Always a Puzzle to Me

 El Malpais is a national park.

There is a trail, (a very loose term), through the badlands. It is 7.5 miles long. Seems easy, right? Well, people do get lost and die in there. In fact, human bones found scattered on a lava flow in El Malpais National Monument have been identified, just last year, as those of James Chatman and Crystal Tuggle, father and daughter, who never came back from an afternoon walk there nine years ago. See? It is so easy to get lost in there. The trail, such as it is, is marked with cairns throughout. Sometimes the cairns are no more than ten feet apart, sometimes, 20 to 30 feet apart, when the trail is obvious. Usually, it is not, so the cairns are placed liberally along the trail, showing the way through every twist and turn.

There’s one there, in the upper right corner, next to one of my hiking companions. Now, this one is fairly easy to spot, but do you see a problem? The cairns are simply piles of lava rocks. On a rise like this, fairly easy to spot, silhouetted against the sky. Imagine that you are walking through a field of lava and all of the cairns are about two to three feet tall (max), composed of rocks the exact same color of the background. Here are two cairns in a row; can you spot them?

The advice the park service gives is to always have the next cairn in sight before you leave the one you’re at, and I wholeheartedly endorse that. Occasionally, this takes a bit of reconnoitering, but there is always a cairn alongside the trail in the direction one needs to travel. Looking at the photo above, you might be tempted to say that one needs only follow the other hikers, right? Wrong. Suppose you’re a slower hiker, or you stop to pee or take a photo. The other hikers are gone, around a bend, down a hill, or behind a pile of lava somewhere. You then have to navigate on your own until you see them again. Sometimes you walk right past a cairn, if you glance up at the wrong moment, so you have to backtrack a bit and try again. Imagine doing this right after a snowstorm. It had snowed the night before, but fortunately, it was light, and tended to melt as the day wore on.

Helpfully, the park service has provided wooden posts for some cairns, sticking straight up through the center of the cairn, but even these have a tendency to fall down, due to the really intense winds blowing through there.    This one was near one end of the trail.

There were piles of these poles here and there, so I assume it’s an ongoing project for the few rangers that have kept their jobs. It’s unfortunate that the National Park Service has felt the brunt of the many cuts in government over the years.  I guess we need to keep raising our Congress people’s salaries, and keep paying them for life, and make sure they have top-of-the-line free medical care.  Well, at least they think it’s more important, for them, even if they don’t think it’s important for the rest of us.

Anyway, you came here for pictures, yes?

Here ya go:

As I told the hike leader, it was one hell of a hike. Although I was tired and aching by the time we finished, (just under five hours including two 15-minute breaks), I really enjoyed this hike. The views were always outstanding, and the experience, on the whole, was fantastic! It’s one of the best hikes I’ve ever done. On the way home, we stopped at the ‘WOW’ diner in Milan, near Grants. Their menu is just as unique and varied as the lava fields are. With three pages of choices, I may never experience everything on their menu, but I intend to try. (There are still lots of hikes in the area.)  It is the perfect end to a perfect hike.

Why, then, does my mind dwell on scenarios of fighting with terrorists, surviving a plane crash, losing my luggage, and even ending up homeless, wandering the world? Too much violence in the world, I suppose. Hard to feel safe anymore. Of course, that was the intention of the terrorists, and the huge expenditure of money from a government in deficit has helped their cause by wasting our tax money on overblown security precautions, and a new bloated government agency. No amount of expenditure is going to make us safe ever again, but we keep on spending money, throwing money away, building new screening machines, hiring more clueless, uneducated screening personnel, making every U.S. citizen a terror suspect. We keep looking over our shoulders, backwards, instead of looking ahead.

Can we really keep spending money like this, just to create a false sense of security? It doesn’t even work, if I am any indication. I don’t believe all this removing my shoes, emptying my pockets, being x-rayed and hassled, and having to suspect all my fellow passengers is making me any safer. Paranoia inevitably leads to fear, and to an inability to function. Look, people: flying has always been dangerous. Planes crash on a regular basis. More people die in car crashes, to be sure, but there is no way to guarantee passenger safety just by hoping that our laughingly inadequate security measures are really going to keep some nutjob from finding a way to sabotage a plane. It’s unlikely that the whole flying a plane into a major U.S. landmark thing is really what every terrorist in the world is planning next. Our security measures are predicated on stopping that from happening. Someone can still plant a bomb in luggage, or fire a rocket grenade at a plane landing or taking off.  Hell, to really inspire more terror, someone is not going to do the same thing that was done before.

The next time, there’s going to be a nuke, or at least a dirty bomb. Forget the planes, for crying out loud. We need to ensure that those nuclear plants are secure, that transportation of fissionable materials, and even nuclear waste is secure. We know this, and yet we permit our government to spend the bulk of our security money on securing our air travel? Jeez, enough already. Let’s monitor terrorists, investigate possible security lapses in protecting our power grids and oil and gas facilities. Let’s go back to working with every nation in the world to seek out and destroy terror cells, and cut off their funding. No funding, no travel. If the nutjobs want to blow each other up, let ‘em. But if they can’t afford large bombs, intercontinental missiles, and even plane fare, then we’d be a lot safer.

Every day, people die in this country. Sometimes it’s from car crashes, bus crashes, plane crashes, gas line explosions, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, or accidents and homicides. Do we really think a few terrorists can do worse? I don’t. This is one huge MF-ing country. It can’t be taken down with a few explosions here and there. But we can fail, if we let fear dominate our everyday lives. We can fail if we use fear to win elections. We can fail if we keep seeing each other as the enemy. Some day, we need to stop fighting each other and work together to make this, again, a country that other nations envy, that everyone would like to imitate, not attack. People don’t hate us because of our freedom. They hate us because we threaten their way of life. Sure, some of them are just nuts, they strike out at power, because they are powerless. But, when we violate the sovereignty of other countries, when we exploit their resources, and attempt to impose, often simply economically, our way of life on other cultures, we create resentment. I think, maybe, we need to stop doing that.

Even the most powerful country on the face of the planet can fall under its own weight. Look at the Roman empire; look at the British empire. Look at the Third Reich. And those were just the most recent empires to fail. Throughout history nations and empires have risen and then fallen. If we want to remain a great nation, we have to represent more than a nation of powerful weapons and large armies. Spending all of our money and effort on weapons and security will not save us.

Are we with the rest of the world, or against it?

Suddenly, I’m dreaming about her this morning. In my dream, I run into her at a party at a friend’s house in the mountains. She asks me to go home with her, so we are driving up this steep mountain road to her place, somewhere deeper up in the mountains. She was always a drinker, so she has concocted a way to drink while driving. She is wearing one of those camelback water bags that hikers use, except that it is filled with wine. She attempts to take a drink from the tube but is having a hard time getting it to stay in her mouth. She is driving, and I realize she is drunk when she swerves across the road into the opposite lane of traffic. It is very late at night, so there is no other traffic, but there is some light snow on the highway, left over from an earlier storm. I am not concerned, as she has slowed way down, aware she is in the other lane. When she gets the wine tube in her mouth and takes a long swallow, she attempts to move back into the right lane when we see headlights behind us. So, she stops the car, on the left side of the road on the shoulder.  When the car passes, I look at her, realizing that she never used to drive when drunk. It was always my job to drive her home. I am wondering why I am not driving. I am wondering why I am with her at all, except I know I am still sexually attracted to her. Jokingly, I tell her that drinking WHILE driving will make them throw the book at her. She tells me to get out. It is cold, the wind is blowing powdery snow around the highway. I can’t believe she is serious. I tell her I was only joking. I want, after all, to go home with her.

All this thinking wakes me up: wrong part of the brain for dreaming, I guess.

I am left wondering why I would have a dream like that! Of course, the car ride could have been a metaphor for our marriage, but I don’t know why I would invent such an elaborate story. Perhaps I am correct, and it was a metaphor.

In a car = in the marriage

Worried about car ride = worried about marriage

Not in control of the car = not in control of marriage

Unwilling to get out of car = unwilling to get out of marriage

Warning her in car = telling her I was unhappy, wanted counseling

Cold, snow, mountain = there be monsters outside marriage

Pissed her off; she says get out = pissed her off; she said I had to go

I guess I never resolved that whole thing. I need to let go; thought I had.

I watched The Man Who Wasn’t There last night.  Perhaps it influenced me too much. In identifying with the protagonist, I ended up being depressed. Of course, I never have to dig too deep to find such feelings. Been that way for some time now. I don’t feel sad as such. I just have this gut feeling that I will die soon. I kept getting the idea running through my head last night that once I leave my house today I will never return. That could mean different things, but it’s hard to imagine not returning to my house if I’m still alive.

I hope someone takes care of my cats.

Balloon Fiesta Park, 07/04/2011

Well, we have lots of other conventions here, like Bubonicon, or the Albuquerque Comic Con, but this is our first Comic Expo. I’m not sure why we need two Comic conventions, but we’ve got ‘em now. The “Expo” says it is more professional.  Stan (The Man) Lee will be here Saturday and Sunday, but  I was only able to attend on Friday. I saw a few friends, mostly photographers, and had my picture taken with LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis. ( photo by Esi)

Attended a great and funny Q&A with Jeremy Bulloch,  who played Boba Fett in Star Wars’ movies. He also has appeared in Dr. Who and James Bond.

Bought some books and had ‘em signed, by Science Fiction author Robert E. Vardeman, and by comic strip artist Stephan McCranie.

I didn’t get to meet Doug Jones (Buffy, Hellboy,etc.) or Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) or ten other notable actors, animators directors and producers, but maybe next time.  Perhaps I’ll have time after a photo shoot on Sunday to stop in again. In the meantime, here are some of the photos I took on 6/24/11:

Warning: I brake for rhinoceros. That’s what the bumper sticker on the pickup in front of me said. What I found odd was not that this was on I-25 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but that I thought rhinoceros should be plural, like rhinoceroses or maybe rhinoceri. I didn’t know that the plural of rhinoceros is rhinoceros, because I was surrounded on all sides by cactus plants known in the aggregate as cacti. So that seemed a good bet. Braking for rhinoceros didn’t seem as odd as the highway signs that say things like Caution: Watch For Water or Gusty Winds May Exist. There is even a large official-looking road sign near my house that says: Lizard Crossing. True enough everywhere around here, but try seeing one on the street ahead of you in the explosively bright afternoon sun with waves of heat shimmering over the road.
The idea that one brakes for rhinoceri tickled me, as tumbleweeds often seemed just as formidable charging across the highway. Some of them grow to enormous size, and, just as often, dozens of them blow by right in front of you. Tumbleweeds may seem innocuous blowing along, but not when you’re traveling between 70 and 80 miles per hour on a highway with traffic flowing anywhere between 60 mph and 110 mph, and several of them appear directly in your path. You can’t swerve into the other lane, because a long line of vehicles are backed up behind the Winnebagos there, and you can’t suddenly brake, because then the idiot behind you, traveling at 110 mph expecting you to get out of their way, will just plow into your ass.
So, sometimes you continue right along, hoping that the tumbleweeds will be knocked up over your hood and into the idiot behind you. For inexplicable reasons, at least part of the tumbleweed will end up under your car, wedged under the muffler or the heat shield. Unfortunately, tumbleweeds, at this stage of their lives, are ridiculously dry, and the underside of your car is pretty damn hot, so it is not unheard of to have one catch fire under there. Tumbleweeds are a good reason to carry a fire extinguisher in your vehicle. What I really need is a bumper sticker that says: I Brake For Tumbleweeds.

She came into the room wearing only frilly pink panties. Her nipples were covered with black crosses of electrical tape. My heart jerked. My eyes felt like they popped out of my head. My hands were shaking; my legs were weak. I could barely speak.
I wanted to wrap my arms around her, pull that tape off with my teeth, taste her, lick her, feel her, fuck her. I wanted to give into my wild impulse and have sex on the spot, sex like no other: wild, uninhibited, hard.
Instead, I clicked the shutter shakily, again and again, over two hundred times. I am a photographer.

We joke about it
It’s not like you have a brain tumor
We compare headaches to
brain tumors.

It’s my step-daughter that had
the brain tumor
I never knew such fear
- the all-day brain surgery
- the chemotherapy
- the radiation.

I never knew I felt such love
this young woman I’d known
thirteen years from girl to woman
I never knew such joy
- after the operation she survived
- still needed chemo she survived
- still needed radiation
gamma knife
- a high-tech magic bullet.

Bad brain tumor
bad brain tumor
dead brain tumor.

She survived
She’s alive
She’s healthy
She’s whole.

My chest loosened
I can breathe
My heart
is beating.

I never knew such joy before
the brain tumor.

Sometimes she would let me put my arms around her while she worked in the kitchen, but she wouldn’t stop what she was doing. Usually she’d move away or brush me off. She seemed to like it sometimes, but never for long. If I persisted, she said all I wanted was sex.

She never came to me for sex. Sometimes she allowed it; that was my impression. I liked sex, sure; never seemed to get enough. I liked sex with her, even though it was so one-sided. During the four years we dated before marriage and for a few years after that, we’d often had sex multiple times in an evening. One morning, I remarked to her in surprise that we’d had sex five times since the night before, and she was shocked; she didn’t remember the middle-of-the-night sex at all. That puzzled me for years. It was rare for her to orgasm, and she said she didn’t mind. She once told me that she had orgasms in her sleep. She thought that was the only time she had them. I knew better. She would orgasm during sex, sure enough, but only after a night of drinking. She had to be really drunk, and her body arched, and shuddered, and sounds came from deep within her chest. Afterward, she passed out. It was years before I found out that she just didn’t remember such things. I always thought it odd that she said she never had orgasms, no matter what I did, when I’d heard her moan softly and felt her breath quicken. And she breathed hard and fast and I kept going as long as I could, and her excitement excited me and I’d go crazy with lust for her. I never wanted to stop when she seemed to actually be enjoying it. I never knew if I pleased her, or if I disappointed, because she never said anything. After years of marriage, she would often just signal that that was enough, and I should stop.

I finally put it all together. It happened one time that we were out of town, staying at a motel in Santa Fe. We ate dinner and drank a lot. We drank way too much, and the increase in altitude made the drinks work faster, and we headed off to bed. It was not often, away from home, that she’d agree to sex, but this night was different, and we both got our clothes off quickly. She said that she had to use the bathroom. I don’t know when she came back. I woke up shortly afterward to find her nude, and asleep. It was a hard night for me in both meanings. I was aroused by her nude body always. She was out cold. I once heard a neighbor tell how he often had sex with his wife when she was passed out drunk. He loved for her to get drunk. That wasn’t me, however. I couldn’t see having sex without mutual desire, or at least acquiescence. I snuggled up to her, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I was aroused, probably because it had been awhile, and also she was nude in bed, which didn’t happen anymore. She always slept in a heavy nightshirt and socks. In the summer she’d wear something lighter, but always there were the socks. When I could snuggle with her, I’d get my hands inside her night clothes to feel her warm body, but often not until she was asleep. She always said she was too hot. She insisted on sleeping under a thick comforter all year long. She said it made her feel good, but she would throw it off several times a night.

Once, on a cold night, I awoke shivering and found neither of us covered. I pulled the comforter up over both of us, which woke her up. She asked me why I’d covered her. I told her it was cold; I thought she’d want to be covered. She yelled at me, angrily, to never cover her or uncover her. She thought I had been uncovering her at night.

On this particular night in Santa Fe I couldn’t sleep. It was a combination of the excessive alcohol and my desire for her. I tried falling asleep, but I couldn’t. I felt her soft belly and cupped my hands around her breasts. My rock-hard penis was nestled against her ass, and it wouldn’t settle down. I felt the curve of her hips and her soft thighs. I caressed her arms. I dared to rest my hand on her mound. She never woke. I was restless and excited. I wanted her so bad. Towards morning I was exhausted. It had been a long night. I dozed off only after light came in the crack between the heavy curtains, but not for long. I woke and dozed, woke and dozed, always with a hard on. Finally she was awake. I snuggled up against her, touched her, kissed her, and she pushed me off, gently this time. I persisted, however, and she said, “We already had sex.” I was incredulous. “What! We didn’t.” I told her she was wrong, that I would know. She insisted. She said that since she was naked, she knew we’d had sex. I struggled for words. It was impossible. There was no stickiness, no wet spot on the bed, no smells, and besides, sex is not something I have ever forgotten. She insisted we must have, but, after a quick trip to the bathroom, she came back to bed and agreed. It was too late for me. I was dead tired, and hung over. My penis was not very stiff, and I couldn’t keep it erect for more than a minute. I had to just give up. She said nothing. We got up and went to breakfast.

But, after that, I knew why she thought she never had orgasms, why she thought we didn’t have sex when we had, and why she thought we’d had sex when we hadn’t. She blacked out. She is one of those drunks who doesn’t remember what she did the night before. All those times we had sex after Thursday night dancing and drinking – she didn’t remember it. I think she remembered mostly the morning sex, the quick rushed sex because we both had to go to work. Years of long Thursday nights, and lots of sex that she would never remember. Orgasms she would never remember. My efforts to please her for nothing. I enjoyed the sex, but it was only a chore for her, something one does for someone else’s benefit. Did it mean she loved me? I guess I’ll never know. She never said. It’s been four years since I’ve seen her. I wrote her, without a reply. I sent her a book with a note in it, asking if we could get together to talk, see if we had misunderstood each other, if there was anything to say; she said no. I called her when her daughter had to travel to Texas for surgery, offered my help, offered to drive, share a motel room, or buy her a plane ticket. She said she’d think about it, that her sister might fly in from LA and go with her, but she never called me back. I called her and she said her son was taking her, and she didn’t want me there. My step-daughter said not to come, that it would just upset her mom more than she was already.

She lives alone now, as do I. She told her daughter once that she had never been alone before. She’d gone from home to marriage, and even after her first divorce, she’d had the kids with her. Now she is alone. She has her alcohol, and her phone and her sisters and friends to call long distance. Her son calls her nearly every day or she calls him. But, she doesn’t need anyone. She thinks she has always been this way, because she doesn’t remember when I held her hand, when I cuddled her, when I touched her and fucked her, and loved her, and only her, for all I was worth. She just doesn’t remember when someone really loved her, and when she thinks of me at all, she knows I didn’t love her, because I just love everyone.

Just what the fuck is depression anyway?  I tried researching it, after experiencing it for a few years.  Got medication simultaneously with counseling. I was definitely depressed.

Depression, which doctors call major depressive disorder, isn’t something you can just “snap out of.”

Symptoms

• Agitation, restlessness, and irritability
• Dramatic change in appetite, often with weight gain or loss
• Extreme difficulty concentrating
• Fatigue and lack of energy
• Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness
• Feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and inappropriate guilt
• Inactivity and withdrawal from usual activities, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities that were once enjoyed (such as sex)
• Thoughts of death or suicide
• Trouble sleeping or excessive sleeping

Major depression disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic, is when a person has five or more symptoms of depression for at least 2 weeks. In addition, people with major depression often have behavior changes, such as new eating and sleeping patterns.

Depression can appear as anger and discouragement, rather than as feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. If depression is very severe, there may also be psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions. These symptoms may focus on themes of guilt, inadequacy, or disease.  It is thought to be caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals and other factors.

However.  Hmmph.  However, none of this says what depression is, or where it comes from. Obviously, trauma can bring it on: the loss of a loved one, a pet, a friend, or the end of a marriage, love affair, or even a job. Many things can trigger depression.  If it is caused solely by a chemical imbalance, then it would be entirely random, in my opinion.  People in all walks of life would be depressed for absolutely no discernible reason, whereas most of us can attribute those feelings to something that happened. Everyone deals with these things in different ways, and, in fact, it is common for everyone to be depressed at some time.  So, to follow the medical opinions, I should talk about major depressive disorder, that thing that just doesn’t go away for some people sometimes.

I think I know what it is, and where it comes from.  I’m not a doctor, neither an M.D., a psychologist nor a psychiatrist.

Now, Wikipedia says: “The biopsychosocial model proposes that biological, psychological, and social factors all play a role in causing depression. The diathesis–stress model specifies that depression results when a preexisting vulnerability, or diathesis, is activated by stressful life events. The preexisting vulnerability can be either genetic, implying an interaction between nature and nurture, or schematic, resulting from views of the world learned in childhood.”

Blah, blah, blah.

I think it is nothing more than our reaction to pain.  Pain, as many of us know, decreases in intensity after we suffer it for a time.  Runners, torture victims, accident victims, and victims of disease know what I’m talking about. There may be a variety of things involved, but we all commonly think about endorphins kicking in, numbing us to pain after awhile.

Endorphins (“endogenous morphine”) are endogenous opioid peptides that function as neurotransmitters. They are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during exercise, excitement, pain, consumption of spicy food, love and orgasm, and they resemble the opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a feeling of well-being.

Well-being after sex, yeah, I know that one pretty well. I also like chile, red or green, and sure enough, a blast of really hot spicy food brings about a lessening of the hotness after a short time. I can then eat hotter chile, but I pay for it later.  So, one thing to notice is that this morphine-like substance we produce in our bodies doesn’t last very long. But, we can produce it over and over again, in response to various stimuli, including stress.  Some of us experience stress daily, so we must also be producing endorphins daily.

Here’s what I think: depression is our bodies’ response to psychological pain.  Depression is our psychological morphine, producing analgesia.  We go numb in response to psychological pain.  We cry, or grieve deeply, sometimes feeling an overwhelming crushing weight.  We can’t function that way.  We have to go to work, or continue our normal routines, so we have to push those feelings aside just enough to function.  Depression is the result.  If it was a relatively minor pain, we may work it out through continuing our normal routines.  Sometimes, however, the pain was severe, or was perceived as severe, and continues to recur. We may keep brushing it aside.  I think this is a normal mental defense, allowing us to continue our life until we can deal with the cause of the pain, similar to the production of adrenalin or endorphins, which give us temporary options for survival.

But, it has to be dealt with sooner or later.  Just as an injury can be ignored while adrenalin or endorphin pumps through our bodies, eventually the injury must be treated.  Depression is our temporary defense against psychological pain, but at some point, we have to deal with the “injury” that produced the depression in the first place.  How we deal with the injury is what our mental health industry is all about.  Alcohol and other central nervous system depressants slow normal brain function. In higher doses, some CNS depressants can become general anesthetics.  Temporary.  These measures are temporary, and can actually worsen depression.

An interesting tidbit I gleaned from the research literature is that endorphins attach themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions (limbic and prefrontal areas).  Perhaps endorphins are involved in the onset of depression? I do not know, nor care.

Do I know how to “cure” depression? No.  Various treatments, combinations of certain drugs with counseling, are said to allow our minds and bodies to slip out of depression long enough to allow us to reprogram ourselves out of it.  The length of treatment, types of drugs and types of counseling vary widely. The results vary widely.

Having just come out of a three-year long depression (at minimum), I have some observations:

1.) Depression is temporary.

2.) It does not occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

3.) In all likelihood, we prolong our depressive state ourselves.

4.) Whatever caused the initial depressive response must be overcome.

Yeah, I hear you: Overcome? How? Beats me.  Drugs and counseling will help in some cases.

My best guess?

Here ’tis.

1.) Recognise that one is depressed.

2.) Trace the cause. This may take medical and psychological help.

3.) Eliminate the cause. This one is tricky.

I know that there are techniques often applied, common sense approaches, that may or not be accepted by all.  For example, I have read that grief cannot be overcome unless one goes through various stages, like denial, and anger, leading to acceptance.  I’ve found this to be true for depression.  One cannot wish depression away – that is simply denial. Accept that one is depressed. And then get angry.  Avoid violent solutions, because the depression will worsen, and be prolonged, but anger? Anger is good.  Get really fucking angry. Maybe one thinks it was all their own fault. Let me tell you, getting angry with oneself doesn’t do a whole lot.  What hurt you badly? What was the thing that drove you over the edge? Was it your boss, your spouse, your ex, your lover, your sibling, your parent?  Hate them. Your injury? Hate it.  Give it all you’ve got.  Hate your boss, your spouse, your ex, the negligent driver, the government regulation, the politician?  Hate them.  Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.  Give into it.  Feel the vindication, the release, the shifting of the pain from yourself somewhere else.  When you’ve gotten the focus off of you and onto the cause, let it go.  Forget? No.  We can never forget.  But we can let the anger go, and the pain goes with it.  Then focus on change.  Get away from the source of the pain if you can, or confront it. Attempt to change the situation that caused the pain in the first place.  We all know what we have to do.  If we don’t, the pain will hit us again, and we will be depressed again.

In my opinion.

When I was a very young man
I asked my father to please tell me
Will I get lucky Will I get laid
Here’s what he said to me

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

When I grew up and fell in love
I asked each lover what lies ahead
Will there be love and sex every day
Here’s what my lovers said

Que sera, sera
What will be will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

When I was just an old man
I asked my shrink what should I try
Could I fall in love again or fucking give up
This was his wise reply

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

What will be, will be
Que sera, sera.

The boy’s nickname was Terry. He didn’t particularly like his name, because a lot of girls had the same one, and it sounded like a child’s name anyway.  He’d started out with Terrance, but in 1st grade the other boys called him Clarence instead.  It always got a laugh, but not from Terry.  It sounded like the name of a clown, or some snooty rich kid in a story.
After grade school, he changed his name to Bob, although Bob didn’t have much of a ring to it.  Still, it seemed a nice unambiguously masculine name, and much more adult sounding than Terry, or Terrance.
Bob, as a name, worked fairly well for Terry.  People didn’t stumble all over it, like they did with Terry, confusing his name with Gerry,  Perry, Harry, but most often, oddly enough, with Larry.  He wondered if it had to do with Larry, Moe and Curly,  since the most common misunderstanding of his name was always Larry.  He tried emphasizing the T whenever he said Terry, but it didn’t help.  People just don’t get Terry usually until the third try.  It made introductions tedious, even though people always smiled, and often apologized.
Terry went by Bob all through high school.  He liked it.  People seemed to respond better.  He was older than he’d been of course, but high school boys are not generally known for their maturity, and Terry, or even Terrance could still have been disastrous.  If there was one thing Terry hated more than anything else, it was being teased.  Still, boys will use just about anything to tease another boy.  The school insisted that everyone wear ties.
Terry had a hard time waking up in the mornings, and taking the time to tie a perfect Windsor knot every day had gotten old fast.  Terry discovered the clip-on tie: perfect knot, perfect length, and impossible to discern.  Somehow, one day, a classmate noticed, and snatched it from him.   He chased after the perp, grabbing the tie and pushing the perp onto the ground.  Generally, Terry had always been very easy-going.  His father often said Terry would let someone take the shirt off his back, but that was what “turning the other cheek” meant in the real world.  In the religious world, “turning the other cheek” meant martyrdom, and martyrdom was preferred to violence.  However, just ignoring all the  jibes and taunts was not easy, and that one time, Terry ran his attacker down and won his self-respect. Or so he thought.
Instead of congratulating him on standing up for himself, his other classmates made light of it, pointing out that the other boy, although the same age, was shorter.  This made Terry into little more than a cowardly bully.  “But, what was I to do?” he asked, “let him take it?”  No one answered that.  Whining was not allowed.  However, this incident provided the catalyst for another far more embarrassing one, since the real bullies felt Terry was an easy mark, and could only defend himself against smaller adversaries.
Terry’s family didn’t have a lot of money, and clothes were patched, sewn and worn until they fell apart.  It so happened one day, as Terry bent over to pick up a fork he dropped in the school cafeteria, that his pants split.  He was mortified, but no one had seemed to notice.  The pants were brown corduroys, with lots of vertical lines, and baggy enough that Terry thought it would pass unnoticed if he walked slowly and kept his butt cheeks pinched together.  He sat down opposite his peers, and relaxed.  He made it through lunch without a single comment.  In fact, he relaxed too much, because as he stood, the gap widened enough for someone to see.  Ellis, agent provocateur, class clown, and always an outlaw, took it upon himself to take full advantage of the situation.  He grabbed a slice of pickle off his lunch tray  and ran up to Terry, dropping the pickle in the rip as Terry stood up.  The indignity of this was just too much.
That someone would see the tear no longer mattered.  Ellis was going down.  Terry lunged for him, and Ellis, cowardly as most bullies are, took off running.  Ellis laughed at Terry,  sidestepping and ducking through the cafeteria.  Terry chased him into the hallway.  Lunch break was not yet over, so there was no one in the hallway.  Terry chased him, gaining on him, running full tilt down the hallway.  Of course, yelling and running past the principal’s office, in a school  that prided itself on self-discipline, was not a particularly bright thing to do.  They were caught.
Now, Terry was in the equally uncomfortable position of trying to explain that someone had put a pickle in his pants.  Fortunately, it had been the principal who’d caught them.  The vice-principal was in charge of discipline, and he would have come down hard on them.  As it was, the principal referred Terry to Student Court, a disciplinary board wholly run by the students.
Terry explained the pickle incident, (picklement?) and the court, laughing behind their hands, let it go.  To add to Terry’s shame, all decisions by the Student Court were published in the school paper, although the rip in someone’s pants became a rip in someone’s shirt.  In 1965, no newspaper would dare even allude to something sexual , much less the innuendo of a pickle in someone’s pants.  It wasn’t journalistic integrity, but everyone knew the real story anyway.
Terry could see, by now, that the name didn’t make any difference.  He was kind of an oddball, it seemed, and names were nowhere near as important as he’d always believed.  After high school, he kept using Bob, although his employer and coworkers were not the types to care about a name one way or the other.   By now, however, Terry noticed that Bob was an extremely common name.  In every room, it seemed, there was a Bob. In a restaurant, in a garage, on the street, or at work, Bob was as ubiquitous as Tom, Dick and Harry.  Terry, realizing that, as an adult, he could have his name changed legally, thought about changing his name to Bilbo Baggins.  It was not a bad name, far out of the ordinary.  That would have been alright, but he knew his family wouldn’t like his dropping the surname. But, what would Bilbo be without a Baggins to go with it?  He thought about just using Frodo,  but few people had read the half a million word sequel to The Hobbit, so he would have had to spend a lot of time explaining the Lord of the Rings character to every person he met.
Of course, changing one’s name is a very superfluous thing to do anyway, as Terry had found out.  And now there were far more important things to worry about in the world, like sex and war, and getting to work on time.  He took night classes at the University where he worked, but he really wanted to go to school full time.  He applied for, and was accepted at another University a few years later, still calling himself Bob.  He kept his job on a part-time basis, as a sort of contract employee.  However, those aforementioned things, sex and war, took over most of his thoughts, as he sought one but wanted to avoid the other.  That took him to rallies and demonstrations, as well as into drug and sexual experimentation, and his studies suffered.  His thoughts were always elsewhere.  Dismissed from school on probation for a year, he decided to travel.
After a few years of odd jobs and traveling, he took a job one day in a small foundry in Arizona.  The foreman must also have thought Terry an oddball when he asked him his name, because  Terry paused.  It was a normal question, but suddenly, and without having given it any thought in years, he told the foreman his name: Terry.  It was, after all, how his family had known and still knew him.  No one he had ever met was as important as family, and he never changed his name again, even though he rarely got through another introduction without having to say his name at least three times.

Dust bunnies blow across my floors
like tumbleweeds through my yard
Some blow away, keep tumbling
some get stuck.

Tumbleweeds in the ditch
tumbleweeds in the fence
dust bunnies in the corner
dust bunnies underneath

Memories are like that.

Some people eat beans every day
some people have bread every meal
some eat anything any old way
We had potatoes, hey, what’s the deal?

Ate a lot of them growing up
with potatoes in the garden
and meat vegetable potatoes
every night for dinner

Mashed potatoes Scalloped potatoes
Boiled potatoes Baked potatoes
Home-fried potatoes
French-fried potatoes

Potatoes au gratin
Potatoes and ham
Bacon potato salad
Sweet potato pie

Potatoes in the stews
potatoes in the soups
potatoes as main course
potatoes on the side

But, ah! potato pancakes
smothered in applesauce
Couldn’t get enough
More pancakes please.

Dark blue evening sky
Wispy white clouds floating high
Feet in the water.

With nothing left to live for, no joy in my life, no pleasure in waking, breathing, eating, or even being, I knew I had to just get it over with and die.  I went through all the options: gun placed in my mouth to fire upwards, blowing the top of my head off – way too messy.
Razor along my vein, for maximum loss of blood – too slow, and painful.  What of pain? I shouldn’t care, but, it’s because I tired of pain that I no longer feel anything at all. No sense having pain be my last memory.
Jumping? What if I survive? What if I’m paralyzed? unable to die? kept alive for nothing?
Pills? so I can wake up choking on my own vomit?
Jumping in front of a bus? Same problem as jumping.
I really couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve some kind of pain, slow death, or public display.  I didn’t want anyone to know I died, or how I died. I had no one to impress, no one to feel sorry for me, no one to send a message to.  I just wanted it all to be over.
I found a solution: drowning.  I knew it would be unpleasant.  I had a plan for that. Nitrous oxide.  I would feel myself drowning, trying to pull air into my lungs, trying to breathe, but I wouldn’t care.  I’d laugh my way into death, gulping in whole lungfuls of water.  Then peace, with a smile on my face.
The water was deepest near the dam, about 75 feet, so I’d plunge deep into the numbing cold water. I wanted to sink, and sink fast.  I found four twenty-pound ankle weights.  It was hard walking with them, but I practiced until I managed to just look like I was just drunk or high or old. And jeez, was I ever old. Too old for life to hold any interest anymore.
With a small canister of nitrous oxide, I crossed Deep Creek’s concrete bridge leading to the dam.  It was 3:00 am.  I walked, slowly and silently. There was no traffic that time of morning.  I’d been there often enough to know.  I climbed the fence to the dam, clumsily, but without making a sound.    There was a maintenance ladder on the dam itself.  As I grabbed each rung, my legs felt dead.  It took a lot of effort to pull them up with me.  I was sweating in that nearly freezing air.  Those weights got heavier with every breath.
The water was calm, and inviting.  I opened up the canister and let it fill me with gas.  I had a small mask to cover my mouth and nose.  It took longer than I thought.  I hung there on the ladder, a few feet from the top.  My legs were tired. My feet were hooked uncomfortably in the rungs.  My hands, wrists, and ankles ached from the climb.  After awhile, I didn’t care much about the slight pain anymore.  I didn’t care much about the cold night air.  I was really happy, for the first time in many years.  I didn’t feel like laughing, but I was smiling.  I dropped the canister into the water.  The splash was reassuring, calming, a funny preview of my own fall.
I threw myself out as far as I could.  I was taking no chances, but there was little danger of hitting the dam wall, as it curved inward at this point, near the long tunnel that takes water to the powerhouse.  The water flows past the turbines, back into Deep Creek lake, back into the Youghiogheny river, continuing on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.  I hit feet first, as I expected. There was pain, pain to my feet, despite the thick hiking boots I’d worn, pain to my knees, pain to my hips.  But the water was so cold, and I was so excited, it didn’t matter.  I sunk quickly.  I opened my eyes, surprised that I’d had them shut so long, surprised that I was holding my breath.  There was not much to see. It was dark, but some light from the power plant was reflected down into the depths.  I had expected to touch bottom, but I seemed to be drifting down incredibly slowly.
It was time.  I pushed my stomach in with my fists, expelling a lot of air.  It blooped out of my mouth and nose.  When it seemed I had no more air left, I held myself still, trying not to breathe until the last possible second, when my reflexes would kick in and force me to.  It was peaceful.  As I faced death, I realized I was ready.  She was gone forever. There was no one left to care for, no one to mourn my passing, no reason for my existence.  I was now useless.  I’d had a good life.  I’d loved, and lost, and loved again, and again.  I’d worked many jobs, some I’d enjoyed, some I hadn’t.  I had done all that I had set out to do, and I was content with my lot in life.  Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t want to die out of regret.  Hell, if I’d still had any regrets, I’d have wanted to keep on living, kept on trying to overcome those regrets for the rest of my life.  No, I had no regrets. It was just time to go.
My lungs burned with the beginnings of pain, so I opened my mouth and swallowed, deeply.  I sucked greedily at the water, blowing some residual water out my nose.  Then, then there was only water, and I was afraid. Fear stabbed at me like an ice pick through my heart.  I wanted to breath!  I wanted air.  My brain felt funny.  It was hard to think, but I kept trying to breathe. There was a heaviness in my head, a feeling of darkness.   My lungs struggled, again and again, for air.  The water was too heavy, too thick. I kept choking.  I started retching, water into water, and water back in again.  It hurt.  It hurt bad.  Worst of all was the feeling of panic, of absolute fear.  I thought I’d wanted to die, but now I wanted to breathe, to live, to think again.
Too late.

What? where? who? slipped vaguely through my barely conscious mind as I came to. There were no answers available.  As I started to lift my head, I couldn’t imagine where I was.  I was lying down; I might be dreaming.  I saw sky above.  I was outside.  I wasn’t in my bed.  I wanted to get up, find out.  In a sudden panic, I realized I didn’t know who I was. I felt like I was still dreaming.  A name, I must have a name.  Now that was scary.  I was awake and thinking, but I didn’t know anything.  I remember telling myself: Just lay here.  Relax.  Let it come. It was like trying to remember something on the tip of my tongue: think of something else, don’t think about what it was I’d forgotten.  I closed my eyes.
I remembered the construction site, being pushed into the hole above an unfinished cellar, waking up to pain, being carried across a field, blood on my face, getting stitches above my eye.  I remembered standing outside the tree house, trying to cover a hole in the roof on a rainy day, slipping, falling, coming to with a terrible sharp pain in my arm, the visiting relatives in our house, the ride to the hospital, the plaster cast.
It came back to me.  Pumping my bicycle down that hill, hell-bent for speed.  Traffic.  Lots of traffic, rush hour traffic.  A whole lane to myself.  I had been keeping up, moving fast.  An unseen car on my left was trying to cut across traffic into a driveway I don’t know was there, just to my right.  It was practically touching me as I looked into a woman’s face: wide open eyes, slack mouth.
So, I was – in the street, still.  Somehow I’d survived.  I opened my eyes to a grey-blue sky.  I knew who I was, forgot that I’d forgotten.  I saw firemen sitting in lawn chairs outside the firehouse across the street.  They appeared to be laughing at something, but I couldn’t hear them.
But, there were vague noises and voices, somewhere else, behind me, yes, and yards away.  I was alone in an empty circle of asphalt.
“I saw the whole thing,” I heard a man say – I could hear an eager concern in his voice – “It wasn’t your fault.  I’ll testify in court for you.”  Now, why would someone say that? I wondered.  I’d had the right of way.
Someone else – I remember a deep gravelly voice – asked, “What about him?”
“Him?  He’s dead,” another voice answered, flatly and certainly.

I’d like to be
a scented candle
in your room
burning for you
glowing
scenting

I’d like to please you
make you feel good
fill your senses
relax you

I see my scent
clinging to you
swirling
falling
rising
caressing you

I see my scent
clinging
to your hair
to your skin
long after
you blow me out

you set me aflame
you made me glow
incandescent
iridescent
you put me out
quenched my flame
I smolder
a smoky ember
yearning to
make you happy
light your face
make you smile

Your lips are a torch
when they smile
Should you smile
if only you would
I think it could
fan my ember
into a wildfire

light me up
so that
I may swirl around you
touching you
pleasing you

O to burn so brightly
even for a moment

ecstasy

though I be totally
consumed.

Birthdays were never an egocentric event for me. My brother and I, although a year apart, shared the same birthday month, so my parents always combined the two into one party, one song. You know how people sing it, Happy Birthday to so-and-so? Ours were always together, Happy Birthday John and Terry. As a result, I think, I never thought of a birthday as a focus on me alone.  This is a little odd, since some psychologists believe children under the age of 7 reason egocentrically, believing that their view of the world is the same as anyone else’s view.  However, I at least saw that the world didn’t center around just me, but included my brother.
I remember much of my childhood, but not all.  However, I can interpolate some things.  I have no idea what my first birthday was like, although my mother was about to give birth to my brother, so I’m certain that weighed heavily on my parent’s minds.  Knowing them, I assume they used the occasion to have family over for cake.  What was my second birthday like? Well, I don’t know, but with John one year old, they might not have wanted people over so things stayed a little quieter.  At that age, I wouldn’t have cared.  I know we were a handful.  By my third birthday, I’m sure the tradition got started to have both our birthdays on the same day.  There were no other children as yet, and mom would have wanted to light candles and teach us to blow them out.  The difficulty would have been in trying to teach us our numbers, because John needed two, and I needed three.  She baked two cakes!  By the age of four, John and I knew the drill.  When October came around, and my mom started baking, we knew what to expect.  We knew there would be a cake with four candles for me, and a cake with three candles for him.  At the time, I remembered that previous birthday, my third, but that memory is long gone now.
You may well ask how I remember my fourth birthday at all, but I think it was the trauma of moving.  I can’t remember the place we moved from anymore, but it had a long stairway outside the building.  I remember being forced into a car, and driving a long way to the new place.  The car was green, the rear sloped in a continuous curve from roof to fender. The inside had a cloth-covered ceiling.  I remember that cloth, because in later years, it was loose, ripped, and always falling down.  At the time, I didn’t pay it much attention, because I was more excited about where we had arrived.  It was a small house, but it had a grass-covered front lawn.  We had not had one of those before.  My parents seemed happy about that, but, compared to the other lawns in the neighborhood, ours looked different.  It hadn’t been mowed in a long time. It was wild and tall.  I liked it, but, of course, no lawn is ever allowed to be like that for long.  I suspect that is when my dad bought his first lawn mower, because by the time I was ten, we had moved twice again, my bother and I had the job of mowing, and that thing seemed ancient.
Those old push mowers were something else.  I delighted in the spinning blades, each one of which curved in a broad sweep, much like present-day wind turbines.  To my ten-year-old brain, the blades should have been straight, but somewhere along the line, people had figured out how to cut grass more efficiently.  Often the blades would be near-dull, and pushing that thing through the grass was not my idea of fun.  It was however, not something I had to do, but something John and I had to do.
We were sidekicks.  From birthdays to work, we did everything together.  Hell, we even got punished together. My father, discovering something broken or missing, would confront us. If neither one of us owned up to it, he said we would both be punished.  Punishments ran a wide gamut then, from standing in a corner, to no dinner, to slaps on our butts, or the dreaded leather strap, which hurt like hell.  One time, John owned up to something neither of us had done, just to get the interrogation and slapping over, and so we wouldn’t both be punished.  Odd to think that our parents thought we’d ever do anything deliberately bad, knowing the consequences, but I guess they thought we wouldn’t ever do anything bad again if they punished us hard enough. Boy, were they wrong.
Running through the yard, we accidentally trampled mom’s azalea bush.  You’d have thought we went outside just to destroy that bush from the way my dad carried on.  We took our clothes off one time, and went out on the porch roof, climbing out the second story window.  A neighbor saw us, so that didn’t go over very well.   We also thought it was fun to throw small stones out that same window at passing cars, since the porch roof kept us from being seen from the street.  We thought we were pretty clever about it, trying to determine the exact time to throw a stone, so that it would hit a car while we ducked down.  We could hear the thunk on a car roof or door, and one time a car squealed to a sudden stop, and backed up to our house.  That we had to see.  Of course, that meant we were seen. Well, it was not fun anymore, as the driver got out and walked up to our house.
Then there was the time John and I built a small fire in an empty lot behind our house.  We tried to build it up with stones all around it, but we were too young then to know to clear the entire area of combustibles.  It spread, and we couldn’t put it out.  We got on our bicycles and rode for our lives, afraid we’d get caught, and we were. A neighbor had seen us, called the fire department, and called our mother.  She made us march out to the firemen and apologize.  They were incredibly nice to us.  They smiled at us.  I didn’t know what to make of that, because we had been scared to death to go out there and tell them it was our fault.  Our parents made sure we knew the danger of fire, and read us the riot act over that one.  I doubt we could sit down without wincing for days after that.
John and I were a class act though.  One time, investigating a construction site nearby, my brother and I and Eddie, a friend, were dropping rocks into a pool of muddy water in the incomplete basement of a new house.  There was a hole in the first floor where the stairs would eventually be. We didn’t question why the basement walls and the floor of the first floor were built, yet the concrete for the basement floor hadn’t been poured yet.  It was just fun to have a huge puddle far enough below us to makes big splashes.  Three boys, a hole, a long way to fall; what could go wrong?  I fell in, but Eddie went for his parents, and John found his way down to me.  I was laying face down, out cold, in the water.  He turned me over, saving my life.
Years later, we had ridden our bikes miles away from our house, and were investigating a sewer drain outlet.  All the storm water from the street above flowed out into a small creek, and beavers had built a dam on it.  It was just too damn fascinating to leave alone.  However, the concrete around the storm drain outlet was green and slimy.  John fell in.  The slime was everywhere.  He couldn’t grab hold of the edge to pull himself back up; he kept slipping back into the water.  It was deep there, over our heads.  We didn’t know how to swim yet, and the water was dark and filthy.  In retrospect, I think he was panicking, because he thrashed around like crazy.  I got on my stomach.  I reached out my hands and yelled at him to grab them.  He did. I was able to pull him far enough so he could climb out.  We rode over to a nearby house and knocked, explaining what had happened.  John was socking wet, and reeked.   My dad drove home from work and took us home.  He was, shall we say, upset, but also happy that we were OK.
So it continued over the years, through accident after accident.  We even shoplifted together; that was a mess of trouble.   Always we survived, and both of us have all our parts.  We even fought each other.  Sometimes only one of us got into trouble at a time.  We balanced everything out by being Altar boys and Boy Scouts. We served mass and camped together.  We were a team.
High school changed everything.  I went first, leaving John behind.  John developed new friends.  Rather than follow me to the same high school, he went to a religious school in another state for a year.  It was the sort of pre-seminary school you go to if you plan to be a priest, but before you go to an actual seminary.  It was strange not having him around.  Stranger still, he changed his mind and came back after that first year.  Instead of hanging out with me however, he had other friends.  He told me about discovering masturbation.  I had discovered that on my own.  He also knew girls. He did end up going to the same high school as me, but we never saw each other.   He was one of the popular kids.  He found a part-time job after school working on an assembly line for printed circuit boards.  I rarely saw him, and he never told me how to get a job like that or what he did.   He had money, bought himself a leather jacket, and combed his hair out and down and over his face, unlike my greasy pompadour.  He was as different as he could be.  I stayed after school myself, joining various clubs: Science, Computer, Drama.  When I was home, I had to study, usually two to three hours, just to keep up.
John and I didn’t have free time anymore; no time to waste riding our bicycles randomly, exploring, getting into trouble.  I stayed to myself. He thought I was weird.  I didn’t have friends, I didn’t date.  Well, I took my cousin out a couple times, but that didn’t go anywhere.   By the time I graduated high school, John and I were like strangers.  There were no more joint birthdays.  I got a job and left home.  He graduated the next year and got married.  I went to his wedding, dressed in a funky double-breasted suit I’d picked up for myself. It reminded me of my grandfather’s suit.  I looked and felt out-of-place around the family.  I tried to look and act mature. I had even bought a packet of Tiparillos, small plastic-tipped cigars.  I thought they’d make me look sophisticated, but when I tried inhaling one at the wedding reception, I thought I’d choke my lungs out. Clueless.
John invited me over one time after his daughter was born , a year later.  He’d always been the skinny one, but he’d put on a lot of weight. His wife cooked a lot.  They had certain meals on certain nights, same thing every week.  I asked him about sex, and he whispered to me, “Tonight’s the night.”  I thought, “What, once a week? Are you kidding?” Clueless.
I however, was very involved with anti-war activities.  I’d been arrested.  John thought it was a joke, that I’d gotten arrested for the hell of it.  Neither of us had been drafted, but I was caught up in a counter-culture, one that distrusted the family unit, authority, the draft, wars, and law itself.  I liked marijuana and tried LSD a few times.  Dropped out of school, lost my job.  I moved away.  I had many lovers.  Sex was my favorite drug.  I was a drifter and a carny.  I settled on the other side of the country, poured bronze, worked as a hod carrier, then found work in a cancer research laboratory at a University.  I took free classes there, got a degree.   I got married and divorced twice.  I retired.
I still miss my brother.  His 40th wedding anniversary is coming up soon.  I think I’ll go see him.   We’re so much alike.

Hey Charlie boy, strange furry little child of mine. You want to go out, do you? Here you go, I said. Charlie, a tiger-striped short-haired domestic tabby, lept out the now open cat door. Why they waited like that puzzled me.  Charlie and his other half, a black and white short-haired domestic tabby, come and go as they please. Sometime they stay out all day, sometimes they pop in for a bite and pop right out again. Sometimes one or both sleeps on my bed all day. In summer they sometimes don’t show for a day or two. I never can figure them out. They don’t need me to open the cat door, but if I’m in the room, they sit or lay patiently until I notice them, and wait for me to hold the flap up so they can leap through the hole.
There’s cat litter in the house, but they rarely use it.  I hardly ever change it anymore. I can pull out the occasional piece of dried shit.  I can often hear them running around over my head. They love the flat-roofed houses around here.  There are six houses connected together, so they often run full tilt across the roofs, sounding like herds of miniature horses.  Cats and horses, of course, have exactly the same gait, moving both legs on either side in unison, alternating from one side to the other as they run.
Often they wait outside the clear plastic door, waiting patiently for me to notice them. I let them in. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they want to be petted, sometimes they are just looking for each other. Sometimes they want to go right back out.
If I’m too slow to notice them, they start scratching the small throw rug by the door.  There’s a small rug by my bed that they do the same thing to, if I’m too long in bed in the morning.  Charlie sometimes meows at me, but the other one, Kilala, just scratches like mad.  Sometimes they want food.  Charlie has a high-pitched meow he uses when he’s hungry, so I always know just what he wants. If he wants attention, he simply jumps up on my lap, or on the desk if I’m at the computer.
Kilala doesn’t ever jump up on me. She likes to rub her neck on all the corners of the walls, and likes me to pet her, mostly just around her neck and head. She was the feral one, showing up out of the blue one day.  Charlie was barely a year old when she showed up; I had raised him from a kitten. His mother had camped out in the yard, and dropped her litter.  I fed them every day.  Since this was the second time a cat had dropped a litter there, my wife insisted I get rid of them quickly.  Before I did, I heard one of them mewing and crying away from inside the fence I had recently put up.  There were pickets on both sides, and he must have fallen in from on top.  Fortunately, I had used deck screws to put the fence up, and I undid the screws on the plank closest to the crying.  It was the little striped orange cat I’d later call Charlie.  I took him over to his mother, petting him all the while.
After a few more weeks I went to Animal Control for a trap.  I set it up early, and put their bowl of cat food inside.  Later on, I found the mother and most kittens inside.  That made my wife happy.  She was glad to see them go.  It was the second litter I’d had to get rid of. I’d kept the mother of the first litter, after leaving all her wiry, well-trained mousers at Animal Control.  They were such lively, healthy animals.  I’d watched the mother train them in mousing, bringing them a field mouse to learn how to catch.  I hated to see them go, but my wife insisted, and she wasn’t interested in waiting for people to come by and take them.
I had the mother fixed; no more kittens for her.  She was a gentle cat, obviously a runaway, as she was well used to people, cat food and houses.  But, one day a few weeks after she been spayed, she died in the garden.  My wife noticed while she was watering.  I was sad. I never knew what killed her: complications from her spaying operation? insect poison on the garden?
But, next spring there was another female, another litter.  That was the litter Charlie came from.
When I trapped them, Charlie was the only one who hadn’t gone into the trap. So I kept him.  My wife wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, but as long as the menagerie was gone, she was OK with keeping one.  Charlie was almost feral himself, still very young.  He stayed away from the house, but showed up every day looking for food.  While he ate, I petted him, and it must have imprinted, because, to this day, he often waits by his food until I pet him.  He’s the only animal I’ve ever seen who will allow himself to be petted while eating. He even purrs as he chomps away.
I think Kilala was no more than six months old then she showed up.  I never knew if she’d stay, so she was just “Girl” for the longest time. She was incredibly thin, but then I noticed her belly hanging down. Damn, another pregnant cat.  She took to Charlie right away.  They hung out a bit until she had her kittens, then she was often missing.  One day I found her with her kittens in a small pit under an old, low-slung bench in the garden area.  She grabbed one of the kittens and ran to the fence, vaulting it like a champion despite the bundle in her teeth. Later on, I noticed she had taken all the kittens, probably in the same manner.  As they got older, they needed more food than Kilala could provide, so she brought them all over to the bowl I had Charlie’s food in. She had eaten there before, so now she was teaching her progeny where the food was.  I had to put a lot more out.  I was happy again to see the kittens playing, fighting, running around the yard, but my wife insisted they could not stay. Again, I had to round ‘em up and take them away.  I kept Kilala of course. She was a great companion for Charlie.   I can’t stand to see animals kept by themselves.  Most animals, especially cats and dogs, are very social creatures. An animal locked up by itself, in a house or yard, is the cruelest kind of life, I think.
Charlie had already been neutered, and I had Kilala spayed.  I kept my fingers crossed, and was very happy to see that she survived.  Eventually I coaxed the two of them into the house to eat.  They had a ball investigating all the rooms in the house, and chasing each other through them.  They didn’t, however, like it when the outside door was closed.  They loved running out and in, and out and in again.  Whenever I could I left the sliding glass door and screen open.  In winter, when I couldn’t, I had to open the door every time they wanted in or out.  They never ran away. Even if they were out all day or night, they waited by the door for me to let them in again.
My wife hated the way I catered to them.  I couldn’t see just leaving them outside, or confining them inside, so I became their doorman.  I didn’t mind.  They are affectionate to me and each other, although, just as people do, sometimes they fight with each other. Often they mate, even though both are fixed.  It is always funny to watch them, curling together like a Yin and Yang painting, then suddenly fighting, or chasing each other around and biting and hissing.  But always, they return and sleep curled around each other.   They remind me so much of married couples, with one exception: they stay together.  Either one could leave, but they never do.  No matter how much they fight, they end up licking each other’s face, and cleaning each other’s fur.  And always they like to sleep together.
Not like humans.  My wife is no longer with me. We grew apart, without much affection passing between us anymore.  I loved her, but she seemed, to me, to be cold and hard.  Perhaps it was all in my mind.  I told her once, after she’d been away, and she kept insisting, drunkenly, that I tell her, that I hadn’t called her because I hadn’t missed her.  I had actually enjoyed a little time away from her. I meant nothing radical.  It just was nice to have the house to myself, with peace and quiet, without the constant noise of the TV and her nagging, once in a while.  I hadn’t meant more than that, but she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, wouldn’t listen to me.  She made me leave, and, of course, I took the cats.  The cats went with me kicking and screaming, but they adjusted to the new place, and they stay with me. I never heard from my human companion of fourteen years again.

my indigestion, my yellow teeth
pain in my feet, pain in my back
or is it my sacroiliac?
all the times I’ve come to grief

they add up over time
these aches and pains
the body slows, stiffens
joints pop and squeak

The mind wanders though time
dull painful memories
sharp happy ones
the future is looking back

Today, my first four oligonucleotides were finished synthesizing, and I took them off the machine; they would require a minimum of five to eight hours heating to be ready for purification next morning.  I was readying the machine for the next set of orders when Dr. Jella rushed in.  He looked anxious. He wanted to know if his DNA was ready.  I almost laughed.  Even if I had synthesized his orders first, it would still require heating and purification.   I told him that I could put his order ahead of the others I was about to start, and explained the time constraints.  He was so anxious looking that I told him that if it was for a critical experiment, and he needed it right away, I could stay late, even work all night to have it ready for him by morning.  He thought about that for a bit, but shrugged his shoulders, saying, “No, that’s alright. I can wait until tomorrow. It’s not, uh, not for anything real important.”  Turns out it was, but he didn’t want anyone to know what he was working on.
Later, I found out that reporters had been cold-calling various researchers, pumping them for information for a story.   Dr. Jella was working on the newly hot disease: hantavirus. The disease had flu-like symptoms, and people in New Mexico had died within days of showing symptoms of what everyone thought was a cold or flu.  A test for hantavirus was needed as soon as possible.  Researchers were working across the country to develop such a test.  Dr. Jella had the idea of creating a kit, using synthetic fragments of single-stranded hantavirus DNA.  If he had told me what it was for, I’d have gladly worked overnight. As it was, research is a highly competitive business.  Researchers across the country, especially at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, where also racing to develop a test. Whoever developed an effective test first would not only get recognition, but would be able to grab new research money to continue their work.  Dr. Jella didn’t want word to get out of the specifics of what he doing.  Someone else could take that information and receive the credit, not to mention future grant money to research other diseases.  Basically, his job and life’s work was on the line.   
I arrived for work an hour early next day, and purified Dr. Jella’s oligos first.  Needless to say, he was at my door soon after.  ”Are they ready yet?” he asked, somewhat breathlessly, like he had run up the stairs.  I told him they were synthesized, and purified, but I would need another two hours, at least, to dry them down. A lot of water is used in the purification protocol, and I used a freeze-drying apparatus to evaporate all of the liquid. That made it easy to reconstitute the DNA to the desired concentration for experiments.  He looked very disappointed, but I promised him I’d bring the DNA to his lab as soon as it was ready.
Later, I found out that he was using the DNA I had synthesized for the hantavirus kit. It worked, and his kit is now used to detect hantavirus.  I got a mention in the paper he wrote describing the experiment.*  That was unusual. Most of the work I did went unacknowledged. Sometimes the lab itself was mentioned.  Most of the time, I went about my days synthesizing, sequencing, analyzing, purifying, and running the lab itself, buying materials, and billing the researchers. They paid me.  It was a good living.

.

.

*(Rapid and specific detection of Sin Nombre virus antibodies in patients with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome by a strip immunoblot assay suitable for field diagnosis).

Stopped breathing.  Just like that.  The ocean had been cold.  Much colder than I’d expected from a warm Spring day. It was early in the beach season.  The winter had been harsh. Cold currents still flowed past the Jersey shore where my parents had dragged all seven kids. Normally, in Summer, they dragged us out of our comfortable beds early on a gray Baltimore morning, drove us across the Bay Bridge and down to the Ocean City on Maryland’s coast. I had no idea there was another Ocean City in New Jersey, and I have no memory of why we went there.
Me and my brother John had run into the waves, let them knock us over, felt the water churning and rolling over our heads.  We never tried to swim in the crashing surf, just dived under the waves and tried to touch bottom. Felt the undertow trying to drag us out to sea. Tried to body surf our way back to the beach. That was our relationship with the ocean. The younger kids were still too young to play in the surf like that.  They were walking along the sand, sticking their feet in the frigid water and running away from the incoming waves.
Me and John were the oldest. We did what we wanted sometimes. We were always together:  walking to school, serving mass as altar boys in the early mornings, riding our bikes miles away from home, sledding down the steep city streets in winter, building a tree house, or carrying groceries home from the store down the road.
Sometimes, when fighting the wild bucking waves and swift undercurrent, I’d do my best to stay under water as long as possible. John and I were pretty good at holding our breath.  I always hoped to see fish, crabs or starfish on the ocean bottom.  I was always digging in it, hoping to find something.
I came up after a long dive and didn’t see John anywhere.   No big deal.  He’d probably gone in.  I was freezing anyway.  Even my frenetic play hadn’t warmed me up all that much.  I headed into the warm dry sand towards my father.   I still didn’t see John anywhere. I knew Dad would know where he was.  As I got closer to him, I felt funny.  My body had instantly started to warm under the 75 degree sun, but I felt hotter than that. My breath became ragged, uncertain. I sped up, saw my dad turn his head towards me, and that was all I saw.
I awoke on my back, but my hair was full of sand.  A crowd encircled me.  “What happened?” I heard a voice ask.  I wanted to know that myself. Another disembodied voice in the crowd answered, “I think some old man drowned.”  Old man? At 15, I could hardly look old.  My dad was there too, looking down at me.  He picked me up.  A beach jeep pulled up, and hands grabbed me, loaded me into the jeep. It flew along the sand, bouncing and twisting.  Suddenly we were off the beach, on the street. An ambulance waited.  I was hustled into it.  A mask was pushed onto my face.  Oxygen poured into my nose and mouth. It felt good.  I didn’t notice anything else, but I wondered where John was.
Next thing I knew, I was lifted onto a gurney, rolled into a curtained-off room.  “I’m cold,” I remember saying.  It was warm in the room; everyone was in swimsuits around me.  The air was humid, but I shivered in all that heat.  A thick wool blanket was dropped over me.  I shook, uncontrollably.  I just couldn’t warm up. “I’m still cold,” I said.  Another heavy, dark green blanket was draped over me.  I still shivered, amazed that I could be so cold, warm as the day was, and covered in heavy blankets.  I felt like a freak.  Well, I was, I guess.  Turns out my rare allergy to cold had been my nemesis. In recent years, after playing for hours in the snow, and coming in the house to warm up, I had developed swollen hands, fingers that wouldn’t bend, red blotches on my face.  But this was summer!  Somehow, the cold ocean currents had swollen the muscles in my throat, tightening around my windpipe, cutting off my air.  As I warmed up, my breathing slowed, and I relaxed.  My parents had my clothes. I got dressed.  I remember being back in the station wagon, surrounded by all the other kids, including John, next to me as always. Freaks need their families.

I carry an Irish name
just part of my lineage
but important   I think.
I got the name from my father
he died – too much tobacco in his lungs
he got the name from his father
he died – bad lungs
too much mustard gas
he got his name from his father

who got his name from his father
a refugee from occupied Ireland.

I don’t know how he died
but I’ll bet he choked on the memory
of leaving his home to the British
the Anglos killed Celtic  men  women  children
took their land
sold some as slaves
no Irish could own land or money
no Irish could speak their native tongue
no Irish could have any other religion but that
of the bloody church of England
No school allowed, no life no culture

Not people       slaves
without hope     without justice
without reason   to live.

They fought and died for freedom
from the bloody English imperialists
who tried to own
the whole world    and failed.
They screwed the Irish even harder
took       their forests   their elk
their land      their money
their language  their culture.

The English fought the spirit of an entire nation
a people that had fought its way across Europe
survived invasions by Norsemen
by Vikings    by Romans
and invasions by the bloody British
’till any sane people would have gone mad with despair
again and again and again.

But the Irish fought back
the British killed them   jailed them
took more land   more crops   more slaves
left the Irish people potatoes.

Their crocodile tears did nothing
for the starving people of Ireland
when the potatoes lost heart.

So the Irish escaped their hell
joined relatives in Australia,
the United States, Mexico, Canada, and other places
Those that survived the trip.

I have their blood in me

the blood of the dispossessed, the beaten, the despised

the hated people who lived in Briton
before the British
who lived as one great people
artisans   bronze workers
honorable     egalitarian
young and old, male and female
many tribes and clans.

The Romans started the slaughter
started the theft of Celtic lands.
The Brits came and took more and more and
more and more and more and more.
But Ireland still exists
Independence for the southern part!
hope to many

But the British still own most of the land
and the factories
and cling to the stolen land in the North
as if it was somehow theirs to defend.
To defend from what?
from joint rule? from democratic elections?
guilty over their own bloody past
they are afraid of retribution.

The Irish clans and tribes lived their own
life   happily   if not always peacefully
but it was their land    their own fights
they had a system of justice praised
by the Roman invaders themselves.
They remind me of the Native peoples
of the Americas
forced from their land
forced to give up their cultures
forced to speak Spanish, or English
killed and beaten and raped as
were my ancestors too.

I don’t wonder at the Irish names
the Irish names that some
Native Americans carry    and the
marriages between Irish immigrants and
Native American peoples.
We are family, after all
we believed in the same things
people    land    even gods
gods who brought rain and sun
and game and water and fire.
in a simpler time
before the English brought their      civilization
to the Celtic tribes

and
British and Spanish brought their     civilization
to the American tribes.

Many of us drink a bit too much
after hundreds of years of
civilized rape     murder    theft.
and we distrust each other
see skin color as a barrier
as if the invaders ever cared
if we were white or brown or red.
To them we were all inferior
scum  vermin  heathens  savages
We know we are not.
similar history
similar struggle
We carry on.

Wouldn’t it be something
wouldn’t it be absolutely fucking amazing
it we saw each other as brothers and sisters
under the skin
on the skin
of our Earth?

Emo warning.

Do you know that odd feeling in your throat when you get emotional? It tightens up, you find it hard to breathe, and maybe your eyes water.  Happens from time to time.  Sometimes I watch a sentimental movie and feel that.  There was a time when I felt deep regret over a lost love and I’d get that way.  Doesn’t seem to happen much anymore.  It’s an odd feeling, and only seems to occur with a sense of great loss, or empathy with someone’s loss or near loss.  I remember when my step-daughter survived cancer.  If it had been something I was watching in a movie, I’d have choked up like that, with my throat tensed and a feeling of  being overcome by emotion, regardless of outcome.  However, when Maya survived the surgery, and then again, when I found out the tumor was gone, after a whole lot of radiation and chemo treatments, I felt joy.  It was the purest joy I’d ever felt.  I was happy.  My throat did not tighten,  I did not cry, I did not feel overcome with emotion.  I was, instead, blissfully happy.  I stayed that way for a while.  I am, of course glad that she is fine today, and in complete remission, and it is not the type of tumor, being so rare, that she is likely to experience ever again.   The joy I felt back then was for her.  I love her so much.  I don’t need anything from her, don’t need to have love from her, or anything at all.  I wish her a long and happy life.

Mine is not so happy.   I experienced depression for a time in my life; got counseling, and medication.  It may have made a difference.  There was a change from that deep hopeless depression.  I was sad a lot.  It was sometimes overwhelming.  There was an almost physical pain, tightness in my chest, sighing.  That part is over now.

As always, I stay busy, even though I’ve retired from work.  I hike, I snowshoe, I read, I watch movies.  I buy things online and in junk/antique stores.  I don’t feel sad.  I eat a lot, which is not good, but it hardly seems to matter anymore. Nothing does really.  It’s not the way I ever thought I’d be: just drifting along.  No sadness, but no joy either.  It is hard to enjoy a movie, a good book, a good sleep.

Sometimes I nap and I wake up nearly suffocating.  It is dark and terrifying.  My throat feels like it has been closed up.  My brain feels oxygen starved.  I feel like I’m dying.  It happens more and more often.   I don’t know what it means for sure.  I’ve no known breathing problems.  I had pneumonia as a child a couple times, so perhaps my lungs are not all that strong, and I had asthma until I was twelve years old.  I don’t feel like there is anything wrong with my lungs now.  My hikes take me up over 10,000 feet above sea level sometimes.  It’s not all that easy, but I survive.  I hiked near that altitude once for 20 miles.

I don’t know what to make of all this sometimes.  I think I will drop off to sleep one day soon and I will just stop breathing.  That doesn’t seem to scare me.  It’s just the waking up unable to think straight and feeling like I’m dying that ever bothers me.  When I couple that with my lack of joy in living, with a loss of interest in companionship or love, and with no enthusiasm for the sex that always made me happy, I wonder if this is it?  Is my life over? Not in any figurative sense, but really.  Is this what it feels like to die, or just to grow old?

I should do something, right? I try.  I have a meeting tomorrow with people who want to change the world of politics.  That used to excite me, but it’s more running on inertia now. I do the things I used to do, and new things too.  I tried out to be a VJ ( a TV announcer/spokesperson), and it was good to try.  Didn’t happen.  I went to a local winery and I will be working there a couple days a week, with flexible days and hours.  I might be serving/selling wine, or helping clear the ditches, or helping with new construction. I may be able to help with some of the tedious paperwork stuff, since I have some experience with maintaining inventory and budgets.  It’s a new place for me. Something to do.

I don’t know if my life will change again.  I tried the guitar, but I’m not doing much with that anymore.  By now I thought I’d have a few dozens songs down.  My photographs never sell, so I don’t know how much I will keep that up.  My stories never sold, and I know they’re not that good.   My poems pale next to most everything I hear or read.  You’d think that would make me sad, but I don’t feel sad so much as tired.  I don’t know what the point of it all is anymore.  Going through the motions, eating, sleeping, doing things, watching things, reading, writing, working.  I just don’t know.   I know that people say, even when they’re dying, that life is a joy, and we can just enjoy every minute.  Can’t say I feel like doing that.

In reality, I think my life is winding down.  I think it may be ending soon.  I can’t say why.  It just seems like it.  Sometimes the brain knows things we don’t consciously admit to, or recognize.  Animals have been observed doing that: preparing themselves to die.  They sometimes seem to know.  Are people any different?

There are lots of things I can do: volunteer to help kids with their homework.  Ask someone out.  I have tried to get interested in other people, but the spark is just not there.  It’s not here in the sense that perhaps there is no need anymore?  If my life is going to end soon, then there really isn’t much point in anything.   I look at that in the reverse direction, and I think, if there isn’t much point in anything anymore, then maybe that’s the sure sign that I am going to die soon.   I have no regrets, no bucket list, no things I need to resolve. Death doesn’t scare me.  Nothing scares me.  Nothing excites me either, so that seems the same as death.

Well, tomorrow is another damn day.  Who knows what will happen?

I had a dream last night: I was moving.  I didn’t want to move. There were other people I was living with, and I didn’t want to go with them.  I stayed in bed while people finished packing.  I got up after awhile. There had been a very young kitten hanging around for awhile, feral, skittish.  I didn’t know where it had come from.  I saw it now, asleep by the bed.  It looked so sweet and happy there.  I went into the bathroom to pee and noticed little bits of cat shit around the toilet. Seems the kitten had decided to stick around.  I thought about sticking around myself, just by myself.  I heard a truck horn.  There were to be two vehicles going. Four guys in one big truck and the two women in a car.   I remember thinking it odd that the women and men were going separately, fearful that the women were going to disappear.  That it was deliberate.

I went back to the cat, stared at it.  I decided it was my cat.  I could stay.  Then I decided to go after all, but the cat was coming with me.

into your sex
your red almond
of sweet
honey joy.

After a fourteen-year marriage, I was alone. The house I’d lived in, worked on and renovated was lost to me.  She had that.  I would keep my future pension. That was all.

I was uneasy in my new place.  Winter-bare trees stared in my windows.  I stared at the rented walls, the rented high ceiling, the rented hard brick floor.  It didn’t feel like home.  It was the nicest place I could find.  It had all I needed, a small kitchen space, a nice bathroom, two bedrooms and a fireplace in the living room.  I had my books, my old vinyl, my 16-year old TV.  Still, I felt like a visitor, as though this was a hotel room far from home.  It seemed cavernous, empty and cold.

After almost four months there, I decided I was going to have a Christmas tree, but I had no ornaments.  eBay to the rescue!  Over the next two months I found and purchased dozens of old glass ornaments.  I’d remembered the thin glass ornaments my parents had decorated the tree with every year, many of them German, family heirlooms.  Online, I found indents, and double indents, and triple indents!  There were  multicolored ones, all fragile, large and small, and round ones, tear shapes, bell shapes and cello shapes.

I had walked down the street to the neighborhood tree lot. They brought in-state trees down from Mora every year.  I carried my tree home, as though I had walked into the forest and chopped it down myself.

Once decorated, the tree stood there silently all through Christmas.  As the new year arrived, I’d grown to accept it as part of my house.  The place seemed more like a home.  On New Year’s day, I built a fire and kept it going all day, for just me and my tree.

Of note are these: October 10, 1010 (not a palindrome), although January 1st, 1010 was; December 12, 1212 is an interesting repeating two-digit number also, but, again, not a palindrome;  and November 11, 1111 (now, that was quite  a date!).  Perhaps people don’t consider 11111111 as a palindrome?

So, assuming today is the palindrome for 2010, then one question that would arise is: when is the next such year?  Obviously, it occurs on November 2nd, 2011; 11022011.   However, no such date palindrome occurs again until 2020: 02022020. For those who put a lot of faith into numbers, it may mean something.  It means nothing of importance to me, but, still, I find it interesting to note that our 12-month, approximately 30-day cycles yield such rare sequences of numbers. 

This would all be so much simpler is there was only one conventional way to write a date.  So, I’m looking forward to February 2nd of 2020, the first date in 1010 years that is unambiguously a palindrome by any convention, even one that puts the year first.

Is the next dual-use, unambiguous one after the year 2020 in March of 3030?  There is, of course, Sept. 22, 2290, an ambiguous palindrome (It’s either 09222290 or 22092290), and October 3rd, 3001, (it’s either 10033001 or 03103001).  Another 1010 years?  I leave that to you, but I believe there is such a date.  Tell me if you think you know what it is.  There’s a hint in this post.

In high school I flipped burgers, but after leaving high school, my first real job was running equipment in a physics lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.  It was a good job, working with a machine that used x-rays to measure molecular spacing in crystals, like silicon and germanium, which would prove vital to computers later on.  It was, however, boring and repetitious, but I took night classes for free there.  I stopped working full time to attend the University of Maryland Baltimore County  for two years, but continued working part time as an independent contractor.  I simply typed up a bill for my time every week.  As good as that was, I was also involved in anti-war and anti-government protests, as well as volunteer work with a free clinic,  classes with a chapter of the Black Panthers,  and experiments with sex and drugs, so college work seemed irrelevant.  The University finally told me my grade-point average was too low to continue, so I’d have to drop out for a couple semesters.  Instead, I left town with my bicycle, riding through parts of Michigan, Canada, Wisconsin and North Dakota.  Short of money, I took my second real job, as an electrician’s assistant for a large mid-western carnival: Murphy Brothers Mile Long Pleasure Exposition.  I spent a full season with them, running cables to rides, troubleshooting, and maintaining the generators.  Then, when my final pay was stolen by Toothless Lester, so he could go on a binge, I stayed on and worked small fairs in Oklahoma and Florida.  Florida in winter is nice, and I got to swim in the ocean in December, but the ride I was with didn’t get enough business, for the four of us it took to set up and run, for us to eat all that well.   I split to Virginia to visit people I’d met in Canada.  The only work I could find there was helping out on a small goat farm, so I passed on that, and hopped a train back to Baltimore.

I got another job at Johns Hopkins  after a short search, and this time I was preparing genetics and developmental biology laboratory materials for the pre-med students there.   That job got short circuited when a graduate student opened a drawer in a chicken egg incubator, and left it open.  The large rotating drum full of dozens of drawers full of eggs then tilted forward, and the drawer slid out.  It didn’t have far to go, and could have slipped back in, but ventilation was maintained by aid of a wooden blade revolving around the drum.  The graduate student was long gone by the time the wooden blade slammed into the open drawer, jamming the whole device, and causing the premature hatching of 50 to 60 chicks.  I was blamed.  As it was, there had been complaints from the students of contaminated agar plates, which was also blamed on me, even though the students did not follow instructions very well, and violated every protocol they were given to prevent contamination.  Another job down the tubes.  I knew exactly what to do: get on the bicycle again.  This time I left Baltimore directly, and rode west to Arizona.  After hiking across the Grand Canyon and back, I ended up in Scottsdale, Arizona, working for a crafts foundry run by Paolo Solari, a visionary architect building an “Arcology” in the desert.  I made bronze wind-bells, melting bronze, ramming clay/sand mixtures around molds and then pouring the bronze, cleaning up the raw products, assembling and even selling them.  Sometimes I helped out by giving tours to tourists and other visitors.  It was a fine job, but I met some bicyclists traveling through who were doing advance work for a cross-country bicycling/networking trip.  I agreed to join them when the group arrived from California.

That was my longest break from working ever, although it involved riding a bicycle nearly every day for six months.  Sometimes we did odd jobs to supplement our communal income, and we all gave workshops in our specialties.  Mine was bicycle maintenance and repair.  The tour ended, and I tried working for a solar contractor in Philadelphia, but that didn’t work out.  I hadn’t enough experience in carpentry (none with solar panels) to satisfy my boss, who had wanted to have me work unsupervised.  So, I traveled to New York City.  I knew a few people there and had a place to stay.  Then began my fourth major job: bicycle messenger.  I pedaled letters, packages, advertising films and even artwork all over Manhattan on my trusty metal steed.  However, I had met a fascinating and very sexy woman in Albuquerque when the bicycle group had stopped there for ten days.  Although I had met several woman in my travels, she seemed like the one.  She wanted me to move there, and I wanted her, so I found my way back to New Mexico.  Unfortunately, there weren’t many jobs available in the Land of Enchantment.  After six months of looking, working odd jobs, and hanging around the unemployment office, I finally got a job at the University of New Mexico as a mason’s helper.   For a couple of years I replaced broken sidewalks, mixed hod for block walls, and even laid a brick floor in the University President’s house.  There was also some remodeling and jack hammer work.  I transferred to a job at the Cancer Center for about a year and half, injecting and implanting, respectively, tumor cells or tumor chunks into rats and mice.  Then I would treat them with radiation and drugs, monitoring them, weighing them, and dissecting them.  It was OK work, but the Director, and my boss, the Associate Director, took their grant money and moved to Philadelphia.  I had no desire to go there, much less to the east coast, so I was out of work for another six months, doing odd jobs, and even collecting unemployment while I searched for work.  I finally found a good part-time job, analyzing electroplating baths for a printed-circuit board manufacturer,  which gave me a chance to take University classes again.  I did that for four years, but my quality control position was dropped, and I was looking for work again.  This time I ended up back at the University, working initially with mice, removing their glands for analysis and isolation of immunoglobulins, the wonderful molecules that protect our bodies from disease.

This time the job lasted 25 years.  It changed continuously though.  I stopped working with mice, and ran machines again exclusively.  There were machines for determining the amino acid sequence of a protein,  for purifying such proteins,  for making short versions of such proteins, for analyzing the total amino acid content of biological samples, and determining the purity of all of the above.  That changed too, as we obtained new machines: first, a machine for creating synthetic DNA.  Cool.  Then a machine for determining the sequence of various DNA samples.  That became my job then: making and sequencing DNA.  Interesting at first, but ultimately boring and repetitive, fraught with problems.  The problems could be fun to isolate and resolve, but dealing with an ever-changing clientele of Ph.D.s, graduate students, post-graduate students, undergraduates, and dealing with all the budget balancing was sometimes frustrating.  As this last and final job wound down, I went through the motions, doing the best job I knew how, but increasingly disinterested.  I could barely force myself to go to work, much less work all day, every day.  In the end, I suddenly decided I’d had enough, and retired.

So, what do I do the day after retirement? I went hiking in the Sandia Mountains here.  Hiking the entire 18-mile length of the Faulty trail from Placitas, New Mexico to Tijeras, New Mexico. It was fun, with beautiful views, a clear blue sky and leftover snowfall from a snowstorm four days earlier. Faulty Trail has a mysterious origin. Diamond blazes appeared on trees marking its route before any official Forest Service recognition, and it was unofficially called the Diamond Trail. Probably an old herding route, it was apparently cleared by a horse club. The Forest Service took it over and renamed it Faulty Trail in honor of the dikes—fissures filled with igneous rock that moved up from a lower fracture and created the limestone blocks—that appear alongside the trail. Working in a laboratory for twenty-five years, however, does not really prepare one for hiking rolling hills 18 miles at almost 8000 feet above sea level, even with some hiking experience over the last year.  I saw wild turkey, rabbit, raccoon, deer, and even fox tracks  in the snow and mud.   Many of the trees date to the 1700 and 1800s, and some have been cored and marked with their age,  so that is a wonderful experience.   I even saw a large black coyote near the crest of the mountain.  It was one hell of a long day however, from the meet-up at 7 a.m., to the timely lunch break halfway, to wandering off the trail for a bit, to the final late, forced steps on the darkened trail in the light of a full moon at 7:30 p.m. (2 1/2 hours beyond schedule).  Tired, sore, and as hungry as a bear, I ate, went home, and crawled into bed early that night, and slept the longest I have in fifteen years: 8 and 1/2 hours non-stop!

Now that is worth retiring for.

I wonder what death tastes like.  Does it taste like the blackened bits of carbon that burn forever on the sides of an iron pan?

Does death taste like brown and yellow agglutinated crap served cold?

Perhaps death tastes of the rotting, putrefying meat of dead animals slaughtered for food served steaming hot?

It is often said that the stench of burning human corpses is sickeningly sweet.  Perhaps death brings an overwhelming flavor of sweetness with it?  Burning corpses layered with fatty oils, burning, smoking greasily, filling the air the nose the lungs the tongue with a cloying odor of blackened leather?

Is death sweet? The aroma of almonds, dead and broken, cut in bloodless slices, layered with caramelized sugar; does death taste like that? Or sweeter still, like the honey of billions of dead flowers?

Or could it be, could it taste like bitter astringent pee? the pee on her labia, like a sharp spice around the honey within?

Oh. Back to her. Her, she, the one who makes me long for death.  Her of the twisted mind and tortured soul like me, the one I longed to be with for these wasted years?  What of her? She is life itself, and smiles and joy and soft flesh and music and reading and video and laughter and companionship.  And death. She is death for me. To long for her is to long for death. O, to taste her would be joy!

Joy denied.

Love denied.

Laughter denied.

Companionship denied.

The sweet look in her eyes.

(A Day Without You 2nd Phase) by Beloved Creature

The poetry of her hands moving about in space, the hands I long to touch, to caress, to feel warm in my hands….

But it is death!  It is death to touch her, to want the untouchable.

Her as Zombie

It is death to taste her, death to smell her honey, taste it on the end of my thrusting tongue probing her sweetness, stirring our flesh into spasms of delight and ever more desire, fevered heat on every part of our skin, and all is sensing and touching and smelling and tasting without thought.

Her as Sugar Skull: on Dia de los Muertos

And there is la petit mort also.

That is the death I would taste.

Rat shit, bat shit, dirty old twat! 69 assholes tied in a knot! Hooray! Lizard shit! FUCK!

- the world, according to photographer/model Kassandra Leigh Purcell

I have no idea why I’m rambling on about this.  Just chain of thought.  So many things to think about lately.  I finally got around to fixing the refrigerator today. I had put a call in to the Sears repair people, because I had no idea what was wrong, or how serious it was.  The old thing cools really well, and keeps the freezer compartment frozen, so I had no complaints there.  However, the freezing cold water dripping onto the top shelf and turning to ice bothered me. I had a large plastic container under the drip, as it dripped at really odd times, sometimes all  at once.  Long story short, it’s $70 just to get a Sears repairman out, and then parts and labor.  It seemed cheaper than a new one.  I gave them my credit card info over the phone, but later on, a repair guy called, asked me about the problem, and told me how to fix it.  Since it involved turning the refrigerator off and “defrosting” the frost-free thing, I had put it off. I needed some ice coolers and ice for my food, and I couldn’t carry all that on the motorcycle.  I have a car,  but it needed work.  First, the  “mass airflow sensor” died.  Having no idea what or where it was, I asked the dealer about it – would cost a lot for the sensor, then labor, and I would need some other engine work done.  For $800 plus bucks, I didn’t trust ‘em.  I took it to a local mechanic who quickly diagnosed the same problem, but said he could probably clean the sensor and I wouldn’t need to buy a new one.  Cool.  $257.70 I could save. however, he said the engine had not been running correctly with the air flow off balance, so I’d need a tune-up.  It was about time for one, so I told him to go ahead.  Still, even though he did a great  job, even replacing the crappy battery terminals, the fouled spark plugs, wires, and valve cover gaskets, I still ended up spending $827.70.  So, I felt it was money well spent, if I could then depend on the car, in case I needed it.  Of course, when next I did need it, the serpentine belt broke, completely shredding all over the engine.  It was beginning to look like I’d never get those ice chests and ice so I could empty out the freezer.

Naturally, on my way to get a new belt, I laid the bike down when the front wheel spun sideways on some loose gravel in a turn bay.  Scraped the fuck out of my hands, my shoulder,  and cut my face too.  I totally freaked out the employees and customers at the dealership; walked in with blood running down my face, and all over my hands.  Got the belt however!   It was hard to work on with my hands bandaged. It took me a while to figure out how to replace it, even with a diagram of the path it had to travel, but I got it on last weekend, and everything worked.  So, finally I got the ice chests and ice today, so I could empty out the refrigerator.  Took three hours from the time I left for the ice and ice chests, took out all the food, and effected the fix I’d been instructed in by the repairman.  It all centered around a drain hole for the defrosted ice water that would ice over and prevent draining.  Since it couldn’t drain normally, the icy water would overflow into the refrigerator compartment.   Twisting a copper wire around the heating element and sticking it into the drain hole was the cure.  So far, it’s working.  I’m not certain I did it correctly, because the “obvious” place to wrap the wire around wasn’t so obvious to me, but I did get the entire refrigerator and freezer cleaned up.  Oddly enough, while it ran a long time to get back down to the cold temperatures, it then stopped cooling, long before it usually does.  It used to be near freezing in the back of the refrigerator compartment, but now I’ve had to raise the temperature setting I’ve been using all along. It’s more efficient now.  I’m hoping this fixes the thing for good – it often seemed to me to run far too long at a stretch, often long into the night.  Of course, it would have been way cheaper, easier, and less painful to buy a new refrigerator.

So, tired, but satisfied, I popped in a movie: Waltz With Bashir,  an animated film by an Israeli filmmaker who fought in the war in Lebanon in the early 1980s.  He had forgotten most of what he did, and travels around in the movie visiting old comrades from the war to see what they remembered.   What little they did remember centered around atrocities, young men shooting blindly in every direction out of fear, massacres, and other horrors.  This is an army oddly similar to the US army, in terms of weapons, training and sheer chutzpah.  I was tempted to think that Israel has no idea what modern warfare is about, and has no misgivings about killing innocent people for no real purpose.  Of course, I found that they weren’t really all that different from the US.  Our military has done, and is doing, some really horrific things in the name of freedom, democracy, and protection of the “homeland”.  I think the US and Israel are evidence of the new way war is fought, without clear strategy or objectives, just fighting and killing with huge tanks, powerful weapons, and clueless soldiers,  in hopes it will all come out right if we spend enough money, shoot enough bullets, and drop enough bombs.   Looks like something is being done, but all that happens is war continues, with the certainty that even if a conflict ends, another will start.  We’ve entered the period of endless, mindless war that was adroitly predicted in the novel 1984.  Always war somewhere; we’re always winning, but the enemy fights on, and we need to support war or we’re unpatriotic.  It just goes on and on.  There is no longer an end.  Even if the combat  troops leave Iraq, we’re leaving behind bases filled with troops, a clear provocation.  In Afghanistan, we don’t even have a winnable objective, no way of defeating the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, or other terrorists.  Bombs, tanks, and bullets just aren’t accomplishing anything except more deaths of our soldiers and local non-combatants, and a terrorist every now and again, and we’ve no plans to try anything else.  The more we fight, the stronger the Taliban and al-Qa’ida get.  It is mindless destruction, with unprecedented levels of non-combatant deaths, but all we ever care about are “our troops’ – support our troops, support our troops, support our troops, and don’t question any of this, because then you won’t be supporting our troops.  I’m sure there were good Germans under Hitler, good Japanese under the emperor, good Iraqis under Saddam Hussein who “supported our troops” too.   People never seem to notice that, and it no longer seems to matter.  No one really cares.  As long as innocent people are dying somewhere else, it’s not really our problem, because God is on our side.  Of course, God is also on the terrorist’s side, on the dictator’s side, on everyone’s side in every war, but still people die; still people lose.

Rambling again tonight.  No real purpose here.  Just a lack of purpose.  All seems pointless now.  War is pointless.  Patriotism is misdirected.  God is equated with war, guns and victory over all.  I honestly don’t know what to believe in anymore, or what to care about, and that is reflected in my personal life.  No desire for companionship, love, or sex.  Just day-to-day mechanical living.  Why?

I started another blog alongside this one back in 2007 that was about ennui and war and all that.  This blog was personal at first, but now it all seems to run together in my head; can’t keep any of it separate, and nothing seems more or less important than anything else.

I had to stop by the auto dealer on my way home. Friday had been a holiday from work, so I had driven my car for once, looking for a new desk chair, and a few other things that don’t fit on the motorcycle.  The ’96 Mercury Cougar is a good car, but I’d recently had to spend over $800 getting the mass air flow sensor fixed, and having the engine tuned up with new plugs and valve covers, filters, new battery terminals, etc.  It was running smooth and quiet.  All of a sudden, on my way home, it had made a funny noise, and the steering crapped out.  It’s power steering, but I could still move the wheel just enough to turn.  Found out the belt had disintegrated.  It was broken and shredded all over the engine.  A lot of coolant had boiled out too.   The belt is a serpentine one, snaking around various pulleys that operate the power steering, the air conditioning, the generator, as well the water pump.  Well, that was where I was going after work today, to the dealer for a good, reliable serpentine belt.

They had moved far up the interstate, and I had to fight traffic going north.  I got off near where they said the new place was, but didn’t see it.  It was supposed to be on the frontage road, and I hadn’t passed it yet, so I went down the side road a bit to turn around.  Pulled into a turn bay, but hit gravel.  The bike went down fast.  Picked it right up, although someone had stopped to help.  He even offered to put my bike in the back of his pickup, and take me to a hospital, but I thanked him and told him I was OK.  He had seen the bike spin out from under me.  The bike is OK, a little scratched up, especially my brand new windshield.  Crap.  Anyway, I got back on the frontage road and went through the intersection this time, and found the dealer about two blocks away around a curve.  Parts guy took my order for the belt, but he didn’t have a cash register in his work area, so he sent me out to the garage.  I told him about the accident.  He said he’d get me some gauze too and meet me up there.  The lady at the register gave me some wipes to clean myself up a bit, baby wipes of all things.  I didn’t know how my face looked, but I had seen and felt blood running down near my left eye, and my sunglasses were full of blood too.  I paid for the Ford Motorcraft belt, $52.81 and they gave me some bandages.  I went into their men’s room to clean up.  Nice gashes near my eye, and the eye was already swollen and dark.  Probably have a black eye tomorrow.  Scrapes on my left knuckles, my right thumb is torn up, both palms are scraped and full of gravel bits.  My left knee hurt, as well as my left shoulder, where my new heavy-duty cotton shirt was torn open.  I bandaged what I needed to in order to grip the handlebars and clutch and brakes, and headed home.  When I got there, I found a 1 3/4 inch diameter scrape on my shoulder, almost round, looks like the skin had been taken off with a belt sander, and still weeping. Oddly, it is not bleeding much except around the edge, and it doesn’t hurt. Smaller scrapes below it, right into the tattoo.  Both knees are scraped, but the left one is bleeding a lot.  Bandaged everything else up that I’d missed at the auto dealer, after cleaning with a little peroxide.

Damn, only one Advil left too. I had wanted two.  Added four aspirin.  I don’t even know why I’m complaining.  I didn’t break anything, and the bike still runs. People go through worse every day.  Still, I wonder why I’m so damn careless and accident prone?  I ride every day, so I suppose the odds were against me.  Just can’t believe I was so stupid.  Should have slowed down more before getting in the turn bay.  Should have been looking for hazards.   Should have taken the car in for scheduled maintenance – perhaps they’d have caught the bad belt?  and then I wouldn’t have had to go there, but I rarely even drive the car. I didn’t think it needed more maintenance so soon. Of course, it’s 13 years old.

Oh, man, my neck and shoulder area hurts now. I sure hope I didn’t do any damage to my collar-bone or neck.   More and more, I feel like I just want to be home and stay here, never going out again.  Work is a real pain with the budget problems and the move to a new lab space.  I really don’t want to deal with any of it anymore.   I’m tired.  And, so what?

Piano duel, Part 1 ; also:  Piano duel Part 2

<-The real Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. As a teenager Jelly Roll Morton worked in the whorehouses of Storyville, New Orléans, as a piano player. From 1904 to 1917 Jelly Roll rambled through the South as gambler, pool shark, pimp, vaudeville comedian and pianist. He was the first great composer and piano player of Jazz and an important transitional figure between ragtime and jazz piano styles. He played on the West Coast from 1917 to 1922 and then moved to Chicago and where he hit his stride. Morton’s 1923 and 1924 recordings of piano solos for the Gennett label were very popular and influential.

He fell upon hard times after 1930 and even lost the diamond he had in his front tooth. He died just before the Dixieland revival rescued so many of his peers from obscurity. He blamed his declining health on a voodoo spell.  See: Red Hot Jazz.

Oddly, I can’t remember now who it was I was supposed to have killed.  Never saw  the face.  It was, however, very real, and I was really sure who it was when I woke up, but now I can’t remember for certain.  But, I clearly remember coming from behind, strangling her, and burying her.  The whole time that was going on, I was aware, in the dream, of my disconnect, of my inability to feel, or care about morality. It was as though I had actually lost all socialization, and had become a serial killer, and without the slightest hint of remorse.

Got up this morning after lying there for hours after that.  It was only 6:00 am on a Saturday.  I should get more sleep, but I wake up nearly every night, sometimes at 1:30 am, sometimes at 3:30 am, or 4:00, and sometimes I just watch the clock tick off the half hours until it’s time to get up. Made coffee.   It’s a special blend of mine: I take a can of  “Lite” coffee, which already has half the caffeine of regular coffee, and I mix it with a can of decaf coffee.  Still I can’t sleep at night.  I’ve tried doing without coffee altogether.  After the headaches stop, I feel good, but I still can’t sleep right, not even after months without caffeine.  I never get 7 or 8 hours sleep anymore.  The amount is not always vital, as long as there is some deep sleep involved, but 5 1/2 hours is my longest time spent asleep, with or without coffee. I don’t think it’s enough time to get a good rest.  I’d imagine this is why I’ve been so tense, irritable and depressed, but those things affect sleep, so it’s hard to say which came first.  Doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, I usually fall asleep right away, but I always wake up long before it’s time to get up.  I’ve gone on ten-miles hikes in the mountains, dropped into bed, to sleep, perchance to dream, but still I wake up, sometimes sweating, sometimes with a bad dream chasing me.  It’s aging me fast.  People used to think I was younger than I was, but now they’re sure I’m older than I am.  I have permanent dark circles under my eyes.  My hair rapidly turned from salt and pepper to almost all-white, so I dye it now.

Today a rental movie came in the mail: Hancock.   I enjoyed it.  I even felt some stirrings of emotion at all the appropriate times.  Movies somehow do that to me.  Hancock, of course is about a guy who happens to have super powers and creates more havoc trying to help than he helps.  Not knowing who he is, or where he came from, he stumbles along until people step up to help him straighten out his life.  In the end he does OK, and even finds out who he is.  Heroic, and a happy ending too.

After the movie, I sat back to daydream, because I always imagine myself in any movie I watch, or any book I read.  I became a superhero.  I don’t have super strength or the power to fly, or magnetic power, or x-ray vision – none of that.   I have the power I’ve always imagined I had, to transport myself instantly anywhere in the world or universe.  It’s a dormant power that surfaces when I need it.  My step-daughter Maya goes into the hospital soon for brain surgery.  The doctors are highly skilled at it, and the danger is not insignificant, but any operation is dangerous, and a brain operation seems more so.  4 1/2 years ago, Maya had her brain opened to remove a tumor, and they got almost all of it.  Enough cells remained to regrow, and she had chemotherapy.  The chemo didn’t work.  She lost all her hair, was sick as a dog, but the tumor actually started growing faster.  She had radiation treatments then, and the tumor was “burned” out of her skull.  No traces left on MRI, nothing in her blood, nothing in her spinal fluid all this time.  Now there’s something there.  Could be scar tissue, a common occurrence with radiation treatment.  They don’t know.  So, they’re going back in to find out.

In my daydream, I get a call from the hospital. She’s just died.  I scream, and suddenly I am there, standing by the phone hundreds of miles away. I ask to see her, and I grab her hand, talk to her, tell her to come back, and she does.  She’s not dead.  She recovers, but I die.  It’s a funny-strange scenario, but it actually makes me happy to think I could do that.  I’d readily trade places with her now if I could.  I don’t want her to suffer through the pain again.  I want her to continue enjoying life.  She can have mine.

The moon, low to the horizon and huge, has a reddish tint to it tonight.  I tried to take a picture when I got home, but it was behind the trees already.

I watched it heading west on my way home at 3 a.m Friday morning, in the western hemisphere, North America.  It was not full, but the light it reflected on a clear night was spectacular.

It reminded me of the scenes on the red surface of Mars in the movie I had just watched. Watchmen.  The only movie I’ve watched in a theater in over a year.  The only movie I’ve ever gone to see the first showing of, and at midnight to boot.  I read Watchman, the graphic novel, many years ago.  Still have it lying around.  Impressed me then, and the movie impressed me even more.  Damn, that was a spectacular movie.   Special effects aside, the graphic depiction of human nature qualifies it as literature, in my opinion, so it ought to be hailed as such.  That was one movie that surely tapped into the words and made them even more visual than the two dimensions of the flat page.  Of course, imagination has no bounds when reading, so the pictures, the colors, the artistic vision are not necessary, and so neither is the movie. Nevertheless, this is how we entertain ourselves, and ideas must be presented as entertainment.  The story, the book, the movie: all are superbly murderous, bloody, violent, tragic, lusty, depraved and, yet, somehow more than that, and much more than entertainment.

Such a story.  Is it a tragedy? It ends with horrible destruction, then hope, and finally, a theme that runs through the entire movie ends it: mankind sucks.  We could do better, but we don’t.  Even the noblest among us would sacrifice millions to save billions, and lie about it.  And the lie provides the hope for humanity, and, in the movie’s ending,  the lie is about to be exposed.

Of course, I had hoped to have seen the movie with Karen.  She’d heard about the graphic novel, but it was out of print.  She hadn’t tried to read it sooner because it was DC comics and, not Marvel.  Growing up, of course, I knew about the superior writing in Marvel comics, the multifaceted characters, the gray areas of truth and right and wrong, and the real life, love and rejection, paying bills, death, and jobs and tiny human dramas on the sidelines of every larger action.  The stuff that goes on even if you’re a superhero. Karen admires that about Marvel and doesn’t care for DC comics. I told her it was worth reading.  By the time I found my copy, it has just been reprinted, and she had already bought a copy.  She hadn’t read it last time we spoke of it, so I’m not sure what she thought.  We have similar ideas about war and peace and science and fiction and religion. We’ve read many of the same books, seen many of the same movies, and admired the best of humanity in all of it.  Unfortunately, the difference in our ages prevents us from seeing something like Watchmen together.

[aside: ran into Karen at the coffee cart later this very day.  I had to have coffee to stay awake after getting maybe one hour of sleep after this movie.  She smiled and forced a wave to me when she got in line.  I was talking to someone, so I waited until she come over to  sprinkle cinnamon on the whipped cream on top of her iced mocha. Told her I'd seen Watchmen, and she asked me about it. Told her how exciting it was, and the crowds there.  Asked her, since it was Friday, after all, if we could meet for lunch later.  She said she was having a working lunch.  Said she had to go.  The oddest thing of all was that I asked her if she had ever read the copy of Watchmen she had bought.  She got real defensive; said she'd read it two years ago! But I know she bought it only recently, when the second printing came out, and I had even asked her if she'd read it, and she said no, that she hadn't had time yet.  Now, suddenly she read it two years ago?  That doesn't make sense. Something is very odd here.]

When I asked her if we could see Silver Surfer together – that’s when she let me know.  She said, “That would be like a date!” with a look of horror or disgust on her face.  “Inappropriate.” That’s the word she used many times.  Inappropriate for me to ask her out, to want to meet her after work, see a movie, have a drink, give her flowers.  Even leaving aside my romantic interest in her, she can not even think of me as friend outside of the workplace.  I rarely see her anymore; we work in different buildings, for different departments, but, occasionally have lunch still.

As intriguing as Watchmen is, I still found part of me wishing I could watch it with Karen.  I didn’t ask her.  I know it’s beyond her to imagine going somewhere with me.  She’d rather go to a play, like Monty Python’s Holy Grail, with her uncle than with me.  I guess old men are OK if you’re related to them.   It’s not even sad anymore to think about. It’s something I’ve had to accept, like my former wife telling me I had to move out, or she’d call the police, tell them her life was in danger.  Very effective.  Very legal.  I could have challenged it later, but by then, I’d have been out, and why would I want to live with someone who’d done that to me?  And Karen.  How nice it would have been to tell her about all that, to have a friend I could talk to, who would listen. She wouldn’t listen – it was also inappropriate to speak of anything personal.  I’m not really sure why.  I could understand a woman not wanting to hear about my disintigrating marriage or the end, when it came.  But, even later? Long after the divorce, she wanted to hear nothing of it.   Of course, sometimes I think it was just because she didn’t want to encourage my inappropriate feelings for her.

But, life goes on. Sort of.  In Watchmen, life goes on, but the underlying tensions are not gone.  Even the deaths of so many millions can ultimately have been for nothing.   I understand the characters in the story who speak of the pointlessness of it all, that we have exactly the society we wanted.  We are violent and selfish and greedy and murderous.  Perhaps we’ll never change.  We cringe at horror, but do little to stop it.  We even participate in our own little ways.

And me? I go on for some reason. Inertia? I don’t know.  I move along with work, with my union activities, with reading, and movies, and guitar, and hiking, and it’s not doing a whole lot for me.  If it were doing something for someone else, perhaps I could accept that as my motivation.  I’m just not really sure I care about anything anymore.  I was happy enough being married to someone I loved, even if not every day was a good one.  I could have gone on that way for a long time, maybe forever.  When it fell apart, and, abruptly it was over, I found myself insanely in love with Karen.  I felt so good, so alive, so ready to fall in love all over again.  It was exhilarating to believe in love, to think I could actually have the “in love” feeling again. That would have given me a real reason to enjoy life and want to go on.  The chances seem slim now.  I feel a great sense of accelerated aging, of death coming soon, but  I don’t fear death.  I would like to be happy while I’m alive, but perhaps it’s just not possible anymore.  I don’t even know what would make me truly happy.  Karen. Well, there’s her, and my feelings for her. I’d certainly be happy being with her, but it cannot be.  So, I seem to be rejecting all possibilities that come my way: the old girlfriend back in my life, the other former lover living close by, the union sister who tried to interest me in dating a friend of hers, or even herself – why am I so withdrawn, so quick to misunderstand, so quick to push people away?

Be that all as it may be, however, I’ve been with many women since then, and I never screwed up like that again, always giving flowers and treats, and not because I had to, but because I wanted to.  So, I like Valentine’s Day.  However, since that last divorce and my subsequent unrequited love infatuation and rejection, I don’t think much of this approaching day of love.  It sucks, really.   I added a note to myself on my appointments calendar for the 14th: Kill myself.  Now, it’s unlikely I will.  For one thing, I’ve gotten really interested in learning guitar, and I practice every day.  I understand a little bit of the nomenclature, and I’m training my fingers, and making slow progress.  It may take a long time, but I think I can do it.  So, since I want to see how well I can do, I should stick around a bit longer.

Before this, I joined the Mountain Club, however.  I went on four hikes, up and down hilly terrain, for lengths of  8 to ten miles, and enjoyed it.  Loved the slowly increasing strength and stamina, but I haven’t been hiking since January 1.  I used to go hiking on level ground about 4 miles every Sunday before going mountaineering, but I haven’t even done that.  Now I’m focused on guitar.  I wonder if I can keep my interest in that?  Or will I lose the excitement that grips me now?  If I do, will I decide there’s no further reason to keep on living? or will I find another item on my bucket list to throw myself into?  I can’t predict, just can’t tell.

Movies seem to have relevance sometimes, but I am tired of extrapolating them into the myriad ways that they reflect my own life, or comment on it, or condemn it.  They’re not as much fun as they used to be for me.  Neither is my job, and my life, which once had purpose.  It’s time to return to the carnival.  We, most of us, speak of running away to join the circus, and that’s what I did so many years ago, although it turned out to be a carnival: no animals, well, live ones anyway.  There were always the two-headed goats and five-legged cows, but they were actually in jars of formaldehyde, which you would only find out after you paid your money to see ‘em.  The marks always lined up to see those kind of things, and the painted signs outside always made it seem like the animals were real, and just inside.  But, a carnival doesn’t put on animal shows, just people shows.  Mostly it’s all “punk” kiddie rides and ferris wheels, and all  the other mechanized thrill rides, with music blaring from giant speakers.  No big top, no tents really.  Lots of trucks, motor homes, and trailers.  And electrical generators, of course. Need power for all that stuff.  All those lights.  All those popcorn “poppers” and games-of-chance “joints”.  Try your luck, but you’re really buying cheap fluff.  Hotdogs and ice cream and sodas. Eat and spend. Eat and spend.  The real American dream.  Carnies epitomize our values – buy low, sell high. Maximize profits. The ideal is to get the most for the absolute least you must provide in return.  Provide thrills and escapism; promote gluttony for empty calories.  Cheap thrills.

When I left the carnival, I realized that much of the world around me was the same, even Universities.  It’s all sleight of hand, and manipulation, and cheap thrills.  Education, sure, it’s important, but secondary to research grants that pay the bills.  Stationary carnivals.  My brain is tired from trying to keep it straight.

I went back to work, and finished college.  I pay my bills, I eat a lot.  I watch movies. I marry and divorce and marry and divorce again, and buy and spend and work and buy and spend.  Cheap thrills.  I am viewed as more respectable than a carny, but the differences are slight.  Some towns only sit in one place, some move around, but we stay the same either way.

I can’t imagine I’d really want to work a carnival again.  But, traveling is always good.  Hiking? Bicycling? The physical activity is liberating.   As you put distance behind you, it feels like a new world, a new beginning, and you can’t go back.  All that walking or biking would be a waste if you went back.  But, one doesn’t have to travel in the opposite direction to go back.  I’ve been back to visit, but I live 1675 miles away.   Where would I go away to now?

1.)  Replaced the remaining three almost-bald tires on the car – they have whitewall stripes too, matching the car (well, actually it’s cream colored).

2.) Took the rear tire off the motorcycle, scraped the grease off the gear and rim, and replaced the tire, which was stark-raving mad, er, nude, er, uh, bald.

3.) Broke a link out of the stretched-out bike chain (had to use a cold chisel); cleaned, adjusted and greased the chain.

4.) Went hiking around To’hajiilee, just west of Albuquerque. Hiked beyond my comfort level, took some nice pics.

5.) Had lunch with my 1st wife.  Learned she thought I wanted the divorce; I thought she did.

6.) Had dinner on Xmas day with my step-daughter; made a kick-ass chile with Italian sausage, green chile, and black beans. We both enjoyed it.

7.) Went hiking in San Lorenzo canyon (near Socorro, New Mexico); hiked just past my comfort level; took a few pics.

8.) Bought a digital picture frame; learned I haven’t beaten my eBay addiction yet.

9.) Read several books: Titan’s Daughter, by Sci Fi author James Blish; Ballroom of the Skies, a Sci Fi novel by crime/mystery novelist John D. MacDonald; Please Write For Details, also by John D. MacDonald, Wild Traveler, a 1967 story about an adopted coyote by A.M. Lightner; Jack of Eagles, by James Blish; Berlin (2): City of Smoke, graphic novel by Jason Lutes; graphic novel David Boring, by Daniel Clowes; graphic novel Far West (Vol. 1), by Richard Moore; the screenplay of Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff; a wierd “art” graphic novel Jellyfist, by Jhonen Vasquez and Jenny Goldberg; and Aya of Yop City, a graphic novel by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie.

10.) Finally watched: 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the new 2008 Journey to the Center of the Earth, the orignal Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Transsiberian, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Outer Limits: The 2nd Soul, the animated Superman Doomsday, anime Kai Doh Maru, Bridge to Terabithia, a dumb anime: Fencer of Minerva, Chap. 1, and The Incredible Hulk, with which I easily identify.

11.) Learned how NOT to make chocolate chip cookies.

12.) Went out to dinner with an old girlfriend on New Year’s Eve; played 2 games of chess, took her home at 10:00 pm (She goes to bed early).

13.) Went hiking 5 miles up the La Luz Trail in our Sandia Mountains; took the old trail back down; got off the trail; had to bushwhack and slide through snow to the bottom and hike back up to the trailhead.  Went beyond any comfort level I thought I had before. Had a GREAT time, because my step-daughter and her boyfriend went with me. (Hope they forgive me for leading them astray.)

Did NOT pass Go, collect $200, fall into or out of love, or have sex, but I  least I kept myself busy.  What a demented way to live.

All that being said however, I still am thankful.  Things haven’t turned out the way I expected, and the future is very uncertain, no matter what I do.  But, every year I have to remind myself, as if I could forget, that Maya is still alive and healthy.  Maya is my step-daughter, a woman so like a daughter to me as to be my daughter.  I watched her grow from an eight-year old into a woman, only to be struck with a malignant brain tumor soon after her 21st birthday.  I never thought about losing her before that, but the realization was like a physical kick in the heart.  There was always hope, and I never hoped so much in my life for anything.  I never gave up hope, and through the day-long surgery, debilitating drugs, poisonous and ultimately useless chemotherapy, and radiation treatments, she survived.  She was astute enough to opt out of the radical, shot-in-the-dark, full-head, and full-spine radiation treatments, so not only is the cancer gone, but she still has her short-term memory, and her full-strength immune system.  She is cancer free, healthy, strong (just ran a fast half-marathon) and absolutely beautiful in spirit and body.

Every time I see her is a joy.  I will always be thankful for her recovery.  Sometimes my life seems to suck, but, in my lifetime I have known a beautiful, loving person who survived a life-threatening, catastrophic illness that would have devastated me, her mother, her brother, her dad, and the rest of her extended family.  I am thankful for Maya, and I have told her so.  Life is not so bad.

Also, see published short story here (on pages 13-14):

That God-Damned Day

Tonight I’ve been watching the 1979 movie, Being There, with Peters Sellers and Shirley MacLaine, and really enjoying it.  I paused the movie to write this.  The readout is 1:11:11.  As with most movies, I only enjoy them if I put myself into the movie, and, much like a medical or psychology student studying disease, I imagine what I watch to apply to myself.  The child-like gardener that Peter Sellers plays is easy to empathize with. He only knows how to do one thing, but somehow people imagine that he knows much more.  Because of the way he’s dressed, and misinterpretations of his description of his life, he is taken to be more educated and intelligent than he really is. That’s where my imagination comes in.  I am him, and imagine that I’ve always been this way.  As far as imitating what I’ve read and watched and people I’ve known, I am.  I also question if I am who people think I am.  I say I work with DNA, which seems to impress people, but I backed into the position, working my way from lab work on rats and mice, to a research position extracting immunoglobulins from the glands of mice and purifying them, to working with proteins.  I learned how to operate simple machines that can uncover the amino acid sequence of proteins, or take amino acids and assemble then into a protein.  The machines simply take known science, and using valves and solenoids, deliver reagents in standard formulas with standard protocols.  From there I learned to do almost the exact same thing with DNA, using very similar machines. At first I was not paid very well, but these days I make about half of what some of the better-paid professors make.  I always live in dread that people will find me out – realize that I don’t really understand much of what I’m doing.

I’ve always wanted to be a scientist, but never could get through all the classes.  I understood basic chemistry, physics, and math in high school, but college was another story.  Laboratories were always fun, but genetics lectures, calculus, and physical chemistry bewildered me.  Oh, I understood the lectures well enough, but I could never remember all the formulas, equations and pathways, and did miserably on tests.  I persevered for a long time, finally passing several classes in calculus, basic genetics, basic physics, organic chemistry, and basic biochemistry, but even though I understood the purpose and usefulness of integrals and derivatives, and stoichiometry, the biology of cells, and vector analyses well enough, I can’t remember how to use them anymore.   I can balance simple chemical equations, and my high school algebra never leaves me, but my understanding of the science of DNA is so rudimentary.

Just like the gardener, I stumble through life, getting credit for knowing far more than I know.  What’s worse, it’s all falling away from me now as I age.  I can barely type anymore, as I invert so many letters and words, even adding extra words, or leaving some out.  Without editing, I hardly make sense.  Without computers, I’d have failed to get through many of my final classes, and it’s much worse now.  I just make too many mistakes, and don’t control my fingers all that well. The brain feels tired now.  I have been playing chess, and doing OK, but only against a novice player.   I don’t know how much longer I can continue to pretend that I have a clue what’s going on, or can concentrate long enough to do a job.  I’d like to retire from life now.  It’s been fun, but, really, it’s all a bit too much for me.  People, and money, and relationships and reading and writing.  I want to withdraw.  I don’t want to be here anymore.  But I stay.  I work every day.  I talk to people.  I go to political rallies.  I play chess.  I still exist.  Existence is not a sufficient raison d’etre.  But, then again, why should I care about the reason for my continued being? Why does it matter to me?  I think we all need a plan, something to shoot for.  What is left me at this stage of life?  Yes, yes, whatever I want.  But, I seem to want less and less.  To be a child again.  That would be nice. To play, to move from one thing to the next, to have no place to be, nothing I must do. Being here.

Surely, we all can’t be simply dragging ourselves along this way, simply to drag ourselves along?

pussys are patient

impassive silent

women are not

men are impatient

mostly about sex

woman can take that

mostly they leave it

what women do want

is ‘our’ own house now

to spend ‘our’ money

to travel and dine

to eat and drink wine

to party and play

you don’t get a say

all for ‘us’ today

now and now and now

but sex tomorrow

I do prefer cats

but I love women

nevertheless more.

violence flares

mom throws things

yells at Dad

Dad yells at Mom

throws things

Mom threw a glass at me

broken shard cut my leg.

Dad, angry knocked me

into walls or

my breath out

backhanded me

from across a table

spankings,

leather strap too

didn’t faze me

much

but

when he falsely accused

and slapped me

one way and back the other

and back again and

his hand swung

and I snapped

knocked him down

and raised my foot

to kick!

his head in

smash his brains

but

he caught my leg

in powerful arms

smiling

never hit me again.

35 years later

married

arguing

she accuses

falsely

she yells

calls me a liar

coffee cups in our hands

I empty mine at her

she throws hers in my face

and I snap

What is wrong with you?

escapes my lips

between clenched teeth

and I slap one way

and the other and swing

my open hand

to slap again

with fingers only

but she backs away

and I sit in my chair

and smash a remote

against a wall

I am my father.

she calls the police

domestic violence, she says

I’m in a domestic violence situation

she says

I listen from my chair

disbelief replaces anger.

the police come

while I clean up the coffee

she is not there

cops are suspicious

stained rag in my hand

no one else around

oh shit! I think

yes, of course, come in

search the house

she is not here

I don’t know where

crap!

I show them neighbors

where she might be

they find her

tell me I have to leave

counseling for me

anger management for me

Later on

She tells me to stay

unless it ever happens again

It never does, but

she keeps drinking

moody

angry happy sad up and down

never satisfied

impatient

demanding and hard

belittling and mean.

I left all that as a boy

but, now, in love

I can’t leave her

my heart beats

in a hollow

relationship

year after year after year.

three thousand dollars

bought three weeks in China

meals hotels and travel.

Beijing and Shanghai

Gulin, Xian, Hong Kong

Rivers Yangtze and Li

the Grand Canal in Suzhou

markets and pandas

and cormorants too

lacquerware silk

acrobats motorcyles

museums and gardens

flowers and ponds

temples and factories

and thousands of

the national bird

the construction crane

are everywhere.

Curious white masks

more and more we see

worn on bikes in shops

in cars on buses

an epidemic – SARS

Meanwhile

the USA invades Iraq

no weapons are found

bloody pictures posted

on walls, fences, bus stops

of Iraqi children.

Chinese express sympathy

for us poor Americans

our country is at war.

I wear my peace symbol

on my lapel as I travel.

Anxiety

returning home

will they let me return?

will SARS close US borders?

is peace treasonous?

But

all they ask is

did I have contact with

anyone, anyone with SARS?

and I have to remove

my shoes

pass through x-rays

and my bag is searched.

I’m home.

O’Maolchaithaigh 2008, ’09