The Events of May

Mom’s birthday is next week. She was born 106 years ago. She was 88 when she died. She died on Fathers Day 2007.

My sister Betty was born in Jamestown, New York. I was born eleven years later in Kentucky. But the rest of the family came from Jamestown. We moved to Florida when I was 2 and that is where I grew up. We’d go to Jamestown to visit my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I spent a few summers at Chautauqua. Chautauqua County is a holy land for me.

Last year I went to Jamestown to meet up with my sister. I took a bus from Port Authority to Buffalo. It was a trip down memory interstates. My niece and her husband picked me up at the Greyhound station and we drove to the Weakland Chapel where my sister was. They had driven up from Alabama. Weakland is Mom’s maiden name and the chapel is named after her sister, whose name was Betty. The Betty Weakland Chapel. Their father was a minister and evangelist. Aunt Betty was a child evangelist. I come from a family of preachers. My sister Betty and I went to the cemetery on Mom’s birthday and looked at our parents’ graves and the grave nearby where my wife’s ashes are buried and where I will also be buried. The graves are on a hill and you can see Lake Chautauqua. It was the first time I saw our grave marker with my name on it under Lori’s.

Now Betty’s ashes are with her husband’s remains in North Carolina. The last time I saw her was on that trip last May. That was the tacit purpose of the trip, to see each other for the last time, and share memories and family history and tell our stories.

On the first of May this year I marched in a May Day parade to protest the policies of the Trump administration. I was with two members of our church.

On the Fourth of May of every year I remember Kent State. The events of May 1970 changed my idea of who I was and what our country is. I was 16 years old. Nixon announced he was expanding the war into Cambodia and students protested. Four of them were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State. It took a while for me to begin to comprehend all this. This crime coupled with the story of the My Lai Massacre. We went to a restaurant on Mother’s Day and I told my family— Mom and Dad and my sister — that I intended to resist the draft. I was making that decision at that moment as I was telling them and we argued about it.

That summer we took a vacation to Jamestown. On the 4th of July we watched them light the flares around the lake. They do this every year. You see the red dotted outline of the lake. Then there are fireworks. Uncle Dan told me he didn’t like fireworks because they reminded him of the war. He was wounded at Anzio. Now I know he had PTSD. He heard Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner on the the radio and didn’t like it, he said, but he understood it. Maybe the sonic fireworks bothered him. The Woodstock album had recently come out. The events of May 1970 were still being felt. We were processing it. After visiting our Jamestown family Mom and Dad and I drove to Toronto to consider it as a possible refuge should I become a refugee. Neil Young’s song Ohio was on the car radio.

In May of 1972, shortly after I registered for the draft, my sister and I and our cousin Cathy organized a peace march in West Palm Beach. We also participated in demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican conventions in Miami that summer.

Last May, as we drove around Chautauqua County looking for familiar places to stir our memories of our lives we told our stories. I don’t know if my stories meant anything to anyone but me. Last week I heard that the administration wants to call up 20,000 National Guard for its war on migrants. They haven’t been shooting student protesters yet, just denying them the rights for due process and deporting them and incarcerating them. But they haven’t started shooting, yet. The government has become lawless. Chaos incarnate sits in the Oval office.

My sister died in October. A few days later I had what they call A Big Dream. I dreamed we were all at the Weakland Chapel, about to go inside. A big crowd outside. Aunt Betty and my sister Betty look unhappy. I am carrying a microphone. The church is packed. I sit near the front and my sister is at the other end of the pew, very quiet and withdrawn. Her pocketbook and bags of stuff are on the seat between us. The congregation watches a film showing war scenes and civil unrest from the 20th century. I hold my microphone.

What will I say when I’m behind the pulpit?

Spring Skull Burst

 

Our slow steady slide

 We carry our phones with us. They are the one essential item for many of us. I know some people brag about not having a smartphone, as if they are roughing it in the urbs and suburbs like frontier people, with old fashioned wind up watches and rolled up newspapers tossed onto their lawns and televisions plugged into their walls and rotary dial phones on their desks and maybe carry one flip phone, maybe, as their one concession to the demands of the millennium.

But I carry my smartphone. I clock in to my job on my phone, when the ADP app works, and take a photo of the sunrise or yet another picture of the Statue of Liberty or a painting I just finished, and check news for updates on the empire’s slow but steady slide into chaos and oblivion.

The scandal of the week is the top secret planning for an apparently illegal act of war and the scandal isn’t that the President’s team circumvented Congress to bomb people in Yemen but that they used a relatively insecure commercial app and mistakenly invited a journalist. They compromised security by discussing a secret military operation on their smartphones and put our own pilots in danger.

The SecDef, a notorious DUI hire, complained about having to do something to secure shipping lanes for our “pathetic”, his word, European allies.

NATO is pretty much over, our former allies are beginning to suspect. Had any European asked any Native American if America could be trusted to honor a treaty they would have gotten an earful of laughter. Now we do what Putin wants, for some reason, for whatever reason Trump thinks is in his personal interest and for his personal profit. My guess is that he is in debt to Russian mobsters.

My Norwegian friend says she is leaving the USA because she no longer feels safe here. This surprised me but I can’t reassure her.

Maybe our technology will be taken over by an artificial intelligence that is wiser than us. Our robot friends will dream new goals for us.

Or maybe a pandemic of sanity will deliver us. and maybe we will organize a democracy movement and heal our republic.

You are tripping, you say.

What do I know? I’m just another wage slave with a smart phone.

Prime time

 

My bodymind has hands and the hands have fingers and the right hand has an index finger that touches the screen of an iPad to spell words and to coordinate with my eyes to hunt and peck for meanings.

My body was pulled out of my mother’s body seventy one years ago. 

I feed my body but I have to be smarter about what I eat. My doctor said to start with vegetables. I have to think about my bones and about my heart when I choose my food.

Last week I learned I have osteopenia. I need more calcium and vitamin D. 

My body gets tired at work. By midafternoon my body struggles to stay awake. I stand behind a cash register and close my eyes and catch myself before I fall. If I sit in the chair I will go to sleep. You are no spring chicken, a coworker reminds me, as if I have forgotten. 

My body gets up several times during the night to pass water. There is a brief conflict with my self over my body’s need to sleep and it’s need to urinate complicated by the need I learned as a child to not wet the bed. Sometimes I dream about the ocean or a flood and wake up needing to go to the bathroom. Other dreams are less obvious in their messaging. My nervous system produces dreams. I don’t know if it’s just random neural noise sometimes or if part of me is telling another part of me something. 

I dream I am arguing with my father, who died seventeen years ago, and I don’t know if I was really arguing with my self. Am I arguing with my self about fatherhood itself or about my own childhood? Am I arguing with the Heavenly Father? 

A long time ago my body impregnated another person’s body. Our bodies knew how to reproduce but our minds were stupid. We went to a clinic to terminate the process. A copy of the book Our Bodies Ourselves was on the table in the waiting room and I started reading it, hoping to become less stupid. I was so stupid I was a stranger to myself despite my selfishness. 

I don’t think I am the kind of person meant to be a father but I was slow to reach that conclusion. I finally fell in love with a woman who wasn’t meant to be a mother and learned something about what it means to be a husband. 

Every morning for the past ten years I get out of bed and carry my bodymind to the couch in my studio, I brew some Bustelo and pour a mug and meditate and pray to the creator spirit Mother/Father and my mind presents its confusion to itself. Am I talking to myself? Or God talking to Godself? 

I consider that just essential awareness and the self of the consciousness united are the Mother/Father and unconditioned condition of body/mind.

Or more neural noise.

A little more clarity, a little more courage or resolve, I ask. 

Then, then I drink the coffee and the day begins. 

At least 71 is a prime number, divisible only by one and by itself. 

I’m in my prime and this is prime time.

Waiting area

 Here I am again.

I don’t know why my doctor wanted me to to do this thing. There was a list of radiology places to choose from and I made a random choice and it wasn’t until this morning I realized it was where Lori came for treatments for several years and I always came with her and now I am sitting here again.

Walking into this building again was a lot scarier than walking into the 9/11 Memorial.

Almost ten years ago what a scary difficult day. Her last petscan and then the ER and a hospital bed and then two weeks hospice at home and then death.

I don’t want to write about that day.

I feel stressed out just sitting here waiting for some kind of scan for bone density maybe to determine the extent of my white fragility I jest.

Just how brittle is the skeleton inside me? My bones are rattling from the vibrations of rumbling machinery in the building. 

Here I am again, like a forgotten survivor of an ancient disaster left buried under a million tons of invisible rubble.

There are things I should do today involving Medicare and Medicaid and things I want to do involving art, but no I don’t want to do anything at all.

A couple of days ago I went with a friend to the cancer center at Bellevue. Rode with her in the Access A Ride and pushed her wheelchair and waited like I am waiting now while they monitored the progress of her stage 4 cancer. 

And here I am again in a waiting area.

Let me describe the setting. It looks like a standard waiting area in a typical medical facility and the other people here look like they are waiting for the ultimate bad news.

I’m only here for a routine test but 

what would I do if I got bad news and I could only expect to live a few months longer?

What would make me feel good?

What fun thing could I do?

I would buy a chain saw and fix every Tesla I could find until they shot me.

I will be able to see the results of the scan online tomorrow,

I will get a barbecue sandwich tonight. And ice cream.

I’m depressed but I’m not really worried about my bones. They feel like they must have the density of lead when I pick up my body and carry it home. 

the jury

 

Wake up!

Wake up!

What?

Wake up!

OK, I’m awake. Why are you waking me up?

Get up! Get out of bed! Go to work!

Where am I going?

This isn’t the time for questions. This is the time for action!

Ok Ok. What am I doing?

No questions! This isn’t the time for navel gazing. Get outside and go to work before it’s too late!

Let me get dressed!

No time! 

But I’m naked! 

No time! You shouldn’t sleep in the nude. You shouldn’t sleep at all! You should be watching and ready at your post! GO!

I’m outside. I’m naked. I don’t know where I am. The world changed overnight. Maybe — how long was I asleep? Hello? Who told me to wake up? Where are they now?

A sudden loud roar of an engine. I slip and fall face down on the icy concrete as a giant bulldozer rolls by nearly missing me. There are many more bulldozers nearby flattening people, cars, trees, houses, Flattening everything. There is no stopping them and I’m stuck to the pavement like a forgotten Kool Pop in back of a freezer.

I don’t know what happened. The Higher Power scraped me off the ground with a holy pancake turner and tossed me back into the reality of a J train headed to Broad Street and I went to work, of course.

The Statue still stands on her little island. Liberty Enlightening the World. Any day now the South African cybernazi or his little friend who sits at The Resolute Desk will have the Army Corps of Engineers move her to an underground cell on Riker’s Island and charged with disseminating DEI. Emma Lazarus’s poem will be declared a thought crime. A hardbound edition of the US Constitution is a popular item at our store and pilgrim tourists from all over the world buy copies. The Constitution is loaded with DEI, though, and will no longer be available. Ellis Island will also have to be shuttered.

Everyday the world gets stranger and more menacing. Bombs and bulldozers drive people from their homeland to make way for real estate schemes of condos and golf courses and casinos on the renamed American Strip. The decaying of the empire is well underway. America stinks.

Oligarchs and cybernazis crawling on the world like roaches on the kitchen floor. I have no tolerance left and wish I could pick up a broom and sweep them away. 

I am having difficulty tolerating anything. I’m on edge.

Today I had an altercation with a pigeon. The pigeons have been a problem at the store. They can get in through the doors of the cafe next door. The cafe can’t keep them all from getting through their doors. I saw a man on their staff chasing some out with a broom but he can’t stand guard all day. The store’s space is divided from the cafe’s by various display fixtures over which the pigeons fly back and forth. Lately a gang of them has been hanging out. They sit in their balcony seating along the shade of the lighting fixture. The spectators are backlit by flourescent lights dramatically casting a greenish glow on the ceiling behind them. Twelve silhouettes of seated pigeons were watching over us like a grand jury. They sit and wait and take turns raiding the cafe, flying over the merchandise displays to the bus trays and dropped crumbs and returning to the balcony. In the morning when we come in there is bird shit everywhere. So we were covering the books and boardgames and Junior Ranger hats and hoodies with plastic sheets. Finally someone from the gift store put up a decorative barrier that effectively kept the pigeons out until today when one walked in through a gap in the barricade, sauntering in and looking all entitled and shit like we are the intruders and I didn’t care for his attitude. I recognized him as the one we called Joe. He has two little white feathers sticking out of his head and seemed to be the gang leader. I uttered a profanity and we made hostile gestures at each other, me waving my hands and Joe flapping his wings, and diving toward my head and I was ready to grab a broom and take a swing at him and kill him. I wanted to kill Joe the pigeon. 

I’m sure I’d be in trouble with the National Park Service.

When Joe left his balcony and walked to the cafe for another pizza crumb run we covered the gap so he couldn’t come back.

The little jerk.

Memory of Time

I read about a mystical experience someone had on an underground train in London. The presence of Christ was suddenly revealed, according to this twentieth century mystic, among the many commuters, the ordinary and diverse people heading home after a days work, now seen to be the incarnate God, Christ living and dying, rejoicing and suffering, in each of them, the whole world on that train.

I didn’t know what to think about that vision. A nonChristian might not like being told that they are Christ or have Christ “in” them.

A Christian might not like being told that nonChristians have Christ in them. And people are confused about what the word “Christ” means. I’m confused about what the word “Christian” means, or if it means anything.

I never see the people on the J train as the incarnate God. Each of us has the Buddha nature, I guess. Maybe the potential for enlightenment is embedded in our DNA. OK, cool, I can dig it. But I can’t say I SEE it on the subway to work.

Workers of the world ride the train. The train crosses a bridge. On the other side of the river the train goes underground and the workers go to the various workplaces and clock in to perform alienated labor, and clock out to perform alienated recreation, clocking in and out until the end of their lives and the great summing up, the great all in all at the end of Time.

I don’t know if I can say this without an ironic tone but I want to have that vision of the messiah in every passenger, every one of these sleepy unhappy people struggling to make a living or to just get through the day and I want to understand their struggle as ultimately being messianic labor, even the struggle of those stretched out on the benches or those walking through the cars begging for money or ranting to the universe and to God.

Some friends were in town and were going to the September 11 Memorial and they invited me to join them at the museum. I hadn’t been to the museum. I was avoiding it because I was suspicious that there would be an element of the nationalistic mythology and propaganda inflicted upon us twenty three years ago as the government drummed up support for war against anybody, against everybody. Indoctrinated by a culture that can only imagine violence as a solution, some young people were susceptible to the war propaganda and the call to kill and die in a display of American Power that left the world and our country worse off and many brave soldiers and innocent civilians dead.

I didn’t need to be reminded of what happened on 9/11/2001. My memory of that never needs to be refreshed. But I wanted to see what people are being shown now, the official story, and how the events are being presented to people who weren’t there or weren’t even born.

My friends were late and I stood in the rain until they arrived and then we stood in the rain together in a long line that took us to a security check with metal detectors, the sort of security check I go through when I go to work, each of us considered to be a possible terrorist, if not a possible Christ.

Inside, we took a long escalator ride down into a crypt called Memorial Hall where unidentified remains are stored behind a big wall. The wall is covered with 2,983 squares of different shades of blue. They represent the 2,983 who died in 1993 WTC bombing as well as 9/11. The blue water color squares are attempts by an artist to remember the color of the sky that day. As you descend you also see a quote from Virgil, the poet who guided Dante in his trip through Hell. That line is displayed on the wall of blue sky patches in letters forged by another artist from steel recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center. The words are taken out of context from The Aeneid and their meaning repurposed for the memorial:

NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME

For a few weeks or days New Yorkers liked each other, one of my co-workers recalls. I remember. And America liked New York and the World liked America. Even Rudy Giuliani acted like a human for a few minutes, I remember.

Maybe its that sense of human community that we need to recover and remember, the kinds of community consciousness, the love for a neighborhood, that form in response to a disaster and emergency. The desire to do something to restore ordinary life. The desire to do something, and the need to do something, to donate blood and money, to help with recovery.

Any ordinary work day can suddenly become extraordinary, extra ordinary terror, or even joy, I imagine, and either way, terror or joy, your life can be changed, all lives changed, so that even in Lower Manhattan people are on the street, looking into each other’s eyes as if recognizing each other for the first time, and recognizing the city we love, as we witness the towers burning, something we had not imagined would be happening today.

I remember that and remembering that I can see that my fellow passengers in this world really are children of the creator spirit on a train bound for Golgotha or Glory.

Draw a line

 12/16/24

At last.

I make it to the free zone.

Eight and a half inches by eleven inches of liberated space where a Bic pen can say whatever it wants to say and show whatever it wants to show.

The soul can gallop over the surface of the paper like a wild horse in a meadow like a free spirit or a god and the only fences are those produced by imagination.

A line goes for a stroll and chooses a direction and maybe chooses a destination, a point to direct itself to, or maybe the line becomes errant and wanders pointlessly, carried by an unknown and indeterminate cause and one imagines it to be free.

Learn a rule and follow it and break the rule and create a new one and make a mistake and learn from it and make new rules and new mistakes.

 

A line goes for a stroll, drawn by a hand, following a rule or free

hand.

A ruler or template can be used and then set aside.

The line starts at a point. The point is located, selected, with the point of the pen applying ink at the the upper left corner, following English convention for writing, but then the pen is dragged down to make a vertical line about a half inch and then a quarter inch horizontal to the right and an acute angle, about forty five degrees, an irregular zig zag and so on, like lightning bolts, or a curve that curves back on itself, following along side of itself more or less parallel and then intersecting itself, crisscrossing itself, or flowing like a river or exploring like a root growing underground or telling a story of no interest to anybody about the pen’s travels on paper,  a map.Or draw a picture. A simple face of two dots and a line in a circle. Draw stick figures, simple pictures, to tell a story, or use the symbols of the alphabet or write it in a secret code. 

Why not use this language to say something meaningful instead of describing what I’m doing with a pen and paper? Why not use these free minutes to develop new symbols and signs?

Why not make remarkable marks that change the given symbol system in some way?

Draw a face that speaks like thunder with lightning bolts and lightning comes from the hand. Create lightning bolts that crack open the sky and blast into the ground. Create a line flowing like a river, flowing from an unknown source behind the hand and behind the face.

Make your mark in the invention of human language. Invent a new mode of signification and communication.

Why not singlehandedly expand and extend collective consciousness and unconscious experience? Collaborate with cosmogenesis and co-create a noosphere? Co-create a mind?

A mind wanders beyond the brain that holds it, beyond the body it is part of, and beyond the room in which the bodymind is sitting, beyond the city in which it resides, beyond America, beyond the world as it is and as it was, beyond whatever world it can imagine,  

A mind wanders within and beyond the material from which it emerges, newborn, screaming under electric lights and gasping for air. A new mind in motion, moving in electrical chemical events in a body in a physical environment, like tiny lightning bolts of neural signals interacting with the physical behavior of the life system it inhabits, organizing its environment, conceptualizing the sensations it receives.

Why not make an effort to do something no one has ever done before with a pen and paper?

Invent an alphabet.

Invent new words with this alphabet.

Write new stories with these words.

A wise one, maybe an unemployed wizard, even, follows a star, not knowing what the star is following or where the star came from, except that it came from the East, like all stars, from an unknown source beyond the horizon, and wanders to the West, to an unknown destination beyond the horizon, and leads the wise one here, bearing gifts to greet the arrival of a newly awakened mind in possession of infinite possibilities and facing the unimagined future.