Making Widows Wince

For clarity, I think I will write this only once. I do not write confessional poetry, and I do not write things down as a form of therapy. I write because I have something unique to say in a unique sort of way, a way that I think is universal in an analogous manner, not as any sort of literal or digital telling of the truth.  I trowel spackle onto pages with a edged blade, I don’t paint aging widows with a brush.  (My soul has been psychedelicized, but t his shit’s not about me.) It comes in this form – that this relates to that, in this way – A form that I think illustrates things that are too true to be looked at straight on – personal truths that are usually discovered through interactions with other people – truths that are often relational, unreliable and subject to the weavings and debris of human beings. Truths that sneak out and become a miraculous surprise of insight – like a Zen master hitting you on the head with a baseball bat at just the right time. I don’t think I’m t

After I avoided watching that Zany new program, ‘Homeland’ on TV today, I told Mary: “Someday when we as a nation are down and out and struggling for a bit of understanding and mercy our new overlords will pull out a show like Homeland and say, “this is when you had a chance to change things.” The things that we do, and the attitudes we take while doing them, will all be used against us on the way down, and everyone goes down eventually.   The barbarians will have their scribes repeat our own words to us and then say them out loud to our children as they do the things to us that we have done to them. We are so powerful that we cannot see anything from anyone else’s point of view, and if we could, it would hold no value to us. Just as we now think that one American life is worth 60 Iraqis, our eventual fall will reflect a different changing math game of attitudes that our educational system has ill prepared us for. We will also become confused because all the words coming ou

Went to a wedding and a funeral this weekend with Mary. Sacramento, Santa Rosa, then home– a whirlwind trip through weekend bay area traffic. The traffic was horrible – life changing horrible, but not unusual. As with most things, it’s a balance of an the unnamed terror and an easy chair in a padded room that rocks.  The wedding was delightful, part of an interconnected strong woman’s club that marries off their daughters to provably weaker men. And so, the cycle continues, but the company was nice and I’m too old to wonder at the process anymore. The funeral was for another interconnected strong woman, who, by hinkey or dinky, was a scary woman that I used to work with as a nurse. She would have been surprised that I outlived her, much as Charles the cat was. Please pay attention out there – this is how life works. (To be fair, she didn’t put up with shit and I liked to throw handfuls of it around as if I were Christ standing on the back of a broken piñata heaving

I left a message on Facebook for someone I care about that ended with the words, “one won”. I did it just because I thought was funny. That led to a whimsical discovery that I no longer had to place a period at the end of my sentences – in fact to do so would be rude and identify myself as an old person.  It seems that, for online use anyway, a period has become a loud shout -- a purposeful exclamation point useful only in drawing unnecessary attention, or as a way of making an angry burp of anti-social angst. Sentences no longer end, they gently back out a side door when no one is looking -- they’ve become bars without a jail, or that angry driver just ahead of you who hesitates before moving through an intersection just to make a point of how stupid you are. Since a period is no longer an end to a thought, its new function has evidentially become nothing but a stuffy ritual of formality that writers can now use to mark up or down generalized feeling of huffiness, or perh

Hard Knox “I am not like the others”   Ralph Steadman  As a small child, it was clear to me that I was fundamentally flawed to the core, and that this fundamental flaw was a forever thing that I needed to get used to. It was also clear that I was going to have some explaining to do down the road in order to survive. Eventually the time came when I began to think this basic flaw as my burden -- my original-sin starter pack conveniently stapled to my inner child at birth -- kind of tramp stamped on the way out.    The very best I could do over time was to continually beg for forgiveness and then to accept it, with conditions, if offered. All else in my life was to be a waiting -- just fodder evidenced by a malevolent tilting at windmills and willful acts of self-abuse and abasement.  And that only through grace – that spontaneous gift from God -- that generous, free and both unexpected and undeserved gift, would there be any kind of relief from my crime of being ma