My Book Is Out, Hallelujah!

And Amen! Can I hear an "Amen!"?

Alright, folks, it's party time! You can now order my book directly through the publisher at the following site:

"Unexpected Light"

Only the hardback is available as yet; we ship throughout the known universe. In fact, we just got an order from the space station. Think how valuable that will be! Yet the shipping and handling are naturally enormous--but what's a few more dollars in the national debt? Here's a poem I think might fit well with the astronauts:

"Ground control to Major Tom" wait--I stole that.



Night Train

Dark, dark, dark
the moon a scimitar
Venus below
a dull round diamond
through low haze beyond
mesquite and mud
by the moon-pebbled lake.

Suddenly slicing
through the night-blue file of trees
comes the train’s
brass foghorn
and Cyclops’ beam

Through high gaps
in the trees’ soft palisade
I see the hard edges
of boxcars disappear
as flatcars sneak by--
the hulking rectangles return,
vanish again--
lights on the caboose.

Box snake,
mechanical river,
pram over cobblestones
(won’t wake the baby)
irregular rumble
comes from darkness
plows through darkness
recedes in darkness

In the lonely spaces
the dark shape
through the darkness
hugely moving
yet small against the hills
and endless highlands.
Tumbleweeds shiver
jackrabbits prick their ears
a coyote approaches
under cover of sound.

By this campfire
beside the moon-pebbled lake
I imagine the stars
as receding trains
head beams staring back
an infinity of cars
stacked behind them
snaking through the black ether
Doppler shift confirms retreat
the universe waving good-bye
constantly from its center
good-bye Stephen Hawking.

A lone train in the wilderness
mysteriously comforting
black obelisk on wheels
slicing through night-blue
beneath the imperative stars
moving to its own syncopation
into the Mexican night.

(published in Tryst; one of the longer pieces in the book)


Now the challenge of the book boils down to marketing. How do you market a book of poetry, esp. in the U.S. where the demand for it is likely less than in Europe or elsewhere? I must overcome the narcissitic quotient: Everyone in America thinks they can write a poem, by golly they did so in high school, so what's the big deal? And among poets: "It's really I that deserve a book, and I'm not going to contribute to another poet's narcissism by buying his!"

Malcom Gladwell in "Outliers" just posited that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I guarantee I have put at least that much time in the reading and composition of poetry, not to mention near a thousand publications. So do not fear; you are not in the hands of an amateur.

I listed twelve reasons to buy my book in a previous post. Is it too early to throw my ambitions on the bonfire of charity and beg you to buy the book, so I can feed my dog and afford a cardboard shelter as a starving artist? No, I haven't come to that juncture of marketing humiliation yet, but stay tuned.

The mere existence of a book does little; it is only by purchase and word of mouth that a buzz is created, and once the buzz happens, it can snowball, and soon healthy sales result.

I guarantee you, as in the poem above, that my book will stretch your mind and help prevent Alzheimer's. I say this as a doctor and a poet.

So, what else is new? My darling baby daughter turned 20 yesterday, the same day my book became available, a nice coincidence or synchronicity. Here's a picture of her for those who don't remember her beautiful mug:



She's not only beautiful but talented, a star of stage and screen majoring in theater. Although she turned 20, I heard a rumor that there might be beer at her party--of course, only for friends that are 21. Right, and I'm going to win the Pulitzer!

But back to my plea: It is you, the long time readers of this blog, who now need to step up and do your part in sustaining my dream of being a recognized poet by not only purchasing a copy but telling your friends. The first version available is the hardback, but it's by far the best deal for the price and will last a lifetime (especially if you put it in a plastic bag and don't read it, although that is not the usual purpose of a book. Some think books should be read, unlike my younger brother who is more a collector--but that's another story).

The secret of marketing is twofold: First, branding--you gotta make your name known, especially in your marketing niche, which in the case of this book is mainly enlightened beings (to whom I'm already sending telepathic vibes). Secondly, you gotta make people want the product--because their lives are incomplete without it, because without it they won't be current, and besides, as everyone knows, poetry is the caviar of literature--and just the fact that you read it will elevate you in the eyes of others, leading to romance and riches and a generalized respect for your intellectual powers. Moreover, a book of poetry is convenient, as it can be read in one or two sittings or relished slowly poem by poem. But I guarantee, for those who take public transportation, the fact of your reading it will invite admirers and discussion.

There are those who read this blog from China, as well as Kuwait and other Muslim nations, where the act of purchasing the book may lead to problems with the authorities, but I say, stand firm with me on freedom of expression. Still, don't be in a hurry to share the book with your local Imam or Communist censor. The work does contain a couple of words that might be censored elsewhere--but only a couple. I won't tell you which ones, because I'm trying to generate prurient interest as well. After all, the book contains 20 love poems.

OK, I've had my say. Here's that link again:

"Unexpected Light"

Do not think this will be the last mention of "Unexpected Light," but I will try to temper its promotion with other posts about the usual suspects, poetry and manic-depression and life on the redwood coast.


In Worldwide Solidarity for Free Expression in the Fine Arts, and in Expectation of Support by All the Readers Here,

C. E. Chaffin


p.s. Those who do buy the book, please write me or comment here, won't you?

Best of: Tears for Rachel + poem

Grief is part of life and part of poetry; below a short poem about my daughter's death from my new book, then a re-posting of my walking the razor's edge of grief and depression.


On Rachel's Death

The hole
in the ground
left by the tree

the hole left
by her life
or my life
or any life

always lacks
dirt enough
to cover
the uprooted
root-crown
again.

Loss is a coin
tossed down
a depthless well

you listen
for a splash
that
never

comes.

(published in Abandoned Towers)



From 10/9/07: "Tears for Rachel":

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."

Another Poem from "Unexpected Light"

In continuing anticipation of my book's release, here's another poem from the volume:


Christ's Lighthouse

There is a pillar of light
stuck in the rocks like Excalibur
above a harbor of heavy water,
hushed and heavy with suffering,
where waves swallow their foam—
but much can obstruct your view.

I used to lose sight of it, thinking
the ocean's furious slam dance the thing,
me roped to the mast between
the cold salt walls of death—
Or ships would block it,
horns and radios distract me
until only a slip of light
in the marbled sky
recalled its jeweled foghorn,
a dog whistle for the deaf.

Do I dare now? Do I dare say
I see it always, through iron bars
and self-revulsion as if the great stone
of the world were rolled away? 
What terrible temptations do I then tempt,
What unexpected holy thing
may morph into evil,
baiting my inner eye
with self-congratulation—
me a blind man beating
his dog with a white stick? 


(earlier version published in Mindfire)

Yesterday I was jonesing for a cheeseburger and satisfied myself, Oh how I satisfied myself, at Jenny's Giant Burger in Fort Bragg. As I was wadding up my napkins and paper to throw into the trash, I lifted my cup for a sip of Coke and managed to jam the straw up my nose rather deeply. In 54 years I can't remember this happening before, but I had another fast-food epiphany once, where I was sucking on a drink in the bathroom while peeing. I felt like an in-and-out factory. Strange.

I'm really a sushi and potatoes kind of guy.

If any have trouble with today's poem, please query or comment below. It's not one of my easier poems, though I constantly strive to be clear--yet there are some things that can only be said in a more complicated way, and sometimes I am not a good enough poet to simplify adequately.

The neurologist said of my neck injury and nerve impingement that I can get by without surgery. Hooray! I hate surgery and the stress it puts upon the body's recovery systems. To be avoided if at all possible.

I'm furiously writing editors who have published me, trying to obtain as many reviews as I can. As they are published I'll post them here. Writing the book took a long time, but promoting it is a new endeavor, and I ask your help with it. In other words, tell your friends!

I've also started a Facebook group around the book, which anyone can join. Here's the link: Unexpected Light

Thanks for stopping by!

At 1 Kilobunny (might be two if I didn't have this cold; hope the jammed straw helped with the congestion),

CE

My Book Is on the Way...

With my book, "Unexpected Light," due out in a few weeks, I thought I better start posting some samples from the book as an inspiration for purchase. First, the jacket cover:




Yes, folks, the publisher insisted on a perfect-bound hardback with a gray cloth cover and book jacket, something that will last years. I've seen the prototype and it's a lovely book. Smells good, too.

The hardback will only be available through myself and the publisher; the paperback edition will be available to the market at large through Amazon and other stores. The hardback goes for $20.00, the paperback for $12. We tried hard to keep the price down on both; the paperback is 161 pages and the hardback, 156. That's twice the poetry you usually get in a book of poetry. And why should you buy it?

1) First, as a collector's item. My last paperback (1997) sold for $14.95 and now goes for $150 used.

2) Eleven years of hard work, publishing roughly fifty pieces a year during that time, braving hundreds of editors.

3) Because you love me.

4) Because you hate me and want to make fun of the book and my poems.

5) Because you like my work.

6) Because as someone with a mood disorder, you find solace in my poems.

7) Because you're a friend or relative and feel obligated.

8) Because you want to support poets who first achieved a reputation on the Net, despite what everyone said about having to make it in the print journals first, most of whom now have a Net presence, as I long ago predicted (even Poetry and The New Yorker now take e-mail submissions).

9) Because my poetry is a harbinger of a 21st century revolution: the broad diction of the Elizabethans combined with the pithy lucidity of the Augustans and the magical reality of the Romantics, along with the irony of the Moderns and the anxiety of the Post-Moderns. Because my style is a fulfillment of my essays on the Logopoetry School that prizes communication above mere linguistic entertainment or intellectual puzzlement. Because language isn't dead but has been suborned by the aficionados and the New York cabal, and we need some via media between the excesses of performance and academic poetry.

10) Because you've never bought a book of poetry before; for the sheer novelty!

11) Out of pity for me.

12) Because you're nice!


Expectantly,

At 1 Kilobunny,

Thine in Truth and Art,

C. E. Chaffin

Best of: Cry Me a River

From 9/24/07, while deeply depressed:

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

Best of: Football and Technology

As the college football championship has just been played, I thought I'd run this one again, from 9/9/07, also in view of today's day--a Sunday.

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 football 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.

Celan and Poetic Genius

It's not often that I encounter a poem that blows my head off. But Paul Celan, a peculiar genius, wrote the piece below (although only a translation, but a good one, I think). He was a Holocaust survivor who battled depression and committed suicide late in life. His primary trauma was to return home at 16 and find both his parents gone--Jews--and never to see them again. What losses he endured are unimaginable; we are lucky he played out his grief in verse. There are very few poems that come to such a pitch as this, turning standard theology on its head:


Tenebrae

We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.

Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.

Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.

Wind-awry we went there,
went there to bend
over hollow and ditch.

To be watered we went there, Lord.

It was blood, it was
what you shed, Lord.

It gleamed.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.
Our eyes and our mouths are open and empty, Lord.

We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

Pray, Lord.
We are near.


His use of Christian themes as a Jew are remarkable. He sought the whole of humanity from his whole heart. Another tragic figure, another great artist.

Instead of wondering at his suicide we might ask why he didn't commit it sooner, truly. His poetry speaks of inexpressible deprivation, unsatisfiable yearnings. Yet there is a dim light throughout; he tries to make peace with reality, a reality that is supercharged in his poetry, where the least experience can give rise to the greatest profundities. He called himself an "autobiographical artist" despite our difficulties with his verse. He is sui generis, a thing unto itself. I don't know who his literary antecedents were.

Then again, in literature we try to make sense of history by assigning schools, trends, influences and what not. But this is a convenient imposition on history.

There are two kinds of poets: the canonical and the upstarts. Yet the upstarts, given sufficient success, become canonical. Remember that Wordsworth and Coleridge were rebels subsequently subsumed by conservatism. Eliot and Pound were rebels too, as were Williams and Ginsberg and innumerable others. But as with Blake, Celan is one whose antecedents are hard to find. He arrives as a solitary genius like Blake. I doubt he, in the Supreme Bloviator's words (Harold Bloom) really subsumed the tradition. He went his own way, like Hopkins and Dylan Thomas: unique voices without traceable literary lineage.

Many still don't believe that the son of a suburban glover wrote Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare was a creature of the Theater and learned his craft firsthand. He relied upon questionable histories and fantasies for his plots. He made such stories into human revelations, but as his contemporary, Ben Jonson, said of him, he had "Little Latin and less Greek." This only goes to show that there are at least two kinds of poetic geniuses; those, who like Shakespeare, Whitman, Blake and Celan, blaze an entirely new path, and those, who like Eliot and Neruda, acknowledge their literary debts yet depart from the tradition with knowledge thereof. Some poets are so gifted that they don't have to read a lot of poetry to be great. But I would warn aspiring poets that this is more exception than the rule. But ah, sweet exception! Think of Emily Dickinson.


Thine,

CE


p.s. My new book, "Unexpected Light," should be available in three weeks.

Best of, cont'd: More on Depression and Grief

On the heels of my last new post, uncharacteristically optimistic, here's a window into the past when I was dealing with the loss of my eldest daughter and an ongoing depression from 9/6/07:


It’s been over a month since Rachel died. Each day I wake up, take my medicines and come downstairs. Before I can pour myself a cup of coffee I start to weep.

Sometimes I wonder if the neighbors can hear me through the open windows but they never say anything. Everyone has their own sorrow to bear. It’s awkward to try to enter another’s; much safer to ignore it. There are rare persons who have a gift for sharing sorrow, who seem able to make your grief equally their own, entering silently, seamlessly, just to be present. I think Kathleen is one of these. And so what if my neighbors hear me crying? They know of my loss.

I saw my psychiatrist yesterday. I told him about my morning anxiety, the fist in my stomach, and the tears that inevitably followed as I got up. He asked me how I’d been when Sarah was visiting; I was, of course, much better, busy taking her around, showing her the wonders of the coast, visiting thrift shops, taking her to restaurants and spoiling her in general. (I pride myself on spoiling all my daughters.) My doctor pointed out how much sadder I’d become since Sarah had left, and that if her presence could affect me so much it was not likely that I was suffering depression, since an external influence could so affect my mood.

Words failed as I tried to tell him what Sarah’s visit meant to me: “Just to watch her, to touch her." And now she’s gone back to her life in Long Beach, and it’s unlikely we’ll talk much since she is a teenager and I’m an old man. She was a great comfort to me as I hope I was to her.

For now I am in uncharted waters. It encourages me for my doctor to tell me I am more in grief than depressed. And my symptoms tend to support that. I can laugh with Kathleen at night after she returns from work. And after my morning tears I find myself able to function. I paid the bills, for instance, on Labor Day, and was not beset by my usual longstanding fears when I paid them.

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

I’ve stopped crying now for this morning, I think. My shrink told me to “fill up my dance card,” to busy myself with whatever work was interested me. I told him how much I craved a job where I could punch the clock and put widgets and whatchamacallits together all day. The freedom I have to choose my work is frightening; I would much rather have it assigned.

Writing is my main form of work, followed by house husbandry, gardening and two college courses. It's time to take up my writing projects again.

Back when Kathleen had thought to promote me, she bought a number of books to help. Last night I paged through The Wealthy Writer, written by an Australian bloke who was willing to write anything. In doing so he made contact with the corporate world and found himself writing press releases, helping with ad campaigns and the like. He said “corporate clients paid best.” Most of his book was about business, how to establish a business of writing. He did not concern himself with what he had to write, only that he could get paid for writing. His approach didn’t appeal to me; it sounded as if he’d created a copywriting arm of an advertising agency on the cheap. I guess my fantasy of being a writer will always have me in a cabin with a typewriter, where my agent has to don snowshoes to reach me. My great genius should not be troubled by the business side of things.

My desire to make money as a writer, something new, is borne of an ambition to fulfill my Protestant work ethic and prove I can do without disability. If I could accept myself as I am, a man declared “disabled” by numerous specialists, a man who enjoys a modicum of success as a poet and essayist, I would, of course, be much happier.

Self-acceptance is easy for sociopaths—it never crosses their minds. For the neurotic it seems nearly unattainable. Even for the manic-depressive it is more than a question of neurochemistry.

What if I was loved as I am? Perish the thought! I can never be loved as I am, I must do something more to deserve it, and that, as well, will never be enough to appease my inner god, so it is all pointless. Still, when I hold Kathleen I can feel her healing love flow through me and I know she loves me just as I am (though she excepts my feet). Despite her help I have immense difficulty in imagining myself being loved as I am, which is the bedrock principle of Christianity: God loves sinners, period, just as they are, and there is nothing we can do to merit such love. I believe in this philosophy, why I call myself a Christian, but as for the inner experience of the good news, I am insensible.

When it comes to loving myself, the self-esteem movement never held any attraction for me because it had no traction. How can you love yourself unless you are loved? We need some external being to love us so that we can internalize it. This needs to come early in one's life, very early. Even then the psyche may reject it.

Though I believe my parents did their best, how could they have known that I felt unwanted, excluded, a burden to them from my earliest memories?--which resulted in my having to prove my worth over and over again in the hopes of being loved.

When it comes to such questions my friends like to remind me that my dad was an intimidating monster, that they didn’t feel welcome in my house with him around, rather intimidated; our house was the maze and Dad was the Minotaur. That was the cloud I lived under.

Do these ramblings sound like depression?

When I cry in the morning, what do I think of? I don’t think; I simply feel this emptiness open up inside me, an emptiness where Rachel isn’t, although she should be there. It’s a sadness that does not beg for her return so much as mourn the fact that she could ever leave, that she had for so long occupied such a large part of my heart. When I weep I weep not only for Rachel but for the human capacity to experience loss and for all who have suffered loss.

Marrying mortality to self-consciousness is a troublesome match. The latter gives the lie to the former because self-consciousness cannot conceive of its own end, thus has a terrible time accepting the evidence that this is indeed the case. We are mortal; the fiction of life we create, our own narrative, is written with disappearing ink; we can’t believe in our own deaths or we would abandon our narratives and follow Bartelby the Scrivener into a catatonic refusal to credit life at all.

That I weep for Rachel proves that I believe in life, but at the same time reminds me how much of a fiction I must create to live my own life. I can’t, for instance, do anything if I am constantly worrying about losing Kathleen or one of my other daughters.

In trying to sum up what I felt towards Sarah before she left, the best I could come up with was, “Don’t go dying on me.”



Thine,

CE

Heaven on Earth

I was feeling so blissful tonight I needed to write about it. I have sharply disregarded the idea of "heaven on earth" for obvious reasons in my life: mistaking it for a result of religious discipline; mistaking my mania for the real thing; a generally pessimistic attitude towards this world ("The poor you have with you always"); a knowledge that human nature has not changed since the dawn of recorded history, and a belief that Christians must naturally go against the grain of the world to live their faith. I'm having second thoughts.

In Ephesians 2: 4-7, the Apostle Paul offers these words: "But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus."

In other words, we are already there: already seated, already resurrected, already saved. Believing this is a great tonic open to all, but it is difficult to grasp. It violates time, for one thing, not to mention the evidence of our eyes. But it is not smoke and mirrors. The foundation of Christian Faith teaches that heaven can be experienced here. It may only amount to a glimpse, Eliot's "timeless moment," but I think a prevailing attitude in accord with this tenet can be achieved as well, or better said, granted by grace.

I have written before about the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness can mean achievement, good luck, good genes, inborn optimism, relative security, even a good meal with friends. But it lacks the depth of joy, which for me is a near beatific response to having endured suffering and loss and transformed them into thanksgiving and wisdom. Joy gives me a deep ache in my heart, makes me draw a deep breath, acknowledges sorrow as much as rejoicing, cuts through to the primal foundation of being and whether that house is built on rock or sand, whether grounded in love or some imitation thereof like success or security. Joy grieves, sympathizes and rejoices. Happiness feels good about itself. Joy is humble; happiness may include a sense of deservedness. In all, the deep gratefulness that accompanies joy cannot be accounted for rationally; those who go there have made a choice, against the evidence of this world, aided by supernatural grace, to see through to the heart of the universe: the God of Love.

I'm not just a Christian, I also consider myself a bit of a Taoist and an Existentialist. Strange bedfellows, perhaps, but not in my mind. I like to think about The River of Life and how I am flowing in it today, and what impediments may face me in the current, and whether I need to negotiate rapids or falls. It is the same river, the living river, the river of karma and coincidence and kairos and salvation. Thus the Taoism; to go against the river is foolish, best to flow with it and try to avoid the stagnant pools and forks.

Are you in the River? Have you let go of yourself enough to rest in the current of Love? Do you think this is possible? Now I do. I have been so blessed in the last year, despite my trials, despite ECT and a serious motorcycle accident and all the rest. I feel good about myself. I like to say, "It's great to be me." And this is not a boast about who I am but what I think I may have discovered, that given the right attitude, some of us can live in present bliss much of the time, and that deep joy cannot be eroded by circumstance, however dire. Sure, we all fall out of the river at times and beach ourselves on shore, get tangled in weeds or circle down in a whirlpool, but that need not be our condition. Our condition, if I understand Paul, is glorious and we need to remember that.

You may say, "But that's only available to Christians." Maybe, but I don't think so. One spiritually attuned to the nature of the cosmos ought to come to the same conclusion, the eternality of love, and the necessity of dwelling in it as much as possible--also that that feeling, that empowerment, that revelation is founded in something more than the personal or historical, the transpersonal if you will. It must exceed yourself. It must dwarf your worldly concerns. It's something that shines so bright that Moses had to wear a veil when he came down off the mountain.

In addition to joy I also have happiness: being in love with Kathleen for ten years; the joy of our children and our new dog, with a minor nod to the cats; the beauty of the coast where we live; my recent unexpected success in having a book published; my recent run of writing some 20 songs in three weeks, many of them, I think, good; the pleasure of reading, of being able to concentrate; the fellowship of friends; and I could go on.

Beneath all this is a foundational layer of joy. It is free. It is by grace. If it is mythology, well, I have bet my life on it, and if it proves not to be true, I had a better life for believing it, but that's not why I believe it; I believe it because it is true, and joy is simply a by-product of the experience.

Here endeth the Epistle for the day,


Thine at 1 Kilobunny,

CE

The Necessity of Denial

From 8/31/07, a month after Rachel's death:

When I find myself weeping and the object of loss fades away until my depressive mindset substitutes another reason for tears, I try to slap myself inwardly: I try to allow tears about Rachel without bleeding into tears about my extremely negative self-view. So I am lost in the middle of a dark wood at 52; what’s more important is she whom I lost.

When you lose someone very close to you it ignites other fears. The thought of losing Kathleen is or one of my other daughters is unendurable, of course. How could a man bear that? How do mothers with multiple sons lost to war cope?

One of the saintliest men I ever knew was a cardiologist, Dr. Srinatha. He lost his entire family in India in one crash (he was the only one not in the vehicle). He was the most compassionate of men, patient to a fault, willing to explain anything, and he never complained about being called to the CCU at 4 AM. His presence was always calming and his smile spiritually reassuring. I do not think his demeanor was solely a product of nature; I like to think grief helped transform him into the saintly being he became. Although grief can also bring lead to bitterness and isolation, the economy of the closed heart must eventually fail.

We need others too much. I hope I’m not leaning too hard on Kathleen. Sarah tells me to be a “poshead” and not a “neghead.” I’m in total agreement save for the wiring in my brain.

As for living with the conscious threat of a loved one’s death, it can’t be done sanely. We simply cannot operate while consciously cognizant of mortality, our own or theirs; such knowledge is existentially crippling and must be practically delimited, yes suppressed, to accomplish the smallest endeavor. Every action depends on faith, whether we trust our legs to rise out of a chair or trust gravity while pouring water in a glass.

We must live in denial to live. We cannot indulge in the Descartian (Cartesian) luxury of questioning every underlying assumption. That leads only to an obsessive unbelief in our own existence. Derealization, as the shrinkolas call it.

One thing that mixes up my grief: The writers conference. I was told point blank by two agents that my writing couldn’t earn money, that hardly any writers earned money. Writing for money had been my new goal of self-redemption, a way to get off the disability wheel that throws Protestant guilt at me like a gorilla heaving turds from a cage. And now I hear from the experts that my dream is wrongheaded.

This is no time to listen to them or analyze my chances, but the timing didn’t help. I was sad enough not to need my face rubbed in it. I don’t want to give up hope but this is no time to globalize about my future and my future goals. This is a time to take the long way home through the graveyard.

Sarah leaves tomorrow; God bless her! I may get back to the work of writing when she’s gone. I didn’t want to waste my time on it while she was here.

I’m in a public library trying not to cry. Earlier during my lunch break between the two halves of my mushroom identification class I did cry. But I cleaned up pretty good.

Last thing I want is to have someone stop me and say, “Woman, why do you weep?” Who wants to hear of your loss? Why spread the peanut butter misery of this world any thicker on the planet's crust?

My sister wrote Kathleen that she worries about me sometimes if I don’t blog. I wish I had the energy to visit the blogs of all those generous enough to comment here.

I still don’t get the Princess Di thing, ten years after her death today. I think it was her innocence, or the innocence we projected upon her—the same kind of innocence Marilyn conveyed. The same kind of innocence Rachel looked back to. We don’t want the innocent to suffer. We want to save them.

Thine,

CE

Best of, cont'd: On Depression and Grief

From 7/26:

Imagine that your brain was your liver and you had Hepatitis C. Or say you were a kidney that needed dialysis but couldn't’t afford it, or a hip joint whose pain no cane could ameliorate but without funds to be replaced. These are metaphors to help explain manic-depression to those who don’t suffer it.

Because the disease involves the brain directly, the ego, the consciousness that says “I,” the brain, in what normally would not be faulty logic, becomes convinced that it, the brain, is the cause of the disease rather than a victim of the disease. Imagine if the liver blamed itself for hepatitis when it was really a contaminated needle; if the kidney blamed itself when its demise was due to lupus; or if the hip named itself the guilty party when every septuagenarian suffers hip degeneration. The beauty of hepatitis, nephropathy and degenerative arthritis is that the organs and joints involved do not harbor consciousness, thus can’t blame themselves. Imagine: “I’m such a bad hip. I’m a complete fuck-up. Why did I let the protective cartilage wear down? I should have told her to stop jogging in her fifties. But would she have listened? Woe is me, I am only pain, pain is all I am; if only I could be replaced! If your brain were in your hip, that’s how it would sound.

This is an oversimplification of a complex disease, yet all metaphorical parallels for other processes suffer some distorting parallax; in this case I think the comparison apt.


From 8/23/07:


I

This morning, after my first cup of coffee, what I greatly feared came upon me. I had a brief thought about my disability and how I had failed to deliver myself from its charitable bondage through being a writer, or by returning to medicine, or in anyway becoming “a useful engine” as Thomas the Tank, my grandson’s favorite, advises. Inevitably this thought was followed by the familiar spiral of worthlessness and failure to which I had become accustomed in my depression. Then I began to think about my darling Rachel and how selfish it was of me to think about me and my failings, which made me erupt in tears, of course, during which the object of my tears changed to the loss of Rachel. But I don’t know if that change was genuine or engineered to escape my own guilt about grieving over myself and my failures instead of my loss.

I know all grieving is grieving for yourself, for how can you possibly grieve except for your loss? I suppose one can genuinely grieve about the lost potential of a life cut short, but that seems like a historical insight. The loss of a loved one can never be so intellectual at first touch. It is more of an emotional amputation, sometimes accompanied by a “phantom limb” syndrome. You imagine the person is there but they’re not. Where they were is an emptiness they used to fill. In searching that negative shape for memories, a cascade of images appears in my mind of Rachel from babyhood to adulthood: all the joy she gave me, how she stretched my love, how she taught me unconditional love simply by being my child. How can you lose that?

In Kenyon’s case it is easier. I look behind me in the car and he is not there. I walk beside a river and he is not swimming. I glance to my heel and he is no longer heeling.

I have two other daughters that need me. They are technically adults and don’t need me like they once did, and I try never to infantilize them in my mind. But right now I need to hold them, to see them, to believe in them. They are equally dear as Rachel. But are they? Nothing is as dear as that which has been lost, as in the parable of the lost sheep. Rachel, coincidentally, whose name meant “ewe,” has left a whole collection of stuffed animal sheep behind, of which Sarah has become the curator, just as I am now the curator of Rachel’s collection of Oz books.

Jacob’s dad did not even attend the memorial service and is incommunicado. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see Jacob again, the last living vestige of Rachel I can hold in my arms (though he doesn’t like that, preferring to scramble out of them).

II

I wish I could say I was in grief or depression; I think still more grief than depression; but as the grieving process proceeds, will grief simply be replaced by the obsession of depression, or will the two morph into some new thing?

I woke up afraid yesterday, not numb. That is more a symptom of
depression. I squired Sarah and her friend around to several beaches and enjoyed watching them enjoy themselves. Sarah is grieving, yes, but she is not depressed. She doesn’t cry about her own sense of failure and then segue to losing Rachel. She does have some guilt about her last conversation with Rachel, but her sad-feelings are all Rachel-oriented. Of course, she is lucky enough not to have a mood disorder, for which the whole family gives thanks.

At Glass Beach I let the wet particles of sunlit gravel and glass fall through my spread fingers over and over in a sort of hypnotic ritual. I lost myself in that. God bless the gravel.

I do not want to dishonor the memory of my daughter with a depression, though to ascribe any control to myself over that is ridiculous. Kathleen says, “Just let it all out. You can’t distinguish the two. This is not a time for that.” Good advice, I think. I try to take it.

Someday I will stop crying, I guess. Or maybe never. I was once a star in this world, a power, a doctor over other doctors, a paid musician and teacher of poets, and now I am what? A small voice in the wilderness? A pinpoint on the Net?

Did I mention how the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference spent three days crushing my dreams during the weekend between Rachel’s viewing and memorial? I had paid extra to meet with an agent for half an hour. Her first words to me? “You’re in the wrong business.” And why did she say that? Because on my application I had the temerity to say “I want to make money writing.” Most writers don’t make money, so I was told. I think I knew that.

I gave the first ten pages of my thriller to another agent, and she e-mailed me to say it lacked “pageturnability,” that too soon I segued into some philosophical tangent. Me? C’mon. I’m as literal as concrete.

I was well received for my music at the Art in the Gardens festival, through which I sleepwalked just as I have been sleepwalking through life since Rachel died, except when I break down, which I think is a kind of waking. To stay busy, to move my body, to take the girls to interesting places, this is all good. But when the carousel stops the lack of motion assails me with all the inertia of death.

“Pray for us sinners at the hour of our death.”

III

Like Rachel, I am a dreamer. I, too, think the world is unfair and that Peter Pan should never grow old, that Puff the Dragon should not be deserted. Unfortunately, to be too enamored of childhood is against nature, which cautions: “grow or die.” Part of my great grief for Rachel is the knowledge of how painful it was for her to negotiate the world while her deepest psyche was dominated by a vision of an overidealized childhood, which became a lost paradise.

Expulsion from paradise is initially separation from the womb, after which comes psychological, and ultimately, with the cessation of nursing, a new kind of physical separation from the mother. Later childhood Freud called "the latent period," as ages 5 - 12 are fairly conflict free. It is the age of Tom Sawyer and Harry Potter. It is the adulthood of childhood, where the illusion of independence is encouraged and supported by the family on which the child actually depends.

The terror of independent identity dominates adolescence, which is the process of finding an adult personality: who you will be for the rest of your life. Failing this last stage means too much dependence on others for the rest of your life (though we are all dependent to a degree). Some remain, intrapsychically, at an earlier stage where separation and independence have not truly been achieved, where only merging insures safety. And the price of that missed stage is often drama, testing those who love you to reaffirm an intense merging, usually through reciprocal emotional pain--accusation, forgiveness and resolution--to be repeated over and over.

Unlike Rachel I grew up too independent, unable to ask for help, afraid to be a bother. Perhaps depression is in part nature's revenge for my claiming emotional independence at too early an age. But that's who I was; it's not as if I chose it.

Unfortunately my early independence did not make me any better at the practical details of life, since I, too, am essentially a dreamer. At 52 I have no money saved and no health insurance. I am often charged with overdraft fees of $35 from my bank. I have not bothered myself about the practical aspects of life; they have never particularly interested me, though when too long neglected they always bite me in the ass. This dereliction towards reality may or may not be part of a poet’s nature, though I now refer to myself as an ex-poet, though that newly assumed mantle has more to do with the practice of poetry than my nature. Even in my grief I have resisted the urge to poetry.

Here’s an unpublished poem about an interaction with Rachel when she was perhaps three years old, one editors have never favored but one that I won’t delete:


Home Surgery

Daughter, when I freed
the glass sliver from your heel
you screamed, you shook, your foot lurched—
so I gripped your ankle with all the firmness
love could muster.

Plucked from your sole, the fragment shone
like a jewel in the bathroom light
while blood streamed, mixed with water,
into the white altar of the sink.

At the moment you hurt more
from my maneuvering,
did you doubt me?

That thought wounds my heart
more deeply than the matador
can bury his long blade.


No doubt the poem is too direct, even maudlin for today’s sensibilities. It is what it is, a record of a parent who must inflict pain to deliver a child from more pain, which requires a great deal of trust. For all her trust in me, Rachel was the kind of child who would prefer to let a sliver fester than have it out due to her fear of pain. As she grew older, even the pain of a lecture or punishment was too much for her to bear so that her feeling of being hurt made her forget the point of the lesson. As I’ve said before, she was too much like the Princess and the Pea, except that she could do with an imaginary pea.

Kathleen and I had such trust with Kenyon. When I performed surgery on him in Mexico after the veterinarians had bungled the job twice, the anesthetic wore off before I finished stitching up his chest. He looked at me but never moved; his eyes trusted me implicitly. Animals are so much easier.

In her defense, Rachel could be convinced of the right thing to do, the right path to take, the responsible decision, and with all her heart she would commit herself to that course of action. But within a day she would usually forget her former resolve and go wandering about seeking another solution, as if the problem had never been addressed. I made so many lists for her in her life, partly due to her ADD, since she had only 20% of normal auditory memory, which makes teaching a difficult thing. I am amazed when my daughter, Sarah, does something after being asked once, and yet that is the norm (within the limits of willful disobedience).

I promised I would not turn this blog into a journal of grief about Rachel, but if I write from the heart I have little choice at present. And the writer’s drama is now, for those who have been following my blog: Will CE again succumb to depression? And for how long? And with the complication of grief, can his chemicals possibly be balanced? Will he feel hope again? Will he feel like a useful engine someday?

One thing I fear is that I may be down for the count, damaged and depressed in some fashion for the rest of my life. I’ve always come back before but I’ve never had a blow like this follow so soon after a nascent recovery from an extended depression.

Will I retreat into myself more and more, keeping the world at bay, avoiding participation? Or will I strike out once more in the hopes of feeling human again?


Thine,

CE

Best of, cont'd.: Rant

From 7/22/07:


Despite my ongoing struggle with my mood disorder, I continue to expand my knowledge of local flora. Now for a rant:

Although they may beat me, stretch my skin on lampshades, inject me with polyphonic resins and ignite me with acetylene torches, I will not give up my secret.

My secret was passed down from generations, the secret that holds the universe captive, that makes the stars do our bidding and the planets follow meekly behind. To reveal it is not worth one life, much less many lives. No amount of organic matter can justify the telling of the secret for a mere reprieve from our planned obsolescence.

What is the secret? To ask that is to be a traitor to the living and no hero to the dead. When a secret is kept for generations, generations have agreed that its price is beyond rubies and gold, beyond a loft in Manhattan or a turn-of-the-century Victorian in San Francisco.

Many don’t understand that nowadays; many have gone over to matter absolutely, believing stuff is the central goal of our species. Perhaps it is. But my forebears and I resist the temptation. We consider our secret too valuable to sell.

The secret is obvious, of course; those who know it need not pursue it and those who don’t, well, no amount of money could secure the wisdom they seek.

I met a panhandler the other day in a greasy orange parka with a watch cap of green wool, straw-colored hair issuing beneath it, and the au courant, open-fingered gloves revealing dirty fingernails in the standard urban cliche'.

“Can you spare some change for a Vet?” he said.

“Let me see your discharge papers,” I said.

“Man, you some kind of hard ass? You don’t believe me? Agent orange wrecked my mind.”

“Agent Craig wrecked mine. Pull up your sleeves,” I said. He wouldn’t. Too many track marks, obviously.

“Go away, man, you’re bringing me down,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, “As a general rule I don’t give money to liars.”

I relate this to tell you that mercy is not enough. Mercy has been hornswaggled, kidnapped, sucked up like nectar from a flower. If a con knows you’re giving something away, by God, he won’t lift a broom for it but his practiced, heartfelt earnestness will strive to unlock your heart.

So much charity is wasted on the persuasive.

The ones in real need are rarely so verbally gifted. And how many of us commit charity to make ourselves feel better, hmm? The better they say, "thanks," the better we feel.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, over 2 million prisoners in the U.S., approaching 0.5% of our population, easily outnumbering doctors. Our charges have a 67% recidivism rate within three years.

Half of our inmates committed non-violent crime, usually drug-related. If we released them, the money saved could fund universal health insurance (this is just an estimate of mine, when combined with present programs; I don't claim to have the math down, but the savings would be 300 billion).

The cost of maintaining one prisoner for a year in California is about $30,000, a figure above the poverty level for a single person, even if that person is forced to live in an 8 X 6 cell, sometimes with two other roommates.

Is this crazy or what?

And some guards, with only a high school education, overtime included, make over $200,000 a year--more than some wardens.

Upon discharge a prisoner gets a bus ticket and the clothes he came in with, along with any money he earned (at 10 cents an hour) that he didn’t spend on deodorant or cigarettes. God bless America. If there’s no “home” to return to, the bus takes him nowhere. Bleakness. Repetition. Devaluation. Reward for predation.

Everyone's corrupt. But society would collapse without enforcers. Who would police Iraq? Who would punish Scooter Libby? Who would object to political firings of federal DAs when the executive branch has full power to fire any they please?

The greatest danger to Plato's Republic is not poets but literacy. Especially literacy in the pursuit of facts. God forbid. Put on a dark suit and answer your roll call vote. Constituents are barbituates.

I listened with great interest to a medicinal herbalist the other day. “Milk thistle gives you a positive glow,” he said. “It’s good for your liver. Figwort helps in detox.”

Why do I bring this up? Because he’s dealing drugs and giving medical advice. Shouldn't he be in prison if the law were applied equally?

The worst doctors go into enforcement; those almost as bad go into business.

I have often said that if every statute on city, state and federal books were enforced, we would all be in prison. How would we then pay the guards? By making license plates?

Good and evil are not absolutes in society; they are defined by current culture. Heretics were formerly burned and now drug dealers are incarcerated. Witches were put to death but now Wicca is chic. Debtors once went to prison but are now offered more credit cards.

Am I arrogant? Is it arrogant to spew the truth as I see it without need to please any constituency?

I think not. People don’t have to read me. Take me off your bookmarks; to otherwise complain is a self-pitying paradox.

I can’t wait for sleep to come. Being awake is so much work. I’m so tired of the player piano of my brain. If only I could come by some new rolls.

Fuck everything that moves. Bless the rocks.

I hate you all as much as I love you. I flagellate myself to please you. How I wish for ataraxia!

Please receive this rant as a rant and not as an essay. Or don't. Eat me.

Oh, and as for the secret? Listen to the Beatles. If you don't decipher it you're not meant to.


2 Kilorats,

CE

Sex in the Men's Bathroom...

I still have more "Best of," but I have to interrupt it now and then for some live coverage. New Year's Eve I had one of those experiences you only see on TV.

At our motel, where we paid for a dinner and dance so we didn't have to drive, someone managed to get the pool and hot tub open at 3 AM. We stole over there and jumped in the hot tub. Two barely twentysomethings were hot and heavy in the tub's corner, he in briefs, she in a slip. Kathleen threw a pool ball at them and told them to get a room. She smacked him in mid-kiss. When they resumed their activity she threw it again. I was in the cold pool and the young man looked pissed, so I explained how my wife was deaf and didn't understand his displeasure. She threw the ball again. They left in a hurry but I couldn't see whereto. Subsequently I had to drain my bladder, and as soon as I entered the men's room, there she was sitting on the sink with legs spread and him pounding her. "Excuse me," I said (though I had every right to a urinal) and turnbed for the ladies' bathroom. After their deed they emerged again and the girl did not look embarrassed or drunk and the young man jumped back into the tub--this time naked--and called to some other girl by the entrance.

I don't how many sex scenes I've seen in movies that occur in closets, airplanes, even an antique store in Woody Allen's "Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask." But other than spying other couples on the beach in a bag or in the distance in the wilderness, I had never seen the act so brazenly played and foreplayed. My point? Sometimes fantasies happen. This was not one I'd like to repeat as either participant or observer. IUf young people can't afford a room, can't they find a dark alley somewhere, or even a well-lit parking lot?

We did stay up all night and walked the dog at sunrise and never went to bed until late last night with no ill effects.

Today I had lunch with J. Webb (or Beau Blue of Cruzio's Cafe') and his lovely wife, Lori, where we traded DVDs and CDs and waxed temporarily literate. He's a character and if you haven't visited his cartoon treatment of poetry, you're missing out. You can also see my "Where Are the Frogs" video there.

My wish for this year was to be as happy and content in 2009 as I was for the second half of 2008. There's no reason I can't continue by God's grace and good luck. And I have the promotion of my new book to look forward to, as I already have a hardback copy for proofing, so I know it's not an illusion. With your help I aim to sell 1000 copies, which for a book of poetry would be a great success. If you love poetry, think about that statistic for a moment. We have a great oversupply of poets and a great undersupply of readers. It's as if everyone who bought a bicycle thinks he's Lance Armstrong.

But I don't mind. It's a big pond and I'm just a small fish looking for a break. And I know, despite my struggles made public here, that I do have a gift and that to some, at least, my words will make a difference. Whatever else you can say about my poetry, most agree that I have a "strong voice."

Happy New Year Again!

CE, Kiloneutral

New Year's Sayings II

One of the more popular of my postings has been "New Year's Sayings." I don't know if my mind is up to it today to create more semi-aphorisms, but I assure you these are my own unless they unconsciously filtered into my consciousness. They are not aimed at a New Year per se, only daily living and the philosophy of living.

Men have bodies; women are their bodies.

What's the thing people least like to hear? The Truth! (esp. about themselves)

What is the most necessary quality of a successful artist? Perseverance.

A good dog is better than a bad child and much easier to obtain.

To see your parent as an equal is taboo.

In America our cleanliness certainly exceeds our godliness.

Release your old friends from their childhood portraits and come to know them anew.

Family love is required, so loyalty must trump preference, even in the face of resentment.

There is no substitute for good parents or good genes.

Even a starving artist has to eat.

Nature, nurture, hard knocks and knowledge: a life.

To spoil a child, give them what they want. To bless a child, give them what they need.

Any defect in ourselves is what we most despise in others.

Wonder is not merely the province of childhood.

Have something to say and say it well--no more needs to be known about writing.

Imagine a world without music--how we take the arts for granted!

Eating healthy trumps dieting; loving one's neighbor trumps religion.

In a world of sheep, leadership is crucial, but beware of wolves in shepherd's clothing.

The most spiritual man is often the most practical.

Trees grow straight when they can but will always bend for the light.

True love is rarer than diamonds and more costly.

To sacrifice of necessity is adaptive; to sacrifice for oneself, ambitious; to sacrifice for others, saintly.

In our children we see the history of our earlier defects on display.

Etiology of adult ADD: overstimulation.

When going for a walk, do not bring your I-Pod; it imprisons your senses.

True luxury is having others do the work you don't want to do.

Wisdom consists of waiting for the nature of things to reveal their natures.

The economic crisis is the result of a banking on the future.

Mind over matter? Matter usually wins.

When you hit a brick wall, turn left.

Effeminate men are not necessarily gay, nor masculine women lesbian.

Dating encourages self-deception as we project our expectations on the other. Infatuation occurs when we believe in our own fantasies. Love appears when we see the other shorn of our distortions and yet remain devoted.

The Bing Bang: God's fingernail clipping lit on fire.

Multiverse: the new haven for UFO seekers.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

"Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, "But you need to mind forgiveness."

In an imperfect world, forgiveness is the most necessary expression of love.

God is the woof and warp of being, not the last explanation for unsolved mysteries.

Most people endure their jobs; he who loves his work is blessed.

Zionists are no better than the terrorists they incite.

The U.S.: Gulliver bound in threads, the helpless giant.

On science and wonder: Hummingbirds are impossible.

Water purifies itself; fanatics try to purify others.

Idolatry is the convenient substitution of ambition and loyalty for anything less than the Truth.

The Truth is neither didactic, abstract or situational. It can only be observed in living it out.

We all know what's right; it's the doing of it that burns.
.
Charity motivated by guilt is an unworthly offering.

Follow your heart, bet your life upon love; it is better to fail gloriously than succeed modestly.

In the age of personal promotion modesty has become a vice.

The ocean refuses nothing--the ultimate recycler.

Reality must be tailored to the size of our illusions; illusions are more necessary for living.

There is more truth in fiction than in non-fiction.

Everyone's the hero of their own story, and therapy consist of listening to their tale until they either buy it or see through it, when reconstruction begins.

We are, inside, very much more the child we once were than the adult we became.

The noose of his own opinion hangs the hypocrite.

What is better than Love?

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

Happy New Year!

I'm about 1 kilorat because of New Year's associated melancholy. It's been a tough year.

CE

Best of: Down to Five Kilorats

First, I got the proof copy of the hardback and softcover versions of my book. It's so exciting to hold them in my nicotine-stained hands! But for now, back to the best of, or worst of, if you consider depression. Some of these entries make my skin crawl, and my disgust for dogs was likely a mild manifestation of my depression at the time it was written.


From 7/7/07:


The sun is just lighting the east side of the redwood trees on this overcast morning. I prefer overcast when depressed; the sun seems an oxymoron.
I wonder if I can write anything more about clinical depression. It's been a rough ride. My shrink added antipsychotics last Wednesday, so I'm half-stoned most of the time, though I care less about my deeds and misdeeds than otherwise. Still my crying spells and interior self-denigrating thoughts persist.

I know this is depressive thinking, but it is not without merit to believe I have wasted my life. That thought brings tears to my eyes, bringing up the chicken and egg conundrum where the sad thought induces the sad affect; we've been over that already and you know that I believe it is the sad affect which generates the sad thoughts.

I've had all these years on disability with dreams of being a writer but no practical plan for marketing and making money from it. I would like to make money, a lot of money, and I can say that for the first time in my life, an ambition that most us come to in our twenties. I'm only thirty years late for that train, although a bad long-term marriage with a non-working wife and three children took their toll in alimony and custody. Nevertheless I always took money for granted and lived hand-to-mouth, save a few years I had some equity in my home. My interests were always "beyond" money. But nothing's really "beyond" money unless you're a monk. And by not paying enough attention, I'm now in a position where money controls me, not the other way around; if the flow stopped tomorrow Kathleen and I would have to move into a tent. Since my disability was yanked in the fall of 2005 (subsequently restored in December, although in the interim all my savings were taken by my first ex-wife), I have been understandably paranoid about having no income tomorrow, which doesn't help.

Premature old age is another symptom of depression. You start dwelling on penury and poor health and how will you get your medications and where will you live and such things. You wonder how you will die. Cancer runs in my family and my cardiac risk is now low without the smoking. But instead of making plans for today and "smelling the flowers," you can only see the brown blooms of winter on the denuded rose bush.

Here's a poem from my first and only book (I have stopped writing poetry):


A Time to Uproot

It shot forth one thin stem
from the waxed, purple stalks.
Suddenly they yellowed, wilted,
a sickness had taken hold.
I waited but no new shoot
grew fine and green between the thorns.

While weeding one day
I placed my hand around the branches,
testing them a little,
when the whole thing sprang into my clutch.
I inspected the roots:
an army of translucent termites
was feasting on the soft wood,
each a hideous jewel of pale yellow.

The bush left a wound in the ground,
dark and pleading, a crumbling mouth.
I salved it as best I could
with powdery white pesticide.


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

I was going to write about dogs and how I didn't like them today: How they haul in every burr and frond into the house, how a house is impossible to keep clean with a big, hairy dog, how I hate the consistency and smell as I mix the wet food in with the dry food in the morning before I have my coffee, how I wonder when a long hair squats how fecal matter can possibly be spared from hanging from its fur (which helps me understand why they cut off some dogs' tails for cleanliness, among other reasons). I hate picking up their poop in public places, I hate waiting around while they sniff in circles making up their minds where to poop. I don't like sticking my fingers down my dog's throat to make sure he swallows his medicine.

Dogs are gross: messy, stupid, smelly, and they demand a lot of care. I love Kenyon but I don't like him as a dog; I wish he had scales instead, that he were as clean as a lizard. There, I've said it. I'm more of a cat person at heart. They're cleaner and smarter. But you can't have nice furniture around them, and if they get mad and start pissing on things you're in big trouble, as the scent is impossible to remove.

One last thing: I don't know if I shall continue this blog after its two-year anniversary on July 27th. I don't know how much good it does me or anyone else. It helps most when I'm very depressed and the act of writing takes my mind off myself for a while. But today it's just making me cry.


4 Kilorats,

CE




From 7/10/07 (sadly, as most of you know, upon finally obtaining ECT in February of '08 I worsened):


Despair is giving in absolutely to catatonia, immobility, infantilism, hopelessness, bowing down to the darkness, agreeing with the Devil.

In depression you experience the temptation to all these things but persevere in the face of them, acting as if, pretending to hope, believing one day you will be better.

My weeping spells generally occur around 11AM or 4PM or both. Today I was hit early, in the shower, around 10 AM. What triggered it? I was remembering my last hospitalization in January of 1996, when it took all the strength I had to get out of bed and get into the shower. I mean all my strength. Every last jot and tittle of my conscious will.

Afterwards I tried to tie my shoes. I couldn't remember how to tie my shoes. It was as if I had to re-think every step of the process, to learn all over again as if I had never done it before. It was extremely puzzling but I finally mastered it.

Likewise as I was showering today I was forgetting how to shower; in what order did I apply shampoo? Had I shampooed already? When to scrub my back? I burst into tears because I was reminded of trying to tie my shoes in '96.

When severely depressed you can't take any automatic behavior for granted, and it's a terrible thing to have to start every task from point zero, to have to look up your own phone number, to try to remember anything you've read. Depression is much harder on the memory than ECT; how I wish I had insurance and could afford ECT! So on with the drug trials.

You see, my present antidepressant is Cymbalta, which has a short half-life, which means the blood levels rise and fall quickly, much more quickly than Prozac, for instance. Therefore missing a day or taking a half dose for two days can completely undermine any progress. Thus I wonder if part of this roller coaster is because mornings my blood level is lower, and perhaps I have another drop in the late afternoon--then this is my usual pattern in depression of sadness seizures, so who knows?

I think it may be time to change my antidepressant. This one has me sputtering; it drops me like an eagle drops a fish back in a lake, where I wait for another eagle.

"Tears on my keyboard..."

Finished 26,000 words of novel revision. My how it sucks! Of course I think all my work sucks in this condition. I've been going through my unpublished poems and deleting liberally, poems that failed, poems I never want to see again.

I do feel better after I cry; numb, perhaps, but the tension is somewhat relieved. In my grief my infant self cries out for Daddy/Mommy/God. Pitiful, huh? But human, so human..

I don't know God. He may know me. Let him worry about me; I'm too sick to worry about him.


5 Kilorats,

CE

Best of: At 4 Kilorats

From 7/3/07:

Do you ever feel invisible?

I mentioned that at my men's group no one asked me to "check in" and it wasn't noticed, though only four men were there.

Last night at a preparatory meeting for our yearly retreat, this year focused on the Jungian archetype of the King, many made suggestions. At first I decided not to speak, as it was my first visit to this meeting. But after a while I joined in, offering the idea that the King could not abdicate, as in King Lear's mistake; I pointed out the idea of the wounded King in the idea of the Fisher King; that a king could never really take a vacation from his responsibilities; that a king needs the humility to repent, and that we should first concentrate on the barriers that kept us from envisioning "the King within." All well and fine. But when the leader summed up the meeting, though he included some of my ideas, he curiously credited everyone for their ideas except me. As if I hadn't been there. As if mine were a disembodied voice without a person attached.

I know I tend to be overly intellectual; I mentioned some literary sources, like Nathan's famous upbraiding King David for the Bathsheba affair, the Grail legend, King Lear, and I hope none beyond that. Perhaps what makes people forget me is that I always feel the need to cite a reference for an opinion; maybe I know nothing except references; maybe I don't exist and have no opinion, substituting references and the opinions of others to shore up my own lack of identity. How do I come across to others? It's nearly impossible to say, but I fear I come across as cold and intellectual, separate, someone not involved in the social flow, someone who doesn't get the "hints" from other people about the social process, someone who throws red herrings on a pile of sardines.

Strangely I brought a notebook to the meeting, and it was the same notebook I brought to last year's retreat when I was seriously depressed-- as I am again now. And it contained notes on the very same problems I still experience, mainly regarding narcissism. Why must I be critical of others in my mind? Why do I suffer from jealousy? What infantile psychology lives in me to make me feel as if I ought to be up on the stage, the center of attention, instead of that person with the microphone?

Naturally depression causes psychological regression. (I'm crying as I write this.) I'm so tired of this journey. I feel like a raw nerve. Friendless. Worthless. Obviously too self-involved, but not knowing how to escape the bell jar.

I have had one good thought in this relapse of ten day's duration; I have prayed for a teacher. I guess that's another way of saying I want more than medications, I want "therapy" as well. But it's not psychodynamic therapy I seek; it's just a wise man to help guide me. All my life I've resisted trusting most authorities or teachers, to avoid the disappointment of overidealization and the subsequent devaluation, but I don't fear that now. What I fear is getting stuck here longer.

It's good to write because that gives me a brief respite from talking to myself inside my head, a habit I can rarely shake. Was I so lonely as an infant and toddler that I had to create all this noise in my mind? Ah to be cooking and not think about cooking, just to cook... the Zen of being wedded to the action without thinking, just doing... I went fishing yesterday and caught nothing from the rocks, I never do... but I couldn't just fish. I did think about making a catalogue of all my fears so that I could look at them and tackle them as best I could. Maybe I'll do that. But not on this blog.

Meanwhile I've been learning many new wildflowers here in my wanderings. Here's the coast onion, Allium dichlamydeum:










Here's sky lupine, Lupinus nanus:










Come July 27 it will be the two-year anniversary of my blog. I don't know how many have visited it as I've only had a tracker since October '06. Since then a little over 11,000 have, more than a thousand a month. Most are, no doubt, recurrent visitors, the rest find me, sometimes serendipitously while looking for something else, by searches.

Why do I persist in blogging? Mainly because it's therapeutic. I never believed in diaries; this is my first.

Since I sank into a depression on April 1, 2006, I've probably had less than two months relief--not of feeling happy but feeling normal. I most regret the burden my illness has placed on Kathleen. She is wonderful. No doubt if I were utterly home alone I would be much worse.

The problem with the psychological infantilization of depression is that one cannot receive the very praise and recognition one craves; it is suspect. Only when my chemicals are righted can I receive such things, but when my chemicals are righted the problem seems to disappear. So it's not worth thinking about. But I can't help it!

Depression is not a choice--why would anyone choose it? It is a curse, and in my case a familial, genetic curse. I got the bad genes. End of story. And I'm weak besides, while depressed; I don't always act in my own best interest because of the underlying hopelessness always whispering: "What's the use of doing this or that?" Yet I continue doing. Without doing I would go utterly under.

Thanks for listening.


At 4 Kilorats,

CE

"Best of": Avoiding a Depressive Crash

From 6/27/07:

I had planned upon our return from the trip to LA to have refills of my most needed medications in the mail from Canada, namely my antidepressant, Cymbalta, and my pain medication, Celebrex. To my horror and surprise, neither had arrived, only an old telephone message that both had been "back-ordered" from Europe. "Both?" I said, calling back. "Solly, one wasn't weady yet and dey don't like to ship dem together." Cheap bastards, I thought. I urged them to get them to me ASAP, whereupon the Indian pharmacist said: "Den you would accept generic?" Of course, you bubble-headed booby! I thought.

I try to keep such thoughts to myself today, because uttering them doesn't help anyone. In private with Kathleen these past two-and-a-half weeks on the road, I have often sat in a motel bed and said, "I hate everyone! I hope they all die!

"Bite your tongue and ask for forgiveness," she would say, especially if I mentioned a family member by name. So I would do what she asked, but the prayer always sounded disrespectful with the lisping effect of teeth on tongue. Nevertheless I did comfort myself with the knowledge that all would die, if not soon enough to suit me.

Why these near nightly rages on the road, I don't know; they were not manic, just a feeling of general anger towards everything, cheap motels, fast food, ungrateful children and obtuse others, all the while suffering pain, emotional and physical, while on limited means on what seemed an interminable road trip to Long Beach, CA, even if no major snafus occurred.

I wouldn't have missed my baby's graduation, but I wouldn't do it again, either.

I think my anger may have been warning me about my grief, particularly over the fortunes of my eldest daughter of late, whose care on the trip exhausted me. But I'll keep her secrets for now, even if she is fond of broadcasting them. Every time I think I have come to accept her as she is, she finds some new hot buttons to push. She's gifted that way. Yes, she's the redhead in the picture at the top right of the blog.

Back to the meds. When I had no Cymbalta for two days I sank into a depressive episode, weeping for half an hour, struggling not to let any verbal equivalents enter my brain, as in "You're worthless. You suck. You've never done anything. You despise your own children." No, I didn't let the lies of the frontal cortex insinuate themselves into the vortex of my lizard brain, thus was proud I could recognize my depressive seizure as just that, an uncontrollable outpouring of emotion unrelated to any specific thing. I also had the wherewithal to call my doctor for a short-term supply until the cheaper meds from Canada arrive; I got these yesterday afternoon and then proceeded to twitch so badly I had to sleep apart from my wife. This is an early side effect of some antidepressants, but thank God, it means they are starting to work.

I sometimes think that part of manic-depression is a complete disconnect, in time, between the emotions one should naturally experience and a safe time to let them out. So, for example, I could go tight-lipped through a funeral and weep at a video arcade a month later. Once I even thought I had come closer to better integrating my emotions with regard to circumstances, but I fear for us bipolars this is a chimera. It's as if we build up mountains of rage and dig chasms of grief of which we are consciously unaware, and one day we smack into them and all hell breaks loose. Chemically, from the standpoint of the actual illness, this likely holds little scientific truth, but it is a useful metaphor for conceptualizing how the phenomenon sometimes feels. In the end manic-depression is really just bad genes and bad luck.

Now it wasn't entirely my fault that I was out of meds, but first a cautionary note: if you respond to an antidepressant and go off of it, your chances of responding to it a second time are much reduced. Since Cymbalta was the only thing I responded to after a year's misery, even missing one day was inexcusable. But that's all I missed. So whoever reads this post, remember to take your medications faithfully, especially if you suffer a mood disorder.

Next post:


I obtained on Tuesday, through tearful anxious phone calls, a refill on my antidepressant, Cymbalta. The substitution of Prozac for two days wasn't cutting it; I switched back to my shrink's recommended dose of Cymbalta, twice normal, of 120 mg. Tuesday afternoon.

Soon after I began to experience akisthesia, a peculiar symptom where you can't become comfortable, where your body must constantly move, twitch--where there is a supreme discomfort in stillness and you must keep moving--your feet, your legs, something. You can't watch TV or read; you can't concentrate; mostly you indulge in various irresistible writhings. Naturally this physical phenomenon drives Kathleen crazy in bed so I had to sleep downstairs. But I knew it was a sign that the antidepressant was working again, or about to work, unlike the thousands of psychiatrists who hear this symptom from their patients and think it means they can't tolerate the medication. I find this "ants in the pants" feeling in my body almost always precedes an improvement in my mood, and have observed the same in countless patients.

Although not confident Wednesday, I didn't cry. And Thursday I worked out for hours at the gym. Today I was afflicted with a little melancholy but managed to get a lot of work done despite it.

So, gentle readers, I didn't mean to leave you hanging on my decompensation--I'm doing better. The downside is that the damn Cymbalta capsules, of which I need two a day, cost about $5 apiece here until the discounted meds arrive from Canada. That's an expensive habit, especially when you combine it with Lamictal, of which I must take two a day, when each tablet costs $4, even at Costco. Until the patents expire on new medicines you need, you're truly fucked without insurance, and as I have previously blogged, I can't obtain insurance, medical or life, because I am a bipolar: bad risk).

The pharmaceutical companies have a limited window to recover their R & D money, and I don't see them as villains, more occasional saviors who must recoup R & D costs on all the drugs that didn't work from ones that do. Accusing them of malfeasance is like attacking "big oil"--wrong target. I'm no Republican; it's just so easy to blame the nearest elephant. The reality is much more complicated.

I've added another paying poetry publication to Byline and and Contrary now; I just got a check from Valerie Polichar's Grasslimb for "The Gloaming." Since I quit writing poetry and started marketing it, I'm not doing half bad.

Even more amazing, an original copy of my first and only book of poems, Elementary, which sold as a paperback at $14.95 in 1997, is listed by one seller at Amazon.com for $398. My eldest daughter told me this but I couldn't believe it. Go figure. Did the rumor of my death exaggerate the price? There are likely book speculators out there, some who are betting that I might be important someday. Or maybe it's just a fluke. Curioser and curioser. (I've never received a single royalty payment from the book.)

This fact gives me hope that the same concern, Mellen Press, might consider publishing a second book of mine. No, I checked that out; like most smart publishers they don't do poetry anymore. .

In the spirit of marketing, I'll close with a poem I wrote before I was an ex-poet:


Homo Promo

You who huddle under billboards
happy in your anonymity,
grateful to avoid the rain,
how I pity you!

You should be up there
above the freeway
in a red bikini
with a high-end tequila
in your happy fist.
Don’t you get it?

Become a commodity
hawking you 24 hours a day:
be your own infomercial!
Celebrity is the only currency
and the Dow is measured in air time!

The first human infomercial was Muhammad Ali,
who became the most recognizable man on the globe.

To become your own spin doctor,

1) Wrap yourself up so tightly nothing hurts.

2) Like Rome, let every conversation lead to you.

3) Although you were never loved the way you wanted to be loved,
there's always a chance if you please your audience!

4) Always sell the product.

5) You are the product.

If Marx and Nietszche could see us now
united in the strife which divided us
at once worker and robber baron
it's hard to find good help anymore
no longer alienated from the product
nobody told me there'd be days like these
I'd love to see the look on their bearded faces.

Wish me luck as I perform solo at the Lavender Festival tomorrow. I hope the wine tasting goes quickly to loosen up my audience; I'm no James Taylor or Cat Stevens, that's for sure. But I do alright.

Thine at 1 kilorat,

CE