Keeping a Resolution I Swore I Wouldn't Make

Judging from the grades I make in my math classes I'm not particularly good at Logic.  Common sense I think I've got in abundance, but that other stuff (flutter of hands, rueful face...)  You see, we went to visit some friends in Poughkeepsie this weekend past.  It was combination housewarming and observance of the death of a guru, complete with meditation and a shrine and communion.

I have what I'll delicately called a perverse relationship to the spiritual arts -- I avoid them.  In posts past I confessed to years ago in Brooklyn having a yoga teacher who loved me despite the fact that I Hate Yoga.  Hate.  It.  And yeah, don't tell me it's good for me.  I know that.  What with this colossally shortened hamstring I'm sporting these days I can barely get down a flight of stairs, but you'd have to put a gun to my head to do anything about it except a few stretches and making Cuthbert drive me everywhere.  But, as I've often written, I digress.  (Embarrassment will do make you do that.)  Anyway, Dear Reader, you'd be proud of me, I meditated.  Really.  I felt things I ordinarily would not have which while not always pleasant was interesting.  All good.  We drove to the hotel to sleep.  Just before climbing into bed I ate a few apricots.

And that's where my troubles began.  I woke up the following morning with a food processor dicing chicken bones in my gut.  Not enough to deter me from eating breakfast, mind you, but enough to know that I'd better get home.  So we called our friends just to say "so long and thanks for all the hospitality" and got invited over for tea.  About 1/2 hour after arriving at their home I was pleading to lie down.  I slept and slept and slept.  Awoke, drank some herbal medicine, rattled around a bit, slept some more on the couch and then shuffled through the apartment to throw up in the toilet bowl.  Spent an extra night in Poughkeepsie in case of encore.

Here's where the un-logic comes in:  Meditation = puking your guts up.  Oh oh.

Since Sunday I've barely eaten, mostly out of fear of which end and at what velocity will the food come out.  And slept of course.  I'm sticking to bland food and juice until then.  Usually when I'm as stressed out as I am these days I'll eat anything.  Just put a piece of wet sheetrock on a plate in front of me, and it's gone.  No problem at all.  But these days I'm giving food the side eye.  Which is fine since I dropped a couple pounds that I sure don't need.  Whether I'll continue when my stress = binge eating gene reactivates is unlikely, but for now it'll do.

All this to say that I am all kinds of tired.  And the great David Carr has died.  Namaste.

25 December 2014

So many things going on.  So much on my mind.  And like almost everything else I'm responsible for these days, I lose track of it, i.e., my thoughts, in a matter of minutes.  Oh.  Well.  Merry Christmas to those for whom it still matters.  I've been up since 2:30 this morning, a consequence of a changed schedule (the university is closed through New Year's) and too much contact with other human beings.  This is what happens to introverts when their social quota is exceeded.

Anyway, here's what I find interesting:

1.  It would be a good idea, at least in these United States, to put a moratorium on receiving gifts by the age of 40.  That way, you have (hopefully) a couple of decades and change to give them away and you don't have to rush.  I've owned (and lost) more than I either need or want for a long, long time.  Lately I walk around with a mental Post-It tagging who should get what.  The sentimental items are the hardest.  I don't want my family to be asking each other why I saved one pecan in my mementos box.  (A love story.)  They can understand the Jesse Jackson for President 1988 button, and I expect them to get a good price for it on e-Bay.  But, some of the other stuff, all they'll say before they throw things in the dumpster is:  what was she thinking?  So, to spare my feelings after death and to spare my family work they won't want to do anyway, I often wish that I had fewer things to decide what to do with.  In our family we've gone the quick and dirty route before (see Annals of Marriage, 2009:  Cuthbert Burns Down the House Because He Didn't Want to Clean the Bathrooms).  But, you can't do that too often.  Anyway, file this under First World Problems.

2.  Ray and Janay Price.  I finally get it, after reading about the longer version of the Killa-from-Manila tape.  Those two met when what, they were 15?  They complete each other; two halves who make a whole.

3.  Today is quiet.  Eventually my niece and her mother will come over to exchange gifts and eat.  The grown kids are doing their thing(s).  The brothers, theirs.  We'll all see each other when we see each others.  A few phone calls to friends and family far and wide.  I wonder when time management self-help books are written if anyone thinks to advise one that if you just omit Christmas you probably gain about 24 more hours in the year.  No shopping.  No card writing.  No travelling.  Plus, real life stresses me out enough; I'm old enough (and wise enough) not to add this kind of artificial stress.  I got deracinated of Christmas slowly over the years.  Part of it was estrangement from my parents (so going home was not an unalloyed joy) and much of it was poverty.  Once you decide that you can't keep up with the Jones' -- could barely keep up with myself -- some of us just let go.  If that doesn't work move into an orthodox Jewish neighborhood.  Christmas, what Christmas?

4.  Still enjoying my work enormously.  Complex, diverse, challenging and creative.  This upcoming semester will be a test of whether I can manage it and another math course.  In preparation I made sure I have a very very short haircut so that when my hair starts to fall out from stress alopecia the contrast won't be so severe.  You can't say I don't plan ahead!

5.  Don't mistake the absence of any remarks about Mike Brown or Eric Garner or Tamir Rice for a lack of interest.  (After all, I started this blog because I was incandescently angry about the controversy over the "Ground Zero" mosque.)  But, for now I work on the margins of resistance to violence, and if ever I can say something comprehensive about it, I will.  This I will say:  It's the first sixth of the 21st century and here in the US of A we have to articulate that Black Lives Matter.  For me, and many of those my age, that reveals a stunning loss of ground.

When I first envisioned writing this post, it was a lot more interesting and free-rangy.  But not wanting to make the perfect the enemy of the good, I said to myself, get something out because you never know when you'll be back here.  (This blog is like a seldom visited room in my house.  I scarcely know what's in here.)

Ciao, bella.  See you when I see you.

If I'd Wanted Heat I Would-A Moved to Myrtle Beach

It is August the 5th and I'm sitting here in my sweatshirt.  Now, this is the kind of summer I'm talkin' about!  I can wear shoes without fainting, and my head has ceased to be one big sinus cavity and now I can think about something else besides pining for last winter's snow apocalypse.  I'll be honest and repetitive -- I detest hot weather.  A few weeks ago I was working out stunned by the amount of sweat pouring down my face.  I knew it wasn't because I'd loaded up more weights; it was simply the ambient atmosphere.  Were I living 150 years ago in Myrtle Beach™ instead of strength-training scientifically I'd probably be horseshoed over picking cotton.  Or not, because by my age I'd be dead dead dead.  I don't have the imagination (or the stomach) to think what life was like then.  I only have the gratitude for living now in an era where my biggest problem is a slow DSL connection on rainy days.

My father was one of nine siblings.  We went down to celebrate the 80th birthday of the last remaining child of Bessie and George.  Otherwise funerals were our only family reunions.  My parents were from Georgetown, SC (as is probably 1/5 of the African-American population in this town), and I lived there with my beloved maternal grandmother, Mamie, for a minute between bouts of staggering depression.  My memories are punctuated by gaps of four years, the intervals between visits.  That's not enough time to know a place, but it is enough to have disorganized and unsorted images that may or may not make sense.  When I moved there at 19 the experience of Georgetown was different.  I was different -- a difficult, tactiturn college dropout from up north.  A child only a grandmother could love; to the others I was either a curiosity, an object of pity or incontrovertible evidence of the gods' rebuke of my parent's ambitions.

Back then, the early 1970's, the place was real.  The social order of centuries was just barely giving way.  My grandmother and her contemporaries were still alive radiating a quiet pride in what they'd accomplished under apartheid -- beautiful well-kept homes, good livings, children who went to college.  The small downtown was still a real downtown, not the theme park for bored golfers, foodies and boaters it has since become.  Georgetown and its environs stank when the paper mill operated.  It was awful -- an almost hostile amalgamation of farts, cornered skunk and sulphur.  There was a synagogue 2 blocks down the street from home.  (I had walked by that building dozens of times, but only realized what it was the last time I was there for my mother's funeral.  After I'd read some about the history of Jews in the American South only then could I see evidence of their presence.)  And undisguised poverty.

And now, with most of the older generation dead and the strip malling, well, there's very little there there for me.  I don't mind so much; my attachments were the people, not the homes.  But still, it's become harder to distinguish Georgetown from suburban Connecticut.  Dunkin Donuts.  Walmart.  AutoZone.  Starbucks.  Sprint.  And Myrtle Beach?  The arable land, the wealth of the Confederacy turned into golf courses and town houses and Columbia, MD-like new communities sprung whole from the real estate developer's mind.

So I visited my Aunt Johanna, she the last of the Pawley's Island Browns.  And we took Lilli to the Holy Cross Faith Memorial Episcopal Church graveyard where my mother and her kin are buried (and where my mother would not recognize the church building or the congregation that now worships there).  And frolicked in the ocean for a day and shared the beach with the new south.

Saturday Poetry: Friday He Retired

from "Turn Left at the Dead Dog":

Monday Frank wore his good luck plaid.

Tuesday he cried.

Wednesday the doctors said

Thursday they’d try.

Friday he retired.

Saturday she died.