240. ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

From the Archives (1 August 2006) “End of life issues are very sensitive, especially if you are the person whose end of life we are talking about.” So said Charles Foti Jr., New Orleans attorney general and obvious opponent of the Schiavo decision.

Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.

These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).

Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).

I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.

My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?

After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.

And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.

Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.

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Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”

Religion kills, man.

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Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.

Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.

I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.

LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....

132. MIND THE GAP

From the Archives

(August 2005) Writer’s Almanac features the following:

REUNION
by Amber Coverdale Sumrall

In your old pickup we drive the length of the island looking for
blackberries and trails that lead to the lighthouse, tell stories
about our six cats, the ones we divided when I left. I took your
favorites, the ones that were mine before we met. Your fifth
marriage is faltering. I am falling in love for the third time since
we separated. All you want to do is fish in your father's rowboat,
build a small cabin on five acres of land. Beyond right now,
I don't know what I want. Somewhere on Orcas another woman
dreams of you, waits for you to enter her life.

We smoke from your well-seasoned pipe, nervous as new
lovers. Those last months I refused to get high with you; we
always fought afterward. I remember why I loved you and why,
after ten years, I left. The reasons blend together, rise with the
smoke and dissipate. You ask me to tell you why, once again.
Each time the story is different, a work in progress. Days pass
in one afternoon. Is there still a chance, you ask.

We smile at one another, our defenses down. No one knows
us better. At the trailhead you pick purple flowers, hand
them to me, suddenly shy. I trip over exposed roots as we walk,
instinctively take your outstretched hand then let it go. In the
lagoon a pair of herons dance for one another, lowering their
long necks in courtship. Hidden behind boulders, we watch in
silence until the birds lift and disappear beyond the lighthouse.
There is always a chance, I say.

I like a few images here, but those exposed roots are more than a little obvious. Ditto instinctively taking his hand.

I have a question though. Can someone tell me exactly what makes this thing a poem because it sure strikes me as three paragraphs of straight narrative. She’s telling a story and makes no use of the line breaks, which are, uh, a basic tool that poets use to further or create meaning. What's gained by using this form as opposed to a paragraph?

The poet may have used another format if she’d read Tuesday’s New York Times article about poet August Kleinzahler, who said “Most poets are shiftless, no account fools.”

(Actually, I believe it was this same poet who publicly criticized Garrison Keillor, the publisher of said Writer’s Almanac, for his middlebrow tastes in verse. Hmmm. It's all making sense now....)

Anyway, here’s my favorite Kleinzahler line: “If you’re a poet, you’ve earned the right to blow off whoever you want.”

(Very fortunate indeed that the New York Times did not drop that second three-letter word while typesetting this line.)

And now, a portion of the Kleinzahler poem “On Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is”—a poem that does make use of end stops:

In a moment or two you will know
exactly where you are,
on which side of the door,
your wallet, your shoes,
and what today you’ll have to do.
Cities each have a kind of light,
a color even,
or set of undertones
determined by the river or hills
as well as by the stone
of their countless buildings.
I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.
It must be close to dawn.

Have been thinking about a couple of things today. First, there’s this argument that we should downgrade Pluto to the status of icy sphere and admit that we were mistaken when we declared it a planet. Does this mean that we can downgrade, oh, idiots like GWB to low-wattage shrubbery and admit that we never should have elected (well) him president too?

I’m in favor of that, but worry that too many of us prefer a bobble-headed jingoistic cowboy for a prez.

(Guess I’ve ranted about that enough though for now though, huh?)

Rob Breszny refers to people whose “good intentions get derailed by modest challenges” as people who suffer from Intention Deficit Disorder. His brother, a realtor, frequently encounters IDD people who “act as if they really want to buy or sell a house, but then never get past the first few fledgling steps toward that end.”

My recent actions surrounding reimbursement of my new bifocal (sob) expenses fall into this category. See I requested the paperwork I need to obtain reimbursement from my vision insurance plan right after I got my glasses. No reply from the benefits office after a few days, so I surfed their site again but still couldn’t find the forms online. Left another voice-mail message, then got busy with deadlines and took a few days off. So now here I sit staring at my receipt, which has been sitting on my desk for over 2 weeks now waiting for me to file it.

The other thing on my mind is the Pacific NW (which I’m still willing to believe I can visit in November, even though financing a car for my mother will probably mean that I can no longer afford the trip).

I love the Pacific NW and am concerned about the news that unusual weather patterns have disrupted the marine ecosystem all the way from CA to BC this year. And scientists don’t know why. Water temperatures are higher than normal, so fish catches are low. Unusual wind conditions have resulted in very little plankton, so dead birds litter the beaches at 4 times the usual rate in some areas.

“The bottom has fallen out of the coastal food chain, and there’s just not enough food out there,” says Julia Parrish (UWA seabird ecologist).

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. I plan to scream at the first SUV driver I see on my lunch break today, but know this means absofuckinglutely nothing. And the measly funds I donate to preserve the place are no match for a president who's loosening the few protections that were in place.

So what exactly do folks believe will happen when the fish and birds die? That we’ll be so preoccupied with our Nintendos or some computer-generated cartoon animals that we’ll fail to notice that the real thing is gone?

I want to go to Whidbey Island and hear the owls. I want to smell Douglas firs. Soon.

37. THE HANDS OF THE EXECUTIONERS AND BUSINESSMEN

From the Archives

(March 2005) I thought of two more butterfly references that are so wonderful that I should have never forgotten them:

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free—Charles Dickens

and

That is why you write your songs
so that someday the disgraced and wounded America
can let its butterflies tremble
and collect its emerald
without the terrifying blood
of beatings, coagulated
on the hands of the executioners and the businessmen
—Pablo Neruda, “Letter to Miguel Otera Silva, in Caraças”

Scenes from Siberiade are free-floating through my brain tonight and I keep thinking about that Alaskan cruise I want to take.

Now I’m not much of a cruise person, generally speaking—I would rather get my hands dirty doing something than put on nice clothes and sit in a dining room with strangers eating too much as canned entertainers perform to a captive audience—but I absolutely love riding on ferries and can imagine being very happy sitting on a deck with my sketchpad all the way to Alaska. Some people would find that boring but I love being on water. I love staring out at the birds and the changing ripples and the foam that sometimes appears and the seaweed and the whales and the dolphins and the occasional jumping fish and sketching them till my fingers hurt.

I was a kayaker before I ruined my shoulder and also loved dropping through air as I shot down a waterfall or paddling furiously toward that perfect V between the rocks that would allow me to shoot through a rapid into still water. Kayaking in Alaska would differ from my white-water adventures, I’m sure, but—in my mind at least—it would be similar to paddling to some of those still-water spots in the Pacific NW that you can only reach by water.

There’s an amazing bird sanctuary near the University of Washington, for example, that only paddlers can access. When I close my eyes, I imagine Alaska like that bird sanctuary. And I imagine paddling into that quiet world where birds I’ve never seen quietly explore the water with me, where I can hear the quiet sound of water lapping against the sides of my boat, where it’s serene.

But now these images from Siberiade compete with my fantasy and I’m lying here imagining loud oil-drilling equipment ruining the place before I even get there.

The language our lawmakers use to describe such decisions confounds me. And where is the outrage? Are we just satisfied to hear words that make things sound acceptable now? Have we lost any ability to read behind the lines and understand implications?

Frank Zappa once called the US government the entertainment division of the military–industrial complex. That insight sinks in more today than it has since Shrub announced that we had to attack in response to being attacked—you know, because of those infamous weapons of mass destruction...

But, hey, this is just blabbing from a liberal in a country that re-elected a man who seems to revel in being willfully ignorant, whose first act as president was to selectively withdraw aid to other countries based on his particular religious beliefs unless these countries complied with his religious beliefs, who is now eagerly tryng to turn our democracy into a plutocracy, who has no problem running slip-shod over our rights ... that spoiled little bully who alienates the thinking world because, hey, don’t we know who he IS? He’s the one with the money, baby, and he doesn’t even have to pretend to respect anyone or anything else.

When JFK was running for president, he answered an opponent’s negative labeling of him and the Democratic Party as liberal thusly:

If by a "liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead, and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I’m proud to say I’m a liberal...

For a liberal society is a free society... and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them.

In these times, though, I hear the words of Ramsey Clark (former US Attorney General) much more clearly:

Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination—that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet; nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of the [US] foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources.—from an interview in The Sun magazine, August 2001)

Two more random thoughts before I turn out the light and try to fall asleep with visions of a still-beautiful Alaska filling my dreams. First, I’ve been tossing around this idea of writing a piece about friends who take Effexor and Paxil or one of those other drugs that have severe sexual side effects. I want to call the piece "Pharma Sutra."

And, finally, I've been thinking a lot about how much nourishment I draw from the sea, which made me remember this line: “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” (e.e. cummings)

25. OLIVER’S MORNING

From the Archives

(March 2005) I love Mary Oliver’s poetry, especially when I’m locked indoors but aching to be outside. I know I already pasted a few of her poems in the blog, but am staring longingly at my river rocks and wanting to go for a hike, so I’m adding a couple more.

I hauled these rocks back from the Pacific NW—and man were they heavy!—so I can look at them and pretend that the wind is blowing my hair as I walk on a Washington State beach where the sand looks as if Keith Haring drew the cartoonish ruts from above.


So here’s another of my favorite Mary Oliver poems:

MORNING POEM
by Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.