Monday, October 2, 2017

CLOSE THE BULLETS

All this awfulness just takes the life force out of me. Another white dude loses his shit and kills a bunch of people for no — not that there is ever one — apparent reason.

Just a quick addition before I get back to regularly scheduled tasks, even at 11:00.

I had a shit day. I know this is not a rarity among feeling humanity. I kept thinking that I should be able to function on the schedule I have set up for myself to get tasks accomplished to get out of town. But I could not. That fugue state I mentioned in yesterday's post? Well, I had a "lite" version of it. I kind of knew what needed to be done and where I was, but I sure-as-hell had a hard time getting any part of it done. I still haven't folded the towels, but I may just get that in before I fall asleep.

I wrote recently a bit about my personal World Trade Center attack experiences. But on December14,  2012, just a couple of weeks after I lived through Hurricane Sandy, I got to be close to another shooting disaster. Louise and I were driving from Brewster up to Connecticut to work on Monsterwood with Jason. We noticed, on the drive through Connecticut, that a lot of official looking vehicles were streaming in the other direction. As we were working through the drive, we did not pay particular attention, nor did we turn on the radio. But there was a vibe.

When we arrived in Ledyard, happy to see our co-conspirator, we learned the truth of that strange flotilla earlier in the day. We learned that some fucknut had murdered a bunch of children and their protectors. Although I might have remained standing, some inner part of me collapsed onto the floor. My heart and psyche left the premises. I was not entirely focussed on the business at hand.

Oh wait. My heart and soul were broken. Shattered. Demolished. Shredded. Dismembered. I did not sleep that night. And when I drove back to Brewster late the next day, my peregrinations took me through SANDY HOOK, it being a mere 20 miles away. Jay, my host, is a newspaperman in Connecticut. I cannot remember him being home for a day or two. I cannot remember much of anything. I was pierced, shocked, and laid too low.

And since then there have been many many other mass killings. Wait! Not by white men, surely not. Not by cops afraid. Not by white guys walking into black churches. Not by white guys walking into movie theaters. I must be mistaken. Surely morality, sanity, and humanity would work on ways to curtail this behavior.

My gentle readers of this blog are in no way deserving of any jeremiads. However, if one has not been pretty damn close to some of these events, they might not have the same visceral reaction. One has to wonder how close the bullets need be fired.

N.B. I have had some wine.

WHERE WOULD YOU BE RIGHT NOW?


So many days have felt like the most awful morning for all of us, November 9, 2016. I still remember waking up, feeling as if my brain and spirit were violently barfing, while my innards dragged behind me. And I was still in bed.

This may shock you, but the trauma of the World Trade Center collapses was far less than the putsch of the Trump and the Triumph of the Kochs. I was within three miles of the towers. I heard the planes overhead. I heard the flotillas of ambulances racing down Seventh Avenue. But the day after Trump was elected was worse.

We depressives can get into something like a fugue state, a dissociative disorder, where we barely know what's going on. I have really only experienced this once that I can clearly remember. The past year has felt like a mild, mental-wool-covered year.

It's so bad today that Janet has turned off the tv and gone to sit in the garden even though it is a cool and overcast morning. I wonder what she still understands as her short term memory is completely gone. She watches endless repeats of Rachel Maddow, Bryan Williams, Shark Tank, and HGTV shows. That's what she can follow, I think. But this is getting to her, all this disaster. And the big disaster.

Is anyone working on a new vocabulary of despair, insults, and dystopia? Shitgibbon is my go-to if I can remember it. All the air and vitriol has gone out of every word of dismay, astonishment, outrage, and slander at my disposal.

And then in my head, all I can hear is a somewhat regrettable song by The Doobie Brothers, Long Train Runnin' ...

Down around the corner, half a mile from here
See them long trains run, and you watch them disappear
Without love, where would you be now
Without lo-o-o-ove
You know I saw miss Lucy down along the tracks
She lost her home and her family and she won't be coming back
Without love, where would you be right now
Without lo-o-o-ove
The song doesn't really quite make it intellectually or lyrically, but that chorus works.

We are so fucked.




Coda.

I wasn't going to include a poem, but I randomly opened to this.

STAR BLOCK

There is no such thing
as star block.
We do not think of
locking out the light
of other galaxies.
It is light
so rinsed of impurities
(heat, for instance)
that it excites
no antibodies in us.
Yet people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissole.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

FEEL IT ACCUMULATE

Has it ever happened to any of you that while reading a biography or a memoir that you became so entranced and beguiled by the protagonist that when that person met the demise you knew was coming all along that you kind of went into shock and mourning, even when that person had died so many years before? (Now that is a Proustian sentence there.) There was a book about Will Rogers (can't quite remember the name) that quite devastated me at the end. I tried to write it in my mind as a novel, so as to soften the blow of loss. Did not quite work. And now I am feeling a bit of sadness for Randolph Bourne. Worth a scan of his bio. A heroic fellow to be sure.

Now on Sunday.

The light and temperature have significantly softened and lowered. We already have blankets (as well as cats) on our beds. I am in countdown to New York mode, making lists in my head and trying to set dates while there.

Last night was the semi-regular cousins dinner. Since returning to California, I have reconnected with my cousins and first cousins once removed. As we all like to eat, drink, and chat, we try to get together, taking turns cooking with the challenge of making something that we personally have not made before. This time, it was Shelly's turn. She made an outstanding Persian meal with some amazing apple-rose-puff pastry at the end.





At least a week later ...

I am not sure where this week went. But up there are some snaps of our dinner.

The week has been a challenging one. I try to stay optimistic-ish however this has been the all-around "heaviest" year I can recall. I suppose a good aspect is that I am not devastatingly depressed, although there have certainly been moments. Somehow, I have managed to access, more often than not, that tiny crack of light and wrench it open to get a bit of other perspective. Other times, a bit of a nap helps.

This might come as a disappointment to some of you, but I have adopted two practices that somewhat fall within the "bliss ninny" range. Besides the looking at the crack of light, I try to accomplish three tasks a day. I know that sounds lame but when despair and indecision team up, it is hard to figure out where to start or stop. Those three things might be get up, swim, write the blog. In general, this rule of three has led to accomplish more than that. Baby steps, kids.

The other: when I am skidding on the slope toward the edge, I try to take a moment to remember 3 (that number is working for me) things that are not bad, possibly, in fact, good. Like 1) Mom still alive and knows who I am; 2) good cats; 3) people like my blog writing. Whatever.

So, I will save my meditations on the darkness and difficulty and just find a poem for good night.

THE OTHER SHOE

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
If the undropped
didn't congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the midair
collusion of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010




I SHOULD DO THE SAME

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