Category: No Name for It

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death back in April, 2000.. I miss him deeply and think of him daily.

Mercifully he died before the election that brought us the shameful presidency of George W. Bush.

I know what he would have said about most of this administration’s greed and crafted ineptitude. He would have said: "Well, don’t drag your ass in the sand." (Yes, a college president for Pete’s sake!)

I think today he would be very optimistic about the candidacy of Barack Obama. I pledge some optimism this morning in his memory.

He would be very optimistic about the Boston Red Sox.

S.K.

The price of milk is up 50 per cent over last year. But heck, who expected that the price of "mystery meat" would go through the roof? Accordingly school lunch programs will now feed children bread and water. I kid you not. See today’s Today Show online. A school lunch official says that they are switching to flour products.

This schoolroom diet will of course be a good preparation for "later life" in this haunted nation.

Last night here in Iowa a "hog containment" facility exploded. Officials are unsure what caused the accident. I’m no agriculture wonk, but I can spell "methane". I prefer to think of this story in Dickensian terms: the hogs simply combusted spontaneously, so terrible was their lot.

American Airlines is back in the air today. Passengers can buy micro-packets of pretzels for 10 bucks. Correct change required.

Off now to garner faith among imaginary flowers…

S.K.

If you do not post a post about your anniversary before your spouse you are, well, a louse. Of excuses I have none. Did I forget it was my anniversary? No. Did I think the matter unimportant? Decidedly not. Am I a low down, un-uxorious varmint? Decidedly.

Now what’s to be done? First, crawl ever so stealthily from the canine shanty and cook her breakfast.

It’s a good thing we’re still in love. Imagine the omelet otherwise.

S.K.

It’s raining in Paris but it’s not raining in my heart. Verlaine.

It’s raining in Iowa City, but it ain’t raining in my heart. Anselm Hollo.

It’s raining in my head and the heart feels it’s a little island in the infinite. Kuusisto/Lorca

Oh, and what kind of rain do you have in your head, sir?

Clavichord rain. Johan Sebastian Bach, early spring morning, lights coming on in the houses.

S.K.

Alright I don’t have much time. Hermes was the lame God. They found him in a tree.

He was the first God to be bruised by human imagination.

People have gotten better and better at this over time.

We really know how to kick the gods around.

We are eating pears and talking about Andromeda.

We try to imagine a vacation without too much pop music.

I speculate that no one can escape The Rolling Stones.

I slept in a Greek cemetery once and woke in the night

Because there was a disco nearby

And they were playing "Sympathy for the Devil".

I lay stretched across a tombstone on the island of Aegina

Listening to the impossibly adenoidal foice box of Mick Jagger

Who the Greeks in their hey day would have slaughtered for impersonating a goat.

"Oh Lordy, Lordy," I thought. "Can’t a lame god get any rest?"

S.K.

"Who do you want to be?" said the doctor. He was cleaning his glasses with the sleeve of his sport coat.

"I want to be a hydro-electric pump designer," said the little girl.

"Why don’t you show me how that works with your Barbie doll," Said the Doctor.

"Okay," said the little girl. "Watch."

She popped Barbie’s head off with a flick of her index finger.

"You must take Barbie’s head off quite often," said the doctor, "It looks like you’ve practiced."

"Barbie loses her head very easily," said the girl.

Then she took a Bic pen and poked a hole In Barbie’s left foot. Then she poked another one on the right foot.

She put the hollowed tube of the Bic pen into the top of Barbie’s neck.

"If you pour water into Barbie through the Bic," said the girl, "Then you can create downward pressure because water displaces the air and creates the conditions necessary for a vacuum, except the air needs to go somewhere so it heads for her feet.: but then you can control the displacement by opening and closing her foot holes."

The girl demonstrated by pressing her thumbs on Barbie’s feet. Water spurted out of the Bic pen atop Barbie’s neck in perfect accord.

"That’s why Sir Thomas Crapper called it a "foot valve"in the first place, "said the girl.

"You know, "she said, "You can’t make this kind of stuff up."

S.K.

A friend who is both a poet and essayist and who grew up in the southwestern desert regions of the United States once told me that When he was a kid he witnessed “first hand” an occurrence that the locals called “the parade of the tarantulas”—each year a single file line of big venomous spiders would walk down the main drag of town.

The line, according to my friend would stretch for miles. People would sit on folding chairs just to watch.

I was reminded of this yesterday while watching the so-called news channels. The Samantha Powers story was bringing both the spiders and the lawn chair lurkers right out into the open.

While Senators Clinton and Obama parade their followers down the street and the body politic and media bubble is caught up in the spectacle of hairy legs and fangs, no one is debating the real issues.

Does anyone care that 30 per cent of the nation’s honeybees have mysteriously disappeared and no one knows why?

As my friend

Lorraine

would say: “I’m just sayin’!”

S.K.

We at Planet of the Blind received the following e-mail from the
Society for Disability Studies. The post is by Professor Warren J.
Blumenfeld of the Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.  Since the
intersection of disability rights and all human rights is not far from
our thoughts I wanted to share Dr. Blumenfeld’s post with our readers.
We do so with his kind permission.

S.K.

In Memoriam: Lawrence King
By Warren J. Blumenfeld

Continue reading “In Memoriam: Lawrence King”

Talking of course. A friend called from New York City. Seems her mother is on a ventilator. Although she’s still conscious—"aware of what’s going on" etc., apparently the woman’s son—my friend’s brother—wants to pull the plug on Mom.

My cell phone was crackling. Our conversation was like old radio traffic far at sea. Somewhere out to the east there was a gibbous moon.

We must fight for every breath in this world. Who shall say the lives of others are inconvenient?

The brother was filled with what he called "ethics"—as in: "It’s terrible to see her this way. She’s probably suffering. She might not ever get better. Etc."

Like a million other Americans, "the brother" thinks life is simply about the absence of pain.

I tell my friend that I tend to side with conservative types around the issue of terminating human life.

But then again, I’m more consistent than conservatives because I oppose the death penalty.

I believe that Terry Shiavo was murdered.

I believe that Frank Zappa was right when he said America is turning into a "fascist theocracy".

I want to kick a badly manufactured thing: a tin lunch box with a picture of Mr. McGoo on the lid.

I want to roll through the day like a wheel on fire.

I realize that I need to stop talking for a time and read some poems by Pablo Neruda.

I went out into the sub-zero afternoon with my guide dog.

Nira, a yellow Labrador, who is only two years old, met her first goose just outside the University of Iowa’s student union.

The goose was eating pellets of salt from the sidewalk.

Students walked around the goose, ignoring it, talking to their friends on their cell phones.

People in this country are no longer living in the present tense.

S.K.