out there

2012-02-10T23:22:00.001-06:00

new story: Five-second rule...enjoy! comments welcome, as usual

2012-02-08T16:04:00.000-06:00

2012-02-07T12:39:00.000-06:00

2012-02-06T22:21:00.002-06:00

it feels ok, running around with all these poetry reading posters, and self-publicizing, but that's partly because it's all a benefit, for the homeless shelter, and i'm already a little famous in this small town anyway, so it's not really trying to make a name for myself, so much as coming out as a poet. but i'm glad i don't take myself too seriously because so much has gone wrong, it's just unbelievable. the coffeeshop says it's wide open, any day is ok, but i choose one and it's taken. i think that's ok, to have two things there in one night, but it's not. i change the date to a week later, but the doctor changes the date of the birth to a week earlier, and now my main headline poet, he's supposed to have a baby on the 15th, same day as the reading. can't talk that doctor into changing his golf game i suppose? no, they're scheduling it for the 15th. that poet will have someone read for him, maybe. the 15th is indirect competition with valentines day, and the international festival, it's a busy time, but we'll live. we're psyched, so to speak. philosophy club, bane of my existence.

i'm a stalinist, because things i'd rather not do, i just kind of stall, and i'm always stallin, because i have so much to do, that some things get put off indefinitely. my job includes all kinds of things that can be put off, but that's bad because so many more can't be put off and there are some things that just aren't getting done. then today, monday morning, my wife got an offer from lubbock texas, texas tech, and i was surprised that i was interested myself, even though it's the far plains, way out there, way flat, way hot, way cotton country. and still it seemed kind of cool, moving way out there. i just needed to entertain a possibility of change. we rolled lubbock around on our tongues, looked it up in wikipedia. probably won't happen. but it seemed kind of interesting there for a while. kind of like bobby knight, moving out there to lubbock. except we probably won't do it. and we don't throw chairs.

so i'm doing publicity, but i lose my main poet to a probable birth situation, and it kind of takes the wind out of my sails, and maybe i should just concentrate on the usual work, that i'm so far behind on. i wonder why i get so tired, & it's because this stuff kind of weighs on me, and i try my best to tear around in the mornings and get as much of it done as possible, yet i stop to talk to people sometimss & it costs me. one class is 2-5 in this room that is directly at the origin of the heater and it's always at least a hundred even with the door open; makes me want to crack the window but that's probably impossible. an oven, a sauna, and nap time to boot, and i have trouble getting anything out of the students, at all...can't blame them. 2-5, nap time. especailly if you're up 'til like 2.

now here's my question. it hasn't rained in texas in like two years, except for a storm which flew through there once a while back. a complete and total drought which turned the kerrville folk festival into a dust storm and threatens to do the same for everyone else. now i say this is related to the fact that they've sucked the bottom out of the water table, and this is because there are millions of people living out in the desert, in places like phoenix and el paso and lubbock, but it's a desert. so if they have no water table and the result is a drought parches the land for two years i maintain those two are related, but they might not be. but either one might be a good reason not to move out there. minnesota would be better, i'd say, at least in terms of having snow once in a while and having a big old lake to stick your toe in when you get bored. guess we'll stay free and see what pops up, & i say this though for all intents and purposes i've declared southern illinois my home, i've been here seventeen years, i've taken to saying half the stuff they say around here.

i do africa for a hobby. helps me get away from it all, and see how vast and diverse this world is. it's a wild place, africa. it has spurts of democracy, or hope. times when everyone does business and improves their lot, or argues about the intentions of the chinese. and it has weather too, maybe not like the lubbock tornado of 1970, or the tri-state tornado of 1925 (?) but weather nonetheless. a good rainstorm, now you don't see that everyday. sometimes europe gets all the snow, and then people like me are forced to drop, exhausted, into bed, without even seeing any. chao

2012-02-05T16:24:00.004-06:00

new movie: Dart monkey vs. Z.O.M.G. btd5

sundays, it usually comes down to a lot of homework, piles of grading i brought home on friday 'cause i got to doing something else at the office. it's drizzling and cold here; everyone is off somewhere watching the super bowl, and i'm home with two very bored kids who are beginning to bounce off the wall, though occasionally they mumble at me about calling their friends who are invariably not home or busy. it's true, i don't have much for them to do, and in fact i'd rather they leave me alone and let me get to my homework, but i should be so lucky. the movie was an aside, disrupted my homework a little, took the computer down 'til it was close to zero, but it didn't matter, because as long as the boys are up, i get very little done. this includes, what's on computer, and what's not. different folks are skyping from different directions. the little guy, he skypes whoever he sees, so there's a kind of running conversation with the entire extended family. we all know what's going on with everyone.

the skype doesn't always work perfectly though, so we occasionally get cut off in the middle of a conversation, and this could be because of disrupted connection, or just about anything. it's maddening. but it's free. in the old days you'd pay a small fortune just to hear a voice.

with the poetry reading now put off a week (see below) i have a little more time to prepare the book and get ready; there are a lot of publicity angles to explore and arms to twist. i'm taking both a personal and public approach to publicity. personal, in that i'll twist the arms of all my friends, virtually all of them. public, in that we're also hitting all the local media, from here to there, to get whatever turnout we can. in the meantime i'm meeting the people at the good samaritan and hearing whatever everyone has to say about it. seemed, at first, to be a worthy cause. maybe there are more worthy ones. 2013 standndeliver might have a different plot line. if there is one.

i'm exhausted on weekends; i get up saturday morning, make a cup of coffee, make another one, finally get dressed, and go run around taking the boys hither and yon. by evening i'm exhausted and i haven't even done anything. takes a whole day to unwind out of my teaching schedule. sundays i try to hold it together at quaker meeting and then have to turnaround, get ready for monday. it's a grind. i'm barely prepared to start. some people talk about going back to work in order to rest. for me, there is no rest. neither one is all that relaxing. rest occasionally happens when i exercise, or swim, or walk from the car to the office where these days i get to see a construction zone. it's rest, when they are operating the heavy machinery, and i am just walking. it's rest when i take the elevator.

the other day i got into the elevator though, and, as usual it doesn't light up, it's impossible to tell from its light whether it will actually stop at three, whether it sensed your urgent push to go to three. ok, that's ok, i'm quite used to that, it's like a deaf old grandfather who, you yell at him, and he mostly hears you because it's the same thing you yell every time and he's quite used to it. i'm used to this, this elevator whose light is broken, and i settle in for my burnt-to-the-gills restful ride, but this woman who's also in the elevator, she's not used to it, and somehow concludes that the elevator is off to a ride into who-knows-where, which makes me feel like maybe she regards me as the wrong person to be stuck in an elevator with. no, she's just plain panicking, the light's not on, who knows where it's going? i spend a few minutes trapped in a claustrophobic box with the panic of being on the edge, and not knowing one floor from no floor.

the exercise bike is restful, and that's because it's entirely zydeco, accordion music and french-creole yelling in harmony, all in a rhythm that is more or less adjusted to the bike itself. i don't know if all those cajun singers were exercise-bicyclists but it sure seems like that kind of sweating and that kind of blues are close kin and in fact actually spare me from being down there say, in the summer, when you really sweat. i knew this guy, a fiddler, who went down there, learned french, came back with all these awesome fiddle tunes, and made it, in his own way, and i think about that sometimes, but mostly i think about other stuff. it's about the only time i rest.

monday rolls around, and once again i'm way behind on everything. way behind on the moodle, where i'm supposed to show everyone my grades. way behind on various aspects of my job which i will frantically try to catch up on this week. there's no way to finish it all. i sometimes talk to people, which is nice, but which costs me. late at night, i feel guilty, there's too much, and i'm too pitifully behind. you'd think these small towns would be restful. well, the traffic is, but everything else, it's worse than ever. more later. chao

2012-02-03T15:26:00.001-06:00

Wed. Feb. 15, 7-9 PM, Longbranch Coffeehouse
100 E. Jackson St., Carbondale

Patrick T. Randolph
Kathy Cotton
Thomas Leverett

More information here.
All Welcome!

2012-02-02T23:05:00.003-06:00

the philosophy club is the bane of my existence, because while i was messing with the poets, choosing wednesday over thursday and making sure everything was cool with everyone, the philosophy club apparently slipped in and reserved the back room for wednesday, for who knows what, and we're out in the cold, out a hundred posters and wondering when the heck we could have this alleged poetry reading benefit. our remaining choice would be the day after valentine's day, which would carry a bit of irony, or possibly to change venues, but it's hard to get three poets to agree on anything and i'm still as a result somewhat hanging in the wind here.

now the jigsaw puzzle you see below was finally completed, except for a single piece, which i could say is the bane of my existence, but in fact i've more or less let it go and now just look at that gap as you would look at say the mouth of a kid who's just lost his first tooth. it's a long way down from here, you might say to the kid, or the puzzle; the puzzle is going into the box, one piece short or not, and those darn reindeer (100?) took me months to get their horns straightened out. it's going into the box, and from whence nowhere, since you can't give away a puzzle that's missing one piece. if i were perhaps to give it away, i would then be more likely to find the piece, which is probably buried in some unread magazine somewhere beneath where the puzzle table was. i could get worried about that piece, and even start opening those magazines, but i haven't.

a granddaughter skypes me almost daily now, and that's a great development because i can hear her word development (gawa turns into gampa in a single week), and i get to blow her kisses. what a kid! i remember how exciting it is to watch someone being almost two. her mom leaves for a minute and she gives me an entire sentence, undecipherable, but dead serious, about what's going on. she tries her best to tell me everything.

it was groundhog day here, but it occurred to me that i'd lost track of what passes for groundhogs these days, and worse, what passes for winter. it was winter? it seemed to me that everything was a little suspended in half-warm, half-cold purgatory, with no rest for the cats at the window who can now see all the birds for lack of groundcover, the cats must, at least, stay in the house, and give the birds a fighting chance. the geese, above, honk loudly in the warm breeze; i'm convinced they're speaking french, or the geese dialect of it, anyway, as they are from canada and we don't have a whole lot of canadians around. they argue about whether to go back or what, and i reckon the must be working it out, whether to speak english, or french.

tiredness washes over me and i'm off to bed, only to say, i'll readvertise the poetry reading as soon as i can, it's not really the bane of my existence. it's good, and it's coming soon, one way or the other! ciao

2012-01-30T20:02:00.001-06:00

2012-01-30T19:43:00.000-06:00

2012-01-30T19:38:00.000-06:00

2012-01-29T22:03:00.001-06:00

Pokemon HGSS Walkthrough Part III Sprout Tower
another pokemon walkthrough; i put them here because i don't want to lose them

2012-01-28T15:33:00.003-06:00

a friend came over and i showed him a little about the publicity angle of the poetry reading which is coming along much better now. i have a facebook page; i've told all my facebook friends; i have a poster (though i haven't copied it), i have actually called both newspapers, though both were closed, it being saturday and all. i uploaded pictures, built sites, did p.r.

but, as i said to my friend, and he was somewhat mystified by this, my motivation is really that in a sense, being a bum and a hobo, albeit 40 years ago, i feel like i've been carrying around this secret, and in a sense i'm telling the town now what i've been carrying. i walk around, and, if i'm trapped in a line at the post office, i write haiku, and that means, i get my head into some moment, which could have been in, say, texas, and i try to condense that into seventeen syllables, and it may be good or bad poetry what do i know, but it gets me out of that feeling of being stuck in line. it's a kind of discipline, to take all those moments, and condense them into seventeen syllables, with a clue of both the place and the season, the season as they would know it in, say, texas, and then i have five hundred or more of these, and i have them all in one volume, and now it's time to show. i feel it, that it's time to show, and i also owe the homeless shelter a favor, since they were there for me one time when i was freshly kicked out of my own house.

the homeless shelters, they say, and others of its ilk, such as the women's center, are responsible more than any other thing for the reduction in the murder rate. i guess that, in the old days, if folks had nowhere to go, they simply went back & murdered the aggrieved spouse, so that this is a benefit of the modern world, one that should be upheld and maintained, like an interfaith center and a teenage help line. if it saves lives, i'm for it, because it could be mine or that of my kids, and i'm glad they are there when my folks need them. that's the first thing. but second, if i'm scrawling this little poetry on little sheets of paper and stuffing them in my pockets at places like the post office and all, i'm hiding secrets, and that doesn't quite feel right, i'd like to say, at some point, yeah, i've been pushing my kids in the swing at turley park for years, and in my head, i'm thinking about that time i was out in west texas watching the san juan river crawl its way down toward mexico, and you want to know what i got in my pocket, here it is. so the little logos i put on my poster say, southern illinois poets, stand & deliver. it's got a kind of wild west, up front feeling, hopefully someone will show up.

turns out the story itself is worth hearing, i've certainly told it enough (see the template of this very blog, where you can read the true versions, in prose, of every step i took) and in fact i rarely tire of telling it so if that's all that happens on that particular night, or if the poetry is bad (which is a distinct possibility in my case, i say possibility because, isolated as i am in my own head, it's reached the point where i almost wouldn't know one way or the other, unless forced to actually read it out and see what people think), at least i'll have an entertaining story to spin out and give people to carry with them, out into the february night. just from the telling of the story to my friend, i know how easy it is to get carried away in the details of what happened say, when the al-can highway washed out and we spent days and nights in a tiny mountain town of british columbia, looking at the northern lights and waiting for a little road repair. or, the mexico and guatemala part, which are pretty much left out of the book but nonetheless tellable, interesting stories. the real version, the prose, just passing through, i actually need to work on and finish this year; that's part of my goal.

so a week from wednesday (or wenny-denzy, as i've taken to calling it), i'll be there, reading this stuff out, and raising money for the local homeless shelter, which i consider to be an important contributor to sanity and sustenance of life in this town. but in the meantime i have to print more books, print and deliver posters, and keep up with other work-related stuff, which is also heating up and causing a certain amount of busy-ness and panic on my part. i've got irons in the fire. a few too many, in fact.

it's cool and clear out, and this is good because a plastic-handled spoon fell down into the dishwasher and melted on the heating element causing a wretched stink to fill the house and leave us a little aggrieved. not a bad time to air the place out though as februarys are known to bring ice storms not to mention leap day, which could add to the misery this year if not thow off all the electronic devices. the powers that be want to eliminate "leap second" because it really gets in the way of all that electronic calculation, but in fact if those electronic devices are off by one second or so, we're all a little better off, because we won't be able to be anal and all worked up about it. it's like that woman in iowa, whose house was about an inch off of the straight north-south axis, and she knew it, and she went bonkers. why? because she couldn't pick up the house and move it. i say, pick up the earth's axis, and move it about an inch, and see how many people we lose. but do it gently, don't do it with a tsunami.

which reminds me, i finished the jigsaw puzzle, and it was missing two pieces, so finally i moved the couch and got everything out from under there, kids books, a sock, a paper clip, all kinds of stuff. and sure enough, one of the pieces was down there. but the other? it's still gone. who knows? those reindeer, they contributed one of their own to the great environment. but what does a single jigsaw puzzle piece do, when it's out in the world, say it fell between the pages of some book in the end-table magazine-holder, and it's just sitting there until we find it somehow, years later? it's worthless, separated from its friends, much like a single sock is worthless without its mate, unless you happened to buy a dozen that were all similar. as i put this puzzle away, i'm intensely aware of how useless it is, i can't even give it away, when it's missing one piece. the hardest puzzle i ever did, too.

so what's with the world pictures? it's a picnik retrospective. picnik is the poster-art maker, photo adjuster, pop-artist toolbox, it's been free all these years, but google is closing it down, maybe because it was too popular, or too free. we can make all the pop art we want until april, then it's all over, maybe somebody will come 'round and provide another, but maybe not, and that's ok, i feel like once again, i'm rolling from one free site to another, like i'm on the road again, or maybe on the train, jumping up but trying not to kill myself, or landing on the gravel and hoping it doesn't put a hole in whatever i land on. one side of me, and you can check out my template here, is always on this big long ramble which, one could say, just goes from one public spot to another. and as long as you're not a public nuisance, you kind of stay under the radar, you help folks out and don't cause trouble, then the world allows you to pass through and says, be my guest.

which reminds me, it was polar bear weekend here, which meant, mass binge-drinking spectacular among the college students, kids puking and ending up in the e-r all over town (at least last year they did) and everyone a little worried that someone might die, or sit down on the railroad tracks, or some other thing, so they write letters to the parents and everyone gets offended, like you're telling on us before we even did anything. but i say, and i'm kind of part of the reformed community, i've been there and back, and somewhat grateful not to be in the clutches of alcohol or any other drug, to speak of, i say such warnings may be offensive but aren't really uncalled for, if they save anyone's life. we are here, and stay here, because this town needs us, it's a drinking town, has a drinking problem, and it needs someone to say, you can beat this stuff and come back from it and live to tell the tale. which is what i'll do on wednesday. i have no intention of encouraging people to jump on trains. as i tell my kids, it's a different world, and you have to be smart, 'cause folks love you & want you to survive. chao

2012-01-25T22:43:00.000-06:00

2012-01-25T22:42:00.000-06:00

2012-01-25T22:41:00.000-06:00

2012-01-25T22:39:00.001-06:00

2012-01-25T19:02:00.001-06:00

2012-01-25T18:58:00.000-06:00

2012-01-23T23:47:00.000-06:00

2012-01-23T23:34:00.000-06:00

2012-01-23T23:20:00.003-06:00

No Picnik: Photo-editing site's users blast Google

new c-net news, it's the big news out there, especially for us pop-art denizens who do our own chopping, saturating, sharpening, and posterizing. as i read about it it appears that google is just trying to ensure that it drives people to use google + ... i think, given the benefits of picnik, it would probably be worth it to me to use google + ... i haven't, so far, found many other reasons to use google + ... unlike many, i don't hold it against google for driving its fans to a new social networking system; it's like putting your phone booth in the new train station. what's the point of arguing? as long as i can use it, i'll be ok. might do a picnik retrospective extravaganza, just in case. starting tonight.

a poetry reading benefit is in the works; it will feature four different poets with me second on the list. i'm actually coming out as a poet, and not without a little nervousness. this is a small town though. i'm already famous. turns out, with all the effort i've put into selling my short stories online (spent a $70 coupon on free google link-advertising), i've only sold one book, and that was poetry. no problem, though, it won't slow me down. i'll get my publicity machinery going as soon as i can!

i was a single father for a couple of days, tried to restring my lap dulcimer in the process, ran into frustration on virtually all counts. patience, my son! tuning pegs are now dangling precariously on my dresser. one son has forgotten about his video camera temporarily, hot on the trail of a new downloadable game that he can wheedle us into getting for him. the other is on us for all kinds of games, movies, netflix, skype, whatever he can get, knowing full well that while we're messing with fixing the computer we're not watching the cookies, it's fairly easy to pull one over on two older parents, one foot in the grave. parents are supposed to cultivate these eyes in the back of our heads. i myself let all my hair grow too long over the holidays, now i'm just too tired to look out for any trouble.

told a few people, but kept it off facebook, that it being the year of the dragon, i'd celebrate by dragon myself into work for another year...i find myself falling asleep, again, however, as i write, so i'm off to bed. forgive the rambling. more later...chao

2012-01-20T00:40:00.002-06:00

i've been challenged to do a poetry reading with my new book e pluribus haiku as a benefit for a local homeless shelter, by a guy who has gotten himself in newspapers nationwide for doing that, reading poetry as benefits for the homeless. he has several books out but is basically a colleague of mine at work, and quite good at self-promotion, i've always thought. i'm somewhat shy about my identity as a poet but am not likely to resist any challenge or well-placed dare of this nature so i think it may happen; it also is to his benefit that i happen to know not only the homeless shelter but also the people at the coffee shop where it would likely be held. it remains to be seen when, how, or who else might be involved. february is a time of poetry, i can tell you that, yet he also has a baby due so we have to move quickly.

my own computer is busy uploading another video for my ten-year-old and i'm afraid to sign out of his account and into mine in the middle of the process so i'm relegated to a back room funky computer at which i often mistype. he has become a man in black, who has his own youtube channel, and who easily could stay up until two or three every morning if i don't wail and moan and goad him into bed. around nine or ten when the little guy is asleep i do my exercise, furious stationary bicycling with cajun blues and accordion, and raunchy singing and i may or may not be on the beat as i get kind of zoned out into listening to it and not concentrating on the bicycle action. we also get skype calls from my granddaughter who plays the harmonica, has names for us (i'm gahwah, and one son is eeeyi)and she looks forward to talking to us because we climb all over each other and live the life of a bunch of wild animals with paws all over the screen, piling up on each other. she's learning to talk though and that's an ever-repeating miracle as kids seem to understand so much before they even start.

a cold spell has settled down over the place and this is somewhat typical for january here so i'm not necessarily complaining about global warming or whatever its opposite is, global or localized flooding or blizzarding. we breathe a little too much of whatever some furnace cranks out. the air is totally fresh outside but nobody wants to go out and balm around in it, though i do see a few bicyclists. outdoor sports? we don't have enough snow, though we have the appearance of it, sometimes. and it's just as likely to be in february as january anymore.

teaching the news again, and that's good, because i'm somewhat of a news junkie anyway these days; i do my africa news 'til i think that's normal, that's the center of the news world, and everyone should know gabon from gambia. unlike santorum, i at least know that africa is a continent, not a country. i should run for president, but i don't, because my computer is being used to upload youtubes.

2012-01-16T23:14:00.002-06:00

another movie:
Pokemon Heart-gold and Soulsilver walkthrough part I

they're coming fast and furiously now; though it is a school night, i have yet another to make and upload for him, but haven't had the chance. it takes about a half-hour to put it into quicktime and another to put it up onto youtube, and you get involved in other stuff and don't notice when it's finished. in this one you can hear dinner being cooked in the background and an occasional family member interrupting....yet he's doing them in broad daylight because he has ideas and wants to produce. i know the feeling, and i'm proud of him.

my own writing is bogged down a bit because i don't quite know everything i'm talking about; i may have to back up and do some research. it's about the similarities between language, traffic and other self-organizing systems; links are coming, be patient.

a storm is rolling in, and that is unusual for january, in that it's rain this year, and not a raging blizzard of frigid snow. i hear thunder in the northwest as i type and am beginning to see some kinds of drizzle around the streetlight aura. i'm coming to the end, close to bed; we all go back to school and work in the morning.

over at the table with the reindeer jigsaw puzzle i finally got going and got dozens of pieces, as you reach a critical mass and soon there are a lot fewer pieces to choose from. i couldn't finish it, however; two months, and it's still not done.

similarly with the quilt, i work on it regularly, enjoy it, yet still am not out of the grays yet; the grays are so far my first and only color on top. just starting, you could say, but it's coming right along.

other projects, i have to give up, or shelve, for the moment, as i have no other choice, it's time to get back to work. i do exercise every day, thirty or forty minutes of cajun music, and i'm enjoying that, but i no longer do poetry then as it seems my mind is just full, or maybe i need to reflect on traffic and self-organization, not enough room in my brain. my dad's pictures, cesl archive, dulcimer tuning pegs, these have all been put off, for the moment. such is life; i give in, relax, let it rain. tomorrow i start back; wednesday i teach. chou

2012-01-16T16:21:00.000-06:00

2012-01-16T12:56:00.002-06:00

my son's most recent movie:
MightyDragonite's dragonite

i can mention two aspects of this movie-making bit: one, that although it requires an enormous amount of my time and guidance, he still learns faster, and knows more about it, than i do, partly because he's young but also because he wants to have a prominent channel in the pokemon-explanation business. he finds the people who do it well and he models himself after them; slowly he will become more polished, with a louder voice, clearer picture, and camera focused steadily on the action.

if you click on the channel you can see all the movies he's made; he gets "views", and "likes," and these are important to him, and i implore you to add your "view" and your "like" if you would be so kind. but this blog is not really about him; he has his own arc, and his own life which you will be able to see easily (if you "subscribe") only soon enough. really what i would like to say is that, on this grim and windy, cold (and soon rainy) holiday, there is one last day for me to start in on my project, and, it is slowly being eaten away by this process. i should not begrudge it, it's ok, it's just life as it is, and i'm not so much an expert on language as a self-organizing system anyway, that i really have that much to say, as i sit down and try to write.

but i have this pile of books, and they deal with language, what it is, and how to explain it, and natural systems, such as ant colonies, nerve structures, etc., and my challenge here is to somehow tie it all together, because i believe that language is what is known as a self-organizing system. and sometimes i get caught on the little stuff, like what is the difference between self-organized and self-organizing, and does that matter? or, how are humans with their perceptual structures different or similar to termites, or ants, or nerves? not sure about this stuff, but i plow forward anyway.

on the king holiday we are all implored to get out in the civic arena and listen to speeches about racial harmony, or about the dream, and collaborate with people from the other churches and various walks of life in this town which is quite diverse, contentious at times, and changing. i however struggle with the fact that i spend so much time just watching the little fellows, that i have very little left to do my own creative projects, and those are piling up and making it hard for me to move around in my own limited office space. i'll occasionally spend a few minutes sorting laundry, or moving papers around in that space, so that i have room for a couple of elbows, but it's a holiday, one part of me says, maybe i should have one more relax before the term crashes in again.

and let me explain about the quilt. i am now on my second quilt, and it is like the first; it has four-squares, with triangles sewn around the outside corners, so that when put together it will all be bow-ties of various colors in what is known as a bow-tie arrangement. the one i'm working on now is a saluki quilt; the last one was a hawkeye quilt, and the next two, for the twins, will be illini quilts. one theme is that the colors we call "our own" (in our case, saluki colors are black, white, silver and maroon-red) are often associated with sports teams and sports success, but should really be taken in, embraced, as folk colors, regional identification, free of the negative attitudes we often associate with sports and everything that goes with it. second, and i get this from the navajo, one thing that a person can do in this world is to take a vision of color and design, and pass it along to one's descendants, in some form or another, so that we have some of that color and design long after we are gone, and that is a better place marker, so to speak, than, say, a journal. my grandfather, yeah, he's the one who made this quilt, and it's ragged, dirty, frayed on the edges, but it's better to remember him by those colors, and the way they go together, than by something he wrote.

not sure if i believe that, but i'm acting on that principle.

2012-01-14T23:52:00.002-06:00

my son could easily stay up all night playing little electronic games, and he would have every reason tonight, having been to an evening birthday party (at which he was one of only about five boys, but there were maybe thirty girls)...and having made and uploaded another movie, this one also about pokemon or something like it, and having a camera stand that actually works and holds steady on the screen so he can describe a battle. it's a quite interesting evolution in that we are both learning imovie at the same time but he is so much faster than me, and i am actually held back by my previous experience with an imovie that was simpler and easier to use. it's like each imovie assumes you'd mastered the last ones, and don't need to have explained to you, for example, how to get out of clip mode.

then, i'm mostly using pop arted news photos which aren't really mine, yet his are entirely original, with only his voice and shots of his screen, and his pokemon doing battle with others' pokemon. quite amazing actually, his turning into an original filmmaker, in front of my eyes.

these birthday parties, the other son had one too, were over in the north side of town, and because there were two, and i had to go back and forth each way, i was on a single street maybe eight times tonight, saw that same neighborhood over and over. i used to live out there, so it's all very familiar, but at the same time, with its narrow roads and kind of funky character, it's different every time. at the recycling center near the gym where the parties were i saw an enormous white animal that could have been a rat, it was darting amongst the bins, and didn't seem to have a tail, but was pretty spooky and stealthy tearing around. it's really cold out, and the students are still gone, and not many people are out on the roads unless they have to be, it's not that hard getting around these days. i actually love the winter, wouldn't mind walking around in it, getting some of that fresh air that nobody else wants. or doing winter sports, which never occurs to people here because we just don't have enough of the white stuff. we could, maybe, sled, if we had sleds and just the right amount of snow fell, we could all run out to the hill, we only have one or two and those are probably man-made, but nonetheless, what happens is that lots of people have nothing to do, and they see that snow coming for miles, and they go buy up all the sleds, and there's only maybe a half-dozen in town at any given time, and the rest of us who wait to actually see the snow, we have to use an old piece of cardboard or something, because we don't have a chance in hell of buying a sled.

so i gradually forget how to ski, how to sled, how to even stop on the ice, in a car while driving, we lose all these skills that we used to have and become wimps and pretty soon i'd just as soon stay home also, same as all these others, if it snows even a half-inch. it's enough to make it dangerous for me, because i no longer have a clue, i'm out of the habit.

then i stepped up the advertising campaign, got a $70 coupon for google ads and used it to direct traffic to my kindle books, in hopes of selling one, maybe, someday, and got five people or more to click through even on the first day, though nobody bought anything, or has yet, to my knowledge. these people are tough customers, times are hard, so maybe i won't sell a darned thing, who knows. maybe these people are aware on some subliminal level that all these stories are basically available on this blog if you only know where to find them, as i've been announcing them here one at a time for years. but for the moment i'm kind of bound up in this click-through business...so people actually click on these ads? and then people actually sell stuff based on their click? it's a system, where you can actually make some money????

so i've had this jigsaw puzzle since maybe november, and it has a hundred reindeer in it or something like that, it's massively confusing and i'm add anyway so i get lost one reindeer to the other and it's been around way too long; i got two more jigsaw puzzles for christmas but haven't been able to break out either one, until this big really hard one gets put away. and there are some pieces i'll spend up to a half hour looking for and still not be able to find it; i begin to suspect that some pieces walked away at some point. you want to know what happened to that vacation, those reindeer will tell you. but hey, if i have those stories on kindle, and have a system, and the system works, then this vacation is better than the last three combined. and it's gotten me to move on to the next thing, which is, can i get amazon to make the print copy too, and can i publish some other stuff, like esl reading books or the just passing through autobiography, or, and i forgot to mention a couple other resolutions here, can i move on to making t-shirts for the local quaker meeting, or the school, or both, and, will i ever find time to lay out the lap dulcimer and put entirely new tuning pegs on it. the cats here are betting that i won't.

school starts on tuesday, so i'm running out of time real fast, but a granddaughter came over today and i showed her the quilt and told her with a straight face that it was a saluki quilt and it was being made for her and i was doing the best i could and would fork it over as soon as possible, and after a while she warmed up a little and even smiled at me, several times, which totally charmed me and made me not care if all i did today was sew a few triangles. in fact i have maybe fourteen out of about a hundred and twenty, but that's entirely manageable if you think about it; it's few enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel even as i sew. and, at the grocery store i bought a new york times, not because i have any time to read, i don't, but because it's good to have high quality stuff, to not have time to read, and it'll sit around looking like it needs to be read. like those reindeer need to be pieced together, and the dulcimer. life is busy, and, at the same time, it's quite a hustle for everyone, right down to that white creature under the dumpster. one can't sit still, or the world will turn too fast and all hell will break loose. hang on for dear life, it's a roller coaster, so to speak.

2012-01-12T14:18:00.002-06:00

new movie
Life Goes On - Occupy

better version
occupy, life goes on

2012-01-11T23:19:00.001-06:00

Now
available
on
Kindle...

2012-01-11T22:53:00.002-06:00

it's a rainy night, on the edge of freezing, with fog which is also on the edge of freezing, and the fog drifts in and out of different patches of the city so that sometimes you can see clearly and other times, you can't see much. i know this because i went out earlier, and practiced music, but i'm back at home now trying to make sure an excited 10-yr-old goes to bed by 11 on a school night, and i reflect a little on a break largely poorly used, a tree gone dry and ready to remove.

the movie? i stopped, though i could probably finish it before break is over. the garage band song? stopped that too, because the cello was in such rotten shape and the tuning peg of the dulcimer snapped from brittleness and i ordered more pegs which i thought i'd install myself, and they haven't come yet. the linguistics project? today, mired in reading about the topic, my brain was overloaded and i had to give it up for a while; i wasn't ready to think. the cesl history project?...i at least got a start on it, got some stuff done there. my dad's photography? most of it is up & online, but i'm not sure if all of it is, and i know the family pictures aren't; i'm not sure if i'm ready to put pictures of me as a 1-yr-old up on the web yet. so, i'm kind of stuck on it.

i did get two books of stories and one book of poetry up on kindle where i can now advertise and push them; i'm wondering what makes people buy this stuff and whether advertising of any kind might make any difference. might try to find out. i know that none of my 500 or so facebook friends bought any, but i didn't exactly push them as i would if i were restlessly relying on this stuff to make a living. i did tell them that i had this stuff on kindle, but how many people are keyed into kindle, enough to actually want to buy stuff that's on it? my wife is, but she doesn't have to buy my stories, they're old news to her. and you, the reader, you know where to find them; they've been around this place for years.

sticks? i didn't move them out of sight, and they are looking like a pile of sticks in the back yard, maybe my next book will be pile of sticks...that or old man and the toilet assembly ha ha.

i did go to the gym, almost every day, including today, and worked out until the sweat rolled off my face and back, took a sauna, came home & limped around due to soreness and stiffness in joints i don't generally use so heavily. i did this almost every day, yet still gained two pounds, which is accounted for by the fact that, basically, i'm home a lot, and just eat when i'm hungry. who wants to go out when it's rainy and cold and bleak, and nobody's out there? the cats curled up near me and took naps as the sun shifted at the windows of the living room, and it seemed warm enough and all the time in the world, even though as you can now tell, i should have been making music or movies. my son comes out tonight, almost eleven, and wants to tamper with his movie, which isn't perfect, but which, as you know, is now on you-tube, is up, and, is getting "likes" from my friends and others. but it's almost eleven, and it's a schoolnight. i play the dad and intimidate him into going to bed. poor kid, a little ragged out by school, what he wants is to be the guy who has a youtube channel, and knows what to do with it.

january here means highly variable weather. some days it will be very cold, others very warm; it rains, or snows, but there are cool sunny clear days also. sometimes the birds honk overhead, confused, as if it's unexpectedly getting warmer as they fly north. i realize places in alaska are getting twelve feet; we haven't got more than a half-inch, but may get some tonight, or maybe some other night, since it's the season. if it's too balmy i think people will feel like they lost out, at least i will. if it's too nice, i'm obliged to put stuff down, go outside, and take in some fresh air.

but now, i'm tired. it's that gym, with all its musclebound gorillas, a few tired old geezers like myself treading around, women trying their hardest to keep a figure from going down. it wears me out. it might be good fodder for more stories, but i've been more into poetry over the break, written maybe a hundred of them, it's really about all i've got to show for it, but it's something. i'd rather do the novel, but i didn't even start that, or restart it would be more accurate, i didn't even pick it back up so to speak (it also is on the web, for free, like most of it)...

and school starts what, on tuesday. but doesn't get serious until, maybe, wednesday. wenny-densy...my time is running out. chou, i'm off to bed

2012-01-08T22:19:00.003-06:00

e pluribus haiku

now available on Kindle

2012-01-07T21:54:00.002-06:00

seven days after new year, twelve after christmas, it was the original christmas, the twelfth day, the epiphany, so i left the lights on on the tree overnight, though it didn't make much difference. my wife has come home; two weeks as a single father over, it will change the routine for sure. give me more time, maybe, but probably not. school will start soon, the pressure's on. i haven't finished a thing i started.

thought about resolutions, and i resolved, for sure, not to do the usual stuff like losing weight or cleaning the garage; both of those were maybe half-done or quarter-done last year and still loom over me as things i want but what's the point. no, i decided to make a few that inspired me, like get started on collecting and learning actualism (a poetry movement in iowa city coincidentally when i was, that has virtually disappeared)...or, better, get started on the art of fixing musical instruments, as i have several that need fixed and nobody around this rural area with any clue as to how to go about it. so i actually got started with this second one, and ordered strings and keys for a lap dulcimer whose keys were so brittle they broke apart when i got it out. the cello will be harder, i realize, and so will the second fiddle, which is like the first only has some inherent problems; the third is tiny; i have no idea how to go about fixing that one. but i'm musing on about this inspirational resolution idea when my ten-year-old gives me his: make a hundred youtubes and get a hundred "likes"...now that's inspirational. he had a new videocam under the tree but the problem was, it wasn't loading them up to the computer, and when we got on youtube to get some free advice, some guy was talking about a "cheap-a--" camera and this kind of stuck a knife in him, took the wind out of his sails.

problem was, the computer wouldn't read the little thumb-drive thing, just wouldn't see it, so couldn't upload any of the movies. the company had no clue that a card-reader might be necessary, though it was, and our computers weren't all that outmoded or unusual; neither could read the thing. we emailed the company and they had no clue, and their offshore advisor had no clue, though she had pretty good english and was able to read out of a script book pretty well. finally some guy at the best-buy geek squad plugged a card-reader into there and we were able to get the movies onto the computer. there are four or five of them, not a bad production record, and they tell people how to get through various pokemon games, online games, dsi games, etc. they are called "walkthroughs" and this believe it or not is how he spends an enormous amount of time, watching them, and so he was eager to get on the production end and share some of his knowledge, and get a loyal fan base. but he was disappointed to find out that youtube basically wouldn't let him start his own channel, being only ten, and upload them himself. he got angry, saying he didn't want his channel having my name, or lying about his age, or anything like that, so he'd just give up the entire dream, put down the camera, forget about it.

this was a cruel end to a long drama, because, in my mind, he was already getting better at making them. several things have occurred to me: one, i could put a few of them here, or someplace where i could see them more easily, maybe make my own movie out of what he made so far. two, i could use the camera myself, if he refuses to use it, even interview him so as to document what we just went through, and not lose these cool "starter" movies which, i'm convinced, show the beginning of some creative talent. is there a way to talk him down from the tree? somehow, upon my wife's arrival, she was able to convince him that it would be ok, somehow, to use one of our addresses, yet still have his pokemon name on the channel and develop the reputation he sought. this he may yet do - stay tuned.

the report from peoria is, the twins are fine, it's a lot of work, they eat and poop a lot but due to scheduling irregularities nobody gets much sleep. there's an urgency to getting a schedule, getting a routine, and getting them both on it, but they don't both want to follow the program quite yet so everyone is apparently trying to play catch-up on their sleep while the babies just do what babies do...

got three books on kindle, successfully, and now should be publicizing them, and fixing up this site where i do that, but as you can see i haven't quite started. googling my name on amazon kindle products, you'll find all three, but i shouldn't be making it so difficult for you, i should have little ads in my templates, i could be using all these sites to be advertising them. and i shall.

as i go steadily more commercial, you the reader will have more opportunities to click on these little ads and go and actually buy this stuff, but the more astute of you will know from the start that it's been available free, on the web, all along, and the main reason for that is that i like publishing them when i make them and ideally get some comments on them before i wrap them up and sell them or present them to the public. and what better audience than you, my faithful readers? of course, it's not working out perfectly well; for one thing, very few people actually go to my stories and read them, and fewer yet actually comment, even on the written stuff, and i have thin skin anyway, and don't change much based on what they say. and, am relatively impatient with either waiting around for good comments or actually revising what i've ever written, so it's not getting done very well. suffice it to say, i have three things on kindle. two are stories; a third is haiku; if you borrow them, or buy them, please "double-like" or whatever. i'm convinced that one of them, someday, will be snapped up for movie rights; that's my goal. if not, i'm likely to figure out how to make movies myself, and then do that.

ao i've said it, there was my vacation; the cello's out, and looking unused; the dulcimer is out, i'm making a quilt, i'm only partway done with my jigsaw puzzle, unread magazines all over the house, tree's still up, garage needs organized, yet i blog, or i bog, or i hang out with the boys trying to figure out how to upload movies. in general, i haven't been very productive with my break, except that spending time with kids is always productive in its own kind of way, and helps out when the chips are down and you have absolutely no time to spend. they're my allies; however this movie thing works out, they are the ones who probably might even read this blog, this far, sometime, and i hope i never say anything to dismay them. i'm proud of everything i've seen so far, and that counts for all the kids i call mine, and their progeny, things have worked out pretty well so far, as andy rooney said, i complain a lot here, and i complain about a lot of things, but one thing i can't complain about is my life.

and with that i wish you a happy new year...

2012-01-05T22:29:00.000-06:00

2012-01-04T23:13:00.000-06:00

2011-12-31T14:48:00.000-06:00

2011-12-31T13:17:00.003-06:00

someday we'll look back at these as the golden days, the good old days; i'm sure we will, especially the boys, who are ten and six, and are not obliged to worry about anything really, but just spend time with their new toys and particularly with their dad when he's free and not working for just a small window. so we went for a walk, and when we came to the concrete bridge over the creek we went under that bridge, where there's graffiti and soft wet mud with animal prints in it, and lots of rocks, and i have to keep ducking my head to get around. and then later we drive out to the river, which is actually a park, about a half-hour drive but really only about fifteen miles as the crow flies, but we have the place virtually to ourselves, and the river flows on down from the north, and once again, lots of mud, and sand, and it's no problem skipping rocks.

this park by the river, biggest river in the world (depending on how you measure), is actually hard to get to, a sign is missing, and the back roads aren't that clear, you kind of have to know it's there. there's a little opening in the cliffs there and you fit through the opening, and you can climb the cliffs if you want which we did, and get a better view.

the holiday can be a bit rancorous; i'd decided that they named boxing day after the general fighting that goes on over toys after christmas, and generally the weather coops us up and keeps us indoors. but this year the weather is a little better, and there's no excuse for staying indoors cooped up by materialism and the false hope that somehow this stuff, whether it's tops, or games, or tracks, is going to do it for us. i exercise at night, but i referee all day, calling fouls, ejecting kids from the game, ripping them off each other flesh and all, relegating them to their rooms where only the television is there to help them regain their composure. i decided to try to direct them outdoors, where fresh air would do some of my work for me. this was my hope.

it took a while, but finally this huge boat came tugging up the river, pushing sn enormous barge with it and some white flag in front that i couldn't distinguish, don't know what country it was from. the river is wide there, comes around a bend at the pilot's house and flattens out around grand tower, and somebody was shooting guns or something over on the missouri side and you could hear it all up the valley. the boys played in the park a bit after climbing the cliffs and i stopped for a moment, watched the boat going upstream, the water coming down. this break might not change much, but it changed me; it gave me a fresh renewal that helped me be a better referee.

as for them, it's back to the usual: ripping and tearing at each other, pointless fights over meaningless use of toys (they both have plenty of time, plenty of toys), etc. it's almost like, fighting for the sake of fighting, or, fighting for the sake of getting my attention, which is getting harder to crowbar out of me. could be trouble...batten down the hatches! happy new year!

2011-12-28T21:08:00.000-06:00

photo by Jim Leverett

2011-12-28T20:24:00.002-06:00

below is a picture of a fresh newfallen snow here in our small southern illinois town; it came at night, looked quite beautiful in the morning and was gone by about noon. this was just how some people like it, but it left me a little wistful, especially since christmas had come and gone without a lick of it. fortunately it was break and the boys got outside immediately and made a small snowman; the snowman survived the morning melt and to my knowledge is still out there, albeit somewhat scraggly and full of the leaves that had been drawn up into him when he was first made. a survivor, he got a crooked shape but his stick arms remained firm and jutted out into the brown world. hopefully more snow will arrive with the new year.

what can i say about the holiday? unlike others, i don't enjoy telling others about the material changes in our humdrum life, to me that's no more than trappings for what is far more important, the spiritual side of life. and how does new video games, or new movies, change anything? there would be virtually nothing i could give them that would put a dent in their life as we now know it though we did walk a basketball down to a park and shoot a few hoops. it's a time i should be devoting to finding ways to be with them, what with my wife out of town on a grandchildren-mission, yet i find myself somewhat preoccupied with my own creative projects, unfulfilled dreams, and wiling to go down to the video store for yet another installment to keep them happy for but another half-hour or so. tonight a friend is over to help entertain the older one; tomorrow we take the little folks to see "chipwrecked," but, nothing much is new. days are short, there isn't much to them.

i work on garage band, and also imovie; i have projects; when i have time i devote myself to them. i put my dad's photography on a single site but it's one of those places where the outside world always sees it differently than i do, and i'm too lazy to go over to a friend's computer to see how it would look. i exercise; this is working out well. i have some projects outdoors if i get to them; my wife left the door to the storm shelter open, apparently, and it drew the snow right down in there to make cold dirty little pools of earthy mildewy water. a large pile of sticks to burn; hey, what about burning it right near the shelter, so as to draw all that moisture right up out of it, killing two birds with one stone so to speak? or burning down the shelter and the house with it, would be more likely. a few years back i had my roof accident on a day like this, post christmas, pre-new year, i'll celebrate that as a grim memorial since it got me to finally produce a little of myself, a kick in the pants as warning that time is running out.

speaking of which, i got all three books on the amazon kindle site, two stories and one poetry, got the e-mail address thing sorted out, they are all up there, all three available for 2.99 each but don't have exact addresses. i do know that if you google my name on amazon kindle you'll run across at least one of them which has been on there for about ten months, the other two just got on there tonight and may take a while to catch on. i've been a little obsessed with the poetry as i've given away a few books over the holidays and find myself somewhat embarassed to call myself a poet yet have been creating them left and right, here and there, trying to make a better collection. it needs a lot of updating and a makeover in its appearance but that's been coming along slowly, for one i'd like the season links to come to my own uploaded pictures but that alone may take a trip into the office.

gonna read to the littlest guy, since that's our campaign, that's one i'm proud of, and one he needs badly. i may do little else for him or them, but i'm there for that, and i cook and do the dishes, they eat ok, they are in good spirits, they stay up late and sleep in, and march to my quirky yelling or what passes for discipline. we don't venture far out of the house, except to the video store most days, the cats tear around at our feet, it's what passes for life in midwinter vacation. time for the back to the future trilogy soon, we try to do it every year, this year i think even the youngest will get into it. that is, when we finally are that desperate for something to do. the phone has died; it got between the cushions of the couch, where we couldn't see it, or figure out how to answer it, and it was so dead it could hardly complain, and we almost lost it for good down there in the underparts of the couch, the fourth dimension. but i solved the problem, there weren't all that many other possibilities, since we'd looked virtually everywhere else.

i'll show you all this other stuff, the movie, for example, that i make in my free time, the garage-band song, for which i had to drag out the lap dulcimer and the cello, the lap-dulcimer's tuning peg cracked from brittleness and had been put in wrong, the best i could figure, and the cello likewise was in pretty sorry shape, but i tried fitting them into my garage band production. hard work. what's hard, is keeping the kids quiet and away from the little studio i've made myself. they won't. which relegates me to facebook on the unused computer, while i'm making another pot of coffee.

2011-12-27T16:53:00.000-06:00

2011-12-24T23:23:00.000-06:00

2011-12-24T23:22:00.000-06:00

2011-12-24T15:24:00.000-06:00

2011-12-24T14:40:00.002-06:00

it's christmas eve day & it's chilly but clear and nice outside; i however have chosen to stay home with young boys who are overboiling with enthusiasm and trying their best to be good in the last few remaining hours. there are a number of good traditions that we run through in the season which i'll recount here, but there's also the inevitable bad traffic, too much exposure to the general public, and exasperation from finding that if you're a late shopper, as we are, things are mighty picked over & desolate by the time you get to them sometimes. i don't want to be negative but you can understand maybe why i'd choose to stay home.

one of the traditions i like the most is lighting the way; this involves little brown paper sacks, buckets of sand, and votive candles; the candles, inside sacks about half full with sand, give a soft brown light to the sacks and make a picture you can see from afar. neighbors actually have electric iluminaria which are also common where they came from, which is new mexico and spain i believe, but actually filling up the sand and lighting them is the part i like. i like it no matter what the weather; tonight looks like bright and clear. i've only seen a couple of white christmases the whole time i've been here.

so i'm at the wal-mart and it seems like a lot of families are standing around figuring out how to get a decent christmas out of no money, given the vastness and cheapness of the place. serious discussions are taking place in the aisles. and then in the register line, one guy is right near me getting into a stemwinder of a speech to two young boys, the essence of which is, yes of course there's a santa, you can bank on it; he would stake his entire reputation on it, and would he steer them wrong? he cajoled them and then proceeded to give his best evidence for why things that happened couldn't be explained any other way.

i myself, and this is another of my traditions, decided to never lie about it, but to maintain the fantasy as long as humanly possible. for example, when my son asked my wife point blank if there was a santa, she said, a lot of people believe it, and that's nice, because we like to keep that good feeling around (this may not be an exact quote, but it's pretty similar to the kind of stuff i say). one always brings it back to the positive aspect of believing, without worrying about the answering of the question precisely. i'm not saying my style is better than that of the gentleman in the wal-mart aisle, but it's more suited to me, so i stick with it.

we decorate cookies and also occasionally receive decorated cookies from others; this causes a certain sugar mania throughout the season part of which i am dealing with at this moment. but my point is, every decorating style is different, every household is different, all these cookies have a lot of character. they have a lot of sugar too. king of the season is the cube-of-butter cookie, as my wife calls it, though i call it the mexican wedding cake and it has several other names. it fills your mouth with butter and powdered sugar and lasts all day.

the deer are all over the roads this time of year and you can't help seeing them, wherever you go, it's almost like they come into town november and december, as an instinct that has been developed over the years to counter whatever hunting season is left. they eat what's left of your garden; they stand out on lawns brazenly, crossing the roads whenever they please. they are the first to notice that it's been warmer than usual, things are still green. though i must say, the geese noticed it too. i thought i heard them flying northwest early this morning, around seven; i know the dogs noticed them. they were making a lot of noise, as usual, as if arguing about whether it was too early to go back north, or what. they come around our house, i think, because there are lots of lakes in the area. none are frozen. if they want to stick around, who are we to dissuade them?

i like to read the old crumpled up newspapers that boxes of presents come wrapped in; these newspapers are often from the cities of my relatives, and are somewhat random; i doubt they stick in a sports section deliberately for me. nevertheless this year i'm reading about the pittsburgh penguins and some years i get a bit of trivia from new mexico or the new york times, or even england. i have tons of unread and very worthy magazines around, i'm not sure what's the attraction of some back page of the pittsburgh papper, crumpled up, for example, except that in the case of the pittsburgh papers, i used to deliver them, maybe forty years ago, so there's a certain nostalgia there as well as the trivia that one picks up from finding out what roster changes the penguins are making, or, what the minor leagues or high schools of western pennsylvania are up to.

i take the main four-lane highway out to wal-mart one night, late, at about midnight, fiddle in the little car, the low-to-the-ground car (i'd been playing music), and at the left turn, to go into the walmart road, i'm in the left-turn lane at the red light, and i look over to see the big carcass of a deer in the median, with its head cut off directly in front of me. it's a fairly fresh deer, no blood on it, no sign of a mess, just a big round red place where the head should have been. there was no evidence of car accident, violence, blood, nothing. just this huge deer carcass in the median, facing me. i have no idea why it was there, what it means, why i'd put it in a blog post like this, no idea except that it kind of loomed over the holiday for me for a few days, as i went about my shopping and wrapping and that kind of stuff. a lot of times people do this stuff for pure practical utilitarian reasons; some guy from the county is going to pick it up; they could drag it over into the ditch but that would make more work for him, and they know him, so they save him the trouble. now why they'd want the head and nothing else, that's beyond me, or why they would make a clean cut the way they did, not messy in any way, i have no idea, on second thought, maybe they were trying to gross me out, or scare the heck out of me. i take the back way home; it's more comfortable anyway, goes by this ancient cemetery, and some overgrown railroad crossings where i suspect there used to be a fairly lively train coming through.

we use old christmas cards, cut up, as the cards on presents that tell who it's for and who it's from. cutting up these old cards recycles them but the thing is, they sometimes stay in this bag for years, waiting to be cut up, and some don't cut so well so they just stay in the bag, period. in general you use about a season's worth of cards cut up to identify all the presents. i've come to admire hallmark, not because i like all the different cards or colors of wrapping paper, but because, wanting to go into the wrapping paper business myself, and go into the card business (definitely), and yet still, fifty seven years into it, not getting it quite together to actually produce all this stuff on my own, i have to at least admire someone who, for as much as we disdain them, still dictates what the culture looks like, based on what they produce. if we wanted different or better wrapping paper, different or better cards, there's nothing stopping us, nothing whatsoever. yet we don't.

santa brings bizarre stuff from all over the world, it's like he has to prove he's been around, so he brings fine honey from france, squid from asia, eel, octopi, jamaican hot sauce, swiss chocolate, japanese whistle candy, etcetera. not everybody appreciates the wide diversity of foods in their stocking but they know that santa finds it necessary to spread the worldly kinds of things and that there's nothing for it but to share what one can't eat, what the heck, there's plenty of food around anyway. my mother tells the story of how i came home from school one day and said to my brother, my classmates are telling me there's no such thing as santa. my brother says, shhh, shhh, they're right, but don't tell mom, she'll get upset.

in the natural world, life goes on as usual; it's cold, but the days are finally getting longer, and that reminds the animals to get out there, get themselves some food before january comes and it gets real cold, that's really the only time it could get cold, though sometimes it snows in february. in the natural world, it's life as usual, just stay off the roads, but in the human world, it's solstice, yule, winter festival, a feast of all kinds, a materialistic orgy, celebration of all things human, and the fulfilling of all one's material desires, which includes gatherings of families far and wide and a lot of activity in the airports and train stations. at our house, the soft glow of paper sacks ih a row leads you up the driveway to the house, the path is lit up to show the way for the baby jesus, whom i would guess has to find his way into your heart. if anyone asks, that's what i tell them. you don't have to believe it. you light the candles, because the mere act of doing it is good for your soul.

2011-12-24T14:39:00.000-06:00

2011-12-21T13:13:00.002-06:00

all the live christmas trees are sold out in this town by about the tenth, anybody who's serious gets theirs around thanksgiving or sooner, which if you think about it means there's a lot of dead needles around town by christmas, but that's another post; my problem is that our semester is just ending around the sixteenth or so, so we're pretty much doomed to going way out in the country to get one, by the time we get it together. so that's ok, i had this farm picked out, and got partway out there one day and realized i didn't have money or clear directions, and the kid was asleep, so i turned back and started out that way again a few days later. this time it was foggy and misty and actually raining, and i took the long way, through marion, because of the direction thing, so it was almost an hour drive, but once you get to know the lay of the land you find this area, around what is called lick creek, is quite beautiful, hilly, rustic, rural, way out there. i'm on this two-lane road that's winding through the back country and i've got this kind of undefinable sense of dread, which i interpret to be nervousness about the van and its ability to make it 30 miles without stranding me out in the middle of nowhere. but the van was running just fine. no real reason for the dread at all.

the other day i decided to put together all the tools i had at my disposal and make a garage-band song out of something i'd had in my head for years, namely a banjo tune with my own accompaniment. and it worked, at least well enough to make a movie out of it real quick, which i gladly and humbly share with you; it has a kind of unkempt fiddle part, not very organized, the pictures didn't quite come out right either but hey i'm pretty much brand new still with both garage band and this i-movie, which assumes you are some kind of film-world splicy-dicy professional. i'm not. i'm sure you can do all kinds of things with the program but i haven't quite figured any of them out, though i was able to delete this one horrible cough or set of coughs that i belted out at the end of one track. i've been doing the family letter, which is a little over-the-top braggy on the grandchild issue, but i gladly and humbly share that with you also, except to say, i don't know what to tell you about the pictures, i used to put them all here, but these days what starts on facebook tends to stay there, and i don't manage to get much of it over here like i used to.

so i get way way out east of lick creek, on this windy road, and i finally see what accounts for this sense of dread. there's this ruins of an old house, trees and bushes grown all round it and covering it, a whole section of it caving in diagonally with the window actually still in it, and that window reflects both the ruins around it and the life that was in it at one time, just a horrible and at the same time fascinating scene. i'm sure the locals are all used to it, even use it as a landmark since it's right on a prominent corner where i actually turned, and i'm sure the local deer and critters are also well familiar with the layout, rotten floors, basement, whatever's left of root cellar, etc., all well picked over and receding into fine mulchy earth. whenever i get that far out in the country i always wonder what it would be like to live out there, so far from town, so precarious in some ways, but when i get to the christmas tree farm i see pretty much what it's like to make it successfully and have a working, productive growing kind of situation. some of these places are truly thriving, others, just kind of receding into the dirt which they were planted on to begin with. the fog, the rain, the cold and winter, all doing their thing to make sure considerable energy is required keeping things up.

coming back is always considerably easier, this time i have a tree in the van, it's running fine, and i'm sure i know the way. the roads are so windy that you can see absolutely nothing until you are right on top of a curve, but i'm sure the folks out there are used to that also. i'm not, and i get the impression they're looking at me and knowing which christmas tree farm i just went to, on account of why else would anyone else be in such a remote locale? back at home, we put the tree up; my wife wants all the fine ornaments that we've rejected in the last few years, allowing kids to grab whatever comes to hand first and whatever is least breakable. a little late on the tree and lights situation, and there's no way we can compete with the neighbors who have way more lights here and there & all over town, it's a pretty big deal in a small town like this, so we light up a little on the inside and then be sure to do the illuminaria, the night before, lighting sacks with sand and a candle in them, to light the way, and go natural. it may be that the world is not that much worse off than it ever was, with people starving in africa and philippines, people ravaged by floods or homeless or without work here and there, this or that side of the globe, but it seems a little crass somehow to blaze too many lights all over a place where so few will actually see it; i know it's just power, just a few watts here and there. it's more the symbolic nature of it, i guess, that i respond to. i like the lights inside, soft, only here when i'm here, inside, and they can shine on me.

and with that i wish you, the reader, the best of the holiday season, i'm aware that today is the solstice, second day of hannukah, and a number of other things all rolled into one, but most of all, we come into the holiday season and i for one am going to do what i want, maybe master garage-band and i-movie, and see if i can't maybe get you something better.

2011-12-18T22:10:00.000-06:00

2011-12-16T20:56:00.002-06:00

since i teach grammar and since most of my students are from what i call the kingdom, and since nineteen boys or the vast majority of the nineteen boys who blew up our towers were from this very kingdom, i'm always a little sensitive of the fact that if anything is going to disaffect these guys, and make them completely unable to handle this culture, it's grammar and our desire to have our language follow certain consistent patterns which apparently theirs doesn't demand, or demands in a completely different way. so it happens that at a grading meeting, where a certain guy had his reading/listening teacher absolutely convinced that he was an excellent student, i could come into that same meeting saying, no, in a test where you get fifty for just putting your name on the page, he couldn't even get a fifty. now it happens that a lot of these guys are socially adept, listening excellent, very fluent, charming even, but they have no concept of grammar, that's their weak point, can't even begin to study it and culturally have trouble picking up a book at night, or doing something that would help them get past that block. buy the book, yes, they can usually do that. show up for class and hear what i say, yes, they can usually do that too. but prove it by performing in a test, no, they probably can't.

so they struggle in the lower levels and we come to the higher levels where they slog through the readings now, still listen intently in class, and by dint of hard work often manage to master the material and pass; i had one gentleman, a rather quiet guy, but he passed, passed legitimately, and popped in on the facebook chat and we were talking for a while so i asked him about his hometown and he finally told me, a small village west of the capital, on the mekka road, so i looked it up on google earth, and i felt like i was flying over this vast saudi desert until it turned mountainous and got kind of interesting, and there were these small towns off the mekka road, and it so happened that we were so far out in the sticks that the towns were labeled in arabic but not english. so now i was in his area and he explained to me that his town was much smaller than mine but he did go into a nearby one every once in a while and yes, they listened to music occasionally and he even gave me a sample which was on youtube, in which someone played the ood which best i can figure is like a balalaika.

so now i listened to this distant far-off kind of folk music and its musical structure is way different from ours, i would have to listen to it dozens of times to really get it, but i kind of wanted to do that, go to this far-off place that i hear so much about and that, from the sky, looks somewhat like texas or south dakota or some dry place where they're not afraid to make flat roofs all over the place. i kind of liked the idea of being on the mekka road because i figured that as isolated as his life might have been, he'd occasionally see some cars coming by from the capital, mercedes and limousines, coming from the capital to the holy city for whatever reason, going a hundred or whatever you do out there in the desert, swerving to avoid an occasional camel in the road. if i were to really visit this guy i'm sure he'd show me the back roads, the high mountain trails, how it gets cool at night, how some young guys play ood out in the desert nights, yes there's some talk about the arab spring and all but overall you don't say anything bad about the king and besides that king provides almost everything for anybody but you know, it's the kind of place where the women are still struggling for the right to drive or be out alone in public, or show their face, and although some people still defend this as the protection of women, the more they see of the outside world, the more they begin to get the idea that human rights and equality will probably and inevitably bring change to their kingdom. i thought back to a time in class when this debate had come up and this same guy, in a kind of gentle wisdom, shrugged at the inevitability of such change and also the general idea that, well, one didn't want to say too much about a subject like this, since, by all accounts, change was inevitable anyway, and being to vocal for or against anything in a collectivist culture could only start a bad chain of events in play, whereas laying low was the way to pass through the gates of opportunity.

in the week or so before class finally let out today i heard a number of stories of vacation plans, since of course this whole business of sending packages, getting a tree and decorating, making cookies, lighting illuminaria and all is totally foreign to them, no reason to hang around a quiet one-horse town in the middle of cold-and-empty season, when even their friends are gone, so some are off to the kingdom, some are going to l.a., some are going south. only in the country for a few years, you got to see disney world, new york, l.a. for starters, just about any place you can get to; in the case of those going back to the kingdom there would be a slight layover in chicago where the nearest international flight takes off and some were looking forward to a what, thirty-hour flight experience, going back to japan, or the kingdom, or wherever they were headed, spend some time in the sun before coming back here for the spring terms. and i thought, i'm really living out on the edge here, all these people world-traveling around me, heading off to these remote towns and villages or big cities where the folks at googlemaps still haven't come up with an english name.

the hallway is a place where these guys mill together between classes, a lot of them smoke and head outside no matter the weather but the day i played fiddle they all found the sing and took a few pictures one of which i finally got my hands on, second one below, and this is how i'd like to see myself really, kind of bleak architecture and dark hallway colors all along, but an attentive audience and a bright ray of sunshine placed on the whole hallway at that moment, between classes. trouble was i kind of mixed up two audiences, i try to teach grammar so hard to one, then the other, i try to please musically, and it put a bit of stress on me putting together everything i know about them and their culture, and our holiday songs and all, and a couple of different ways to be hard to please. there's a gulf of differences between the two cultures, you see, and it's not just how they respect women, or how they get around, or how they speak a language that has grammar, versus one that may not see it that way, it's a lot more than that. one of the former students came back, he said he was doing well in classes, and socially having a lot of fun, lots of girlfriends for sure, but he said, i'd rather be all black or all white, than brown the way i am, as if he were given a curse to deal with out there in the social world. and i'm sure it feels that way, since once i saw a young woman, probably from a small town in illinois, and she'd twisted or broken her ankle outside on the walkway near our building and somehow found her way into the hallway where sure enough a passel of maybe six or eight of these guys surrounded her asking her if she needed help; one ran upstairs to get bandaids. they knew enough about first aid to be friendly and offer their services, and i knew them to be gentlemen who wouldn't hurt a flea under any circumstances but might be a little weak in the grammar department. but she was absolutely, completely terrified, almost couldn't be consoled. reminds me also of some of that stuff they say on the lowe's website or wherever they can, the people who spread scurrilous rumors about the nature of islam and how in its dark way it's trying to take over the world, as if christianity weren't in the exact same business. but the point is, when it's over, as i told one japanese girl, who was apologizing about her grades and her bad progress in the class, in the end nobody remembers your grade. you remember whether people were nice to you, and whether it was a decent place to be, and whether you heard any good music, or kind words. and what you hear carries a long way back, it'll last a thirty-hour flight or more, if you can make good friends, and manage, through facebook or any other way, to keep them.

2011-12-16T20:20:00.000-06:00

2011-12-16T12:17:00.000-06:00

2011-12-12T21:49:00.000-06:00

2011-12-12T21:12:00.002-06:00

going up to the right on my facebook page where it says "ticker" allows me to see what all my "friends" are doing and where they comment, and even lets me see what other people who are not my "friends" have posted as long as my "friends" are posting on their posts, so i get to read these entire conversations that people are having in the comments of some post or another, often these roll in right while i'm looking at them, and sometimes as in the case of siuc & lowe's, the institution has eliminated them from their page yet people are still somehow commenting and adding onto each other's comments. i'm not quite sure how this happens, maybe the people who have "joined" are allowed to see what's going on yet people like me who just happen in from somewhere else see a certain glossy page where none of that "commentary" is available. so, by going in through my friend's feed, i get the whole conversation, but by going in as i would the front door of, say, lowe's, i would never see, never know.

the nature of privacy is an odd thing worth remarking on; recently i read an article where a guy who was traveling around, and had a kind of mid-eastern name, started to get yanked into those little rooms in airports and homeland spaces, and asked all kinds of questions, due to someone's impression that he was up to no good, or had a suspicious name. now i've been yanked a number of times in these places, because i look somewhat palestinian, and travel alone, and that sets off all kinds of alarms, but i'm always polite to them and figure, if i were them, i'd be suspicious of myself also, or, another way of looking at it is, if you knew what i was thinking, you'd reach out of the line to pull me over & search me. so to get back to this guy, he finally writes to the fbi and says, tell you what, i'll start sending you information about where i am, what i'm up to, which bathroom i'm in, how fast i'm going from here to there. i'll send it to you, free, bury you in the stuff, i'll give you all this data, and you can have it for as long as you want. i'll give you so much data you'll have no idea what to do with it and you'll have to wade through it just to figure out why you were so interested in me in the first place.

this guy struck a chord in me because basically i saw this coming & have been doing more or less the same thing for years. it's easy for me because i do absolutely no radical or subversive activity whatsoever but instead focus entirely on bringing up young children who wouldn't want me to get thrown in jail or even detained unnecessarily for having suspicious thoughts. so i cleaned up my act, knowing full well i'd get searched at every "homeland" outpost, and to tell you the truth i don't even think revolutionary thoughts much anymore, i even vote democrat, though to tell you the truth i do that more because i detest the republicans, than because i really believe in anything those democrats have to say. really i mull over the radical idea that by voting at all you give them permission to stage all these wars in our name, and both democrats and republicans are the same that way, and execute prisoners and ship some of them over onto this little outpost they have in cuba where they keep them indefinitely all in the name of what, we can go into pakistan or wherever and just grab these guys? don't get me started, anyway sometimes i think that just voting, makes you part of the system, and the same is true for the death penalty, even though you vote against it, the mere fact that you vote makes you part of the state, and the system, that ultimately uses its authority to kill these guys, guilty or not. so i mull over this stuff, but sometimes i just write haiku, and i pull out some little folded-up piece of paper in my pocket and scrawl these little poems while i'm being delayed indefinitely in these lines, and then people get really suspicious (what's he making notes about??) and then i'm really in for it.

but fortunately i haven't figured out how to get my cell-phone to flood the world, or facebook, or twitter, with reminders of where i am and what i am doing and how far i am from any place you could call "sensitive". not to mention, flood the fbi with data about my life. i'm just some schmuck with eight kids and a wandering mind.

it's bad enough traveling around the country without your pocketknife, that's the thing i use mostly to open bottles and screw in battery caps that fall out unexpectedly when my kids overuse their little gizmos and threaten to leave battery caps in hotel rooms across the countryside. being asked to travel without a pocketknife or deodorant or toothpaste makes you feel somewhat naked in the world as if anyone can come up to you with a bottle or something, and there would be no way you could open it. you're out there in the world, with no pocketknife and the keys that are attached to them, which are useless anyway when you're away from home, make your pocket feel a pound or two lighter because i've left the pocketknife behind in the glovebox of the little car in the longterm parking over by the far fence. now there's all my data, but it's too late, because i'm back home, & those keys don't get you into anything to speak of, anyway.

sometimes the world comes creeping in on me, like every little piece of lint floating in the air around me is carrying a camera and somebody is watching every little thing i do and making special note of my radical thoughts, or illegal ones, or just the ones that would embarrass me around my own people, if they ever were to need that. but i guess i consider myself lucky, i've done plenty of embarrassing things, but most of it was in the seventies quick before they developed any of this cloying privacy-busting technology where the minute you express interest in a "gadget" ads for that "gadget" start appearing in the little sides of every blog or facebook page you open up trying to lure you into some kind of deal involving your "time" or your "money" and the "hope" of getting one of these "gadgets"...altogether i find myself getting less and less attached to "gadgets" like cell-phones that connect me with the whole mess and more and more attached to a pocketknife which could, in a pinch, open a can of sardines. i would consider bending over so the security cameras couldn't quite get a full picture of what i was opening but the fact is, it's impossible to open a can of sardines without getting some of it on your shirt, and in this way you leave a permanent record that stands up against the tides of time and will be there years from now, with its mute testimony that you went the cheap route rather than simply go to the airport diner where cameras can get a better shot, and order a "turkey club" or a "burger". and so it is that we spend our days in these public places where somebody somewhere is wondering why we don't just get our faces better into the camera so it can tell exactly what we're doing instead of forcing someone to guess, what the heck is he writing on that little piece of paper. you should be glad i don't text while i'm driving. now those guys are really dangerous, and oughtta be hauled in before they bring down the whole fabric of our society's mutual agreement to drive safely, respectfully, and with eyes wide open, so as not to run over the little kid who's chasing his basketball across the road. amen. travel with god, more later.

2011-12-06T23:33:00.001-06:00

from a photo by tugi papua

2011-12-06T23:03:00.002-06:00

i'm in the basement of the gaia house, home of our quaker meeting, and a long train goes by and my eyes wander out the window to the cars. it's kind of a typical train in that it has a lot of black oil tankers, like businessmen, in their plain black, going north, but also some old wisconsin central cars with graffiti on them, those are the ones that sit around a little too long in the chicago yards, and then there are the canadian national ones themselves, which, depending on random chance i assume, either show you the side with 'canadian' spelled with an a, or 'canadien' spelled with an e, the french version. it's as if these cn cars speak french to you if they choose, but i assume it's random, and they just put whatever side front they feel like on any given day, because, on the east side as we are, about half are in english and about half are in french.

kind of like the geese, i think, which i assume are also canadian, and which honk a lot, sometimes confused, trying to decide whether to go further south, or just stop right here since we have a lot of lakes, and it's relatively wooded, and there aren't any chemicals until you get into farm country which starts just north of here. now they aren't going north yet, they're still going south, since it's still getting colder, i assume, but half the time i look up at them and they're arguing with each other, as if to say, are you sure you want to go any farther, let's just turn around and grab a little of that grass down there, quick before it's too late.

it's been raining for days now, not that that would make me think of canada, in fact it's probably raining up there too. the cold grim stuff doesn't bother me much though it makes people nervous who have to drive in it, particularly when it hovers around 32, and can't decide whether to turn into snow, or stick, or freeze, or what. somebody asked me what it meant when i said, it snowed but it didn't 'stick'. up here we all know a snow that doesn't stick from a snow that does, because when it does, everything is white and you get this temporary sense of peace and the kids all want to run outside and throw snowballs. you feel quite alive here since nobody ever plans for it and they throw snowballs in bare hands which makes it even better, a nice stinging cold that can only be warmed up by going inside and drying off. but the real first snow is yet to come here; i've seen a little, but it hasn't stuck.

the graffiti on the wisconsin central cars is rich and colorful but has many designs which we just can't understand, being in a small town and somewhat isolated from the culture that produced them. we had a 'tagger' a while back, a graffiti artist, but he made the same stuff over and over again as i'm sure they all do, and they got tired of that pretty quick and they laid for him but i'm not sure if they ever got him, probably he got bored and ran out of walls and headed for chicago anyway. in the same way the african music is in these languages i don't even know, although i recognize the swahili and the zulu, but the malian ones are my favorites and they're in, what, fulani, or these languages i don't know a word of. we play the songs over and over again though so we come to actually know the words even though we don't know what they mean. consistently upbeat, jumpy, lively, they're perfect for a town where everyone is putting their brakelights in your face, refusing to get out of the lane when they're considering turning right. the lights are often not timed right, either that or i'm going the wrong speed, getting caught at them, and it's like, hey, all of a sudden you have a couple of minute break, at some corner you've been at a thousand times in the last week. and what do you do with it? nothing. it's still raining. stare blankly at the car that pulls up beside you, which is occupied usually by someone who is vaguely familiar.

in the same way i take the elevator even though i'm kind of an exercise freak and make sure to swim my 2/3 mile every day at lunchtime; at about three minutes to one i'm coming back into the building with wet hair, somewhat exhausted, have to teach in three minutes, and the elevator is right there ready to give me a couple-minute break. but you never know, there might be people in it, and the door closes and you have this twenty-or-thirty second interval in which virtually anything can happen although i'm usually quite polite and just talk about the weather to put everyone at ease. they could be from any department but usually not mine since our people don't even leave for lunch anymore and if they do they don't come in that obscure entrance that really doesn't go much of anywhere. you occasionally get these bizarre conversations with people who, again, are vaguely familiar and have nothing to lose by just saying something crazy. it's life in an enclosed painted box moving upward mechanically. i'm sure i smell pretty strongly of pool chlorine but it's arguable whether that's more of a sin than smelling like cologne which i'm allergic to, by the way. a little tang on the old system, i might get a little woozy by the time i grab my books and get downstairs, and i'm often a minute or two late.

you hear the trains here every once in a while; it's kind of soft, depending on where you are, but there are two big ones in the middle of the night, and you usually hear those, since nothing else is making any noise. this morning in my grammar class, it meets at ten o'clock, and this morning being the first tuesday of the month the tornado siren went off, as it does the first tuesday of every month, and i believe i told them last month, it's just a test siren, but this month, i told them, we have a tornado every first tuesday of every month, it just so happens we have these tornadoes at ten o'clock, but they aren't very strong tornadoes, so there's no sense even getting out of your seat, since grammar is way more important than tornadoes anyway. this particular class flunked the bejeezus out of a verb-tense exam where they had to write things like i will have eaten and i will be living in carbondale and instead they kept writing i will be eaten and i will be lived as if you could be a victim of a verb like live, as if someone lived you. i tell them, no, if you live in this town, you might feel like a victim, but in fact, you are the one who's doing the living, nobody's living you.

my words sound slightly hollow; grammatically true, but, aomewhat like noise in the wind. a train goes by in the distance; the classroom heater is broken, and students with their jackets still on shiver. what do they know? they're pretty sure it wasn't a tornado. but they have to more or less take my word for the rest of it.

2011-12-06T23:01:00.000-06:00

2011-12-05T22:41:00.002-06:00

ok so this time of year things really start piling up and i find myself saying to myself, i'll have to get to that over break. but "break" starts with the week before christmas and includes christmas; it usually takes me weeks to come down off of that and i start to relax and get some stuff done maybe a little after new year. so we're talking about a month before i have a shot at some of this stuff.

but i began a collection of christmas songs and i'm still interested in maybe putting together what we perform (just performed, on sunday) into a single cd; also, i want to try out garage band on this little computer and see if i can create and produce at least one of my own songs, which i've renamed okawville girl (sounds like OAK-a ville but maybe i'm wrong, or at least wrong to believe i can rename it that & get away with it). (it was danville girl but danville girl is taken, apparently, by a different song)...also, i've had inklings of desire to finish some other writing projects, namely the plays, and just passing through, which always needs work and which i put down for months at a time. it however is the masterpiece of the bunch as it tells the true story of the travels and my life if i can ever get it under control. and of course i want to finish the novel. i should be linking this stuff but it's late at night & i'm ready to crash.

which gets to the crux of the problem; no tree yet, no shopping done yet, finally got a wedding present for a wedding way last october, for which they already sent thank-you notes, and i don't have that present to them yet, phone's recharging in the kitchen, and a big pile of clothes sits here along with toys, back in my 'office', and the clothes are from the police chief's family next door, all large size, i ought to do something with them. and magazines piling up, unread, as, at work, i'm teaching sick teachers' hours a little, having trouble keeping up with my own, things got a little busy up there. got my calendars though, and, in fact, have fantasies about making a quaker calendar or maybe an occupy calendar. one can do whatever one wants, and these days, i want to do everything, including research stonewall, and do africahub, christmas shopping, and making music on garage band.

so when i saw that the phone was down to one bar i plugged it in and came back here for a minute, to bash off some rambling b/c i know that if i go about living another day the one-bar phone will go out on me while i'm out driving around; tonight it started snowing but wasn't sticking and it's basically been rainy and cold for what three days or so ever since the parade. plug in that phone whatever you do; i could sit and read a new new yorker, or an old sports illustrated, or update my poetry, the haiku is piling up in my e-mail box which is now over 1200, and somehow i think i'll get to it over break. one boy is sick but the other is as wild and out there as ever and he often has a full agenda on any given weekend which sometimes requires my attention, at least partway. when i got a minute i looked up "turning points of the civil war" and sure enough there was "death of stonewall" right up there near the top; actually they listed twelve or so turning points without judgement and merely explained their reasons for each one, and sure enough under death of stonewall they mentioned how he was an inspired genius general in leading his troops around the countryside and because he was a popular hero his death took the wind out of confederate sails and sure enough more romantic posters are made of stonewall than virtually anyone else. they don't seem to get so blurry-eyed over lee although maybe i'm mistaken or just haven't done my research, or maybe it's because lee actually lost, whereas stonewall would have won if they just hadn't shot him. but then reading through this list of turning points leads you through the war itself, vicksburg, antietam, gettysburg, the occupation of kentucky etc., everything about the battle of chancellorsville which of course the south won, so it couldn't have been a turning point at all.

speaking of chancellorsville i had an opportunity the other day when i was more or less encouraged to walk over and say hello to the chancellor herself and i did; she was nice, and for a moment there i took in the whole maroon-and-silver university thing with nice coffee, people swarming the place, and a polite exchange before going back to my grind of teaching and rooms that don't seem to have the heat working these days. my students are struggling to pass quizes and exams and losing the struggle, falling by the wayside, not even showing up on a drizzling cold and bitter monday morning & letting point totals dwindle down below 50, what a tragedy. winter is upon us, three inches of snow out in new mexico though my parents are in good spirits and all i can think of is those folks who walk up the mountain barefoot on the tenth of december and i'm thinking of making that a personal holiday, maybe i'll walk up some mountain barefoot or just go down and get the mail and walk back barefoot, that might be enough penance for me though it might not be enough for the virgen...me, with my quilt sitting here, un-sewed, old mail that's getting stuff stacked on top of it, jewish books that i got in a transfer, unread, things to send off to a granddaughter if i ever get to it and twins fixin' to plop up there in peoria, fortunately they're holding on and growing more and not rushing the situation, storm's come in, and they're still happy, cruising past their due date, not showing up in any hurry at all. a package to send to another granddaughter, who left her binky in my care for what, about a week or until i can get it together.

which is the way it should be. you have christmas cookies, and a tree, and the music, and all the preparations, a card, presents, all in its own good time, and i'm well aware that if you don't buy a tree pretty darn quick they run out of them and you're left begging someone, even it's a couple of weeks before, but it's a small town, folks are ready to move on to valentine's day i figure, they're already tired of the green & red stuff. i'd like some mistletoe, that's something i wouldn't mind teaching those students, but i'm not sure it would go over too well. too much to do, and besides, where would i get it? i lose track of whole ideas, if i don't write 'em down here, they float away in the cold hard wind. fact is, i didn't hardly get started, got out a fresh list-paper to write some of it down, and still didn't write anything, because i got distracted and it just went by the wayside. it's the way it goes. a busy season, and things are fixin to get worse, before they get better.

2011-12-04T20:27:00.002-06:00

2011-12-03T22:48:00.002-06:00

when you march in the parade you start out way down on mill street and go under the bridge, then go all the way up highway 51 which is south illinois avenue turning into north illinois avenue, and finally you turn right on jackson street and past the longbranch, and turn right again on washington where the parade is officially over and people start wandering off. people line the streets most of the way and this year it wasn't bone-chilling, skin-numbing cold so people were in a good mood and cheered us a lot as we walked. sometimes there were whole crowds of people and everyone was waving. sometimes i heard our names as people we knew called out at us. sometimes my son wandered off or got a little behind the pack due to distraction or whatever and i'd have to kind of fetch him and bring him back into the fold. and once a train came, parallel to the highway we were on, and i could see through the buildings on the main street there, beyond to the tracks, where the usual coal cars and boxcars were passing through town, with their chicago graffiti and occasional "cn" marking which shows that they, like the geese, are from canada.

it was our town, part good part bad, contentious, raucous, but lucky, because this year the cold bitter winter storm waited until just after the parade to come in. i can hear it now, outside my living room window, but i'm home safe and dry, son asleep, glad it's over. got pictures too, which i will upload as soon as possible, because i'm beginning to realize i need a steady flow here, i need to show you what i'm up to, and rather than stealing lazily, for example that grinch below, i could get my camera right in the face of the real grinch, which i did tonight, and bring it to you live, which i will. this town isn't much, but it does have some photo-ops, and in this case you can have them all, i need them for a movie, yes, but that won't be for a while.

once again i parked way up on the north side and walked all the way back, through downtown, to where the parade was starting and hung out with our crowd which is the group from my son's school. another son and my wife were home sick but might not have liked the parade anyway. i however have taken my boys to the parade virtually every year, if they want it, and have done it for seventeen years now, and yes, have noticed that the first weekend in december is often frigid, windy, iced over, bone-chilling, you name it, and they hold it anyway. i heard the story of a high school kid who was promised, if you join marching band, you won't have to march in the lights parade, coldest one in the year, but they retracted their promise and ruined her high-school experience, forcing her to march and freeze her knuckles and knees like generations of other unfortunate area schoolkids. tonight, they didn't seem to be suffering too much. tonight they were lucky and they knew it, and they picked up the construction blockades and cleared out as fast as they could before the storm came whaling in with its rain and temp-drops ushering in the winter.

found the helsinki complaints choir the other day and was surprised that apparently i'm about the last person to know about this; in fact, people have made complaints choirs around the world but nobody seems to be able to beat the finns for just plain making sweet music while complaining about everyday life. it got me to thinking that it's a kind of december tradition here and on my facebook to have a music revue so i quick slapped that up there along with another that i ran across on my son's site. i'm reflecting on whether i should do another retrospective: songs i've loved, african songs, or complaints songs. or perhaps my own songs. these i would have to make using garage band or whatever, but it would be fun & maybe i could get the boys involved. we have an old tradition of pots & pans orchestras and there are a bunch of songs i'm dying to get down in some kind of format, put them in the sky or wherever, let people hear a little of what's in my mind. i could start with the complaints choir format, but heck, why limit yourself?

i have goals, dreams, lots on my plate, but time is limited. i looked out at the crowds, some of whom i knew, others i merely recognized, and some of course, total strangers. our float was not like the big boys, and we didn't throw candy like the politicians, but people cheered for us, since my son's school is well-known to be kind of hippie-ish, independent, a survivor, and it's always there, it always marches. we waved at people whether they waved back or not; you could hear bands up the street, or cheers, or the train, lots of noise and lots of people talking. the wind was already starting to blow although, at the parade, it still wasn't too cold. walking allows you to see the whole town (in my case twice), and stay warm, and see lots of people, but you miss some of the high-school bands and you miss the sense of whole big floats coming toward you; in our case, we were following our own float and staying well ahead of the next one. the only town in the area, i believe, that would hold its parade in the cold bone-chill season, but, didn't matter. i was proud to be part of it, and my son was ok with marching along just to be part of the group. now, he's sound asleep, and the storm is rolling in.

2011-12-03T11:44:00.000-06:00

2011-12-03T11:15:00.002-06:00

woke up this morning afraid that it would rain on our parade; literally, our town has one big parade and it's always in early december when the weather is cold and snowy and miserable, and this year it's supposed to rain but who knows? the clouds hang and it's mild now, but anything can happen, and if we walk in the rain or don't walk, or stand there shivering, either way i'll give you a report.

my wife hangs every day on the possibility of the news from the twins, who may or may not arrive at any minute, so she wants to get work done and is under pressure from all angles sociologically and administratively. the burden of it all got to her and she was down for a day or two while life hurried on at its frantic pace and the boys get into their materialism and preparations for the holidays. by materialism i mean, they talk to their friends, they focus on what they want, everyone focuses on what they want, and that's what we talk about for about a month. i'm sick of it already.

as for me, i'm into african music, but oddly enough i could get what i want, more than enough of it anyway, just being online, going there, and listening regularly. i think actually spending the money on these musician folks is a good idea, but i don't actually need it, and don't actually feel that i really need anything. i'm more like these occupy folks who say, if you don't give your money to the big boys (walmart, target, the banks) then everyone would be better off. but i'm not sure everyone can live up to that high standard. how can you tell your kid you're not going to get them the big electronic this year?

going around town, i now listen to almost exclusively african, and this brings to mind a dilemma i've been feeling lately. life is, actually, what you do, and for a couple of months now (a little more) i've been committing about twenty minutes a day to aggregating news from africa onto a single site which is nothing more than a collection of links to recent news articles. it was originally intended to be an entire resource collection that would help my son and me to learn programming, use journalism skills, find a field to become an expert in, etc. and in fact there is a lot in there, a lot to know, a lot to learn, etc. i've learned an enormous amount from becoming a focused news junkie and learning more about the continent and its issues.

but now, the time has come to decide whether to keep doing it or not, or, if so, how to keep doing it (it would be possible to back off, and not be so religious about my efforts, but then, a holiday is coming and i should have more time for it)...the fact is, i have irons in lots of fires. i am trying to write a novel. i have short stories coming. i work on haiku...most of all, i have a linguistics book in the works, which really needs a lot of attention. and now i'm becoming an africanist?

i originally did it for my son, so that he could use journalism, and french, and learn programming (at least as little as i know) and feel productively occupied while he looks for a job that suits his abilities. i wanted to show him how you have to take the world at what it is and create your own scene, so as to have something to show for your time on earth, and learn about what you love and get better at it by practice and by diving in with your whole self. he barely got a toe in though he did try it. i accept the fact that he's not about to do what his father wants as i surely would have never done what my father wanted, either. aha, but, after starting, i got into it myself. it was cool. it still is. i may make him feel guilty, but i want to keep doing it.

alas, that's my dilemma. what about the poetry, the novel, the jigsaw puzzle on the livingroom table? or the ling book? sometimes it's all i can do to do the laundry, the dishes, get matching socks on the boys, get across town without getting mad and popping off on some old person who takes an hour to turn right and get out of the road. life goes on that way, and almost a majority of my class has no chance of passing, no ability, no desire, or no tendency to do the work, thus leaving me with an ironic smile and no choice but to slip off into the break, giving them all what they deserve. time for a tree; time to mail calendars; time to make a card; time to get off my you-know-what and get going. but first, the parade.

2011-11-30T18:28:00.001-06:00

2011-11-30T18:27:00.000-06:00

2011-11-27T21:06:00.001-06:00

2011-11-27T20:28:00.002-06:00

before I left new mexico I was happy to notice that the shuttle took us along the rio grande, instead of cutting back behind the mountain as the other had done. My only problem was that, entering the shuttle, I had chosen the far back seat, and it was protected from the sun by a kind of screen that prevented me from seeing in clearly. same with the chihuahua license plates; I knew they were there, but I couldn’t read them, because I couldn’t see them clearly and in fact have trouble reading little license plates now, even when I can see them clearly.

the trip back was uneventful, relatively; dallas was a huge sprawling city but its airport didn’t have wi-fi so I graded papers almost the whole way, and drove back through the villes of southwest illinois in the middle of the night. thanksgiving at home was similarly uneventful; it was nice to be home, and have turkey, and have family and even a friend, who said she thought it would be tofurkey based on what she knew about my wife, but it wasn’t, it was the real thing, with plenty of leftovers which is the way it should be.

but the following day off we went to peoria where twins could be born any minute, and it started raining and stayed raining for almost the whole two days we were there. Sometimes it was a steady drizzle and sometimes it was pounding, but it kind of took over the place with its cold wet insistence. now we’re on the road back, at the windmills of use, and the rain has turned into overwhelmingly cloudy, cold grayness. we spent a lot of time swimming in the motel and I read the papers, which was nice, but the news was full of black friday shopping violence which was somewhat disturbing. apparently the stores are so desperate for customers that they’ll open in the middle of the night and work with these couponers to make sure hundreds of people appear at their doors in the middle of the night; apparently shoppers are so desperate for the exceptionally cheap discounts on such things as xbox, etc. that they wiil come out, and stampede, with pepper spray and pure shoulders, in order to get these deals; and the muggers are enjoying people with goods walking around parking lots in the middle of the night, because those guys are desperate also…it all sounded kind of sad, actually, like a country that’s lost its bearings.

the road from the motel to the tiny town where the new parents live goes through northern illinois countryside which is really very beautiful, but has lots of farms, ranches, mansions and developments in every direction. It cuts right through the town of kickapoo, and crosses kickapoo creek, which I’m pretty sure fed into the kickapoo river, and the low spots there I’m sure are called the kickapoo bottoms, so we had fun saying that the kickapoo bottoms were looking pretty soggy, and noticing how that rolled off the tongue. peoria in general is a hard-luck kind of town, with not a whole lot of good new jobs around, and people trading around the same dusty old antiques on the edge of the road there, though the folks in the mansions seemed to be doing well enough.

a little further down the road now, past springfield, I’ve noticed that the traffic is very heavy; we’ve seen more license plates in a couple hours than I saw in the whole trip before today, and altogether this trip may rival the last one, in which I had the benefit of seeing all those southwestern states, like AZ and NV. Up here I’m seeing mostly southern states; they’re all over the road, but what’s missing really is the eastern ones, who don’t get all the way out here this time of year or at all any more, for all I can figure. On this part of the road the big things to see are this enormous mansion, which is for sale, and which must have twenty rooms or more, but is right on the highway, and an old-car lot that has cars going back to the fifties and sixties which I drool over upon passing it. aside from that, it’s all flat illinois farmland, stubble cornfield and bean fields plowed over, and a gray sky above to cover everything. there are three colors in the fields: a bright green that is probably winter wheat, a stark black that is probably a bean field, and ground with stubble on it, brownish, probably corn fields.

people pushing and shoving, one even using pepper-spray, lining up in the middle of the night, bringing coupons from online that promise huge discounts, which will put thousands of people in a store but will only give a few hundred of them discounts, thus frustrating many and getting people to turn to violence after three to ten hours committed to a cheap deal goes bad. you wanted a deal? i'm not sure what advice to give.

home now, having gone through the villes, and even to an old farm on the hill outside murphysboro, to drop off dogs, and the kids are in bed and we settle into the calm of a winter night, though we all have school tomorrow. i don't know what my point is; i'm proud of granddaughters born and unborn, but worried about the world they are inheriting. the news was a twisted mess about what's happening in pakistan, egypt, los angeles & philadelphia, etc., but the story that stuck in my craw was one about these amish guys who went bad and broke into other amish folks' houses and cut their hair. didn't rob them, or kill them, but humiliated them badly by cutting what could have been a lifetime of hair. it made me wonder about the other crime folks commit in this society, and how much humiliation is a part of it: whether, if one were to remove the violence, this kind of criminal would simply be left with the prospect of humiliating people, yet not even really having to hurt them. it was an odd story, so odd that one wonders. out here in the "english" world, one wouldn't dream of doing crime without the proper firearms. i've reached a point, though, where i wouldn't do it in any case. i haven't been humiliated, denied work, made to feel inferior or incapable, pushed back, made consistently more and more angry; on the contrary, i have enough, even in rough times, and i wake up grateful, generally.

on the license plate front i ended up with 27, almost the same as my entire new mexico trip, and got CT toward the end being the only one from new england. on the new mexico trip the high point was the chihuahua one, being out of the country and all, but on this one i saw two that mystified me, and i never did place them. the first was on the way there and appeared to have a bear on it; i thought, at first, nwt, canada, which has had a bear for years, but on looking it up, i decided that wasn't it. the other was a multi-colored one in which a rich dark green was prominent, but i couldn't read that one either, it flew by pretty fast. in general, i like letting my wife drive; i see more; she's very observant of the speed limit, and, as a result, people tend to fly by us and i being on the outside have trouble reading their tags. this is especially true if they have a dealer's license-holder or if there's a shadow or no light. i lost more than a few of them and cursed my own impending elderly infirmities as i tried to guess and wondered if the license game would allow me to "know" what i saw. hawaii? nwt? guam? one flew by me that was a rich orange and i could have sworn it was an ancient oregon; it was on a van, and sometimes those large vehicles keep the old-style plates long after a state has converted en-masse to the light one with the trees on it. but i couldn't read the "oregon" clearly and never did quite count it, though i'd seen oregon trucks on both trips. not sure, even now, what i did see, but it'll have to go down as one of those unresolved things, you learn it eventually, or maybe you don't.

main point is, it's now the season of buying, and i'm not sure what kind of x-box kind of toy i'll need, i only hope i don't get pepper-sprayed in the process of retrieving it. i've tried to spread a general non-materialism throughout my family and my life, but to no avail, and i can see that the nation as a whole is getting worse, with black friday now rivaling valentines day as a major must-spend occasion. i can only imagine that the bright side is that, having parked in the last spot in the mall parking lot, one gets at least some exercise, to do the mall, unless one has contrived to get a handicapped flag, illegally, or goes to the trouble of staging a fake car-is-busted-must-leave-it-here-indefinitely kind of ruse, in order to get out of walking. i heard stories of massive foreclosure fraud, and disability fraud, and the widespread nature of the fraud is such that i begin to wonder what people consider "work," if there is such a thing, if people do "jobs" anymore, or even if there is a point in encouraging people to try to make an honest living. would the system be stacked against you? if so many people are watching television, even at work, what does that make those of us who don't have time? non-participants, i guess, in a sordid kind of culture. if it comes to this, maybe it's time to turn off the power, so that we have more of a separately generated, off-the-grid kind of system, where you can turn, non-commercially, for a little bit of peace. maybe the occupants will come up with it, or i can do it for them. it's time for a new concept. this black friday crap has gone far enough.

2011-11-24T21:55:00.004-06:00

2011-11-24T21:51:00.001-06:00

2011-11-23T23:21:00.000-06:00

2011-11-23T23:07:00.003-06:00

the plane circled high over west texas plains and this guy next to me started in telling me about an interesting life in east texas and in various places where he works. i missed new mexico already, its soft mountains, clear sky and cacti. two stories from new mexico stuck with me; both were from world war two.

the first was that of the navajo code talkers. the navajo had joined from throughout the reservation so many were from arizona as well as new mexico, and also la and other places. it turns out that at that time navajo were forced to go to school away from home and were miserable, so many joined purely in order to get a better life or to get out of school. but the army found them useful since the navajo language had not borrowed a single word from english even in spite of having borrowed entire machines like cars which were of course full of parts. because the navajo had words for every single thing, their language became an impenetrable code. but because of that the navajo were spread out in different locations during the war; there was no place that had many of them; each regiment had maybe one or two.

unlike the navajo, the ranchers of deming had a much worse fate. they all happened to be in a single regiment, and they had the bad luck to be placed in bataan, philippines, home of the worst incident of the entire war. there weren't many ranchers around deming but every young man went and joined this particular regiment. so an entire area was totally destroyed by the bataan death march. the place was low on ranchers for an entire generation. and now, they still re-enact that death march out on the white sands every year. new mexico is the center of the 'remember the death march' movement.

the trip home was uneventful. i'm glad to be out of the airports tonight, at home, not needing to go anywhere in particular. i'm thinking about my parents a lot, out there under the organ mountains, where the sun shines so, and where it's so far away from the rest of us. they are happy, though; they are together, still getting around, and doing what they want. and for that i'm thankful, every minute.

2011-11-21T23:31:00.001-06:00

2011-11-21T22:47:00.002-06:00

coming up out of el paso, about three or four hundred years ago, you might stop in this area because the river would be reasonable, off to your left, and the caves of the organ mountains would be cool and welcoming, off to your right. and you might have heard, that straight north of las cruces, ninety miles at least of total nothing, jornada de los muertos, no water to kill for, nothing. down before el paso, which is really el paso del rio, the place you can cross the river, before el paso was this huge sand dunes that catch wagon wheels and which people would go hundreds of miles just to go around.

so when the catholic missionaries came up this way they figured they could be rather absolute, like their superiors, or they could actually incorporate some of the indian beliefs into their ritual, thus ensuring that they would have some indian allies in a very hostile environment and maybe live to see another day. near the south part of las cruces in the village of tortuga they made a church to the virgen de guadalupe and the local people, by custom, would walk east all the way up to tortuga mountain, some barefoot, and they would do this for the virgen, and had been doing it anyway for quite some time. and this kind of mixed religion, part catholic, part local custom, took root and survived.

these days the whole southern part of las cruces has been taken over by the university, which is new mexico state university, a land grant college that got the land between what is now interstates 10 and 25, and the development it brought overtook the town of tortuga, and all along what is now university avenue, at least halfway up the mountain, which now has a large "a" on it and is known to the locals as "a mountain". so the locals go up there and look back down at the valley, and light up the "a" at times when the "aggies" need some school spirit.

it so happened that my parents lived near university avenue, and that on the first night i walked down toward the university, almost all the way to the old town of tortuga, which i knew nothing about. and on the second night i turned the other way on university avenue, and this time walked eastward until the streetlights died out, stars took over, and the road took a steady rise toward "a mountain." at that point it always looks like the mountain is directly in front of you, yet you walk and walk and it doesn't appear to be much closer. at one point i stopped, and sat on a gravel kind of hill where sagebrush and chapparal and cactus and grasses dominated the land, and just watched the stars for a minute before i turned back. i still then didn't know about the people who marched. i was just going for a walk out in the desert.

people come from as far as california to march up the mountain during the festival of the virgen de guadalupe which is around the tenth of december and which is celebrated with days of free food down in the church hall in the town of tortuga. if you asked god for any favor during the year, say your relative was sick, then you promised to march up the mountain and you are expected to deliver. if you march barefoot then you are really showing your devotion, your suffering, for the virgen. fires are burned on the mountain, prayers are said. there's a mass. the local tv stations come and take pictures; one made an excellent documentary which i am using even now as i write this, otherwise how would i know? "tortuga" is a turtle, & i have no idea where the mountain, or the town, got that name, but i can tell you that tortuga images were popular with the mimbres who were the people in the area around the time cahokia was big, around 1100. the mimbres are long gone, but their pottery figures remain as a kind of symbol in the area, and i don't know whether there are turtles or anything like them.

the cacti took it in the chin in about february when there was a deep freeze and it lasted almost two days, wiping out agave, barrel cacti, palm trees, all kinds of things. somehow my parents got out of the habit of walking around the little cactus park as there was a lot of dieback there and it wasn't pretty; even now, though some of it has returned, some of it clearly hasn't. they say it only gets that cold every thirty years ago, but that's assuming there isn't some catastrophic weather change, and that could be assuming too much. but right now it's cool and clear in the mesilla valley, it's at the peak of the fall season with bright oranges and reds everywhere, and some of the cacti are flowering even now.

my parents did the walk around the block with me; my dad took his camera but didn't take many pictures, perhaps thinking flowering cacti were old news. i wished i had my camera, but instead have been filching cactus pictures and posting them just for image's sake. you have to get out there, i told my dad; the place is beautiful, and you need to let that desert air lift your spirit. at one point he said he hadn't seen a sky full of stars in a while, but i wondered: he's got a wheelchair, and he could...if it was my job to remind them of the magic character of their place to live, i hope i was up to the task; in any case, my time has almost run out, as i'm leaving for illinois again tomorrow.

we told lots of stories, of how my parents took us down as far as cars could go in mexico, in 1957, of the crystal caves in chihuahua, and the tarahumara indians, who run barefoot 120 miles or more, routinely, in the mountains of northern chihuahua, and of a friend in the town of guanajuato, a truly memorable place deep in the heart of mexico, and of their travels throughout southern new mexico and up and down the highway where the jornada has been replaced by highway 25. up there is a spaceport these days, but it's off the road a ways, and it's private, and who knows if and when anybody could get to space from there, it's the new tourist item though and it appears in the local paper. they don't get out much, though, and it's all i can do to get them around the block, though mom gets into town quite a bit and still knows her way around the streets. the town has grown, and it's busy, she no longer drives, and it's a hassle getting around and doing errands. we did get a cell phone though and that will at least make them feel a little more connected to the modern world and certainly a little more able to reach a caller when they ring. a lot of its benefits, alarm clock, mobile photos, using it when traveling, etc. are of almost no use to them. they were just unable to answer the cord-phone in their living room, half the time.

a lot of the cacti have come back, and with flowers; i tend to see them in bleached and saturated colors, made into posters. a kind of romanticized view of a land in which these prickly things have to pick up every inch of rainfall, and hold onto it for an entire year, and if you drop a cigarette or something on the red-gravel clay soil it's likely to stay there forever, or until the next rain, which is about the same. camping is not an issue; there's miles and miles of desert, and lots of stars out at night, and though you might want a tent, you'd more likely not want one, so as to dream better, and take in the mountain air. this was not an issue for me this time, since, in my parents' care, i slept like a rock, every night, on a foldaway or not, and had all these wild dreams that connected to every aspect of my childhood. and woke up, completely, and absolutely, refreshed.

2011-11-19T23:53:00.003-06:00

2011-11-19T23:32:00.002-06:00

missed the shuttle, but fortunately there was one more, and then the shuttle driver took the road back behind the mountain, so i didn't exactly see juarez, except as a passel of lights across the valley for a minute. besides it was night; the plane had been an hour or hour and a half late, all due to some mechanical problem back in oklahoma or something. better to be late than up in the air on a plane with mechanical difficulty, but that's another post.

new mexico is wide and spreads out forever on every side, and the reason they call it jornada del muerto is because there's absolutely no water at all on this one stretch north of las cruces. my mom was heading up there to a park, camino real which sounds like it might be "real road" but is in fact more likely to be "royal road" according to my parents. so this park aims to preserve the old trail that started in mexico and came up through las cruces, through dona ana, and up the jornada to san antonio, and apparently the mexican side was more active, safer, and up here it was good luck buddy, take an extra bottle of water. indian attacks and nothing but wide, wide plain, nowhere to hide. when they finally got little arroyos to hide in (hide from the sun, mainly) they'd make a ranch and settle in for the long haul.

i'm late to get to my parents' place because the shuttle, for some reason, takes us out to old mesilla before it does me. out at old mesilla, the historic district, i see the setup of somebody who agrees with the desert landscape, the wide plain, the mountains in the background, the arroyo as homestead. even at night, the colors are stunning. in the day i take a long nap and tonight i took a long walk down a huge hill into the rio grande valley, beyond new mexico state university on my way back out to mesilla, but then turn around and go way back up the hill and back to base. i'm lucky, basically, that my parents are well enough and living their lives, providing me a place to stay and feeding me, still together, and we seem to be at peace together in this place; they are, at least, where they want to be.

i have a few conversations, on the plane, in the shuttle, and here, about the state of the world we're in, and the occupy protests, and how there's conflict here & there, and a sister is getting involved, visiting and talking to the protesters in zuccotti and environs. i have not decided whether or how much of this to report; it's history, unfolding in front of our eyes, yet i'm tired, and have other stuff to worry about; maybe later. back home, one gray cat (scroll down) has a new home; this is ash & i wish her well. her black cousin, he's hanging around a while, maybe we'll keep him. you reach a point where what you end up with, is a compromise involving what you're willing to tolerate, and what your aggressive efforts at improvement are able to accomplish. the world wins, in the end, because it survives, whereas each of us is tiny, in the big picture.

2011-11-19T14:39:00.002-06:00

2011-11-19T14:35:00.002-06:00

flight laid over in albuquerque for about an hour more than it should have, due to a mechanical problem back in oklahoma or something. They never quite told us what the problem was but it didn’t matter; albuquerque airport had free wi-fi and I got on facebook and played around for a while. now we’re in the air again, crossing new mexico on our way down to el paso, from whence I’ll catch a shuttle back up into las cruces.

my question about el paso was this (and this may have appeared on this blog years ago): el paso undoubtedly means the pass, as in the mountain pass, but if one gives it the wrong accent, as in el paSSO instead of el PAH-so then one changes it to it happened. my question is this: if you said it that way in spanish would it be considered a clever pun, or would somebody sock you for your insolence? or both? I’ll keep my ears open. btw that general rule that says stay out of Juarez, it’s the most dangerous city in america, has been upgraded to most dangerous city in the world….of course, the guys who said this have never been to rio, say, or goma, congo. and, not that I would know anyway. Here I am going from st. louis to el paSO, and all I’ll do is look at the place.

gave a monster grammar test as I was leaving town and I’ll have to grade it sometime on this trip & I’m not sure, tell you the truth, when I’ll have time. I stuffed it in the luggage and sent the luggage through baggage so I’m taking my chances and those grammar exams could end up in tucson or san diego for all I know, but my point is that I was teaching past perfects (had eaten & had been eating) and future perfects will have eaten & will have been eating) and so I told them, when you learn these you always have to remember, compared to what? Yesterday when I saw you, I had eaten, that’s finished before I saw you. compared to what means it’s finished before something else & we always have to know what else. So then I played them this song I like, compared to what and I had the class rocking for a minute, they thought I’d gone over the edge there for a while, but it was kind of a cool song and the saudi guys obviously went home and listened to it again.

now these are the guys who don’t know grammar for anything, they’re more likely to say had ate or had eating but most of all can’t fathom why there would be any rule at all, or any way of making this stuff or any reason one would have to mess with it at all. but they kind of liked that song, so they were at least attending class, most of the time. one of them lost his book, but he didn’t notice it apparently until the night before the exam. what was I supposed to do, give him a break?

the plane suffers a little from turbulence, the mountains around albuquerque may create an unfavorable set of turbulent gusts. As we get out over the high plains though, across the desert areas and the jornada it might be a little easier. The pilot was going on about whether positivity is a word, but he’s let up a little now & we’re just flying. one thing we’ll fly near would be roswell, home of the ufo’s, and the training area where supposedly everyone saw them so many times. And the town of truth or consequences which one would have to assume, comes from a television show in the fifties or sixties or whenever. And then of course there’s the jornada itself, the walk of death, the place where there was no water at all, and almost nobody who ever crossed it ever made it to the other side. I’m not sure if white sands was anywhere near this, or part of it, or maybe the walkers got captivated by its brilliant whiteness and lost their way, lost their direction, and then ran out of water and died. don’t know the history.

the pilot maintains everything is cool, we’ll get there soon enough, weather’s good, the cool air over the high desert is all good. I’m just hoping the shuttle will still be there for me an hour late, as it goes past Juarez and I peer across the border at life in mexico i always get the shuttle driver to tell me how he feels. and then back into new mexico we’ll go, up past sunland and mesquite, into southern new mexico.

so at the end of this exam, one of them, who has done quite poorly all term, mystified by the whole concept of grammar, walks up to me and hands me his exam, and says, what does that compared to what mean? I mean, what are you talking about? So I explained it to him. he really had no idea. he’s got perfect listening, fluent orally, almost no grammar, no clue. But also, he just didn’t know the meaning of the word “compared”

so, they’re a little bad at grammar. compared to what?

2011-11-18T20:04:00.000-06:00

2011-11-18T19:55:00.002-06:00

you don’t always get out of my town easily: cars get in front of you, and drive too slowly, and miss the lights, and you don’t want to zoom around, weave or do dangerous stuff before you even leave town. i grit my teeth and hold on until i slip onto the two-lanes outside of town. traveling in november is always special to me, it’s so beautiful, yet this time it seems almost as if winter is coming down, gripping the place with economic hardship, and other hardships, even though it’s a beautiful day and winter wheat fields spread out in the sunlight. i’m on my way to st. louis airport, and from there to new mexico, but I start thinking of all the places I’ve been that have stuck with me over the years. jupiter beach, that was one; on the coast of florida one night, I walked over a sand dune and there was the wide open ocean, stretching out toward a huge sky with lots of stars, and you could see wide dark and gray ocean for miles and miles, with the sand dunes below us. the name, I think, kind of stuck with me, but the wideness, the vastness of it is what I remember.

in illinois, I go past a town so tiny that it’s decided to put up its christmas decorations before thanksgiving; this is typical in that, if you have nothing to do, and halloween is over, you might as well get started, it's true in lots of these small towns. it’s really not a great way though, because you end up getting sick of them before december even starts and, in the case of trees, they become fire hazards after a couple of weeks which in some cases is before the whole season is really even ready to start. nevertheless in a place so hungry for cheer or something to look at, decorations are big, at least they’ve changed a place that looks so much like it did the last couple of times I came through.

once I was on this spit in the kenai peninsula and I think I was on high ground because I was aware that there was sea on at least three sides of me and I could see it on just about every side. I was also aware that I had gone about as far out to the edge as I could possibly get, as far from home as I would get, on land anyway, and I could practically see that the road led almost no further. but in front of me, down a little hill toward one of the edges of the peninsula, an odd person was working the land on a farm kind of place. he was like no one I’d ever seen, though I don’t remember what it was that was so distinctive; if it was his clothes, I don’t especially remember what they looked like. At the time I was almost out of money and coffee was like three or four dollars a cup so I was about turning around, but I’d found a job on a salmon boat and made enough to fix my pack before I turned around, and I asked one guy what was going on, and he said it was a kind of commune down there. I found out later that it was old believers. I read about those guys later, much later, but if I’d heard that name then, I’d never have even known who they were.

in pinckneyville there’s a grace outreach place but it looks humble, well who knows what kind of outreach, although in my town the word grace is associated with lutherans. In the center of town the opera house has burned down and is still a pile of bricks, old and classy bricks, but a guy in a cat dozer is in the middle of it and some other guy is standing in it too either telling him what to do, or telling him what not to do. actually it looked like that last time I went through too. nothing new here.

the old believers were the truly orthodox, they wouldn’t change when the orthodox changed. then when the orthodox became catholic the orthodox refused to change. Then when the protestants came along the catholics refused to change. But the old believers were the original “refuse to change”…they were so orthodox, they got run out of russia and had to come to alaska. I didn’t know this, of course, at the time. and of course one would have to figure that this was old believers, what, twenty generations after the first ones refused to change.

another place that kind of stuck with me in my travels was guymon oklahoma, out on the panhandle. actually just about everything in oklahoma seemed to be extreme, whether it was extremely barren and windy like guymon, or extremely hot and muggy, or sunny and inhospitable like lawton. or remote and out there like the ouachita mountains of the wild southeast where the rogue criminals hid out. In any case in this one place, guymon, out on the panhandle, the wind blew and blew and every bob-wire fence had whatever paper it had picked up for miles around, and this paper, mostly grocery store inserts, was flattened up against the wire fence like it was trying to hide something, but it was just the wind blowing. it was the kind of place you’d have to press hard on your feet to keep from blowing away. Our kids had high fevers at that time and we took them in to a clinic where they said, 103, or 105, or something like that. that’s where I first learned that that enormous kind of fever wasn’t unusual for a kid. they just cook up in order to burn it off.

past pinckneyville you come to the baseball player’s house which is huge, and beautiful, behind some trees, but basically right on the road. A little driveway heads right up there into it so I fantasize about using it and just asking him what it was like pitching in the big leagues. further on I come to the town of Nashville which is also quite small and which puts the names of players on one of its teams, maybe girls’ basketball, on decorative cheering cone-shaped decorations. girls’ names are spelled differently these days, but the only example I can think of is brittni…anyway they kind of fly by because at this point there is other stuff to look at besides winter wheat. again I get the feeling of economic squeeze, even in farm country. maybe people are worrying about christmas.

one place that definitely stuck with me was northeast iowa, a place so stark and beautiful yet totally void of tourists, you couldn’t even move in and buy a chunk of beautiful land to save your life. It was hilly river valley, lots of rivers through there including the wapsipinicon, the cedar, the iowa, and a few more, all feeding into the mississippi and making hilly and beautiful farm country. I think people jealously guarded it; part of that was that it was just such good farm country that it was worth a fortune, and only other farmers either had the money, or had a true idea about its worth. in any case it was strange traveling up there because these farmers were generally never even aware of the beauty, yet it was just stunning in the way that you’d come around one hill and see fog, a cornfield, an old barn, redwing blackbirds, a kind of paradise scene out there, and nobody to share it with.

in new baden, which I consider to be illinois’ version of out there, farm country squared, I see a flock of white seagulls, and then around the next bend a large flock of black crows, or black birds of some kind. I actually wouldn’t know a crow from another kind, but when they come in large numbers and circle around you always think that they are either menacing the trucks or getting caught up in some other kind of updraft, or, maybe they’ve just picked the goods out of one field and are looking for another. Further down the road we come into east saint louis which really looks much different now that I know about Cahokia, it being the center of the world as we know it for a thousand years and all, now reduced to strip clubs and fast food restaurants. There’s a lot of work on the highway too; somebody’s getting paid something, and it’s probably keeping a few families afloat. Again it looks bleak though. Looks like a depression is settling in, taking hold and making everyone cough.

back home I was given a trove of books before I left, six full boxes of books about every aspect of judaism, including mystical Judaism, orthodox, etc., everything. I could hardly bear to pick through them since I have so little time in my life to actually read anything, but fortunately I had my boys with me and they were able to pick through and keep a few.. the one I had to grab though was called “postville.” It was about a group of orthodox jews who came to northeast iowa and opened a meatpacking plant which they operated for years, with much cultural conflict etc. I can’t even imagine. I’ll have to read the book, if I can find any time.

high above saint louis now, I look back and see that the center of town, the downtown, looks incredibly small and recedes as we follow the sun out west across the ozarks. the arch, it’s like a little ribbon popping out of the ground and marking the place, but, you would have never guessed how insignificant it would look when you were tearing through town, cars flying by on both sides, road construction tearing up the lanes. the “mark mcguire highway” sign is gone, which is good or in any case it’s good that they won it all this year, and were able to move on and glorify in a new world championship…enough to make them forget the steroid era. And the economic malaise. and the loss of budweiser, and whatever else they’ve lost.

there’s a cloudy haze over the ozarks or western missouri if that’s what it is; I wonder if it will burn off as we get into the dry country further west, and I can see the wide plains and the hills of northern new mexico. For once I have a laptop on the plane and can type away while everyone settles in with their crackers and soda; I’m typing mostly for the novelty of it, since I’ve so rarely got to bring a laptop. What a joy! And to tell you the truth, I’ve run out of other memories, nothing else comes to mind, though I’ve been lots of places, and remember them, but at the moment, they’re all kind of blended together, the fog spreads below, the nuts come, & i’ll sign off for now.

2011-11-14T21:12:00.002-06:00

on this side of the earth a strong wind is blowing, but it's a warm wind, and leaves are flying from their neat piles on the side of the road, and filling up the yards again where people so patiently had raked (in my case), or got out the horsepower and burned gas to blow them around. i myself had raked for the mental pleasure of doing it (i think it's my right to not rake, but i actually enjoy raking these days)...it was warm, and beautiful, with oranges turning to browns and greens fading slowly into winter. i also spent some time burning sticks which was hugely satisfying except that it threw the baby off (visiting granddaughter) and she definitely reacted to the smell; she didn't especially want to be picked up by wood-pile smelling old grandpa.

on the other side of the world a volcano erupted, and continues to erupt; it's called mount nyamulagira, and it's in the d.r. congo, which has been called both the most musical place on the planet, and the worst possible place to be a woman. i think, in fact, that all these things could be true, and the volcano is real to boot and could get more real with every passing day. this is a place with all kinds of animals, including gorillas and okapi, and many kinds of terrain, thousands of warring tribes, civil war in its immediate past, and a vast and impenetrable interior. attractive to me, yes, but only from my armchair. there's no way i could even imagine going there, at this moment.

got to work this morning, and it was monday morning; i don't drink all weekend, so i get there ready to work, and actually enjoy my work, most of the time. so anyway i'd only graded half my midterm, because a colleague had walked off with about half of them, and my students had done quite poorly on it, so i'd fretted all weekend, and tracked him down early, and forced him to empty out his briefcase of all papers, so that he could find the twenty or so tests that were mine. tons of ungraded stacks came out of that poor briefcase. this guy made me look like an anal, uptight, overorganized fanatic who actually gets my midterms back to the students on monday. the surprising thing is, they did so well on that last half (it was easy, apparently), that many of them passed, a surprising number. their luck.

took a son down into the creek bed because his assignment, for some reason, was to put twenty rocks in a shoe-box. it actually wasn't easy to get down into that creek-bed and i was surprised, upon getting down there, that the water was high, and not too many rocks were exposed. guess it has been raining, a little; i know it rained today, hard, with violent lightning and thunder, but this was before, over the weekend, and i hadn't remembered much rain before that. we are heading into the changeover - from dry, august through october, to wet, which starts now or any day now. and i can see, already the drainspouts need cleaning, the water has no place to go. we're now a two-car family; i no longer bicycle every day, but this is ok; i'm still swimming, keeping my head above water, so to speak.

trips approach, one to new mexico, before thanksgiving, and one to peoria, and possibly iowa, after, so i should get a little tour of the countryside, and that's good, because this time of year, as i like to say, is by far the most gorgeous of any time, downright spiritual, to get out on the road, as things get brown, and dull reddish, and dark yellow. people look at me as if i'm crazy when i say it. the hajj happened to be in november this year, but i say, every trip in november is a holy trip, a pilgramage, even if you go to visit grandmother, or you only go a couple of city blocks. it's incredibly beautiful, and it's always this way. though, later in the month, especially farther north like iowa, you do run into some snow, and sometimes it blows around, limits your visibility, threatens your welfare, right out there on the highway. it's been known to happen. but i say, hang in there, survive; i have a new traveling hat, relatives to see, a journey to make, and i badly need to get away. a small town moves in on you once in a while, especially a self-absorbed one, a cauldron of egos slowly simmering and reaching a boiling point without even being aware of it. folks drive too fast, and there are lots of casualties. it chews people up and spits them out, and if you don't get out once in a while, you lose all perspective.

2011-11-13T21:35:00.000-06:00

a new story:
Re-enactment
enjoy! comments welcome, as usual!

2011-11-11T11:39:00.000-06:00

2011-11-11T11:38:00.000-06:00

2011-11-11T11:37:00.001-06:00

2011-11-10T21:29:00.001-06:00

2011-11-10T20:55:00.002-06:00

got interested in chancellorsville, if only because we have a big chancellor, and a small ville, and it's been a very long week in which i've indulged myself in extended fact-finding missions to wikipedia in hopes of forgetting the whirl of conflict around me even as the strike was settled, and everyone i know virtually is back at work, happily or not. so it turns out that chancellorsville was a key battle, one in which the rebels won, and they won through a daring and clever move of splitting their army up into two, and going around, and so, because the rebels won (I assume), re-enacters like this battle, because they always have enough confederates to make two companies and sneak up on the poor union blokes, although those guys, I'd bet, are also confederates who just dress up as union blokes every couple of years, so that they get to be confederates the rest of the time. so the re-enacters like this battle of chancellorsville, and get out to re-enact it a lot, and battle strategy historians study the battle and reflect on how things could have turned out.

but then there's this general, general stonewall jackson, of the rebel side, who at one point gets shot up by his own men by mistake, and he's shot in his arm, so badly that they cut it off. and then, not only do they cut off the arm, but they give it a proper burial, an entire burial for only an arm, because they hold him in such high esteem, as he's a general and all. but he dies eight days later anyway. and i keep thinking about him, this guy's got a name, i've heard that name, he's actually quite famous. and he is.

but he is not, in any way, related to the stonewall riots of new york city in the late 1960's, the birth of the gay rights movement, apparently, sparked by a police raid of a seedy mafia-owned bar in greenwich village by the name of stonewall. if this place had any relation to the general, i'd doubt it, but i can't find any other connection, and it seems to me that as far as i can tell the riots came along and purloined the name, expropriated it, maybe old stonewall is rolling over in his grave.

a guy at the swimming place pointed out a couple of interesting things; he works in the library and takes a keen interest in the way people try to revive old events, and don't let the conflict die, especially in a case like that of old general jackson, or the "war of northern aggression." he said first that in fact, this is the sesquicentennial of the civil war, it's been 150 since fort sumter, so there will be some festivities any time now, particularly in the direction of fort sumter itself, i would imagine. and second, he said, if anyone back then at that battle knew that we would, 150 years from that date, go out camping and re-enacting that kind of thing, they would consider us crazy, gluttons for punishment. they would laugh at us. yet we do, and are likely to re-enact others as well: wwII, the revolution, and the war of 1810, maybe? is it the war we like, or the old clothes?

the boys are now old enough to do serious damage to each other on a simple drive across town, or you would think so judging by their anguished howls, and accusations of pinching, hair-pulling, torture, etc. now i know the geneva convention specifically mentions some of these actions and the sibling exemption in no way allows any of it, nevertheless it frequently gets so bad that we have to stop the car and pull over or wait until sense reigns again. i know i know you are thinking of parallels again, both to a strike situation and to an outright war where everyone loses their senses entirely and takes up arms. i'm not arguing. in any case, at one point we pull up next to this enormous truck at a stoplight, and in the truck are a number of pigs, or rather the younger boy claims there are kangaroos in there also, and they are making an enormous racket, very unhappy to be driving across town, and i think this might help the pinching/hairpulling situation so i roll down all the windows and we listen to those howling pigs for a while, until the light turns green. but it doesn't work, a few blocks down, near the cash-loan pawn shop and the railroad tracks, they're at it again, worse than ever. it's an ongoing battle, so to speak. i'm about to construct a false wall, keep their hands off each other, and their eyes to themselves, the purpose of which, i could drive across town, maybe listen to some bluegrass for a change.

the picture below comes from the virginia countryside where they have names like rappahannock and spotsylvania, and where appomattox is a small nowheresville town with a little work in it but where nobody will ever forget, ever, what it represents and what happened to dear old stonewall makes him a martyr in the eyes of the true and faithful, even though he was shot essentially by his own guys, by mistake. in the end, somebody always loses, that's the cycle of war, you can re-enact the victories, or the feeling of power, or the movement through a beautiful glade on a fall day, but you don't really want to re-enact the sawing off of limbs, or the actual starvation, or even the feeling of defeat. it's over, and it's time to move on; here, the gingko leaves have fallen, and they didn't quite pick a single day, instead, they kind of came down in bunches, all week. most everyone's back to work, but it's a holiday, veteran's day, in fact, time to back off, enjoy the weather, and get some sleep, for a change.

2011-11-10T11:10:00.000-06:00

2011-11-09T21:31:00.002-06:00

so the strike has been settled, or so they say after rumors whirled and finally i got an email from the chancellor herself who was probably relieved that the whole lurid mess finally came to a close. it was a week of loud marches, people banging drums in front of the chancellor's building, propaganda flying like excretory material hitting the ventilating device. it has thrown me into a civil war mood and i've started researching what it was like for the people in this southern-sympathizing area, drawn in to a national battle to crush the rebel troops in places like chancellorsville or vicksburg. to learn this i've been reading a bit about our local hero, one john a logan, who was known to have started memorial day and who was a colorful politician. at the john a logan museum though, one guy told me he was a traitor. sold out to the highest bidder.

now by the way i might also mention, i've been working straight along, i never struck myself, my union settled at 4 30 in the morning before the deadline and back to work i went until i have a midterm tomorrow and then settle in for a long holiday weekend of what, maybe reliving a solid week of uprooted lives and anxiety over in my wife's department and in other nearby households, the kind of ground-war that affects every classroom, every walk out to the parking lot, etc. i wore a civil war hat for a bit and told everyone the news was that the south was seceding from the union. when i heard that the teacher's union wanted strike pay, pay for the five or six days they'd been out on strike, i suggested that they get hardship pay for the times they stood at the entrances and people actually tried to run them over. this was only half in jest as this actually happened, probably more than once, in spite of it being a nice day and most people having nothing against the faculty. i myself waved at them every time, thinking, actually, that in a town this small you say hello to everyone, and it really doesn't matter if they're your best friend, an acquaintance, or someone you're locked in a life-or-death struggle for basic human rights at all costs etc. etc.

there is of course this one woman in town who doesn't even say hello to me, she tried to be chair of our department once a while back and promised to make relationships more civil within the department. i'm all for more civil, i pointed out, but still i wondered how it was she hadn't talked to me in so many years and i still didn't know, clearly, why. a good place to start with "civil" would be saying hello to everyone, even your worst enemies.

in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people in the countryside, amid vast and overflowing propaganda for all sides and a land war in which not only attendance monitors, but also substitute teachers and even regular teachers are all taking an interest in who exactly is in class at any given time, anyone except the students themselves, who are all marching outside carrying signs and beating drums, the one thing i can say is, they've both kind of lost my heart and mind, i'd rather be thinking chancellorsville, appomattox, vicksburg, than of more mundane concerns such as financial exigency, fair share, whatever. i come back from the civil war re-enactment and my quaker friend says to me, why don't you re-enact the dysentery, or the sawed-off legs, or the starvation. that's not the point, i said, and i didn't even mind the musket fire though it was obvious that the kids liked that much more than the steamed beets and fried yams. the point is to remember history, and not worry so much about how great it was.

the faculty union blog is called deo volente and that is the motto of the university itself although i've always wondered, not knowing latin, if that would be god willing or if god wills or god's will or, better, god is violent since who knows latin anyway? i tend to read it always keeping in mind that complete, utter obsession with any single dominating one-horse-town kind of institution is thoroughly unhealthy even though, at this point, it is still my main and only employer, and though i try to keep an even keel, and even feel that if you completely believe one side or the other in a dispute like this, you're way over your head, i still get caught up, once in a while, in the tides of war. i'll spare you the pictures of dead bodies all over beautiful battlefields such as gettysburg, manassas, etc. which ironically are all placed in the mountain areas, center of the country as we knew it at that time. this was john a's country, his people, the rolling hills, the hardwood forests felled to make little jacksonian pioneer homesteads out on the western fringe of civilization. brother against brother, some went off to fight for the rebs, and preserve a southern way of doing things.

why do i confuse the issues? some guy has begun writing on deo volente by the name of johnny gray and i don't even know this guy, but all i can think of is, what a name, where'd you get this name, and, are you taking sides or what? i guess he's clearly taking sides, writing on the blog and all, but i'm thinking, no, it's just a coincidence, and, not a single person has died yet in our conflagration although it's reared up and devoured our entire town not to mention our building, our student center, our coffee shop, even the pool. down at the pool, speaking of which, i told someone, now if they shut down this pool, then i'll be right out there with my sign, lifting it and shaking it and screaming at passersby, but i really don't care that much about that other stuff, which is pathetic, if you think about it, because "that other stuff" is faculty respect and an honest accounting etc. etc. and is life and death in its own kind of way. but if i couldn't swim, then my life would really go to hell.

in class we were talking about these two identical twins who were adopted out into different homes and found each other thirty-three years later & did an informal nature-nurture experiment trying to figure out all the stuff they had in common that could only or at least would more likely, come from their common genetics. then the underground railroad came up unexpectedly and, sure enough, back into the civil war i went, researching where exactly folks came, when they came through here on their way north to chicago or wherever it wasn't so darn hostile to black folks. it doesn't hurt to do research. you tend to find out stuff that way.

down in the democratic republic of congo they prepare for a presidential election and one of the main candidates goes bonkers, announcing that he's already president and they should just turn everything over to him. meanwhile a volcano erupts out there in the eastern part of the place, which is actually huge, bigger than texas, and harder to drive across, being all jungle and no roads. this volcano is called nyamuragira and what do i know, about when it erupted or who it affected, for all i know it's just a peaceful little orange bubbly drink, spitting and gurgling for all comers & especially the photographers. it's a rowdy place, that eastern congo, tucked right up against uganda and all these other places where rebels like the lord's resistance army go around just killing whoever they please, raping and pillaging and using the border like it's some kind of tightrope they don't have to keep their feet on. here, everyone's so wrapped up in the propaganda, and they try to figure out if these are real people we are dealing with, or have they been awake for a few too many 24-hour bargaining sessions or is there any reason on earth, that civilized educated people couldn't reach a deal of some kind before it got too late and ruined the entire university system and all hopes for future enrollment. we'll have to wait and find out. my guess is, someday, the whole place might be civilized, but, by then, it might be too late.

2011-11-08T21:31:00.004-06:00

2011-11-08T11:12:00.001-06:00

2011-11-08T11:11:00.000-06:00

2011-11-08T11:10:00.000-06:00

2011-11-07T21:20:00.002-06:00

oh yeah sure, there are a few people who are scarcely touched by the strike, even me, my union settled at 4 30 am and i went back the next day, scarcely missed a beat, teaching as full time as i ever did. or the secretaries, or the janitors, their unions settled too, so life went on as usual, they didn't have to feel a thing. but a ground war is taking place over the faculty classes, some people are teaching, some aren't; some are teaching others'; some are encouraging marches and standing out at the entrances of the campuses; some are encouraging disruption, or disrupting; the war is played out on the internet, in the media, on e-mail, in the press. having come from a civil-war encampment weekend, and being an escapist kind of guy, thoroughly averse to conflict but still totally engrossed in it, my thoughts naturally turn to the civil war, brother against brother, everyone wrapped up in it, nobody unaffected. i think of something i heard over the weekend: our local hero, john a logan, he could have gone either way; he could have been a northerner or southerner, so the reb sympathizers tend to think of him as a traitor, to his people, to his area, for going off with the north, selling out to the highest bidder. when i run into a history buff, as i did, i ask, what's up with that. i guess the question really is, if you grew up around here, as he did, who would you have been expected to fight for?

john a was a political dude, a jacksonian democrat, got elected from southern illinois as an ally of douglas, lincoln's adversary, but jacksonian democrat in these parts meant, anti-abolitionist, pro-states' rights, and it was perfectly natural to represent illinois, believe in the union, yet still not believe in war; to believe, at first, that illinois should discourage slaves from seeking freedom here, yet also believe in preserving the union, and then, as it got worse, joining up with illinois and union forces, because he knew grant, and knew other illinoisans, and was, after all, part of the state. but his friends and family were more than rebel sympathizers; they were outright confederate allies. this place had been settled by people from virginia, kentucky and tennessee; almost everyone, all the settlers, had come up that way.

interesting to be in such a treacherous environment, where you don't quite know who's on what side, where you have good friends that go both ways, on either radical pole of the situation. i myself, as i've said, have quaker inclinations, feel that the rhetoric wraps people up & makes them lose reason, that both sides are wrong, especially inasmuch as they start in on lying, cheating, censoring, disrupting, destroying, etc. & i'm talking about both sides here...in a war, you do war-like things. and you develop a network of spies, and people talk to each other in corners in low voices, trading stories of what it's like in this department or that, in the ground war. brother against brother, bloody campaign, scorched earth, march to georgia or wherever.

on my mom's side they were pennsylvania doctors, got called into the service i presume but then asked to be doctors thus living through what killed a vast number of countrymen. on my dad's side they'd taken a sawmill, loaded onto a buggy, and were walking out towards pike's peak when everyone told them it was bust and you might as well turn around. they settled in a little corner of nebraska near kansas and missouri, and a little girl died out there on the prairie, but worse, the civil war came and found them as it was especially hostile out on the kansas-missouri lines where people seemed to think that if a new state like kansas went slave or free it would upset the delicate political balance of the rest of the union. upon returning to illinois, the ancestor was called into service and marched to alabama but it was too late, battles were over and he lived through the war, almost by chance. no brotherly conflict in our family; the part of illinois he was in, it was relatively unambiguous. if he'd lived down here, in what they call egypt, it might not have been so clear.

don't want to give you details of a ground war while talks are going on as we speak at what, appomattox or wherever, that might resolve the whole thing, but you never know, and to tell you the truth, i know absolutely nothing about what they are still fighting for, or whether they might resolve it in the coming week, or not. doesn't matter though; you can get those details if you want; might even be over by the time you read this. a different kind of problems looms. homeless and drifters have taken over the building that houses our quaker meeting, an interfaith kind of place, funky, a bit run down, lacking leadership except for that of activists who have keys but whose main problem saying no is stemming from philosophical belief that the movement is here to save the drifting class. the problem is, it's not meant to be a homeless shelter. wasn't made for that; doesn't have showers, for example. now that doesn't stop a true drifter, and i think, as obamavilles go, or rather, hoovervilles, one takes what one can get, and it appears to be getting worse in that direction, rather than better, as the unemployment rate hovers over ten, and people need a place to go. so to some degree, if it's not this place, it's someplace else, and the organizing principle of the occupants may be, hang onto these people, as they're warm bodies, and will hold a sign in a pinch, as long as you feed them. it's a ground war.

i fall asleep at the keys; computer makes endless i's and a's as if i'm screaming out, from within, for rest. time to get some; more later.

2011-11-07T21:14:00.000-06:00

2011-11-07T21:13:00.000-06:00

2011-11-07T16:02:00.000-06:00

2011-11-05T20:50:00.000-05:00

2011-11-05T16:37:00.001-05:00

2011-11-05T15:09:00.003-05:00

i sit at my living-room window on saturday afternoon after an overnight campout with the 10-year-old and the other 10 & 11-year-old academically talented students in his school. the idea was to have a civil war re-enactment, with old-fashioned food, no electronic devices, a little hardship, etc. the teacher at one point said, "i wanted them to have a taste of hunger and hardship" but she had actually gone way out of her way to have fresh vegetables, rustic pancakes, bread-rolls roasted in the fire, etc. the other parents brought their tents out into a glade that had absolutely stunning colors; to me, this time, beginning of november, is by far the most beautiful in the year, when the bright yellows and oranges and reds begin to give way to the more subtle browns behind them; this was added to by the camp smoke and the gray drizzly overcast nature of the weekend.

the kids tore around the glade; the parents were allowed to have flashlights, and the kids then were allowed to borrow them which they did. many of these were kids i've known much of their lives, though i'd lost track of quite a few of them and there were some i didn't know at all. they had prepared regimental flags and regiment songs and were able to march around with wooden guns and flags, and follow the orders of a civil-war soldier (company march!) who at one point also fired his musket into the woods. i tried playing "ashokan farewell" (actually one ten-year-old, later, did a much better job than i had) and also played my banjo in the glade, late at night, by the fire.

the kids had been assigned, randomly, to either confederate or union battalions; my son and friends were in a union battalion that was called "Minn-Conn-Penn-V Rangers (?) and had a flag to match; one of my sons' friends said the the V was for Virginia but was corrected; it was for Vermont. We are in the second day of a faculty strike here in our small university town, so hearing the word "union" perked up some people's ears, especially mine, though i was trying to avoid any talk of the strike really (gratefully, i woke up on thurs. morning to find out that my union had settled along with two others, leaving the tenured faculty alone striking). some of the parents were involved, principally or marginally, and talked about it a little. but the big news was the kids, their marching, their costumes, their music, and what they knew and showed about the civil war.

it occurred to me, watching them tear around, that they were on the cusp of adulthood. you could still hug them or kiss them, but it was obvious that this wouldn't last for long, for any of them. the girls giggled about the boys and told stories about them in the tents; the boys ran around and spied on the girls, not quite ready really for the trials of being older.

the valley filled up with the smoke of campfires and the musket, but pretty soon it cleared up and the sky was a brilliant blue, the soft browns of november and the reds and yellow of the leaves all around. a box turtle stood in the path, withdrawn; the re-enactment was too much for it. it too was pretty though; it had a yellow design on its shell. it survived the encampment.

on the road home a huge fog sat between the state park and our house even though it's really only about a twenty minute drive. the fog varied in its thickness as we drove up and down the hills out in the country; at times we couldn't see much. close to home the fog had almost lifted when we drove past the little dirt road to the old ruins of the asylum/vivarium where it's known to be haunted, with unmarked graves around it and writing all over its walls; at this time of year, with the leaves falling off the trees, it can be seen from the road. and there was a kid heading off on the dirt driveway, purposefully carrying something, maybe a camera or computer, to document his journey.

the last couple of days, the town has been preoccupied with the strike. groups of picketers stand at every entrance to the university with signs; it is impossible to drive anywhere without going past them. many of these are friends of mine, or at least acquaintances, and it's hard to go to work past them, knowing they remain, out in the cold, demanding a contract, etc. i'll stay out of this fight on this blog, since i don't know the issues well, and hear only incomplete versions from various friends and my wife. i was grateful to not be caught up in it, but in a sense everyone in this town is caught up in it, and will be for some time to come. it's like the civil war itself: it takes in everyone, it pits brother against brother, and people will be sawing off legs before it's all over.

at home, the gingko leaves are a bright yellow, asian-fan shaped, perching on the edge of the tree waiting to fall off on "gingko day," the day they all fall off, which could be tomorrow, guy fawkes day. i'm not sure which day this will happen but i guarantee it's coming; i can see it, and know that much. i'm exhausted (lots of tent-carrying, tent-pitching, etc.) and wouldn't mind sitting in this very chair until the last one falls. but it's an intensely beautiful day, and i'll probably be called into service at some point to make sure every child gets a dose of fresh air; there is still way too much energy around the house. i find myself thinking about union politics at the time i was growing up, around pittsburgh. you didn't find a wide variety of attitudes then, about striking, about "scabs", about unions in general, ambivalence was unheard of. the mill owners were known to kill people to get their mills back from the occupation of strikers, who were brawny, mean and violent themselves. on the verge of losing their job, they could get violent, and stories were told throughout town for years about mill-owner steel-worker conflict, and the violence that it wrought; the mountains of west virginia, southwest pennsylvania and kentucky were similar except there it was the mine-workers, the u-m-w. as i remember those stories and the collective memories of the region i come to feel that a university union is almost a caricature, like a historical account is to the history itself, like a political science class is to a revolution. but i shrink from the conflict itself. my sister, when she heard it was a civil war re-enactment, asked me what side i was on, and i answered, "parents".

being a northerner, i never actually suffered any doubt about which side i was on in that particular conflict, but as i traveled many countries, i did notice one curious thing: the closer you were to the borders (kansas-missouri, for example, or illinois-kentucky, or say pennsylvania-maryland), the more intensely people felt about it, relived it, fell hard on one side or the other. it could also be said that the southern side still felt the sting of losing, daily, continuously, and to some degree its regional economic success has been at the expense of the north which has fallen away into economic malaise, its unions staring at vacant factory shells. i heard about this a little from one of the parents who happened to be a manufacturer in the area, who had actually worked in and run manufacturing places throughout the south and now up here in illinois, where the climate is somewhat set against him. he told me of the difficulty of running a shop; laying people off, and facing the facts when someone he'd laid off killed himself the following day; choosing a location when in essence you don't want union territory, and you want tax breaks, so you tend to favor the south. we stood by a crackling fire, i with my banjo, various other parents staying warm in the cold november night, the kids running around us with their lights.

the war is over, i'd like to think, though i can tell you, the strike has barely begun. the country may still be divided north-south, confederate-union, but we are but one country in so much trouble that it doesn't make much sense to stay divided. and that's basically how i felt about the university; it had enough problems, that being riven by union problems was the last thing it needed. ah, but such things, i suppose, get lost in the fog, as it burns off on a fall day. getting drawn into a conflict can be a life-altering, or life-ending, turn of events; it can cost you a job, or a leg, or a home, or a marriage. i, however, have lived to see another day. the picture above is from traveling days; i'd always look more carefully at the maps from mountain country. they've got the most interesting-looking roads.

2011-11-03T21:32:00.000-05:00

2011-11-02T17:50:00.000-05:00

2011-11-02T16:31:00.002-05:00

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.

2011-11-02T16:28:00.000-05:00

2011-10-28T22:21:00.001-05:00

2011-10-28T22:20:00.001-05:00