Muse Doctor

The desk is filled with chronic papers always wanting to solve their own illness

The only depression I feel is the cleft where my male part goes, I am propulsion

The event horizon is breakfast: two eggs better than tits/a keyboard/a dream


I'm a burning ball of fire and feel mandated to 'get things done', therefore I scream


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The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 2 Of 2

You haven't gotten the whole story.  During this waiting time, maybe 25 minutes in, a very personable young woman with a clipboard, after attending to a score of others south of the aisle, made her way to me over the three ranks of chairs where I sat, and asked if she had managed to talk with me yet.

I was prepared, having seen her 'work the room' up to then, and explained clearly my simple problem:  how to use the online system designed to prevent people from having to queue up in the local offices like this one, like I was doing now.  I left out anything that sounded remotely snide.

She was sympathetic, but pointed out, there's nothing I can do from here.

I went back to looking at the screen, and as my number was near to being called, I stuffed Sartre into my book satchel, zipped it, and prepared for what seemed to be the need for a modest dash to the proper window before the potency of my queue number deliquesced.

My turn, Window 8.  The lady there was girded like any pro to deal with what happened to come her professional way.  I threw her off-balance.  

I was hoping to get you!  I chirped.  

She locked her chin a bit closer down to her clavicle and pretended to finish-off some prior business on her computer screen before she asked how she might help.

I detailed cleanly and quickly my problem -- really a simple one, I underscored.  She had an answer oh-so-ready.  You'll have to call the national number.

Ah, but I have done, and it, too, could offer no access -- is this a systems problem, then?

Her distant frown emphatically denied knowledge of any, and told me to keep on trying.

I nodded and then asked her an allied question about how to change my email with the Agency.

She denied even the possibility that there was any email contact whatever between the Agency and any individual at any time, and began to explain how The Privacy Act interlocked with government programs.

I nodded and raised the question of what I must have been smoking at the time that the Agency screen seemed to show an email I may have inadvertently and irrelevantly given at the time of my online contact.  She began to smile strangely, but at that point we both heard very raised voices coming from another window south of the aisle.

You'll have to come back, someone was saying to someone else.

The other voice muttered something in a growl.

You'll have to come back, the first voice insisted again

Fuck you!

My window lady had her head turned in that direction.  I whispered to her, I used to work in a public office.  She said, Security should have stopped all that, but he's just standing there.

Our business was almost at an end, but I decided to play my trump card.

I used to work for SSA.

She perked up, now connecting up why in blazes I had been able to use, earlier in the conversation, the term 'T bens'.  Up here? She asked, now with true interest.

Mostly at Bay Area Regional, in Richmond.

We chatted shop talk for another few minutes, but by the time I left, it was as though we had worked in the same unit, desk-to-desk, for a dozen years.  No.  As though we had served, unit-to-unit, in the same theater of war.

So familiar we had become so quickly, that when I told her my stint of service, she dubbed me a 'pioneer', and when I told her I left with my retirement, she came close to 'high-fiving' me.

Sometime soon, she intimated, and to signal her intended exit, she scuttled the fingers of her left hand across the counter as if they were departing feet.

I actually did get up -- her time-per-conversation being measured for efficiency -- I went to shake her hand.  She seemed almost giddy, our talk a sun-break in her very cloudy workday.  She responded with a jazz riff of a handshake, fingers thrumming the inside of my palm.

This wasn't 'business' -- this was homecoming and fond departure.

Good talking with you, I said.

Remember to call that number, she chuckled.

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The Cost Of Some Things

Unfolded, the menu labels the food in sequential pages, alphabetically, one set of courses per page.  The actual dishes read in Chinese characters, and the accompanying English makes sense, but sounds more exotic than what we normally find.

What's 'pottage'?

She tells me.  Her ensuing oral presentation, very hard to understand, includes reciting the daily special which is either one or two or three separate options.  We're not sure which.

How much?  B asks.

The waitress begins an explanation of what comes along with the beef or oysters or tofu -- or all three.

How much does it cost?  B clarifies her question.

We think she thinks we are asking to be told more about the beef dish.

I point at numbers on the menu.  Price?

Oh.  Eight dollar.

When they come, the two items we've ordered overfill our table-for-two.  Six small boats and one large of differing dishes: pork, rice, edamame, tofu, leeks, mushrooms, brick-red dried chilis.  We've been told that this is 'Taiwanese street food' -- no street I've ever been on.  This has the look of elegant service and the taste of sophisticated cuisine.  But not at all its expense.

To maximize their square footage, the place is set up for café seating, so we lunch with two young men on one side and two middle-aged women on the other.  I can't help overhearing the women's conversation the segments I catch of which center around family history, something I first think will be a genealogical recital but turns into something else.

When we leave and I take a step or two to follow B out, I pivot back and muster the greatest politeness I can find.

Excuse me -- were you just talking about the internment camps?

Yes.

I am looking at her, but not really 'seeing' her, not comfortable -- I conclude later -- focusing on her face.  She's as willing to talk about this with me, though, as she was eager, it must have been, to arrange the meeting about it with her friend.

My father at one point was interned just south of here.  She shifts paperwork a bit.  This is a map of the inside of it.

She points down at the document she's had out this whole time -- I think again her reason for lunching.  Barracks, in rectangles.  Plotted-out in numbers.  Fences.  Gates.  Guard towers.

I shake my head, not quite sure what I am going to say.  Are your parents still . . . in the area?

Yes.

With the impression I've glanced from her face, and from her voice and figure, she's an attractive woman, perhaps 60 years old.  And I'm standing before her, interrupting her engagement.  The words we are exchanging are nearly idle, flat.  My purpose is unclear to her and inchoate within me.  The conversation inherits whatever stablility it should have by taking place in the bustling ambiance of a public lunchroom where things are quite safe.

I have no business doing this.

Then I say what I must have felt I had to say.  My concentration on her face now brings her features into sharp focus. 

Let them know that I care.

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Nature's Hoof

The husband dies 'of natural causes'.  

The family, which includes his spouse and two grown children, mourns, and after a reasonable time, reaches an emotional balance, a healthy stability.  

 

The widow, in her late 50s, living away from her children, has continually loved the outdoors, is a horsewoman in a modest way -- not a competitor, but a knowledgeable rider.  Not long after her husband's death, she re-engages with that vocation.

In a routine outing with friends, working the horses off-trail a bit, they negotiate a gully.  They're aware of scrub growth, stray logs, the rockiness of the terrain.

Somehow the jennet mare she's on slips, and the widow rolls off its side, forward.  The fall disturbs the closeness of their line and riles-up the coltishness of the horse just in front, who kicks his hooves smack into her chest, stopping her heart instantly.

Does it matter that this is a 'true story'?

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Not-So-Commonplace 4

The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.

But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself:  her privates, he, so to speak.

The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind.

He is reponsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.

-- Northrop Frye

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Fourrures Interdites

Working over papers, I, drinking mucho coffee -- floating in it, threads of tabby.

The cat, Midge, simply cocks her head, as if to say, What? ain't you seen hair before?

Peer Pressure

People don't want to do it all the time.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Yet they're supposed to want to do it all the time or there's something wrong with them.

But what's really wrong is that they're meant to claim to want to do it all the time and feel as though they mean the feeling even though they're not having it.

Sure.  Some people do want to do it all the time, and we have places for them with cots, nutritious energy snacks, showering facilities, and plenty of filtered water.

Most people, though, would forgo that haven and just be left alone for a while simply not wanting to do it.

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Paradoxy

I know there are answers to this.

How do I find myself in non-neo-colonial proactive defensive wars.

How do I find myself in non-exploitative, socially-mobile, wealth-engendering corporate hegemonies.

I know.  There are answers to this.

This is no irony.  This means a changed world.

Whose terminology games me, a 'boy of the 50s'.

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Walkies

Let's call them social workers, these two women who stood in the office of one of them. The office was a place of acquainting, dispensing, love.  The one whose office it was had rescued a dog, a German Shepherd, 'King', condemned to a suffocating death by law.

The Shepherd had failed to adjust to its foster homes.

The one woman whose office this was kept wristing-back, from time to time, the chain holding King in a muscular show of who-leads-whom.

They loved animals, these tall, strong two.

The office had a burnt-brick northern wall, an architectural allusion to industrial times.  Contrasted to that Dickensian surface were the other three walls, each with thin strips of chrome and large, broad panels of moon-bright light.

The post-modern shine contrasted with brick, the venerable, rough rust-and-char, but, also, now with the dark swirls on the coat of the jittery King.

Woman Number 2, a sturdy gal, had cloaked herself in an all-weather, quilted, down-stuffed, rain-proof jacket of red.  And when she got down on all-fours, encouraging a rub with  Hi, boy!  Hi, boy! no one foresaw or could stop King's wild move.

So fast was its lunge and the retraction of its muzzle.  So much was the sound of an ice cliff falling.  So much was the umbrage in a nature without reason.

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Free Speech Movement

Political table set out on the sidewalk at the public entrance of a US Post Office displays a poster of President Obama with a Hitlerian mustache.  Plenty of leaflets.

Young woman, 'co-manning' the table, smiles a sweet smile and flaps a short 'hi' wave at me as I enter.  I pass on.

As I leave, I try to avoid eye contact, but I notice a conversation has been started between the other political operative and a woman, suburban middle class, white, maybe in her late 40s, who had dropped off her mail.

She's smiling, and she's already said something.

Now I hear what she says, smiling, twice:  Do I look like white trash? (pause) Do I look like white trash?

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Clue

Miss Scarlett, 

in the library, 

with a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The 100-Dollar Poached Eggs

They were very good.  A choice was given between on the hard side or should we go softer, which is the method I prefer, the yoke being liquid and sloppy so as to give a gastronomic reason for the artisan bread with its peek-a-boo texture holes.

And there were garlic smashed potatoes, as well, your basic red potatoes not so much 'smashed' as 'distressed' so that the skin breaks like chapped hands, but with tender baby-cheek-sized white starch mingling in its fall-off separation with that very skin rubbed with herbs and kosher salt.  And garlic.

The coffee was also very good, served by a perky, shaved-head waiter with fashionably thin glasses and a good sense of humor, a great rhythm to his friendly patter, which made me open the discussion when the breath seemed right to deal with the relative social behaviors attendant on men's urinals having privacy splash-guards, versus a more trendy, 'open-minded' style of bathtub-trough, shoulder-to-shoulder presentations.

If I were a sociology teacher, I suppose I could've assigned a poll to be taken.  

It was, it really was, an 'educable moment'.


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Yo! Literates!

It being a new year and all, an update of my reading habits seems called for, though I'm not sure by whom.

As a refresher of my habits, let me remind you that there is a stack of books by the bedside.  

I read a bit from each book each night.  They change over time.

Sometimes I read when I get a chance in my work life or waiting for a car lube or killing time in the car outside the mall when others are 'shopping'.

Or even when Lisa, my haircutter, has booked me into a time slot in her schedule too cramped to handle the proper perming of a lady before me who wanted a dye job, also, and conversation about the trip to the shore and how much fun the family had, and I have a choice of reading hairstyling mags, the Enquirer, or why-didn't-I-think-of-bringing-one-myself!

The current list may not represent books I will actually complete.

I don't mandate that of myself.  Sometimes enough is enough.  Sometimes it's better for the book author and me to part our ways amicably, having learned plenty about one another already.

So, the current list, alphabetical by author's last name:

1) Alain de Botton.  The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work.

2) Northrop Frye.  Anatomy Of Criticism.

3) Amy Gerstler, editor. The Best Poetry Of 2010.

4) Henning Mankell. The White Lioness.

5) Frederic Morton. A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889.

6) Jacob Neusner. Rabbinic Judaism: Structure And System.

7) L. Michael White. From Jesus To Christianity.

A smart list.  Probably too smart for me, so don't draw conclusions.

You might ask what I learn, and this general statement holds so very, very true, and I think holds true for any reader:  

To read well, adapt to style.

Writers write at their own pace, they have their own density.  

To 'get' them, you have to 'get into' them, swim in their waters, that temperature, those currents, the varying depths and dangers. 

Their content depends not so much on how it corresponds to an 'actual world of (wo)men', but on how that experienced world is conveyed.

Rotating the authors through an hour is a mental 'circuit training', running up the bleachers and down, then lying supine on the Bermuda grass to do sit-ups.  Work the parts in the interest of the whole.

I suppose a corollary for those of us blogsters (let alone poets) is:  

To write well, beget a style.

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Hey, Wittgenstein -- Follow This Discourse, Big Shot!

Sharp as a tack, yes.  Sharp as a needle, works.  Sharp as a bell?  Clear as a bell. Clear as the nose on my face.  Plain. Plain as the nose on my face.  Plain Jane.  Plain ugly.  Plug ugly?  Pug ugly?  Whupped with an ugly stick.  Stick in the mud.  Stick up his a**.  Got a match?  Yeah:  my a** and your face.  Face to face.  About face.  About a boy.  It's about time.  Short-timer. Time waster.  Time server.  Bad time.  Straight time.  Doing time.  Time on my hands.  Dishpan hands.  Get your hands outta your pockets.  Is that a pencil in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?  It's all about me.  Me for you, you for me.  And baby makes three.  Tea for two.  Tea service. Roll some tea.  Cigar of tea.  Mexico Cit-tea blues.  Blues for Charlie.  Kinda Blue. Kinda between jobs.  Job search.  Search parameters.  Parameter this! This and that.  That's right.  Taking the right tack.


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Pacific Gale

At exactly midnight, Friday/Saturday, all power to these 'Eastern foothills' of the Cascade Mountains hugging close to the low land that is Puget Sound's Seattle Metro Area -- all their power got snuffed more surely than a Charles Manson cult victim.  

This is being written about 18 hours later, most of the intervening time between then and now being dark, cold, and anxious.  Oh, it was chilly during the night, even with gloves and watchcap and hood.  And long-johns and sweats and socks and a quilt over 4 blankets. And it was an nervous waking every so often to relieve my gelid bladder and check whether the lights had come back on.  

They hadn't.

I went to bed sour as whiskey sipped from grandma's slipper.

And I'm still hung over from the experience.

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Spoiler Alert

The one to stay alive is the blind man able to discern between a 5- and a 10-dollar bill.

Guess Who

In the spirit of never-say-anything-about-a-person-unless-you-say-something-good, no names shall be mentioned.

Think of, say, a third-rate political unknown plucked from an obscure backwater and given a national sounding board. Originally, this is done to add youth and vigor and a sense of gender-balance to a political ticket led by an aging man with a history of a worrisome health issue.

After being exposed for the hack she is -- shamed out in the open for her utter mediocrity and slipshod understanding of matters -- all that's left of her virtue is anger and sourness, choler and bile. She's got skill in rallying and in producing froth among those who also want to be angry.

After her loss, circled by friendly advisors, she backs off, 'writes' a book, and proceeds righteously to revenge herself on the sensible world, re-packaging her campaign message as an onslaught on the constructive programs of the victors.

Now no longer supported in candidacy, but paid flat-out by the most self-serving, retrograde power tacticians, she makes incitement the first rule of citizenship. Drawing an inspirational page from her athletic days, any idea involves itself in a contest, and contests are, after all, a kind of warfare without guns, a winner-take-all, a chest-bumping, crotch-grabbing, opponent-drubbing, soul-gutting assault-and-battery.

And with breath-taking irony, it's that kind of America she considers foundational, democratic.

This is 'campaign politics' at its worst -- indeed, not even in 'campaign season'.

This is not 'government'; this is the antithesis of government.

I'm sure The Founding Fathers understood 'the rabble', and it's for their fear of the kind of thing this woman and her corporate funders do, that we have our Byzantine form of 'checks and balances' within National power, Federal system, staggered election terms, bicameral legislature, Electoral College, and so on.

So misled people don't swivel control into the hands of demagogues.

Lucrezia Borgia poisoned men. This woman poisons the system.

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Centuries Of Misgiving

The question with which Mr. Bertram had to contend over the next hours roiled him the deepest, indeed would have perplexed any man bred to such gentility.  Why would Miss Price have ventured to do as most worried him?

Certainly her modesty had always prevailed, and yet, now, in this instance, her attachment, the seeming depth of her attachment, both to Elvis and to Tupac, drew notice of even the most unaware in the village that she might jilt and bolt.

Oh, pray, he inwardly voiced, that I have not lost Fanny!

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Doctor . . . Jones

The man who sells his soul to the Devil  for enough wealth to set me up for life.

The Devil lays down a ten.  That's more than enough, he says, and shoots the man in the head.

A Place In The Sun

Those who love this movie often point to this scene and the lingering close-ups of beautiful actors.  

I love this scene for another reason.  The film is based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy, and we do indeed get oppressive class structure, a pathetic marriage, a universe where human effort inevitably gets trumped by malevolent circumstance, punctuated by a scene wherein Raymond Burr demonstrates a murder by smashing an oar to bits inside a courtroom.

I love this particular scene for the musical theme, and incidentally for the lovers (Liz and Monty) caught up first in dance and then on the verandah, orchestra still within earshot.

The plans, the passion.  

Despite the utter improbability of any social acceptance, they race at doom.

That moment motivates.

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