an uneasy peace in the living room this afternoon; i'm home with a sick child, and not feeling all that well myself, though i've gone back to teaching and even eating full meals, and i often skip coffee now but i finally poured a cold cup at home to sit down here. uneasy, because tomorrow is supposed to be a strike, for our university; four unions are gearing up for zero-hour; negotiations have been going around the clock; people are whispering in the hallways; students are wondering if we will actually have class. students don't have a clue, but, worse, many of us teachers don't have a clue either and we're important because we are the ones who actually might go...it is incumbent upon us to find out, quickly, what exactly this is all about.

it brings up the general question, and i mean this in all sincerity, that if you live in this country, and you work your forty-five or fifty hours, and bring up your children, and go to their school programs, and keep your cars running, and laundry done, and actually cook once in a while, do you really have time to notice if somebody is stealing thousands of dollars at the top levels of government or the institutions that matter in our lives? oh yes, you notice when they charge you twenty dollars for a band-aid in the hospital, and that's even when insurance is paying most of it, and you notice that probably a whole swath of people can't pay it, so those of us who can are left holding the bag. and half the working people, going all the way up past wal-mart, can't afford insurance and don't have it, so aren't paying for it, so incredible amounts of money are flying around; the government bails out whole banks and financial institutes, car companies, finances both sides of wars in afghanistan, and occupations in places such as libya and iraq, and korea, and germany and panama and probably samoa and guam; and this means a lot of health insurance, and twenty-dollar bandaids. but my point is, when somebody is stealing, or moving vast amounts around at the top, who is watching? anyone? is there a press to say, hey, what happened to the twelve billion, or, is there any control over how and when it was misspent? this i think is what the occupy people are going after, and i think it's a good impulse, i think it applies both on the siuc campus and in the world-bank hustle.

and then, because i don't want to think about how wretched things can be, when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, and there's war between the haves and havenots, and the powers and the no-powers, or the i-can-do-as-i-wishes and the open-up-the-vaults, and there's a class war, or a strike, or a use of force, or a carrying-out-of-threats, so i think about other stuff, like the holiday season. here we have gone, from halloween, to all saints day, to all souls day, and it turns out that in mexico the all-saints to all-souls translation is more like dia de los inocentes to dia de los muertos where you at first pray for the souls of young children, the truly innocent, who must certainly go straight to heaven anyway, being aligned with the saints and saints day and all, but then you move on to the murkier territory, that of adults who have died, whose fate is far less certain. so you're hoping that, if they are still in that purgatory area, somebody today (all souls) is looking in on them and judging them in the right direction. which brings me to this question: when it's all over, and i'm dead and gone, me, a guy who is certainly not an inocente, then will there be anyone around saying, this is all souls, let's give a hand to these souls who are trapped in the in-between-land? i kind of vacillate, thinking sometimes that this whole world as we know it is a kind of purgatory, that we're all here in in-between-land, or, maybe, that we have all three, heaven hell & the purg, all here with us at once and on the spot, depending on how we look at it. yet i don't ever, ever, hear anyone wish anyone a happy all-souls day.

it is, however, quite beautiful outside, the leaves of the gingko turning bright yellow and waiting for their day (they all fall at once); other leaves oranging up, turning red, falling gently; some huge leaf so enormous that, for a moment, i thought it was an animal writhing on the road, turning over and over, and i slowed down to avoid hitting it. the leaves, even the largest, will blow around somewhat indiscriminately, until they find a valley or a hedgerow to settle in for the winter, where the wind can't get around them or stir them up, then, finally, they can rot in peace. the same will happen with a marble that a cat bats around until it's in a corner where the cat can't reach it, and it will then live there what, until you move? or longer.

the socks have their own all-souls-day basket, where loose ones end up, unpaired with their partners, waiting to be matched and used but they are often taken out of the basket, lined up so we can see if they actually do match, and then left there to be scattered in the winds or slept on by the cat or end up on the floor where they'll have to be washed again. so it happens that a lot of time they're in a kind of purgatory but that assumes that, in fact, a folded-up, in-the-drawer kind of state is what? heaven? or maybe that's hell, considering that, if the system were actually working, being in the drawer would mean you could be snatched and worn by any kid at virtually any moment, and have no control whatsoever. but about a month ago my wife was moving kids from one room to the next and put a whole basket-load of clothes aside with the purpose of sorting, and it remained there, it's now a couple of months, this pile of mostly clean clothes has been sitting in that basket, and it somehow got out of the cycle. is that good? does that help those clothes last one more kid? not sure. one has to assume that clothes want to be worn, they're made to be worn, not sit there like some museum piece. this would be a toy-story kind of religion, to be sure.

these days i slog through my swim, and when i get to my afternoon classes, i'm a little dizzy, and woozy, being not quite over my flu, and need coffee to keep going. i try to focus on the class's issues; we were studying bobby fischer, and he was kind of a wild nut (though i saw him one time, when i was about nine), but their reading was so bad that they couldn't quite get the hang of what the reading had to say about him. and then in grammar class, i'm coming to one of the classic points of all time, which is the difference between "i ate" and "i have eaten" - a distinction lost on the average american kid, by the way, but not lost at all in england - and this uncertainty, this idea that the outside world is not at all supporting the idea that there is a difference, is unsettling, to the point that i have to talk myself into the value of teaching it. perhaps i shouldn't bother? or i should qualify it by saying, you don't really need this in your everyday life, since you can get by just fine with, "i just ate" or "i never ate"...whole grammatical structures are in a purgatory of their own, except that they don't have anyone praying for them, except maybe me, since i know what they are and can literally see them fading into the autumn fog. the leaf lets go of the tree, and it hangs, suspended in a breeze; it could drift in either direction, or just not drift at all.