MIcrosqueeze and My Day as an Atheist

If you remember yesterday's post, well good. Here's the deal:

Microsquish is using Vista as a new OS to make all your old programs obsolete and not transferable--which means, if you buy a computer with Vista already loaded, that you will have to pay all over again for Word, Norton, whatever programs you have purchased in the past.

This is their dastardly approach.

Bill needs the money for his malaria vaccine, apparently.

Ka-Ching!

Do not buy a computer loaded with Vista unless you're wealthy and willing to fool around for a long time with your software.

I shall take my new computer back, for which, being out of the box, Circuit City will likely charge me close to $200. Yes, Matilda, I put it back in the box--but the box was unsealed! Woe is me.

*********************

Yesterday I did a thought experiment and decided to spend the day as an atheist. Nothing really happened except that I didn't pray to give thanks; I just felt grateful for certain things.

The hope of heaven and fear of hell don't work on me in any case. As I say, I believe because I can't convince myself it's not true. The best result of the day was that I felt less guilty, not so quick to condemn myself as a one falling short of the spirituality I once hoped to achieve. Also, there's freedom: If there is no God, it's up to me to decide how I'm doing. And for a manic-depressive in chronic pain I think I'm doing pretty damn well. I have love and work that I love. I gather delicious wild mushrooms whether they evolved or some great hand was behind them. Who cares?

I should say that even as a Christian I believe in a type of evolution. One argument for that position is the poor design of the human spine, especially the lumbar spine. It didn't change enough when we went from four legs to upright, and I could design a better back very easily and reduce the chances of chronic pain and millions of work days lost to back problems. This fact argues that God just let the process go and learned from it, that perfection is a process of perfecting without achieving perfection.

If we imagine there could be no sin except among angels prior to our appearance on the globe, biological life reflects a trial and error approach. God is omniscient as to what is, but I doubt he is capable of predicting, prior to the union of sperm and egg, what kind of human being will result. And there are many more areas for his ignorance, which makes me believe in limited omniscience--why God had to become Christ in order to have an experiential knowledge of human nature.

If God exists, he spent 500 million years, minimum, trying to come up with consciousness from matter.

Recently the fossil of a sea scorpion over eight feet long was discovered; imagine, an insect bigger than man! Did God hope at one time that the insects would be the dominant species? Or fish? Or birds? No one can say. Going back in time I certainly wouldn't bet on wimpy primates without claws, physically weak, prey to leopards and snakes and man-eating birds.

Man's greatest achievement is agriculture. God's greatest achievement, according to dogma, is when a new heavens and earth will be created--made possible by Christ's incarnation, of course. Good thing earth is still included. I can't imagine a paradise without trees and trout.

****************

Historically, if Christ rose from the dead and performed the miracles, it behooves us to pay attention. I'm convinced the history is accurate for the most part. Many early Christians died rather than admit that Christ didn't rise from the dead.

As for my loved ones, like my recently deceased daughter, Rachel, it is enough to carry her memory in my head and think fondly of her. That she and I will only be dust for centuries to come makes no difference in my feelings toward her. I don't love her or any of my children or sibs or wife any less for not believing in God. So what is the advantage of faith beyond a comprehensive world view? "He makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust."

The one dividing line is when we are truly in need, what I call "fox hole faith." That is, it's said there are no atheists in a fox hole. Under severe stress we regress to infancy and want some Mommy figure to intervene, to make it all better, issuing in "prayer" while an atheist in a fox hole calculates his chances and uses his intelligence for survival. Perhaps his deliberations might actually be harmed by prayer; perhaps reliance on some supernatural being might also undermine self-reliance and consequent escape. The fear that the atheist would shoot his fellow for food in a pinch I find laughable. Friendship, a worldly thing, would prevent that, not to mention the army code and the human code which does not depend on the Bible for us to know, as Confucious and others have laid it out very well. And Kant says morality is in effect hard-wired; there's no way to avoid it.

Being an atheist doesn't turn one into a sociopath. But it may increase the appreciation one has for life and friends and love, knowing that they are evanescent, knowing that there is no future but now, a damn good reason to dandle your grandchild on your knee for an extra half hour.

So here is my challenge: Convince me how life would be worse, especially my life, in real time if I deconvert to atheism, because I'm stumped. I thought it would be horrible, that life would be bereft of meaning. It's not. In fact, atheism could help my career, as I would be more aggressive in promoting my writing in the hope of having a reputation that might outlast my life.

So, for you who have finished this first-draft ramble, I'm curious as to your opinions. I have met many agnostics more charitable than Christians. That doesn't make Christianity untrue; it only implies that becoming a Christian, in my experience, does not necessarily make you a better person. Often believers become more obsessed with salvation than good works. Christ's ultimate judgment between the sheep and goats depends on their works. "I was in prison and you visited me."

If an agnostic performs the above, according to Ct his works won't save him and being a better person is only relative. I tend to disagree. I prefer an unbeliever who acts in a Christian way to a Christian who doesn't any day of the week. "I was hungry and you fed me."

Not that agnostics and atheists are so great as a group: "I was in prison and you spent all your money on a new Volvo and a trip to Hawaii."

Enough. Or not enough.

Kiloneutral,

Craig Erick

Of Presumption in Consumption

I didn't believe in Black Friday. I thought only lemmings did what the papers say we'll do. So I drove to Circuit City in the early afternoon to buy a computer I picked out weeks ahead, though the significant outlay may render our Christmas commercially skimpy; call it a "Victoria's Secret" Christmas.

When I arrived at Circuit City what did I find but a parking lot full of mad lemmings! I went down a parking aisle; two cars stopped in front of me, three locked in behind me, and we began to wait for some blue hair in a Cadillac to back out of her space. I freaked. "I can't do this!" As soon as could, I extricated myself from that consumer madhouse to breathe freely again on the blessed freeway. I did not go near a store entrance.

Afterwards I said to my sister: "I can't believe that people actually behave the way retailers want them to, like sheep to fodder!" She stared at me as if I were a Kindergartner. Hey, I was never very good with practical reality. Like most fools I assumed others were like me. No. Others were in line at Best Buy by 4 AM.

Later, driving home from the Bay Area, I stopped at the Circuit City in Santa Rosa in the late afternoon. No rush, no hassle, instant service, they had it in stock, I got my $105 rebate--it went like clockwork. Until I got my new Acer Aspire 5520 5912 home--only to discover it had Vista but no Word program! All my former documents were now useless! The ecstasy of my new purchase had been plunged into the agony of its uselessness. Mr. Gates wants $265 for Microsoft Office and I can't spend any more right now. So keep those cards and bootlegs coming.

What's funny is that I did not discover the fact until I was deep into the information transfer protocol. Talk about stupid! Why won't my documents open? Word Pad, which was included, did open them but lost all their formatting. I plead stupid. To buy a computer loaded with Vista but not Word never occurred to this little trout brain of mine. I should have bought a new brain.

Kathleen had also purchased new sheets at a Costco nearby, but while drying them somehow a pen burst and spotted everything, including my stepson's clothes. Now I call him "Dalmation Boy." (Perhaps "spotted dog," that famous greasy English pudding of the O'Brien novels, might suit him better.)

Kathleen also purchased another layer of memory foam to add to our present layer. Unfortunately the increased foam makes us sink towards the middle of the bed even faster--the very thing she sought to prevent. It's simple physics. I weigh 270, she weighs at least 100 lbs. less. I make a deeper hole in the memory foam, she rolls into it. "He who digs a pit will fall into it," wrote Solomon. He should have added: "And his bedmate, too." What a pisser! New sheets stained, new mattress addition worthless, new computer impossible to use.

No matter. There's a super low tide for abalone picking today and Kathleen also wants me to gather wild mushrooms for her pot roast, which I am more than happy to do. To obtain mushrooms for a pot roast is much more tangibly satisfying than fooling with software. And mushrooms are fungible whereas computer files are not.

Another perfect day!



2 kilobunnies,

CE

Black Friday and the Kingdom of Craig

Tonight we voyage down to the Bay Area to have Thanksgiving with my sister. It's become a yearly tradition, God bless her, and I like traditions--we have too few.

She pointed out to me that "Black Friday" (so named for putting businesses in back in the black) coincides this year with our father's suicide, 11/23/87.
Twenty years.

He was a shrewd consumer.

Mom tumored out on us 17 years ago, exactly how long we've all been orphans playing at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's a bitch being in charge. Thank God for women, truly.

If I were my parents I'd be grateful my children were still talking to each other.

Notice the date he chose. He meant it to be before Thanksgiving, the poor bastard couldn't face the bird, the Pteranadon of darkness.

He wanted there to be something there more than chemicals. There is, but in this realm it still involves chemicals as one parallel incarnation.

He didn't believe psychiatrists were real doctors, perhaps because they locked him up in the Air Force for a month for a manic episode and gave him a medical discharge. The shame of it, for him, was too painful to acknowledge. He always said "it was for pneumonia."

My psychiatrist told me today that I had negatively biased information selection, the cognitive-behavioral equivalent of a melancholy temperament. The words change, the disease doesn't. Of course I am much more likely to remember sad, mad and bad things about Dad than rad and glad things about him.

My melancholy temperament makes me want to weep over my daughters in ballet outfits as young girls, though sometimes it curls my lips upward.

It's my memory of me in those pictures that most makes me sad. Why do I feel lost? My wife loves me unconditionally; my spirit can't actually receive it though my body believes it. How great it would be to look at the grain and not the chaff.

In the Kingdom of Craig there are no sad thoughts, no mad thoughts and no bad thoughts.

Yearbooks make me sad. Even old photographs of my children can, Rachel's death notwithstanding.

My back hurts. I don't want to type any more.

In the Kingdom of Craig there is no pain.

My back is the chief reason I receive disability. Manic-depression is just frosting. Did you really need to know that?

Ah, but you love me. Because in the Kingdom of Craig, what?

There are no sad thoughts and no mad thoughts and no bad thoughts.


Love and thanks to all,

Craggeerik

Is This Normal?

Tell me if this is normal background worry:

A vague recrimination about your hoping to be dead before the planet goes to hell; a guilty wish to be protected from people you don't like; dread at answering the phone; being afraid to speak my real feelings for fear of hurting other people's feelings. I take my anger out on little issues like; "Why didn't you tell you were going to take my effin cell phone!"

Or maybe that violation is justifiably anger-provoking.

How would I know? It's been so long since I've been normal, if ever I was.

I'm taking all my medications but not feeling particularly sanguine. I wonder if I am within the normal range of feelings.

Normality requires a kind of blindness to things, a protective tunnel vision constructed around concrete reality. I get so bored with that.

I have great ambivalence toward my visiting stepson whom I recently sprang from Mexico in a act of mad forgiveness, but I can't go into detail, I might hurt someone's feelings.

What about my feelings? Is my polite subjugation to others' needs really polite or just subjugation? Am I a man or a mouse?

Why can't I be my own co-dependent?

I have enough voices in my head for a complete AA meeting.

I'm not psychotic. I'm not depressed. I'm stressed and slightly melancholy.

3 new beings in my environment in less than 3 weeks! I was silly to go along with it. It's a wonder I haven't lost my mind.

Now Kathleen and the cats and Derek gang up on me . I'm a stranger in my own home and I pay the rent.

I do like the cats.

Soon the stress of Thanksgiving.

Even joy is stressful.


At 1 Kilorat,

CE

Car Parts and a New Cat

Greetings, Earthlings!

I went online to order a passenger side headlight assembly for our ’99 Plymouth Voyager super beater. Did you know that the passenger side headlight assembly costs twice as much as the driver’s side assembly? Must be that more drivers are creaming their left headlight is all I can figure. Still, $265? Discount warehouse, yeah! The prices for many car parts are outrageous. Why can’t they have more chop shops online?

Yesterday we mailed my Eliot ms., a labor of four years, to the professor who will read it for Mellen Press. Keep your cyberfingers crossed for me; it would mean a lot to me if someone published this book. Still I won’t give up after a first rejection by any means.

As some of you know, except for this blog I have given up new writing for the nonce. I will embark on no new ventures until all my old ones are wrapped up and marketed to the best of my ability. The novel’s in good shape and so are two books of stories. The columns, which Kathleen believes in, I think are too anachronistic to be reprinted, as many of them concern current events such as 9/11 and elections.

So I’m doing a lot of donkey work. Yesterday I scanned about thirty different song lyrics in various states of disrepair onto my computer so that I can compile all the songs I’ve written and record them as well. I have many more songs to go. It is a slow process, scanning and correcting moldy old papers with some print on them. It might actually be easier to type them anew, but I like the whole process of reclaiming these old papers.

I used to write songs more often than poems. Certainly they are easier to remember, set to melody and all. I like things you can whistle.

Kathleen was named “Employee of the Quarter” in the charitable organization for which she labors, which included a nice bonus. And now, with the manager’s absence, she has been raised to temporary manager. Soon she’ll be fundraising in Manhattan with Yoko.

*************

My baby brother is so obsessive that I hope he doesn’t read this. My baby brother is so obsessive that I hope he doesn’t read this. My baby brother is so obsessive that I hope he doesn’t read this. My baby brother is so obsessive that if he reads this he will think it’s about him, after which he will look for clues as to my real meaning. My real meaning is hidden in the hollows of the letters. What I have written there, too small for reproduction, is the secret of and cure for all his obsessions. My baby brother is so obsessive that I hope he doesn’t read this or he will be disappointed, Not enough to obsess about.

My baby brother is 6’7” and at least 350 lbs. Big baby brother! In the picture above he is the one on the right.

I think I’m going slowly deaf. I don’t know which ear is worse. Either that or Kathleen has taken to speaking more softly. As our vision and hearing goes we shall have to tap Morse on each other’s skulls to communicate. As for sex, I suppose grabbing will still do in a pinch.

We got another cat, Topaz. I promise pictures soon. Kathleen didn’t want Jo Jo to be lonely while we’re gone. Now Jo Jo’s not lonely, she’s pissed and hissing at Topaz, who is nonplussed by the larger cat. We call her “Topaz” because she has a beautiful rust-colored diamond in the middle of her forehead.

Kiloneutral with occasional glimpses into the abyss, but working hard and whistling past the graveyard,


Craig Erick

Kiloneutral; The Great American Novel Race

I have been neglecting my blog because of an Amazon.com contest for a first novel, for which they are receiving 5000 entries. A friend told me about this, a friend who dedicated himself, though a realtor, to producing a novel in a matter of weeks for the contest. I haven’t checked back with him; I really don’t want to be asked to read his output, though I’m sure its genius is unrivaled. That’s a lot of Chutzpah on his part. There are people who can write well at that pace, like the prolific Joyce Carol Oates, but I don’t think life as a realtor is the best preparation.

If he wins I’ll kill myself.

So I got through a third draft and began a fourth draft (largely incomplete) of “The Abomination” before today, the day I must mail the ms. and a 5,000-word excerpt to Amazon. In the revision process the book has been cut from 120,000 words to 85,000, roughly 30%, which I take as a good sign. For sustaining interest the book relies heavily on character, although the plot includes four murders and some science fiction and religious mumbo-jumbo.

Meanwhile the Edwin Mellen Press has agreed to look at my T. S. Eliot ms.

Also, an editor from a paying magazine solicited poems from me and took two out of three. So things are looking up.

It’s hard for an artist to dissociate his self-esteem from his work, but I try. My psychological defense against “failure” is very primitive; I belittle my work and give it no chance to succeed. Thus I prevent disappointment by already being disappointed. Still I can’t help feeling my little heart go bumpety-bump to know some Oxford professor will be taking my Eliot ms. seriously.

In other news, the friend I recovered at Rachel’s memorial service has been plying me eloquently with the neglected news of Christians' contributions to art and civilization. He bragged that the Christian monasteries kept the classics alive for the Renaissance. I said why didn’t the dumb monks read the books and start a Renaissance? He's wonderful debater and writer and rhetorical cheat, and I’ve enjoyed our interchanges thoroughly, just as the resumption of our friendship has been the one good thing that came out of Rachel’s death for me. As daughter Sarah says, 18 (though already bitten by the Chaffin black humor bug), “And all I got was this car.”

Mushrooming season has started. The other night I smothered Kathleen’s pot roast in honey mushrooms, and the result was heavenly. Nothing like fresh mushrooms for delicate spicing and good gravy. One of these nights we’ll eat all wild: Abalone, wild mushrooms and a salad of local leaves. But I’ll have to add rice. I like rice or potatoes with nearly every dinner that isn't soup. And although I may be accused of blasphemy in the matter, I prize potatoes over macaroni and cheese as well as meatloaf as the ultimate comfort food. And there's no German or Irish in me.

I’m at kiloneutral today. I still don’t feel as if the ground is absolutely solid beneath my feet, but for someone who just endured a depression for a year-and-a-half, this is not surprising. I may never feel the ground is solid again. I know I can fall victim to bad chemicals at any time. Still, the background threat of “groundlessness,” as Buddhists call it, also increases my gratefulness for every moment I’m not depressed. Funny how that works.


Kiloneutral,

CE

Stalking the Wild Abalone

One of the first questions I could answer when I emerged from my awful depression was: “What do you want for your birthday?” Without hesitation I said, “A guided abalone dive.”

This is a good test question for mental health. Healthy people usually want things and if they can get those things for free they should have no trouble remembering what those things are. If you’d asked me the same question over a month ago I would have been absolutely stumped.

********

Sunday I cashed in Kathleen’s gift and went stalking the wild abalone-- that terrifying mollusk of the deep! It was after 5 PM. The water was murky, the swell was picking up. Strands of bull kelp and sea grass clawed at my head like blackberry vines. Visibility perhaps 15 ft. Seawater in my snorkel, damn! They come….…

sliming, sliggering, slouching, suctioning forward on dirty tongues with the black ruffle around them, the army of angry mollusks pursue their ancient grudge against vertebrates: "The shell was it, man! Impregnable. And now you feast on me. I'm gonna go Pre-Cambrian on your ass.”

“That’s because you evolved far enough to survive and afterwards got lazy.”

"Beware, vertebrate!”

When the abalone attacked I was already fitted with 30 lbs. of weights (to counteract the flotation of my wetsuit), so that the weight of each additional abalone that grolloped on my bod would drag me further down to Davey Jones' Gym Locker no matter what manic counter-propulsion my fins attempted.

Here come the limpets on steroids! The Barry Bonds Barnacles!

"Belt first!" Their general cried.

I tried to release my belt but the damn clams wouldn’t let me get my hands on the buckle in time.

In ten-foot depths I clung to a large rock and hoped that my house—the one with a spine and real lungs--would not have its subprime jumbo shrimp bluff called.

On they came, sucking, seeking…

When my eyes dipped toward the waterline and I took my last breath, I realized that the mask and snorkel were of no use now—but before I tossed them a thought arrived: What if I were to blow air underneath the abalooneys with the snorkel! They use water cannons above ground, why not reverse the elements?

I began air-goosing every parasitic mollusk I could find clinging to my suit. Miraculously the damn clams ran from air like black from rice. Lightened, I rose to the surface; frightened, they twirled back to the bottom, licking their tongues and whining invertebrate excuses.

Despite these initial difficulties I managed three legal abalones in my first hour.

Afterwards I bought an abalone hammer and pounded the beasts into delicate strip-steaks of firm white flesh for my dear wife who had never tasted abalone. It lived up to its reputation; she said it was “to die for,” and indeed, every season five divers agree with her.

Sorry to leave you with the taste of death in your mouths.


Happy Halloween,

Craig Erick

Rip Van Winkle

Not being depressed I find myself whining about inconsequential matters. That I should experience fear, anger, or sadness apart from their obsidian amalgam in my illness I suddenly take for granted.

Today, for instance: after I had to buy seven more Abilify for $107.00 yesterday because my meds hadn’t come from Canada—yes, you guessed it, the damn meds arrived. And of course they were late because when I sent the Rx in, I hadn’t noted the order # on the Rx. I did make an order online, but they filed the original Rx away and never connected the dots. Fine print. Policy and procedure. Don’t you hate it?

Kathleen has taught me to read instructions on many things I didn’t use to; still, I somehow manage to miss the important parts. If for every new purchase you read every instruction and legal disclaimer, would you even have time to eat? Imagine grocery shopping and reading every nutritional box. Or the complete instructions, twenty pages in badly translated Chinese, of how to operate your new television. Laugh, you can laugh, but eventually your dereliction will bite you in the ass. I suppose the answer is to read the fine print for anything important, like life and health insurance and mortgages and new cars. But what about refrigerators? Where do you draw the line?

My theme was how forgetful the human animal is. I must remember gratefulness; after being underwater for 18 mos. and having my head above for one, do I really need to complain about spending an unnecessary $100.00 for my life-saving medication? Or is that just normal living? “Dear, that man cut me off! Get his license number! Why did they deliver the paper so late? I can’t believe the price of gas! Can you believe how all the aging rock stars are trying to revive their careers by doing duets with other aging rock stars?” And so on. These are the normal and trivial emotions of the human tribe, and perhaps I should be grateful that I can again experience them.

It’s like sports; there’s something so innocently human about rooting for your favorite team. I’m rooting for Boston now, though a Dodgers fan, though neither compares to my devotion to the Lakers. But isn’t it charming? The arbitrary loyalty to a team of millionaires who do something with a ball? I think it’s charming. So normal. I feel sorry for those who choose their allegiances by merit. Home teams are like family; you love them mindlessly. They belong to you.

My new euthymic attitude extends to so many things. It’s like waking up from a long nightmare. I look at my bookcase and exclaim, “I have so many wonderful books! I look at my CD collection and remark, “I can’t believe how much good music I have!” I look in my closet and think, “I’ve never had so many clothes!

Is that my beautiful wife?


1 Kilobunny.

CE

Cruelty to Plants; New Cat; Banned from My Writing Class

I saw a pick-up truck today with tropical plants in the bed traveling at 50 mph along the bracing coast. I thought of reporting it to the SPCP, “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants.” Then I realized there was no such organization and that it was up to me to found it. Ah, one more small responsibility for Dr. Yours Truly. (You’d think people would have wised up by now and simply elected me supreme potentate, since I know what’s best for everyone. Who else worries about the damn plants, hmm?)

Did you know that plants grow better to Mozart and that carrots, according to electric sensors, emit the equivalent of a scream when uprooted? Just because we believe plants don’t have sentience doesn’t mean they can’t experience pain just as animals do. Yes, Cain’s vegetable offering was rejected and Abel’s received, and we grieve about the fratricide, but what about the poor vegetables and the emotional wound of their rejection by the very God who created them? We’re talking years of therapy with manure and fish emulsion.

Today we picked out our new pet, a cat almost one-year-old. Her name is Jo Jo, but we haven’t decided to keep the name yet. She is gray with white paws and all kinds of crazy stripes, her eyes yellow. Right now she’s hiding in the open coat closet behind the vacuum cleaner, from where she makes sorties up and down the stairs, but never too far—she’s brave but still cautious. The cubicle at the pound was big but not so overwhelming as our rental to her. I’ve seen cats go through this adjustment period before and am confident that she will soon rule the roost. LKD knows that already.

It may take a while for me to provide a picture since Kathleen lost the digital camera (that we couldn’t afford) I bought her for Christmas. If she reads this it is only to make her feel guilty. I’m so mean! Then why should Kathleen read my blog? She lives it with me. It should bore her to hell, one of the lesser known means of entrance to that region.

Besides the four new publications announced in my last blog, I just got news that Oysters and Chocolate, an online magazine of erotica, will pay me for a poem entitled “Her Steaming Love Tunnel.” I’ll give you the link when it appears, but I don’t feel comfortable posting the poem--my Junior Craig Club members’ parents might sue me and then who would pay my freight? Ever since I exposed Big Bird as the extraterrestrial queer that he is, many parents have directed their children here. Why did I write this sexy piece (though long ago, before my break from writing poetry)? Because to write for money means experimenting with every paying genre. If porno poems sell better than love poems I’ll just go there. Wait—not porno--The poem has socially redeeming value, if only to affirm the joy of intromission, ejaculation and afterglow in pursuit of the “golden fleece” of the simultaneous orgasm. Near the end the narrator yells, “I’m a horse not a man!” I like that and so would Catherine the Great.

Kathleen is reading my novel’s second draft and finds it more absorbing than the Dick Francis novel she’s trying to read, which is good news for me, as she is certainly my harshest critic. If I can hold her attention, there is hope for a third draft.

BTW, if anyone would like an e-mail attachment of any of the works below, simply mail me and ask. You’ll have to bear the costs of printing.


Poems:

Sine Wave
Love Poems
Simply Said

Novel:

The Abomination

Short Stories:

The Eric Chronicles
Five Stories and a Play

Criticism:

T. S. Eliot: The Major Poems (an undergraduate primer)

Humor:

Collected Columns


Max asked me to detail how I got booted from a creative writing class. First, I joined it during my depression as a discipline for continuing social involvement that I demand of myself when depressed. I also hoped to meet a circle of writers in my new stomping grounds. And the teacher came highly recommended from my neighbor who claims to be a writer but will always lack the chops.

At the last class I attended a woman read a treacly, maudlin poem that made my hair stand on end. Since everyone else chimed in, I added my two cents that it sounded like “A Blue Mountain Arts” card. The teacher interrupted me to say “that’s over the line, let’s stop there.” I assure you there was no malice in my comment and that the “poem” was abominable.

After class the teacher asked to speak with me. She told me she tried to provide a nurturing environment for writers, and that this class had been together a long time. I asked her if feeling good was more important than writing well, and she dodged the question, indicating both were important, but one shouldn’t call another’s work “Hallmark,” to which I vociferously objected:

“I didn’t call it ‘Hallmark,’ I called it ‘Blue Mountain Arts,’ and there’s a world of difference in that distinction. I choose my comments carefully, unlike what you think.” That was over her head. I then asked her, “How many people have complained about me?”

She said, “four.” That amazed me. “And they don’t have the balls to speak to me but have to hide under the teacher’s skirt?” She didn’t like that one at all.
“So, do you really want me to come back?” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said, “You’re a very good writer.” (How would she know if she’s more concerned with feelings?)

I asked her again if she really wanted me to return. “By all means,” she said, “just try to be more nurturing and less critical.”

I said, “If four people complained about you in a writing class, would you feel like coming back?”

“I can’t say,” she said, “and it’s not like that.”

“Like what?” I said.

She demurred. Depressed or not I wasn’t going to return to a class of wannabes who couldn’t stand constructive, yes, constructive criticism. The story of my life: unable to judge the social acceptability of my utterance of the truth as I perceive it. My tongue believes in “Leap before thou lookest.”

I cried yesterday morning when Kathleen mentioned that she had been grieving for Kenyon and Rachel. While weeping separately together, I said, “Good morning to you, too!” Later I graciously thanked her for ruining my day. But Jo Jo the wonder cat made me happy again. Soon she will be purring in my lap beside my laptop. I love a purring cat!

All for today.

1 Kilobunny,

CE

Happy Birthday, Dr. Depresso!

Famous People born on October 17th:

1920 Montgomery Clift (actor)
1938 Evel Knievel (motorcycle stunt rider)
1948 Margot Kidder (actress)
1954 C. E. Chaffin (journeyman poet and critic, family doctor)
1962 Mike Judge (cartoonist, animator, writer, actor)
1968 Ziggy Marley (singer)
1972 Eminem (rapper)

Margot is bipolar. The creator of Beevis and Butthead? Definitely up my line. Daredevil? Oh yes. Singer/poet? Yes, but never much into Reggae. Rapper? Only in so far as poetry qualifies. Clift is one of my favorite actors but was very effed up, probably a male Borderline Personality Disorder, heavy into polysubstance abuse, alcoholism, and libertine bisexuality.

It is also Black Poetry Day in the U.S., the date Einstein moved to the U.S., U.N. International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the Feast of St. Ignatius and the day on which Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion.

It would be nice if I were listed and people were happy to share my birthday. Don't look for it in my lifetime. For now these lists are a bunch of meaningless "granfalloons," or unimportant coincidences, to use Vonnegut's term.

Happy birthday now to me!
Strong and smart at 53!
A face of great utility
and hands licensed for surgery.

Instead of simply googling myself on my birthday as Homer Simpson does all day, I thought I would call my information center to demonstrate how hard it is to get anything done over the phone anymore. And when you get done registering, a computer is really no faster. I contend that with human operators information was disseminated more quickly than today.

****************

Here goes:

**************

Hello?

You have reached the center for Craig Chaffin. Por Espanol por favor marque el numero dos. Please listen to the following menu:

For psychiatric history, please press or say, ‘1.’
For literary history, please press or say, ‘2.’

For vital statistics, please press or say, ‘3.’

For sexual history please press or say ‘4.’

For a biography, please press or say ‘5.’

For an exaggerated biography featuring Craig as the savior of the universe, please press or say ‘6.’To register a complaint against Craig, please press or say ‘7.’

“Five.”

What would you like to know? You can say, for instance, “The size of his Peter.”

”I’m not interested in that. I’m lucky to see it in the shower.”

I’m sorry, I did not understand your entry. You can say something like, “Where was he born?”

“How many psychedelic drugs did he consume in his youth?”

I’m sorry, I did not understand your entry. Please try again.

“Shoe size.”

Did you say, “Shoe size?”

“Yes.”

OK. Now let me connect you to that department. You may meanwhile hear, under terrible audio conditions, a Muzak version of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” by the Rolling Stones.

“Thanks.”

Your conversation may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

(The band plays “da-da-da-da-- dat dat ta da da” for three minutes.)

Hello, my name is Dale, how may I help you?

“Your phone menu directed me here. I asked for Craig’s shoe size.”

Would that be European or American?

“American.”

Let me connect you to another department.

(ring, ring, beep)

Hello, this is Jack Gilley. I’m sorry but I’m not at my desk right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

*************

For any dying to know the answer, I usually say: “Same as mouth.” But for those who must know, I wear 13 in American and 46 in European sizes, which means my feet are average for a man my size (and you know what they say about feet—which answers the first impertinent question I asked the phone menu).

On my birthdays I usually wax melancholy and look back at my life with a certain disappointed wistfulness, thinking it may never be better than it was, thinking that perhaps my life has been wasted, hoping to turn over a new leaf or accomplish something at last. But today I feel fine. Isn’t that a bitch? Because my blog is more popular when I’m struggling with grief or depression, as I’m told that my descriptions of these experiences are helpful to others. If I post poems and speak of literary matters my readership contracts.

Truthfully I don’t blog for an audience, or at least I didn’t used to. Now that a fair number of readers have attached themselves to me, I am more likely to try to please them. Every good artist must be sensitive to his audience while cognizant of the fact that an audience always changes art.

I finished my umpteenth re-write of my book of essays, T. S. Eliot: The Major Poems: An Undergraduate Primer at 12:15 AM last night, a great thing to have accomplished on my birthday. I felt satisfied and justified as I went to bed; I felt I had done my best to make Eliot understandable to this generation. Even if no academic press takes the book, I am proud of the work. Here’s an excerpt:

“‘Prufrock,’ in my view, is quite simply one of the greatest poems in the history of the language, as well as the first truly modern poem. Its appearance cannot be predicted by any antecedents in English literature. Although Eliot was a student of literary history in a number of languages, especially French (in which he published four poems in his second collection), the voice, technique and substance of “Prufrock” are undeniably something new: an original synthesis of all that had gone before while claiming vast new territories for the future. The cardinal difference between ‘Prufrock’ and previous poetry is the fact that ‘Prufrock,’ though a drama, occurs almost entirely inside the head of the narrator. What external human interaction the poem contains is comprised of only six lines.”

58,000 words of that. My greatest satisfaction was in explicating Four Quartets, which took up half the book. I have never read a lucid explication of Eliot’s masterwork (then my ignorance is vas and I would have wanted to do it myself in any event).

Birthday plans? Kathleen was going to fix me a special dinner but since I’ll be playing music with friends around 7 PM, we’ll likely skip that. Maybe she’ll bring some Dungeness crab home. They're back in season.

I planned to devote today to getting Kathleen’s new wireless voice transcriber to work, but the engineer has failed to call me back (although he has, inexplicably, been text messaging Kathleen while she is driving around trying to do her job of coaching the developmentally disabled in employment situations).

I have seven books ready for publication: three collections of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories about growing up in LA, a book with five short stories and a play, and my tome on Eliot, a collection of essays--and a theological tome as well, but it is only half re-written. To date I have published but one book, Elementary, in 1997, my first collection of poems. I need to get cracking on these other properties. I need to stop my life and promote my writing instead of taking on new projects. So I intend to do in this, my 54th year. And if after a year I meet with no success, I will certainly consider self-publishing with publishing on demand convenience. I mean, there must be someone who wants to read one of these books! Or?

My 53rd has been a terrible year, in that I lost my oldest daughter, not to mention being clinically depressed nearly the whole time. On the other hand, my youngest, Sarah, graduated from high school; I've reconciled with my estranged stepson; I constructed a website for my works despite being depressed; I was kicked out of a local creative writing class for being too critical; I have stopped and started drinking several times; and I did get a ton of writing done by sheer will, also because work is the only respite for a mind dominated by depression.

The book on Eliot is the toughest thing I’ve ever written, and it took me four years altogether to polish it to my satisfaction. I think it’s lucid now.

Oh, and there's this blog--another aid in preserving my sanity, and a source of much encouragement. I'm glad I continued it in my 18-month depression.

Freud defined mental health as the ability to love and to work. Life is sweet when you’re loved, employed and in good health. I even know 14 souls who strive to love me unconditionally. How lucky can a man be?

My hope for this year is that I learn how to successfully market my writing. Self-promotion has always been distasteful to me, why I have a backlog of seven finished books. I am ready to go on the attack, which means a hell of a lot of envelope and stamp-licking and typing e-mails into the ether. I also want to re-decorate the small space we live in so that I feel better about my environment, and follow through on a landscaping plan I have for my garden.

Happy birthday, all!


3 Kilobunnies,

Craig Erick

Enjoying My Euthymia; Poem, "Salad Burial"

No crises, no depths, no chemical aberrations to report. No doubt my readers will quickly become bored with my newfound wellness, though I am delighted with it. To --not be depressed-- is the greatest blessing I can receive in this life. Sure, I love my wife and daughters and friends. But when depressed I can feel none of that love, neither for me nor for them. I feel like an insignificant fly speck or worse, a tiny curse in the world, or so my chemicals would convince me (until whipped into shape by modern psychopharmacology).

My poem, “When I Am an Old Man” in Chimaera was a take-off on “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.” It’s worth a peek for a laugh, though I do wax a little surrealistic at the end--which reminds me of some paintings I saw yesterday, categorized as “hyperrealistic surrealism.” And damn, it fit!

Today I attended my mushroom identification course, per usual, except my memory for recalling Famoptosis cajanderi and countless other strange monikers is much improved with the depression at bay. It is amazing how much my mind improves when free from a depression, just amazing. I can think of many delightful, forgotten grudges from the past, not to mention all the new slights I look forward to.

Next week we’ll begin our field work with fungi, thank goodness, as I am so tired of the classroom experience. The rains have come so the mushrooms will follow. I can’t wait to be foraging for fungi in the forest. That line reminds me of another poem that no one has deigned to publish, a poem in a light-hearted vein. I labor to be reader friendly. I try to write for readers, not poets. But this is not a new poem. I am holding to my vow to eschew poetry.


Salad Burial

I made it on a Saturday
with romaine and green leaf lettuce,
stems crisp and firm,
fresh-boiled eggs in slices,
the rose-white flesh of radishes,
mushrooms cut kidney-style,
spinach with that suede feel
and chicken strips
grilled in garlic oil.

If it had been eaten at the party
or I hadn’t dressed it for convenience
I wouldn't be standing here, a week later
afraid to open the blue ironware pot
where Hansel and Gretel are lost
in the furry forest of the fungal underworld,
where spice of meat and greens are married
to the ghoulish sponge of Miss Havisham’s
spider-riddled wedding cake.

Holding my nose I look away
and blindly bag the mutant gallimaufry,
dropping it in the trash, but as I do
I wonder what alien stews must be
composting in my neighbors’ cans—
See how the imagination festers?


Did you like the phrase, “mutant gallimaufry?” I was proud of that.

************

So what does the immediate future look like for me if I stay euthymic?

My main goals are to wrap up all my art from the past, to record all the songs I’ve ever written, to revise or complete all the prose and poetry else toss all I've written, and to improve my website so that my music can be downloaded. I also aim to complete the workbook, A Graceful Farewell, so that in the event of my own death things will go smoothly. So many die unprepared! I don’t want my brothers fighting over my Stratocaster and my Martin guitars, for instance. As for a literary executor, it is not clear at this point whether one will be needed unless my writings obtain a higher visibility. Right now this blog is the best thing I got going, because more people read it than all my poetry buried in all those publications for the semi-elite. Strange, isn’t it? Journaling gets me more readers than composition.

Other goals? I want to paint our living room and purchase better furniture and use our space more elegantly. Our unit has two rooms, upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs holds the bedroom, TV and closets; downstairs Kathleen and I each have our own office in opposite corners from which we sometimes e-mail each other in lieu of talking. Our dual schmegg zones eat up all the available space. We can't even have guests over for dinner, having no table to speak of.

The rain is here. So is my birthday, October 17, for which Kathleen has purchased me a guided abalone dive. I can’t wait! That’s what I asked for when she asked me what I wanted. Can you imagine me just two-and-half weeks ago asking for anything at all? Nope. Neither can I. What a different when the light is turned on.

Like that old film star, the only presents I now accept are those I can eat, read, wear, listen to, or spend. No knick-knacks.

For those with budget constraints a simple genuflection to my blog photo will do. I do also kinda want a cat. (Hear that, Laurel?) We are not ready for a new dog yet.


2 Kilobunnies,

CE

Tears for Rachel; Paying for Knowledge

Today marks two weeks since I was started on the "magic bullet," Abilify. Since I flipped into euthymia Thursday, September 27, I have daily been grateful for a huge negative: NOT TO BE DEPRESSED. Those who have suffered clinical depression know whereof I speak. It brings up the old question, is the avoidance of pain superior to the enjoyment of pleasure? As a manic-depressive I say, yes indeed!

Today is the second day I've experienced a little morning anxiety and suffered some of the recurring thoughts about my future and my past, not to suggest they are of such a level as to be depressive obsessions. Still, it scares me; it's as if the ground beneath me has become a net rather than solid earth, that I see the open squares to the abyss and must tread carefully.

Sometimes I need to cry but am afraid to; this morning apparently not, as the tears have begun and I think, "poor Rachel!" My darling baby. My sweet freckled redheaded sunshine. That's what I called her as a small child, my "Sunshine." Because she could distract me from my melancholy in an instant; she was filled with so much wonder for life, her smile could illuminate my heart, he constant activity distract me; she could rescue me from the vision of the net beneath my feet. She was a tonic; she was my sunshine.

Oh, it's true as a teenager and adult she was often a huge pain in the ass, but I think what parents most remember is the unadulterated nature of a child, their essential goodness from birth--before it is spoiled by this world, by competition and the special cruelty of other children. (Children are often emotionallly brutal but at least they tend to be more honest than adults.)

So I grieve today; perhaps this was the source of my anxiety, that I still need to cry. Yes, I fear weeping may lead me back to depression, but I pray not. I'm seeing my shrink tomorrow so I can run these concerns by him.

Yesterday Kathleen scared me by asking, "You're not going to relapse, are you?" I said no, of course. But that she would pick up on a diminution of my cheerfulness is also anxiety-provoking. It wasn't like I was crying or bemoaning my state or anything.

I'm sure if warning signs continue, my doctor will bump up the Abilify. I am on the lowest dose, which, incidentally, is the most expensive--5 mg. How those drug companies know how to stick it to you! (To be fair, likely fewer are on such a small dose, why it costs more, supply and demand, etc.) Still a months supply of 5 mg.Abilify, even from Canada, is $418.

Ah Rachel. Your absence makes me weep. I know you exist, but I miss you in this world. And I wonder what effect this will have on Jacob, losing his mother at 5. But we can't take on the sadness of the world like a saddle for a pack horse. We can only adjudicate our own sorrows slowly. I don't know where people get the energy to grieve for Darfur or Burma; I have enough on my plate. Then many idealists have thrown themselves into good works because of trouble inside and at home. As has been well said, and it sounds like it should have been Shaw, "I love humanity in general but can't stand it in particular."

Today I shall return to my assault upon my revision of my tome on Four Quartets. Sometimes, in reading past prose, I get the distinct feeling I must have been smarter in the past. But I am wiser now and better able to corral my leaping thoughts into a readable order. In some further research on the Quartets, for the first time on the web I paid $14 for two-week access to "F. H. Bradley's Doctrine of Experience in T. S. Eiot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets" by Jewel Spears Brooker. Unfortunately it concentrated mainly on TWL when I bought it for 4Q, about which it had little to say, at least not much more than I knew.

Presumably there is a research library somewhere where the issue of this philology journal is available for free to an academic. But it's so much easier to just buy it; think of the transportation alone! The free access of scholarly information is not free on the Internet, a shame for any university, though they have us by the short hairs when it comes to convenience.

I have stopped crying. God bless you, Rachel, God bless you Jacob.


Kiloneutral,

Craig Erick

p.s. I have some two poems and a story out in in a new journal, sister to Shit Creek Review, called Chimeara . It's good to see some friends and acquaintances in there such as Janet Kenny, Rob Mackenzie, former nemesis Leo Yankevich, Kate Benedict, Jeffrey Calhoun, Salli Shepard and Rick Mullin.

"Ash Wednesday" and the Cost of Medications in America

"(Why should the ag/ed eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?"

I love Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" and consider it the easiest introduction to Eliot's work, as it is essentially Eliot "light" mixed with a religious sensibility. It's easy to understand. I felt like quoting the passage above since I finished revising my chapter on AW and am now into Four Quartets, which makes up half my book. It makes sense that if I spend 7,000 words on "Ash Wednesday," each of the Quartets deserves as much.

Here's a sample from the essay:

"For those who haven’t walked in Eliot’s shoes, whether raised in the faith, agnostic, atheist, or unconcerned, the difficult negotiation of a commitment to Christianity which AW belabors may seem anchorite overkill, artistic and spiritual self-flagellation. But if we think of the person behind the persona, the "politic, cautious and meticulous" Eliot of "Prufrock," and compare him to the pilgrim of AW, I am tempted to cliché ("You’ve come a long way, baby”).

In AW Eliot achieves a Christian commitment painfully, incrementally, achieving initial communication without spiritual union or the joy of deliverance. One unexpected benefit of his experience is a greater degree of acceptance of the flesh in his verse, and one presumes, his life. In AW the speaker realizes it is possible to live the spiritual life in this world despite our animal defects (not an easy admission for a perfectionistic aesthete). Looking back at "Prufrock," one might predict that Eliot would sooner have embraced monasticism than the life of the Church. The very ordinariness of his adoption of Anglicanism is the most surprising thing about his conversion. The tentative solution AW proffers is, of course, more fully treated in 4Q. "

BTW, the initial essays in Melic are no longer representative of my work and I hope soon at my website to substitute the revised versions for the earlier drafts.

My mood is holding, but I think the American public should know how much the medications that achieved that miracle cost per month at the most reasonable retailer, Costco, Each drug is priced for a month's supply.

Lamictal: $400
Abilify: $430
Prozac: $50
Wellbutrin: $200
Celebrex for two: $200
A narcotic for chronic pain: $120
Blood pressure medicine: $35

The arithmetic yields a total of $1435, mainly because three of the medications have yet to lose their exclusive patents.

After the first Rx here I order my meds from Canada for one third the price. Kathleen is working full-time just to get us insurance. Coincidentally she loves her job and likes to work! (though it's hard on her back). The insurance increases her earnings by at least 60% in terms of value.

Having her work full-time makes me the househusband/writer, cooking nightly, making her lunches, doing the dishes and wash and helping with the shopping and cleaning. I don't mind; anything for Kathleen!. In fact cooking is a good adventure. Tonight I bought a pork shoulder roast for $1/lb. and it has turned out deliciously, with the sage/pepper/olive oil/lemon/crushed garlic baste and the honey glaze.

Mmmmm... the sage is from my spice garden.

spice... the spice....

Any Dune fans out there?

I still think that David Lynch, who later disowned the movie, made a visual tour de force but he must have given up some autonomy to Dino De Laurentis in the dialogue and pacing, particularly portraying the inward thoughts of statues. In spite of this, Baron Harkonnen is one of the great characters in the history of cinema, even better than Nicholson as "The Joker" in its way.

Happy to be alive!


3 kilobunnies!

Craig


p.s. Despite the prices I am grateful to the pharmaceutical companies who took risks to create medications that saved my life--again.

Happy Alcoholic?

Is there such a thing? As for giving up poetry, I plead innocent; this is "light verse," which means it should not be taken seriously by anyone but myself.

Bi-Cycle

I drink too much. It’s sad. It’s so plebeian.
Whiskey straight and ice, though sometimes wine.
I drink until my faults—well, I don’t see ‘um.
I think that’s why most drink. “It is divine

To forgive,” so the caveat goes.
But caveats don’t comfort—they’re abstractions.
They will not numb my head down to my toes.
I’m want to lose, not gain any more traction!

The rabble-rousing voices in my head
Rarely shut off when I am being still.
A little booze, the radio goes dead;
A little booze, I step off the treadmill.

Although my doctor says my habit’s risky
Considering all the medicines I take
There are worse ways to cope than a lot of whiskey—
I mean a lot. I’ve got a thirst to slake!

Oh happy alcoholic! Or so I think.
My mind’s at ease, I’m never in denial
Until the morning and the morning’s trial
When weaving towards the bath I swear off drink.

2 Kilobunnies,

CE

Posting Problem, Medications and Rachel

The chief purpose of this post is to discover whether posting through Internet Explorer will eliminate the irritating text comment interruptions.

I was quite productive today but don't have the patience to tell you all I did. I did feel an obligation to reveal the medication cocktail that freed me from longstanding clinical depression:

Lamictal: 150 mg. BID (twice a day)
Wellbrutrin: 300 mg AM, 150 mg PM.
Prozac, 80 mg AM.
Abilify, 5 mg AM.

I think the addition of this new antipsychotic (Abilify), that affects the Dopamine 2 receptors more selectively, proved the difference in my treatment. I think it worked adjunctively to enhance all the other medications. Given the failure of two antipsychotics attuned to a more traditional dopamine receptor prior to it, I wonder whether the D2 receptor might be more important for my treatment-resistant depression (since bipolars suffer the most serious suicidal depressions, and the hardest to treat).

Norm, you there? Was I too mean to you about your poem at Alsop? I have no gauge anymore; the truth is in such short supply, and I like to speak my truth. Those who know me know that I never seek to diminish another poet, only to react honestly according to my lights.

Alright. Done with that. I need not be paranoid toward you or I am ruined as a literary correspondent entirely.

I still don't understand the dearth of comments about the spooky photographs of Rachel and I a little over a month before her demise.

I LOVE YOU RACHEL AND THINK OF YOU EVERYTIME WE DON'T RUN OUT OF FORKS BECAUSE WE TOOK YOUR KITCHEN STUFF AND HAD BEEN VERY SHORK ON FORTS. I MEAN SHORT ON FORKS. HORTS ON KORFS. WHATEVER. FORTS ON WARTS. FARTS WITH CORKS.

ENJOY YOUR FAMILY'S DRAMA WHILE YOU'RE IN THE BLEACHERS; LUCKY FOR YOU, YOU WEREN'T BORN INTO A BORING FAMILY! I BET ALL YOUR NEW FRIENDS PREFER WATCHING YOUR FAMILY'S TAPES.

Love,

Papa

3 Kilobunnies!

Spooky Photo; Men's Retreat; 2 poems

Besides noticing how Rachel seems somehow apart from me in the family photo to the left, I changed the caption so that everyone's expendable.

How horrible but how true.

But here's another picture from the last pictures I ever took with Rachel:



It makes light of my choking her, doesn't it? And that's how she died, poor dear.

Curioser and curioser.....


***********

I just finished my second Mendocino Circle of Men's retreat last weekend. If you care to compare it to my former experience, this link should deliver you to the general area where I blogged about my fear in being swallowed up by New Age nonsense a year ago at the same retreat.

Fortunately this time I was not depressed and participated fully in all the rituals and encounters. I must say it was life-changing. Rather than employ prose, though I know I swore off poetry, I'm offering two poems that describe one very important aspect of our spiritual exercises.

The theme of the retreat was a fourth Jungian archetype for the masculine personality: The King.

A key exercise over the weekend was to stare deeply in the eyes of another man. I found that extremely powerful.

I know I gave up poetry, but it is such a habit of mind to reduce experiences to shorthand that I could not prevent myself. I needed to make sense of the weekend. So here:


Close Encounter

The difficulty, I think, is with the eyes.
Hold eye contact too long, the other blinks.
Christ called this portal “the window to the soul.”
We treat it casually while contact shrinks.

It’s hard for me to follow both your eyes;
My eyes go back and forth to follow one.
If I look at your nose in compromise
You think I see both pupils but I don’t.

After the Retreat

The angels swirl in orange sparks to heaven
In gyres and gyres and all the gyres agree
The redwoods set the naked dancers free
And all is judged and all likewise forgiven.
It is the age of seconds and degrees.
Life passes faster that we can absorb.
Here! There! Then! Now! Toward
the center? Is it there? Axle of peace?
What is a man that we should even care?
A bit of clay, some spit—yet brother to Christ!
I had forgotten the scent of regal spice
Until I dared to brave my brother’s stare
And scales fell from our suspicious eyes:
We saw the King in Full without disguise.

I posted one of these poems at the Alsop Gazebo Metric Poetry thread. I haven't posted to a workshop in a coon's age, but the indefatigable Pat Jones has finally pushed me into contact again. My chief objection to most online workshops is that they don't help you to be a better poet; they are more pools of self-justifying piranhas who scrutinize, with their razor teeth, any work whose disassembly confirms that their commentary is actually important. Per usual the critics are more interested in their own voice than the voice of the poet who throws his soul on ice.

Love to everyone!

3 Kilobunnies,

Your formerly melancholic guide,

C. E Chaffin M.D. (MD) FAAFP

Free, free, free at last!!! ...?.....

It is a week since I started on the expensive $14 tablet/day that my wife insisted we buy, contrary to my best depressive judgment. I can honestly say before God and Man and the Devil that I haven't been depressed in a week. I've cried in grief, but have had no depression. It's a fucking miracle! .

As my elder brother Chris always says, "Good to have you back!!"

Good to be back!!!!!

I can't tell you how grateful I am to science, luck, my doctor, the Demiurge who gave us reason and my darling wife, who insisted on more snake oil at a scandalous price, as well as the support I've received here. Know that your encouragements were never wasted, however dark it seemed to me.

At 3 Kilobunnies,

CE


I don't know how I fucked up this underlining feature, but not being depressed, I can live with imperfection. Hoo Haw!

Only Lunatics Need Apply

My weeping spells continue most of the day.

There has long been a debate in psychology about which comes first, the affect or the thought. Obviously in the death of a loved one the thought precedes the affect. But clinically, as in my case, the affect overcomes me and afterwards I may append thoughts, but the thoughts are not valid. When sad you seek something sad in your mind to explain it. So I can fasten on Rachel’s death, or my own infinite shortcomings to fill the necessary object for the sadness. But in truth there is no object; the labels are falsely appended afterwards. I cry because I cry.

When I cry I keep hearing in my inner mind: “God helps those who help themselves.”

It’s true, you know. I’m not saying I have to make the burden worse by “trying harder,” just that I should make the effort to cope and seek help as best I can. I am doing that. In fact, the doctor started me on a new medicine yesterday, only $14 a tablet—which we can’t afford—nevertheless Kathleen insisted that we buy it now that she has a job. I would not have spent the money but she would do anything to make me well. This depression has now matched my longest depression of 1982-83, also 16 mos. and sent packing with ECT.

I’ve thought of starting a fund drive: “Dr. Chaffin needs ECT. He has no insurance and no way of getting the proper treatment. It will cost around 50 K. Please send your donation to Dr. Craig Chaffin, PO Box 2436, Ft. Bragg, CA, 95437.

Who knows? Maybe a millionaire will read this and send me the money. I promise to use it only for treatment, and if the medications start working consistently, I will naturally send the money back.

I said I was done with poetry but the other day I reverted to the familiar form to exorcise some dark feelings:


Kentucky-Fried Christ

I wear the Elephant Man’s mask
like a Jewskin lampshade.
Do you see the glow of hell through it?
Come, warm yourself,
take my gold fillings,
my bones for your Camellias

Living is for men in sunglasses
who can filter the not me from the me.
Suicide is for sissies
in little nautical suits with big bow ties.
Don’t worry about me.
If my blood has been desiccated
and ground to red pepper,
remember me on your pizza.


I am the Jesus of the broken cell phone,
the Savior of ceramic kitsch.
I’ll glue that broken cat
with the clock in its belly
back together with my spittle.
Of my healing there shall be no end.


I think that’s pretty dark. The title, incidentally, was furnished by my old friend with whom I have recently reconciled, Eric. He seems in a very good space, content with his lot in life, grateful to serve in a church where he is a deacon. It was my illness that drove him away in the first place.

Funny, for the last two nights I saw TV ads for “bipolar treatment.” Although they never came out and named a drug, you know some big pharmaceutical company is behind them. And in Emily Martin’s book, Bipolar Expeditions, she points out that the hypomanic/manic side of the illness is considered valuable in business. So bipolar disease has become fashionable nowadays, it seems, and is being greatly overdiagnosed in children.

I for one resent the lowering of the bar for diagnosis. The word “lunatic” is derived from early observations of manic-depressives, whose cycling was thought to be associated with the phases of the moon. As a true lunatic I don’t want some penny ante bipolar II or cyclothymic wannabe sharing my hard won moniker in this matter.

BTW, I should say, that although I don’t pick up the phone, I am always happy when someone calls me, as a friend did today. Though I teared up several times on the phone, my voice cracking, listening to him was a great comfort. So don’t be afraid to call me, I’m happy to hear from you. Write me if you need my phone number. My only caveat is that I already know you; I don’t want to encounter new people, I am in no position to make new friends right now, the strain of the introduction would be too much.


Thine in lunacy,

CE

Cry me a river

I wish I had better news. I wish I could say, “I’m well! I’m well! Thank God Almighty I’m well!”

But I’m not. I’m sick. I’m very sick.

Since Friday, soon after I wake up I burst into tears and sobs and they last all day until my tear ducts are just burned out by nighttime. Even yesterday, when I hiked with Kathleen along the beautiful cliffs of the coastline, I couldn’t stop the tears running down my cheeks beneath my Ray-Bans. I called my doctor but we did not connect. I don’t know how to stop crying. I don’t know what I’m crying about. It’s as if someone left the alarm clock on and it won’t shut off.

I am overcome with grief. Yes, I miss Rachel; yes, I can’t believe she’s dead. Yes, that thought makes me weep. But my grief, my physical expression of grief, triggers self-denigrating thoughts as well: How incompetent and incapable I am. What a failure I am. I couldn't get a job at McDonald's. I would never learn to flip the hamburgers properly. My back hurts always, yes, and my mind seems like a tattered kite hanging from the telephone wire, but I feel as if I deserve to be thrown out on the streets and given a shopping cart. Or perhaps I could join a freak circus. “The Saddest Man Alive,” the marquee would read. The curtain would open and there I would sit, watering the tulips.

I want to look “well” for Kathleen. But I can’t dissimulate in front of her. I tell her of my little triumphs, how I put shelves in the coat closet, how I cleaned out the entire refrigerator. During these tasks I continued to weep. Obviously I can function in this state, though it feels as if I can't.

What am I crying about? I don’t know. It’s like a record skipping. I should have had ECT a year ago, but who knows whether my daughter’s death might have sent me off the deep end again anyway? I took an antipsychotic this morning hoping it will calm me some. I called my doctor again. I try to be responsible about my illness.

Netflix sent me “The Elephant Man,” which I apparently ordered long ago. Terrific movie. I understand John Merrick, as I think most of us do. Not that I have actually suffered as a sideshow freak and been beaten by a drunken handler. It’s just the feeling of being so very different when I know I am not, just as he yells at his pursuers, “I am a human being!” And because he is befriended and loved, he receives more happiness than any of us can imagine—who can imagine being lifted from such a wretched state to become a favorite of London society, and that not because he was a freak, but because he was human despite his unfortunate appearance.

I have a friend who suffers from the same disease, neurofibromatosis or “Von Recklinghausen’s disease.” Like most cases, his is much less severe, though the fibrous tumors have necessitated multiple surgeries on his foot. I’ve never heard him complain about it.

I recently read an article in the New Yorker about those rare individuals afflicted with Lesch-Nyan syndrome. Because of one random mutation in their X chromosome, they chew their lips and fingers off and react oppositely in their emotions—that is, if they like someone they may cuss at him or punch him. If they dislike someone they may say something polite. Their hands must be covered with mitts because their fingers frighten them, as they feel suddenly compelled to bite them. Most have no lips, having long since chewed them off. Often they ask their caretakers to restrain them when they feel the self-destructive compulsions coming on. To think that one base pair askew in the DNA chain could result in such specific behaviors is frightening and raises serious questions about free will.

Kathleen tells me, “It’s not your fault. It’s your genes.”

But I don’t know any other me. Just because some genetic abnormality makes me cry for days on end doesn’t mean that that crying feels any less like me. And I don't dwell on suicide, a thought that more hounds me when depressed.

Nevertheless, if genetics is destiny, can I make myself stop crying? Can I will myself into sanity? Of course not. I can’t control it any more than an epileptic can control a seizure. This is not a failure of courage or anything else; it is not a failure at all. It is a biological sentence that differs from grief.

I don't feel sorry for myself; if I grieve, I grieve for the whole world, because I feel as if the object of my grief has become diffused and fills the universe.

If you asked me why I weep, I could only say, “For nothing. For everything.” My sadness has no limit except this body. Still, my state is not like a pure biological depression. It is something new. I have never cried this much when depressed; in that state there is too much of the bitter, metallic despair in me to do so.

I don’t feel inhuman. I feel too human, even if the capacity for sadness is only one aspect of being human.

In writing this I have temporarily stopped crying.

I feel like an emotional astronaut. I try to report the journey and it doesn’t have to make sense.


Unrateable,

CE

Second draft of "airport" novel finished....

Yesterday I finished the second draft of my “airport” novel and e-mailed it to my sister. What I want to know from her is whether an average reader would be interested in finishing the book or prefer to leave it on a bench.

My novel is no great work of art, neither is it purely plot-driven; character does come in at places, and is probably too long-winded when it appears. The book is an experiment as to whether presumed elements of popularity will overcome marginal writing. The book is baldly designed to be popular, as I made a list of things to be in the novel, with the overall idea of Michael Crichton meets Dan Brown (except for their research). Here are some of the elements I put in the book:


Four murders, three questionable because the victims were clones.
Dangerous fundamentalists.
Secretive Jesuits.
A ten-year project of the Jesuits ruined.
A manic-depressive doctor/coroner/investigator, overlarge, who doesn’t know his own strength, and adjusts his own psychiatric medications frequently throughout the book to improve his performance.
His playful but deadly Irish Wolfhound, Grendel.
His sidekick and chauffeur of vintage automobiles, (retired) detective Ray.
His mother, computer hacker extraordinaire, who still nags her fifty-year-old son.
A love triangle between the doctor, detective and the doctor’s beautiful deaf secretary.
Beautiful horses (a dog wasn’t enough for animal lovers, I thought).
Crash-bang ending where Grendel is seriously wounded, Ray is injured, and the doctor exposes the evil leadership of the sect.
All is reported back to the Vatican.

There’s an old joke about bestsellers. If people love to read about Lincoln, doctors and dogs, why not “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” That’s what I’m trying to do here. Really.

Fiction is hard for me because of the donkeywork. So much connecting of the dots, the tearing out of details and connections readers don’t need, the question of how much description is necessary or merely boring? How much do people want character? Will anyone identify with the characters?

All this chatter, blecch. How about a brief excerpt from my novel? This is taken near the end of the book, when the doctor’s mood is heightened before his he invades the sect's chapel.


*********************************************************************

In the brief interlude before their advance, Gunderson could hear Isaiah’s preaching in the stillness. The man’s voice seemed painfully loud. He could hear the congregation shifting in their seats, the slide of cotton on polished oak, the squeak of small shoes on the floorboards.

His mood was already heightened by the hunt and his encounter on the ridge, pushed into the kind of manic rebound that Zyprexa often yielded short-term. Time had slowed. His mind wasn’t racing; that would be “out of phase” hypomania. Instead he was enjoying his illness, a state of hyperawareness combined with the confidence of a god and the caution of a deer. He felt as if he had eyes in the back of his head, eyes all around like the fabled seraphim of Ezekiel. He could hear the proverbial pin drop.

“OK, Ray,” he said.

As they made it to the cabin next to the chapel, Gunderson automatically categorized the three intensities of light, from faint moonlight to the harsher, Edisonian light in the lamps in the eaves. He could see every crack in every knot of pine while the grain bespoke years, each laid down for the next—moment wedded to moment, limb to limb. The third intensity of light was a limited glow near the entrance. Looking back at Grendel, Gunderson could see every wire in his coat: rust, gray, brown, every curled point, noting that each whisker fanned out from his cheeks at its own peculiar angle.

Unlike Plath’s bell jar, he felt in this moment of stalking as if the world was a bell jar and he was looking in, intent on helping those trapped inside. Glancing up at the eaves again he saw each wing beat of a pale moth and the brown dots near the bottom of each wing beneath the slightly irregular slats of the eaves themselves, already warping from a brutal summer and a thirsty winter. As Ray hugged the chapel wall to his left, Gunderson meditated upon the pattern of tarnish in the six brass hinges of the chapel doors while noting the doors did not quite hang true. Better than a level. The world was glass and he moved through it like a diamond.

***************************

I paused the action here to describe the doctor’s mental state, but such excursions may impair the book’s “pageturnability,” as the agent who recently rejected the first ten pages wrote me. What do I care? I finished the thing, however grotesque the result. Now it’s time to get feedback as to whether the book deserves a third draft or would be better donated to an abortion clinic.

Now I’ll return to working on my Eliot book, which last scrambled my brain as I re-wrote my take on “The Waste Land” for the fourth or fifth time. That is a very different form of mental exercise.


I teared up over Rachel briefly this morning, though no crying jag. I’m working, that’s the important thing.

I do not think I’m depressed but euthymic and still grieving.

I am anxious today for good reason, because Kathleen starts work full-time and I don’t know if her back condition will permit it. She is my hero to try! I will miss her every hour she’s gone; she grounds me. Sharing her with the world costs me in comfort but I wouldn’t stand in her way. Her job entails coaching the disabled to obtain and retain menial jobs and to make sure they are not disrespected in the workplace, to be their “job coach.” She loves the work and her lip-reading skills have made her deafness a non-issue; in fact, politically, it is a feather in the cap of the organization that hired her: “The disabled helping the disabled.”

At Rachel’s memorial I was reconciled to a friend I had not seen in eleven years. He’s called me once since. I think I may screw up my courage and call him back today. We were tight for 27 years before an unfortunate incident, fueled by the manic side of my illness, separated us.

If anyone is interested in publishing my novel, please write. I have no agent and expect, if others deem it worthy, I'll have to eventually self-publish, like 85% of the books in America.


Kiloneutral but still grieving,

CE

Fulfilling an Assignment

Rachel is slowly becoming a groove in my sedimentary geology. The fossil fills with calcium; the calcium is mine.

My daughter lives through me and all who loved her. She was a joy and a gift. I did not cry over her today, which means nothing except an aberration in my limbic patterns.

Meanwhile, in filling up my dance card, my creative writing teacher gave us this week's prompt: to write a non-rhyming poem of 15 lines with the words "sour, pepper and seven."

I have given up poetry but could not fail my assignment:


Beginning with the Pleiades

Like white pepper thrown against the night
there are six, not seven sisters—
and Orion’s dog looks nothing like a dog.

Not to sour on the Greeks,
but if they had not connected the dots
into standard constellations

Would our imagination benefit?
Or must the memory of a superior culture
inhibit what we envision?

Pigeon shit scattered on Churchill’s statue;
winter may hide it but for now
the present outranks the past.

The Greeks kidnapped the stars,
but what artist among us could top
a terrifying darkness woven with bright gods?


More importantly, I received a two-page single-spaced letter from a major poet yesterday about my work. To my astonishment she told me that I was on my own; that the level I had attained would likely not be helped by workshops or mentors or other aids. She also mentioned that her success had nothing to do with connections but with the faithful licking of envelopes.

Perserverance. Again and again. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Never give up. The reason to write is because you are a writer and you must.

Kathleen and I had breakfast with Pat Jones this morning (art maven for Shit Creek Review), and we reminisced about the early LitNet and characters like Don Taylor, Jaimes Alsop and the the late Ron Jones. She keeps pushing me to post at the Gazebo again. Maybe I will.

Small world, huh?


2 Kilobunnies,

CE

Musings on America's Obsession with Pro Football

For literary rejectees like myself, my brother Clay sent me this wonderful article on manuscripts Knopf has rejected over the years: No thanks, Mr. Nabokov.

*******************************************************

It’s Sunday and America’s obsession with pro football has begun. I think it fitting that our culture would prefer our brand of football over any other sport because of its technological complexity. No other team sport employs so many trainers, specialization, special teams, pads, helmets, gloves, wristbands—not to mention an awkward projectile of a ball. Then there are the team rosters that approach 50, many of whose players are paid a million a more a year, and some paid well for just one function, like a punter or a holder and long-hiker.

The most popular game in the world is soccer, called “football” everywhere but here. It can be played anywhere there is an open field and something resembling a ball. American football, by contrast, is a Rube Goldberg concoction—more bells and whistles than one could ever want or need. Baseball doesn’t compare, not even polo. Maybe mountain climbing would, except that the sport has no crowd appeal. “Piton advanced by two feet, look at that, wow!”

The Soviet MIGs were much cheaper to build than our Phantom jets. They were more maneuverable, not “technically” superior in speed or firepower. MIGs had inferior arms and guidance systems, but our jets were burdened with everything a group of engineers could come up with while locked in a room with those venerable monkeys pounding on typewriters. I’ve seen ravens easily fight off red-tailed hawks on the same principle. The most advanced is not necessarily the best.

At a time when Detroit was introducing the Edsel, with its pushbutton transmission, and T-Birds with automatic trunk openers and cruise control, a little car called a Volkswagen began to make inroads into American car sales. Not only were these imports cheaper, they were simpler; any teenager with an interest could do his own brakes and even re-build the engine. And the cars didn’t use as much gas. This was soon followed by the Japanese invasion and Detroit didn’t get it. It was simply expected that the standard rising middle class American would want the car with the most gizmos, the most futuristic styling, the ultimate in current technology.

Americans love football because it is technical, so technical that we need a million analysts to explain it to us. It’s more strategic than a war and more violent than boxing. Best of all it plays well on television. In my experience at actual games I couldn’t see what the hell was going on from the fifty-yard line. Three yards and a cloud of dust. Moreover, football is a sport of interrupted action, a sport ruled by minute calls of inches, video replays, picayune details that can decide the fate of a season. Our Puritan heritage loves rules and no sport has so many as football, I’d wager. Americans also love to argue and disagree with authorities, because, as we all know, the Declaration of Independence has morphed into a national sentiment that not only were men created equal in rights, they were created equal in ability and intelligence. Stanley Kowalski deserves to go to Harvard as much as the next guy.

I watch the Super Bowl every year just as I put out candy for Halloween, as an American tradition. The grand event is usually a disappointment, even when Justin Timberlake exposes one surgically enhanced breast of Janet Jackson in the halftime show. Last year was laughable, with the Strolling Bones going through the motions (have you ever seen musicians more bored than Keith Richards and Ron Wood?), while a sixty-year old man danced around in leather pants and thick make-up trying to preserve his sex symbol status while ultimately appearing ridiculous. What’s funnier is that the image-conscious NFL turned to the Rolling Stones for more wholesome entertainment than Janet and Justin, or perhaps their marketing division thought them advantageous as demographic baby boom fodder.

I digress. Americans are in love with technology. My middle daughter complained about my youngest daughter texting 500 messages last month on their joint account. It adds up. People stood in line overnight for I-Phones, now a bit angry that the price has fallen. But they wanted the latest technology and were quite willing to pay for it.

Think of how often in B-movies from the 50s, especially Sci-Fi movies, humanity is saved by technology, and it doesn’t stop there. There’s “Independence Day” and “The Andromeda Strain” and those two terrible movies about meteors where astronauts sacrifice themselves to avert the world’s destruction, and countless others. And I find it interesting how often, instead of a standard hero, Americans demand a technologically enhanced hero, like Batman. Is it any coincidence that all the Marvel comics are being made into movies today? Not only because of a failure of imagination in Hollywood, but because we want to believe in technology as the answer, as our ally and friend. Right now, with the greenhouse gas threat, technology is looking more like the question. But the genie’s out of the bottle and no one no one can tell a developing country like China that their rising standard of living isn’t worth the pollution it’s creating. (China has surpassed the U.S. as the greatest greenhouse gas contributor.)

I don’t even like an analog phone. I’m a bit of a Luddite. Right now we have only a dial-up Internet connection, which is painfully slow. Cell phones don’t even work where I live. My car’s a beat-up ’99 Plymouth Voyager. Though a beater, it has cruise control, a rear windshield wiper, A/C and electric windows and seat adjustment. It took me a while to learn all the options it featured after I bought it. I really did have to read the owner’s manual. I shudder to think what the dashboard of a 2007 Lincoln Town Car might look like. If only I had the money to hire a chauffeur!

Football. Emblematic of a nation obsessed with winning, the danger of violence, the endless chess board of play-calling, the specialists and the special teams, and most of all, the privilege of second-guessing the coach, general manager and owner (a joy shared throughout the world by all fans of professional sports).

Speaking of violence, did you know the average career of a pro football player is three years?

Again, why is America’s sport really football, while baseball is only its “national pastime?” Because it’s the most complicated, technological, violent competition known to man.

How many of you will watch it today? If you do, don’t be ashamed if you are an American. For any foreign readers I hope my remarks transmit some understanding of our obsession. And, given that we have more firearms in private hands than the rest of the world combined, football may assuage some of our need for violent confrontation. It’s not that Americans condone violence, more that we are accustomed to it, I fear, and football codifies it nicely, though I much prefer a good boxing match.

For those interested in my ongoing transition as a manic-depressive father in grief over the loss of his daughter, I thought it would be healthy to take break today. When I first posted about it I said I didn’t want to turn this into a “grief journal.” Besides, I hear Joan Didion did a much better job in her Year of Magical Thinking.