a little after noon. I'm at the local library near work, reveling in how nice it is to have a keyboard with a functioning letter "n" and "b"! This morning I had an appointment at my local Department of Human Services to apply for food stamps--successfully, this time. Last year when I was on unemployment I'd also applied, only to be rejected because my benefit amount was too large. Odd, really, since it wasn't all that much more than my current weekly paycheck, and at the old apartment the rent was much higher and I had all the utilities.

Ah, well.

I want to say a few things about music. This is, in part, inspired by Gin & Tacos' recent post, and the comments that flowed after it. By the by, I adored the OK Go video, and also Pachelbel's Canon in D transposed into the key of J was really delightfully creepy.

People do get attached to the music we liked as teenagers. For all that I've been out of my teens just less than a decade, this much I've found to be true of people who are in their 90s as much as those in their 40s. Anton LaVey called it "erotic crystallization inertia", which seems to me one too many adjectives. Though the phrase does conjure up the image of the personality as a kind of Freudian chemical experiment, which reaches a state of dynamic equilibrium and hovers around it thereafter. I prefer either mechanical or biological images for the personality myself, though metaphors, like music, are largely a matter of taste. I digress! One way or another, even though fond (or dismal) associations mean that time alone can never rob one's adolescent favorites of their appeal, over time one does develop a discerning ear.

'This band, this singer, this song that I enjoyed back in my day,' we'll say to ourselves, 'they were really just a re-hashing of the great so-and-so from a previous decade!' There's a certain exasperation that often comes with that thought, a feeling of having been cheated. 'How dare someone trick me into liking them, when all they were doing is something somebody else already did better?' To say nothing of the upstarts who have the temerity to continue composing, or at least performing, new material, long after one's own musical preferences are set. And as often as not, doing what seems to the educated ear to be a half-baked imitation of other musicians, perhaps from one's own preferred time period--who were themselves imitations. "A copy, of a copy, of a copy," as the fellow said in Fight Club.

The general consensus seems to be that all the really good songs have already been written. Not once, not twice, but many times, the most moving melodies revisited and scrubbed smooth and frictionless like a stone staircase made treacherously slick by the passage of many thousands of climbers. Various persons pointed out a couple of extremely cogent facts. There are, for example, a finite number of notes in the scale. And the scale we use, as evidenced by the weirdness of the "Canon in J", seems to be the one human ears are able to appreciate, through some emergent quirk in the mystical relationship between mathematics and biology. There are, furthermore, among the finite but enormous possible combinations, a still-large but much more limited number of melodies which are pleasing to the human ear and capable therefore of carrying the emotional weight of a song.

All of these melodies have been used many times, will be used many more times, and all of them are what patent lawyers call "known in the art" though they are not yet codified as such. Before the era of recorded music it would have been impossible ever to become acquainted with this fact as an individual, however obvious it is to the deductive mind. People before recorded music had to make do with whatever music-makers presented themselves, live and in person. Our enrichment in this respect is also our impoverishment. We now have the luxury to demand that every performer and composer present to us, not just the best that can be had in a given region, but the best there ever was in all the world.

Someone in G&T's comment thread mentioned a bit of trivia of which I had not been aware. Apparently at one point Bob Dylan (jokingly or not, I've no idea) proposed a moratorium on new songs. Seems a bit mean-spirited to me; "I've already withdrawn my money, so let the bank close now--screw everyone else." I didn't comment over there, partly because the conversation had wandered into television, where I'm not really fit to contribute, and partly because this is an issue I take very personally.

A moratorium on new songs might be a perfectly fine thing for a listener, who knows they have all the recorded musics of the world to explore. In that vast library of sound one could explore for several lifetimes and still find new things to appreciate. Such a moratorium would just about kill me, though. If that well ran dry, if I went looking for music in that secret place where all else falls away and could never find it again, knew that it was gone, it would be worse than losing a limb, my eyes, my ears. If I lost my ears I could still make music--likely not as well as Beethoven did when he went deaf, and not anymore with my own pipes. If I lost my eyes I would do almost nothing else. Eyes and ears and hands and feet and all, though, are means to an end. As Leonard Cohen put it, "magic is no instrument; magic is the end." Music is far from the only part of life which is magical, which is an end in itself to those who love it. Any one small life has room for only a few such. A person is fortunate who can lean on more than one, though one alone is just enough to sustain self and sanity in perilous times.

Melodically I know my limits; I catch myself echoing my own stuff now and then even after only fifteen years of working at it. Lyrically I'm on a more solid footing. Even though writers of lyrics have essentially the same kinds of things to say in every place and time, the evolution of language and culture ensure that those same human experiences will need to be described anew, those same truths must be evoked from slightly different angles of view. (I'm grateful to Amber, by the way, for quoting Kipling at me at great length and assuring me that even though it's not fashionable here and now, the world is not going to stop needing good poetry.) But even if I'd reached the limits of my competence and discovered my skill as a maker of songs to be barely mediocre, I would not stop. I would not consider it for a moment. I might, on the advice of trusted allies and my own conscience, decide to take my dim, flickering little work and "hide it under a bushel". By choice, I mean, and not by this stupid lack of the ready means to do otherwise.

But I would not be bullied out of making music by the mere weight of musical history. That sentiment is, frankly, more stupid and tawdry and designed to lead astray the innocent than the lyrics to A Simple Plan's Welcome To My Life. Music is not like chemistry, or math, where once a thing is discovered it may (must!) be done just the same way every time to achieve the desired result. Music is like cooking, like storytelling; we need at least a little of it to get through every day of our lives, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we participate in it actively or passively.

There are a finite number of tunes, of course. There are a finite number of edible foods, too. And certainly every possible combination of foodstuffs has been tried, whether by a world-famous chef or a curious and enterprising three-year-old. I despise the way the word "artist" gets overused these days, slathered liberally over everything that touches music. In much the same way, come to think of it, that bad lyricists harp on the word "love" when the four-letter word they really mean to use would get their silly song taken off the radio. But every really good creator of anything is an artist, any really good sandwich-maker or porch-builder or room-arranger, even if, like a janitor, all you create is order and cleanliness where once was refuse and filth. Love, skill and attention make the difference.

One's art is one's passion is one's life, the love that binds us to reality and to the world and everything and everyone with whom we share it. The finished product itself might not be of very much to use to anyone but the maker. But whether it's "therapy poetry" or a spotless room needlessly re-cleaned to calm its inhabitant's nerves, it's worth the doing. It may be the act that prevents another act, one of needless destruction rather than needless creation. Or it may be practice, a taste of things to come, the first stumbling steps down a road that leads somewhere, anywhere, so long as it is a place better than here.

To be angry at someone for despoiling something you love is natural and, within limits, just. To be willing to destroy something you love because it has been despoiled is an act of cowardice. So let the people who are bad at making music keep trying, I say. And if they are not really trying but are merely content to be bad, then perhaps one day I will get ahold of them, and shake them by their lapels and roar at them until they think twice about casually misusing what gifts they may possess.

At work, they've got a computer upstairs with a lengthy playlist, a mixture of songs new and old. Some in each category, the new and the old (but especially the new!), annoy me to the point of baring my teeth at the speakers in the ceiling, and complaining of the songwriters' faults to any and all who will listen. (Welcome To My Life is naturally at the top of the list in the teeth-gnashingly awful category. Though I admit, to my shame, to having seen Simple Plan in person, I got almost no pleasure out of it and was glad I had a place to sit down.) I've thought very often of reinstating Musical Mondays as a place to voice my complaints in text. Apart from the lack of free time, one of the things that has stopped me is the thought that somewhere out there, there's a kid who doesn't know any better, for whom this song I consider third-rate and exasperating helped them in some way. Teased a kernel of truth out from between the floorboards in their mind, and helped them lift it up and carry it off to where it could usefully be planted.

Having an excuse to think it over in a different way, though, has been good for me. This is the internet, for dog's sake. If perfectly intelligent and forthright people can go around saying music's dead and we should shut off the rat faucet already, then by great Marilyn's bra strap I ought to have the gumption to scold the songwriters of today for being lazy, and for not upholding what I consider to be a sacred trust.

want. not wish, not lack. want.

2010-03-06T23:12:00.005-06:00

For a few minutes there I regarded this feeling with suspicion. Crazy, rising up from the depths of my mind to drag my attention away from real life and down unpleasant bunny trails, has felt similar. I'm writing from a place which combines powerful emotion with a great tightness of the intellect, mind like a long-tensed muscle. So please excuse the flowery, rather than correct, grammar et cetera.

This feels like impatience, anger, resolve. Angry, not crazy. I want whatever happens next to happen now, now, now now!
I want to mosh.
I want to get respectably educated about a loud angry band and go mosh.
I want to see Local H again.

Oh, this wanting, it is dangerous stuff.

Sometimes my brain calls up the memory of gun oil and for a moment, I smell it. It is a comfort; reminds me of Dad.

I want to start an organization, a congregation. I want disciples awesome enough to supplant me and leave me in place behind the scenes in an advisory role. Disciples only in the sense of people who are trying to figure out the same sorts of things I am trying to figure out. They may or may not start out by listening to me. At some point, though, I want them to have enough of their own opinions, informed by experiment and thought, that we can generate a common terminology and have debates about things which are otherwise almost impossible to speak of.

It is as if, by giving myself leave to actively desire, I have opened a skylight on a room full of long-dormant lush leafy vined things that, of a sudden, all began to sprout and grow. Violently. Which desires to prune back, and which to let climb, bud, flower. I wonder. Which flowers would bear nourishing fruits.

Reminds me of a dream I had recently. Of which I won't say anything except that it reminded me strongly of a Miller and Lee quote, a commonplace in the Liaden Universe: Can you nurture the children of your actions?

Another dream, last night, ended with me looking at myself in a mirror. Always a good thing, mental-health-wise, when you dream your face in a mirror and it is your own face.

I want a place I can go to play my music where people recognize me, expect me, know me by name, are familiar with my catalog, give me sass when I'm off my A game. I know, now, how to earn such a role. If the place were of the right character and the scene spacious enough or nascent enough for me to be that person there without supplanting someone else, which I would dislike.

I want people to walk away from me and say to each other, "you mean she's like this all the time?!" In a good way, though.

Life cycles through seasons, or rather, we in our dance with life throw ourselves into different things with different amounts and aspects of ourselves. It seems to me these changes are guided by what we are becoming, and how we go about it. I've gone through a long season of not writing out my changes as I go, not attempting to draw out a map behind me in words as I travel through time. I have been acting, doing, and when I've stepped back analyze I have kept it to myself. I want this season to end. And that will require a time of a different shape.

The burden and danger of desire is that what we desire, we do. What we do, we become. What we become, we stamp on the world around us, in the imprint of our presence on the people with whom we interact and the tasks we perform.

There are two ways in which you can believe you are unworthy to desire, and so shut off that place within yourself. You can believe, as I did for a time, that desire itself is a power you are inherently unfit to wield. That everything which grows from you must wither or spring up poisonous and thorned. Or you can believe, as I did for a time, that desire is too great a danger and a responsibility. That by taking it up you place in your hands a terrible weapon, which you dare not wield for fear of doing some great harm.

I do not think so much of myself, now, that I feel my mere desires to be a danger.

Fear--that formless, irrational terror that drives self away from self and out of reality--does not drive me anymore. Nor the smaller, more reasoned caution that served in its place, the extreme vigilance that kept fear itself in the background while I altered those parts of myself which generated it. Now it is not only acceptable to me to desire; it is necessary. Otherwise I would not have had the courage to attempt so risky a transformation!

I want to find out exactly how dangerous I am. The power that may be used to destroy may also be used to create, and a thing well-created serves and enriches far more than it consumes. I want to make things, and not only things which may be called art, works of the mind that each person must encounter in the quiet of his or her own awareness.

I want to turn locations into places. As in, "if you're looking for X, that is the place." I want to turn processes, interactions, people participating in groupthinks, into times. As in, "oh, those were the times when we were really getting X done."

I want to take some of this stuff I've learned how to do and use it.

the placebo effect

2010-03-04T17:59:00.004-06:00

So I was noodling around on Mom's electric guitar last weekend when I went up to Elgin to visit, and came up with the line "I believe in the placebo effect", over a series of E-form chords that sounded bluesy. The line struck me as super cool, and I became determined to write this song and actually finish it. Over the past month or so I've gotten a boatload of first-verse-and-a-chorus fragments that I couldn't figure out how to complete. Maybe the idea's not strong enough to carry a song, maybe I'm not mentally in the right place to finish them--maybe I've just been spending more of my creative energy on other stuff. Who knows. This one, though, turned out pretty well.
I realized, practicing this the day after I wrote it, that it contains not one but two shout-outs to Radiohead songs: where I end and you begin, and I might be wrong. I've changed the tune in those spots accordingly, and it actually fits!:)

If you want an invisible friend
you've got to grow yourself a phone
and listen carefully inside your head
for any voice that's not your own
I say "operator, operator!"
but there's only music on the line
when I start singing on it later
cause it's stuck inside my head, it sounds divine

operator, player to be named later
I'll take whatever, whatever I can get
cause I believe in the placebo effect
I believe in the placebo effect
and it's working for me
working for me
working for me
ain't done yet

when the fear inside me rose up to my neck
I was relieved to be alone
there were just two things I was sure I could expect
to be rejected or be owned
now I know better; I've stopped trying to draw the line
down where I end and you begin
I try to sit back and appreciate
the miracle--we let each other in

come my friend, believe we'll never reach the end
of peace and harmony, love and respect
cause I believe in the placebo effect
I believe in the placebo effect
and it's working for me
working for me
working for me
ain't done yet

fake it till you make it is
a strategy that doesn't get much props
but taking on the world's only pretentious
if you haven't got the chops
no shame in just believing something good
just don't forget, you might be wrong
still every now and then and every now and then
reality will play along

change yourself
grow yourself
no one else
knows yourself

till you rise up, make them lift their eyes up
like the first raindrop that leaves your forehead wet
I believe in the placebo effect
I believe in the placebo effect
cause it's working for me
working for me
working for me
ain't done yet.

2010-02-28T21:08:00.004-06:00

Can you nurture the children of your actions?
~Miller & Lee, in Plan B

In this dream there is a great party in my honor. It is my baby shower; I feel my swollen belly, warm with new life as I look through the heavy curtains of the sound booth over the packed auditorium. The stage is brightly lit, empty, its forward curtains open. I seize a microphone, the techs around me showing faces concerned that I might flub a line with nervousness. In a hearty, full voice, I welcome one and all and thank them for coming.

What I remember next is tossing and turning in a bed in the dream, tired, so very tired, in desperate need of more sleep. But I know that outside this room all my assembled guests have been waiting, expecting. They came for a party, and there was nothing prepared for them. No music, no games, no entertainers, no food or drink. They have been expecting me, but I am so tired. Groaning with the effort and filled with shame at my weakness, that let me disappoint them so, I haul myself out of bed and dash into the dining room. I know that the throng of celebrants were to have been seated there, but it has been a long time--hours?--since I vanished.

When I arrive in the dining room, I see long tables covered with white cloth, long rows of empty chairs. Not a candle or a piece of silverware or anything else is on the tables, and where earlier there had been a packed house, I see at the near end of the table a mere handful of stubborn, tough older women. I sit myself among them, my heart heavy, and place my head in my hands. I apologize.

There is conversation I don't recall clearly, but it seems important. Someone comforts, perhaps; someone offers advice. I make some kind of effort, and food at least, at last, arrives. It's too little, and stale. Each is item wrapped in foiled paper that's been wrapped around it too long and has either stuck to the food inside or broken open. I pick one up and unwrap it. Some kind of messy, spicy sandwich, lukewarm from its long journey. I taste one experimentally--too spicy, too much bread.

One of the ladies says something then which offends me. Command, derisive comment on the food, obvious observation about events already transpired? Something insulting. I lose my temper and make an impassioned little speech which I don't recall, but which ends, "now you owe me one!"

End of dream.

So I know that right now I biologically cannot be pregnant. At a certain time of the month, which propitiously arrived a couple days after Dave's visit, makes me very sure of this. Which means this dream is about a spiritual pregnancy, not a literal one--about the children of my actions and my intent, not the children of my body.

Lots of earth and air, not enough water and fire. I mean by this, a grand place in which allies may assemble, and a great name to bring them there, but nothing to sustain the flow of interaction, and no purpose to move them towards a commonly held goal. Magic in the right amounts but the wrong proportions.

And in trying to fill the lack from myself, I exhaust myself.

It's a puzzle, though, how to fix it.

Lacks in air and earth, I understand these. I think of them as vertical-draw elements. Your relationship with the physical, material world is earth, down. You draw more power through conscientiousness, reliability, steadfastness. Your relationship with the intellectual world, the perception and understanding of what's around you, and your understanding of how your perceptions are framed, how your judgments are made, as well.

Lacks in water and fire are harder for me. Horizontal draw.

Fire, what burns in the spiritual space "behind" you and drives you forward, is your motivation, your passion, the power of your will. Willpower, too, though, comes from somewhere. Even though it's central to the self, it, too, rises from relationships. Your fire rises, I think, out of your religion in the special sense. What is sacred to you, where your innocence and wonder come home to roost. The strength of your commitment to these things, and how much of yourself you pour into their service, is the measure of how strong your fire is.

Water, what draws you onward and discovers, by its movement, the shape of the space and time within which you move.

I still have a lot to learn in that department. I'm starting to get the hang of the basics, but it's slow going.

the peace of hidden places

2010-02-18T23:57:00.005-06:00

I have started and not finished a couple blog posts recently. There is much, so much to tell, but my internet time is ridiculously limited. And I spend it on KoL and keeping in touch with Dave, and am content. Maybe when I've successfully *left* the deli counter I can finally find a way to post things in my upcoming series "tales from the deli counter."

It's been almost six months, and I have finally reached the point where I am emotionally ready to leave.

Upstairs, behind the breakroom, there is a room where all the temperature control machinery flows. I've hung out there before, even played my guitar there once, but lately I have been sitting in there for a minute or so at the end of each shift. My heart knows it is time to begin the deep appreciation that comes before goodbye. Even though I have yet to actually find or get interviewed for another job, it's a fact that the decision to desire something makes one more effective at pursuing that thing. The magic of the decision rests in choosing the right moment.

The other day I was applying for a job online. It's a tedious process, since just about every company has their own website, and every website has a different application form into which a candidate must type his or her entire employment history. Typing it all in again brings back memories, of people I have known and buildings I have loved. Oh, granted, I love the people too. A building, though, you love in a different way.

People know they're interacting with you. They form opinions, make guesses, react to you, change their behavior based on how they perceive their relationship with you. This is a wonderful thing; from the process of getting to know people and be known by them, the whole rich symphony and dance of human life, sprung from passion and forged in necessity, emerges. It is exhausting, though. Some interactions fill you up emotionally, others wear you down. There's no predicting in advance which will be which, though you can hedge your bets a little by being bright and charming and easy to get along with. A building filled with machines, though, keeps right on being what it is, like a tree or a stone. Unlike a tree, though, it was built by humans for a purpose. And as long as people who understand that purpose expend their will and effort--even their love!--to keep it running, it will do what it is, be what it is, act out the essence of itself in every moment.

I like to sit in the machine room to listen. To feel in my bones the thrum of motors as the many strong pipes blast out cool, spread the chill that keeps food safe to eat, all through the departments of my store. I've looked at the pipes and I know some go to the deli, others to meat, some to produce, others to the frozen aisle, and I picture this river of cool branching out from that room, just as the electricity that keeps the lights on flows through different channels to keep all the lights burning. I listen to the song of the motors and it calms me, helps me think of the store as an organism in which moment-to-moment human uncertainties play a large role, a starring role, but cannot give life to the living thing that is a store all on our own.

To me a holy place is a place where things happen--specifically, things which change people's lives for the better. It's additive, cumulative, so a thousand little good things weigh in one sense, a few amazing good things weigh in another. Holy places which are unremarked, which don't attract attention, though, these I love for the peace I find in them. These are powerful metaphors for me for the parts of life, the parts of ourselves, which keep on working because they must, not because they are loudly praised. It brings me peace to love such places, to have had the opportunity to do so, even if I know that sooner or later I must leave them.

a bit of cta gossip

2010-02-09T01:54:00.003-06:00

Amber, you are way, way right about the wry fondness.

Like being loyal to the office of king/queen without having to like a particular monarch, I love the CTA's spiritual and practical role in the organism that is my city without necessarily approving of the way it is run.

Starting on Sunday, the CTA enacted massive cutbacks, eliminating 9 express buses and reducing frequency of service on 119 bus and rail lines. Prompted by this, today I had a conversation with a bus driver today which underlined that. Some of his (paraphrased and condensed) opinions and observations about the CTA follow.

It would not have been necessary to reduce service so drastically if the CTA did not manage their money so poorly. Every bus garage serves approximately 20 bus lines, yet each garage also boasts about 20 managers, who pull in manager salaries without actually driving buses themselves.

(I was aghast at this, since I work at a deli with around 20 employees which is run effectvely--albeit with a great deal of stress and hard work--by one manager and two assistant managers.)

In addition to possibly excessive amounts of managers, each garge also has a complement of supervisors, who drive around in official CTA vehicles to oversee buses and ensure they are on time.

Furthermore, even though the CTA has no official connection to the utility providers of gas, electricity, and water, all of them are run by the city. This means that when a CTA employee is late on his or her utility bills, the employee's name gets written up on a board in a public place in the garage, and they are required to go and talk to their manager about the status of the utility bills for their home. If the employee does not promptly get caught up on said utility bill, they are threatened with no longer being scheduled to drive buses.

(I was outraged by this, and said that was some freaky medieval crap that had to be illegal. Why couldn't they get their union to file a class action?)

The union itself is useless, and the so-called leaders of the union are themselves Daley cronies who won't say boo to actually support the workers.

In addition, the now-deposed head of the CTA, who is responsible for the current mess, has been moved to a position of authority in the Chicago Public Schools. The replacement person isn't helping the CTA much, but the idea of someone who created the mess the driver himself had lived through in charge of kids' education was worrisome to him.

(I agreed with this. Alas, at this point I'd reached my stop.)

So there's some stuff there that I really ought to fact check. Other stuff is more difficult to check. Still, it's a sweet but of gossip that wrinkles my lobes and makes me feel more informed. Even if I'm not.

another love poem to the CTA

2010-02-01T13:23:00.005-06:00

I'd been trying to write a poem about work, a dense little thing in sapphics, but it didn't fly. So I said to myself, Self, you haven't done anything in freeverse in just months and months. It came out pretty well. There's a couple swears, so be warned if you don't like swears.

Lullabye wheels scrape tracks, and I watch sparks
ricochet off the concrete. I love them.
A man sits to my left, rocks; he sneezes
at demons. I wish I could tell him,
"you tell 'em, man. fuck 'em."

I'm in love with the train and the tunnels
it travels, the spiderwebs of rusted iron
that keep it off the street.
Run my fingers across and the metal flakes off.
Park my ass on the floor of the platform;
it sucks up my heat.

I don't care if it makes me a sweet fool,
a naive fool. I'm that nice crazy lady
that buskers and beggars look on with fond pity,
don't know what to say to me.
In my dreams I recreate them, impersonate them--
whistle and tapdance while playing the banjo;
dance the robot, my silver hands just so.

And there through the dim space behind me
the cold city's blood flows.

Yes, we kick the bums out of the stations at night,
and the subway performers' first act
is red tape acrobatics, streetwise mathematics.
Yes, all that we're trying to do
is come out in the black
at the bottom of some balance sheet.
So deep beneath the city streets, steel wheels
still carry us, sing to us, flow with us
into the darkness that only swallows.

We are blood, heat sucked out by stone,
bone borne forward in steel. All we feel
is the moan of cold metal on metal. It rocks us
to sleep, then jerks us back awake
as it bleats, "doors. closing."

But under the bleats and the sneezes
the rhythm resolves, as the passengers trudge to the top.
Sway, shiver, whatever--you are the cold blood
of my city. You're moving. Keep moving. Don't stop.

i wrote a poem!

2010-01-23T21:46:00.004-06:00

It has been just ages since I wrote a poem. Months and months. Lots of songs--even a very recent one called "fun with orifices" which, though it is free of swears, is too hot for this blog--but no poems. This one seems mostly like a shaking-the-rust-out sort of poem. And I still haven't thought of a title. Still, it's good enough to post. Even if the end seems kind of blech. I mean, c'mon, who writes out the word "befriended"?
(Edit: end is much better now.)

Let there be surfaces:
dew-slick, cool, wider than
arm's reach, stone's throw, sight.

Light pours, pools over them,
bends them. Only touch tells
where the edges lie.

Dry senses, memories
swept from corners, shaken
from folds--let them sink,

ink, blended. Let there be
surfaces, blank till you
befriend them. Thank them.

diplomatic victory

2010-01-15T17:01:00.010-06:00

Today is my one day off this week, and I chose to spend most of it playing Civilization III. I finally managed to finish a game, instead of quitting in the middle of the industrial era and starting over. Rather than play through to an inevitable defeat, I'll quit when I realize that a) I don't have enough cities to remain financially solvent and ahead in the culture race, or b) a nearby, militaristic civilization is about to conquer me and there is nothing I can do about it.

My first win was a diplomatic victory, which is achieved by being elected leader of the virtual United Nations. I'd traded with everyone, never been at war with anyone, and none of my spies had been detected in other civs' cities, so no one had reason to distrust me, and the vote was 3-1 in my favor. Yay winning.

The possibility of non-violent victory in Civ III appeals to me even more than the brain-stimulating complexity of the gameplay. Every other game with this kind of depth has one and only one path to victory: kill everybody who isn't on your team. I go along with it, since it's essential to the interface, but it's a thing to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. That's not how I approach anything in my life, and that's not a path of action I especially want to wallow in, even in an imaginary world.

That grizzled old axiom, "as above, so below" applies to the personality in a very direct way. Your deepest beliefs about the nature of reality, your operating assumptions, provide the perceptual framework through which you perceive your experiences and come to understand the world and your relation to it. The shape of your desires--the happiness for which you strive, the qualities of the world you wish to create around yourself--can only come together within the limits of the framework created by your operating assumptions. You can't strive to create a reality that contradicts your fundamental assumptions, anymore than Kratos in the game God of War can win by diplomacy. The interface simply doesn't support it.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. But I got to thinking on the subject of filters of perception after reading this article on the "quarter-life crisis" to which Gin And Tacos recently linked. (He also has a neat idea about how the US can help Haiti, and others, using awesome things we already have.)

Quarter-life crisis happens to many people my age, though the article focuses on those with educations and skills similar to mine who have also managed to hold on to reasonably decent jobs in the midst of the Second Great Depression (which is what this is!). Yet they are dissatisfied and hopeless, either because they lack the clearly defined ambitions which would give their lives direction, or they recognize that the courses of action they need to take in order to achieve their dreams are mutually exclusive. Have a family, or work hard to gain entry into a career which would enable you to support a family. Spend your income to maintain contact and enjoy leisure time with a network of friends, or spend it paying down your debt so that you can afford to maintain the same standard of living as those friends. I'm looking at some mutually contradictory paths as well, but still, I wouldn't characterize myself as going through a crisis.

To me, personal growth is all about watching the fruits of your assumptions play out in practical experience. "By their fruits you shall know them", though it was something Christ said about people, applies really, really well to ideas, and to the beliefs we form when ideas hit the cold waters of reality. At any given time in the process of constructing your personality, there's a portion of your identity based on new ideas and newly formed beliefs, struggling to find its best fit with the real-life circumstances those ideas were developed to describe. There's another portion composed of the beliefs which turned out to be valuable in the last set of life circumstances you encountered, which must re-form and stretch itself out to meet the demands of the new. And of course there's the core of your identity, the assumptions, passions and purposes which have stood the test of time and form your basic sense of self, the part of you which says "I" and is not contradicted.

All of these facets of your personality are organic things, living structures which grow and change as you employ them to form and develop relationships with the world around you and the people in it. As you express your personality through action, you change the world around you in accordance with what you believe, desire, and intend. You make the world of your experience a little more like the interior of yourself. The 'games' you play in life depend on the interface you've created in the structures of your personality. What you assume, that is, what you know and are certain is true, determines not only your paths to victory, but also your definition of what victory is.

A crisis of any kind describes a situation where you become conscious of the fact that the assumptions you have, your personality as it currently stands, the games you know how to play, can't turn what you have into what you want. It's actually worse, harder to resolve, when you don't know what you want. Not knowing what you want means that you have not found ways to express your desires and beliefs in reality to the extent that you can recognize the outward, tangible situations and qualities which match up with the living ideas which comprise your identity. You need to field-test your beliefs, in other words, to give shape to your desires. On the other hand, for a crisis in which you do know what you want but can't see any way to achieve or obtain it, I see exactly two solutions:

1. Change the games you know how to play.
2. Change your desires.

Right now I'm in the midst of option 1. There are personality parts I've brought online while working at the grocery store that I frankly doubted I'd ever be able to develop. I am part of a community here--and it doesn't frighten or unnerve me. I work hard, enjoy my work, am proud of doing it well, and have accepted the identity structures necessary to make those things happen--something I was never able to manage at any previous job.

Yes, there is a substantial opportunity cost involved in staying here. In my own bizarre way, I'm being compensated, though not in a currency that will (hopefully) ever be exchanged by banks or tracked in financial newspapers. It would of course be nice to have a job that paid me enough that I could afford to do debt service, save towards future goals, and go out and develop more complex relationships with my city and the people in it.

But unlike the folks in the quarter-life crisis article, I know what my priorities are and to some extent what I'm working to build out of the materials of my life. (I may not know what this contraption will do once it's put together, but I know darn well that tab A goes into slot B.) Personality construction comes first for me, resource accumulation, at most, third--because if the personality is shakily built and poorly designed, the resources will slip away in any case. As above, so below. And it's true that right now I have no idea whether I'll be able to have a family with Dave, record several albums, get some books of poetry published, write a few novels, and make a meaningful contribution to the theory of psychology in the course of my lifetime. Two victories out of five ambitions would be great.

However, I know (viz., it is among my primary operating assumptions) that while what I do now changes which victories I'll be able to pursue and how, I can't know the results of my current choices in advance. I weigh the opportunity costs which are visible to me now, and choose which advances, which experiences, which resources I'm going to spend this time in my life to get.

Every time in a person's life is like that. Every moment of our lives, we choose which ambitions we will value above all others, as Paris in the Greek myth had to choose which goddess was the prettiest one, to be blessed and cursed thereafter by her favor. We wrestle with the shape of our lives and the world we live in, as Jacob wrestled all night with the angel. In choosing to stay, to strive, to become, we echo Jacob's vow: "I will not let you go until you bless me."

January storm

2010-01-06T14:11:00.002-06:00

Aw yeah, I got here in time to use the library's internet.

This is one of those grown-from-a-seed songs. Like [teeth of the storm], it started with a single line I carried around for a long time before I could get the rest of the song to come together around it. Unlike teeth, though, this one only took a couple of weeks instead of more than a year.

For me a song, in the personal development sense, is both an acid test of where I'm at right now and a road sign of where I'm headed in the immediate future. This has more to do with the mechanics of songwriting than anything mysterious: to create a song, you have to open up a space inside your personality where the spark of something living can grow. Any personality only has so much "living space", that is, suitable places for aliveness to flourish. So how potent a thing you can create depends on what areas of yourself are available for use, whether because you're able to pull yourself back temporarily or because a part of yourself has been cleared out by disaster or the urgent need for change.

I think this one was a case of intentionally pulling back from a space I've used for the purpose pretty often. It's good, but a part of me always goes "you can make a bigger space! you can do better! next time there will be even more shiny!" Oof da. XD I feel like I've been writing more confident things lately, "I will", "I am" et cetera. Which makes me eye myself suspiciously to make sure I'm not growing into bad egotistical attitudes. Still, I figure where I'm at right now must have some good in it, when it means I can write a love song to my city. :D

[January storm]

it's afternoon, all right
come on, fill my cup with morning light
I need something to pour
over this frozen vehicle's front door
if love is
letting in
your beloved to yourself
then the winter wind loves me

stretch out my morning legs
did not leave myself time to fry an egg
conversing with the pets
cause I ain't fit to walk that cold mile yet
if love is
waiting in
patient silence by the door
then the winter wind loves me

oh hello, icy neighborhood
hey graveyard, hope your night was good
sweet light beyond the grey, grey clouds
who's singing louder than me now
if love comes
crashing in
like a January storm
then the winter wind loves me

the subway walls all echo back my voice
they sing their names to me
oh let me make Chicago home by choice
not just necessity
bonsai me till I've grown to love
the blood and sweat the stone's made of
like the winter wind loves me

let me love you
like the winter wind loves me
let me love you
like a January storm
let me love you
the only difference would be
I would keep you warm

first song of 2010!

2010-01-06T12:33:00.004-06:00

Strangely the first one was a song by request. *wagwagwag* I love when that happens. My coworker Stephanie and her for-many-years best friend decided recently that they had to kick out their third roommate. Steph agonized about the decision, not wanting to be needlessly mean. But when the prospect of life without the obnoxious roommate really hit home, it made her giddy with relief. And after hearing about the situation I reassured her that she and her friend really seemed to be making the right decision. She told me not too long afterwards how the girl reacted to the news. It was so predictable and the girl's catchphrase so, well, catchy I said, "dude, I should so write a song about this." She said, "do it, do it! Oh, you should do a rap, that would be awesome!"

I'd done a rap once before, when we were sampling prepackaged refrigerated side dishes, which Steph had really gotten a kick out of. So I said okay, wrote this on the bus on the way home, and left it in her voicemail. (She liked it.) The chorus is sung, the rest is rap. You have to squish words here and there to make 'em fit the meter for the first two verses especially. I think this stress pattern is called a trochaic line: da DA, da DA, da-DA da-DA. XD

[help me change my ways]

it isn't fair it isn't fair
sometimes I washed my underwear
it's like you don't care how I feel
didn't know it was that big a deal
clean up my doggie's defecations
keep my voice down when I have relations
I got your voicemails and your texts
but this I just did not expect

help me, help me, help me change my ways
if you help, if you help, if you help me I can stay
I don't know no way, know no way
know no way to change

I really feel like staying here
bet I'll finish college in a year
while you girls stay behind like slobs
with a full class load and two crap jobs
my parents pay my room and board
which they're unemployed and can't afford
they give up so much to help me out
so what are you all so uptight about

help me, help me, help me change my ways
if you help, if you help, if you help me I can stay
I don't know no way, know no way
know no way to change

I really meant to do the dishes
why are you both being such bitches
say the mess I leave is giving you the creeps
and why not babysit my pets
I didn't ask, so you're upset
when I take off to spend a few days with my peeps
going to classes is for suckers
I spend all night with my lover
stop complaining that you need to get some rest
how's I supposed to know you meant
those stupid little notes you sent
you can't be serious, this has to be a test

don't give me thirty days
to find another place
learn what I've never known
how to make it on my own

help me help me change my ways
I know no way, say no no way
help me help me change my ways
slow it down to meet my pace
help me help me help me help
I won't lift a finger myself
so help me
change my ways

Ach, I have to leave for work now. Either this afternoon if I have time to hit up my local library, or tonight when I get home, I'll post up the song I wrote day before yesterday. Which is a more typical-for-me melodic urban nature poetry type thing. :)

quick content update

2009-12-29T12:42:00.006-06:00

I've still been writing songs, oh yes. Of the last month or so's crop, however, only two are worth writing down.

The first, [be the one], I composed the same night as [Ithaka], when Dave realized that he'd have to stay with his mom for awhile for me to be able to afford to get by. Needless to say it was a sad night, but since then most of the uncertainty in the song has changed into hopefulness. I didn't want to post it until I'd had a chance to play it for Dave. He liked it, so you get to see it. The prettiest parts of it are the "ahh..."s, which are each a string of notes as long as a line. I was going to write words till I realized it really didn't need them, and given the tone of the song the chorus is better without excess verbage.

The second, [player to be named later], I wrote yesterday. It's a happy bouncy song which has a lot of triplets on the lyrics. Which means the syllable emphases fall in odd spots sometimes. It was a classic example of revise, revise, revise--the lyrics, tune, everything got completely scrapped and rewritten at least three times to make the tight little ditty I have now.

[be the one (to decide)]

lover you think that I'm wrong
you would not have waited so long
but I chose and I choose you
I'm not gonna lose you
I'll choose you long after you're gone

ahh...
ahh...

if you don't deserve to be mine
if you think I've wasted my time
then don't write and don't visit me
online or physically
you be the one to decide this time

ahh...
ahh...
you be the one to decide this time

promises are easy to break
orgasms are easy to fake
but we know the price of being coy
is a future that you destroy
a place inside you that is always going to ache

tip the bottle and bite the lime
and don't pay your mirror no mind
though I'm right and you're perfect
my opinion's worthless
love, you be the one to decide this time

ahh...
ahh...
you be the one to
you be the one to
you be the one to decide this time

[player to be named later]

every morning as
I'm walking out to catch the bus
I wrestle pride and worry down
try to wrap my hands around trust
it's always better to surrender to great love without a fight
but oh my invisible friend
I just got myself working right

player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer
player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer

I can smell a demon
all the way across the street
they taste like bile and sweat and panic
but chewed up they make good eats
it's dangerous to go believin'
when believin' makes things real
so I ain't choosing a religion
based on how it makes me feel

player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer
player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer

I'm not the kind of gourmet fool who feels contempt
for a reality from which I'm not exempt
cook up points of view until I taste the scent
of the thing that all the symbols represent
whether I came to be here by design or chance
I'm here now, I'm here to make you dance

player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer
player to be named later
I hope that you can hear my prayer

2009 wrapup: the name of the year

2009-12-18T21:52:00.005-06:00

Starting in January 2008, I got in the habit of giving a name to every year. It was partly inspired by the way, in the book Redwall, the abbey's chronicler gives each year a name based on a memorable event which took place during that year. Except I give the name to the year ahead of time. Kind of like doing baseball pre-season predictions, except much more vague. And as we all know from newspaper horoscopes, fortune cookies etc., the more vague a prediction is, the more likely it is to seem accurate!

2008 was the Year of Great Change. I'd been hoping for the "good" kind of great, rather than the "your father dies and your life is altered irrevocably" kind. Still, it's important to have lots of ways in which to appreciate the irony of life when life is difficult. So that counted as a plus, to me, for the "name the years" idea, which is why I decided to keep doing it.

2009 is the Year Without Disaster. At the beginning of this year I was unemployed, living with Dave in the West Loop in an apartment too rich for my unemployment checks to cover. And, having gotten all the mileage I could out of the painful irony of 2008's name, I felt a strong desire to pick a more hopeful name, even at the expense of vagueness, because the facts on the ground were pretty grim.

As it turns out, Year Without Disaster was a fairly decent name for the year I've experienced. The closest call was when Dave and I had to move out of our place. However, thanks to Mom's help getting movers, Mom, Amber, Pearl and Paula helping us pack, and the surprising fact that I found a good housemate on Craigslist on short notice, it wasn't actually a disaster - just very, very difficult.

Rather than terrible events, my Year Without Disaster was instead characterized by things that were good, but still less than ideal. Getting free state-sponsored psychiatric care--for a few months. Getting a permanent job--at a grocery store. Writing better songs--less often, and with fewer opportunities to play them. Deepening my relationship with Dave--because he had to move back to his mom's and we both have to work harder at staying close. Oh, also things that were unpleasant but could have been much, much worse, though I won't enumerate those. That would be a bummer, and is beside the point.

So to come up with a name, a theme for myself for 2010, I've got to put my thinkin' hat on, step back, and ponder the current situation. It's impossible to know exact events ahead of time, of course. (At least, not without losing all touch with the context of the present, without which that information is meaningless.) The best insight you can hope for is something like the way a master chess player has a vague, intuitive hunch how the board will look twenty or twenty-five moves from now. You can, at most, find yourself a reference framework, a set of mental filters, a way of looking at what's around you that is likely to be useful in the times ahead.

So I will name 2010 the Year of the Cheese Procedure.

Oh, that would make so much more sense if I'd made a few "tales from the deli counter" posts. Maybe I will; I've got a little time off next week, though I'll be doing a cheese procedure (a sampling--excuse me, "dynamic selling"--event) till we close at 6 on Christmas Eve. However, it's late, I'm on the morning shift tomorrow, and I promised Dave and myself I'd get good sleep tonight. So a full contextual description will have to wait.

Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, joyous Eid (okay, okay, Eid was back in September, bu I don't think Islam has a December holiday), blessed Solstice, and wonderful winter family togetherness time to all. And to all a good night.

Ithaka

2009-11-19T12:32:00.004-06:00

(I'm in a much better mood lately. Talking to Dave for hours on AIM every day rules, and I've also been talking to my sisters on the phone a lot. So I don't feel so disconnected.
Anyway, here's a song I wrote about a week ago. Amber got me reading this cool series by Rick Riordan, wherein the Greek gods still exist in modern times and still have squabbles, half-human kids, etc. The second book, The Sea of Monsters, go me thinking about Odysseus. So I thought to myself, if Odysseus were to write an emo song about his trip through the Sea of Monsters, what would it be like?)

it's been two long days since I last touched page to pen
and ain't much changed since then
supplies are short
and the wind is calm
this trip is taking way too long

and I better not be wrong

I was the only man in Greece who didn't care about Helen
just wanted plunder
and a quick end to the killin'
ain't it just like the gods to let them go home
and send me out here alone

there's a tree that grows up through the floor
there's an old dog waiting by the door
will you be my old lady anymore
when I drag my bones back up the shore
of Ithaka, Ithaka, Ithaka

every dame out here want to make me a slave, or dinner
but brave Penelope, not one of them's a winner
monsters, princesses, sorceresses
every one of them tastes frustration

I have only one destination

there's a tree that grows up through the floor
there's an old dog waiting by the door
will you be my old lady anymore
when I drag my bones back up the shore
of Ithaka, Ithaka, Ithaka

yeah, the crew barbecued some beef
that was sacred to the sun
and I blinded a child of Poseidon
but they mostly got eaten
and I'm still as lost as ever
I never say I'm beaten
great Athena knows I'm clever

but Charybdis takes all my letters

there's a tree that grows up through the floor
there's an old dog waiting by the door
will you be my old lady anymore
when I drag my bones back up the shore
of Ithaka, Ithaka, Ithaka

roseanne vs. the vma's

2009-11-11T16:40:00.002-06:00

I'm just an ordinary average guy
my friends are all boring
and so am I
we're just ordinary average guys
~ Joe Walsh

I have a problem with envy.

Every year when awards season comes around, I gather my pettiness around me like skirts and flounce away from the TV. Or at least away from the channels where one may watch the Emmys, the VMAs, and various other musical award shows. I don't want to see droves of people who are, in my heart's reckoning, not quite as good at songwriting as myself, be fêted and fawned over and asked to give speeches--or even have the cameras pan over them while they watch with sour expressions as rivals give speeches.

The real reason they are there, of course, has more than anything else to do with merchandising. That is, the amount of money their CDs, mp3s, concert tickets and associated gewgaws are able to siphon into the pockets of their corporate sponsors. But supposedly--nominally--in theory--they are being honored for having created wonderful music. As the creation of wonderful music (though I lack the means to distribute it at the moment) is one of the central load-bearing pylons of my identity, this is maddening. I feel like the dog who must sit and watch while I, the foolish human, slowly devour a delicious-smelling steak which the dog is one hundred percent certain is rightfully his. Hence, I do not watch these shows, because I tend to act like an ass and sarcastically insult all the performers, even the ones I like, and detract from everyone else's enjoyment.

As I said, a problem. A problem for which a practical solution still evades me. All I can do on that front is bide my time, keep an alert eye and a grasping hand ready for any resources I can use for the purpose, and continue to get better at writing and playing songs. So that when I do find an opportunity to do more than nothing about it, the quality of music I can actually produce will be as high as freaking possible.

I used to have another, more serious problem with elitism--or, to use the wider-reaching Biblical term for it, pride. I touched on it briefly in my last post.

It came directly out of my extreme social awkwardness and low self-esteem; identity-wise, that sort of pride is a last-resort defense against loneliness. It says, I am not excluded from these social relationships because I am an unworthy ally, but rather because I am so special and different that it is important for me to hold out for something better. Which contains a couple of major untruths right on the face of it. First, the falsehood that certain kinds of people or relationships are somehow better or worse than others. After assuming the first falsehood, the second falsehood states that being unfit to have "lesser" kinds of relationships somehow gives you extra points or makes you more fit to have "better" kinds. Take the two wrong ideas together, and you get a burst of ego-soothing pride every time some incident takes place which ought to have made you feel ashamed. Like all fake "good feelings" that come from lies, though, the emotional energy for it had to get stolen out of another part of your personality. In this case, it comes from robbing yourself of the ability to like, respect and trust others.

Pernicious lies like the above are the sort which ruin otherwise decent personalities and make the people who exist through them impossible to like. All the self-loathing, acting foolish et cetera that I eat raw to try and shake them off are a very small price to pay, considering the risk. And the risk is not totally gone. I still have a somewhat shaky hold on self-respect, still have trouble holding on to friends once I've made them (though at least I can now make friends pretty easily because I like everyone and it shows), still catch myself mentally turning my nose up at things which I know are good and valuable and not to be scorned. It's like Jefferson said: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Personality construction isn't architecture; it's flow mechanics. It's being able to maintain a standing wave with just enough curl that you can surf in it.

So yesterday evening Dave was channel-surfing and we ended up watching an episode of Roseanne. It was one of the big end-of-the-series ones where all the relationships have more or less stabilized and everyone's together twisting together loose strands of plot. So people were talking about the big stuff, relationships and love and the future, way more than in your typical sitcom episode.

I have no idea why, but when I was a lonely, ulcerous little kid, the Roseanne show stood for failure in my mind. I'd never watched it, just assumed that it was about people who'd given up striving for Greatness and Fame and a Chance to Earn a Place in History, and chosen to settle for being (ick!) an ordinary, average family. One of those nasty-assumptions-based-on-several-falsehoods that I didn't think about consciously, and wouldn't have recognized as such until I'd taken the trouble to drain out all the tributary falsehoods. That life isn't worth living unless at some point you attain Greatness and Fame. (And presumably Even More Ulcers.) That being part of a large, loving, occasionally squabbling family that still has each other's backs when it counts is somehow a bad thing, or an unimportant one. To name just a couple.

As I sat there and watched the show, saw all the plot threads come together as the fictional family reaffirmed their love and support for one another, I felt the same old gut-twist of envy that I normally expect from watching the VMAs. These fictional characters, for whom I used to feel casual, unexamined contempt, had something I desperately wanted. Not only the acceptance (howsoever grudging sometimes) and the togetherness (howsoever irritating sometimes), but the stability and means to enjoy and focus on those things. It's just a show about an ordinary, average family who has the freedom to sit around and live life and work out their relationships with each other, and the reasonable expectation that they can keep doing so. I want that, more intensely than I want a record deal, even. And at the moment, I'm about equally likely to be able to get either one.

Luckily I have a lot of practice appreciating the irony of moments like this. A way of life for which I once felt ill-thought-through contempt turns out to be one of my highest ambitions. A seemingly unattainable one, too, at least in the immediate term. Pass the salt and carve the crow, it's a typical dinner at my place.

Tomorrow Paula's going to be coming over to pick Dave up. Him staying here is not something I can afford with what I'm making now, and none of his job opportunities in the area panned out. I have no idea what's going to happen next. And this time that doesn't feel like a good thing.

authenticity

2009-11-01T00:02:00.003-05:00

The entrance to the place was clogged with sweating courtiers--not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.

~ Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, p.168

"I just lost my best friend on Dead Man's Curve!"
"What's Dead Man's Curve?"
"It's an incredibly dangerous curve in the fake highway we built."
"Why would you build an incredibly dangerous curve in a FAKE highway?"
"Authenticity!"

~ Upright Citizens' Brigade, the episode with the space dolphins

Authenticity is dangerous, elusive--necessary. Pundits cross verbal swords over what the "real America" is or isn't, hipsters chase an ever-receding horizon of cool, philosophers and theologians argue over the original intent of ancient texts, governments attempt to demonstrate the connections between their mechanisms of power and the will of the people they rule and, supposedly, represent. And very little of this, when I boil it down to its syrupy essence, has much to do with my life in practical terms.

I spent probably more than half my life in an attempt to win free of a deep-seated, irrational self-loathing. And just as, in this man's army, the reward for a job well done is another job, the success of that project cascaded into another project: self-respect.

Looking into how people put our personalities together has led me to observe some things about norms--the expectations and standards of behavior we use to judge the worth, the coolness, the desirability of various actions and behaviors. We also use norms to create and, unconsciously at least, rank the categories into which various types of persons may fall. A norm is, structurally, a collection of memes which we have invested with belief.

I've got some of the classic ivory-tower intellectual norms about blue-collar jobs. You could call it prejudice, naivete, or even something nicer if your norms lean in the same direction. Namely, deep in the bottom of my brain, I feel that people who work with their hands and the strength of their backs are in some weird way nobler and more connected to reality than people who sit at desks and crunch numbers or wrangle legalese.

Since most of my jobs have been the sitting-at-desks kind, I've experienced an interesting tension between pride in my work and shame that it's not "honest" labor. Now, however, I'm in a place where I don't just feel like an authentic, hardworking American laborer, I actually am one. I work (when I'm lucky) eight hours a day, on my feet, slicing meats and cheeses. I make salads, help customers find items, even make sandwiches or pizzas on occasion, and at the end of the night I take deli slicers apart and clean them, mop floors, and turn out the lights when I leave.

And I'm friggin' loving it. I actually do feel more connected to reality, and even if it's only an illusion created by my preconceptions, it's a useful illusion and I cultivate it. This teeny tiny job in this one grocery store is where the rubber meets the road. The whole corporate hierarchy of the company which owns "my" store, all the people who have desk jobs crunching numbers and wrangling legalese, exist so that I can have a side of beef or turkey or ham to slice up, tag, bag, hand to a customer and say, "Would you like some cheese with that?" Call me crazy, but I've been here almost three months now and it's still exhilarating.

The coolest part about it is really the human aspect. There's a camaraderie among people who work together with their hands that just doesn't exist in an office. We spend a shift together, or at least within eye contact of one another, performing the same mind-numbing and back-straining tasks, over and over, getting hassled by the same hilarious (in retrospect) customers, staring at the backs of the same item tags and watching to see when our trays and dishes need to be refilled. And when there's a lull in business, when it's time to mop up at the end of the day, when we're outside catching a cancer stick on break, we connect like real human beings. We swap war stories about crazy customers, talk about our kids/parents/significant others/roommates, and just generally bask in mutually earned respect.

Far from having my old norms dispelled by a rude shock of horrible reality, I find them confirmed and solidified. It matters that I can spend a shift pushing pizzas and squirming my whole torso in under the counter to scoop up precise weights of potato salads and still walk out the door smiling. It makes a difference in somebody's day that I gave them their turkey sliced to the thickness they wanted, got them a sample, and still found the energy to joke about the weather. If I want to be a bodhisattva when I grow up (even if that is just a collection of ideals I've assembled in my brain! or like a saint, but with more arms--both good!), then this is a step I absolutely could not have afforded to skip. This is freaking important.

Sure, I spend a lot of time worrying about money. That, too, is part of being a real authentic blue-collar American. At $8.20 an hour (per union contract for new hires--did I mention I'm in a union now? how cool is that?), the difference between 27 and 30 hours a week is the difference between not quite being able to pay my rent and being able to pay it and also buy bus fare and maybe some eggs, bread and beer. My manager is cool about it--she schedules me for the first seven hours of an eight-hour shift, so that if, at the end of the night, I find there's enough work to keep me there a bit longer, I can call in to the person-in-charge and get me an extra half-hour or so for the night. Gives me a chance to juice the clock from 27 hours up to 30 or so, in other words. Me being an awesome worker and high-energy customer service guru is the difference between getting that consideration and getting scheduled for the union-contract-minimum 16 hours per week--which would most definitely not be enough to pay for my rent, bus fare and food.

I work at a nexus in the maelstrom of commercial exchange, but subsist on a very narrow margin between the income I can produce and what I must consume in order to continue eating and living indoors. Every day is a balancing act. Sure, I could get the employee-discounted coffee for $0.83--but do I have that much in my bank account? Will I need it later for rent or bus fare? Or do I actually need to get it, to get a cash-back amount of less than $20 (the minimum ATM withdrawal) so that I can recharge my bus card in order to be able to get to work tomorrow?

It's kind of weird. I worry about this stuff every day, I run the numbers over and over in my head to reach the same sums, and then I take a step back into the philosophical, metagaming sphere which is my native realm. And I ask myself things like, "In what do you actually believe?" or "What gives you strength and keeps you going?" or "Whence comes your help?"

People.
Relationships.
Love.
Magic.

I am reformatting my personal definitions of all those things with every step I take, with every slice I push through with the strength of my arms, with every cent I spend. Authenticity, as I conceive it, is a thing you earn by living in spite of difficulty, through effort, by meeting challenges for which failure is not an option. It is the triumph of the spark in the ashes of the phoenix, the extra twenty minutes you put on the clock, the quarter you find in the gutter that makes bus fare home out of not quite enough. It is the difference between independent life and living under a bridge hoping for a handful of someone else's change. It is so very little, and in the final analysis, everything.

poem in lieu of update

2009-10-18T23:42:00.004-05:00

In my first blog post since, well, awhile, I could cover many topics. Tales from the deli counter, stories of my impending AIM-based D&D campaign, details of the checking account dance of not-quite doom...but those things can wait for another day. Because I wrote a poem!

Props, surprisingly enough, to David Drake's novel Fortress of Glass. Once I ran through the library's assortment of Mercedes Lackey and Lois Bujold, I thought I'd give him a try. Some of the images from the book seem to have filtered their way into this poem. It's a pantoum! I think it needs punctuation, and I'll probably edit it, but the basics are there.

[hedge maze]

Math's in my head, where music used to spring
Numbers curl out with sharp-angled leaves
These soaring notes spread under me like wings
I gather feathers up in muted sheaves

Numbers curl out with sharp-angled leaves
I dance among their vertices like glass
I gather feathers up in muted sheaves
With every balanced step I gather mass

I dance among their vertices like glass
Reflecting all the light that dapples through
With every balanced step I gather mass
Momentum for a great leap, but where to?

Oh, plant me a horizon in this soil
These soaring notes, spread under me like wings
Will bear me to some fresh, immortal coil
Math's in my head where music used to spring

Playoffs!?

2009-10-07T19:43:00.004-05:00

The baseball season has officially begun, and now that we dwell in a place where there is cable, we can watch (in Dave's case) or vaguely be aware of while doing other stuff (in my case) the baseball postseason in all its glorious merchandisable glory. I have not paid attention to baseball at all this year, so I'm anticipating my preseason picks for both the National League and the American League will be hilarious in retrospect. Mmm, retrospect.

My preseason picks:

NL
East: NY Mets
Central: Chicago Cubs
West: Arizona Diamondbacks
Wild card: Atlanta Braves

AL
East: NY Yankees
Central: Minnesota Twins
West: Oakland A's
Wild card: Chicago White Sox

Actual standings at the end of the 2009 regular season:

NL
East: Philadelphia Phillies (Mets finished 4th)
Central: St. Louis Cardinals (Cubs finished 2nd)
West: LA Dodgers (Diamondbacks finished dead last in the West)
Wild card: Colorado Rockies

AL
East: NY Yankees (why does being right about this make me feel glum?)
Central: Minnesota Twins (good hunch on my part there)
West: LA Angels (Oakland finished dead last in the West)
Wild card: Boston Red Sox

I have learned a few things from this exercise. I will list them in a random order!

#12. I know absolutely nothing about the Western divisions in baseball. Worse than nothing. In fact, there is only one way to make use of my opinions on these divisions. Take my opinions, write down the opposite of each, then go to your local sports betting facility and place wagers for MLB games based on the things you have written down. You might end up with cab fare home for your troubles!

A(2)(192-j). Each season, I get one shockingly correct hunch. However, it is always surrounded by abysmally incorrect hunches. I could attribute this either to random chance, with which it is logically consistent, or to the time-traveling machinations of mischievous fairies.

Stupid fairies. Er, y'know--the wingy, shiny, time-traveling, wish-granting kind. Stupid them.

#771. Picking the Yankees is apparently the smart move again. Man, I liked it better when they stank on ice. Although now, if they lose in the first round, it will be to the ChiSox's arch rival, the Twins. So I suppose that's a no-win situation for a sports-bigamizing Chicagoan like me. (*looks up at TV* Wait, why are we watching this game?)

ZZ9(pl)Za. The Cubs are always good on paper. On paper is where they have home field advantage. Everywhere else, they are like the pitching staff of a team visiting Mile-High Stadium, home of the Rockies, before the humidor was installed which counteracts some of the extra sproing given to the leathery spheres by the high altitude. In other words, grimly brave but ultimately ineffectual.

#1. If I am going to have interesting things to say about baseball, it would help to actually follow it.

now live from under a local bridge!

2009-10-07T19:10:00.005-05:00

Okay, not under a bridge. It was a close thing, though, and without much and prodigious help, that is where we would be right now.

Moving is complete!

Well, technically, moving was complete last Saturday. Mom, Amber and Paula all came to help us finish getting packed. And Mom, in a burst of extreme generosity and very good sense, hired some movers to do the actual loading, driving and unloading. Since after all the packing etc., just watching them made me feel tired, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been possible for the few of us to do it all in less than three days! Even with a UHaul.

So to Mom and Amber and Paula, you have our great thanks! And Mom, you gave us the getting-married present we wanted and needed most!

Our new place is pretty awesome. We have a roommate named Don, who's a cool guy and is already being a good influence on us in terms of neatness. The place wasn't just cleaned-up and nice looking for the potential renters, as it turns out. He really keeps it this way all the time. Also, he has a dog named Oliver.
:) <--- me, learning we get to live with a dog
:-D :*-) ) <----- Dave, learning we get to live with a dog
O_O >_< x_x;; <---- Shashi, our cat, learning we now live with a dog

Having experimented a bit, I've found that my new commute, if I hit all my buses, is actually only an hour. As opposed to the hour and a half it was before. Except on Sundays, when one of the buses I need doesn't run past 9pm. That, however, is okay, since Don's cool with picking me up from the bus station as long as I take a phone with me and call. And I can always explain to my manager that it'd really be better for me to not work Sunday nights.

Dave is looking for a job closer to new home, and plans to make a day of it tomorrow. This week up till now has been a flurry of (for me) work, unpacking, and various move-in chores. Like, for example, getting our wireless router hooked up to Don's internet. It works way better than the DSL at the apartment did, lemme tell ya.

So, yeah. Got new place to live. Made beef stew. Arranged furniture in bedroom. Played some KoL. All in all, a very good week so far!

Oh, and I finished [in the middle of it]. I don't think it's all that good, but at least it's done. Made me think maybe I could put together an album of "riddle songs", where each song is about an abstract concept or state of mind which is danced around but never explicitly stated in the song. (Edit 4-28-10: Actually this song IS really good. Took me awhile to notice.)

can't get me moving
unless I'm dragged up by the chains of duty
but if I stand still
I can't wave my hand and call forth beauty
gotta find what's left of me
at the end of the live-long day
gotta hope it's enough
enough, enough to give away

beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
come get some, come get some from it

I loved a neighborhood
it showed me how to run and when to stand
and when I had to leave
it helped me find a solid place to land
you get so tired
of having something to prove
but underneath is fire
so you've always got to move

beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
come get some, come get some from it

and it's a waste of breath
not to have a little talk on it
and it's a waste of time
not to give it every hour
and it's a waste of ground
not to lay a little rock on it
honey, you've got to sweat
to be empowered

beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
come get some, come get some from it

pride and disgust

2009-09-23T00:22:00.002-05:00

Apartment hunting developments in brief, for those who are interested:

The place we were looking at before is now a non-option. Leasing agent told me verbally that we'd start on a month-to-month basis and would be out if we fell a month behind; I assumed co-signing would be on that basis and told Mom and Amber this. However when Mom called the leasing agent, he told her it would be a minimum six-month lease, for payment of which both principals and co-signers would still be responsible in the event of eviction. I am annoyed with the agent for this, but hey, what can be done?
So I'll be looking at another place tomorrow and yet another on Friday, and we'll see what happens.

The rest of this post is about things inside my brain. As that is the purpose of this blog: to spill my guts for your amusement and possible informeditude.

For this post, there's a chart I want to scan, and maybe later I'll figure out how and scan it in here. It's a handwritten copy I made from a chart on page 78 of Peter Carroll's Liber Null. (I later lent the book to a friend, so I'm glad I had made the copy.) The chart divides up the many shades of emotional experiences into a wheel, where each emotion is placed across from its opposite--loathing opposite greed, anger opposite joy and so forth. Sure, it's Carroll's personal interpretation of how emotional experiences can be divided up, but as a concept it can still be a useful tool.

One perspective on it is that one can use the chart to understand the tensions within experience. In physics, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In personality construction, every emotion produces an equal and opposite emotion. To be angered by one experience is to create within oneself the potential to find joy in another.

Another side of it is that in a sense, each emotion contains its opposite. When we experience greed and loathing, the actual relationship each emotion creates is very similar: only the direction is inverted. Loathing pushes us away from the object and greed draws us toward it, but in both cases, we are bound to it. We develop a powerful relationship with the object of our emotion, a relationship which influences our perceptions, our choices, even our values. In math, the "absolute values" of "plus 5" and "minus 5" represent the same distance from zero--just in different directions. In a similar way the "absolute values" of positive and negative emotions can represent the same distance away from "no relationship at all".

So, once upon a time, I was in high school, and I was plagued by constant, intense feelings of self-disgust. A gesture, a word, a stray thought out of place--and how many stray thoughts go out of place in a minute? an hour?--and a wave of moral and emotional nausea so intense it was almost physical would rise up in me. I disgusted myself to the point where it got in the way of everything except breathing. (Unless I breathed too loud or sniffled. That, too, disgusted me.) Thus, I decided the most sensible thing I could do would be to eliminate the emotion of disgust from my personality.

Those of you who have been reading me or listening to me blather for a long time already know this story. It's one of my standard referents, and is still something I'm pretty proud of, because that was my first step in the direction of attacking my emotional issues head-on. At the time it was a really smart move, because this one emotion was totally out of control and throwing everything else inside me out of whack. (Er, out of alignment. Whatever.) Unless I put the work in to develop ways to manage this emotion and keep it within its proper, useful context, letting it back into my personality would have been unwise.

However, when I removed one negative emotion from the spectrum of my experiences, I also removed its opposite, positive emotion. I didn't know what it was, exactly--until it came back! Recently I have gotten to the point where I have a kind of pride born of self-respect. Of having proved to myself, to my own satisfaction, that I'm competent to meet various challenges. A whole bunch of real-life experiences went into this, some of which I've blogged about, some I haven't. Some are still ongoing. (which will hopefully always be the case! one should never cease to grow!)

Three days this week, I'm on loan from my usual grocery store to another store in the chain. This other store is about to close; it has very few customers and very little staff and is generally older and dingier than my store. For the first time I'm alone behind the deli counter and responsible for it. I'm doing pretty well, and I'm proud of myself for it, in no small part because this is a comparatively blue-collar sort of job, "real, honest work" as I see it, for which my previous experience hasn't much prepared me.

And I noticed that I was starting to feel disgust. Simple, honest, physical disgust. At the intense amount of work I had to do to keep this deli counter sanitary and free of flies, at the process of skewering raw chickens for tomorrow's roasting, at the way certain items got dried out and nasty during the day. About halfway through my shift I realized that I was feeling disgust--and immediately I understood what this meant.

The self-confidence and pride I've got now, which are based on having set and successfully met various challenges for myself, these things are the opposite of the self-disgust which used to be so crippling for me. Pride based on practical knowledge is the opposite of disgust based on irrational terror. Worthy / unworthy is the spectrum of experience I'm talking about. Right now the scale is very small--but nonetheless I've come back around full circle. So there's a whole wavelength I'd cut out of my emotional spectrum which has now been restored to limited functionality! Hooray for functionality!

:D

wound so tight

2009-09-20T23:51:00.004-05:00

So this was totally not the direction I was expecting this song to take. It is a jazz number, with lots of show-offy spots for runs and trills and stuff. (But no guitar part as yet. I've been working on finger-picking but the voice part is hard enough by itself.) My voice at seventeen maybe could have really taken it places, but I can give it a decent treatment even now. The chorus is a couple months old, so I suppose my song-making parts had time to give it a good "three points and a prayer" treatment. Meaning, it comes back to the same image from a different angle each time. And has a happy ending, for a wonder!

panic rises up so subtly within me
crease my brows and purse my lips, and I look old
I'm like an origami spider up a chimney
I will fall into the fire if I unfold

wound so tight
wound so tight
because everything else is unraveling

we gather up the things we own
the books, the clothes, the telephone
devices we use every day
and statues we cannot display

but like a camel full of water
knowing I'm my father's daughter
swells my back, makes it seem muscular and strong
how can I carry all this gear
I'm just a snarl of love and fear
and will, suspended from a filament of song

wound so tight
wound so tight
because everything else is unraveling

when the harness breaks
you grab the rope
and when the rope breaks
you clutch the stone
though we must leave this place
we see our loved ones' faces
here so that we won't have to leave this place
alone

for we all weave our hands together
trying all our best to never
let one of us go to tumble to the ground
so whatever else we're losing
we are rich because we're choosing
to love, be loved, to cherish and be bound

wound so tight
wound so tight
because everything else is unraveling

some weird kinda poetic justice?

2009-09-19T08:18:00.003-05:00

It's been a frustrating thirty-six hours for the Fiat, and I'm not entirely certain I should write about it. Except when you get the same frustrating thing from multiple different sources near-simultaneously, this is often a good indicator that you have missed something important.

I've basically just gotten the message--in real life, in a variety of different situations--from about six different people, "you're an irresponsible child, and we don't trust your judgment or think you really care enough to try." In fact every different situation has been accompanied by someone saying "you're a child." Of course not in a mean way--just in comparison to their standards.

Ordinarily I wouldn't mind being called a child, if it weren't for the context. And for the first time in my life I'm pretty sure that I haven't been acting like one. So maybe some kinda weird poetic justice, an opportunity to reflect on all those times in the past when I was irresponsible, did act like a child, and created this impression, this image of myself which is now proving so hard to shake. Either that or I am missing something really, really important which is about to rear up and bite me in the behind. However, I will not have an uncontrollable public attack of hysterical panic about it. That is what I did when I was a child. I instead will get fingernail-bitey and panicky at home, and then go to work and act like nothing is wrong.

Since after all, people a work probably have their own things to panic about. Like responsible adults, however, they are able to disguise their true feelings from everyone except those select few who actually care what those feelings are, and/or have the ability to do something about the situations to which those feelings pertain.

P.S. Present company most definitely excepted, as I explain in the comments. You guys and gals are all cool in my book.
P.P.S. Wow, major typo in the title there. Fixed it!

We're in the process of getting married! And moving!

2009-09-15T16:54:00.001-05:00

That's us, yesterday, at Ronny's Original Chicago Steakhouse. Steaks and Buds for both of us were only $20, because Ronny's was having a sale. The piece of paper I'm holding in the photo is a marriage license, which cost twice that. (Dave found a fellow restaurant patron who was willing to get our picture using Dave's phone, because it seemed to me that you-all would be slightly mollified if we at least had a picture.) So we have between now and Nov. 14th to get it signed by a judge or cleric and sent in to the Cook County officials. Perhaps we will keep the actual date a secret for awhile after the fact--but we are most certainly keeping it a secret before. This is going to be the most non-secret elopement it's possible to have, but it's still going to be an elopement. Because that's what we want to do. So there. At some point after the actual documents are official, when we can afford it and have agreed on a design, we're probably going to find us a good tattoo parlor and get our wedding rings. :D

Immediately after food, we went north to see an apartment which I can actually afford on the money I'm making working at the deli. And as Dave pointed out, if he found a job in the neighborhood, we would be making significantly more than would be necessary to survive. We could, in other words, start doing cool stuff like debt service and savings. We'd still be living right next to a train line--just a different one. The one I take to get to work. Much, much closer to work. In a neighborhood that's actually slightly nicer than the one in which we currently reside. So depending on how fast we can get an appointment to see the leasing agent (and whether our execrable and/or nonexistent credit is adequate) we could, in theory, start moving our stuff into it while it's still September, and start paying rent Oct 1.

Now, if I were you, and if I read this from the other side of the interscreen, I can tell you what I'd be thinking right about now.

(And by "you" I mean "our friend or loved one, who quite likely knows us in real life and would have been invited to our large, public ritual for the acknowledgement of heterosexual life-partnerment, such as the one shown in the above photo I copied without permission from the website of a photographer apparently named Ian Haring, if in fact we were having one, which we are not, at least not at the traditional time in the process.")

If I were "you", I'd be thinking:
"Huzzah, good for them, and about freaking time!"
"Those sneaky jerks have forgone a large public ritual, thereby denying me and everyone else who knows them the opportunity for the vast exchange of social-structure and relationship information which the organization and performance of such a ritual exists, in large part, to expedite! How very rude, even if it is monetarily practical at the moment!"

See, this is why elopement is both frowned upon and attractive, depending on one's feelings about large, complex social relationships among large numbers of people. When many different relationships, some very intense, between a whole lot of people at the same time are all going to be altered by a single event, it makes good sense to mark that event with a public ritual. Just in terms of emotional and mental economy. That way everyone who has a stake in the event can symbolically communicate to everyone else involved what the event means to them, how their relationships with various other involved parties are going to change, and (just for garnish!) how they feel about the fact that it is happening. Furthermore, because these changing social realities are acknowledged publicly, simultaneously and symbolically, everyone has a much better chance of remembering who now means what to whom afterwards. The form of the ritual itself acts as a mnemonic device: common ceremonial elements serve as shorthand to describe relationships even to persons not within the social group but familiar with the culture. "Oh, do you know them well?" "Why yes, I [did X] at their wedding."

Also, too, it gives people an opportunity to express their love and support* in a highly condensed and reasonably approachable way.

So, if you feel you absolutely must do something to express your love and support**, by all means, please come and help us pack, help us move, come over and find stuff we're not going to be able to take with us and take it back to your dwelling with you***. Or you can, y'know, wait for us to give in to the inevitable and start planning a post-matrimonial party of some kind. Haven't talked it over with Dave yet, but I'm thinking Firstiversary Party. Has a nice sound to it, and is sufficiently far away****. ;)

Love and pez be unto all of you.
I for one am exceedingly***** happy.

* or their hatred and opposition
** or hatred and opposition
*** or call our prospective landlord and tell him nasty things about us, sneak into our current apartment at night to unpack our boxen, and leave behind large, badly damaged pieces of furniture
**** also, it now occurs to me, announcing a Firstiversary Party would require revealing the date of the actual marriage, which would be fun
***** but not, I think, excessively

eviction song

2009-09-13T01:58:00.010-05:00

Written just now! I was gettin' all nostalgic because of not being able to play guitar on this back porch much longer. The guitar part is really pretty--I heard it in my head first, and am kinda surprised it was so easy to play. Tried to make it one of those songs where this specific experience can be metaphorically generalized, so the song-story can apply to other people's similar-but-different experiences. Bit of a rising action at the end. Chords included in parentheses, although there's actual picking in this one. But the chords give a general idea of the tune if you know how to strum 'em. Chord sequences repeat until superseded.

back when the moon was full (F C G D)
I was so self-assured (F C D )
just getting comfortable
in this place I cannot afford

take a deep, deep breath, girl
they don't charge for the air like the land
you can clutch at the carpet and weep but still
it has slipped from beneath your hands

take your ancestors' ashes down off the shelf
load 'em up on your full faith and credit
one last look at the skin of your childhood self
one last curse that you had to shed it

pick your landing site (F C G@3fr Bm F)
and stick it (C D)
got a problem left
just lick it
pack your baggage
here's your ticket
all you have is all you have (C G G@3fr Bm)
all you have is all you have
all you have is all you have

'cause you're evicted (C G D)

halcyon days are ovah!

2009-09-10T23:21:00.002-05:00

Just as well that I seem to have scared Gideon off. (And just as I was getting warmed up, too!)

My landlord wants us out by the 28th, if possible. He is so very reasonable and nice about it, on the phone. Even--certebus parebus, all other things being equal--I agree he has been more than generous. But I can't keep up this damn place on the pittance I make and that's a fact.

Now all that remains is to determine:

--Which mom(s) will allow us (and/or cat) to move in with them of a sudden
--Which people we know are willing to help us move out
--Which storage facility shall house whatever of my/Dave's/Dad's stuff we don't want to either give to our local thrift store or throw away
--Where I will work that I can get to from wherever I must live next

And other things of that nature. Wish me well, or if you know me in real life, let us get in contact soon, and I will beg you for whatever assistance you can render!

Gideon response III

2009-09-08T03:08:00.016-05:00

But, about my commas... there is some dispute that commas are underused. I'm surprised, being an author, you didn't know this? (Did I do it right... the commas?)

Ah, I was just needling you about the commas 'cause you needled me about the French grammar. :)

May I ask the name(s) of the book(s) you wrote? Considering the Biblical simplicity of your pseudonym and the fact that your blogger profile page contains no links, you are effectively completely anonymous. Hence I had no way of knowing you are a published author. Congratulations! Can your work be purchased off Amazon or a personal website of yours? Or is it, like your current blog, something you'd rather I not see?

So, sweetie, (oh... does that demean you? No disrespect, but, you are young enough to be my child) let's see how honest YOU are, in your seemingly down-to-earth, laid-back, unassuming way of being, and in interaction. You ready, like so many other enlightened atheists I've encountered, to step up to the plate with ol' Gid, or, are you going to play the offended priss, and stomp off, somewhere?

You may use whatever endearments towards me you wish! As a child (as opposed to my current state, namely, "I'm not quite sure why I don't still count as a teenager") I was always envious of kids who had interesting nicknames based on their names or even based on their exploits. Good or bad, notoriety is notoriety in the eyes of one's peers. So you can call me sweetie, or honey, as my coworkers at the deli counter do, or Farty McGee The Butt-Faced Broad if that's what revs your engine.

This is my 'house' and I invited you. So I'm not leaving, and I have no intention of banning you. If I don't like you as a commenter, I have only myself to blame, since you wouldn't be here if I'd just sat back and said nothing. As for the other, I've only left one place as the result of an online fight. And that was a forum inhabited by the aforementioned Reverend Roger, of whom I am still very fond, albeit from a distance. If you are interested I will tell you about it; if not, no worries.

On to our differing views of what constitutes the proper approach to Christianity! You come to the discussion as a Christian who views himself as a righteous mouthpiece of God. I come to the discussion as a former Christian who has been deconverted for about ten years.

The only reason I bother with you at all, is, (comma?) that His Spirit moves me to do it. The "old man", as I said, doesn't really care. This is in line with what the apostle describes in his analysis of the human condition, during and prior to conversion.

Well, hey, I'm flattered your invisible friend wants you to talk to me. (And please know, when I use the term invisible friend, it is not meant to be derogatory. I had a beast of a time trying to find a symbol-set-neutral term, so that I'm not conceding the appropriateness of the other person's terminology in the middle of the discussion. And that's the best I could come up with.) It certainly jives with the fascination you inspire in me, which led me to invite you here. You are a rare amalgam of traits I abhor and traits I respect, which means that unlike many people who share certain of your views, it is actually possible to talk to you. You are a troll, yes, but by comparison to others who share some of your views, a very urbane and civilized troll! So yes, let's--let us bother with one another for a time.

I'll admit that, sometimes, it is gratifying to "kick some ass", especially when they ask for it. Of course, YOU would never do that, would you?

Honesty and transparency are the main reasons I like trolls. The thing I find abhorrent about your particular brand of trolling is that you take the position "I'm hurting you because it's good for you when I hurt you." Whereas Roger and his crew were quite open about the fact that they hurt people because they got a buzz out of starting fights, making people squirm, and doling out comeuppance where they believed comeuppance was due. You do the same, but you hide behind God. "No, see, Jesus wants me to be mean to you; the fact that I enjoy it is just a side benefit, his reward to me because I'm so faithful to him."

I am enjoying this interaction with you, by the way, however you wish to characterize it. It is like moshing with brains. Exhilarating, and lent a dangerous spice by the fact that there's always a remote possibility of someone getting an arm broken or a nose bloodied!

And I relish the opportunity to have this discussion with you, because I try very hard to operate within the frame my interlocutors are using. As I see it, when people take on the same tone, the same roles with one another, they can actually exchange information and ideas. If one person takes on an attitude which is sharply and wildly distinct from that of the other person, they don't communicate much. They just trade emotional value loads back and forth, until they either achieve equilibrium and begin to communicate, or one of them gives up. You came in "guns blazing"--so I get to blaze! I so, so rarely get to blaze! :D :D

As for my character, I am a Christian, whether I meet your criteria for being one or not. You said it - everyone tries their best.

It is true, as I personally choose to define the term, I do not at this time consider you a Christian. My definition of the term "Christian" is: a person whose highest and primary aim in life is to become like the Christ of the Gospels, according to my understanding of the same. Your definition may be similar, but it is necessarily based upon your own understanding of the Christ of the Gospels. Which is clearly different than mine.

When you say "the apostle", you mean Paul, yes? I've been flipping around the beginning of Acts, and I don't see any of his sermons transcribed until well after his conversion, when he was saying things like "For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, to lay upon you no further burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well." (Acts 15:28-29) This arose out of a disagreement among the Apostles over whether Gentile converts should have to conform to Jewish custom as well as Christian doctrine. In these times the meat-sacrificed-to-idols bit doesn't apply. Though nobody seems to pay any attention whatsoever to the Jewish ecclesiastical laws from which the other instructions were drawn. Fornicating, now--Christians today do pay a lot of attention to fornicating. Ah! But I am getting bogged down in details.

To which statements of Paul's did you refer, or was it more of a general comment?

In fact, if one reads Proverbs, the wisest man that ever lived says, in effect, over and over, that assholes don't deserve any respect or fair treatment!

Oh, I love Proverbs!

When I was a little girl, Revelations was my favorite book of the Bible (so exciting, you know?) but as a teenager, I started to like Ecclesiastes best. It's good that it comes after Proverbs; it's like a sequel. King spends long reign composing wise sayings, then at the end, tired and trying hard not to be bitter, recounts what it feels like to be the person reputed to be most wise. Good stuff!

Nice thing about Proverbs is, it has a quote for every situation you can think of. It all depends which real-time thing you mean to hook up with which part of the proverb.

"There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the tongue of the wise is health." (Prov 12:18)

"He that despiseth his neighbor sinneth: but he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he." (Prov 14:21)

"Strive not with a man without cause, if he have done thee no harm. Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways." (Prov 3:30-31)

"The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh." (Prov 11:17)

Rose-colored glasses seem to be a common feature with the scarlet-A crowd. Only Christians are hypocritical pricks. *Sigh*

This is an interesting statement, and I put it up here right next to my own cherry-picked Bible verses for a reason.

I'm'a add another couple quotes from you and then get down to business.

I've had many of "God's children" desert me, though, at crucial times, and many atheists, too!

[quote from a different place]

So, when I see a bunch of know-nothing clowns blogging about how God is a prick, if He exists at all, I say to myself: Gid... those bastards need a visit, and a little tuning up!" Of course, any tuning up I do is in brotherly love! You believe me, don't you?

*Big, innocent, bloodshot eyes*

Now, it seems to me that you do not make any distinction at all between lifetime atheists and ex-Christians.

Lifetime atheists who never had any religious beliefs tend, in my observation, to be sort of casual, sarcastic, and baffled when they bash God. They're not so much opposed to people believing in God, they just don't understand why a person would want to worship a being which fits the garbled description that usually comes across to them. Lifetime atheists, then, oppose God because of either ignorance, or because they have encountered Christians who are more interested in pimping a political or social agenda than in actually preaching the Gospel. Even the Apostles, for all they argued about Jewish dietary laws, for all of Paul's exhortations not to bicker or fornicate or whatever, they followed the pattern: convert first, encourage life changes afterwards.

The way you, and a lot of those who take on the name of Christians, seem to do things is the opposite.

I know it's not Biblical--but do you remember that famous scene in Ben-Hur, when Ben-Hur is on a forced march and collapses from thirst? A gourd of water is thrust towards his mouth and he drinks, desperately. Then he looks up and sees a robed figure who, in the story of the movie, turns out to be Christ.

At a time when I was attending a church which met in the city, some of us went out a few times in the hottest part of the summer to hand out tracts. They were clever little tracts, written by our pastor, which had a graphic of droplets on the front next to the word "thirsty?" On the inside was a brief Gospel message, and directions and contact information to the church. We walked through the park in the daytime, under the hot sun, handing them out.

But we didn't bring any water. Not water bottles, not a jug and Dixie cups--nada. We didn't quench people's physical thirst, as a physical metaphor for the way in which Christ is said to quench the thirst of people's souls. We just reminded them of the fact that they were thirsty, did nothing to help, and then left. So instead of associating Jesus with their thirst being quenched, people associated Jesus with their thirst being mocked. Not surprisingly, nobody showed up at services in response to the tracts.

My point is that even if you are right about humanity's need for salvation, you are doing the same thing I and my then-fellow churchgoers did. You are rubbing their noses in the fact that they are "wrong", but you're doing it in such a way that there's not a snowball's chance on a hot summer day on a Chicago sidewalk that you'll inspire in them any desire to find out how to do right, instead.

As for former Christians, the above also applies, but they (we, I suppose) actually have baggage over and above the mere ignorance of the never-believers.

You, yourself, have been lied to, abandoned, mistreated by Christians and atheists alike. You think very little of humanity in general and take solace in God's wrath against the sinful.

And yet--if we assume you're right about Christianity being the One True Faith--you are actually stronger in your faith than those of us who left. Closer to God, still able to partake of his presence, mercy, gifts etc. Right here on my blog you've mocked people who left Christianity, saying "oh, they didn't get what they wanted, so they're taking their ball and going home." By your reckoning, we caved in to merely human weakness, abandoning God because humans failed us, humans who happened to be taking on the name of God at the time. We allowed the image of God in our hearts to be sullied and tarnished, confused with the images of human pettiness and human spite. Yet you, who have also been hurt by those who called themselves Christians, were able to stay with God and not lose your faith.

Yet you have no compassion in you, for we who were (allegedly) so destitute of strength, so pitiful and spineless, that we could be driven away from God by mere human cruelty. Instead you take pride in your own perceived strength of soul and are boastful. You do not rejoice that you are saved and we, because of our own fragility, are damned. Instead you take the things in us which are broken and seek to break them further. You do not encourage us by saying that God is not as we think he is, that we can live with God and be mighty and speak out against those who would take on God's name in vain. Instead, you compound and multiply the human pitilessness from which we fled.

You are exactly as you perceive us to be. You were hurt, so you take joy in hurting. You are strong, so you believe God has sent you to belittle and lash out at the weak. You see people being petty and spiteful and mean-spirited, so you go in among us and are petty and spiteful and mean-spirited. You bait and barb and look for chinks in our armor and wait with baited breath for a reaction of rage, for the wrath of the violated, the panic of the invaded. You are gleeful when you find it. You are satisfied when someone chases you away, because you take it as proof that you have done God's work.

"He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame: and he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot. Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee." (Prov 9:7-8)

"Say not thou, I will recompense evil: but wait on the Lord and he shall save thee." (Prov 20:22)

"Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth: Lest the Lord see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him." (Prov 24:17-18)

And finally! The one I was looking for!

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him." (Prov 26:4)

I've gotten these quotes, given you "So much flattery!", as you said, to try and make sure you really, really understand what I'm trying to tell you. Most non-Christians would not bother to do it. The never-believers won't because they don't know how, and in the case of other ex-Christians, your persona is specifically tailored to give them a knee-jerk, emotional reaction which produces only flame. Which escalates into more flame, which helps absolutely no one, not by any definition of the word "help" which I would accept.

Personally I don't think that I and my fellow ex-Christians should be derided as weaklings for leaving a religion that mostly hurt them. Whether I myself am a weakling is a matter I always consider open for debate! Truly! But in my opinion, if ex-Christians have come to the conclusion that this idea people like to call God is a bunch of bullshit invented by humans who want to be able to bully other humans and tell them what to do, then we get to think that. And if we want to blow off steam about how frustrated we are at the bullshit we abandoned, then we get to do that, too. And if you are distracted by the steam and smoke and baggage and won't be troubled to "look behind the curtain", then we are going to interpret your behavior as merely further evidence that we were correct in the first place. Turnabout, my friend!

It is the person who makes the positive assertion--viz., "Christ is the only truth"--who bears the burden of proof. One who makes a negative assertion--viz., "you are not believable or honest when you talk about Christ, and as far as I can tell there may be no Christ"--merely asserts that a burden of proof has not been met to that one's satisfaction. If you think we are fools and weaklings because we say we are not satisfied with the proofs you offer, you can do one of two things. You can throw up your hands in disgust and laugh at us on your way out the door, or you can try different tactics. I myself strenuously request the latter.

I'm not friends with every atheist and ex-Christian on the internet--nor every interesting, cool, compassionate Christian, either, and I'm friends with some of those! But the ones I choose to follow are the ones that seem to be doing something interesting or amusing with their post-deconversion reaction, and not merely wallowing in bitterness or spite. I am quite sure you see it differently. Nonetheless, my willingness to respect and tolerate your different perspective is why you are here to stay as long as you like, instead of haranguing somebody else until they ban you. ;)

Much though I love to blaze and clash with you, I want there to be real information exchange too, because this is important! I think a lot of people within the aegis of Christianity would either:

a) tell you to "go get 'em!" because they are making what I see as the same mistake you are making, or
b) not want to criticize you because you are a co-religionist.

Some of the people in this second category are those same Christians you denounce as "pussies", the ones who frustrate me because their "God" seems to make them more squeamish, more frightened, more withdrawn inside themselves, than they ever would have been without a religion. People in the first category, as I said above, would not have stuck it out with me this far.

So I congratulate you on that, certainly. And congratulations as well for keeping me up past my bedtime on a worknight. ^_^ Ah, the joys of a job that tires out my back but not my brain.

I await your next response with great interest!

Cheers, toodles, and hope everybody had a happy Labor Day.

Gideon response II

2009-09-06T00:47:00.005-05:00

I was going to post about Deborah Butterfield, and wildness and time and order. And also about Bruce Droppings, since has elected to quit this ethereal blogosphere and concentrate on his real life and will be sorely missed, by me at least. However, Gideon came back, and I am most certain my response here will be too long for a comment.

Let that be a lesson to you lurkers! :) If your comments are lengthy and impassioned, I will respond, no matter the nature of said passion!

Your French is a tad disjointed, girl, but, I got the message... same to you.

XD Aye, disjointed it is; serves me right for trying to use a language I only learned in high school. And trying to quote The Truman Show at the same time.

Would you mind letting me know how to find your current blog, or is that not part of the purpose for which you created it?

And I see there that you chose to continue telling me your opinion of Lorena after I'd requested you not do so. Certainly, the choice of what to type or not type is yours to make.

I lose no sleep over anything that I say, or, is said to me. It's just text... period.

Your comma usage is a little disjointed, but I think I get your meaning. Words are just words, yes? Sticks and stones may break Gideon's bones, but words will never hurt him. And if other people get hurt by words you say, you don't worry about it either. Gideon is not his brother's keeper, eh?

You are a fence-sitter, Lex. You imagine your neutrality as something superior. Sooner or later, you will be called upon to take a stand.

And you, Gideon, are on the biggest high-horse I've seen in many a year. This is twice now that I've seen you make broad sweeping assertions about an individual's character, thoughts, imaginings etc. based solely on a few thousand words of text and your own personal biases.

Are you sure you're not a secret Discordian? Your troll persona invites comparison with that of The Good Reverend Roger for its potential to generate sheer flame. Dear dog, you are wasted, simply wasted among the Christians!

At any rate, it is not the case that I am neutral, nor is it the case that I imagine my stance to be something superior. I will explain both of these statements.

Firstly, I am in favor of Christianity properly carried out, and at the same time I am a fuming, foaming, irascible opponent of Christianity twisted to evil, selfish purposes, such as you have done. You, sir, are the classic example of the "Christian" who, from what I observe:

--talks himself into believing his own personal biases are the Will of God Almighty
--uses those personal biases to bully and demean others into attacking or fleeing from him
--rests replete on a cushion of self-righteousness, believing that he has forced wicked sinners into revealing their own wickedness.

You reveal nothing except that people scream when they are stabbed. And then you congratulate yourself on your cleverness in wearing stab-proof armor to something that was supposed to be a bareknuckle boxing match rather than a knife fight. Congratulations! That's exactly what Jesus would have done!

I digress, however. Christianity properly carried out is a very different thing. Many good-hearted people strive to live up to Christ's example every day. Sometimes they fail, other times they succeed with heartbreaking brilliance. I admire them either way!

Atheism is not a prefabricated system of moral rules couched in a story; thus each atheist develops his or her own moral code based on a personal interpretation of life. Thus, there are some athiests whom I feel are shallow, selfish dolts, and others whom I admire. Some of the ones I admire also try to live up to the moral standards they themselves have developed in ways which are, on occasion, heartbreakingly brilliant.

The thing I am for is something which is neither Christianity nor atheism, and which you would laugh at if I explained it to you. So I won't. For the above reason and because I assume you're not terribly interested. Since, I again assume, anything which is not your pet version of Christianity is a laughable excrescence not worthy of much thought.

I don't believe what I believe because it I think it is Absolute Truth, but rather because the effects of having placed my belief as I have are more healthful and conducive to positive personal growth than anything else I have yet tried. Provisional, diversified belief is something foreign to both Christians and atheists, I think. I am certainly not saying it's better--in a lot of ways it's cumbersome and inefficient!--but it works best for what I'm trying to do. And I don't mind the inefficiency of a work in progress.

I've spent my whole stupid life having people think that I think I'm superior because of the way I use language. I don't think that. I spend a lot of effort trying not to be unfairly prejudiced against others in any direction, whether it's elitism or classist distrust of the powerful and comfortable. (Sometimes I even succeed!) I'm saner and more understanding and more helpful than I was five years ago, ten years ago, or when I was a child. You consider me to still be a child. (And perhaps a drunkard to boot! Truly, though, novels are the vice that threatens to take over my life--alcohol I use judiciously for muscle relaxation and to promote increased volubility at appropriate times. I have four rules. Don't drink if you think you might need to: 1. drive, 2. work, 3. care for small children or the infirm, or 4. be in the close presence of people you don't trust.) Certainly I don't know your perspective well enough to understand all that these perceptions imply, but I am interested to find out.

I don't care if gays bugger themselves silly, then get sick and die. (Just don't do it around me!) I don't care if 10,000 children in Ethiopia croak from starvation. We have our own problems.

See, this is one of those statements which makes me think that if the alleged Holy Spirit really is influencing your mind, you must be resisting it pretty fiercely at every turn.

Christ, the Christ described in the Gospels, cared deeply about every person who ever lived and ever will. He cared enough about any individual gay person at risk for a horrible, slow death from AIDS, about every child in Ethiopia whose family was killed by war or disease, to die for them. This Christ cared so much that if any person were in need of salvation, he still would have incarnated on Earth, suffered and died on the cross, and risen to life again so that person would have a chance at eternal life.

You, as you say, don't give a fuck. All you want to do is "kick some ass" when the prompting within you tells you that there's some ass available for easy kicking. And you seem to think that's Christ talking. Which is why I think you're a bully, and one of those who takes on the name of your supposed Lord in vain, for the sole apparent purpose of your own gratification.

response to Gideon in lieu of content!

2009-09-03T03:35:00.003-05:00

Greetings, my few, my happy few, my faithful readers. I have stayed up past my bedtime typing this up. Friday and Sunday this week will be my days off, so Amber, Pearl, Mom, I will attempt to call you then. Love! Hugs! Miss you!

In the meantime, I am still working hard and remaining in good spirits. Our downstairs neighbor Stan, who has five dogs, is interested in giving us one. Dave has taken up walking Stan's dogs for a very reasonable fee. And Stan is desirous of giving us one of those dogs. Namely Blue, with whom Dave has subsequently fallen in love. (He woke up calling for Blue yestermorn, at which point I decided it was best to surrender to the inevitable--fortunate my inclinations already lean in the direction of a dog-plus-cat household!)

But here, here is a comment which surely exceeds the 4096 character limit, or whatever it is. Here is my response to Gideon, in all its silly detail.

Ah! mes amis: je vous aime toujours. Bonjour, bon aprés-midi, et si je ne vous pas rencontrer plus aujourd'hui, bon nuit.

Oh, don't worry about my constitution--the deli counter is toughening up this egghead faster than you can say "it's 9:15 and I want you to shave me a pound of prosciutto!"

(My new least favorite meat. I already disliked the taste, but it's a bastard to slice, too. Sticky, falls apart at the slightest touch, and must be laid out in neat layers separated by little plastic sheets. Which sucks when there's a line. But enough shop talk!)

Lorena is one of those online people I consider a friend. Though it is often said that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", I try really hard not to have enemies. So although, because of events for which I was largely not present, you seem to be the enemy of my friend, you are not my enemy. Make of that what you will! I have neither banninated nor baleeted anyone other than an obvious salebot, which you are not, and hope to keep my streak alive.

May I ask why your blog is now disbanded?

As for Lorena, please, since we are clearly of such differing views, I prefer not to discuss her further. It would only annoy us both. Your participation in this intention would be appreciated greatly by me!

Instead, hoping you do not mind, I will apply some of your points in re: deconverts to myself, and see what happens.

I will even take your words out of order, a great indignity!

The whole idea behind faith is that it gives one HOPE. After spending half of my life as an agnostic, by golly, I just don't see a lot of friggin' hope in the religion that she's chosen! Three score and ten, then... nothing!

For purposes of discussion, I tend to default to my dad's definition of religion. It is from the Latin, res legiones, namely: chosen things, the things one chooses to guide and shape one's life.

So, you find the atheist-materialist viewpoint a hollow and hopeless one. Many do, and seek organized faiths or DIY spirituality to fill in the gap! Christianity gives you hope and makes daily life meaningful and filled with wonder; for this I am glad.

But I'm telling you, this is not the case for everyone.

Christianity is a symbol set, a storyverse, which can be used in many ways and for many purposes. Yes, it is unfair to characterize the whole storyverse in terms of the negative and destructive interpretations laid on it by some controlling or narrowminded individuals. Or by the negative perspective of it that I, for example, grew up with, through a combination of circumstantial confusion, blurring of emotional value loads, the occasional unconsciously malicious individual, and good old-fashioned "failure to communicate."

Nonetheless the wicked "false" Christianity is my default, and the one rooted deep in my unconscious mind. Any other version comes up just as artificial, contrived, ineffectual, as any other organized-religious symbol set. And even moreso contrived and less effectual than any symbol set I've made for myself and tried out in practice.

The "believe, and you will see" dictum applies with equal efficacy to any well-constructed eidolon (definition 2). Meaning, an ideal which has been given form in the mind to the extent that one can interact with it as one would the memory-reconstituted presence of a human being not physically present.

I am not interested in an eidolon to which I give the name Christ. As for other deconverts, I cannot speak for them, though I suspect many would agree with this description.

To me it is more hopeful to say, "I suspect, I deduce, I imagine, but I do not know" than to cobble together an answer out of a much-disputed document and thunder "I know!" This brash certainty, with only the textev and the otherworldly pipings of my pet eidolon to back it up. This is how I see it. I would rather be a naked fool than a fool dressed up in that.

like many of those hardened infidels she's taken up with, are simply whiners that didn't get what they thought they should have, so, now they're mad, and they're taking their ball and going home.

Oh, the emotionally charged language you use. It makes me think you are reacting emotionally, based upon your experiences with those bloody-minded people who refuse to re-convert. Even beyond a certain person repeatedly banninating you, you must have been ill-treated elsewhere as well, to be so angry. You have my sympathy. (yes! I can do that!)

I am curious. I must inquire. What is it that, in your perception, the "hardened infidels" believe they should have gotten, that we have fled the faith because we did not receive?

For me--and my experience is by no means characteristic!--it began with deliverance from demons, and continued with relief from self-loathing and constant panic. These things I obtained over the course of a mere decade or so, after a paltry half-decade or so of prayers did not provide noticeable relief.

But ah! that is another story, and by no means all of my own little story, which again is entirely non-representative. So let us leave it for now, and go on to more pertinent matters.

(Yes. This is how I talk when I'm tipsy. In person, as well.)

So, to return to the topic at hand. As you see it, deconverts in general are merely selfish and immature. We are persons who demanded a particular response from God or from then-fellow Christians in a time of crisis. And, having failed to receive the response we desired, we have with petulance and spite decided to quit the faith and become its enemies.

It reminds me of C.S. Lewis, something he wrote in "The Problem of Pain." I do not recall it exactly, but the sense of the passage was this:

Some people wish to hold the universe hostage to their own unhappiness. Everything--time, seasons, the grace of God--must cease, until their private hurts are soothed and their objections answered. But instead of bringing the rest of the world to a halt, these people exile only themselves. They become prisoners of their own selfishness, cut off from all love and all hope because they refuse to receive it.

I didn't put that paragraph in quotes because, as I said, I don't recall the passage exactly and it is an extreme paraphrase. But it does seem to sum up the Christian view of why most deconverts leave the Christianity. And more specifically, the way that you, Gideon, seem to me to perceive the deconverts with whom you have thus far had conversation.

It is of course a narrative viewpoint. A metaphor, which can only be answered with other metaphors. Equally powerless to un-convince the convinced. But I will try to explain nonetheless.

It was like trying to divide numbers by first converting them all into fractions, before I knew how to do long division.

It was like trying to assemble a mechanical device using instructions poorly translated through Korean from Japanese, by persons who barely spoke either Japanese or English. (Both of which are notoriously idiomatic and difficult to learn!)

It was like driving a stick shift, when one only knows how to use automatic, down an icy road in winter, when one's car had a trailer which is not securely attached to the rear of one's vehicle.

It just seemed like a bunch of effort wasted on a thing which had no purpose, except to give other human beings a convenient lever by which one could be steered into directions of their choosing.

There was no God in it, except in the sense that there is "divinity" in any endeavor worth pursuing.

Perhaps that is petty, selfish, shallow. I am very happy to say that I guess, I deduce, I choose to believe for the purposes of hope and meaning in everyday life--but I do not know.

In case they or you or anyone hasn't noticed, there isn't any "evolution" going on in society, in fact, society's going down the head rather quickly! So much for this progression that humanists are always barking about. Oh, sure, now and then some little ray of light shines through, in some individual act of benevolence or kindness, but, overall, this world is surfing downward in ever-tightening spirals.

What a very cynical and depressing view of human life! Please, allow me to quote my big sister Amber, as quoted by my little sister Pearl on her Myspace:

"I live in a time when I don't have to worry about being shot with a poisoned arrow or raped six to eight times a year! My food is kept at the temperature I want in a box in my house! I have indoor f@*#ing plumbing! By the standards of most of human history I am a queen!"

This is not progress? This is not "evolution of society"? Trade increases, and war becomes increasingly distant from the lives of individuals! Yes, there are many places in the world--such as Afghanistan or the Sudan--where such progress has yet to take place. But it is no longer universal. There are, in many many places in the world, "salt and pepper on every table, and none account the cost." Salt--necessity, what humans need in order to live. Pepper--luxury, what humans desire in order to make the necessary things of life more enjoyable.

I do not share your view that humanity is gradually becoming more depraved, more ruled by instinct, less able to live in civilized society. In contrast, I think humanity in general is developing higher standards of behavior. By the measures we use today, yes, many actions by currently living persons seem barbaric and intolerable, which in previous centuries would have been "business as usual." But the fact is that now we have our modern standards for comparison. You and I presume, for example, that rape of any person for any reason is morally reprehensible. That the killing of any person, whether of one's tribe or social class or belief system or otherwise, who does not present an immediate threat to life and safety, is murder and thus unacceptable.

These and other comparable things are relatively new concepts for humans. We are just now as a culture, to say nothing of the species, getting used to them. I look at murder statistics for Chicago, which represent something like reality, and see a present triumph. How many times in human history have there been so many cities with so little violent death, and that so well accounted for? I look at shows like Law & Order and see a triumph of ideas. If this flawed but very human thing is the ideal towards which our system of justice strives, then perhaps it will become more effective as time goes on, prevent more needless suffering, deter more human evils.

I am not entirely surprised that you, who believe the doctrine of Original Sin, can look at humanity in its present condition and see only hopelessness. But I sympathize, because there are a lot of things which are still totally messed up, and a lot of people who are doing horrible things to other people and getting away with it. Still, I am glad your religion provides you with hopes. Because I see ample cause for hope in the supposedly bleak outlines of my everyday, "impoverished" life.

I have nothing to sell, friend Gideon. You get what you pay for, in this life or any other which may or may not exist, for certain values of the term "exist". And the only coinage that matters in any of them is attention--the hardest thing to pay. As Robert Ruark said, "Do not give up something of value unless you have something of value with which to replace it."

Thus, if you want to pay attention to the Christian story and the shape it gives to your life, do it! If you want to pay attention to something else, do that! By no means should you abandon anything that is working for you merely on my say-so.

I ask only the same consideration.

oh, and some content

2009-08-30T01:23:00.004-05:00

I am almost drunk enough to go make chocolate chip cookies. In the meantime, though, I'm'a play some KoL turns and post this fragmenary bit of content. Thank you, by the way, Amber and Lorena, for your kind words about my sonnet and such! I like to think I am not losing my touch.

This thing will be a song, but so far I have only the first verse and chorus. Slight inaccuracies in scansion are covered over by vocal show-offery which, alas, you cannot hear yet:

can't get me moving
unless I'm dragged up by the chains of duty
but if I stand still
I can't wave my hand and call forth beauty
gotta find what's left of me
at the end of the live-long day
gotta hope it's enough
enough, enough to give away

beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
I'm in the middle of it
beloved
come get some, come get some from it

she slices, she dices...she is finally blue-collar

2009-08-29T23:38:00.005-05:00

On my last day off, which was Thursday, I went up to my old college to try and get the last bits of paperwork done which were keeping me from my degree. Mom stepped in like a champion, got leave from her work to go visit their plant up in the area so she could give me a ride there, and even paid the last couple little fees I had on my account at college, though she could ill afford to do so. I am greatly in her debt!

Tomorrow, however, is my second off day in this week, so I can afford to spend a little time blogging. Ah, the comfort of the written word. Even generating 3000 words in five hours did not sate me. I must write more, for the peace of my mind. So I write.

These days I am reminded of Idle Theory, a concept delineated by a fellow named Chris Davis as one of the factors in determining evolutionary fitness. I wish I could find his original page, which had some nice diagrams and such, but I will explain briefly. Idleness is the amount of time and energy which an organism has left over after it has satisfied the basic requirements of immediate survival--food, sleep, etc. Think of it as the profit margin of effort. Organisms with a very small amount of idleness are vulnerable to environmental changes. A small change in the requirements for immediate survival can mean the difference between life and death for something living on the edge. In contrast, living things with high levels of idleness can afford to spend their extra time and effort seeking out interesting mates, scouting out new territories, playing internet games, et cetera. Societies, which are themselves organisms in a sense, also change their behaviors based on idleness. Societies with low idleness tend to emphasize virtues such as hard work, thrift and rule-following--because if those virtues are not practiced by most individuals most of the time, that society will burn through its "profit margin" of available effort and collapse.

For me, personally, this is the lowest level of idleness I've ever attempted on an ongoing basis. Oh, I had some worse period at Aigre Doux (now defunct, Clarissa tells me, so I suppose I can use its name!), but those were periodic, not continuous. Let me show you some deli-counter-worker math:

8 hours per day at work
3 hours per day in transit (1.5hr train + walk time)
8 hours per day sleeping
leaves
6 hours per workday for other activity.

See, at the office-type jobs I've had in the past, internet access was part of worktime, to a limited extent. I could play my KoL turns, make the occasional blog post (in bits and pieces, by keeping the window open behind other work), and read random stuff to keep my imagination sizzling. I sat on my butt and typed and talked on the phone and spoke a lot of doublespeak.

Now my day is spent on my feet. I lift meats and cheeses out of the counter, on and off the slicers, work the slicers with hitherto-unused arm, shoulder and back muscles. I often lean my entire torso into the cold salad case to carefully scoop out, say, potato salad, without smearing tuna salad or curry on my apron or elbows in the process. It is like a combination of contortionism, spelunking, constructing a stone wall out of smallish rocks, and playing an endless game of tug-of-war with a gaggle of children. And I haven't even been on the café side and learned to make sandwiches or fry chicken in super-hot grease yet!

The thing is, though--I am happy. I feel like the guy at the end of Office Space. I'm doing something constructive and real. So what if my back feels like it has a knife stuck in it between the hours of seven and nine pm most nights? So what if the customers ask me to thin-shave a full pound of our messiest, juiciest meat at 8:45pm when I'm supposed to be disassembling and cleaning the slicers and sweeping the floor, when the auto-slicer is done for the night and I must do it by hand? I can hack that. That is no frickin problem. I sing while I slice, I banter with customers, I try to convince the nice ladies from the café side of the counter to teach me Bosnian. I've only been here a couple weeks, but I can weigh by the quarter-pound with either hand now and I know half the item codes by heart. And apparently all my coworkers like me, because I like them and think they're cool, and I'm sunny and polite and work like a fiend and sing.

For some reason, my day-to-day sense of identity is tied up in my work to a fairly large extent. Maybe it's because so much of how I remain socialized is a conscious process; the personas I use in daily life are assembled "by hand" rather than by instinct. And much of my consciousness is swept up in the self-check routines by which I create and assure my continued sanity, functionality. So there's not a whole lot of tolerance in me for identity concepts not directly supported by incoming data.

Oh, there is a residue. Life events and decisions leave a mark, little permanent records which say "you rose to X challenge to Y extent. you reacted to A crisis with B level of competence." Each little possible area of life I am able to approach with what I deem to be honor and nobility, by that increment is my heart eased and my childhood certainty weakened--the certainty that I am useless and without value. Not sure where it came from. Perhaps that knowledge is down in my spaghetti memory somewhere, safe to recall only when its poison is nullified.

Nobility is being equally comfortable, confident, competent, equally able to belong, in all places and all circumstances. Heinlein has a quote about it, a quote which I don't recall verbatim that ends "specialization is for insects." Honor is integrity in action: that you behave at all times and in all ways so that the world you wish to experience is the world which your actions make more possible.

In previous jobs, then, I have demonstrated to myself that I can be white-collar, that I can be an egghead amongst eggheads. That I can type numbers into a screen all day and night and still have the wherewithal to go to altavista's babelfish and crib enough Spanish to tell the dishwasher that his money was direct-deposited to his bank account and he should have it within three business days. That I can research the doings of a city which I have never visited, through news clippings and random statistical journals, well enough that my supervisor can go to that city's government and ask the right pointed questions about how they handle their finances. That I can shout down an aged building owner, whose concept of how business is done was cemented in the fifties, in a vain attempt convince him to pay for renovations required by fire safety regulations passed into law in the nineties. All these things I know about myself.

But now, now if I can keep this job for enough months to satisfy myself, I will have proved to myself that I can put in eight hours of real work, like a real person. Oh, the mad mad lengths to which we go for self-respect. It is worth it.

Besides, my unemployment was about to run out. There is some irony, as this back-aching job pays only $8.20 an hour, and thus nets me per week exactly the same amount as I used to get from unemployment, for doing nothing.

Still. I am happier, because even in a time of extremely low idleness, I am happier doing something than nothing.

from Lamuella, with love

2009-08-22T02:38:00.004-05:00

Hi everybody!

I've been working nights in the deli this week (2-9), so I'm still getting myself adjusted to the new schedule. Mostly I've been doing my writing on my hour-plus CTA commute where none of y'all can see it, so nyah for now. Next week, because I seem to be working out well and have full availability, I'll be getting the full 40 hours! The week after that I'll be switched over to the café side of the counter, where I get to (anticipatory cringe) learn to fry chickens, in addition to learning how to create sandwiches and pizzas. The accompanying happy sandwich-making and pizza-making songs, however, I will not need to learn how to create. So either I'll learn how to make shorter evening-time posts, or I'll get used to getting up a little earlier and making my long, long posts in the morning.

Either way I'm hoping to stay at this job at least long enough to qualify for union health insurance, explore setting up my 401(k) with at least partially company stock, get caught up on rent, start untangling my various debt service obligations, develop a sufficiently strong and healthy musculature to not be in constant pain from all the lifting and slicing, and get forged in the crucible of the holiday deli/café counter rush. It is an ambitious plan, but a refreshingly unambiguous one.

I like having a nice predictable work routine. I am an exceedingly non-territorial person--to an extent pathologically so. Most of my territorial instincts are, were, or have been sublimated into various things which are carried with me wherever I go. So for me temporal feng shui is, I think, even more important than spatial feng shui, in terms of its ability to promote calm and ordered processes of emotion and thought. And I think I'm getting better about physical space habitation as well. These sorts of things are all connected: time management, learning to be comfortable and belong wherever you are, taking ownership of space and self, developing the confidence to make decisions, etc.

Blog is a secondary consideration in all this. Though I do regret that my new schedule has planted my work hours squarely on top of those hours when I would normally be talking to people on the phone. Perhaps I should add a cell phone to my list of things to get back or fix up, so I can at least have brief convos on the train around 10pm at night. We shall see!

In the meantime, here's a sonnet I've been working over the last couple train rides. I'm not wholly satisfied with it--it's only the first full revision, and poems are rarely polished until the third. But hopefully it's a nice read anyway. :)

[building materials]

To build a soul, a solid cornerstone
can give straight lines, square edges to its walls.
Each brick and board is one true thing you've known
forever. Mine get tangled where they fall,
just like my hair when I've walked in the rain,
wet, hatless, wrestled by the wild, cold wind.
If I can tame this snarled and dripping mane,
I'll know what's in it, and how to begin.
What's good will anchor firmly where it's set;
what's wicked snaps the moment it is tugged.
I'll plumb, with the best measures I can get,
each stone, and fill these trenches I have dug.
Up from its edges, planted right, below,
a true home for my waking soul will grow.

This is a Fiat Lex healthcare reform post. Enter at your own risk.

2009-08-17T17:50:00.012-05:00

So I've gone and bitten the bullet; I've decided to do a healthcare post.

This is thanks to Amber for linking me to "The Doctor Is In", whose most recent post is also about the healthcare reform bill. His links to the Library of Congress and HTML versions of HR 3200 always time out for me--I guess a lot of people are reading that thing!--but I found another link to the proposed healthcare reform bill which has worked well for me all afternoon. Later on in my post, you will need this link if you want to look up my textevs. I cite both by section and paragraph numbers and by page numbers.

Dr. Bob brings up summaries of some key things which he finds worrisome, with a refreshing lack of reliance on polemic. (In other words, no rightist "totalitarian zmobies killz ur granma while gubmint breaks into ur house 2 force vitamins down ur froat!" and no leftist "this bill is a fixeverything and must pass immediately 2 save all the childrens or else ur greedy fatcat who hatez teh poor!") So if you have inclination and time, do go read him! I agree with him on the worrisome-ness of several key points, and he presents them more succinctly than I will.

To briefly sum up my reaction to HR 3200:
It has taken socialized medicine and privatized medicine and combined the worst aspects of both. It is a well-intentioned piece of crap. I do not think that it will work. Although even if it does get passed, I might possibly be able to afford to keep my internet on--if I take up selling drugs, or offload a kidney, or quit smoking for a year and sell an ovary. And I will enjoy all the healthcare, so that'll be some comfort.

Personally I want us to have fully socialized medicine like France and Canada and England. Healthcare is one of those things for which demand is so ridiculously inelastic (people's need for it is not sensitive to price) that socializing it is the only sensible course of action, just because of the economies of scale (things, even bureaucratic institutions, get cheaper when you buy in bulk). But I am getting both sidetracked and ahead of myself!

Back to our new friend the document, namely HR 3200.

My love of long, complicated, unbelievably boring documents goes back to childhood. As a child, I would apply for those "sweepstakes by mail" things. Y'know, the ones which made it very easy to enter the sweepstakes if you ordered a throw pillow or set of 36 coasters with seashell pictures on them, but extremely complicated and fiddly to correctly enter without purchasing anything. American law requires all sweepstakes to be enterable without a purchase, but it's not in the sweepstakes company's interest to make it easy for you to do. So I developed a cheeky sense of pride in my ability to wade through tiny, tiny print and successfully foil those who meant said tiny print to prevent me from getting things for free. I never did win anything, but the skill set and the cheeky pride persisted.

The key thing with a government document is to ignore the fact that it's over a thousand pages long and filled with paragraph upon paragraph of impenetrable detail. The strategy that tends to work for me is to zero in on indexes, write down the page numbers of any pertinent thing I find via use of said indexes, and always, always follow up on it when one paragraph references another paragraph. Seriously. Don't get blinded by those paragraph and section numbers. In general, if you have to follow through multiple citations and change which keywords you're following once or twice, the information you get at the end of the search will be very useful indeed.

In wading back and forth through HR 3200 I was interested in a few basic, netspeakable questions:

--What we get to has?
--How much we pay for get this?
--What is catch?!?

Here is what I found.

What we get to has?

p.8, Title I Section A (c)
"Acceptable coverage" (as defined on p.76-7, II A 202(d)(2)) essentially means being enrolled in a qualified health benefits plan created under the new rules, a healthcare plan one already had under the old rules, Medicare, Medicaid, armed forces health plans incl. Tricare, or VA benefits.

Minimum acceptable coverage under the new rules would mean enrollment in a "basic plan."
A "basic plan" (according to p.85, II A 203(c)) is a plan which contains the "benefits package required under title I for a qualified health benefits plan."
"essential benefits package" includes the following "minimum services to be covered" (copied from p.27-28, I C 122(b)):
"(1) Hospitalization.
(2) Outpatient hospital and outpatient clinic services, including emergency department services.
(3) Professional services of physicians and other health professionals.
(4) Such services, equipment, and supplies incident to the services of a physician’s or a health professional’s delivery of care in institutional settings, physician offices, patients’ homes or place of residence, or other settings, as appropriate.
(5) Prescription drugs.
(6) Rehabilitative and habilitative services.
(7) Mental health and substance use disorder services.
(8) Preventive services, including those services recommended with a grade of A or B by the Task Force on Clinical Preventive Services and those vaccines recommended for use by the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(9) Maternity care.
(10) Well baby and well child care and oral health, vision, and hearing services, equipment, and supplies at least for children under 21 years of age."

How much we pay for get this?

The first part of the answer to this question deals with premiums.

An "affordable premium amount" (according to p.135, II C 243(b)(1)) is calculated as:
"The affordable premium amount specified in this subsection for an individual for monthly premium in a plan year shall be equal to 1⁄12 of the product of—
(A) the premium percentage limit specified in paragraph (2) for the individual based upon
the individual’s family income for the plan year;
and
(B) the individual’s family income for such plan year."

Paragraph II C 243(b)(2) contains a chart which I'll copy shortly, but first I want to go over the formula real quick. A is the percentage bracket you fall within on the chart, and B is your family's yearly income. So your "affordable premium" = A*B/12.

The chart from page 137 is below. I've removed the actuarial values because I don't know what they mean, and shortened the descriptions for the columns. Since this bill provides for the healthcare reform act to be phased in over three years, the affordability percentage slowly increases as the plan progresses. "FPL" stands for the federal poverty line--I'll copy that chart in a moment.

Income % of FPL.........Yr 1.....Yr 3
133% through 150%....1.5%....3%
150% through 200%....3%......5%
200% through 250%....5%......7%
250% through 300%....7%......9%
300% through 350%....9%......10%
350% through 400%....10%....11%

This chart gives us the values for A in the equation above. "A" is your "affordable premium amount", and is thus the maximum percentage of your income which must be dedicated to your health insurance premium. From what I read in II C, the law seems to work as follows. If your monthly insurance premium is greater than "A" and your income is less than or equal to 400% of the FPL, then you get "affordability credits" to pay the difference between your provider's premium and whatever "A" is for you. These credits are paid directly from the government to your provider (p.129 II C 241(a)(2)) and can't be received as cash (p.132 II C 241(e)).

The FPL guidelines are as follows:

Family size...Yearly income
1.....................10,830
2.....................14,570
3.....................18,310
4.....................22,050
5.....................25,790
6.....................29,530
7.....................33,270
8.....................37,010

So, let's take me for example. For tax purposes, I am a one-person household, so the FPL for me is $10,830 per year. If, at my new deli job, I were to work all 35 of my hours per week all 52 weeks of the year, my gross yearly income would be $16,380. I'd be earning 151% of the FPL amount. This puts me in the second bracket (150-200%), so in Year 3 under this bill, "B" in my equation will be 5%. Let's calculate my "affordable premium amount"!

(16,380)*(.05)/12 = $68.25

It does seem pretty reasonable. Kinda-sorta.
Except that my net pay, in this highly likely scenario, is about $1120 per month. And I live in Chicago, and have utilities and things in addition to rent. So even if I get off my duff and get food stamps already (and we assume I eat no food which is not purchased with food stamps), $68.25 is still a prohibitively huge amount. There is no freaking way I can afford to pay that. At least not if I want to remain a smoker and also keep electric, gas (which gets crazy spensive in the winter), phone/internet service, and the ability to pay $2.25 per ride to take the train to and from work 6 days a week. Oh, and do laundry at my local laundromat, since my building has no laundry machines.

People with higher incomes, on the other hand, seem to be upset about the cost-sharing stuff. I have not been able to find specifics on cost-sharing beyond the following:

Regarding enhanced, premium, and premium-plus plans (from p.87, II A 203(c)):
"(3) ENHANCED PLAN.—A enhanced plan shall offer, in addition to the level of benefits under the basic plan, a lower level of cost-sharing as provided under title I consistent with section 123(b)(5)(A).
(4) PREMIUM PLAN.—A premium plan shall offer, in addition to the level of benefits under the basic plan, a lower level of cost-sharing as provided under title I consistent with section 123(b)(5)(B).
(5) PREMIUM-PLUS PLAN.—A premium-plus plan is a premium plan that also provides additional benefits, such as adult oral health and vision care, approved by the Commissioner. The portion of the premium that is attributable to such additional benefits shall be separately specified.
(6) RANGE OF PERMISSIBLE VARIATION IN COST-SHARING.—The Commissioner shall establish a permissible range of variation of cost-sharing for each basic, enhanced, and premium plan, except with respect to any benefit for which there is no cost sharing permitted under the essential benefits package. Such variation shall permit a variation of not more than plus (or minus) 10 percent in cost-sharing with respect to each benefit category specified under section 122."

Let me sum that up, briefly. (Although I'm sure you're all a-quiver to see what's in section 123(b)(5)! I know I am!)

Basic plans charge the amounts we learned how to calculate above and provide the services listed above. Enhanced and premium plans reduce the amount of cost-sharing, although the total reduction in cost-sharing (per p.87, II A 203(c)(6)) cannot exceed 10%. Whatever that means. Cost-sharing money applies only to the list of "minimum services to be covered" I have copied above (from p.27-28, I C 122(b)).

Premium plans not only reduce cost-sharing; they also provide vision and dental care. I have no idea what effect the three tiers have on premium amounts, although I have some vague idea that, after Year 3 of this bill (per p.131, II C 241(c)(2)), affordability credits can also apply to enhanced and premium plan monthly...er, premiums.

(Why the crap didn't they choose another word for the super-cool plan, knowing that "premium" already has another definition in an insurance context? Arrgh!)

If anyone with a more proprietary interest than me in the cost-sharing math is willing to look up some more textev on this issue, I would be truly grateful. Perhaps my dear stalwart cohort of readers would also be grateful for further textev--though who knows but they themselves?

By the by, before I copy/paste it, section I C 123 is entitled "Health Benefits Advisory Committee", and 123(a)(2) says that if this bill were passed today, Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta would be the chair of the advisory committee. Honestly I myself don't know much, if anything, about Dr. Gupta because I am lazy. So make of that whatever you will. And tell me about it!

Anyway, here's p.30, I C 123(b)(5):

"(5) LEVELS OF COST-SHARING FOR ENHANCED AND PREMIUM PLANS.—
(A) ENHANCED PLAN.—The level of cost sharing for enhanced plans shall be designed so that such plans have benefits that are actuarially equivalent to approximately 85 percent of the actuarial value of the benefits provided under the reference benefits package described in section 122(c)(3)(B).
(B) PREMIUM PLAN.—The level of cost sharing for premium plans shall be designed so that such plans have benefits that are actuarially equivalent to approximately 95 percent of the actuarial value of the benefits provided under the reference benefits package described in section 122(c)(3)(B)."

Ohhh, that's what those actuarial values were for. I think. Y'know, those actuarial values in the table from page 137, which I left out 'cause I didn't know what they were for. Maybe this is what they're for? You look it up, if you've got the brain energy! I'm'a move on to my last point now.

What is catch?!?

(per p.167-8, IV A 401(a)): If you do not get health insurance, you will be taxed. The tax for failure to buy health insurance coverage will not exceed your "affordable premium amount." It is calculated according to the following formula:
"In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of—
(1) the taxpayer’s modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over
(2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer."

I'm assuming this refers to 6012(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code, since the health care reform bill only goes as high as 2541. After much digging--way too much digging--here's section 6012 of the Internal Revenue Code. If you don't get it, don't worry; I don't get it either. If you do get it, please explain it to me. This magnificent bastard of a document has eaten my brain.

As for another thing I was troubled about, I'm having trouble finding a part where individuals have to comply with certain government-defined health maintenance standards in order to obtain coverage. If you have found it or know where it is, please point it out to me. I did find the part where employers have to fulfill certain standards in order to be approved providers (starting on p. 143, III B 311), but that's less scary and more sensible.

This deep digging into labyrinthine documents only reconfirms my initial suspicion. Namely--on the one hand, fully socialized medicine would be better for me personally, at least. And on the other hand, yes everyone is angry, yes everyone should be angry, but everyone is angry at the wrong things for the wrong reasons. And that makes me angry! Rrrreow!

I'm going to quit now while I still have a head on my shoulders. I've spent, not counting bathroom and food prep breaks and one brief phone break, around five hours on this post, so I better be freakin' done with it.

Hasta mañana, ladies, gentlemen and persons of indeterminate gender. I'm'a go play Solitaire and drink beer until KoL rollover now.