It's so hard being good and it used to be so easy. I finished my liver so I'd grow up to be strong and prevent famine in China. I wore galoshes and three sweaters because everyone knew disease came from drafts and I swallowed cod liver oil to ensure that I'd grow up at all.
Now, with an alphabet of vitamins playing Scrabble in my bloodstream and trace minerals making noise like a heavy metal band, my life is threatened daily by new findings telling me I'm doing it all wrong. What's a person to do?
My email is full of messages from close friends I've never heard of urging me to take ancient herbs for longevity but my "gevity" is quite long enough, thank you.
I ponder this as I'm pedaling to the Punjab on my stationary bike. I'm staying out of the sun to prevent melanoma only to read that I need more sun to get that essential Vitamin D. I'm drinking water to flush my kidneys but wait. The water is suspicious. No it isn't. Yes it is. O.K., I'll drink bottled water but the plastic is toxic. I'm doomed.
Eat organic. Is there anything in this world that isn't organic? Then it must be other-galactic. I have an herb-garden in my gut. Where did the rumor start that "natural" is necessarily beneficial and harmless? Opium, Digitalis, anyone?
I'm drinking tea as fast as I can. Black? Green? Or was it Oolong that is supposed to oxidize those nasty free radicals? And we all know about free radicals.
The latest bulletin warns against drinking tea straight from the whistling kettle which can scorch the esophagus. Now I am sucking ice trying some tepid extract from the leaping frogs of New Guinea awaiting next week's latest breakthrough. Maybe a new study will prove how hot tea really extends life so I can die on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Summer Fruit
For those of us already in the autumn of our lives, if not the winter, it’s understandable that we dwell a bit longer in ripe August with fruit trees heavy
to bending.
Have peaches always been this peachy? Freestone which doesn’t and Cling that does, to say nothing of those white Babcock and the flat Chinese. I had a drippy one just now that T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock dared. I slurped it all over me like a blessing. With their fragrance and fuzz peaches are a full body feast for the senses.
Then there are this year’s plums, red to purple-to-bursting; Satsuma or Santa Rosa. Eat them cold and forbidden like the one William Carlos Williams ate because man is not made for such denial. I buy mine at Costco by the dozen.It becomes a happy race to gobble them before they become prunes. My advice is to start eating when you get on line, then sell them door to door or better yet give them away.
The honeydews are uncommonly honeyed. Watermelons you could dive into and swim through its red sea, pits and all. And tell me if the cantaloupe each morning does not contain the sun.
Gather them while ye may. It, too, shall pass and soon rust and orange will rule the day. Earth will re-assert its tones and call down the leaves in their best amber and golden dress, soon gone to mulch.
Never mind the preservatives and pesticides. I don’t want to hear about the sulfur dioxide additive to enhance the color. Let’s just savor summer for what it yields, its many birth days. Pass the grapes; they were never so fat and firm and succulent. This is a season to cling to, like the peach, to our essence. Enjoy.
to bending.
Have peaches always been this peachy? Freestone which doesn’t and Cling that does, to say nothing of those white Babcock and the flat Chinese. I had a drippy one just now that T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock dared. I slurped it all over me like a blessing. With their fragrance and fuzz peaches are a full body feast for the senses.
Then there are this year’s plums, red to purple-to-bursting; Satsuma or Santa Rosa. Eat them cold and forbidden like the one William Carlos Williams ate because man is not made for such denial. I buy mine at Costco by the dozen.It becomes a happy race to gobble them before they become prunes. My advice is to start eating when you get on line, then sell them door to door or better yet give them away.
The honeydews are uncommonly honeyed. Watermelons you could dive into and swim through its red sea, pits and all. And tell me if the cantaloupe each morning does not contain the sun.
Gather them while ye may. It, too, shall pass and soon rust and orange will rule the day. Earth will re-assert its tones and call down the leaves in their best amber and golden dress, soon gone to mulch.
Never mind the preservatives and pesticides. I don’t want to hear about the sulfur dioxide additive to enhance the color. Let’s just savor summer for what it yields, its many birth days. Pass the grapes; they were never so fat and firm and succulent. This is a season to cling to, like the peach, to our essence. Enjoy.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Life On Hold
In the Depression decade when breadlines were the headlines we had up to three mail deliveries a day but no telephone. Instead most people depended on “runners” who hung around the drugstore hoping to make a nickel tip, They would dash up the stairs of our four story walk-up to convey messages or summon people to the community phone.
During the war there were none available so I was fourteen before we had a phone in our apartment; a party line, of course. With all these impediments I’m not so sure it wasn’t a better system than what we have today. Fewer digits to dial, friendlier operators to whom you might ask the meaning of life (on a dare) and phone booths where Clark Kent shed his merely mortal self.
Over the years we’ve witnessed one innovation after another from colored phones to match the bedspread to push-button to answering machines along with a monthly bill higher than our old rent.
Answering machines are a symbol of our age; a soliloquy addressing the elongated silence. First it’s just you and the beep. And now it’s your turn to grab the open mike without Interruption and say your piece, or burst into song, wax poetic or rant.
If you are calling a large company you are generally told how important your call is. This is what goes through my mind while on hold:
I’m glad you have a chance to get away from your desk. May I ask why you change your menu more often than my local deli? I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. No, I can’t call back between mid-night and three. You’ve put me on an elevator with your music. Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you have just opened up the wound. Is it my numb ear you are monitoring for quality assurance or my withered arm? Seasons have passed; my arm is in its foliage. I’ve finished the newspaper, the police blotter, weather reports in Asia and the obits. I’m almost mentioned. The grandchildren have grown. Life is slipping away. There’s no one left but that great operator in the sky and all humanity is on hold with faith that their call will be answered in the order received.
Instead, this could be an occasion for retreat and contemplation rather than reaction, a time to reconnect with a more elemental sense of who we are away from the buzz. Might it be that we are too connected and at some level crave the aloneness?
During the war there were none available so I was fourteen before we had a phone in our apartment; a party line, of course. With all these impediments I’m not so sure it wasn’t a better system than what we have today. Fewer digits to dial, friendlier operators to whom you might ask the meaning of life (on a dare) and phone booths where Clark Kent shed his merely mortal self.
Over the years we’ve witnessed one innovation after another from colored phones to match the bedspread to push-button to answering machines along with a monthly bill higher than our old rent.
Answering machines are a symbol of our age; a soliloquy addressing the elongated silence. First it’s just you and the beep. And now it’s your turn to grab the open mike without Interruption and say your piece, or burst into song, wax poetic or rant.
If you are calling a large company you are generally told how important your call is. This is what goes through my mind while on hold:
I’m glad you have a chance to get away from your desk. May I ask why you change your menu more often than my local deli? I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. No, I can’t call back between mid-night and three. You’ve put me on an elevator with your music. Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you have just opened up the wound. Is it my numb ear you are monitoring for quality assurance or my withered arm? Seasons have passed; my arm is in its foliage. I’ve finished the newspaper, the police blotter, weather reports in Asia and the obits. I’m almost mentioned. The grandchildren have grown. Life is slipping away. There’s no one left but that great operator in the sky and all humanity is on hold with faith that their call will be answered in the order received.
Instead, this could be an occasion for retreat and contemplation rather than reaction, a time to reconnect with a more elemental sense of who we are away from the buzz. Might it be that we are too connected and at some level crave the aloneness?
Friday, August 7, 2009
Money Enough
Money is sexy, it juices us. It represents security and makes the world go around or at least pays the fare and makes music jiggling. Or "It really doesn't matter," as my mother would say, "you should only have your health." I knew then that money was actually in first place....as long I wasn't sick.
Money means power and privilege to most people. It's the mother of all metaphors yet a taboo word for many poets. The object of derision for artists who live in garrets, wash at the Exxon station and dine at the Automat on hot water and ketchup. Some worship the almighty buck and others romanticize its absence.
For me, money is an abstraction until I spend it or don't have any. On the board game of life I'm sailing between Baltic and Mediterranean but docking at Marvin Gardens. The trench coat in the shadows trailing me for sixty years would be a rich man today if he had noted all my buyings and sellings ....and done the opposite.
It takes a special skill to have lived in Southern California for the second half of the twentieth century and not made any money. It's like being unable to find a restaurant in San Francisco.
I sell before the soufflé rises. A psychologist friend tells me I need to love money more. Regress me, then, to my days as milk monitor when everyone got cookies, coin or no. I'm with the queen eating bread and honey while the others are in the counting house playing with their money.
The teacher said to pay attention and my father, in kindergarten, heard it as ,"pay a pencil." When he found out he passed the good news along to me of what is free....pencils and all those other blues and greens. To make of life an art; and when you're spent to know the "voluptuous destitution" of having plenty of nothing; that place where we start and finish and in between it's enough to have just enough.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Geography 101
Psst....there's a map on your back. When my wife and I scratch each other's back we call out the location by states. Her itch is usually in South Dakota down to Nebraska and over as far as Illinois while mine tend to range from Kansas across to Kentucky. Just writing this has me reaching for my back-scratcher.
Strange the way our states are shaped. There's a story behind every border. The original colonies look the way they do as a result of squabbles between European royalty. Further west the lines seem penciled in by surveyors, sometimes without a good night's sleep.
Deleware, for example, was courted by both Maryland and Pennsylvania. Settled by the Protestant Dutch they resisted Papist Maryland and the Quakers of William Penn. In fact Maryland lost every dispute on its flanks.
Texas gave up land in four states to its north just to remain a slave state. Land grabs and grants and broken Indian treaties define much of the jigsaw we now take for granted.
I have known people who remind me of Utah or Colorado with margins rigid and absolute. There are times when order trumps folly and I'm glad we have such states. But I couldn't live with New Mexico or Wyoming for long. I can almost hear John Philip Souza's ump-pa-pa marching along their perpendiculars.
Give me New Jersey or Michigan which obey no ruler. They seem to be exploring themselves, stopping by for a drink or, like Florida, dribbling off for a nap.The swampy bottom of Louisiana seems shaped by an improvisation from South Basin Street. And just what does West Virginia think it is doing with Kentucky, in public yet while all the time Illinois is laughing into Missouri.
The Pacific Northwest is still a work-in-progress, P.C. green in my atlas as if those tiny islands might attach themselves by the next edition. Perhaps the coast has been bitten off and these are the indigestible chunks or the pieces of an argument that resist containment like an organism that won't hold still for a minute.
Strange the way our states are shaped. There's a story behind every border. The original colonies look the way they do as a result of squabbles between European royalty. Further west the lines seem penciled in by surveyors, sometimes without a good night's sleep.
Deleware, for example, was courted by both Maryland and Pennsylvania. Settled by the Protestant Dutch they resisted Papist Maryland and the Quakers of William Penn. In fact Maryland lost every dispute on its flanks.
Texas gave up land in four states to its north just to remain a slave state. Land grabs and grants and broken Indian treaties define much of the jigsaw we now take for granted.
I have known people who remind me of Utah or Colorado with margins rigid and absolute. There are times when order trumps folly and I'm glad we have such states. But I couldn't live with New Mexico or Wyoming for long. I can almost hear John Philip Souza's ump-pa-pa marching along their perpendiculars.
Give me New Jersey or Michigan which obey no ruler. They seem to be exploring themselves, stopping by for a drink or, like Florida, dribbling off for a nap.The swampy bottom of Louisiana seems shaped by an improvisation from South Basin Street. And just what does West Virginia think it is doing with Kentucky, in public yet while all the time Illinois is laughing into Missouri.
The Pacific Northwest is still a work-in-progress, P.C. green in my atlas as if those tiny islands might attach themselves by the next edition. Perhaps the coast has been bitten off and these are the indigestible chunks or the pieces of an argument that resist containment like an organism that won't hold still for a minute.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Unanswered Questions
There are certain Qs for which there may be no A. For instance, where do dead birds go? Or more importantly how did my collection of bumbblegum cards disappear? Or what happens to failed poets?
I shall tackle the third proposition since I am intimately acquainted with the species. in fact, I'm one of them. Some of them (us) are running workshops instructing others how to be one. There's nothing wrong with a nation of failed poets.
Most are unrecognizable having been absorbed into the hum-drum life. Perhaps that guy in the market who waters the lettuce is one or the checker who let me in the express lane with eleven items. Ordinary folks... of this world but not quite in it.
It needs to be said that by most measure's in our greed-driven society the term successful poet is an oxymoron. At best we put up with them as court jester or some nuisance on the far margins.
Before taking my place in line I generally let others speed through the checkstand in a happy stupor with bar codes beeping obediently. I prefer the queue that barely moves horizontally but offers vertical flight instead; where else but from my weekly fill of tabloids. A cursory glance at the headlines convinces me that I have located the sanctuary of failed poets.
If there isn't a story about inter-galactic visitations then it's another citing of JFK or Elvis or the nonagenarian child found frozen on the sunken Titanic.
I'd love to sit in on the meeting room of the fabulists, that garden of fecund minds where gossip grows wild and baby alligators are hatched into our plumbing. I knew I was on to something when I read about half a mermaid found in a tuna fish sandwich.
One less question to ponder; as for dead birds maybe the answer is in the tabloids.
I shall tackle the third proposition since I am intimately acquainted with the species. in fact, I'm one of them. Some of them (us) are running workshops instructing others how to be one. There's nothing wrong with a nation of failed poets.
Most are unrecognizable having been absorbed into the hum-drum life. Perhaps that guy in the market who waters the lettuce is one or the checker who let me in the express lane with eleven items. Ordinary folks... of this world but not quite in it.
It needs to be said that by most measure's in our greed-driven society the term successful poet is an oxymoron. At best we put up with them as court jester or some nuisance on the far margins.
Before taking my place in line I generally let others speed through the checkstand in a happy stupor with bar codes beeping obediently. I prefer the queue that barely moves horizontally but offers vertical flight instead; where else but from my weekly fill of tabloids. A cursory glance at the headlines convinces me that I have located the sanctuary of failed poets.
If there isn't a story about inter-galactic visitations then it's another citing of JFK or Elvis or the nonagenarian child found frozen on the sunken Titanic.
I'd love to sit in on the meeting room of the fabulists, that garden of fecund minds where gossip grows wild and baby alligators are hatched into our plumbing. I knew I was on to something when I read about half a mermaid found in a tuna fish sandwich.
One less question to ponder; as for dead birds maybe the answer is in the tabloids.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Counter-Intuitive
I can handle having an e-mail ignored but it's tough when your neighborhood hummingbirds reject your feeder. I was scrubbing it and replacing the sugar water when a friend remarked that all my attention to the tiny birds was counter-intuitive.
He explained that my red plastic flower look-alike was destorying the birds natural survival instincts. I was stopped in my tracks. One more time I did it all wrong.
As an urban creature I have long been two with Nature. I can't even recall being attached to stuffed animals. My idea of camping is to go to a motel and sleep with the windows open. I couldn't tell dog poop from bear droppings. But I digress.
The subject is counter-intuition. By "intuition" I mean common sense or a hunch; an opinion based on scraps of information often indistinguishable from a wish. The "counter" must therefore mean that which contradicts the gut feeling which itself could be oppositional to received wisdom. Already I'm getting a brain ache.
Thus with 4th down and inches the quarterback goes for the bomb. Ah ha,the element of surprise. The manager pulls his clean-up hitter and sends in the guy at the end of the bench to pinch hit. Maybe it's nothing more than the triumph of the unexpected; going by the seat of your pants rather than by statisical analysis.
In the case of the beloved hummingbird who works so hard just to stay still isn't my friend simply weighing in with new information? And all for the ultimate well-being of the fluttering wings. So why call it "counter" anything?
Maybe the counter-intuitive is yet another phrase to describe the innovator, one who sees around the corner; who picks up whiffs of tomorrow's news. The Swiss who had 80%of the watch market at one time lost it to the Japanese who took the transitor and ran with it. Five years ago we would have called that kind of vision,"intuitive" and let it go at that.
He explained that my red plastic flower look-alike was destorying the birds natural survival instincts. I was stopped in my tracks. One more time I did it all wrong.
As an urban creature I have long been two with Nature. I can't even recall being attached to stuffed animals. My idea of camping is to go to a motel and sleep with the windows open. I couldn't tell dog poop from bear droppings. But I digress.
The subject is counter-intuition. By "intuition" I mean common sense or a hunch; an opinion based on scraps of information often indistinguishable from a wish. The "counter" must therefore mean that which contradicts the gut feeling which itself could be oppositional to received wisdom. Already I'm getting a brain ache.
Thus with 4th down and inches the quarterback goes for the bomb. Ah ha,the element of surprise. The manager pulls his clean-up hitter and sends in the guy at the end of the bench to pinch hit. Maybe it's nothing more than the triumph of the unexpected; going by the seat of your pants rather than by statisical analysis.
In the case of the beloved hummingbird who works so hard just to stay still isn't my friend simply weighing in with new information? And all for the ultimate well-being of the fluttering wings. So why call it "counter" anything?
Maybe the counter-intuitive is yet another phrase to describe the innovator, one who sees around the corner; who picks up whiffs of tomorrow's news. The Swiss who had 80%of the watch market at one time lost it to the Japanese who took the transitor and ran with it. Five years ago we would have called that kind of vision,"intuitive" and let it go at that.
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