Jingo (Jin-Go-Lo-Ba)

Once in a great while, music can bring me back to my 14^th year, which in many ways determined the forward action of my life. Everything around me was changing, yet again (Nixon, EPA, Watergate), just a few short years after 1968 (MLK, RFK), but at this time my brain was playing center, driving toward the basket, as the rest of me hovered around adolescence. A female body in a constrained space and time. It was my time, for me and me alone, to contemplate my future. This was two years before Roe v. Wade, and sexual peer pressure was the furthest thing from my mind. I was entering high school. I was an excellent student. I had many excellent teachers who were 100% behind me. I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted my mother to stop telling me to wear more make-up, to dress nicely, to go out on dates with the local boys (a great many of whom were demonstrably moronic), and to smile more at the variety of men she brought to our home. I also wanted my mother to stop scolding me, to stop telling me that I was selfish and unpleasant every time I picked up a book and applied myself to my studies. I wanted her to stop punishing me for being intelligent and for showing it. What I wanted and needed at that time of intense education and training for self-reliance, was for men and boys, and really EVERYBODY, to leave me alone and let me think. Because thinking is key to everything. It had nothing to do with ego or besting anyone. It had everything to do to figuring out how to live. And I knew even way back then that I did not want anyone near my sovereign body, much less to comment on it, unless I permitted it, and unless the person wanting contact was a demonstrably good person.

In actuality, the intense desire to protect my sovereign body and to proclaim it as nobody’s goddamned business but my own is the exact characteristic that makes any human being a private citizen, protected by the US Constitution. I was shocked, at 14, in 1971, to discover that I was considered “difficult” because I so thoroughly believed in an unshakeable tenet of our fair land.

Today, I am also considered difficult because I am observant, and because there are some people who do not like to be closely observed, principally because they are rarely doing anything particularly admirable, and because they don’t like to be seen or known as acting unadmirably but they still wish to be admired. If you are observant, these people stand out like neon signs. And, you will observe further, these people will move to cut you down once they have been observed.

And, this has been great for me, in a purely personal sense, even while it has taken me a long time to learn how to deal with such humans. I am no longer compelled to be around the many shitty people who do very little good in this world, and identifying them swiftly has been a gift of large proportions, especially now, since the absolute reign of shitty people appears to be closer than ever, even while rapidly recognizing them has allowed me more luxury to look after myself. But, here’s the thing. Shitty people are multiplying uncontrollably, thus it is time to be more vigilant and responsible, to look outward, beyond the self, to dig a few foxholes and make plans. Sigh. Just when things were going so well….

I am a happy dinosaur. I know of several thirty-somethings who love to comment that I am an out-of-touch Boomer who is angry all the time (because I don’t smile at opinions they have stolen, without attribution, from Joe Rogan), that I am too “critical” (because I have actual opinions that are opposed to their own), that I am “weird” (who cares), that I don’t wear a bra most of the time (again, who really bloody cares). These are people, quite representative of society-at-large, who would rather rant mindlessly about other peoples’ pronouns, and the emotional fracas of Twitter, than pay attention to the imminent loss of our democratic government. They are a microcosm of a macro-debacle that is spreading. They are representative of the mediocre, run-of-the-mill bullies who hate real work and real discourse, and who have managed to maintain their roughshod cavorting in this land, despite the fact that their dictator of choice missed his incompetent swipe in 2020. They showed their real selves when they smeared their feces all over the Capitol and assaulted their supposedly venerated police force, and when they blamed everyone else at the instant they realized they had been so closely “observed” doing what they were doing. Moreover, a few of those hypocritical bullies now sit on the Supreme Court, who, having emulated their third-rate Fuhrer, lied through their teeth about their philosophy of adjudication to gain confirmation, just to set their sights on select rights. Saving all those unborn babies so that they can serve as future targets for their inept, eternally dissatisfied buddies, puffed-up wannabe soldier-boys who now have the increased freedom and opportunity to murder all those saved babies while they are sequestered in their classrooms, learning their fractions. The US citizen now has expanded rights for owning and using deadly weapons, but the US female citizen no longer has the Constitutional right to defend her own body from impregnation, a life event that is as significant, and every bit as life-changing, as death. The sorts of bullies who are now in charge hold special hatred for people who think for themselves, and who refuse to smile when asked to smile. Those bullies detest the freedom of others while they venerate their own. Those bullies hate the loss of control, and they fear the loss of their wobbly and unmerited status.

This is no laughing matter. I can feel the filthy tide rising again and lapping at my feet. None of it smells good or looks good or feels good. Much like Jamaica Bay when the waters ebb and all the garbage is revealed, sunken into the silt.

I have come full circle to this 14-year-old self, after years of having to keep mum because of survival, pressures minor and major, necessity, motherhood, work, hypocrisy, prejudice. It is a glorious feeling to be so free. Liberty kicked in hard this morning as I took a walk in the humid, cool air, and Carlos Santana sent a guitar riff from Jingo down my spinal cord to the sacrum and back up again into the cortex, lighting up all those past sense memories and inscribing them into my sinews, like Madame LaFarge’s scarf full of names. The names of all the realizations, goals, dreams, ambitions that got guillotined, just because I was female. Female in a supposedly “enlightened” era. The uncountable things I was unable to accomplish because I was simply fighting to stay alive, and because I was fighting for the lives of other people for whom I was responsible, for a very very long time. I am obviously not the only person who has pulled through these circumstances, and I know that there are millions, billions more who wish they were fortunate enough to have lived my life. And yet. I live in a country run by people whose only claim to superiority is the ability to lie, again and again, in order to hide their shameful acts, and to steal, maim, torture, and kill to get what they want. And they want everything.

The full circle is an omnibus symbol, of accomplishment, inclusion, eternity.

The irony is that as my little chime of freedom rings its loud, clear, opulent notes in my head, the country around me is being dragged back into ignorance and fear and totalitarianism and blood sacrifice. I cannot believe it is happening. We have been shown, in no uncertain terms, that freedom is only for the few. Powers of observation are now more critical than ever. What can we do with them? I am assiduously applying myself to the task. I hope you are doing the same.

By the way, I discovered today that Jin-Go-Lo-Ba is Nigerian in origin, and the phrase means: Do Not Worry. Jingo, a version of Jin-Go-Lo-Ba that was recorded by Santana, has a beat and persuasion that will reach any but the entirely brain-dead. It is the beat of the invincible. And yes, there are zombies about. Perhaps you should play them this song before you decide to get close enough to see the whites (ahem) of their eyes.

Bye, L

Putting this out there for all the Linnea fans in our little universe:

I “met” Linnea right after my late husband, Chris, died of lung cancer. For quite some time, I had been following her blog, detailing her pioneering efforts in advocating for her rare lung cancer mutation, efforts which in fact morphed into an entirely novel targeted agent that treated her particular form of cancer for quite a number of years. She, in turn, had been following the CaringBridge website that I had established for family and friends, unbeknownst to me, and when I switched to WordPress in 2011, she left me a comment on one of my blog entries. From there started a friendship based on shared affinities and interests: our respective sets of children; our unique thoughts on being female in this increasingly nutty US of A; the amazing and simultaneously appalling existence of life itself on this benighted planet: possibly the only life anywhere. Life that for the very reason of its uniqueness, is precious beyond any imaginable amount of riches. It is too much to recount, really, when my heart is so full of sorrow, but I will try.

We kept in touch for years mostly through blog commentary; we read each other’s entries the way other people make phone calls or text. Absorbing the facets of each other’s personalities and knowing very well what the other was thinking at many times. I finally met her in person on a business trip to Boston some years back, when she was slogging back and forth to Massachusetts General Hospital to see the wonderful Alice Shaw, oncologist extraordinaire, who helped keep Linnea alive well beyond expectations. The fact that Linnea’s cancer had been criminally misdiagnosed, and attributed to “hysteria,” for roughly four years, is something that makes me so incensed that I can only address it briefly. I will just say here: Doctors of the world, remove your heads from your lower alimentary canals when you are diagnosing females. It should become a basic tenet of medicine, along with First, Do No Harm—First, Leave Your Lazy Biases at the Door.

But, I digress. When I arrived in Boston, Linnea and I furiously texted back and forth, trying to locate each other at a train station on the Boston “T” line. She was nearly six feet tall, and thus hard to miss, and after some comical missteps we finally managed to connect. She looked down at me from her great heights. Extra willowy thanks to the battle her body was undergoing, and a little out of breath, she flashed that gap-toothed grin as we reached out our hands to one another. She looked hard into my face, and then said without preamble: You are verrry pretty. Well, who can resist that kind of stuff? We ate dinner at a small restaurant, and we visited with her daughter, Jemesii, at an eclectic shop called December Thieves. Then we talked half the night away before she sacked out on a sofa bed in my hotel room, after which she went to MGH for her medical consult, and I went off to my meetings. I am very happy to have these memories.

Linnea once described herself as a “superconnector.” It was an apt term, particularly as it parallels the superconductor concept. Cool down some materials and they will conduct electrons very rapidly, fueling a more efficient phenomenon with minimal resistance. Linnea’s advocacy for herself, and for her fellow lung cancer patients, ramped up and became more streamlined and effective as each treatment failed her, and as each next step was identified. The challenge of staying alive charged her with an electricity that was linear, forceful, and exacting. Few people could resist her pull and her charm. She was featured, bald-headed and magnificent, in a black and white photo that made the rounds, first in a New York Times segment on cancer treatment. That photo is now all over the Internet. She sat on patient boards, spoke at pharmaceutical conferences, fought hard for such simple things as parking passes for patients who lent their bodies to grueling clinical trials. She herself underwent more than one Phase I trial, in which safety has not yet been established. She experienced an array of side effects that would crush most human beings. She never once expressed sorrow for her predicament; she worried only about her kids. She wanted so badly to live.

Linnea was an artist, a very fine painter. She also collected weird crap and curated the objects into boxes in the manner of Joseph Cornell. She got herself a dog, named Kumo, who is a pale version of my own dog, Mochi. We traded photos of found objects (striped sticks, rocks, you name it). She was funny as hell. She threw herself into online dating late in the course of her disease. In her young 60s, when the dating pool is full of “odds that are good, but goods that are odd,” she regaled us with hilarious/horrible stories. The frantic skid marks left by the guys who were stymied by this powerhouse, frightened by her massive intelligence and her disease, are all over Boston. Bravery is a very rare trait: that is what all brave people discover eventually. It can make them feel rather alone. But, Linnea was brave, undeterred, and she had a big tribe.

This tribe, comprised chiefly of her incredible children: Jemesii, August, and Peter, and her numerous friends, eased her passage with the help of hospice. The time between her last failed trial and her death was shockingly brief, and illustrative of just how sick she had actually been. The most recent photos of her on Facebook, however, reveal her huge smile, and the joy I will always associate with her memory. She left us yesterday, the day before her daughter’s 37^th birthday. Which is also my daughter’s 34^th birthday

God damn it I am so very angry, and sad, and disappointed. But you wouldn’t like a rant to send you off, dear Linnea, so I will say: Goodbye goodbye goodbye. I will see you when I, too, have turned back into star dust.

Coyotes

A few years ago, as I was biking through a wooded park close to the W&OD trail, a brown smudge flashed just at the corner of my vision, deep in a brush-covered culvert. I wasn’t sure I’d really seen anything, but the afterimage that stayed with me said to my brain: Coyote. There was something about the swift and sneaky movement, combined with the dull camouflage of its coat, that seemed unmistakable. I had only seen one in my lifetime, up close and personal, prior to this presumed sighting. Whether or not I saw one that day, it is clear that today we in fact have a large and active pack in our area. Their images have been captured on the ubiquitous cameras that now dominate the neighborhood. The deer, grown in number, have been having record numbers of fawns, which seem to be the primary prey of the coyote. The local government has suspended deer-culling for some time, perhaps due to COVID, which suits me fine, as some local bow hunters who are far more eager than skilled have been known to leave wounded animals to stagger around the backyards, to die slow deaths. Not that succumbing to a pack of coyotes is a picnic. Just maybe preferable to and a lot more rapid than bleeding out from a mis-shot arrow.

A few weeks ago, H and I drove out towards Charlottesville and the Shenandoah Valley, where H had found and rented us a small, beautiful cabin nestled in the oaks, beeches, and maples abutting the low mountains. We stayed a couple of nights, enjoyed meals at a first-rate winery, and generally relaxed. H is a busy realtor who also cares full time for his mother, and he got some well-deserved downtime. We drove around and puttered peacefully. We walked a path around a 60-year-old golf course just after sunrise, mist rising off the grass, shifted by dawn breezes. We toured some excellent Maori artwork near the UVA campus. And we stopped at a Plow and Hearth store so I could check out an ash vacuum for the fireplace, something I’d been meaning to buy. Walking in, taking care to be masked even though we are vaccinated, to protect ourselves and other unvaccinated people (such as my young grandchildren), I noticed an older man seated in a rocking chair, facing the entrance. He had one dog on a leash, while another unleashed dog trotted over to greet me. As usual, I collapsed myself over one of the pups, and was enjoying scratching her behind her ears, when I felt rather than saw daggers of hate flying in my direction. I looked up from the warm and loving dogfest to confirm that indeed this man’s eyes were pinned on me, full of rage. Implacable and primitive. I smiled at him as best I could from behind my mask, and asked the dog’s name. Silence. Not exactly sure why he was so unfriendly. Mask? Did he think I was some sort of durn Sheeple, believing in vaccines and Moon landings and the curvature of the Earth? Or was it because I, a white woman, was with H, who is black? We were near Charlottesville, after all. That sort of grunting ignorance runs deep, right at the edge of a university associated with high achievement, the way noxious weeds will try to crowd out fragrant red roses and sweet alyssum. It does not matter what or why these types of men hate, only that the hate is dangerous. Virginia is also gun country. Suppose the old fellow, rather corpulent and slow, was packing? I thought hard about my next move.

Worldwide, males are responsible for 95% of murders (stats from the United Nations). In the US, males are responsible for 89.5% of murder convictions (stats from the US DOJ). Rich murderers do get away with murder all the time, so I assume that the difference between global statistics and US statistics is brought about by the activity of expensive pitbull lawyers in the US of A, a growing breed, which accounts for the difference in the number of convictions. I didn’t need a bell curve or a math degree to arrive at the assumption that my life was not at all valuable to this disagreeable sack of rage, watching me with a predator’s eyes.

It is said that coyotes sometimes use a ruse to catch their prey: they have been known to “play” with domesticated dogs, drawing them farther and farther away from a protected homesite, until the dogs are far enough away from safety such that they can be set upon by the large pack waiting in the brush and cover. This behavior is likely one of the reasons that Coyote is the Trickster in some mythologies. If humans behaved like coyotes, they would be understandably accused of employing shabby, lowdown tactics. Some humans, however, admire the coyotes. This old fellow, stabbing me with his eyes, was no Trickster, although I imagine he enjoys the thought of the coyotes now running the perimeters of our happy homes, picking off the small easy prey, sneaking around in the shadows, snuffling and pawing, growing more wily and numerous by the year, until we have occasion to step out, right into the waiting jaws, outnumbered at last.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Daughters Go Out Without Handguns

https://www.weareplannedparenthoodaction.org/onlineactions/6iOI0_HnUUmPu_6_SRgayg2?sourceid=1006442&ms=4NALz2100K1N1A&gclid=Cj0KCQjw7MGJBhD-ARIsAMZ0eesa-3wvqCh3deNqmra81rnQK3EGF-jybz8_3Tq-ZNvxImZ8U1XPBYUaAqUMEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

https://www.rainn.org/

They always come back. They fade into the background once in a great while, but they always come back. They are bullies. They are mindless and vicious and petty, and they are basically incompetent and lazy, which is why they need to create societies based on coercion and fear in order to prop up their weak excuses for existence. They  remain in power through the promulgation of egregious lies. They practice intimidation. They set up snitch lines so that they can gleefully spy on their neighbors. They are pathetic gossips, hoping to reap rewards for themselves by advancing the cause of FREEDOM. There are many more of them now, surviving childhood and coming to malformed maturity in vaster numbers thanks to modern conveniences like antibiotics and vaccines. The periodic proliferation of the neck-steppers and armed grunts is the unfortunate side effect of progressive policies and faith in the basic kindness of people. Which backfires again and again over the millennia. Cuz, FREEDOM.

So let’s say New York bans guns, and sets up a hotline and a reward system for all the eager beavers waiting to drop a dime on the dam owner next door. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? States’ rights, y’all. FREEDOM!!! It could happen, were it not for the fact that the Supreme Court is now stacked with Major Wealthy Bullies With Guns.

I am sick at heart to watch the return of the bullies. I’ve had occasion to know many a bully on a personal level, partly due to my quiet personality, which has often been mistaken for an acquiescing personality. As a female, I’ve experienced too much bullying to recount, at the hands of creepy men and narcissists of many stripes. As a female, trained to smile when I am uncomfortable, to be “nice” in response to just about anything save an attempt to behead me, I have been able to survive many times through the subtle art of jiu jitsu, fading back when some jerk comes after me with his hands balled into fists, feigning retreat, only to step forward and let the jerk fall past me on his face. Come to think of it, if I’d had a gun at many crucial moments in my life, I’d have been far less afraid and far more confident. And there mighta been some bodies to hide. You know, like the bodies that the bullies have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

So I say let’s hear it for FREEDOM. Arm all the women! Ladies, get your guns! They are up for grabs! You can get them with a Groupon and some boxtops, no registration required. You’re going to need them, especially in Texas.

Because we are really going to need the protection now. Men have long wanted the freedom to to impregnate us, force us to endure the ultimate parasitism, to give up control over our sovereign bodies, to risk our lives, to become responsible for an unwanted and wholly preventable human life. Human lives that these bullies conveniently forget about once they are born, human lives that languish in poverty and misery because fewer and fewer people can really afford to support children in a way that any of us would like to be supported, i.e. human lives that can be exploited to further serve the needs of the bullies.

Bullies cry FREEDOM in order to eliminate your FREEDOM through force. They can only obtain this FREEDOM by acquiring all manner of weaponry, figurative and literal, and pointing these weapons at our heads. Bullies want the FREEDOM to kneel on our necks. Bullies want the FREEDOM to kill humans for selling single cigarettes, live and on camera and witnessed by horrified, helpless onlookers. FREEDOM to commit crimes against humanity and walk away. FREEDOM to practice depraved indifference. FREEDOM to help the other bullies multiply, because bullies really need all those other bullies, because bullies are brave only when they are seething, bacteria-like, in a mob, or armed. Maybe that’s why bullies don’t want women to control their own bodies—they want the manpower, as it were. They need to train up more bullies, and they usually can’t obtain the consent that is necessary to create them.

Bullies also want the FREEDOM to march the streets and scream “Jews will not replace us!” Well, Steve-O, I can’t think of a single Jew who would like to replace you, but I can think of several who would like you to crawl back into your mom’s basement with your porn and your Cheetos and your beer. Remember that your FREEDOM, Steve-O, has been only temporarily acquired through mass brutality and a complete lack of conscience.

Humans have been humans for a very long time now, hundreds of thousands of years. Many civilizations have come and gone, the vast majority of them leaving no archaeological trace. Volcanism, ice ages, earthquakes, plate tectonics: grinding the remains of the past into soil and diamonds. Once in a great while, even in human memory, we get some respite, some golden ages, where our minds have the FREEDOM to play in the fields of endeavor that have yielded art and the basics of science and philosophy, which in turn have created and informed the knowledge that has allowed us, at times, to live peacefully within our natural limitations and actually thrive. There were undoubtedly many periods of flourishing, of moving forward, or we would not now be all over this Earth in numbers that are hard to visualize. FREEDOM has actually brought us to this moment in time. However, FREEDOM is not an exclusive attribute. If you bullies want FREEDOM, remember that everyone gets to be free. Not just you. And guess what happens when we all have the FREEDOM to fight off the bullies?

That silence you hear is the silence of one step backward, like a jiu jitsu practitioner who uses the weight of the attacker to her own advantage. It is the silence of 2020, when the numerous, silent defenders of democracy worked feverishly to ensure a free and fair election. The bullies will rant and seethe and legislate more bullying. That’s their shtick. But our aim is true.

Oh My Nerves

I have been meaning to post for some time now, on the theme of entropy, or how Things Fall Apart unless we continually strive to make them better, or put energy into the system. The pandemic; the four ruinous years of a hideous tyrant who came unthinkably close to gaining four more years; the increasingly loud drumbeat of history; the assault on the Capitol by a bunch of unimaginably spoiled and entitled white people. It’s enough to make a thoughtful person grip her forehead. Every morning, I drink a thermos of dark roast and listen to the birds, avoid any type of digital media, read venerable old books by people who know how to write and think, walk the dog, and try to sally forth verily, but for months now I have been unable to eke out a word on digital paper.

Except today. I will post today about my cousin Barbara, who was in violent agreement with me concerning all the things I am perennially concerned about, and which I have referenced above. We lost her last Wednesday, April 21st.

She was born in Brooklyn, and she died in North Carolina. a place which can be severely disappointing, bagel-wise, during that difficult interval wherein a transplanted Brooklynite tries to take root. Nonetheless, in her stoic way, she carried on in Cary through years of illness and disability, often dreaming of an Everything Bagel with Cream Cheese, and wistfully acknowledging that it just wasn’t gonna happen.

Barbara Lynne Yurgel Nespoli was ten years older than me, and she often reminded me that she changed my diapers. I lived in her room for about a year when I was ten going on eleven, and with my brother, and with my other two cousins (her two younger siblings), we definitely made her tear her hair out on more than one occasion. In the late 1960s, she worked at the Empire State Building as a secretary, fresh out of high school, and once took me to her office, which was somewhere in vicinity of the 40th or 50th floors, the girthy mid-section of the ESB.

Barbara hosted many Christmases and Thanksgivings and non-holiday visits, and my children have great memories of the freedom of Brooklyn. Entenmann’s cake! Coca Cola! Unlimited cartoons! Nok-Hockey in the basement. Largely free from parental interference, my kids and their three cousins roamed her house like sugar-crazed wildebeests, and woe betide the parent who got in the way of their fun, because Barbara would give them what for, and woe betide the family member who unfailingly messed up the VCR programmed to record Barbara’s programs. It wasn’t me, just sayin’.

Barbara made acres of lasagne and metric tons of turkeys. Even in the leanest years of our childhood, Sunday was pot roast day, and I still make mine according to Barbara’s recipe. She was the designated gift-buyer for her family and could wrap a present like nobody’s business, her carefully guarded sharp scissors gliding through paper. Each Christmas, her brother Glenn would videotape her reaction to generous gifts (she wept easily), while adding annoying voiceover commentary (Hey Barbara, need a tissue?). She was an affectionate person. She taught my son to hug properly (You call that a hug? What’s wrong with you? Come back here and hug me again). I can still feel how she would completely envelop me in her arms, coming or going.

Barbara was a busy aunt who performed many unsung hours of niece and nephew oversight, and she knew how to make a kid behave with merely a glance. All those kids learned how to clean dishes and sweep up a floor and set a table, when they weren’t busy reprogramming the VCR. Oh My Nerves became her catchphrase (believe me, your nerves would be shot, too), and she had the t-shirt to prove it.

When we got together in our later years, we would reminisce about our collective pasts, lives winding in and out of each others’ as time passed, attempting to confirm or deny certain facets of the truth, fact-checking, teasing, laughing uproariously, and sometimes falling silent from the overwhelming weight of everything we’ve been through, alone and together.

I spoke to Barbara just a few days before she passed away, never thinking it would be the last time. She had been in intense pain for weeks, and on that day she simply was unable to converse for more than a brief moment. I had been planning to visit her, and then she was suddenly hospitalized, and then she was gone.

Goodbye, Barbara. You were my friend as well as my cousin, and I will miss you very much.

Not a Mat. A Raft.

I’ve always had a conflicted relationship with my brain. Seat of volition and sensation, engine of motion, generator of images, sprinkler of thoughts. When I was very young I soaked up impressions at a visceral and exhausting pace, and I had a nearly photographic memory. I was a solitary kid, often lost in daydreams, nose in a book, and content in my own little world. When my family split up and we moved from the quiet, grassy suburbs to concrete-lined, disruptive Brooklyn, I was entering the fifth grade. As it was a new environment and a new school district, I was subjected to a battery of tests, and it turned out I was 6 grades ahead in language arts, and 3 grades ahead in math. I started attending a “gifted” class that was an intellectual awakening which paralleled another, more social awakening. Shy and mortified much of the time, I was nearly suffocated by the scrutiny of my peers, who seemed at first to be a barking, braying pack of monkeys that were intent on tripping me up and embarrassing me every chance they got. These new, gifted city kids were a rambunctious lot, relentless, talkative, witty, cynical, and hilarious. I didn’t fit in at all. I was way inside my head, and they were decidedly exterior, swinging from the roof beams.

I blushed and sweated my way through most schooldays, unable to speak above a miserable whisper. To make things worse, our teacher was a giant, polyester-wrapped Gorgon who turned me to stone with every one of her very pointed, often disdainful glaring judgments. When I turned in a book report on Orwell’s 1984, she accused me of both not reading the book and of plagiarizing other sources for the report. Yeah, at 11 it was a tough read, and obviously I absorbed much more of its import when I re-read it in my twenties. But also at 11, I was way too catechized and fearful of the priest’s confessional to have ever done such a dishonest thing as to lie about reading a book. That would have been a venial sin, but a sin nonetheless. Back then my worst penance was ten Hail Marys (every week) for calling my little brother a big dope. Mrs. R’s accusation was the first time I felt really stung by deliberate, malicious blindness in a school setting, a place that I had thought to be sacrosanct and ideal, the seat of knowledge. She had some bad points. Those points constituted a separate lesson in the art of thought, to which I was now an adherent, and barely hanging on. Here I was, a little kid in love with reading and daydreaming, and now she was forcing me to think about what I read. How rude!

This above all was her finest point: Rigor. She was demanding and unapologetic. She made many of us extremely uncomfortable, and she clearly reveled in her power to do so. We were required to read the Op-Ed essays of Russell Baker, parse the front page of The New York Times, and write full reports on the pressing topics of each day. Every day. Here among the restless howler monkeys is where I learned the pillars of critical thinking. Why did I persist in thinking “a” when “b” was right in front of my face? Where is the evidence? What is the evidence? Is the source reliable? Does the source benefit from the information? Why is Gary torturing me with paper airplanes? Why can’t Mrs. R see him? And how does he make them fly so well?

There was duality in the lesson. While Mrs. R taught rigor, her actions showed me plainly that allegiance would frequently influence what I had once thought of as “pure intellect.” Even the frostiest human has an amygdala, and is therefore ruled by the fear, loathing, favoritism, and loyalty emotions that shape a person from birth.

Why didn’t she ever see Gary launch his latest supersonic paper creation? Because she liked Gary’s fractious personality, and it also cracked her up to see him target me. She resented little old me for some reason. She had a mean streak that surfaced when least expected, and she had a classroom of captives on which to practice her lesser arts. Maybe I reminded her of her annoying younger sister. Who knows? Some people are just naturally nasty, and their nastiness is easily propagated when enough of their fellow jerks congregate, proliferate, profit, and protect each other. And that’s when the power of the jerks becomes accepted and amplified, to no one’s benefit but theirs, and they roll over the Earth.

Bacteria behave in this way. Individually they are not much to fear, but in mats and biofilms they become more than the sum of cells, and their very physical structure will change due to the awakening of genes that are activated only when the bacteria reach a critical mass. Suddenly they feed differently, change actual shape, grow or discard cilia, alter their metabolic pathways. The genetics of these conversions is interesting to evolutionary scientists, some of whom argue that DNA itself calls the shots in an exquisitely balanced, naturally occurring, unsupervised molecular battle between selflessness and selfishness. When it’s a mat of bacteria, the battle is tiny and invisible. When it’s a mat of us, the battle is colossal and beyond understanding. The battle is won when one side overcomes. But what of the aftermath? Once that mat of bacteria has consumed its purines and pyrimidines, its trace minerals, its essential nutrients, there is nothing more to be consumed. It is then that the biofilm becomes completely useless, a mere sponge for its own toxic waste products, and it is then that the bacterial colony dies.

We are not bacteria. Maybe.

In the Trumpiverse, no careful thought process ever occurs. Instead we get treated to knee-jerk rage, the “why should I pay for free-loading immigrants,” the “stand for the anthem or be punished,” the cries of the absolutist gun nuts, the evangelists who see doom around every corner and need someone to blame, the crush-the-women crusaders, the “ignore Puerto Rico now that I have failed to establish a profitable Trump golf course” apologists, all of whom have supported the demented creature in the Oval Office. The disavowal of those who regularly practice oppression, sexual cruelty, wholesale murder, crimes for which they never pay, because they can pay off everyone. Despicable lies hiding the even more despicable truths. Willful imperception, day after day, is a grind. For the past four years, I have had persistent knots in my muscles, a sign that I am unconsciously tense much of the time, all from conscientiously reading a few minutes of news in the morning, before I take the dog and obtain my (still so incredibly beloved and savored) cup of coffee and try to keep on doing what I do. There are still my kids to think about, and my grandson and granddaughter to teach, to read to, to gather in my arms. There are still dahlias of lavender and white and tangerine in my garden and bulbs to plant for the winter. There are stories to write.

There are still endless opportunities to take in all the disparate sources and try to make them talk sense, and to keep considering the bases for the “other” arguments in reaching an acceptable conclusion for as many people as possible.

That howling pack of fifth-grade monkeys is never far from my mind.  A goodly number of that pack ultimately shielded me from many harms, engaged as we all were in surviving the streets on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. Because that’s what we were all taught, from the get-go. Take care of each other out there, even that shy little kid who rarely speaks above a whisper.

The monkeys have dispersed and grown up, have become adults in the wider world, and I am fortunate enough to know to which places some of them have far-flung, like welcoming and bright stars in the increasingly murky firmament. It often amazes me, although really it should not, that their lines of development did not take them very far from who they were at eleven years of age. They have become musicians, artists, family-makers, district attorneys, musicians, doctors, teachers, software developers. Those I have managed to keep in touch with have this irreversible, irrepressible trait of outgoing agency, care, love; a capacity for looking forward and bringing their fellows with them, maybe (almost assuredly) due to the hurdles they had to leap over early in life. The Big Raft/Mahayana concept of Buddhism holds that the surviving boddhisatvas gather, cobble together a rickety and temporary craft, and pull up the stragglers in the raging river as they bob past, pull them onto a dry platform where they, we, you, can be safe from drowning, all while this mud-tinged flood of hate rages past our disbelieving eyes.

Not a mat. A raft.

Little Drops, Big Rivers

Climate change- a tiresome topic for some. And you know who you are.  Not talking to you.

It is a real and deadly topic for some others. While it barely skirted the local news over the last two years, the story of Ellicott City, MD has suddenly burst its banks, just as its swollen Tiber and Patapsco Rivers did, making headlines in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. My talented significant other, Howard Fletcher, has created a series of podcasts on this very subject as part of his Masters program in journalism.  He sought out many viewpoints and interviewed, among many others, city councilpersons, shop owners, historical preservationists, and a woman who barely escaped with her life during one of the flash floods that hit Ellicott City in 2016 and 2018. While eight of the podcasts are now complete, the story is not over, and H expects to follow more leads as they arise.

This is a fascinating series. Give it a shot.

https://soundcloud.com/user-162113410/ec-ht_hw-episode-one-water

Dirty (White) Power

I have spent a number of days digging out a large colony of Bermuda grass that has invaded my flower beds. The nasty stolons are snaking under my well-established edging of flowering stonecrop, and strangling the roots of multicolored echinacea (coneflower). The goldfinches visit the flowers’ seed heads at this time of year, thus I am loath to use a targeted herbicide to kill the grass. I have completely banned herbicides and pesticides from my fenced yard, which will host my grandson in the very near future.

The grass is now everywhere in the front flower bed. It had shown its evil face in a place or two previously, and I thought I had dug most of it out every time it popped up during the spring and summer, but my two weeks’ absence, vacationing in Cape Hatteras, came with a price. Unchecked, and away from the eyes of my daily vigilance, the grass got totally out of control and took over. So it’s just my 61-year-old, shovel-armed carcass, versus this invader. And I really, truly, deeply hate this invader, in the way that only a gardener, dedicated to careful nurture, can hate weeds and invasive plants. It will take the better part of another week to dig it all out, and hopefully, destroy it. My gloves are off. My nails are dirty and splitting. I have plenty of time to rue the consequences of my inattention. But I keep going.

As I worked away in the garden one hot afternoon, after putting in 20 miles on my bike, I got a little dizzy and nauseated. Age, heat, dehydration. Then a pickup truck came roaring down my street, its unmuffled engine startling me badly. This was the same pickup that had come roaring down my street the day after Trump was elected, flapping dual Confederate flags. A little show of white-guy force in our liberal Vienna. How sweet. Making a lot of noise and letting us know he was rough and tough and that his fossil-fueled, smoke-belching contraption could run us over. A few minutes later a compatriot of his followed in a low-slung antique Beemer, an old fart with a stogie jammed in his mouth and a white swath of hair on his fat white head, enforcing his point by speeding along at 45 mph on our 25 mph-limited road, because, you know, he can. Earlier that morning on my 20-miler, I passed a carefully jerseyed and clipped-in old fart on an expensive bicycle, and watched incredulously as he flipped off a car that had not stopped for him in the crosswalk. The old fart had not stopped at his own stop sign, as he is required to do by the laws governing our fair nation. He had simply barreled through because he felt the world owed him this favor. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen this phenomenon. In my 25 years of biking the W&OD Trail, it’s always a young-to-middle-aged white guy, i.e. old farts in training, pissed off at the terrible inconveniences of red lights and stop signs, waving a middle finger at injustice, at the daily stabs at white male pride that have every Tom, Dick and Jethro up in meaty arms these days. I got so nauseated by these last two events, finally, that I went inside and washed all the grime away in a refreshing hot shower.

Digging out Bermuda grass requires sweat, vigilance, and dirty fighting. Bending to the task, you must take off your garden gloves in order to directly feel the steely ropes of underground runners that lie in wait to spring up when you take your attention elsewhere. The grass looks like fescue when it first comes up; it looks like something you’re familiar with, it looks almost friendly, but then it sprouts up in a disorienting onslaught of unhinged malignancy, mowing down flowers that have been carefully sown and tended.

Years ago, when my husband and I first met, I had one of my many experiences of two very separate worlds colliding. He grew up in an environment that was de facto segregated, with a full shelf of encyclopedias, tennis lessons, in a series of increasingly spacious and comfortable homes. I grew up in an undulating and multiethnic, multicolored arc of comfortable home/crowded apartment house/decaying beach community, and the one encyclopedia volume we did own came from an A&P supermarket, because I had begged my mother to buy it. The volume covered Pa through Pi, thus I became exceptionally knowledgeable about the Mexican volcano, Paricutìn, which rose up in a farmer’s field one fine day. And paraffin, penny dreadfuls, and pitchblende. Definitely no tennis lessons. Everything I learned, I had to work very hard to learn.

On that day years ago, Chris and I were walking through a somewhat downscale neighborhood in my hometown, New York, and he mentioned to me that he hoped we wouldn’t get mugged. I laughed and said, Don’t worry. You’re with me. I can bite and scratch and kick. Well. He was utterly horrified at this suggestion, and engaged me, quite earnestly, in a 30-minute argument as to why I should not fight dirty, insisting that gentleman’s rules should always apply to a “fair fight,” and that I must accept this fact as a given. In his world.

To the two or three of you readers who are not now rolling on your floor laughing: lemme explain. When your life is in danger, you do what you have to do. Gloves are off. Rules, the rules that have been laid down by the “gentlemen” who enjoy all the privileges of their dirtily won perches, do not apply. Complacency must go out the window. It is a narrow road to walk, living and working in a society that is by many lights, successful, but also hypocritical and murky and unjust and secretive and resting on the enforced, helpless silence and miserable labor of billions.

Here we are today, in a society that is even more de facto segregated than when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. In the seats behind a Supreme Court justice candidate, a woman flashes a white power sign, accompanied by that recognizable, obnoxiously self-satisfied smirk. Now on the Internet, we get to see policemen flashing those same signs, hands resting on their automatic weapons. They think supremacy is their due, that this vast beautiful continent is all theirs because they are white, because they somehow define America. This highly emotional Mr. Kavanaugh, a man at the furthest antipodes of judicious calm, thinks he has the authority to invade the privacy and circumvent the will of the only human beings who are physically capable of producing other human beings. He also thinks he can get away with sexual depravity. He does so with the complicity of the Orange Blob Who Shall Not Be Named, who rages on in his imbecile’s slash-and-burn smear campaign, continuing a pattern of gleefully abusing whomever he pleases.

White men are pissed off. They don’t like the fact that their millennium-old ability to abuse and abase is being called into question. Everyone who is not a white male should know exactly what that means. It means they will use increasingly dirty tactics to keep their power. They are doing that right now. And it means that we, the people they want to control, must do the same. It means it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But it also means that power is power. People with power want very badly to retain that power, and if we want to change the situation, to prevent them from making laws and crowding courts with individuals that do not represent us or our best interests, we must get down and dirty. It means that more of us have to vote. And shout out the truth whenever possible, no matter how uncomfortable. All the time. And loudly.

It means that we also must take off our gloves to rip out, without mercy, the invader that so obviously wishes to harm us.

Porcelain from the Wreckage

For a dying friend

 

He grasped my hand hard before I left

A shrinking giant in a heaven of skylights

High on the vapor of morphine

His eyes were hooded but clear

Said he was square with the Man upstairs, 

Though I cannot imagine but this square 

Could have used some rounding

With the Man’s more amusing emeries

Instead the Man rewarded kindness with cancer

The Man can be that way

 

I told him I’d be back

That I would bring him images of autumn

That we would look at them together in a few days’ time

His wife may be a widow today, tomorrow

Like me

 

I see pictures

In the mountain gaps filled with smoke

In the leaves curling fast before winter blasts them

Off the talus slopes

In the black bear that leaps up on stone walls

To lure the idjits in for a close-up

I wrote that poem in October 2012, for a neighbor of mine named Dave. He was a very good guy. He was a writer, like his wife. He was gentle, very learned, and completely devoid of authoritarian impulses. I wrote the poem for him just before I headed out on a solo trip to the Shenandoah to watch the autumn cover the fields and mountains, because he couldn’t do what I was doing. I wrote it so he could see what I hoped to see, sort of like an internal document we could share intra-office. I write poetry very seldom these days. But there is a term—“beautiful inner seams”— that I discovered recently, that has started to resonate with me suddenly. The term refers to fine tailoring that is not carried out for the purpose of being seen, but simply for the sake of doing the work as well as possible, for making something beautiful that someone else may never see, for creating an epitome. Something for which you will never get credit.

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger before some people convinced me that literature was a waste of my intellect, and moreover, that a concentration in literature would surely not make me rich (some of these people had ulterior motives and concerns for their particular futures). I took those pieces of stupid advice to heart for a long while, switched to the sciences, and in the doing lost much of my inclination to noodle around the dictionary and thesaurus. There’s no doubt the sciences brought me more certainty and a type of real joy, but they did not bring me sublimity.

The arts are no less dogmatic than the sciences. Both suffer from the plagues of celebrity culture, popularity contests, and knee-jerk resistance to change. I first encountered the dogmatism of art in a Shakespeare class, where the top student, well-read but somewhat sycophantic, mouthed the platitudes of the professor at every opportunity, thereby dominating most discussions and mocking with dismissive, annotated commentary any alarming signs of original thought. His presence, and the tired hierarchical establishment, grated on me. Recognized and demonstrated laws in chemistry, say, or mathematics, gradually erode any possibility of riffing on previous criticisms. Science moves forward in fits and starts, and does indeed suffer from its personality cults, but move forward it does (I exclude the present idiotic attempts to prove that the Earth is flat, and the ubiquitous Facebook trolls with their antic crappy video “facts” that serve as brainless retorts to complex problems). We had to throw out the books on alchemy once it was graduated to empirical methods and became chemistry. Not so in literature or philosophy or psychology. Old themes crop up like fashion colors- one season’s burgundy is the next season’s merlot. Adding to the cacophony. Human themes repeat themselves endlessly like spirals in natural growths or fractal patterns in the tree tops. These products of an extraordinarily simple yet complex self-replicating molecule are not inherently harmful or harmless. It is the self-awareness of the human that facilitates harm, or good. And sometimes that human awareness latches on to malignancy and does not let go. That is a mystery. One worth plumbing and monitoring.

I am re-reading Saul Bellow’s Herzog. I read a lot of Bellow as a teenager and young adult, dazzled by his language. This go-round, I am struck by how much the protagonist dwells on the physical failings of his characters- receding hairlines, hairy ears, paunches, the early signs of age on the faces of the women that Herzog loves. All of this frantic description is punctuated by discourses on philosophy and history that don’t exactly get anywhere or make any lingering points. It strikes me more like furious name-dropping or brand-flashing, or something, a look-at-me exercise. The protagonist is in his forties, the age of disenlightenment. A silverback who rescues himself from his personal disappointments by concentrating on the flaws of others. I am admittedly only halfway through so I have not yet made an accounting. But the self-congratulatory blatting is noteworthy. Compare it to Carol Shields’ Stone Diaries, a magnificent account of an “ordinary” woman’s life, or to any of Willa Cather’s dazzling and incisive character tales, and you notice the absence of the writer’s ego. I didn’t notice this when I was younger, plowing through books at speed. Largely because I accepted the status quo as normal.

On my way home from Pasadena a while back, I lugged my suitcase through the cavernous LAX terminal in the company of many TV monitors. I looked up and saw the talking heads, all male, all the time, all over the airport. All yammering away. They say: Listen to me. Only me. Give me your time, your money, your sovereign souls. Because we want to profit off your backs. We want to control it all. We want to shove our opinions down your gullet.

And this pervasive strain in our society struck me at once as so loudly, horribly, disgustingly abnormal, that I had to shake myself.

I am not anti-male. Far from it. The people I work with at NASA are largely male, but most of them are beyond enlightened, to my great relief. Anyone with enough “knowledge” comes to know just how much a human cannot know or understand. The knowledge the truly learned carry around tends to make them tentative, humble, inclusive, and welcoming, by and large. They are a contemplative oasis in this continuing Trumpian nightmare. But I am so incredibly tired of the male fixation on guns, the corrosive anger, the sexual repugnance, the entitled stances, the power hunger, all the timeworn factors that brought an unthinkably monstrous cretin to an office he does not remotely merit. I think of the “great” literature I have read through the years and that caustic drip of the braggart voice, the effect it has had on me and the behavior I tolerated for decades. The many powerful people who have tried to silence women and other disenfranchised humans. The many people who looked the other way. The many petty disingenuous avowals and disavowals. The many ways we all end up silencing ourselves in the fight we must fight every day. I am just one woman, but every single woman I know has a similar story, a trove of sickening tales. Just think of the factorial summation, the implication of just one of us and what we have each experienced, and the branching numbers are hard to believe. Each day, when I wake up and see that an odious criminal is still sitting in the White House, I must actively seek goodness to counteract all that palpable badness, a strangely rotten touch that can be heard as well as felt.

Carry on the work, love your kids and your friends, bake cookies, create objects with care, read, write, think, think, think. Be like Dave. Learn and adjust your antennae, every day. Be generous with your time and attention. Do good. Erase that snotty, wretched, selfish, whiny, infantile thought— “But why should I have to pay for someone else’s problems?”—from your brain. Please. My two cents for the day.

We still have those “beautiful inner seams” to look forward to, seams that good people are always working away on, seams that we will re-discover eventually, after these dark days are over. It’s the only thing to do. That phrase, by the way, lest *anyone* mock it or attempt to devalue it for being distaff, was coined by a male designer.

 

Guns and Savage Reason

Below, in quotes, is a response to a Facebook post I recently shared; the post contained information on how to contact our representatives to address gun safety, for obvious reasons. Because the response contained arguments that inevitably appear when yet another shooting in the good old US of A occurs, I felt it was time to address these perennial arguments with some specificity. Most urgently, however, I have a very specific response to having been accused of “standing on the bodies of freshly injured and murdered people to push a political agenda,” and having been accused of using emotion, and not logic, in my post.

Here is the response:

“I’d rather have a gun and not need it, than need it and not have it. Not only that, but we have a right to bear arms, to defend ourselves. The guns used by the shooter were already illegal, so what would more gun laws do? All they do is disarm law abiding citizens, making them (or better read, us) more vulnerable not only to criminals who don’t care about laws, but to a government that becomes increasingly more corrupt and power hungry.

Now, let’s stop standing on the bodies of freshly injured and murdered people in order to push a political agenda please. Let’s wait, get all the facts, try to figure out what happened, and use logic rather than emotions to decide on a good course of action.”

Yes, we have a right to bear arms and defend ourselves. No one is disputing this. Were the Las Vegas murderer’s guns legal? Why yes, a good number of them were. The jury is out on the rest of them. But while we are “waiting for facts,” it is now known that he altered at least one legal gun to make it automatic. He altered a legal gun with a legal device to make it more lethal. American citizens are barred only from purchasing automatic weapons that were manufactured after 1986. But the law still allows for devices that virtually any gun aficionado can obtain, to alter a gun into an automatic weapon that can burp out more rounds than you can easily duck and cover from. These laws allow, effectively, the possession of automatic weapons. Automatic weapons therefore are still fully available to anyone who wants to use them. Freedom! Fact!

If you want a gun, fine. They are legal and they are now freaking ubiquitous. Where exactly do you see the threat to your gun ownership? I only wish I could see evidence of that threat. But don’t fume about gun laws. The control that now exists in our country when it comes to guns is in fact truly inadequate, and on the face of it, criminal. Criminal because the injuries and murders, which are crimes, are being committed with high-powered, highly efficient guns that can kill more people per unit time than ever before. And these weapons are obviously not controlled enough to keep them from being used against innocent, law-abiding people. The laws which govern modern guns have proven to be neither effective nor realistic, and this fact manifests itself with each mass shooting.

And by the way, exactly which law had or has the effect of disarming you, law-abiding citizen? Which laws, exactly, have prevented more than 300 million guns passing into private ownership in this country? Where is the privation you fear and militate against?

And finally, as to “standing on the bodies of freshly injured and murdered people,” what, dear responder to my post, did you just do? You pushed me aside, off those very same bodies, so that you yourself could climb atop them in order to be heard making a louder plea to hang on to your precious firearms, to protect yourself from “criminals who don’t care about laws,” and your increasingly corrupt government. You are in fact trading on, and pandering to, the emotion of fear, when you do this.

Yes, criminals don’t care about laws. This is why they are called criminals. Years ago, I lived in one of the worst neighborhoods in NYC. If guns had been as prevalent in the 70s as they are now, there’s a good chance I’d be pushing up daisies right now, instead of typing this post. Each time I was assaulted, my attackers only had their hands (and rocks, in one case). More guns, legal or illegal, equals more access to quicker and more widespread death, period. More high-powered weaponry, being sold to large numbers of law-abiding or non-law-abiding citizens, has unquestionably fed the precipitous rise of mass shootings in the US, following a regression line as exact as I have ever seen, and its result is also reflected in the clear numeracy displayed in my post, which depicted the comparative incidence of gun deaths per 100,000 in Western countries. (Guess who won). I no longer live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, thankfully. In my 60 years, in neighborhoods good and not-so-good, I have never felt the need to carry a gun. Nor have I ever been accosted by a gun-toting human. I might want to carry a rifle if I lived in bear country. No one is stopping me from doing that, and no one, in fact, is stopping you.

Yes, our government is increasingly corrupt. But our government, no matter how many guns you possess, can and will blow your heinie into the next dimension if it wants to. That is a fact. No gun or arsenal or carefully maintained personal stockpile will ever save you from your government if it decides to target you. Why are we in this predicament? You could debate that for weeks. Or forever. Sure, you could hole up for a few months (particularly if you are white), maybe even occupy a wildlife refuge if you felt particularly irked because you couldn’t graze your beasts on land that belonged to your hated government. Wild idea, right? But you would lose, hands down. Don’t believe me? Try fomenting revolution. Just once.

And if you think your government is out to get you, and that this government is so corrupt and monumentally powerful that it puts you, personally, in so much danger that you only feel safe when you have a gun, then why in the world do you stay in this country? It would be far more logical for you to take your guns and leave immediately, to escape the imminent exercise of malignant governmental will upon your person.

Accusing me of standing upon the bodies of freshly shot persons to push my agenda is like me accusing you of mashing your shoes further into the raw wounds of the injured, all to trumpet your concern about a completely nonexistent threat that you, personally, will soon be divested of your guns. And, to boot, you have inexplicably characterized reasonable discourse on this serious crisis, which exists right now, as an “emotional” reaction.

Interesting approach.