Territory
Dad owned an Eskimo mask
carved of brown whale balleen porous as lava
whose Mongol lips curved in a knowing smile
above the fireplace-- immune, I thought,
to the Russian novel we lived.
Icon or eyesore, it marked his territory.
After redecoration its pitted face was hidden
between prints of red-hued harlequins
meant to marry the lemony walls
of the newly cheerful family room
to the crimson shag below. The living room,
with its wall-length mirrors of smoked glass
marbled with gold, crushed velvet sofa
and uncomfortably small floral chairs,
was only good for cocktails.
In their last home the mask was mounted
under Plexiglas next to the wet bar
facing Mom's candle snuffer collection.
We didn't know Dad was running out of territory
until the whiskey quit working
and he sealed himself in his car
and I got to compare fixed smiles.
(published in The Miserere Review)
******************************************
This is the third of poems about my dad, which are grouped together in the depression section of Sine Wave. The careful reader may have noticed that the speaker has now risen from the complete self-involvement of severe depression and is able to think about the misery of others, objectifying his concerns.
This poem is based on a central metaphor. Early in his career my father worked for Shell Oil and made frequent trips to Alaska to negotiate oil leases. He brought various mementos back form his trips; one of our favorites was a worm made of fur that when stroked would crawl up an arm. The Eskimo mask survived decorators and all the changes mother wrought as we rose socially to better houses and neighborhoods. It speaks for itself, as a manic-depressive's defenses are very porous, though also stubborn. Its final resting place, caged in Plexiglass across from my mother's collection of candlesnuffers, symbolized to me his ultimate defeat by domestication, thus women. He was a misogynist among other things, but the cause of this defect was three enormous older sisters who bossed him around when he was the baby of the family. His distant father was over fifty when he was born, his only brother thirteen years older and unavailable to save him from the female domination of his formative experience. I don't excuse his misogyny for these reasons, I only seek to understand it.
Dad purchased other art for the walls, most of it bad except for those prints in which he was guided by my older brother. Nevertheless the mask held a power for us all, I think, as a symbol of continuity and my dad's refusal to give in entirely to my mom's re-decorating schemes, as a male totem.
'CO' in the previous poem of course stands both for carbon monoxide, the method of his death, and "commanding officer."
This is the last poem about my father in the book.
BTW, I want to thank everyone who writes me by e-mail with their comments (and compliments!) on the poems. Because they comment directly by e-mail you won't read their posts here.
My father wasn't a bad man. He, like most of us, was just sadly deficient in self-knowledge. Had he know himself better he would have been better.
Thine,
CE
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Monday, May 22, 2006
Sine Wave #10: CO
CO
At five o'clock you'd douse the rocks
with Scoresby in a tumbler,
maybe a little water for respectability
and position yourself
in the ugly brown chair
for the numbing effect.
Night was a disappointment
because it was only a continuation
of unemployment. Still
you obeyed the clock,
whose pointed hands attacked
the limits of its circumference,
by never drinking before five,
a rhythm as predictable
as the pulse between your fingers
that signaled for another Winston
to crush between your knuckles
so that the butts stood up
at right angles in the ashtray.
Dad, I wish for you to note
the plaintive flute of meadowlarks at dusk,
to taste the first pear of summer,
to lie naked on your front lawn
clutching roses, waving at cars.
Slumped behind the wheel of your Lincoln
like an officer asleep at the bar,
the roses in your cheeks
were not the kind florists carry.
Lucky you brought your own.
*************************
This poem is obviously about my father's suicide at age on November 23, 1987, at age 62. Although I did not discover him (my younger brother did), the day is indelibly etched in my mind.
One thing that made it particularly hard, and I'm sure for my dad as well, is that I was just released from prison in late September 1987 for a manic episode (about which the retiring Connecticut judge decided to punish me for his political ambitions, or so I was told). So I was coming out of a mania while my Dad was stuck in depression, not that he could talk about it.
I'm sure it wasn't easy for him to see his illness in me at that time. It was mania that caused his discharge from the Air Force after he failed his pilot's exam, and mania in part responsible for some bad investments he'd made late in his life.
"Every sick family is sick in its own peculiar way." --Tolstoy
BTW, as an NBA fan I read Mark Cuban's blog today, and I must say, mine is much better, at least for literate people. ;-)
CE
At five o'clock you'd douse the rocks
with Scoresby in a tumbler,
maybe a little water for respectability
and position yourself
in the ugly brown chair
for the numbing effect.
Night was a disappointment
because it was only a continuation
of unemployment. Still
you obeyed the clock,
whose pointed hands attacked
the limits of its circumference,
by never drinking before five,
a rhythm as predictable
as the pulse between your fingers
that signaled for another Winston
to crush between your knuckles
so that the butts stood up
at right angles in the ashtray.
Dad, I wish for you to note
the plaintive flute of meadowlarks at dusk,
to taste the first pear of summer,
to lie naked on your front lawn
clutching roses, waving at cars.
Slumped behind the wheel of your Lincoln
like an officer asleep at the bar,
the roses in your cheeks
were not the kind florists carry.
Lucky you brought your own.
*************************
This poem is obviously about my father's suicide at age on November 23, 1987, at age 62. Although I did not discover him (my younger brother did), the day is indelibly etched in my mind.
One thing that made it particularly hard, and I'm sure for my dad as well, is that I was just released from prison in late September 1987 for a manic episode (about which the retiring Connecticut judge decided to punish me for his political ambitions, or so I was told). So I was coming out of a mania while my Dad was stuck in depression, not that he could talk about it.
I'm sure it wasn't easy for him to see his illness in me at that time. It was mania that caused his discharge from the Air Force after he failed his pilot's exam, and mania in part responsible for some bad investments he'd made late in his life.
"Every sick family is sick in its own peculiar way." --Tolstoy
BTW, as an NBA fan I read Mark Cuban's blog today, and I must say, mine is much better, at least for literate people. ;-)
CE
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Poem #9: "Paternal"
Paternal
My dad turned to me at times,
eyes hooded in drink,
to say, "I love you, Son."
The words were eerie and eviscerate,
mechanical nightingales of rickety song.
A cigar store Indian
could have spoken them better.
My heart burned anyway.
Late at night, curled on the rug
in a fetal position before the television,
his nostrils trumpeted snores
deep enough to rattle
the fragile beanstalk of my spine.
I could never wake him
Especially in the mornings
I felt my bird-like spirit
unwelcome in his lap.
I might have been smothered
by the sports section
or crushed like a cigarette.
*******************************
This has to be the oldest poem in the collection. I'm sure I wrote it before I was twenty. My dad, also manic-depressive, succumbed the the disease at age 62.
CE
My dad turned to me at times,
eyes hooded in drink,
to say, "I love you, Son."
The words were eerie and eviscerate,
mechanical nightingales of rickety song.
A cigar store Indian
could have spoken them better.
My heart burned anyway.
Late at night, curled on the rug
in a fetal position before the television,
his nostrils trumpeted snores
deep enough to rattle
the fragile beanstalk of my spine.
I could never wake him
Especially in the mornings
I felt my bird-like spirit
unwelcome in his lap.
I might have been smothered
by the sports section
or crushed like a cigarette.
*******************************
This has to be the oldest poem in the collection. I'm sure I wrote it before I was twenty. My dad, also manic-depressive, succumbed the the disease at age 62.
CE
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Depression Poem #8
Company of Crows
The crows cawed with relief
when Vincent blew his guts out in the wheat,
though his mind first burst against
the black-and-white angularity of sanity.
When a man sees heaven
like the Apostle Paul,
he becomes speechless,
a prisoner of an involuntary silence
almost as terrible as his exile to earth.
If he tries to put it on canvas
only those who have already seen
will understand, and they are few.
A man gets lonely
under such circumstances,
when the thing closest to his heart
can't be spoken, only pawed at with paint.
A man gets so lonely he may seek
the company of crows.
(published in Poetry Magazine, the online mag--not Poetry)
***********************
I remember writing this poem in January of 1996 during my last admission for depression. My manic vision had collapsed and I was left with such psychic emptiness I had no sense of a valid self; at best I felt like a mechanism, like a machine that had lost its ghost. In that miserable quasi-psychotic miasma I scribbled most of this poem.
Since I quit practicing medicine I have not been hospitalized again.
CE
The crows cawed with relief
when Vincent blew his guts out in the wheat,
though his mind first burst against
the black-and-white angularity of sanity.
When a man sees heaven
like the Apostle Paul,
he becomes speechless,
a prisoner of an involuntary silence
almost as terrible as his exile to earth.
If he tries to put it on canvas
only those who have already seen
will understand, and they are few.
A man gets lonely
under such circumstances,
when the thing closest to his heart
can't be spoken, only pawed at with paint.
A man gets so lonely he may seek
the company of crows.
(published in Poetry Magazine, the online mag--not Poetry)
***********************
I remember writing this poem in January of 1996 during my last admission for depression. My manic vision had collapsed and I was left with such psychic emptiness I had no sense of a valid self; at best I felt like a mechanism, like a machine that had lost its ghost. In that miserable quasi-psychotic miasma I scribbled most of this poem.
Since I quit practicing medicine I have not been hospitalized again.
CE
Friday, May 19, 2006
Therapy without Medication Pointless in Bipolars (Sine Wave Depression Poem #7)
Glass Giraffe
When my soul was sanded so raw
the capillaries couldn't even seep,
I questioned the value of pain.
"You must experience your feelings of abandonment
until you are comfortable with them," you said.
When my suicidal doppelganger
turned me inside out, pulling my anus
through my mouth, you said,
"Now that you are stripped of defenses
you have a better chance of changing them."
When I called you up one weekend
to say I was terrified of inanimate objects
like doorknobs and tea kettles, you said,
"Stay with it. Globalized fear indicates
a necessary therapeutic regression."
Finally the antidepressants kicked in
and I felt like myself.
When I left you gave me another card
since therapy was “unfinished”
and I might be back on your couch or another’s.
I gazed at your office figurines,
crystal leopards and pewter trolls,
porcelain ballerinas and kachina dolls,
and imagined the souls of your patients
trapped inside them-- those, like me,
who sought relief through words
when only medicines would do.
I could have been the glass giraffe.
(published in Slumgullion, an e-zine now defunct, I believe)
****************************
Prior to the advent of modern pharmacotherapy, manic-depressives were often seen by analysts. In reports of up to seven years of therapy, no improvement was noted.
CE
When my soul was sanded so raw
the capillaries couldn't even seep,
I questioned the value of pain.
"You must experience your feelings of abandonment
until you are comfortable with them," you said.
When my suicidal doppelganger
turned me inside out, pulling my anus
through my mouth, you said,
"Now that you are stripped of defenses
you have a better chance of changing them."
When I called you up one weekend
to say I was terrified of inanimate objects
like doorknobs and tea kettles, you said,
"Stay with it. Globalized fear indicates
a necessary therapeutic regression."
Finally the antidepressants kicked in
and I felt like myself.
When I left you gave me another card
since therapy was “unfinished”
and I might be back on your couch or another’s.
I gazed at your office figurines,
crystal leopards and pewter trolls,
porcelain ballerinas and kachina dolls,
and imagined the souls of your patients
trapped inside them-- those, like me,
who sought relief through words
when only medicines would do.
I could have been the glass giraffe.
(published in Slumgullion, an e-zine now defunct, I believe)
****************************
Prior to the advent of modern pharmacotherapy, manic-depressives were often seen by analysts. In reports of up to seven years of therapy, no improvement was noted.
CE
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Happy Birthday, Darllng! (and Depression Poem #6)
Before I get to today's post, I want to wish my beloved wife and editor, Kathleen McGovern Chaffin, a joyous birthday, and I pray the gift I ordered arrives today! I have added a link to her poems below (left hand margin) from a recent feature in Mindfire (ed. Gary Blankenship), which I encourage you to read, not because it's her birthday but because she is an outstanding poet who, unfortunately, writes only rarely. She is one of the most lyrical poets I know, as her deafness affords her one outlet for her love of music: language. I would also be remiss if I did not mention that her beloved service dog, Kenyon, turned 11 on May 15.
Here's one of the many love poems I've written for Kathleen:
To Kathleen, after Neruda
As the salmon seeks its mother gravel
through the lying ions of the sea, I seek you.
Without your body my blankets are cold,
the ground hard, my joints uneasy.
Apart, I am a mold for your bronze--
halved, discarded. Do you know this hollow?
There is no shame in love. Daily
I embarrass myself, collar strangers,
weary my children. I am the ancient mariner
condemned to speak of you wherever I go.
Have you suffered this? Who am I to compare us?
You are smooth as agate, I am ripsawn wood.
My heart seeks you like a cyclone.
I would swallow your farmhouse whole.
Without you I am a one-handed magician
cheating at solitaire, hoarding coppers.
II
When will you come to me? It is already late
and my father has closed the drapes.
I listen for your stride; I could never
confuse it with another.
Your back is strong as a barge,
your legs were sculpted in Greece,
your hips formed in India,
your face sought by Raphael.
Your eyes threaten green lightning
from the Atlantic. You could crush me
with a word, like a mussel at low tide.
Why do I trust you so utterly?
**********************************
Now back to the anxiety of depression:
It
I feel its cold shadow on my neck.
When I turn it’s gone. It keeps track of this.
It keeps track of everything
in a black binder with angstrom-thin sheets.
Did Mom create it by incessant hovering?
Did Dad by his necessary domination?
Did school create it by forcing comparisons,
or did I, by imagining I was important?
It feels like a huge bear behind me,
more impatient than malevolent,
sniffing the wind for the first hint of failure.
I try not to disappoint.
**********************
One of the most crippling aspects of typical clinical depression, or melancholia, as opposed to the lethargy of atypical depression, is an overwhelming sense of anxiety. It's as if every tiny decision is one terrible, fatal, final exam. Emptying a dishwasher can be a horror. Making a sandwich is like walking a tightwire without a net. Your hand shakes with the pressure of putting sugar in your coffee. You get the picture. Today's poem emphasizes that aspect of clinical depression.
I have found in treating patients that often a depression cannot be reversed unless the anxiety is first controlled, especially since early reactions to antidepressants can lead to an increase in anxiety (particularly Wellbutrin and Effexor in my experience).
This early effect of antidepressants is also the reason for a window of increased suicide; the driving energy of the antidepressant, while the mood is still black, can lead to rash actions. The physical stimulation of an antidepressant usually manifests before the patient experiences an improvement in mood, why it's very important to talk a patient through this transition.
Often a benzodiazapine, such as clonazepam, is beneficial in this transition phase to control anxiety. Antipsychotics may be needed, but remember: they can cause akisthesia, a feeling of "ants in one's pants," which can make the transition even harder. Lithium is a good adjunct in bipolars, less effective in unipolars, in acute depression, and there are many other adjunctive options, including thyroid supplementation, but to list them would be beyond the scope of this blog.
All for today,
Dr. Chaffin
Here's one of the many love poems I've written for Kathleen:
To Kathleen, after Neruda
As the salmon seeks its mother gravel
through the lying ions of the sea, I seek you.
Without your body my blankets are cold,
the ground hard, my joints uneasy.
Apart, I am a mold for your bronze--
halved, discarded. Do you know this hollow?
There is no shame in love. Daily
I embarrass myself, collar strangers,
weary my children. I am the ancient mariner
condemned to speak of you wherever I go.
Have you suffered this? Who am I to compare us?
You are smooth as agate, I am ripsawn wood.
My heart seeks you like a cyclone.
I would swallow your farmhouse whole.
Without you I am a one-handed magician
cheating at solitaire, hoarding coppers.
II
When will you come to me? It is already late
and my father has closed the drapes.
I listen for your stride; I could never
confuse it with another.
Your back is strong as a barge,
your legs were sculpted in Greece,
your hips formed in India,
your face sought by Raphael.
Your eyes threaten green lightning
from the Atlantic. You could crush me
with a word, like a mussel at low tide.
Why do I trust you so utterly?
**********************************
Now back to the anxiety of depression:
It
I feel its cold shadow on my neck.
When I turn it’s gone. It keeps track of this.
It keeps track of everything
in a black binder with angstrom-thin sheets.
Did Mom create it by incessant hovering?
Did Dad by his necessary domination?
Did school create it by forcing comparisons,
or did I, by imagining I was important?
It feels like a huge bear behind me,
more impatient than malevolent,
sniffing the wind for the first hint of failure.
I try not to disappoint.
**********************
One of the most crippling aspects of typical clinical depression, or melancholia, as opposed to the lethargy of atypical depression, is an overwhelming sense of anxiety. It's as if every tiny decision is one terrible, fatal, final exam. Emptying a dishwasher can be a horror. Making a sandwich is like walking a tightwire without a net. Your hand shakes with the pressure of putting sugar in your coffee. You get the picture. Today's poem emphasizes that aspect of clinical depression.
I have found in treating patients that often a depression cannot be reversed unless the anxiety is first controlled, especially since early reactions to antidepressants can lead to an increase in anxiety (particularly Wellbutrin and Effexor in my experience).
This early effect of antidepressants is also the reason for a window of increased suicide; the driving energy of the antidepressant, while the mood is still black, can lead to rash actions. The physical stimulation of an antidepressant usually manifests before the patient experiences an improvement in mood, why it's very important to talk a patient through this transition.
Often a benzodiazapine, such as clonazepam, is beneficial in this transition phase to control anxiety. Antipsychotics may be needed, but remember: they can cause akisthesia, a feeling of "ants in one's pants," which can make the transition even harder. Lithium is a good adjunct in bipolars, less effective in unipolars, in acute depression, and there are many other adjunctive options, including thyroid supplementation, but to list them would be beyond the scope of this blog.
All for today,
Dr. Chaffin
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Sine Wave Poem #5; depression lessens somewhat...
Leaf Sermon
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
and drifted down
from green crown to brown humus,
thinned to a fishbone pattern
of cellulose threads.
I washed into a stream
past stones squirming
with black question marks
of dragonfly larvae,
slid through reeds
into eddying pools
where I stalled until the rains
delivered me to the sea.
My last proteins fed the plankton
the humpback swallowed,
whose song woke me,
the ghost of a ghost of a leaf,
to the shocking green astral body
from which I speak:
You who seek
thrill without sustenance,
love without burden,
light without heat--
hollow, hollow men,
Tom ‘O Bedlam slim:
Your greatest feat
each work day morning
is to pull the sheet
from your own faces
to avoid being wheeled,
elbows locked,
to the refrigerated cases.
**************************
As the reader can see, the depression in this poem is lightening somewhat, though the speaker is by no means euthymic.
By the end of this series you will see poems that babble manically. So hang in there.
Happy not to be depressed, I drank and ate too much last night. It did, if nothing else, help slow me down this morning.
Again, if anyone wants a ms. copy of Sine Wave, e-mail me and I'll send it for free.
And any who want a copy of the Eliot essay for the offered prize, please e-mail me as well, as the published version is not the current one.
cechaffin@hotmail.com
Thanks, Rea, for publishing my letter at Dear Tobacco
And I wish you all a frabjous day!
CE
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
and drifted down
from green crown to brown humus,
thinned to a fishbone pattern
of cellulose threads.
I washed into a stream
past stones squirming
with black question marks
of dragonfly larvae,
slid through reeds
into eddying pools
where I stalled until the rains
delivered me to the sea.
My last proteins fed the plankton
the humpback swallowed,
whose song woke me,
the ghost of a ghost of a leaf,
to the shocking green astral body
from which I speak:
You who seek
thrill without sustenance,
love without burden,
light without heat--
hollow, hollow men,
Tom ‘O Bedlam slim:
Your greatest feat
each work day morning
is to pull the sheet
from your own faces
to avoid being wheeled,
elbows locked,
to the refrigerated cases.
**************************
As the reader can see, the depression in this poem is lightening somewhat, though the speaker is by no means euthymic.
By the end of this series you will see poems that babble manically. So hang in there.
Happy not to be depressed, I drank and ate too much last night. It did, if nothing else, help slow me down this morning.
Again, if anyone wants a ms. copy of Sine Wave, e-mail me and I'll send it for free.
And any who want a copy of the Eliot essay for the offered prize, please e-mail me as well, as the published version is not the current one.
cechaffin@hotmail.com
Thanks, Rea, for publishing my letter at Dear Tobacco
And I wish you all a frabjous day!
CE
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Mood Improved; Wife Don't Like It
It was today I realized I had crossed the bar (thought not with Tennyson).
No, I had entered a mixed state and was rising to euthymia when a guy cussed at me in a parking lot in Fort Bragg while I was safely weaving my way around him. His window was cracked and so was mine, so passing him closely on my left I heard his epithets: "Fuck you! You're gonna fuck my car! You're gonna damage it! What the fuck do you thing you're doing?"
From my point of view, and I think my wife will testify on my behalf, I was doing a safe thing to get around this silver, long bed Toyota with fiberglass shell.
Trouble was, my window was cracked and I heard every word. I sprang out of my van like a bad watch and grabbed his door handle. Locked. Through his cracked window I yelled that I'd kick his ass "from here to Antarctica" if he didn't apologize to my wife for cussing and furthermore put my elbow through his windhield for starters. Chastised, he apologized to Kathleen (who never heard his epithets, of course, being deaf) and thus saved his window.
I hope talk of a madman gets around. I'm mad enought to defend myself against rude little truck-worshipping scrawny red-headed men with watery blue eyes who don't know what being a neighbor means. No racism intended.
Small town: I may remember him, but he will always remember me.
Now Kathleen fears I'm hypomanic, like I don't deserve a break! I tell her this incident was normal for me. I didn't go nuts. The asshole apologized to her, I was satisfied.
It's true, I never told him she didn't hear it because that would have cost him his window. But if his door had been unlocked in the first place he would have been thrown into the planters. See how kind I am? See my restraint?
Kathleen doubts my report and has gone upstairs now, pointedly avoiding me, telling me how I need to slow down and how she's not nagging me.
************************************************
Just because I had this sea change doesn't mean the order of my poems will be accelerated; but if anyone would prefer a few hypomanic or manic poems for relief, please post and I will try to accomodate you from the second half of my manuscript, Sine Wave. And just because I had a good day does not mean I'm stable; it will take at least two weeks to prove that. Stick with me.
Thine in renewed euthymia (though Kathleen suspects hypmania),
C. E. Chaffin
No, I had entered a mixed state and was rising to euthymia when a guy cussed at me in a parking lot in Fort Bragg while I was safely weaving my way around him. His window was cracked and so was mine, so passing him closely on my left I heard his epithets: "Fuck you! You're gonna fuck my car! You're gonna damage it! What the fuck do you thing you're doing?"
From my point of view, and I think my wife will testify on my behalf, I was doing a safe thing to get around this silver, long bed Toyota with fiberglass shell.
Trouble was, my window was cracked and I heard every word. I sprang out of my van like a bad watch and grabbed his door handle. Locked. Through his cracked window I yelled that I'd kick his ass "from here to Antarctica" if he didn't apologize to my wife for cussing and furthermore put my elbow through his windhield for starters. Chastised, he apologized to Kathleen (who never heard his epithets, of course, being deaf) and thus saved his window.
I hope talk of a madman gets around. I'm mad enought to defend myself against rude little truck-worshipping scrawny red-headed men with watery blue eyes who don't know what being a neighbor means. No racism intended.
Small town: I may remember him, but he will always remember me.
Now Kathleen fears I'm hypomanic, like I don't deserve a break! I tell her this incident was normal for me. I didn't go nuts. The asshole apologized to her, I was satisfied.
It's true, I never told him she didn't hear it because that would have cost him his window. But if his door had been unlocked in the first place he would have been thrown into the planters. See how kind I am? See my restraint?
Kathleen doubts my report and has gone upstairs now, pointedly avoiding me, telling me how I need to slow down and how she's not nagging me.
************************************************
Just because I had this sea change doesn't mean the order of my poems will be accelerated; but if anyone would prefer a few hypomanic or manic poems for relief, please post and I will try to accomodate you from the second half of my manuscript, Sine Wave. And just because I had a good day does not mean I'm stable; it will take at least two weeks to prove that. Stick with me.
Thine in renewed euthymia (though Kathleen suspects hypmania),
C. E. Chaffin
Depression Poem Day 4
Baby
It’s 4:30 AM, pitch-black and cold.
I spoon against your body
wishing there were no cotton
to separate us, not even skin.
I want to crawl up your tunnel
and hide deep in your belly
before the sun exposes me.
Let me re-gestate, please.
Maybe this time it will be better,
maybe this time I won’t end up
clinging to you like an ice floe
in the middle of the night,
forty and terrified.
If you should wake and want to make love,
I warn you I may stay inside forever.
(published in Crescent Moon Journal; won first prize in a contest sponsored by Desert Moon Review, Jim Corner and Christopher T. George, editors)
It’s 4:30 AM, pitch-black and cold.
I spoon against your body
wishing there were no cotton
to separate us, not even skin.
I want to crawl up your tunnel
and hide deep in your belly
before the sun exposes me.
Let me re-gestate, please.
Maybe this time it will be better,
maybe this time I won’t end up
clinging to you like an ice floe
in the middle of the night,
forty and terrified.
If you should wake and want to make love,
I warn you I may stay inside forever.
(published in Crescent Moon Journal; won first prize in a contest sponsored by Desert Moon Review, Jim Corner and Christopher T. George, editors)
Monday, May 15, 2006
Depression Poem #3
Down
Again we meet, Medusa
and stones cannot cry.
Yes, I remember that face—
the unshaven pastures of my cheeks
bloated by hangover,
my eyes purple wells—
so I drink too much.
Wouldn't you?
Awkward giraffe,
I lack speech to say
"These leaves have lost their taste."
Music affects only irritation,
touch frightens and food sickens.
My psychiatrist says,
"You suffer from anhedonia."
Looking down a well
water and darkness do not soothe.
It's hard to explain
because the gray muzzle in me
moans for lack of howling
at the sickly moon beneath the smog line.
How dead that moon appears--
like my own pock marks in a mirror.
Again we meet, Medusa
and stones cannot cry.
Yes, I remember that face—
the unshaven pastures of my cheeks
bloated by hangover,
my eyes purple wells—
so I drink too much.
Wouldn't you?
Awkward giraffe,
I lack speech to say
"These leaves have lost their taste."
Music affects only irritation,
touch frightens and food sickens.
My psychiatrist says,
"You suffer from anhedonia."
Looking down a well
water and darkness do not soothe.
It's hard to explain
because the gray muzzle in me
moans for lack of howling
at the sickly moon beneath the smog line.
How dead that moon appears--
like my own pock marks in a mirror.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Depression Poem #2; Religious Psychosis in Bipolars
Today's poem:
For the Record
I am myself, even in the dark
without mirrors or clues.
I may be as inconsequential
as the point of a fading penlight
but I am not this feeling
of being buried alive.
If I fall through the ice
I am not my hypothermia.
I am not my heart's vacuum's
cruel absence of presence.
There are times this distinction
seems specious, as if I were a Jesuit
preaching in a sewer
hoping echoes could convince me--
but all I have is this distinction.
I hold it in a cup like Christ's blood
as I fall through infinite separations.
I am still here.
I write this for the record.
********************************
Late last night I began to feel a little better; I began to talk with Kathleen a bit, was able to listen to music and read. This is normal with clinical depression. Just as patients with infections often have fevers only at night, likewise those mired in clinical depression often only feel better at night, the later the better (which makes me wonder whether the legend of vampires, like the term, "lunatics," was partly based on bipolar disease).
Nevertheless I woke up this morning nervous. Despite this or because of it I told Kathleen I'd drive to town to get the Sunday paper. I turned on the radio, thinking I had punched a public station but instead found a fundamentalist church service. The congregation was singing, "Slow me down, Lord," which is exactly what lithium and other anti-manic medications do. You can't make this stuff up! Meanwhile, my internal motor was sputtering and going into overdrive. Let me explain this.
A "mixed state" occurs when a bipolar is unstable and can go from manic symptoms to depressive symptoms rapidly. A patient can start out weeping, for instance, become anxious and possibly paranoid, change to hysterical laughter and hilarity, and all the while feel propelled forward by an energy that is ego-dystonic--a fancy psychiatric term for "unpleasant," though unpleasant doesn't cover it. Often when a bipolar is about to flip back into normal mood he experiences these hints and guesses--brief periods of feeling normal mixed with anxiety, sadness, and an internal energy that seems to be pushing him, of being driven. In its worst form, as described by Kay Jamison in her book, An Unquiet Mind, it can turn into a "black mania"--a psychotic depression with all the energy of mania, a horror that is nearly indescribable to the average person. It is hell. I have not experienced an extended black mania, thank God, but I have come close to it, briefly, in mixed states. Back to my story.
On the way back from town I put on a music station but was tempted to go back to the religious station, where the minister was preaching from the Gospel of John about the extended metaphor where Christ is the vine and we are the branches. In exposition of the term "abide," used eight times in the passage, the preacher explained that the sense was "to conform or comply"--which turned the passage into evidence to me of damnation, i.e., I cannot conform or comply with Christ's teachings, much less abide in him, with any confidence, especially when depressed, where all turns against me. I should know better than to have listened; religion is risky at best to the symptomatic bipolar. Thus the sermon had the opposite effect than intended, just as when depressed I always leave church feeling more guilty than I came in, paradoxically damned by my shortcomings rather than lifted by God's love.
It is well known that bipolars and schizophrenics often have severe religious delusions. (There is a book called The Three Christs of Ipsilanti where a psychiatrist actually had three patients in group therapy who all thought they were Christ). Religion can be extremely toxic to the bipolar, and it certainly is for me, because after I heard this portion of the sermon I broke out in tears, praying or crying out loud, "I can't conform to you, Lord, I can't comply with you, can't you abide with me? Please abide with me Lord, Oh please."
The redeeming aspect of this, thought the experience was painful, is that I did turn the tables on my self-condemnation; I was able to add a Lutheran flavor of grace to my mental suffering, that I was a helpless sinner dependent on grace, therefore by faith God should abide with me--not that I believed it with any conviction, but I did feel a little better afterwards. At least I stopped crying by the time I got home.
When I was younger, and before I was diagnosed, I was hyper-religious, mistaking my bipolar symptoms for nearness or distance from God, fasting and praying when depressed (fasting was not hard since I lost my appetite) and rejoicing and sharing my faith when manic. After electroconvulsive therapy at age 30 I didn't darken a church for nearly a decade, wanted nothing to do with any inner conception of religion, fearful that it would worsen my disease. My attitude was, "if God is interested, let him come to me." In Mexico over the last three years I have been able to attend church but only because it was Episcopal, where the form of worship took from me the personal burden of connecting with God. The symbol of the Eucharist became my main affirmation of faith and singing bass in the choir was my contribution. And luckily, during my time in Mexico, I had no extended depressions, only brief ones, just as I had brief manias, the main reason being that I knew from experience how to medicate myself quickly in order to prevent the extremes of cycling.
If I were in my right mind, I think I would tell religious bipolars that God grants us a special dispensation to avoid any intense involvement with religion. We're much better off doing good deeds and loving our neighbor than daring the insanity any form of Pentecostalism or mysticism may bring on. God loves us no less for our illness, it is only our self-hatred, chemically based, that makes us sometimes feel abandoned by God, just as the inappropriate inflation of self-love may convince us we are God incarnate. I've been through both.
I wish this disease on no one. Untreated it has over a 30% mortality rate lifetime. That's a bad number, not to mention lifetimes of relative disability because of it, like that poor composer, Schumann.
I'll conclude today's epistle with poem dealing with my past religious psychoses:
An Ex-Pentecostal Examines His Psychosis
God was a pet who lived in my head
and told me what to do
just before I thought of it,
as if the idea were His.
I heard: Go to the store, not,
I think I’ll go to the store.
Has God ever told you
to order a hamburger?
My God did– with pickles and lettuce.
(He knows if a sparrow falls
so a hamburger’s no big deal.)
More than a sparrow fell
when I dropped from that nest,
that mares-eat-oats-and-does-eat-oats
sick haven and all the rest.
I want no personal God;
I might mistake him for me.
If there’s a God, and he’s listening,
I pray he ignores this poem.
Thine in Bipolar Depression,
CE
For the Record
I am myself, even in the dark
without mirrors or clues.
I may be as inconsequential
as the point of a fading penlight
but I am not this feeling
of being buried alive.
If I fall through the ice
I am not my hypothermia.
I am not my heart's vacuum's
cruel absence of presence.
There are times this distinction
seems specious, as if I were a Jesuit
preaching in a sewer
hoping echoes could convince me--
but all I have is this distinction.
I hold it in a cup like Christ's blood
as I fall through infinite separations.
I am still here.
I write this for the record.
********************************
Late last night I began to feel a little better; I began to talk with Kathleen a bit, was able to listen to music and read. This is normal with clinical depression. Just as patients with infections often have fevers only at night, likewise those mired in clinical depression often only feel better at night, the later the better (which makes me wonder whether the legend of vampires, like the term, "lunatics," was partly based on bipolar disease).
Nevertheless I woke up this morning nervous. Despite this or because of it I told Kathleen I'd drive to town to get the Sunday paper. I turned on the radio, thinking I had punched a public station but instead found a fundamentalist church service. The congregation was singing, "Slow me down, Lord," which is exactly what lithium and other anti-manic medications do. You can't make this stuff up! Meanwhile, my internal motor was sputtering and going into overdrive. Let me explain this.
A "mixed state" occurs when a bipolar is unstable and can go from manic symptoms to depressive symptoms rapidly. A patient can start out weeping, for instance, become anxious and possibly paranoid, change to hysterical laughter and hilarity, and all the while feel propelled forward by an energy that is ego-dystonic--a fancy psychiatric term for "unpleasant," though unpleasant doesn't cover it. Often when a bipolar is about to flip back into normal mood he experiences these hints and guesses--brief periods of feeling normal mixed with anxiety, sadness, and an internal energy that seems to be pushing him, of being driven. In its worst form, as described by Kay Jamison in her book, An Unquiet Mind, it can turn into a "black mania"--a psychotic depression with all the energy of mania, a horror that is nearly indescribable to the average person. It is hell. I have not experienced an extended black mania, thank God, but I have come close to it, briefly, in mixed states. Back to my story.
On the way back from town I put on a music station but was tempted to go back to the religious station, where the minister was preaching from the Gospel of John about the extended metaphor where Christ is the vine and we are the branches. In exposition of the term "abide," used eight times in the passage, the preacher explained that the sense was "to conform or comply"--which turned the passage into evidence to me of damnation, i.e., I cannot conform or comply with Christ's teachings, much less abide in him, with any confidence, especially when depressed, where all turns against me. I should know better than to have listened; religion is risky at best to the symptomatic bipolar. Thus the sermon had the opposite effect than intended, just as when depressed I always leave church feeling more guilty than I came in, paradoxically damned by my shortcomings rather than lifted by God's love.
It is well known that bipolars and schizophrenics often have severe religious delusions. (There is a book called The Three Christs of Ipsilanti where a psychiatrist actually had three patients in group therapy who all thought they were Christ). Religion can be extremely toxic to the bipolar, and it certainly is for me, because after I heard this portion of the sermon I broke out in tears, praying or crying out loud, "I can't conform to you, Lord, I can't comply with you, can't you abide with me? Please abide with me Lord, Oh please."
The redeeming aspect of this, thought the experience was painful, is that I did turn the tables on my self-condemnation; I was able to add a Lutheran flavor of grace to my mental suffering, that I was a helpless sinner dependent on grace, therefore by faith God should abide with me--not that I believed it with any conviction, but I did feel a little better afterwards. At least I stopped crying by the time I got home.
When I was younger, and before I was diagnosed, I was hyper-religious, mistaking my bipolar symptoms for nearness or distance from God, fasting and praying when depressed (fasting was not hard since I lost my appetite) and rejoicing and sharing my faith when manic. After electroconvulsive therapy at age 30 I didn't darken a church for nearly a decade, wanted nothing to do with any inner conception of religion, fearful that it would worsen my disease. My attitude was, "if God is interested, let him come to me." In Mexico over the last three years I have been able to attend church but only because it was Episcopal, where the form of worship took from me the personal burden of connecting with God. The symbol of the Eucharist became my main affirmation of faith and singing bass in the choir was my contribution. And luckily, during my time in Mexico, I had no extended depressions, only brief ones, just as I had brief manias, the main reason being that I knew from experience how to medicate myself quickly in order to prevent the extremes of cycling.
If I were in my right mind, I think I would tell religious bipolars that God grants us a special dispensation to avoid any intense involvement with religion. We're much better off doing good deeds and loving our neighbor than daring the insanity any form of Pentecostalism or mysticism may bring on. God loves us no less for our illness, it is only our self-hatred, chemically based, that makes us sometimes feel abandoned by God, just as the inappropriate inflation of self-love may convince us we are God incarnate. I've been through both.
I wish this disease on no one. Untreated it has over a 30% mortality rate lifetime. That's a bad number, not to mention lifetimes of relative disability because of it, like that poor composer, Schumann.
I'll conclude today's epistle with poem dealing with my past religious psychoses:
An Ex-Pentecostal Examines His Psychosis
God was a pet who lived in my head
and told me what to do
just before I thought of it,
as if the idea were His.
I heard: Go to the store, not,
I think I’ll go to the store.
Has God ever told you
to order a hamburger?
My God did– with pickles and lettuce.
(He knows if a sparrow falls
so a hamburger’s no big deal.)
More than a sparrow fell
when I dropped from that nest,
that mares-eat-oats-and-does-eat-oats
sick haven and all the rest.
I want no personal God;
I might mistake him for me.
If there’s a God, and he’s listening,
I pray he ignores this poem.
Thine in Bipolar Depression,
CE
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Depression, Cont'd.
Having been through the manic-depressive cycle any number of times, I have an unpublished ms. that seeks to duplicate the experience, called Sine Wave (which I would be happy to e-mail to anyone interested). The book begins in depression and by degrees rises to manic psychosis. (Yes, Virginia, I've experienced both. When manic I usually end up in handcuffs; when depressed curled up in a fetal position in admitting.)
This disease has done more to form my life than any other factor; it contributed to my early hyper-religiosity, my choice of career, even my first marriage. I was not capable of making major decisions back then; I had to get a sign, a voice, some special message from God in order to make one. It wasn't until after my first course of electroconvulsive therapy at age 30 that I completely abandoned my underlying psychosis for reason in my own life. (I had been able to apply reason to work and other tasks.)
It was in my early 40s when I finally faced the truth, that the major decisions of my life, marriage and career, were based on psychotic direction, and here I was, a divorced doctor with three children. That's a hard nut to swallow without entirely devaluing one's life.
As I type this I am becoming tearful, as it is 3:15 PM. I don't think crying does much good so I will try to resist. It may have a short-term calming effect but it ultimately makes me more tired. In manic-depression, I experience crying jags as seizures of toxic melancholy. I don't cry about anything, it feels more like a reflex, like vomiting. Tears of grief are different, only available to me when my mood is normal or "euthymic." When I'm sick, weeping only seems to deepen the darkness. Now for today's poem:
Demon Melancholy
His cold breath steams up my neck
like dry ice. I never see him approach.
He comes from darkness
where eyes forget they are eyes,
where speech has no conclusion
and touch is without resistance,
where music becomes noise
and selves are emptied
of history like milk bottles
below the ninth circle of hell.
I hear his wild dogs carol
in the burning church of my mind.
Pass the offering plate--
Is that a medicine vial, a gun?
Jimmy crack corn and I don't care,
the light has gone away.
("Demon Melancholy" first appeared in Ygdrasil.)
Thine,
CE
This disease has done more to form my life than any other factor; it contributed to my early hyper-religiosity, my choice of career, even my first marriage. I was not capable of making major decisions back then; I had to get a sign, a voice, some special message from God in order to make one. It wasn't until after my first course of electroconvulsive therapy at age 30 that I completely abandoned my underlying psychosis for reason in my own life. (I had been able to apply reason to work and other tasks.)
It was in my early 40s when I finally faced the truth, that the major decisions of my life, marriage and career, were based on psychotic direction, and here I was, a divorced doctor with three children. That's a hard nut to swallow without entirely devaluing one's life.
As I type this I am becoming tearful, as it is 3:15 PM. I don't think crying does much good so I will try to resist. It may have a short-term calming effect but it ultimately makes me more tired. In manic-depression, I experience crying jags as seizures of toxic melancholy. I don't cry about anything, it feels more like a reflex, like vomiting. Tears of grief are different, only available to me when my mood is normal or "euthymic." When I'm sick, weeping only seems to deepen the darkness. Now for today's poem:
Demon Melancholy
His cold breath steams up my neck
like dry ice. I never see him approach.
He comes from darkness
where eyes forget they are eyes,
where speech has no conclusion
and touch is without resistance,
where music becomes noise
and selves are emptied
of history like milk bottles
below the ninth circle of hell.
I hear his wild dogs carol
in the burning church of my mind.
Pass the offering plate--
Is that a medicine vial, a gun?
Jimmy crack corn and I don't care,
the light has gone away.
("Demon Melancholy" first appeared in Ygdrasil.)
Thine,
CE
Friday, May 12, 2006
Back to Depression, Sorry..
I've sunk back into depression, unfortunately, though it was slightly predictable. My pain management doctor had given me narcotics for control, but she's in San Diego, so naturally I ran out. And I didn't plan my withdrawal properly like I did last time, so I sank immediately into depression. Today is a little better. I made a list of goals for the day. And I'm writing, which is also a good sign. If I keep this palaver up I may convince myself that I'm coming out of it.
What I really hate about depression is how I can be on the beautiful Mendocino coast where the pines parade down to the sea and take no pleasure in it. This is called "anhedonia." Then there is the incapacity to feel love towards anyone or anything; there is simply a blank wall, Sylvia Plath's "bell jar." I am convinced in my bones that my life amounts to nothing and that all would be better off without me. When I asked myself where I might be happy, I could only think of a hole in the earth. My crying jags also arrive on time; right now they are scheduled for about 3 PM. This always happens in my depressions, a clockwork biology where I can predict when I will weep like a mock turtle on a schedule about the waste I call my life. No list of accomplishments can dissuade me from the opinion that I have done nothing. The future is unimaginable; the past is an incontrovertible witness in favor of the prosecution against me.
My "life script," also, a Transactional Analysis term, feeds into this. When I did my fourth step in AA, I reduced my life and the message I received in childhood to this: "If you're not perfect, you're worthless; if you're not the best, you're nothing." I'm sure my parents did not intend me to be branded by these double-binds, but they meshed nicely with my manic-depressive disease. My new psychiatrist pointed out this psychological misperception to me in our first session, and that upset me. But he had me.
Which raises the question, "What good is self-knowledge?" If I know how I'm fucked up, can write about it, talk about it, why can't I change it? It may be too deeply embedded to dislodge. My philosophy is to accept it and try to be aware of it, as it is too late to escape the programming. If you knew the details of my earlier life, you would know how many awards I won, how my GPA at UCLA was 4.0 while married and working three jobs, and how none of my procession of awards and accomplishments were really planned; I was simply driven. And how hollow such accomplishments seemed to me afterwards! As Groucho said, "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." I feel the same way; I refuse to accept any recognition or award because in honoring me the prize is automatically devalued. A lose-lose philosophy.
If nothing I do can proves I'm not worthless, why do I keep trying? When not depressed I think my goals might be worthy in themselves, and my worth is not entirely dependent on them, rather I have some intrinsic worth granted by the Almighty and my loved ones. Nevertheless at the core of my being, like the rubber strands wound around the mystic center of a golf ball, the mantra persists.
In Mexico I counseled an elderly lady with severe myesthenia gravis who was virtually paralyzed, had to have her diapers changed, for instance. She could still talk. How she maintained fortitude and avoided depression under such conditions amazed me. If I became totally dependent upon others, there would be nothing to prove my worth. That scares me. And life is just that thin; "car crash tomorrow." "All flesh is like grass." Everything you trust in today could be ripped away tomorrow. Think of the Christmas tsunami and Katrina.
We can't let the vulnerability of our immediate lives into the forefront of our minds too much or it will undermine our confidence in the things we actually do and strive for, letting the air out of the balloon we have constructed in an unfounded faith in the continuity of our existence and expectations.
I recently read Jack London's Sea Wolf for the first time, where the captain, a thoroughgoing amoral atheist, preaches the gospel of survival, of bigger fish eating littler fish, where whoever gets to indulge in the most "piggishness" was the ostensible winner. The protagonist, Humphrey Van Weyden, tries to counter these arguments with his philosophy of the sacredness of life and altruism, but discovers that his reasoning is not nearly so water tight as the captain's, especially in view of the brutal conditions on the sealing ship where he is forced to work, along with the evil character of most of the hands.
So what remedy remains me? My best philosophy is acceptance. If I accept these features in my flawed self they will not exercise the unconscious power over me that they otherwise possess. In my best moments I will be able to actually laugh at myself and the programs I swallowed whole as a small child. Alas, today is not one of those days, because the biological aspect of my depression does not yet allow me such wisdom.
This too will pass, and I will embrace this ephemeral world as substantial again. But one thing depression teaches you is how thin the spider's thread from which we hang truly is.
Thine in Depression (again),
CE
What I really hate about depression is how I can be on the beautiful Mendocino coast where the pines parade down to the sea and take no pleasure in it. This is called "anhedonia." Then there is the incapacity to feel love towards anyone or anything; there is simply a blank wall, Sylvia Plath's "bell jar." I am convinced in my bones that my life amounts to nothing and that all would be better off without me. When I asked myself where I might be happy, I could only think of a hole in the earth. My crying jags also arrive on time; right now they are scheduled for about 3 PM. This always happens in my depressions, a clockwork biology where I can predict when I will weep like a mock turtle on a schedule about the waste I call my life. No list of accomplishments can dissuade me from the opinion that I have done nothing. The future is unimaginable; the past is an incontrovertible witness in favor of the prosecution against me.
My "life script," also, a Transactional Analysis term, feeds into this. When I did my fourth step in AA, I reduced my life and the message I received in childhood to this: "If you're not perfect, you're worthless; if you're not the best, you're nothing." I'm sure my parents did not intend me to be branded by these double-binds, but they meshed nicely with my manic-depressive disease. My new psychiatrist pointed out this psychological misperception to me in our first session, and that upset me. But he had me.
Which raises the question, "What good is self-knowledge?" If I know how I'm fucked up, can write about it, talk about it, why can't I change it? It may be too deeply embedded to dislodge. My philosophy is to accept it and try to be aware of it, as it is too late to escape the programming. If you knew the details of my earlier life, you would know how many awards I won, how my GPA at UCLA was 4.0 while married and working three jobs, and how none of my procession of awards and accomplishments were really planned; I was simply driven. And how hollow such accomplishments seemed to me afterwards! As Groucho said, "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." I feel the same way; I refuse to accept any recognition or award because in honoring me the prize is automatically devalued. A lose-lose philosophy.
If nothing I do can proves I'm not worthless, why do I keep trying? When not depressed I think my goals might be worthy in themselves, and my worth is not entirely dependent on them, rather I have some intrinsic worth granted by the Almighty and my loved ones. Nevertheless at the core of my being, like the rubber strands wound around the mystic center of a golf ball, the mantra persists.
In Mexico I counseled an elderly lady with severe myesthenia gravis who was virtually paralyzed, had to have her diapers changed, for instance. She could still talk. How she maintained fortitude and avoided depression under such conditions amazed me. If I became totally dependent upon others, there would be nothing to prove my worth. That scares me. And life is just that thin; "car crash tomorrow." "All flesh is like grass." Everything you trust in today could be ripped away tomorrow. Think of the Christmas tsunami and Katrina.
We can't let the vulnerability of our immediate lives into the forefront of our minds too much or it will undermine our confidence in the things we actually do and strive for, letting the air out of the balloon we have constructed in an unfounded faith in the continuity of our existence and expectations.
I recently read Jack London's Sea Wolf for the first time, where the captain, a thoroughgoing amoral atheist, preaches the gospel of survival, of bigger fish eating littler fish, where whoever gets to indulge in the most "piggishness" was the ostensible winner. The protagonist, Humphrey Van Weyden, tries to counter these arguments with his philosophy of the sacredness of life and altruism, but discovers that his reasoning is not nearly so water tight as the captain's, especially in view of the brutal conditions on the sealing ship where he is forced to work, along with the evil character of most of the hands.
So what remedy remains me? My best philosophy is acceptance. If I accept these features in my flawed self they will not exercise the unconscious power over me that they otherwise possess. In my best moments I will be able to actually laugh at myself and the programs I swallowed whole as a small child. Alas, today is not one of those days, because the biological aspect of my depression does not yet allow me such wisdom.
This too will pass, and I will embrace this ephemeral world as substantial again. But one thing depression teaches you is how thin the spider's thread from which we hang truly is.
Thine in Depression (again),
CE
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Everyone's an Illegal Alien to Me: Stay Out of My Head!
Before I am distracted and derailed by the present, I had some major themes to develop. First there’s my opinion on this whole immigration debate.
First, I don’t know if we can protect our borders even with the proper technology, though a wall would certainly decrease the success rate of those desperate to come north.
Second, we don’t have the means to deport all the people we ought to if we were going to enforce our laws.
The only rational solution is to let the people here stay and build the wall to keep new ones out. Anything less is ineffective. The alternative is the status quo, where we get a million new bodies each year from the south who become eligible for social services but, in their underground economy, often don’t pay taxes for those services. It’s a burden we can bear, but for me 300 million Americans is enough. Without the influx of immigrants in California, for instance, our birth rate would be zero.
All the half measures our politicians will employ to make it seem like something is being done will, of course, result in nothing but it will be very expensive and confusing and require thousands of new bureaucrats trained in discouraging forms, though bilingual, of course. In fact it would help if these new federal employees themselves crossed the border illegally to be employed by the federal government to deal with other illegals. I like the symmetry of that. And in doing so they’ll be doing “jobs Americans don’t want to do.” I hate that phrase, by the way. What are “jobs Americans don’t want to do?” I see citizens working at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. I see them on road crews picking up trash and doing janitorial work. As for migrant agricultural workers, that’s a whole different ball of wax. Mexicans have nimble fingers and sturdy backs, and I would hate to see our fruit crushed by Iowa linebackers.
Still illegal immigration doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the illegal aliens who want to cross the border of my mind.
You know the type. You’re sitting at a bar, trying to watch a basketball game, and the guy next to you wants to talk about UFOs. You have a good seat, you don’t want to give it up, but neither do you want to let this crazed alien past the border of your brain, and here lies the danger. Don’t let them cross.
There are machine gun turrets and booby traps all along my brain’s border. The guy with the UFO obsession is not going to enter, period. He is fended off by ignoring him, which behaviorists call “extinguishing.” Else I become so vocal about the game he can’t talk. Else I spill a beer on him accidentally and he’s preoccupied with that. But he’s not going to get across the border.
Actually you’re all illegal aliens to me, all of you! I don’t want you in my brain!
Our neighbor, “I’m Not Creepy,” has tried to get into my brain but has no chance. Here are some of his recent antics.
I was gardening, which I can only do in little portions because of my back. I like to garden in quiet. Instead INC stood on his deck, drinking wine, literally screaming his philosophy of humanity at me. He would also say things like, “You’re a doctor and we ought to be in awe of doctors, but you’re a West Coast doctor and not ruined by third party payments like the doctors back east.” Once I told him that he could lower his volume; he did for one sentence and went back to the top of his lungs style. Later he knocked at my door with a sinister looking gray metal box. “I want to show you my collection,” he said. I feared it might be filled with human knuckle bones, and told him I didn’t feel like talking right then. He seemed perturbed by this, since in his world I only exist for him, as he has one of those minds that constantly seeks to cross the borders of other minds, because he has no borders and everything leaks in and out in his psychotic sieve.
Later that night he knocked urgently on our door and I let him in, whereupon he kneeled by Kathleen’s chair and went on a discourse about erysipelas, a disease with which I’m familiar, but his was a special case where the fever of erysipelas may have cured a lymphoma. He acted as if he were continuing a conversation from earlier but I couldn’t recall it and neither could Kathleen. He used our washer in our absence by creeping into the garage and left it with standing water, which he told me about. He won’t use it anymore, he said. Nor will he use the common recycling bin for his recyclables; he has to drive them into town himself. He’s probably afraid we’ll go through them. Now he may use the washer, but it is not cricket to go into someone else’s abode and fool around when they’re not there without permission. Last night he was yelling to me at my second story bathroom window about some conspiracy of the phone company. You get the picture; likely another manic-depressive narcissist.
We attract the mental, you know, it’s part of our magnetism. I think of my other gifts and why I have not taken commercial advantage of them, but the powers that be keep dumping mental patients in my lap, so perhaps this is my true destiny. But I won’t let them in my head. And for you, dear reader, to try to get into my head, fuhgedaboutit. If you’ve let me into your head, well don’t feel bad. I’m a good influence there and can help defend your borders.
CE
First, I don’t know if we can protect our borders even with the proper technology, though a wall would certainly decrease the success rate of those desperate to come north.
Second, we don’t have the means to deport all the people we ought to if we were going to enforce our laws.
The only rational solution is to let the people here stay and build the wall to keep new ones out. Anything less is ineffective. The alternative is the status quo, where we get a million new bodies each year from the south who become eligible for social services but, in their underground economy, often don’t pay taxes for those services. It’s a burden we can bear, but for me 300 million Americans is enough. Without the influx of immigrants in California, for instance, our birth rate would be zero.
All the half measures our politicians will employ to make it seem like something is being done will, of course, result in nothing but it will be very expensive and confusing and require thousands of new bureaucrats trained in discouraging forms, though bilingual, of course. In fact it would help if these new federal employees themselves crossed the border illegally to be employed by the federal government to deal with other illegals. I like the symmetry of that. And in doing so they’ll be doing “jobs Americans don’t want to do.” I hate that phrase, by the way. What are “jobs Americans don’t want to do?” I see citizens working at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. I see them on road crews picking up trash and doing janitorial work. As for migrant agricultural workers, that’s a whole different ball of wax. Mexicans have nimble fingers and sturdy backs, and I would hate to see our fruit crushed by Iowa linebackers.
Still illegal immigration doesn’t concern me nearly as much as the illegal aliens who want to cross the border of my mind.
You know the type. You’re sitting at a bar, trying to watch a basketball game, and the guy next to you wants to talk about UFOs. You have a good seat, you don’t want to give it up, but neither do you want to let this crazed alien past the border of your brain, and here lies the danger. Don’t let them cross.
There are machine gun turrets and booby traps all along my brain’s border. The guy with the UFO obsession is not going to enter, period. He is fended off by ignoring him, which behaviorists call “extinguishing.” Else I become so vocal about the game he can’t talk. Else I spill a beer on him accidentally and he’s preoccupied with that. But he’s not going to get across the border.
Actually you’re all illegal aliens to me, all of you! I don’t want you in my brain!
Our neighbor, “I’m Not Creepy,” has tried to get into my brain but has no chance. Here are some of his recent antics.
I was gardening, which I can only do in little portions because of my back. I like to garden in quiet. Instead INC stood on his deck, drinking wine, literally screaming his philosophy of humanity at me. He would also say things like, “You’re a doctor and we ought to be in awe of doctors, but you’re a West Coast doctor and not ruined by third party payments like the doctors back east.” Once I told him that he could lower his volume; he did for one sentence and went back to the top of his lungs style. Later he knocked at my door with a sinister looking gray metal box. “I want to show you my collection,” he said. I feared it might be filled with human knuckle bones, and told him I didn’t feel like talking right then. He seemed perturbed by this, since in his world I only exist for him, as he has one of those minds that constantly seeks to cross the borders of other minds, because he has no borders and everything leaks in and out in his psychotic sieve.
Later that night he knocked urgently on our door and I let him in, whereupon he kneeled by Kathleen’s chair and went on a discourse about erysipelas, a disease with which I’m familiar, but his was a special case where the fever of erysipelas may have cured a lymphoma. He acted as if he were continuing a conversation from earlier but I couldn’t recall it and neither could Kathleen. He used our washer in our absence by creeping into the garage and left it with standing water, which he told me about. He won’t use it anymore, he said. Nor will he use the common recycling bin for his recyclables; he has to drive them into town himself. He’s probably afraid we’ll go through them. Now he may use the washer, but it is not cricket to go into someone else’s abode and fool around when they’re not there without permission. Last night he was yelling to me at my second story bathroom window about some conspiracy of the phone company. You get the picture; likely another manic-depressive narcissist.
We attract the mental, you know, it’s part of our magnetism. I think of my other gifts and why I have not taken commercial advantage of them, but the powers that be keep dumping mental patients in my lap, so perhaps this is my true destiny. But I won’t let them in my head. And for you, dear reader, to try to get into my head, fuhgedaboutit. If you’ve let me into your head, well don’t feel bad. I’m a good influence there and can help defend your borders.
CE
Sunday, May 07, 2006
The Compost Pile of Celebrity; New Prize Offered for Not Reading Me!
"Your blog really and truly sucks."
--from Zachary Bush. I don't know who he is but I thought a good way to clean out my address files was to just smack people on my mailing list and see what happened.
Anybody doesn't want my spam, I say, "Get a spam filter, don't get personal!"
Now this fellow did everything right on being removed from my mailing list except one: he didn't put the slogan in the subject line. Here's my notice:
Note: I added a number of people to this mailing list today, many of whom probably submitted to the Melic Review, some after the magazine had closed. Forgive me, I was just trying to make sense of my address list. If you don't want to be on this mailing list, just hit 'reply' and insert the subject header, "Your blog really and truly sucks." Omission of either adverb will not constitute a release from continuing spam. If you get duplicate mailings, please write me.
I say he didn't strictly comply with my demand. His "Your blog really and truly sucks" was not in the subject line but in the text of a reply!
What law protects one from spam anyway? I try not to write people who don't want my notice, but it happens. Face it, my blog updates are as much spam as Viagra ads, it's only a difference in degree, not kind. No one asked me to start a blog nor has anyone written to say, "Oh, please, Dr. Chaffin, afflict us with a mailing about your blog!"
I want to submit this question to my esteemed sister, Esq., even though my blog peeved her as well, or better, caused her to call me peevish:
"You often comment that your family doesn't read your work, and I find this peevish because 1) I do, and 2) none of us really reads each other's briefs or ads so I'm not sure why this bears mentioning."
I corrected this oversight by altering my last entry, sorry Sis. I would also point out that ads and briefs are not generally considered entertainment for the reading public, so the categories are not comparable. Also, look at the extremes of blogging I must go to just to have such works offered for my perusal, which I would be more than happy to assay in order to defuse any nascent sibling rivalry.
My brothers don't read my blog anyway. Brother Dobey, in fact, told me: "I'm a writer. I don't read anything but myself." Gotta love that honesty, even if his writing, to my knowledge, only applies to copywriting. His company's biggest client is Yahoo, and he doesn't like that work. I don't like Yahoo either; they're at least as predatory as Microsoft--download one thing and you can't escape all the other things that pile into your hard drive like pixilated roaches, and the software you want, amazingly, won't run without all the other things.
So I irritated a stranger and a a loved one. Better, I irritated an editor, F.S., who asked me to remove my link to her magazine in my blog. I said I would if they restored my poem about Jimi Hendrix to their archives, from where it has mysteriously vanished, but they're not able to do that right now. There's no quid pro quo here; why should I comply? Because I was an editor for many years, I suppose, and understand.
I would not accuse them of actually despising my work, but now, I suspect, by causing them trouble I will have zero chance of them considering my new submission. That's fine as long as they fix the archive. Eventually. I'm tired of being de-published. Hell, half of my published work on the net has disappeared because nobody bothered do keep archives after their magazines folded. Understand-- some of these were good magazines at the time.
Since my last blog irritated some people, though no one has finished my essay yet, I'm offering a new prize: If you are on my mailing list and resist reading my blog, although you do read its announcement and excerpts for thirty days or more, I'll give you a $30 gift certificate to Amazon.com. In case of a tie there will be a quiz to determine who did or did not read what and for how long they managed to resist my siren song of bloviation.
Notice how my blog is becoming about my blog. This is how celebrities are born!
It's like a compost pile. You add layers to get a critical mass; soon the worms show up! One day you receive three letters from different people, and instead of writing what you planned you end up writing about reactions to your blog. Soon, if I reach a critical mass of self-reference, I shall finally become a celebrity, my ultimate goal and the only goal worth having anymore.
I celebrate myself! (Walt Whitman)
Oh, and to remind myself: What I really wanted to write about was 1) How none of us can get "the whole thing;" and 2) How all people are illegal aliens to me, and I won't let them sneak across the border of my mind. This must wait for another day.
I also meant to thank my cousin Doris for sending me the names of two new subscribers to my mailings. Thanks, Doris, and greetings to all the Erickson Clan up in Moorhead, MN.
--CE Chaffin
--from Zachary Bush. I don't know who he is but I thought a good way to clean out my address files was to just smack people on my mailing list and see what happened.
Anybody doesn't want my spam, I say, "Get a spam filter, don't get personal!"
Now this fellow did everything right on being removed from my mailing list except one: he didn't put the slogan in the subject line. Here's my notice:
Note: I added a number of people to this mailing list today, many of whom probably submitted to the Melic Review, some after the magazine had closed. Forgive me, I was just trying to make sense of my address list. If you don't want to be on this mailing list, just hit 'reply' and insert the subject header, "Your blog really and truly sucks." Omission of either adverb will not constitute a release from continuing spam. If you get duplicate mailings, please write me.
I say he didn't strictly comply with my demand. His "Your blog really and truly sucks" was not in the subject line but in the text of a reply!
What law protects one from spam anyway? I try not to write people who don't want my notice, but it happens. Face it, my blog updates are as much spam as Viagra ads, it's only a difference in degree, not kind. No one asked me to start a blog nor has anyone written to say, "Oh, please, Dr. Chaffin, afflict us with a mailing about your blog!"
I want to submit this question to my esteemed sister, Esq., even though my blog peeved her as well, or better, caused her to call me peevish:
"You often comment that your family doesn't read your work, and I find this peevish because 1) I do, and 2) none of us really reads each other's briefs or ads so I'm not sure why this bears mentioning."
I corrected this oversight by altering my last entry, sorry Sis. I would also point out that ads and briefs are not generally considered entertainment for the reading public, so the categories are not comparable. Also, look at the extremes of blogging I must go to just to have such works offered for my perusal, which I would be more than happy to assay in order to defuse any nascent sibling rivalry.
My brothers don't read my blog anyway. Brother Dobey, in fact, told me: "I'm a writer. I don't read anything but myself." Gotta love that honesty, even if his writing, to my knowledge, only applies to copywriting. His company's biggest client is Yahoo, and he doesn't like that work. I don't like Yahoo either; they're at least as predatory as Microsoft--download one thing and you can't escape all the other things that pile into your hard drive like pixilated roaches, and the software you want, amazingly, won't run without all the other things.
So I irritated a stranger and a a loved one. Better, I irritated an editor, F.S., who asked me to remove my link to her magazine in my blog. I said I would if they restored my poem about Jimi Hendrix to their archives, from where it has mysteriously vanished, but they're not able to do that right now. There's no quid pro quo here; why should I comply? Because I was an editor for many years, I suppose, and understand.
I would not accuse them of actually despising my work, but now, I suspect, by causing them trouble I will have zero chance of them considering my new submission. That's fine as long as they fix the archive. Eventually. I'm tired of being de-published. Hell, half of my published work on the net has disappeared because nobody bothered do keep archives after their magazines folded. Understand-- some of these were good magazines at the time.
Since my last blog irritated some people, though no one has finished my essay yet, I'm offering a new prize: If you are on my mailing list and resist reading my blog, although you do read its announcement and excerpts for thirty days or more, I'll give you a $30 gift certificate to Amazon.com. In case of a tie there will be a quiz to determine who did or did not read what and for how long they managed to resist my siren song of bloviation.
Notice how my blog is becoming about my blog. This is how celebrities are born!
It's like a compost pile. You add layers to get a critical mass; soon the worms show up! One day you receive three letters from different people, and instead of writing what you planned you end up writing about reactions to your blog. Soon, if I reach a critical mass of self-reference, I shall finally become a celebrity, my ultimate goal and the only goal worth having anymore.
I celebrate myself! (Walt Whitman)
Oh, and to remind myself: What I really wanted to write about was 1) How none of us can get "the whole thing;" and 2) How all people are illegal aliens to me, and I won't let them sneak across the border of my mind. This must wait for another day.
I also meant to thank my cousin Doris for sending me the names of two new subscribers to my mailings. Thanks, Doris, and greetings to all the Erickson Clan up in Moorhead, MN.
--CE Chaffin
I Have to Pay People to Read Me
I woke this morning feeling as if elves had beaten my body with tiny ball peen hammers all night; I attribute this to lying on my stomach to sample my new internet connection with a short phone cord, a dastardly position for all my busted disks. On the bright side I had a good movement this morning!
Meanwhile I’ve submitted “The Deprivathon” to eight editors whose magazines have published me before, full well knowing, due to its length, that the chances of publication are slim.
Here’s a plug for some of the magazines I sent it to, with links to my poems in all except small spiral notebook, which published my poem "Odd Dream" in March of 2002 but let the page disappear from the archives--this happens all the time, how you can get "de-published" on the net:
Tryst
Rose and Thorn
Plum Ruby Review
The Pedestal Magazine
Agnieska’s Dowry
Niederngasse
Also, I couldn’t resist a magazine new to me because of its title: Monkey Bicycle
I have been peeing from our deck onto the ceramic gnome I purchased, who stands with a mushroom cup above his head on a redwood stump below. Kathleen yesterday mistakenly thought it had rained for that reason. It’s a good ten feet down and out, by the way, so for a 51-year-old man I haven’t lost my fire hose just yet, though prostatic hypertrophy is inevitable for any man who has the audacity to pee for longer than his God-appointed days.
Kathleen claims the salamander she found was more spotted like a leopard, but I claim poetic license. It did look as if its spots had been dripped on its sides, not any kind of symmetric adornment, nevertheless in a general way they qualified as stripes.
Kathleen was late to read my blog yesterday so I’m punishing her by revealing the origin of her back problems: wild sex with her husband. There, I’ve said it. The pop we heard in Mexico two years ago when that first disk went was so impressive we had coitus interruptus from diskus explosis.
I can always delete this if it gets me in trouble.
Kathleen asked me yesterday if there were anything I wouldn’t do for attention. I couldn’t think of anything.
I need to acknowledge some folks who’ve been writing me and deserve praise for that reason, one of whom actually responded to my plea for new e-mail addresses for my mailing list, Jake, who led me to Miriam, who said she was happy to be added.
A Ms. Rea was quite complimentary about “The Deprivathon,” and asked me to contribute a letter to her site addressing tobacco. Many have praised the “Tobaccohontas” section of my poem (no doubt because it’s sexy and sexy poetry is hard to write).
Christopher T. George, Norman Ball, Vicki Broach, Sharon Kourous and Kathleen Burke, possibly David Ayers, have all promised to read my essay on Four Quartets. (For any interested, there is now a revised copy I’d rather you printed out, so please e-mail me for the new version before assaying the essay--love that ass-saying word, veritably oracular, even orificial.)
There will be a PRIZE, a gift certificate of $25 for Amazon.com, to the first reader who actually completes the essay. This prize will be known as the “The Chaffin Has to Pay People to Read Him Prize.” It will be awarded on the honor system. (Any skimming of the essay does not qualify; you must read it entire at least once, and that with a copy of Four Quartets in your hand for when I delve into the poems in detail.)
I know it’s not easy fare, though I strove to make it so. 33,000 words of criticism is asking a lot, even of your friends. My sister has read quite a bit of it, but family members don't qualify for the prize. Naturally, my wife and editor, Kathleen, was forced to read it by her job description. Although she hates my writing she enjoys criticizing it.
CE
Meanwhile I’ve submitted “The Deprivathon” to eight editors whose magazines have published me before, full well knowing, due to its length, that the chances of publication are slim.
Here’s a plug for some of the magazines I sent it to, with links to my poems in all except small spiral notebook, which published my poem "Odd Dream" in March of 2002 but let the page disappear from the archives--this happens all the time, how you can get "de-published" on the net:
Tryst
Rose and Thorn
Plum Ruby Review
The Pedestal Magazine
Agnieska’s Dowry
Niederngasse
Also, I couldn’t resist a magazine new to me because of its title: Monkey Bicycle
I have been peeing from our deck onto the ceramic gnome I purchased, who stands with a mushroom cup above his head on a redwood stump below. Kathleen yesterday mistakenly thought it had rained for that reason. It’s a good ten feet down and out, by the way, so for a 51-year-old man I haven’t lost my fire hose just yet, though prostatic hypertrophy is inevitable for any man who has the audacity to pee for longer than his God-appointed days.
Kathleen claims the salamander she found was more spotted like a leopard, but I claim poetic license. It did look as if its spots had been dripped on its sides, not any kind of symmetric adornment, nevertheless in a general way they qualified as stripes.
Kathleen was late to read my blog yesterday so I’m punishing her by revealing the origin of her back problems: wild sex with her husband. There, I’ve said it. The pop we heard in Mexico two years ago when that first disk went was so impressive we had coitus interruptus from diskus explosis.
I can always delete this if it gets me in trouble.
Kathleen asked me yesterday if there were anything I wouldn’t do for attention. I couldn’t think of anything.
I need to acknowledge some folks who’ve been writing me and deserve praise for that reason, one of whom actually responded to my plea for new e-mail addresses for my mailing list, Jake, who led me to Miriam, who said she was happy to be added.
A Ms. Rea was quite complimentary about “The Deprivathon,” and asked me to contribute a letter to her site addressing tobacco. Many have praised the “Tobaccohontas” section of my poem (no doubt because it’s sexy and sexy poetry is hard to write).
Christopher T. George, Norman Ball, Vicki Broach, Sharon Kourous and Kathleen Burke, possibly David Ayers, have all promised to read my essay on Four Quartets. (For any interested, there is now a revised copy I’d rather you printed out, so please e-mail me for the new version before assaying the essay--love that ass-saying word, veritably oracular, even orificial.)
There will be a PRIZE, a gift certificate of $25 for Amazon.com, to the first reader who actually completes the essay. This prize will be known as the “The Chaffin Has to Pay People to Read Him Prize.” It will be awarded on the honor system. (Any skimming of the essay does not qualify; you must read it entire at least once, and that with a copy of Four Quartets in your hand for when I delve into the poems in detail.)
I know it’s not easy fare, though I strove to make it so. 33,000 words of criticism is asking a lot, even of your friends. My sister has read quite a bit of it, but family members don't qualify for the prize. Naturally, my wife and editor, Kathleen, was forced to read it by her job description. Although she hates my writing she enjoys criticizing it.
CE
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Guest Comment by James Carroll; Wife Tests His Bitch-O-Meter
As wherelsewhere reported, snarveling protechs were fined to attend nearly every public causemaker, and the senior twankis lacks a strategy to forfend their rabbity inoculations. When asked by the mikeymouth how to respondblabber to this, Strendiman Buber said, “That’s how we like it—to snork the advantage over the drasticons and render their stewbase insoluble.”
Mayor Dipthong had nothing drastier to foretell on the subbie but his cess prickretary was furred to say, “A golfbag’s as good as a gun in a waitress pinch,” snoozing jabberly. The quotabots smiled, dahmerly excusing hizzoner’s smokesperson's tense of rumor.
On other frontages, a senior drizzle of the United Pessimists forked dark futures in an attempted derailment of overhappyizing members convinced that re-sizing may trend the weightylipoids negatively. Next to that waddle, is was lardish to preloon so vast an underbody with nary a soolick to pasture. In attrition many of of the bonetypes were snallagagging about how this coven of cows could druzzle the cupboard before even the mice could downchow.
--James Carroll
Thanks, James. Wocky your jabber had no claws. I hates wabbits!
That interlude surprised me.
I've been revising my essay on Four Quartets the past week and have managed to clip nearly 3,000 words from it, mainly by deleting anything having to do with me and not the work at hand, those little birdwalks into Craigland long after Elvis has left the building.
Kathleen discovered a massive salamander while gardening two days ago, a green thing with brown stripes limned in yellow, perhaps the endangered tiger salamander for all I know.
He made for some excellent sushi. Afterwards we cleaned our teeth with spotted brown owl quills.
Strange how frog and salamander both have that "Is it fish or chicken?" thing going, though I think Sally was just a wee bit fishier than Froggy.
My wife made an epic of shopping today.
This is how she tests me to see if I'm really out of a depression; she becomes a bitch to see if I can take it. If that feels safe she'll usually go into a depression of her own, the only luxury she prizes above a bath.
Then maybe I'm worth it.
I'll let you know. Everyone said mad poets would never last. And here we are near 7 years together.
BTW, it's Kathleen's birthday May 18.
Here's her e-mail address: klmchaffin@yahoo.com
Our home address is now 41001 Comptche Ukiah Road, Mendocino, CA, 95460. Telephone: 707 937-9985
My neck hurts more than my back right now. Gotta stop.
Thine,
CE
Mayor Dipthong had nothing drastier to foretell on the subbie but his cess prickretary was furred to say, “A golfbag’s as good as a gun in a waitress pinch,” snoozing jabberly. The quotabots smiled, dahmerly excusing hizzoner’s smokesperson's tense of rumor.
On other frontages, a senior drizzle of the United Pessimists forked dark futures in an attempted derailment of overhappyizing members convinced that re-sizing may trend the weightylipoids negatively. Next to that waddle, is was lardish to preloon so vast an underbody with nary a soolick to pasture. In attrition many of of the bonetypes were snallagagging about how this coven of cows could druzzle the cupboard before even the mice could downchow.
--James Carroll
Thanks, James. Wocky your jabber had no claws. I hates wabbits!
That interlude surprised me.
I've been revising my essay on Four Quartets the past week and have managed to clip nearly 3,000 words from it, mainly by deleting anything having to do with me and not the work at hand, those little birdwalks into Craigland long after Elvis has left the building.
Kathleen discovered a massive salamander while gardening two days ago, a green thing with brown stripes limned in yellow, perhaps the endangered tiger salamander for all I know.
He made for some excellent sushi. Afterwards we cleaned our teeth with spotted brown owl quills.
Strange how frog and salamander both have that "Is it fish or chicken?" thing going, though I think Sally was just a wee bit fishier than Froggy.
My wife made an epic of shopping today.
This is how she tests me to see if I'm really out of a depression; she becomes a bitch to see if I can take it. If that feels safe she'll usually go into a depression of her own, the only luxury she prizes above a bath.
Then maybe I'm worth it.
I'll let you know. Everyone said mad poets would never last. And here we are near 7 years together.
BTW, it's Kathleen's birthday May 18.
Here's her e-mail address: klmchaffin@yahoo.com
Our home address is now 41001 Comptche Ukiah Road, Mendocino, CA, 95460. Telephone: 707 937-9985
My neck hurts more than my back right now. Gotta stop.
Thine,
CE
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Wordland and Other Thoughts
4/28
I know my current diary cannot compete with the adventures that beset us in Mexico, but one must sometimes make bricks without straw, especially when one’s mood disorder persuades one that one is incapable of making a ham sandwich
This third person neutral prose troubles me. What is the proper usage to acknowledge a reading audience today? You may find it will best serve you to speak in the second person. Or is it better when I speak and the audience becomes the thou, and mutual recognition occurs. When one speaks of one doesn’t one seem some faceless automaton who obeys the directives of the audience and writer? There remains it, the more personal third person, he, and the alternative, she, and the most awkward of all, he/she—which I think has thankfully left the language.
(Among languages English is known for its common sense. As a mutation of Germanic and Romance languages, English is endlessly adaptable, unlike French, a language jealously protected from contamination from inferior tongues. If I could write in any language in 2006, I would choose English. What a luxury that it is my native tongue!)
Interesting to consider how these different usages affect the topography of Wordland. I speak of Wordland, of course, the land that language generates in our brains. Now that I am using the first person plural, do we feel more included or does it strike us as an imposition?
Wordland is nothing like reality. In Wordland the sound of a muffled gong at twilight should generate, at the very least, either leather or brass in the reader’s mind. Or not? Please write.
Perhaps the affinity for image generation from language determines the audience for poetry and the best-written prose.
If words paint they do so through the transducer of the brain, integrating the senses, dominated by vision. Much easier to describe a thing than a sound, smell, touch or taste.
If there is a wide range in our ability to transform language into an ersatz sensory experience, unique to each reader, there must also be a Jungian commonality that allows us to speak of written works to each other for purposes of discussion in Wordland.
Here it gets dicier, because it is words interpreting words until a new commonality of terms becomes the playing field. An upper level rink in the Galleria of Wordland, in other words. One must have a tremendous commonality of language simply to agree to disagree. In disagreeing through the common use of language, one is more in agreement than otherwise.
The existence of literary criticism is evidence of a general understanding of language.
Language need not be propaganda, or a puzzle of texts and context, assumptions deconstructionism, which I poorly understand, sometimes implies.
Language need not have an ulterior motive. It doesn’t have to be used. There can be honest language.
I write a blog without remuneration and only the faintest assurance than anyone reads me.
Why, then, do I write? To write. It’s a pleasure to write. If I do well, the thoughts I put on a page eventually assume a life of their own apart from me. I enjoy that. I also enjoy the progress I’ve made as a writer. For most of my life I was primarily a poet, but I have made some strides in prose in the last few years, and this blog, in addition to its therapeutic value, gives me room to practice.
I most envy the prose style of C. S. Lewis, who always makes me feel like just the two of us are sitting by a fire with a glass of port and talking. I don’t know how he achieves such intimacy in prose, but I suspect it has something to do with humility—not my chief virtue.
Recently I’ve been writing about depression. I didn’t e-mail anyone about it because I thought it wasn’t worth reading. But as T. S. Eliot said in our encounter at the end of my essay on his Four Quartets:
CE: Do you think my attempt to make your work more accessible to those who may not be among “the elite” of any value?
TS: I cannot pass judgment on what you undertake. It would be presumptuous. Let the reader decide.
CE: Good advice.
TS: The only advice.
The link to this issue with that essay is, btw:
T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets
(It’s been nearly three months since the publication of Melic’s last issue and no one to date has written me about the Eliot essay. I’m wondering if anyone has yet managed it. If anyone has, I’d like them to know I’ve revised it, especially the muddy “Overview” section, and I’d be happy to e-mail a revised draft to any who wish it. Just write me at cechaffin@hotmail.com with the subject header, “Eliot.”)
As to my mood, I think I am ascending out of the Slough of Despond, so cross your fingers because human kind cannot bear very much reality.
I intended to write today about our landlord, whom we nicknamed “I’m Not Crazy,” and our new neighbor from Manhattan, whom we nicknamed “I’m Not Creepy.” But I’ll save that for tomorrow, along with the Naked Tile Guy I met at an Irish bar tonight. Not to mention the hippie who pinched my nipples there, then ran after me when I was leaving, screaming “I’m not gay! I’m not gay!”—while begging me to slap his face in retaliation, indeed insisting until I touched his cheek with my finger, something he apparently needed for his primitive version of atonement.
I also want to write about the saga of our dog, Kenyon, and our grandson, Jacob. Something occurred between them 21/2 years ago that nearly tore our family apart, and I recently had a healing experience that seemed to put a cap on the trauma.
To be continued....
4/29 I'm Not Creepy and I'm Not Crazy
Why then has our landlord been christened “I’m Not Crazy”?
It’s simple. When we were first applying for tenancy at his little chalet in the redwoods, he would often call before 8 AM, hardly the hour a writer is generally conscious. One morning he called me to discuss the placement of various skirts around a chimney on the roof of his property, going on at length. I told him I was confused but was willing to listen. He concluded the conversation apparently satisfied, not realizing that he was not speaking with his carpenter. Afterwards the phone rang again, but I chose not to answer it, fearing it was he again. So it was. He left a message. “Doc, I’m sorry I called you earlier about construction issues, I want you to know, despite the appearance, that I’m not crazy.”
When a new acquaintance and prospective landlord feels the need to assure you that he is not crazy, the opposite suspicion blossoms. Hence his moniker.
Near us is another residence, one we considered before renting ours, into which a new tenant just moved. I’m Not Crazy warned us that a new tenant might be moving in, and that he hoped we’d get along. I told INC that we would do our best, but that we considered him our village god should any disputes arise. He gave me an anxious smile.
That same day I thought I heard a car, and going out back discovered a man with disheveled white hair that drooping in curls, a five-day beard, and polyester slacks, looking as seedy as a displaced professor. I approached him and he introduced himself. “I’m just killing time,” he said. “I’m just killing time. I hope you don’t mind. This is so beautiful. It’s the only place I’ve applied for. I hope you don’t mind. I’m just killing time.” He was obviously enraptured by the redwoods, but I found his social graces lacking; not that he was offensive, only in a world apart, in a word, creepy. There are better ways to introduce oneself. “Hi, my name is ___, I’ll be your neighbor, how are you? I hope you don’t mind, I’m just enjoying the view of the woods here. It’s really spectacular.”
Now it was none of my business, but seeing as how this man might be destined to be our near neighbor, I called I’m Not Crazy to render an opinion. I told him his prospective tenant seemed a little creepy to me. He responded by saying “We’re all different, you and I are different.” To which I said, “Yes, but although we are different, I don’t think either of us is creepy.” And that was that.
I’m Not Creepy turned out to be from Manhattan, where he just sold his co-op for God knows how much money. He’s been very friendly, just gave us bookcase today that he didn’t need, but his boundaries are shaky, the kind of person who immediately tells you about his most intimate struggles as if you had been bosom friends for a decade. He desperately wanted to tell me about his troubles with the co-op board, etc., etc., and I could have cared less, but he did go through four glasses of wine in less than half an hour while first visiting with us and unabashedly recited his travails back in Manhattan. At least INC seems harmless.
Thine as Always,
CE
I know my current diary cannot compete with the adventures that beset us in Mexico, but one must sometimes make bricks without straw, especially when one’s mood disorder persuades one that one is incapable of making a ham sandwich
This third person neutral prose troubles me. What is the proper usage to acknowledge a reading audience today? You may find it will best serve you to speak in the second person. Or is it better when I speak and the audience becomes the thou, and mutual recognition occurs. When one speaks of one doesn’t one seem some faceless automaton who obeys the directives of the audience and writer? There remains it, the more personal third person, he, and the alternative, she, and the most awkward of all, he/she—which I think has thankfully left the language.
(Among languages English is known for its common sense. As a mutation of Germanic and Romance languages, English is endlessly adaptable, unlike French, a language jealously protected from contamination from inferior tongues. If I could write in any language in 2006, I would choose English. What a luxury that it is my native tongue!)
Interesting to consider how these different usages affect the topography of Wordland. I speak of Wordland, of course, the land that language generates in our brains. Now that I am using the first person plural, do we feel more included or does it strike us as an imposition?
Wordland is nothing like reality. In Wordland the sound of a muffled gong at twilight should generate, at the very least, either leather or brass in the reader’s mind. Or not? Please write.
Perhaps the affinity for image generation from language determines the audience for poetry and the best-written prose.
If words paint they do so through the transducer of the brain, integrating the senses, dominated by vision. Much easier to describe a thing than a sound, smell, touch or taste.
If there is a wide range in our ability to transform language into an ersatz sensory experience, unique to each reader, there must also be a Jungian commonality that allows us to speak of written works to each other for purposes of discussion in Wordland.
Here it gets dicier, because it is words interpreting words until a new commonality of terms becomes the playing field. An upper level rink in the Galleria of Wordland, in other words. One must have a tremendous commonality of language simply to agree to disagree. In disagreeing through the common use of language, one is more in agreement than otherwise.
The existence of literary criticism is evidence of a general understanding of language.
Language need not be propaganda, or a puzzle of texts and context, assumptions deconstructionism, which I poorly understand, sometimes implies.
Language need not have an ulterior motive. It doesn’t have to be used. There can be honest language.
I write a blog without remuneration and only the faintest assurance than anyone reads me.
Why, then, do I write? To write. It’s a pleasure to write. If I do well, the thoughts I put on a page eventually assume a life of their own apart from me. I enjoy that. I also enjoy the progress I’ve made as a writer. For most of my life I was primarily a poet, but I have made some strides in prose in the last few years, and this blog, in addition to its therapeutic value, gives me room to practice.
I most envy the prose style of C. S. Lewis, who always makes me feel like just the two of us are sitting by a fire with a glass of port and talking. I don’t know how he achieves such intimacy in prose, but I suspect it has something to do with humility—not my chief virtue.
Recently I’ve been writing about depression. I didn’t e-mail anyone about it because I thought it wasn’t worth reading. But as T. S. Eliot said in our encounter at the end of my essay on his Four Quartets:
CE: Do you think my attempt to make your work more accessible to those who may not be among “the elite” of any value?
TS: I cannot pass judgment on what you undertake. It would be presumptuous. Let the reader decide.
CE: Good advice.
TS: The only advice.
The link to this issue with that essay is, btw:
T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets
(It’s been nearly three months since the publication of Melic’s last issue and no one to date has written me about the Eliot essay. I’m wondering if anyone has yet managed it. If anyone has, I’d like them to know I’ve revised it, especially the muddy “Overview” section, and I’d be happy to e-mail a revised draft to any who wish it. Just write me at cechaffin@hotmail.com with the subject header, “Eliot.”)
As to my mood, I think I am ascending out of the Slough of Despond, so cross your fingers because human kind cannot bear very much reality.
I intended to write today about our landlord, whom we nicknamed “I’m Not Crazy,” and our new neighbor from Manhattan, whom we nicknamed “I’m Not Creepy.” But I’ll save that for tomorrow, along with the Naked Tile Guy I met at an Irish bar tonight. Not to mention the hippie who pinched my nipples there, then ran after me when I was leaving, screaming “I’m not gay! I’m not gay!”—while begging me to slap his face in retaliation, indeed insisting until I touched his cheek with my finger, something he apparently needed for his primitive version of atonement.
I also want to write about the saga of our dog, Kenyon, and our grandson, Jacob. Something occurred between them 21/2 years ago that nearly tore our family apart, and I recently had a healing experience that seemed to put a cap on the trauma.
To be continued....
4/29 I'm Not Creepy and I'm Not Crazy
Why then has our landlord been christened “I’m Not Crazy”?
It’s simple. When we were first applying for tenancy at his little chalet in the redwoods, he would often call before 8 AM, hardly the hour a writer is generally conscious. One morning he called me to discuss the placement of various skirts around a chimney on the roof of his property, going on at length. I told him I was confused but was willing to listen. He concluded the conversation apparently satisfied, not realizing that he was not speaking with his carpenter. Afterwards the phone rang again, but I chose not to answer it, fearing it was he again. So it was. He left a message. “Doc, I’m sorry I called you earlier about construction issues, I want you to know, despite the appearance, that I’m not crazy.”
When a new acquaintance and prospective landlord feels the need to assure you that he is not crazy, the opposite suspicion blossoms. Hence his moniker.
Near us is another residence, one we considered before renting ours, into which a new tenant just moved. I’m Not Crazy warned us that a new tenant might be moving in, and that he hoped we’d get along. I told INC that we would do our best, but that we considered him our village god should any disputes arise. He gave me an anxious smile.
That same day I thought I heard a car, and going out back discovered a man with disheveled white hair that drooping in curls, a five-day beard, and polyester slacks, looking as seedy as a displaced professor. I approached him and he introduced himself. “I’m just killing time,” he said. “I’m just killing time. I hope you don’t mind. This is so beautiful. It’s the only place I’ve applied for. I hope you don’t mind. I’m just killing time.” He was obviously enraptured by the redwoods, but I found his social graces lacking; not that he was offensive, only in a world apart, in a word, creepy. There are better ways to introduce oneself. “Hi, my name is ___, I’ll be your neighbor, how are you? I hope you don’t mind, I’m just enjoying the view of the woods here. It’s really spectacular.”
Now it was none of my business, but seeing as how this man might be destined to be our near neighbor, I called I’m Not Crazy to render an opinion. I told him his prospective tenant seemed a little creepy to me. He responded by saying “We’re all different, you and I are different.” To which I said, “Yes, but although we are different, I don’t think either of us is creepy.” And that was that.
I’m Not Creepy turned out to be from Manhattan, where he just sold his co-op for God knows how much money. He’s been very friendly, just gave us bookcase today that he didn’t need, but his boundaries are shaky, the kind of person who immediately tells you about his most intimate struggles as if you had been bosom friends for a decade. He desperately wanted to tell me about his troubles with the co-op board, etc., etc., and I could have cared less, but he did go through four glasses of wine in less than half an hour while first visiting with us and unabashedly recited his travails back in Manhattan. At least INC seems harmless.
Thine as Always,
CE
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Micromanaging Melancholy
Yes, give up hope all ye who enter here. I persist in my depression that began three weeks ago, give or take a few mixed states.
I have settled into my negative personality. I imagine explanations for every blow of Kathleen's criticism, though it rarely comes--I am nevertheless prepared for that iron rain.
Everyone ignores me, I am invisible. I sit on the deck and read Keats by the redwoods and wish to become insensate in their towering excellence, their ramrod-straight striving for the sun without apology.
Love Keats' "Ode to Melancholy," one of the best poems I know that tries to make sense out of manic-depression. "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" skirt the same subject but not so personally.
Kathleen is happy. She tells me I am negative and boring. I wholeheartedly agree while in this state. I am grateful for her company but have no right to expect anything more than a grudging tolerance for my existence. She tells me she loves me but I know better; that's the transparent habit of compassion she's developed for a nobody of no consequence.
I am too tired to catch her in the lie; after all, what difference does it make if I cannot imagine being loved, much less feel love?
It's amazing how very bad Keats was until the last years of his life. The transformation is quick and unforeseen. Beforehand I would never have imagined him becoming a first rate poet, rather relegated as a minor Romantic hack. Only five of all his belabored sonnets are worth saving. Then come "St. Agnes" and the incredible Odes. Go figure.
Dead at 25. Lucky bastard. I see my last twenty years going by in a "poof" of forgettable gray negatives of nothing some fools might mistake for a life.
So much for the happy ramblings of the depressed.
NOTE: None of the above should be construed as strictly true or even what the writer believes, rather a sour exhalation of melancholic vapors.
Thine in Despondency,
Anonymous
I have settled into my negative personality. I imagine explanations for every blow of Kathleen's criticism, though it rarely comes--I am nevertheless prepared for that iron rain.
Everyone ignores me, I am invisible. I sit on the deck and read Keats by the redwoods and wish to become insensate in their towering excellence, their ramrod-straight striving for the sun without apology.
Love Keats' "Ode to Melancholy," one of the best poems I know that tries to make sense out of manic-depression. "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn" skirt the same subject but not so personally.
Kathleen is happy. She tells me I am negative and boring. I wholeheartedly agree while in this state. I am grateful for her company but have no right to expect anything more than a grudging tolerance for my existence. She tells me she loves me but I know better; that's the transparent habit of compassion she's developed for a nobody of no consequence.
I am too tired to catch her in the lie; after all, what difference does it make if I cannot imagine being loved, much less feel love?
It's amazing how very bad Keats was until the last years of his life. The transformation is quick and unforeseen. Beforehand I would never have imagined him becoming a first rate poet, rather relegated as a minor Romantic hack. Only five of all his belabored sonnets are worth saving. Then come "St. Agnes" and the incredible Odes. Go figure.
Dead at 25. Lucky bastard. I see my last twenty years going by in a "poof" of forgettable gray negatives of nothing some fools might mistake for a life.
So much for the happy ramblings of the depressed.
NOTE: None of the above should be construed as strictly true or even what the writer believes, rather a sour exhalation of melancholic vapors.
Thine in Despondency,
Anonymous
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Update
Last night I said to Kathleen, "Kenyon is old and boring." Whereupon she burst into angry tears and left for the upstairs, where we now have a full-size bed. I was afraid to sleep with her and didn't. She claimed I harped on Kenyon's age, I thought I just mentioned it. In trying to clarify my remark this morning, she broke into tears again.
Why are men so stupid?
Kenyon isn't boring when we take him swimming, and he was frisky this morning as he danced around Kathleen with his favorite sock in his mouth. I fear Kathleen without a dog and want to get a puppy. She feels a puppy would shorten Kenyon's life, displacing him.
She is always right because it is her dog.
But Kenyon may have another three years, and I dread the day he goes to doggie heaven, as my sweeheart will weep for weeks.
Can't be helped, I guess.
***************************
I've had an awful cold, so bad I needed a chest X-ray. I didn't see anything serious on the X-ray but I'll wait for the radiologist's imprimatur. What's so strange is that I know I'm coughing out of my anterior left lung, and recumbency worsens it, and I've been doing so for two months with various shades of productivity, presently yellow-white. This means it was time to check for TB (from Mexico), lymphoma, lung cancer and other delights. I'll have four weeks off the damn cigs Monday as will Kathleen.
I hate going to doctors. Luckily I saw a PA. Ka-Ching!
I had to tell him how important I was. He told me he knew that I had to know everything. Wise man.
Strange, I always hated hospitals and clinics, even when I worked in them or managed them. I hate the sterility of it all, the implied inhumanity.
Shit, as we have no insurance, they wanted $318 for the chest X-ray! But I get a 30% discount if I pay the bill withing 45 days. Could illegal immigrants be driving the price up? Hmmm.....
*****************************
Our check from Principal is late this month so we are being forced to be sober because we can't afford booze. I'd like to cut back on our drinking anyway, but as we so recently achieved smobriety, better one thing at a time, so I'm told.
Just a note for today. I'm computer-impaired as I left mine at my sister's like a blockhead. (You know, last minute, I'm telling myself "Don't forget the computer, Doc, don't forget..."
And then I do!)
Thine,
CE
Why are men so stupid?
Kenyon isn't boring when we take him swimming, and he was frisky this morning as he danced around Kathleen with his favorite sock in his mouth. I fear Kathleen without a dog and want to get a puppy. She feels a puppy would shorten Kenyon's life, displacing him.
She is always right because it is her dog.
But Kenyon may have another three years, and I dread the day he goes to doggie heaven, as my sweeheart will weep for weeks.
Can't be helped, I guess.
***************************
I've had an awful cold, so bad I needed a chest X-ray. I didn't see anything serious on the X-ray but I'll wait for the radiologist's imprimatur. What's so strange is that I know I'm coughing out of my anterior left lung, and recumbency worsens it, and I've been doing so for two months with various shades of productivity, presently yellow-white. This means it was time to check for TB (from Mexico), lymphoma, lung cancer and other delights. I'll have four weeks off the damn cigs Monday as will Kathleen.
I hate going to doctors. Luckily I saw a PA. Ka-Ching!
I had to tell him how important I was. He told me he knew that I had to know everything. Wise man.
Strange, I always hated hospitals and clinics, even when I worked in them or managed them. I hate the sterility of it all, the implied inhumanity.
Shit, as we have no insurance, they wanted $318 for the chest X-ray! But I get a 30% discount if I pay the bill withing 45 days. Could illegal immigrants be driving the price up? Hmmm.....
*****************************
Our check from Principal is late this month so we are being forced to be sober because we can't afford booze. I'd like to cut back on our drinking anyway, but as we so recently achieved smobriety, better one thing at a time, so I'm told.
Just a note for today. I'm computer-impaired as I left mine at my sister's like a blockhead. (You know, last minute, I'm telling myself "Don't forget the computer, Doc, don't forget..."
And then I do!)
Thine,
CE
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Sky is Falling
As part of my treatment for depression I try to stay busy and avoid being alone, even though I can't stand my own company. So I just finished five days with my oldest daughter and grandson Jacob, and am now visiting my two younger daughters in Long Beach, CA.
Yesterday I had to drive to San Diego for a doctor's appointment, about 100 miles from here, a two hour drive. After my appointment I stopped at Costco for my prescription, then got on the road about 1 PM. But I miscalculated. It was Good Friday and the last day before spring break for many students. But worst of all, it began to rain and rain hard. And nothing so paralyzes SoCal drivers as that strange liquid.
It took me four-and-a-half hours to get back to Long Beach, and I only narrowly avoided rear-ending several herky-jerky drivers who seemed driven by Brownian motion.
Now I used to write a regular column called "View from the Left Coast," but each of the three magazines that featured it eventually went belly-up. Either my column was a curse or this is simply a reflection of the instability of small presses, especially web publications. In any event, since my column on SoCal drivers in the rain is no longer available online (previously published in Savoy, I reprint it below.
I would happily write a column for an e-zine again but I would insist on being paid. Not a lot--just enough to make me feel like a real writer, not some cyberhackwhore who gives it away for free (as I do here!)
Here's the column:
The Sky is Falling!
With our annual rainfall around thirteen inches, the Los Angeles basin qualifies as a desert. Though our climate is labeled "Mediterranean," a low elevation hike in the foothills will quickly convince you by its spiny barrenness that this is a desert-- unless you prefer a jaunt downtown, where the traffic court building has huge planters filled with nothing but dirt. We survive by stealing water from Arizona and Northern California (see Chinatown), though desalinization plants (one is currently being tested on Catalina Island) will make all this moot in the future, given technology's exponential progress.
The Sons of Champlin sang: "Why Do People Run from the Rain?" In LA we don't. Instead we undergo mass paralysis. Freeways move slower than Mississippi mud. Millions call in sick. If "Nobody Walks in LA," then when it rains, we need a stronger pronoun than "nobody"— and "Mad dogs and Englishmen" has already been co-opted by the noonday sun.
Why, when it rains, do our freeways slow to the tempo of blood through plaque-filled coronaries? Our road surfaces are good, their drainage is good, there's really no reason to go less than 60 mph on the freeways when it rains. Yet magically, when it does rain, the freeways fill like seats for The Phantom of the Opera when Michael Crawford was still appearing.
Here's some possible reasons for this peculiarly LA phenomenon, something I've never witnessed in Houston or Seattle:
1) Braking in rain requires longer distances.
2) Water from puddles can impair brake function.
3) It's harder to see through rain.
4) A gray sky makes gray freeways treacherously indistinct.
5) People fear rain by force of unfamiliarity.
6) Not everyone has a SUV just yet.
7) Rain makes Angelenos mooningly homesick for their more temperate birthplaces, since anyone who lives here and was born here is a rarity.
8) Culture shock, or geographic/habitat dystonia, i.e., rain is natural, and LA, artificial.
9) The old man is snoring.
10) The spermatozoa-like rivulets on carnuba-waxed Jaguar hoods can be hypnotizing.
11) Leaking sun roofs and convertible tops.
12) Rain makes one concentrate too much on driving to employ a cell phone effectively.
13) All of the above.
14) None of the above.
15) #5, again. And again.
I asked my favorite California Highway Patrol contact, Officer Judy, to explain the phenomenon.
CE: Why is it that Angelenos go into paralysis when it rains?
OJ: Isn't it obvious?
CE: To you, perhaps.
OJ: We have a term for it.
CE: Yes?
OJ: Toxic Terrapinization.
CE: Huh?
OJ: Notice how each driver feels safe in their carapace, err…vehicle. They can see out the windows of their shell and proceed. When rain smears the windows people begin to lose faith in their vision and thus retract their heads and limbs, so to speak, and proceed at turtle speeds with their heads up their asses. Notice I didn't say tortoise, though perhaps I should, since the tortoise is a desert animal and rain in LA forces drivers into an unwanted state of evolution, back into their amphibious past.
CE: Are you sure it isn't because they can't use their cruise control settings?
OJ: Shit, those aren't any good on our freeways, anyway. Even at 2 A.M.
CE: But don't the windshield wipers help?
OJ: Oh, no, they make it worse. Most people don't know how to turn them on, and those who do are frightened by the noise. It reminds them of the score from Jaws, another aquatic nightmare.
CE: That's the silliest thing I've ever heard.
OJ: Sillier than a cop named "Judy," whose initials remind us all of a great friend of the force, or as we affectionately refer to him, “Bronco-Man?” Strange that grief over his murdered wife nearly drove him to suicide. Hey, you know if anyone’s picked up the reward yet? Rumor has it the killer had a limp and a bad arm.
CE: Oh, stop it. The Smothers Brothers show was canceled ages ago and hear I’m giving you a second chance for notoriety and you’re turning into a bore. What, did your mother contaminate your DNA sample, too?
OJ: No, actually, I think that was my dad. Or a sperm bank.
CE: No wonder they canceled the show, with lines like that.
OJ: Stop rubbing in the carnuba wax.
CE: Ouch!
OJ: As I was saying, the AQMB (Air Quality Management Board) has succeeded in reducing smog for over thirty years, I'll have you know, but they haven't made much headway with this other unwelcome toxin. As all well-informed Californians know, rain spoils the lettuce in our irrigated central valley, causes weeds to sprout in our planned communities, and forces the homeless inside, which frustrates do-gooders, and worst of all, it can ruin the crease in your chinos in a society where appearance is everything. Didn't you know most women under thirty iron their jeans?
CE: I uhh… no……
OJ: Rain is poison. We don't want it. We don't need it. The only people that benefit from the uninvited liquid are the owners of local ski resorts, but they have snow-making machines now so who needs it? Someday they may even progress to permanent synthetic snow, the kind which has successfully adorned Disneyland’s Matterhorn for fifty years. In short, rain is the enemy of the state. Mayor Yorty told me so himself.
CE: You don't look old enough to have known him.
OJ: Give me a break. I saw him on videos then met him through channeling, dufus. Where have you been?
CE: I like to read books and don’t believe in reincarnation, FYI.
OJ: God, you journalistic-literary types are so out of it. See, rain also interferes with our psychic reception, and that's big business. It's hard to get a clear reading from Mafu when it rains. Since a lot of people rely on channeling for automatic driving, so they can use their commute time to practice the saxophone or other important business, having their guidance severed is a crippling blow to transportation and commerce.
CE: So you're telling me that enough drivers depend on spirit guides that when rain impairs communication with the upper reaches, it affects traffic?
OJ: What planet did you say you were from? This is LA!
Per usual, Officer Judy proved a big help in understanding “Toxic Terrapinization.” I'm curious whether it affects Phoenix and San Diego similarly, but not curious enough to go down there and wait for a year just to see some real rain.
Thine in Truth and Rain,
C. E. Chaffin
Yesterday I had to drive to San Diego for a doctor's appointment, about 100 miles from here, a two hour drive. After my appointment I stopped at Costco for my prescription, then got on the road about 1 PM. But I miscalculated. It was Good Friday and the last day before spring break for many students. But worst of all, it began to rain and rain hard. And nothing so paralyzes SoCal drivers as that strange liquid.
It took me four-and-a-half hours to get back to Long Beach, and I only narrowly avoided rear-ending several herky-jerky drivers who seemed driven by Brownian motion.
Now I used to write a regular column called "View from the Left Coast," but each of the three magazines that featured it eventually went belly-up. Either my column was a curse or this is simply a reflection of the instability of small presses, especially web publications. In any event, since my column on SoCal drivers in the rain is no longer available online (previously published in Savoy, I reprint it below.
I would happily write a column for an e-zine again but I would insist on being paid. Not a lot--just enough to make me feel like a real writer, not some cyberhackwhore who gives it away for free (as I do here!)
Here's the column:
The Sky is Falling!
With our annual rainfall around thirteen inches, the Los Angeles basin qualifies as a desert. Though our climate is labeled "Mediterranean," a low elevation hike in the foothills will quickly convince you by its spiny barrenness that this is a desert-- unless you prefer a jaunt downtown, where the traffic court building has huge planters filled with nothing but dirt. We survive by stealing water from Arizona and Northern California (see Chinatown), though desalinization plants (one is currently being tested on Catalina Island) will make all this moot in the future, given technology's exponential progress.
The Sons of Champlin sang: "Why Do People Run from the Rain?" In LA we don't. Instead we undergo mass paralysis. Freeways move slower than Mississippi mud. Millions call in sick. If "Nobody Walks in LA," then when it rains, we need a stronger pronoun than "nobody"— and "Mad dogs and Englishmen" has already been co-opted by the noonday sun.
Why, when it rains, do our freeways slow to the tempo of blood through plaque-filled coronaries? Our road surfaces are good, their drainage is good, there's really no reason to go less than 60 mph on the freeways when it rains. Yet magically, when it does rain, the freeways fill like seats for The Phantom of the Opera when Michael Crawford was still appearing.
Here's some possible reasons for this peculiarly LA phenomenon, something I've never witnessed in Houston or Seattle:
1) Braking in rain requires longer distances.
2) Water from puddles can impair brake function.
3) It's harder to see through rain.
4) A gray sky makes gray freeways treacherously indistinct.
5) People fear rain by force of unfamiliarity.
6) Not everyone has a SUV just yet.
7) Rain makes Angelenos mooningly homesick for their more temperate birthplaces, since anyone who lives here and was born here is a rarity.
8) Culture shock, or geographic/habitat dystonia, i.e., rain is natural, and LA, artificial.
9) The old man is snoring.
10) The spermatozoa-like rivulets on carnuba-waxed Jaguar hoods can be hypnotizing.
11) Leaking sun roofs and convertible tops.
12) Rain makes one concentrate too much on driving to employ a cell phone effectively.
13) All of the above.
14) None of the above.
15) #5, again. And again.
I asked my favorite California Highway Patrol contact, Officer Judy, to explain the phenomenon.
CE: Why is it that Angelenos go into paralysis when it rains?
OJ: Isn't it obvious?
CE: To you, perhaps.
OJ: We have a term for it.
CE: Yes?
OJ: Toxic Terrapinization.
CE: Huh?
OJ: Notice how each driver feels safe in their carapace, err…vehicle. They can see out the windows of their shell and proceed. When rain smears the windows people begin to lose faith in their vision and thus retract their heads and limbs, so to speak, and proceed at turtle speeds with their heads up their asses. Notice I didn't say tortoise, though perhaps I should, since the tortoise is a desert animal and rain in LA forces drivers into an unwanted state of evolution, back into their amphibious past.
CE: Are you sure it isn't because they can't use their cruise control settings?
OJ: Shit, those aren't any good on our freeways, anyway. Even at 2 A.M.
CE: But don't the windshield wipers help?
OJ: Oh, no, they make it worse. Most people don't know how to turn them on, and those who do are frightened by the noise. It reminds them of the score from Jaws, another aquatic nightmare.
CE: That's the silliest thing I've ever heard.
OJ: Sillier than a cop named "Judy," whose initials remind us all of a great friend of the force, or as we affectionately refer to him, “Bronco-Man?” Strange that grief over his murdered wife nearly drove him to suicide. Hey, you know if anyone’s picked up the reward yet? Rumor has it the killer had a limp and a bad arm.
CE: Oh, stop it. The Smothers Brothers show was canceled ages ago and hear I’m giving you a second chance for notoriety and you’re turning into a bore. What, did your mother contaminate your DNA sample, too?
OJ: No, actually, I think that was my dad. Or a sperm bank.
CE: No wonder they canceled the show, with lines like that.
OJ: Stop rubbing in the carnuba wax.
CE: Ouch!
OJ: As I was saying, the AQMB (Air Quality Management Board) has succeeded in reducing smog for over thirty years, I'll have you know, but they haven't made much headway with this other unwelcome toxin. As all well-informed Californians know, rain spoils the lettuce in our irrigated central valley, causes weeds to sprout in our planned communities, and forces the homeless inside, which frustrates do-gooders, and worst of all, it can ruin the crease in your chinos in a society where appearance is everything. Didn't you know most women under thirty iron their jeans?
CE: I uhh… no……
OJ: Rain is poison. We don't want it. We don't need it. The only people that benefit from the uninvited liquid are the owners of local ski resorts, but they have snow-making machines now so who needs it? Someday they may even progress to permanent synthetic snow, the kind which has successfully adorned Disneyland’s Matterhorn for fifty years. In short, rain is the enemy of the state. Mayor Yorty told me so himself.
CE: You don't look old enough to have known him.
OJ: Give me a break. I saw him on videos then met him through channeling, dufus. Where have you been?
CE: I like to read books and don’t believe in reincarnation, FYI.
OJ: God, you journalistic-literary types are so out of it. See, rain also interferes with our psychic reception, and that's big business. It's hard to get a clear reading from Mafu when it rains. Since a lot of people rely on channeling for automatic driving, so they can use their commute time to practice the saxophone or other important business, having their guidance severed is a crippling blow to transportation and commerce.
CE: So you're telling me that enough drivers depend on spirit guides that when rain impairs communication with the upper reaches, it affects traffic?
OJ: What planet did you say you were from? This is LA!
Per usual, Officer Judy proved a big help in understanding “Toxic Terrapinization.” I'm curious whether it affects Phoenix and San Diego similarly, but not curious enough to go down there and wait for a year just to see some real rain.
Thine in Truth and Rain,
C. E. Chaffin
Monday, April 10, 2006
Back to Depression with Kenyon
Kathleen’s in NY until 4/17 and I have sunk into a depression. As a bipolar I, I knew I was in a mixed state at the motel in Fort Bragg. As my last post described, our new abode filled me with anxiety for the very contrast between the starkness of our indoor environment and the luxuriance of the coastal redwoods. I started lithium while there, and by the time I arrived at my daughter’s, near Sacramento, I had all the symptoms of depression, though masked by lithium.
I added olanzapine last night and today obtained a prescription from my new psychiatrist for fluoxetine and buproprion. Unfortunately my debit card won’t work to pay for them yet, as the money I gave my daughter to help obtain a lawyer put me in the hole again, from which my sister again extricated me, generous soul, with the admonition not to try to pay her back her loan until I was settled.
I do not regret the shame I felt in inconveniencing her, as the money I gave my daughter was to help with the custody battle for our grandson, Jacob, with whom I feel a special bond. But when depressed it is rare that I feel I am doing the right thing; in this I felt I was, which was a miracle, as with regard to everything else, while melancholic, I feel that I might as well throw darts. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” How about watermelon? Sit or stand? Drink or not drink? Walk or sit? All such considerations are only pointless exercises in the indecision of existential despair.
When depressed everything looks strange to me. Every place I go it seems I’ve never been there before. My own body becomes alien; my spirit has abandoned it. I seek distraction as I am incapable of pleasure. In the worst depressions I cannot eat or sleep. This one has not gotten that bad yet, and won’t, as I have quickly attacked with medications from long experience.
It is not surprising that I have finally sunk into a depression after the last year-and-a-half. I am not Superman, after all, and life takes its toll. And the increased medications, though they keep the abyss from completely swallowing me, only do so by clouding my vision and slowing my synapses. This is, of course, better than the hypervigilant deer-in-the-headlights anxiety that would otherwise attend me. What’s terrible about melancholia is the need to act, to do something, anything, while you cannot bring yourself to act. It’s like trying to run in place in cement. There’s a desperation that requires you do something but there’s nothing to do, only the sense that something must be done and done quickly, else you are damned.
I am not alone in this mood, however. Ever since he was separated from Kathleen, Kenyon has been moping. He doesn't want to go on walks, eats little, and when I leave him alone he just stares into the distance, sitting, waiting for Kathleen to come. It' unnerving. Today I let him out and positioned himself on the grass near my daughter's door, always looking in the distance as if Kathleen might arrive at any second.
The best thing in all this has been playing with my grandson, Jacob. But I'll save that for another post. He is so rambunctious there is not time for me to stew in my own juices for long. He left for his father's today and I miss him terribly already.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
I added olanzapine last night and today obtained a prescription from my new psychiatrist for fluoxetine and buproprion. Unfortunately my debit card won’t work to pay for them yet, as the money I gave my daughter to help obtain a lawyer put me in the hole again, from which my sister again extricated me, generous soul, with the admonition not to try to pay her back her loan until I was settled.
I do not regret the shame I felt in inconveniencing her, as the money I gave my daughter was to help with the custody battle for our grandson, Jacob, with whom I feel a special bond. But when depressed it is rare that I feel I am doing the right thing; in this I felt I was, which was a miracle, as with regard to everything else, while melancholic, I feel that I might as well throw darts. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” How about watermelon? Sit or stand? Drink or not drink? Walk or sit? All such considerations are only pointless exercises in the indecision of existential despair.
When depressed everything looks strange to me. Every place I go it seems I’ve never been there before. My own body becomes alien; my spirit has abandoned it. I seek distraction as I am incapable of pleasure. In the worst depressions I cannot eat or sleep. This one has not gotten that bad yet, and won’t, as I have quickly attacked with medications from long experience.
It is not surprising that I have finally sunk into a depression after the last year-and-a-half. I am not Superman, after all, and life takes its toll. And the increased medications, though they keep the abyss from completely swallowing me, only do so by clouding my vision and slowing my synapses. This is, of course, better than the hypervigilant deer-in-the-headlights anxiety that would otherwise attend me. What’s terrible about melancholia is the need to act, to do something, anything, while you cannot bring yourself to act. It’s like trying to run in place in cement. There’s a desperation that requires you do something but there’s nothing to do, only the sense that something must be done and done quickly, else you are damned.
I am not alone in this mood, however. Ever since he was separated from Kathleen, Kenyon has been moping. He doesn't want to go on walks, eats little, and when I leave him alone he just stares into the distance, sitting, waiting for Kathleen to come. It' unnerving. Today I let him out and positioned himself on the grass near my daughter's door, always looking in the distance as if Kathleen might arrive at any second.
The best thing in all this has been playing with my grandson, Jacob. But I'll save that for another post. He is so rambunctious there is not time for me to stew in my own juices for long. He left for his father's today and I miss him terribly already.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
We Move into the Former Home of a Slacker-Stoner
We moved into our new domicile on April 1, no fooling, located about four miles east of Mendocino, a small coastal town in NorCal. Although in the middle of the redwoods, the rental was our third choice. Due to “poor” credit (naturally besmirched by our homeless adventures to Mexico and back), in every competition for a rental the landlord invariably chose the party with better credit, despite bribes and proof of income.
Yes, bribes. I offered our first prospective landlord, whose income I learned was only $1500/mo., $500 extra just to choose us. She wouldn’t take it, choosing a single woman to live near her instead. Then her property would likely have seemed overpopulated what with me, Kathleen and Kenyon wandering around. I also think our energy overwhelmed this solitary artist who struck me as a chronic depressive besides. She missed out because I’m really good at raising such people out of their doldrums, which helps protect me from my own melancholy, which I’m suffering today—but I’ll get to that later.
Our next and preferred choice of all remaining rentals had a panoramic ocean view overlooking Highway 1 from the east. It was also the most expensive we considered. As if it mattered. Shot down by poor credit.
What, you voyeur, you want an actual number? Our best, Equifax: 539, “poor.” But I’m working on it.
Our third choice of rental, in which we now live, is situated in the coastal redwoods, as I noted above. Built a year ago, the walls are pristine white. The two-level modernistic dwelling has three skylights and lots of large windows to make it seem that we are living in a reverse terrarium. From inside a white vacuum we gaze out upon a wet, lush forest. Our outdoor deck is flanked by two large redwoods on each side.
Between the bare walls we sleep on two thin futons that our new landlord kindly lent us yesterday. He’s new to the business, likely why he trusted us in the first place with our poor credit, also the reason his former tenant was such an irresponsible pig, as the place was not clean when we moved in, but filthy in the way only a slacker-stoner could make it filthy.
We found no evidence of food in the cupboards but mouse turds nevertheless. Kathleen deduced the mice must have subsisted in part on pot seeds. Though the house was emptied of most objects (save the garage where many had been hastily thrown), it had the pervasive odor of Humboldt County grass, a smell Kathleen, being from NY, did not at first recognize. And although smoking had been forbidden by the lease, there were ashes everywhere, and the cupboards were littered with scraps of bud, so much that they amounted to at least half an ounce when collected. The linoleum in the kitchen had been repeatedly burned by dropping ash. The dishwasher had never been used. I found the original instructions and sample detergent within. (This may be in part explained by all the pizza boxes in the garage.)
Based on the evidence, we suspect this young man was self-employed in the growth and sale of pot, although like many dealers, he was only barely successful—because he liked his product too much. While I was gone yesterday Kathleen saw him creeping around the property, which spooked her. He had already stopped by the day before “to get some stuff.” When accosted by Kathleen he sheepishly explained he had returned for his “alfalfa seedlings,” not yet sprouted but supposedly contained in three 36-pocket plastic trays. Only a horse would need that much alfalfa, but I wasn’t there to intimidate the bastard, he had the cheek to ask Kathleen to help him carry his projects to the car. She said his eyes were strangely clear, nearly colorless, and although wispy and slight, that he gave off an air of hidden malevolence. Later she saw him creeping across the driveway up the hill to examine something. We both assume he had some gardening to attend to and hope he took care of it.
Wait—I just went downstairs to find another scraggly stoner at the door with a large, glass bowl held out like an offering. “Is Nathan here?” he asked. Now I was pissed; not only had Nathan shown up twice, but this was the second stoner who came here to buy some pot, so I assume by his proffered container, blithely parking in our driveway and disturbing our privacy. I told the young man that if I ever see Nathan again that I will kick his ass, and to spread the word that there was a new sheriff in town who didn’t sell pot.
You can’t imagine how uncool such a frontal assault is in drifty NorCal. The poor boy was in shock, so much so, I expect, that he got his diesel Mercedes stuck in the mud near the top of our driveway. I went up to help him, explaining I was pissed at Nathan and not him. Finally he managed to back his car down and escape with his belts screaming under the hood. I’ve noticed a lot of screaming belts in up here. Is it the moisture or just the quiet? Could cars actually be that noisy everywhere?
After this I went up the hill where Nathan had skulked to see what I could see. There he had hidden nothing but a Shop-Vac and two trashcans with five gallon buckets inside. I was expecting to find some dopage but I doubt that place gets enough sun. If Nathan comes back a third time, too bad; we don’t know where his vacuum or trash cans and buckets are, period (although we will be using some that very much resemble his). We learned this strategy of passive ignorance in Mexico. If the poor buy starts to whine, I’ll let him know that he is illegally on our property and thus in grave danger. (Jack: “Is there any other kind?”)
I shouldn’t be so hard on these slackers, it’s just a territorial thing—that Nathan was skulking around without identifying himself while my deaf wife was home alone. Kathleen opined that the reason Kenyon didn’t bark at him was because he seemed such a nonentity.
The 60s were never over; they just moved north.
As for my melancholy? It has to do with the cognitive dissonance of living in a sterile fish bowl while being surrounded by a lush forest. Add the fact Kathleen leaves for NY on Thursday and we have no bed as yet and our arthritis medication has not arrived from the Internet—
No, I think it’s mainly the stillness here! I’ve never lived in a place so quiet, where the refrigerator makes the most noise and you can hear a mouse fart. Strange. I did not know I was overstimulated; now I am suffering understimulation or stimulation withdrawal, not to mention withdrawal from my favorite stimulant, nicotine.
I’m sure I’ll become accustomed to this new space eventually but for now I find it kind of spooky. It’s as if I, too, were deaf, as there is nothing to hear. This must be somewhat how it is for Kathleen (without her hearing aid) all the time. Peaceful but slightly disconnected, so I suppose, and then there is always the issue of safety—you can’t hear a creeping stoner, for instance.
Kathleen loves it here, by the way. Her hearing aid normally picks up so much ambient noise that she finds the quiet delicious. “In the city all I hear is noise,” she says.
I’m still mad at Kenyon for not barking at a potential intruder. Then, to be fair, Kenyon don’t hear and see like he used to. And neither do I.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
Yes, bribes. I offered our first prospective landlord, whose income I learned was only $1500/mo., $500 extra just to choose us. She wouldn’t take it, choosing a single woman to live near her instead. Then her property would likely have seemed overpopulated what with me, Kathleen and Kenyon wandering around. I also think our energy overwhelmed this solitary artist who struck me as a chronic depressive besides. She missed out because I’m really good at raising such people out of their doldrums, which helps protect me from my own melancholy, which I’m suffering today—but I’ll get to that later.
Our next and preferred choice of all remaining rentals had a panoramic ocean view overlooking Highway 1 from the east. It was also the most expensive we considered. As if it mattered. Shot down by poor credit.
What, you voyeur, you want an actual number? Our best, Equifax: 539, “poor.” But I’m working on it.
Our third choice of rental, in which we now live, is situated in the coastal redwoods, as I noted above. Built a year ago, the walls are pristine white. The two-level modernistic dwelling has three skylights and lots of large windows to make it seem that we are living in a reverse terrarium. From inside a white vacuum we gaze out upon a wet, lush forest. Our outdoor deck is flanked by two large redwoods on each side.
Between the bare walls we sleep on two thin futons that our new landlord kindly lent us yesterday. He’s new to the business, likely why he trusted us in the first place with our poor credit, also the reason his former tenant was such an irresponsible pig, as the place was not clean when we moved in, but filthy in the way only a slacker-stoner could make it filthy.
We found no evidence of food in the cupboards but mouse turds nevertheless. Kathleen deduced the mice must have subsisted in part on pot seeds. Though the house was emptied of most objects (save the garage where many had been hastily thrown), it had the pervasive odor of Humboldt County grass, a smell Kathleen, being from NY, did not at first recognize. And although smoking had been forbidden by the lease, there were ashes everywhere, and the cupboards were littered with scraps of bud, so much that they amounted to at least half an ounce when collected. The linoleum in the kitchen had been repeatedly burned by dropping ash. The dishwasher had never been used. I found the original instructions and sample detergent within. (This may be in part explained by all the pizza boxes in the garage.)
Based on the evidence, we suspect this young man was self-employed in the growth and sale of pot, although like many dealers, he was only barely successful—because he liked his product too much. While I was gone yesterday Kathleen saw him creeping around the property, which spooked her. He had already stopped by the day before “to get some stuff.” When accosted by Kathleen he sheepishly explained he had returned for his “alfalfa seedlings,” not yet sprouted but supposedly contained in three 36-pocket plastic trays. Only a horse would need that much alfalfa, but I wasn’t there to intimidate the bastard, he had the cheek to ask Kathleen to help him carry his projects to the car. She said his eyes were strangely clear, nearly colorless, and although wispy and slight, that he gave off an air of hidden malevolence. Later she saw him creeping across the driveway up the hill to examine something. We both assume he had some gardening to attend to and hope he took care of it.
Wait—I just went downstairs to find another scraggly stoner at the door with a large, glass bowl held out like an offering. “Is Nathan here?” he asked. Now I was pissed; not only had Nathan shown up twice, but this was the second stoner who came here to buy some pot, so I assume by his proffered container, blithely parking in our driveway and disturbing our privacy. I told the young man that if I ever see Nathan again that I will kick his ass, and to spread the word that there was a new sheriff in town who didn’t sell pot.
You can’t imagine how uncool such a frontal assault is in drifty NorCal. The poor boy was in shock, so much so, I expect, that he got his diesel Mercedes stuck in the mud near the top of our driveway. I went up to help him, explaining I was pissed at Nathan and not him. Finally he managed to back his car down and escape with his belts screaming under the hood. I’ve noticed a lot of screaming belts in up here. Is it the moisture or just the quiet? Could cars actually be that noisy everywhere?
After this I went up the hill where Nathan had skulked to see what I could see. There he had hidden nothing but a Shop-Vac and two trashcans with five gallon buckets inside. I was expecting to find some dopage but I doubt that place gets enough sun. If Nathan comes back a third time, too bad; we don’t know where his vacuum or trash cans and buckets are, period (although we will be using some that very much resemble his). We learned this strategy of passive ignorance in Mexico. If the poor buy starts to whine, I’ll let him know that he is illegally on our property and thus in grave danger. (Jack: “Is there any other kind?”)
I shouldn’t be so hard on these slackers, it’s just a territorial thing—that Nathan was skulking around without identifying himself while my deaf wife was home alone. Kathleen opined that the reason Kenyon didn’t bark at him was because he seemed such a nonentity.
The 60s were never over; they just moved north.
As for my melancholy? It has to do with the cognitive dissonance of living in a sterile fish bowl while being surrounded by a lush forest. Add the fact Kathleen leaves for NY on Thursday and we have no bed as yet and our arthritis medication has not arrived from the Internet—
No, I think it’s mainly the stillness here! I’ve never lived in a place so quiet, where the refrigerator makes the most noise and you can hear a mouse fart. Strange. I did not know I was overstimulated; now I am suffering understimulation or stimulation withdrawal, not to mention withdrawal from my favorite stimulant, nicotine.
I’m sure I’ll become accustomed to this new space eventually but for now I find it kind of spooky. It’s as if I, too, were deaf, as there is nothing to hear. This must be somewhat how it is for Kathleen (without her hearing aid) all the time. Peaceful but slightly disconnected, so I suppose, and then there is always the issue of safety—you can’t hear a creeping stoner, for instance.
Kathleen loves it here, by the way. Her hearing aid normally picks up so much ambient noise that she finds the quiet delicious. “In the city all I hear is noise,” she says.
I’m still mad at Kenyon for not barking at a potential intruder. Then, to be fair, Kenyon don’t hear and see like he used to. And neither do I.
Thine in Truth and Art,
C. E. Chaffin
Monday, April 03, 2006
Epic on Addiction: The Deprivathon Entire (thoughts while quitting smoking)
The Deprivathon
I
Nothing fills the body like tobacco gas
sating each bronchiole
until alveoli collapse,
punctured bubble wrap,
Yet it is not the health risk I address but slavery,
the false comfort of stuffing the God-shaped vacuum
with dark matter.
Inscrutable face of the known universe
know that without tobacco
my chest is an abandoned altar,
my lungs empty gloves.
This day
by the grace of the unknowable
I will not smoke.
II
How can I wax oracular about a deadly habit? Shall I say, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by white voodoo missiles from the military industrial suicidal tobacco coven,
Red Man's revenge funded by oil-wealthy Oklahoma Indians,
saw the blue smoke climb the undefended caves of their nostrils like mutated kudzu planting a Manitou deep in their unsuspecting ribs
to one day metastasize and waste their brains for the prize of a green oxygen tank and a wheelchair!
O Cancer! O Emphysema! O Stroke! O Coronary!
O insidious degenerative enzymes from secret hybrid leaves developed for mass destruction!
O refreshing Salems in a waterfall among the green ferns!
O perfect models with khaki slacks and sweaters tied around their necks sailing off Martha's Vineyard, liberated by Newports!
O Marlboro man who never talks but rides by purple mountains and orange sunsets in his fleece-lined suede jacket!
O Virginia Slims who keep that weight off for a woman who is only a clothes rack for designers, X-Ray clavicles and Botox.
O be happy, go Lucky, Winston tastes good, the pause that refreshes, smooth, smooth, smooth as polished agate.
But I'm not starving hysterical naked only addicted to inhaled nicotine jolting the brain in seven seconds, instantaneous pleasure loop hydrogen jukebox!
III
Mornings are made worse
by smoking too much under the influence of alcohol
the night before, which temporarily dulled
the pain of inhalation. You wake up
feeling like a crematorium,
still, have to have that morning rush
while listening to the coffeemaker
hum with the refrigerator.
I can’t ignore the pleading quality of machines—
a whir, a whine, as if a wish for petting,
as if they sympathized somehow,
could understand the loss of choice.
It’s said "one of three" will die from smoking
but this is only pseudoscientific propaganda.
Easier to see the damage in finely furrowed faces,
gray with sunken cheeks
who purse their lips to make it easier to exhale
against the increased resistance:
The blue bloaters of emphysema.
Then there are the barrel-chested wheezers
who hyperventilate to compensate:
The pink puffers of chronic bronchitis.
Yet none of this so terrifies
as does the black crab.
Lung cancer patients stink.
No one wants to play with them
on the field or at the rink,
no one wants to stay with them.
Because cancer is possession by an alien—
cells gone native, cells too stupid to know
they destroy their host,
mole burrowed deep, tiny claws
scratch at the pulmonary tree
in the darkness of blood and bronchi.
IV
Depression and loss look much the same
along life's hedgerow, still, differ
as hawthorn from holly, as grape from pear.
Loss is a coin tossed down a well
until you hear the plunk of water and weep;
in depression you never hear the coin
drop.
Nicotine, like benzedrine,
has antidepressant properties.
Deprived, the mind shudders
like an old engine.
Who will pull this train?
I think I can, I think I can,
desiring this man's art and that man's scope
the sea has jaws and a gray-green coat.
what hangs from the jaws is pulverized
to pebbles until the shingle rattles
before an otter floating in the caramel kelp.
The disconnection, stoppage, hesitation, grappling
for numbers, addresses, details, sans nicotine
I mourn the vanished power of the stimulated reign.
V
My parents smoked, it was not unpleasant.
It was present at Christmas with the holly wreath
and the brown couch with the little nubs
and the wrought iron legs from which my mother read
Hiawatha to us while smoking.
Mom smoked when I was a fetus.
Bad, bad mother.
Mom withheld her nipples from me.
Mean, mean mother.
She tried to nurse my older brother but failed.
Weak, weak mother.
At birth I knew what she knew:
There must be a substitute.
VI
I saw the spirit of fire,
Tobaccohontas
in her coronet of coals
dancing in a leaf skirt
of golden brown,
her incendiary thighs
burning burning burning.
Before her only God breathed fire.
Afterwards came dragons,
venomous snakes and toads.
Finally man's penis swelled
and woman's labia grew
bloody-purple, pink and wet.
I heard Tobaccohontas speak:
"I burn for you, Brave.
Do not forget your love.
Cleave me with your tomahawk,
undo the seam so lightly stitched by nature
or my own nails will ream it,
drive your spear into the ravenous slit
beneath the golden curls of my mons,
pound me as a bear ruts a sow
in a ditch littered with salmon bones and acorns.
My mouths have swallowed
the seed of many warriors, come.”
Ah, Tobaccohontas,
I once fingered your moist fragrance
in blue pouches of Drum tobacco.
Your scent still calls me
from the tent of the elders
puff by puff
but moderation is beyond me.
I must devour and be devoured.
Hear me:
My lava grows hard in your ocean.
Your undersea cleft shapes me.
My tip breaks off like a coal in your wet purse.
I shudder, deflate and die.
You are the siren of my death.
I stub you out in ashtrays
as if they were vampires’ coffins
through which to pound my stake.
Now I can only suck
the memory of your forbidden pleasure
and cast its usage toward some future
beyond obsession. Forgive me
Princess; you were the best.
VII
Withdrawal still twists me on its spit.
I suck my toothbrush in a rage,
spit out toothpicks like a nail gun.
When then is there an end to it?
Was slavery worth the wage?
No—I must—can’t—think of it!
I’ll wash my inside windows today.
After the Windex and the suds
the accumulated slime runs
yellow and gray onto my rag,
phlegm of oncology.
the same sick mucous color you get
from washing an ashtray—
I was living in an ashtray—no;
I was a living ashtray.
.
Yet when the windows were done
I was at a loss at how to reward myself.
A glass of water? A walk in the park?
A swim at the gym?
A pitcher of warm spit?
Nothing beats a cigarette.
I must hold on hold out hold to
hold forth hold back hold sway—
Mommy, don’t let me die an ashtray.
VIII
There is an absence greater than absence of life
there is a hollow hollower than death
when the lights go off in the gunman's eyes
and every man becomes a purse.
There is a loss greater than loss of pleasure
when there is no breast or nipple
and the nurse removes your pacifier
and the wailing of your deprivation
goes unnoticed in the bassinet
and your infant body shakes
into the grief of sleep.
Or when standing at the railing of your crib
and there is no mother
and no substitute for mother
in the endless darkness—
“Why can’t you change yourself?”
After such abandonment you may spend your life
seeking a fix like the milk-dewed nipple
in the rhythm of the bliss of your sucking,
the warm pillow of breast pressed against your face
IX
There is so little poetry left
I suffer its loss as much as cigarettes.
It may leave a bigger emptiness.
Love or addiction?
Sometimes I think addiction
especially when I am around poets
and feel the heat of their narcissism
rise like steam from a meatloaf,
the endless infantile hunger to be heard.
The problem is that poets can’t give themselves a fix,
they need an audience for praise.
Plato was right and wrong.
He never imagined the democratization of poetry,
fearing Aeschylus and Aristophanes
not Angelou and Bukowski.
You say I am writing prose now.
I say form must fit function
in this proliferation of venues and dilution of talent
on the Internet and in overpriced coffeehouses.
What do I really think?
Forget poetry, poetry sucks.
Poetry sucks donkey dicks in the dead of night.
Poetry sucks the butt holes of rabid bats
Poetry sucks the big Walla-Walla like a Staubsauger.
Poetry is a concentration camp for narcissists.
Poetry is eternal competition with every poet, living or dead.
Poetry causes stillborns, curdles milk and stains the altar with pig’s blood.
Poetry is bread in the mouth of a pigeon spreading Legionnaire's disease.
Poetry is the word flu.
Fuck poetry.
X
When asked why she didn't quit,
Bette Davis replied, "Then how would I talk?"
gesturing with her cigarette holder.
And what if I become seriously depressed
when the faces of familiar cars look strange
and I am frightened by doorknobs and tea kettles,
when whatever spark of self I knew
flies up and out the chimney into the wailing dark?
Will I zero-sum suck again?
That is always one danger: when smoking
or not smoking appear equally pointless
in a universe without pity.
Ergo, “Who cares if I smoke?”
In that state, which always returns
I vow to pretend to care
against all evidence.
The other danger is similar—
on a very good day, say your daughter’s wedding
or grandson's baptism, when the joyful
conviction of invulnerability
whispers, “You’ve achieved control
and can have just one.”
I have decided
when I get the urge
to imagine a silver angel
with glacier-blue eyes and crystal hair
swooping down like Winged Victory
to pluck my desire in her gleaming hands
and throw it back to heaven as a spent coal.
I
Nothing fills the body like tobacco gas
sating each bronchiole
until alveoli collapse,
punctured bubble wrap,
Yet it is not the health risk I address but slavery,
the false comfort of stuffing the God-shaped vacuum
with dark matter.
Inscrutable face of the known universe
know that without tobacco
my chest is an abandoned altar,
my lungs empty gloves.
This day
by the grace of the unknowable
I will not smoke.
II
How can I wax oracular about a deadly habit? Shall I say, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by white voodoo missiles from the military industrial suicidal tobacco coven,
Red Man's revenge funded by oil-wealthy Oklahoma Indians,
saw the blue smoke climb the undefended caves of their nostrils like mutated kudzu planting a Manitou deep in their unsuspecting ribs
to one day metastasize and waste their brains for the prize of a green oxygen tank and a wheelchair!
O Cancer! O Emphysema! O Stroke! O Coronary!
O insidious degenerative enzymes from secret hybrid leaves developed for mass destruction!
O refreshing Salems in a waterfall among the green ferns!
O perfect models with khaki slacks and sweaters tied around their necks sailing off Martha's Vineyard, liberated by Newports!
O Marlboro man who never talks but rides by purple mountains and orange sunsets in his fleece-lined suede jacket!
O Virginia Slims who keep that weight off for a woman who is only a clothes rack for designers, X-Ray clavicles and Botox.
O be happy, go Lucky, Winston tastes good, the pause that refreshes, smooth, smooth, smooth as polished agate.
But I'm not starving hysterical naked only addicted to inhaled nicotine jolting the brain in seven seconds, instantaneous pleasure loop hydrogen jukebox!
III
Mornings are made worse
by smoking too much under the influence of alcohol
the night before, which temporarily dulled
the pain of inhalation. You wake up
feeling like a crematorium,
still, have to have that morning rush
while listening to the coffeemaker
hum with the refrigerator.
I can’t ignore the pleading quality of machines—
a whir, a whine, as if a wish for petting,
as if they sympathized somehow,
could understand the loss of choice.
It’s said "one of three" will die from smoking
but this is only pseudoscientific propaganda.
Easier to see the damage in finely furrowed faces,
gray with sunken cheeks
who purse their lips to make it easier to exhale
against the increased resistance:
The blue bloaters of emphysema.
Then there are the barrel-chested wheezers
who hyperventilate to compensate:
The pink puffers of chronic bronchitis.
Yet none of this so terrifies
as does the black crab.
Lung cancer patients stink.
No one wants to play with them
on the field or at the rink,
no one wants to stay with them.
Because cancer is possession by an alien—
cells gone native, cells too stupid to know
they destroy their host,
mole burrowed deep, tiny claws
scratch at the pulmonary tree
in the darkness of blood and bronchi.
IV
Depression and loss look much the same
along life's hedgerow, still, differ
as hawthorn from holly, as grape from pear.
Loss is a coin tossed down a well
until you hear the plunk of water and weep;
in depression you never hear the coin
drop.
Nicotine, like benzedrine,
has antidepressant properties.
Deprived, the mind shudders
like an old engine.
Who will pull this train?
I think I can, I think I can,
desiring this man's art and that man's scope
the sea has jaws and a gray-green coat.
what hangs from the jaws is pulverized
to pebbles until the shingle rattles
before an otter floating in the caramel kelp.
The disconnection, stoppage, hesitation, grappling
for numbers, addresses, details, sans nicotine
I mourn the vanished power of the stimulated reign.
V
My parents smoked, it was not unpleasant.
It was present at Christmas with the holly wreath
and the brown couch with the little nubs
and the wrought iron legs from which my mother read
Hiawatha to us while smoking.
Mom smoked when I was a fetus.
Bad, bad mother.
Mom withheld her nipples from me.
Mean, mean mother.
She tried to nurse my older brother but failed.
Weak, weak mother.
At birth I knew what she knew:
There must be a substitute.
VI
I saw the spirit of fire,
Tobaccohontas
in her coronet of coals
dancing in a leaf skirt
of golden brown,
her incendiary thighs
burning burning burning.
Before her only God breathed fire.
Afterwards came dragons,
venomous snakes and toads.
Finally man's penis swelled
and woman's labia grew
bloody-purple, pink and wet.
I heard Tobaccohontas speak:
"I burn for you, Brave.
Do not forget your love.
Cleave me with your tomahawk,
undo the seam so lightly stitched by nature
or my own nails will ream it,
drive your spear into the ravenous slit
beneath the golden curls of my mons,
pound me as a bear ruts a sow
in a ditch littered with salmon bones and acorns.
My mouths have swallowed
the seed of many warriors, come.”
Ah, Tobaccohontas,
I once fingered your moist fragrance
in blue pouches of Drum tobacco.
Your scent still calls me
from the tent of the elders
puff by puff
but moderation is beyond me.
I must devour and be devoured.
Hear me:
My lava grows hard in your ocean.
Your undersea cleft shapes me.
My tip breaks off like a coal in your wet purse.
I shudder, deflate and die.
You are the siren of my death.
I stub you out in ashtrays
as if they were vampires’ coffins
through which to pound my stake.
Now I can only suck
the memory of your forbidden pleasure
and cast its usage toward some future
beyond obsession. Forgive me
Princess; you were the best.
VII
Withdrawal still twists me on its spit.
I suck my toothbrush in a rage,
spit out toothpicks like a nail gun.
When then is there an end to it?
Was slavery worth the wage?
No—I must—can’t—think of it!
I’ll wash my inside windows today.
After the Windex and the suds
the accumulated slime runs
yellow and gray onto my rag,
phlegm of oncology.
the same sick mucous color you get
from washing an ashtray—
I was living in an ashtray—no;
I was a living ashtray.
.
Yet when the windows were done
I was at a loss at how to reward myself.
A glass of water? A walk in the park?
A swim at the gym?
A pitcher of warm spit?
Nothing beats a cigarette.
I must hold on hold out hold to
hold forth hold back hold sway—
Mommy, don’t let me die an ashtray.
VIII
There is an absence greater than absence of life
there is a hollow hollower than death
when the lights go off in the gunman's eyes
and every man becomes a purse.
There is a loss greater than loss of pleasure
when there is no breast or nipple
and the nurse removes your pacifier
and the wailing of your deprivation
goes unnoticed in the bassinet
and your infant body shakes
into the grief of sleep.
Or when standing at the railing of your crib
and there is no mother
and no substitute for mother
in the endless darkness—
“Why can’t you change yourself?”
After such abandonment you may spend your life
seeking a fix like the milk-dewed nipple
in the rhythm of the bliss of your sucking,
the warm pillow of breast pressed against your face
IX
There is so little poetry left
I suffer its loss as much as cigarettes.
It may leave a bigger emptiness.
Love or addiction?
Sometimes I think addiction
especially when I am around poets
and feel the heat of their narcissism
rise like steam from a meatloaf,
the endless infantile hunger to be heard.
The problem is that poets can’t give themselves a fix,
they need an audience for praise.
Plato was right and wrong.
He never imagined the democratization of poetry,
fearing Aeschylus and Aristophanes
not Angelou and Bukowski.
You say I am writing prose now.
I say form must fit function
in this proliferation of venues and dilution of talent
on the Internet and in overpriced coffeehouses.
What do I really think?
Forget poetry, poetry sucks.
Poetry sucks donkey dicks in the dead of night.
Poetry sucks the butt holes of rabid bats
Poetry sucks the big Walla-Walla like a Staubsauger.
Poetry is a concentration camp for narcissists.
Poetry is eternal competition with every poet, living or dead.
Poetry causes stillborns, curdles milk and stains the altar with pig’s blood.
Poetry is bread in the mouth of a pigeon spreading Legionnaire's disease.
Poetry is the word flu.
Fuck poetry.
X
When asked why she didn't quit,
Bette Davis replied, "Then how would I talk?"
gesturing with her cigarette holder.
And what if I become seriously depressed
when the faces of familiar cars look strange
and I am frightened by doorknobs and tea kettles,
when whatever spark of self I knew
flies up and out the chimney into the wailing dark?
Will I zero-sum suck again?
That is always one danger: when smoking
or not smoking appear equally pointless
in a universe without pity.
Ergo, “Who cares if I smoke?”
In that state, which always returns
I vow to pretend to care
against all evidence.
The other danger is similar—
on a very good day, say your daughter’s wedding
or grandson's baptism, when the joyful
conviction of invulnerability
whispers, “You’ve achieved control
and can have just one.”
I have decided
when I get the urge
to imagine a silver angel
with glacier-blue eyes and crystal hair
swooping down like Winged Victory
to pluck my desire in her gleaming hands
and throw it back to heaven as a spent coal.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Quitting Smoking Day 6; Update on Our Situation
First, as of yesterday, we moved into our own rented domicile, and slept on linoleum in sleeping bags without a chair to sit on, in a house schmegged up by a former stoner tenant with ashes and bud trace everywhere--and seedling pots, and mouse turds in the cupboards.
But at least this slacker launched, since 33% of men 24-32, I read today, are still living with their parents.
Anyway, our new landlord, whom we call "I'm not crazy" Bill (because one morning he called me to discuss the building of a water tank and only afterwards realized I wasn't the contractor--so he left another message assuring us he "was not crazy," and it stuck).
Very nice man; as a landlord he has a lot to learn. Still, in that he's not charging us to crash in the redwoods in the modern two-level studio with the large windows and skylights until the place is ship-shape, hey, where's the downside?--only in our aging bones. Send us a mattress ASAP.
Kathleen proceeds to NY on Thursday for a spell; I proceed to Rachel and Jacob's (first daughter and only grandkid) on the same day and will stay until I'm not welcome, but I figure the more babysit my boy, the happier mom will be, and I might even get three days without a scene. One can hope. "Daughters are forever."
Finally, today, below, the conclusion of The Deprivathon, the longest poem I've ever penned. It may end more with a whimper than a bang, but isn't that the way giving up an addiction goes? I mean, being a non-smoker becomes almost commonplace? (Although I do describe my greatest know dangers for recidivism.)
Anyway, for those who haven't glanced this way, since I'm not announcing a new blog until I post the poem in its entirety, the work covers the first six days of withdrawal. That was enough time for God to create the world, likewise enough time for a poetic journey in a world of video blogs.
Thanks to C. Bagley for hanging with me for the duration!
Thine as ever,
Dr. Chaffin
*************************
The Deprivathon, Day 6
X. Will I Make It?
When asked why she didn't quit,
Bette Davis asked, "Then how would I talk?"
while furiously gesturing with her cigarette holder.
And what if as a non-smoker
I become seriously depressed
when the faces of familiar cars look strange
and I am firghtened by doorknobs and tea kettles,
when whatever spark of self I knew
flies up and out the chimney into the wailing dark?
That is always one danger, when smoking
or not smoking appear equally pointless
in a universe mostly composed of dark matter
so why should I care if I smoke?
In that state, which will come again,
I must pretend to care against all evidence.
The other danger is similar
as on a very good day,
say your daughter’s wedding or grandson's baptism,
when the joyful conviction of invulnerability
convinces you you’ve finally got control
and you can have just one.
Yet on a day like this,
betwee cycles and rather stable,
I choose to imagine a silver angel
with glacier-blue eyes and crystal hair
swooping down like a winged victory
to pluck my desire in her gleaming hands
and throw it back to heaven like a coal.
Finis
But at least this slacker launched, since 33% of men 24-32, I read today, are still living with their parents.
Anyway, our new landlord, whom we call "I'm not crazy" Bill (because one morning he called me to discuss the building of a water tank and only afterwards realized I wasn't the contractor--so he left another message assuring us he "was not crazy," and it stuck).
Very nice man; as a landlord he has a lot to learn. Still, in that he's not charging us to crash in the redwoods in the modern two-level studio with the large windows and skylights until the place is ship-shape, hey, where's the downside?--only in our aging bones. Send us a mattress ASAP.
Kathleen proceeds to NY on Thursday for a spell; I proceed to Rachel and Jacob's (first daughter and only grandkid) on the same day and will stay until I'm not welcome, but I figure the more babysit my boy, the happier mom will be, and I might even get three days without a scene. One can hope. "Daughters are forever."
Finally, today, below, the conclusion of The Deprivathon, the longest poem I've ever penned. It may end more with a whimper than a bang, but isn't that the way giving up an addiction goes? I mean, being a non-smoker becomes almost commonplace? (Although I do describe my greatest know dangers for recidivism.)
Anyway, for those who haven't glanced this way, since I'm not announcing a new blog until I post the poem in its entirety, the work covers the first six days of withdrawal. That was enough time for God to create the world, likewise enough time for a poetic journey in a world of video blogs.
Thanks to C. Bagley for hanging with me for the duration!
Thine as ever,
Dr. Chaffin
*************************
The Deprivathon, Day 6
X. Will I Make It?
When asked why she didn't quit,
Bette Davis asked, "Then how would I talk?"
while furiously gesturing with her cigarette holder.
And what if as a non-smoker
I become seriously depressed
when the faces of familiar cars look strange
and I am firghtened by doorknobs and tea kettles,
when whatever spark of self I knew
flies up and out the chimney into the wailing dark?
That is always one danger, when smoking
or not smoking appear equally pointless
in a universe mostly composed of dark matter
so why should I care if I smoke?
In that state, which will come again,
I must pretend to care against all evidence.
The other danger is similar
as on a very good day,
say your daughter’s wedding or grandson's baptism,
when the joyful conviction of invulnerability
convinces you you’ve finally got control
and you can have just one.
Yet on a day like this,
betwee cycles and rather stable,
I choose to imagine a silver angel
with glacier-blue eyes and crystal hair
swooping down like a winged victory
to pluck my desire in her gleaming hands
and throw it back to heaven like a coal.
Finis
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Unexpected Light
Selected Poems and Love Poems 1998-2008 ON SALE NOW!