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.