What we did and why

The last three days of classes
we ran up to the Union
and laughed at the students
who took as their token

Mirandas of waltzes and
turrets of tomes and
vaults full of vinegar and
words we forgot and

Then we slept soundly
and woke on our stomachs
and grumbled and grimaced
to fall clear of the ax

That aimed for the neck
and sliced off the head
when plenty of folks
studied instead.

2008

Turned

"He had lived without knowledge of himself."

-- Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel

--

I Google'd my name. The top ten hits:

- Wikipedia's disambiguation page
- Medical Intuitive home page: www.clairvoyantguide.com
- Reume and headshot page for "this stuntman specializing in the martial arts"
- MySpace page for the musician
- NCAA college tennis player
- A "Holistic Healer" profile--I think this is related to Medical Intuitive
- Football player's recruitment page
- "The Official Website of Author and Journalist..."
- A blurb about the Major League Baseball player
- An IMDB site devoted to...the actor.

--

I was given great food, delicious alcohol, and a copy of To the Actor by Michael Chekhov last night.

Old Woman Parts Crowd

I lunched at McDonald's on a whim and found myself at the end of a long line. This line became, as lines of hungry people do, more squiggly and chaotic in the span of about ten minutes. Twenty or so of us, young and old, townie and hippie and all, willed ourselves closer to the register, closer to filling our bellies with crap. Gobs and gobs of crap, shaped into fries, burgers, and soft drinks.

There were two fat women in front of me talking about slippers. They wore matching black outfits. They were blond. One was a little taller than the other.

They might have been sisters.

We inched forward.

Then came an old woman, who held her plastic tray and its gobs of crap up so high she looked like a little girl trying to hop onto a kitchen counter. She had been here before, and her eyes were happy.

We made way for her, happy eyes and all.

"Excuse me," she said, pushing her tray through the crowd, "I'm sorry, excuse me, excuse me, I'm so sorry, excuse me..."

One of the fat women said to her, "Don't ever be sorry for parting a crowd."

I liked that.

Farming

It was April and I was ready for spring. I was restless. School was getting on my nerves. I liked my teacher, but you can only take so much sitting in a classroom. I had forgotten all about the field trip Mrs. Sanford had planned. We were going to a farm, but this was not a modern farm. On this farm they used horses as they did over 100 years ago. Mrs. Sanford thought it would be good for us to learn about the old ways farmers once used.

-- “What I Found at the Farm," from a textbook I've been working on

--

It’s April and I am ready for spring. I am restless. School is getting on my nerves. I like my teacher, but you can only take so much sitting in a classroom. I had forgotten all about the big trip I had planned.

No farm. No horses. No Mrs. Sanford.

I did go to a school, but it was not a modern school. At this school they used methods as they did over 100 years ago. The professors thought it would be good for us to learn about the old ways people once used.

This is what I found at Hillsdale College.

Playbooks

"Eat a crocodile?"

-- Hamlet

--

About two years ago, the faculty of the Theatre Department emptied their shelves of books and plays they were willing (in some cases, more than willing) to give up. They put them onto a kind of "free shelf" in the glassed-in upstairs lounge of Sage, where they sit in tight stacks, mostly forgotten. There are ancient theatre journals and plays of all kinds.

I rediscovered them just this afternoon. No one was around. These were the titles I took:

- The Good Doctor, by Neil Simon
- The Sunshine Boys, by Neil Simon
- You Can't Take It With You, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
- The Yale Shakespeare Othello
- All My Sons, by Arthur Miller
- Rat in the Skull, by Ron Hutchinson
- Angel Street, a Victorian Thriller in Three Acts, by Patrick Hamilton
- Seven Famous Greek Plays (Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Alcestis, Medea, and the Frogs)
- The Knack, by Ann Jellicoe
- The Dining Room, by A. R. Gurney, Jr.
- The Lion in Winter, by James Goldman
- Arms and the Man, by Bernard Shaw
- The Oresteia, by Aeschylus

--

I wonder how many I'll actually read.

Dulce et decorum

Marina Vice, Swedish Erotica Featurettes 1, Rainwoman 3, Blow Job Betty, Afterhours, Frosty's Dad in Action, Lust Italian Style, Taboo 13, Teri Weigel: Centerfold, Fire and Ice, The Girl Next Door 1, Ackland Uses Clay

-- Titles of pornographic films by Patti Rhodes, a member of the Adult Video News Hall of Fame

--

The thought occurred to me today that the saying, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," might be inaccurate. It seems to me that being healthy, wealthy and wise would allow a man to go to bed early and give him a reason to get out of bed at all. But for the sick, the poor, and the stupid, the key is to stay up late and sleep until it feels better. The key to life is to avoid living it, to avoid being hurt while awake.

Small wonder that a vast sum of folks wish to die in their sleep.

I mean, we're not puppets, and I guess that's the idea. Puppets never worry about things like people do. Silly Pinnochio--why on earth would he desire to be like his maker? The maker's Maker made whales for people who tried to do that, and once kicked out heaven's best angel and earth's finest creation for being little Pinnochios to the Great Big Japetto.

But that's the funny thing, isn't it? That this Creator did something no other gods bothered to do before, and that was to worry about what he was doing and halt his vengeance.

Smart God. Good God.

--

Or something like that.

The flip side is that people--and Lucifer--bothered to do something that had never been done by a creation before, and that was to rebel and halt their obedience.

Dumb dogs. Bad dogs.

Hm.

Disappeared

"What can I say?
I got carried away...
...and not just by
balloo-oons."

-- The Wizard in Wicked!, by Stephen Schwartz

--

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/priest-vanishes-on-party-balloon-flight/20080422065509990001

--

My boss talked to the carpet guy again and they both referred to me as "the slow help." I heard them because they were standing very close to me when they said it. I am glad to be ending my employment here in two days. The carpet guy says it will take two weeks to replace the carpet in this office, and that if the existing carpet is stretched, the binding on the bottom will unlaminate (?) and will stretch an extra three inches. This moves the problem from the middle of the room to the corners, but it does not ensure the carpet will not relax back into place in a few months.

Strange, the idea of one's carpet slowly crawling beneath you.

--

I once read a book in which a little child, trying to comprehend death, calls the deceased "disappeared." "He got himself disappeared," I think is the phrase.

I hope that Brazilian priest gets himself found soon.

Ignorance

"Sin is ignorance."

-- Socrates

"Innocence is ignorance."

-- Kierkegaard

--

There are nineteen days until the end of the semester. No more semesters until the end of college. One degree to finish earning. Two papers, or forty pages. One repair that has to be made on my car's thermostat so that a gasket stops squirting antifreeze onto hot things and making smoke. Four things I have to accomplish as head of an honorary. Two work contracts to sign and mail. One rent check to pay. One bike to sell. One movie I may have to finish. One book I definitely have to finish. Three books I have to pretend to finish. Fifteen pairs of socks, ten pairs of underwear, about two dozen shirts and pants and shorts, and a few coats to pack. Several CDs to listen to, turn, burn, and maybe return. Who knows how many boogers to extract from my nostril walls. Many pens to lose. Nineteen breakfasts to make it to. Lots of piles of forgotten papers to throw away or maybe save.

And I don't want to. I don't even want to know about them.

Nineteen days.

Leaps

"The human race has outgrown Christianity."

-- Soren Kierkegaard, "Journals," June 19, 1852

--

After seeing "Rain," a philosophy major asked if I had read any Kierkegaard. I really haven't. But my curiosity is peaked now, and I just read the Wikipedia article on the great Dane.

The Pope is in this country and most people do not care. The Catholics believe the Pope is the closest one can get to God on earth.

I think I believe people is the closest people can get to God on earth. Other people. Loving needs an object. I think I am a Christian existentialist and a humanist at the same time, but I don't know yet.

--

"You died on a Saturday morning. And I had you placed here under our tree. And I had that house of your father's bulldozed to the ground. Momma always said dyin' was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn't. Little Forrest, he's doing just fine. About to start school again soon. I make his breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. I make sure he combs his hair and brushes his teeth every day. Teaching him how to play ping-pong. He's really good. We fish a lot. And every night, we read a book. He's so smart, Jenny. You'd be so proud of him. I am. He, uh, wrote a letter, and he says I can't read it. I'm not supposed to, so I'll just leave it here for you. Jenny, I don't know if Momma was right or if, if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time. I miss you, Jenny. If there's anything you need, I won't be far away. "

-- Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in "Forrest Gump"

Theme

Me--who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records--Bessie, bop, or Bach.

-- Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B"

--

After the performance last night, an old couple approached me. They figured I had directed the show on account of I had dressed up, and they wanted to let me know they liked what they had seen. They praised the acting like they knew what they were talking about. They said the show would make a good choice for a Bible study, that they would perhaps like to use the script and read it aloud with their group. I smiled like that was a good idea. I like that--several "goddamns," "shits," and "assholes," and one very important F-bomb, and they think it will be okay for a group of Christian adults sipping grape juice and sitting cross-legged on the newly-cleaned carpet of some squeaky, friendly couple.

(For what it's worth, I'd love for them to take the script and actually do it. I think a lot of Christians would be better people if they just broke down and swore from time to time. It's like farting--just get it out.)

"I was expecting the father at the end to blame the mother for letting their daughter go off with that boy," the woman said to me.

"Sure. You know, that's not really the point, though--"

"Oh, I know, I know. But that's what I would have expected from him."

I bade them good night.

Away

On came the kings, came at them,
Canaan's kings came at them,
by Taanak, on Megiddo's streams;
and much they made of it!
The very stars in heaven were fighting,
fighting Sisera from their spheres;
Kishon's torrent swept the foe off,
Kishon's torrent in their faces!
(Bless the Eternal's power, my soul!)

Then thudded hoofs of horses,
and the chargers thundered away.

-- Judges 6:19-22

--

The smoke under my hood is from an antifreeze leak; I smell it. One drop of antifreeze can mean a world of stink. It's like wearing a pillowcase on your head, that chamber liquid smell, the smell of worn skin or a windbreaker in the rain.

So instead of coming to see the show I've directed (shameless plug), my parents will be sending me the money they would have spent on gas. I am to take this money and have my car fixed. The antifreeze, see, has leaked into the oil via a broken gasket. The engine turns but the wheels do not. It does not start fully before it shudders into silence.

--

They will come for commencement, though, when as far as I'm concerned all the chargers can thunder away. No--that's not true. Not quite. I'll trade one besieging army for another, most likely.

--

I found a Vonnegut children's story called Sun Moon Star. I wonder sometimes how many children's books (movies, too) were made with the intent that no child would ever read it. That only adults would read it, accepting it as an immature work for immature minds, and finding that it has stabbed them in the back.

Universe

ONE -- Each person is important
TWO -- Be kind in all you do
THREE -- We're free to learn together
FOUR -- And search for what is true
FIVE -- All people need a vote
SIX -- Build a fair and peaceful world
SEVEN -- We care for Earth's lifeboat
That will bring us back to me and UU... (repeat)

-- Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association, children's version (sung to the tune of "Do Re Mi")

--

In the "Across the Universe" version of the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus," at one point crap singer Bono slips and sings, "I am a walrus!"

I have never felt the kind of alienated pride I felt today at the tech rehearsal for "Rain." It's the biggest artistic project I've ever attempted myself, this little snow-globe world of farmers in a drought.

Night

Blackbird, fly
Blackbird, fly
Into the light of a dark, black night

-- "Blackbird," The Beatles

--

Into the light of a dark, black night, we sat with our hands in our laps, and everyone's dresses were as nice as their masks. Into the light of a large, lit room, we walked with our stomachs grumbling, and the food was great. Into the light of Dionysus we danced...and the towers knelt while the muses twirled and rushed and let the fabric unfurl before my eyes while the snow danced with the tree fairies and the street fairies bought dope in the alleys with silver coins in the bottom of a plastic cup, the same cup I bought to save me, damn me, rave and clam me, pave and pummel and parade and slum me in my tie and suspenders snapping free in the hands of a drunk young man with a fresh cut and cutting eyes like spiders flying across the room like ships in a continuum of rolled sleeves and sweating skins and the Masons watched and smoked in the atrium like capitalists at a revolution:--

-- my final big party before the big plunge.

Saved

"Though Assassins is organized online and played in person, many students on campus, such as senior Christ Stewart, engage in strictly online games as a diversion throughout their day also."

-- http://media.www.hillsdalecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1270/news/2008/04/10/Focus/From-Campus.Assassinations.To.A.Game.Of.Scrabble-3316569.shtml

--

Watchful eyes await my return.

Walk

"Friday, Nov. 6th. Having completed the necessary preparations, I left Potosi at three o'clock, P.M., accompanied by Mr. Levi Pettibone, being both armed with guns, and clothed and equipped in the manner of the hunter, and leading a pack-horse, who carried our baggage, consisting of skins to cover us at night, some provisions, an axe, a few cooking utensils, etc. On walking out of the village of Potosi, on the south-west, we immediately commenced ascending a series of hills, which are the seat of the principal mines, winding along among pits, heaps of gravel, and spars, and other rubbish constantly accumulating at the mines, where scarcely ground enough has been left undisturbed for the safe passage of the traveller, who is constantly kept in peril by unseen excavations, and falling-in pits."

-- Henry Schoolcraft, "Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw, from Potosi, or Mine a Burton, in Missouri Territory, in a South-West Direction, toward the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1818 and 1819"

--

After breakfast, I drove to the publishing company. I always park across the street, in some vacant spaces around the corner from a dilapidated apartment complex. There are sometimes tricycles and Little Tike jungle-jims caked with small-town yuck in the little patches of grass near the parking lot. The sky is usually white.

I sat in the car, cold, tired, five minutes early. I took the time to breathe and think about tricycles. Then I watched an old man walk.

He was wearing all brown: pants, shoes, socks, jacket, Irish tweed cap. He had his hands in his pockets, not jammed against the air but slipped in like if they went too far down his wrists would crack. He moved his head but did not see me. He paced slowly, his form swaying like a tire swing, those hands in those pockets. It took him a minute to move ten feet. When he reached the corner of the building, he turned from the shoulders, smacked his lips to the world, and started swaying down the block, where he paused by a glass door, blinking. His beloved came downstairs, spry old lass, waved, and they walked down the block together.

--

I listened for half an hour as my boss's wife told me about her life. She told me about how every room in her parents' house was filled with light, except for two rooms, the dining room in the center of the house, and the kitchen on the south side, where the shadows were heavy. She told me about her mother and how her father won't get out of bed any more. She told me about her trip to England and the anniversary they spent in a castle and the smoked flayed salmon their hostess prepared that night. She told me about how curry burned her lips to numbness and how coconut milk and pineapple nursed them back. She told me how castles feel like barns at night.

--

Schoolcraft's "Journal" begins this way:

"I begin my tour where other travellers have ended theirs..."

Minute Men

“To see the borders and coastal boundaries of the United States secured against the unlawful and unauthorized entry
 of all individuals, contraband, and foreign military. We will employ all means of civil protest, demonstration, and political lobbying to accomplish this goal.”

-- Mission Statement of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (17,550,501 members to date)

--

Time passes and funny things happen to people and places. Texts appear, disappear, reappear. Like comes from like, and dust gathers unto dust, and wheels spin other wheels, and axes grind each other, and sparks fly everywhere, and plugs plug up people, and bigger books have bigger border wars for shelf space, and the states keep smiling at the children with eyes bigger than their mouths, and ink stains, and doors fall from jambs, and students purse their lips at professors’ smug shots, and the world is wrapped in cellophane like a great big manufactured good and evil—a ball of the Belleville bull weevil named Bill who kills the bulls.

That is to say…

Eve looked at the scorching sun’s tamale face in the cool blueberry water and said, “Wow. We will surely die.”

Poster

"This is madness."

-- Dr. Justin Jackson

--

The zany one-act poster is done. I've used four more colors per page than I prefer. Then again, there are four shows.

Today is flip-flop day.

Shorts

"It's not the way you think--it isn't that way, at all. Nobody wants it this way; nobody would ever let it be this way if it was humanly possible to change it."

-- Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations"

--

It's a big day. Shorts day. It's the first day of the year when I wear shorts outside. I'm wearing a sherbet-orange polo shirt, too. I look like the drumline douchebags who played tennis in high school and tried to steal girls from nerds. Never throw away a tie.

My cell phone withstood a full wash cycle this morning. Now it can't pick up my voice, and there is fog in the LED screen.

--

There are some historians who read The Wizard of Oz as an allegory of the Populist movement. Of the part where Dorothy falls asleep in a field of deadly poppies, these historians have written, "the poppies represent the issue of anti-imperialism," citing the British Opium Wars in China. (The Historian's Wizard of Oz, edited by Ranjit S. Dighe)

They also interpret the Stork that saves the Scarecrow from drowning as the woman suffrage movement.

Poor

"Only grown-up men are scared of women."

-- Kurt von Trapp, The Sound of Music

--

High school theatre is the best kind of poor theatre. And I mean "poor" in the way Grotowski meant it.

When you strip theatre (that magnificent beast) down to its essentials, you strip yourself. The director strips his demands, the actor his comfort, the audience its fickle pains. You have lights, you have watchers, and you have action. All else melts, crumbles, pops, falls over, or frankly, looks fake. The less you build, the less you tear down. The less you tear down, the more stuff lasts.

Maybe that's the reason the world is not better than it is. The Japanese, after all, believe a thing cannot be called beautiful unless it is sure to end.

Pluck

"He played a joke."

-- Peter Jancovic, guitarist

--

You gotta play your jokes.

Pickings

"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
For that which I was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring..."

-- Walt Whitman, "Shut not your doors"

--

I pick my fingernails. It's a bad habit. I do it anyway. It's better than smoking. (I do that sometimes anyway, too.)

I don't just settle for prying at my nails with the nails of my other hand. I bite. I gnash and gnaw. I scrape at pale cuticles until it hurts. Then I go at the knobby bumps on the inside pads of my thumbs, and the callous I've roughed into being on my right ring finger. The activity makes my hands sweat. When the yellow-green end of a nail surpasses the fingertip, I set my teeth to it, peeling it away like opening a bag of Sun Chips. Then I'm left with a fingernail that is sharp and flimsy, and I pluck away the excess until I have a smooth, honed tip. I don't know why I don't just clip them. Sometimes, I do.

I don't like the feeling of making a fist. That's not pacifism, it's just comfort. My nails never feel right, stabbing at my palms.

Trifle

"Three fingernails of the dead woman's right hand had been daubed with thick, gummy fingernail polish. There seemed to have been no effort to keep the polish on the nails because actually it nearly covered the entire tips of the fingers. I touched one pointed fingernail lightly. The polish still was a trifle sticky."

-- Richard Starnes, And When She Was Bad She Was Murdered, a pulp fiction novel from 1949

--

It is never a good idea to watch pornographic films in public.

Separatrix

Names for the slash "/":

oblique dash, diagonal, separatrix, virgule, scratch comma, slant

--Wikipedia

--

The slash, like all marks of punctuation, is both a link and sever for the words before and after it. It can mean "and" or "or." At the same time it admits difference, it reconciles.

Interesting that the word "slash" has similar duplicity: "He-slash-she" slashed "his-slash-her" tires.

--

I submit that no food makes its fans more particular about the way it is made and eaten than sushi.

Such a scratch comma of a food.

Consistency

"Other books may not be wrong, just different."

--J. K. Bollard, Preface to Webster's Instant Word Guide 1980

--

This publishing company is a sinking ship, and I'm a rat, scavenging. Today I nibbled on a guide to the new textbook, an Excel spreadsheet in imitation of other Michigan textbook companies, a lesson-by-lesson breakdown of how the textbook attacks certain subjects. It was a colorful meal, full of complex cross-references and standard formatting: frozen columns, stacks of colored bricks, fun with borders and boldface. Bon appetit.

It's one of my last meals I'll eat here. It's also one of the last meals they'll prepare here. Like I said, the ship's going down, like the Edmund Fitzgerald in chapter eight. "The legend lives on..."

The cook laughs on the phone, but he's dying inside. His father, the senile captain, sits in his quarters, licking envelopes, shuffling and reordering papers as if it mattered. Fifty years on the sea, and it all comes down to this: a slow, steady rising of the water, or a slow, steady sinking of a ship. Half full, half empty, he's going down.

And then I think: rats can only swim for so long. What happens when my ship starts to go down?

Scholarship

"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his... That said, I pity the man who can't enjoy Shakespeare."

-- George Bernhard Shaw, on Shakespeare's Cymbeline, the last act of which Shaw rewrote in 1938

--

I'm fighting senioritis. I turned in the rough draft of my research paper on Wicked. A week early.

The problem with staying on the ball is, your legs get tired fast. Here it is, "South Park" night, and I'm hitting the hay at 12:08AM.

--

because I laid me down, I slept
away the soul I might have kept,
so give me wine and give me bread
to make my soul come back instead.

Desire

"Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us."

-- L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

--

My world met bread martinis last night.

If only I could have stopped dreaming, maybe I could have gotten some sleep. As it was, I had a groggy morning and a silent shower. I went to a lesson I didn't have, I read a poem that wasn't there, and I loved a girl I didn't love. So be it.

Was it worth it, do you think?

For Long

Oedipus, eyeless, turns to Creon. "Take care of them," he says,
meaning his daughters. "Creon, take care of them."

-- Sophocles, Oedipus the King

--

Today, I logged an hour in the costume shop. With a seam ripper,
I plucked out ancient threads on a purple silk dress, removing the lace.
The fabric disintegrated on my fingers.

I asked Bryan how old he thought the dress was. He took the neck and
examined the stitch. "Turn of the century, I think," he said.

Once the lace was all plucked off, I turned to an old blouse,
one with coffee stains from Victorian England. I took off the hooks.
The seam ripper was a shark, with a bulging bubble of blood on the head,
zoning under the flaky silk in my sad hands. So it goes.

--

We will have class in a bar tonight.