What Do You Think I've Been Doing?

Watching clips from the RNC convention,
Reading blogs and online zines about El Trump,
Observing conservatives of conscience (and some without) squirm and all I can say is that it's like watching someone trying to thread a rock-salted pretzel through a needle.  Good luck with that, y'all, and
Gardening in the hot hot sun.  (Insert it's-in-her-DNA joke along with a stained-glass window.  I slipped in an inside New Haven reference.  Don't bother to figure it out; my eyes haven't stopped rolling about what passes for political outrage these days in this joint.)

I took a mini-vacation last week, rented an apartment south of Prospect Park, and did speed dating with friends, some of whom I haven't seen for years.  (Shortly after moving here I realized that I like very much to sleep in my own bed, and when I did go to New York for business I persisted in coming home no matter how late it was.  I kept making vague promises to friends about getting together and never keeping them in my rush to get to Grand Central.)  The time I spent there last week was fun, and I'd do it again but perhaps in the fall when it's not so likely I'll be boiled alive.  I don't miss New York, of that I'm certain.  I'm like Goldilocks here -- this is just right.  But Gawd do I miss the street theater.  An example (to which I can't do justice):

I'm standing on the Manhattan-bound platform at the aboveground Parkside station.  Across the way on the Coney Island bound platform is a flock of city kids, summer day campers all wearing the same bright t-shirts, shorts and sneakers.  On my side are 3 young men.  Something about them says tourist, Eastern European variety at that.  (Don't ask me how I know.  If El Trump can recognize Mexican rapists from the Upper East Side, I can spot European tourists five feet to the right of me.)  They are weaving as if, at 11 in the morning in the godforsaken heat, they've been drinking.  The oldest of the 3 is brandishing a camera and wants to take a picture of the middle school blackbirds.  He has the kids' attention, they are happy to pose.  After all he is several train tracks away, waving his camera, not giving them the finger.  So they oblige him, posing as kids do, and he takes the shot.  Then he points one of his younger partners.  "Dis is Justin Timberlake brudder.  Jus-tin Timber-lake brudder!"  Am I the only one on the platform besides Tae Three Stooges who finds this hilariously funny?  The kids don't.  Thankfully our train comes and the kids are spared even more inanity and I get on grateful grateful grateful for the cool air and a seat.  But don't you know 1/3 of this stand-up act sidles over and leans into the young man next to me and asks:  Vat is the name of the building that King Kong climb?  And he is serious, standing there waiting for the answer.  Jeopardy for 100 points!  What is the Empire State Building?  Boy, I really miss all the gratuitous craziness that New York serves on a platter.

And speaking of gratuitous craziness how about the Republican nominee for President of these United States, eh?  I have spent more time than I care to admit scouring the web for stories about all of it.  (It's avoidance I realize, and I know exactly what I'm avoiding -- death and taxes -- but it's been fun.)  I found this comment in response to a post, "Kirchick's Coup Fantasies"  in The American Conservative by Noah Millman,and it comes as close as anything I've read as a rebuke to those who persist in promulgating false equivalencies when comparing Trump and Clinton -- and yes I mean you, intransient Berners -- and those who rationalize that a vainglorious and vulgar id-iot with narrow executive, and no political experience can govern the world's most powerful nation-state is qualified enough:

demz taters says:

July 22, 2016 at 9:48 pm

The idea that Hillary doesn’t adhere to political norms is a fallacy. She is the consummate American political animal – hawkish, cozy with the monied class, requisite fealty to Israel, and well acquainted with the art of the back room deal – just like EVERY OTHER politician who’s occupied the Oval Office for the past 50 years (including the Bush admin, which did most of its work on RNC servers). She is, in other words, the truly conservative choice. You may not like her policies but she is not a destroyer of institutions or a dangerous rabble-rouser. Life under Hillary will continue pretty much as it has, stable, more or less predictable – and a little more generous for the have-nots. Trump, on the other hand, is a dangerous radical who seeks to destabilize American institutions and replace them with … what? He is short on details other than promising to punish whole classes of people who have been deemed insufficiently “American” in the rightwing media universe; to rewrite treaties, agreements and alliances that have contributed to an unprecedented, sustained era of relative global peace; and to make the world stop “laughing at us” which is a truly an unhinged and paranoid point of view. If you can’t recognize which is a greater threat to American stability, I feel for you because to people who understand both history and human nature, there aren’t enough facepalms in the world to adequately respond to those who think Trump is going to save the Republic.

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch ....

Believe me when I tell you that I had all good intentions to check in last Saturday -- the holiday be damned -- now that I am posting again.  But, as we all know what the Road to Hell is paved with, yes?

The truth is I was asleep.  For like 20 hours a day.  In the midst of a weekend visit by friends I got sick.  It was, mirabile dictu, a virulent response to something that's blooming, sailing through the air,or  being shat in my yard by birds or feral cats.  Being the logical type I tried to figure out, with the help of Cuthbert who got his Ph.D. in the Science of Mind from the Matchbook University of the Greater Palo Alto Community School District, why this had happen a moi after a decade or more of being seasonal allergy free.  Seasons come, seasons go, my sleep pattern alters a bit, and life goes on.  I just thought Claritan commercials were weird, that's how much I paid attention.

So, we said, what has changed?  Cuthbert grew a lawn in the back this year.  Would new grass be any different than that knarly crab grass that we lived with (because it went to so well with this knarly house)?  Don't think so.  Our retired neighbor is single-handedly trying to raise homeowner's property values on our little block and is on a one-man weed whacker crusade.  His rule of thumb is:  if it's higher than 2" and closer to the curb than 3" it's coming down.  So, many a morning while I'm watering the garden he's out there giving the block's weeds a haircut.  I put that in the maybe column.  What about the front yard, which now that it's beautiful with a profusion of flowering whatevahs my neighbors' opinion of me has gone from (in Spanish and English) "that weird woman with a white husband" to "that weird woman with a white husband who can grow some purty flowers", was it causing this malady?  I didn't want to blame my yard which gives me no end of pleasure and since I'm already a member in good standing of the I'll-Suffer-For-My-Art Corp, if it turns out that my front yard is making me sick, well I'll go.  It stays.

By the time we figured out that we didn't have it figured out I was quaffing a solution of sassafras and other herbs brewed by my friend who not only likes to cook but is a herbalist by avocation.  I'd drink, blink and go back to bed.  Everyone carried on very well without me, going ahead with the day after block picnic (which I joined for a while), cooking, sleeping, and putting a mirror to my lips to see if I was still breathing.

I didn't feel particularly bad -- no fever, not much phlegm, no nausea or vomiting -- I was just so very very tired and my brain had been replaced by a gigantic sinus cavity.  I still can't smell; I can just barely taste.  (It's probably sense memory and nothing more.)  That's not necessarily a bad thing since it means I eat a lot less.  I can't complete a sentence without coughing up a lung and since I am always on the verge of or well into a headache, when I'm out in public I looked like I'd just as soon kill you as talk to you.  (This is often true even when I'm not sick.)

Cuthbert thinks I had, have a mild infection.  Old Indestructible Moi thought that was nonsense until 2 days ago when he started to exhibit the same symptoms, too.  Fatigue, empty-headedness, and in his case, skeletal aches and pains.  Last night, feeling incrementally livelier than I had in days, I stayed up late ironing and watching the original Wallender (in Swedish).   (When I'm in slo-mo reading subtitles is soothing.)  I had already stood over him in the bedroom (well before dusk) and told him I was sleeping elsewhere.  It was obvious he was sick and was probably going to wind up on both sides of the bed and what the hell?, if what we have are infections why would I return to the scene of the crime?

Although this house is small, it does have an extra room.  (I've slept in a convent with larger sleeping quarters.)  I didn't even bother to move the linen I'd been piling on the bed for weeks; I just weaseled my way under the covers with aspirin and water within reach and went to sleep.  I woke up knowing I was getting better.  Parts of my brain had re-occupied my skull and I could breath through 2 nostrils and my mouth!  Not much, but I'll take it.  My hope is to have enough energy and will to houseclean today.  The place looks manky, and I can only imagine that it smells worse.  We'll see ...

Thus ends this installment of How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

A Letter to My Faithful Readers

... and to the porn sites which account for 90% of my traffic.  It has been 3 months and change since I last posted.  I stopped blogging for practical reasons:  my life was organized around the care of a dying friend.  I had no desire to write about "it" then, and I am reluctant to write about it now.  The irony is that many of us (in my generation) sculpted ourselves into fiction writers by confessing, mining the travails of our own lives and convincing ourselves that it represented the anxieties of the age.  Had I that need still there would be plenty of entries here, but I don't so there aren't.

It's spring.  Like many in the northeast I had my doubts that it would ever arrive.  I've been awarded for my patience with a front yard that is filling out with strawberries, echinacea, hydrangeas, day lilies, ferns, daisies, oxalis, clover, mint, sage and more than a few spectacular flowering weeds.  During the winter I would sit in my dining room willing the plants into existence, wondering if last year's volunteer squash would take over by late summer, imagining what color the hydrangea blossoms would be.  Now I happily bury the stools of the feral cats that use our yard as their litter box, pull and slice the roots off of weeds so that they can be composted.  And think.

I've been dreaming lately.  A few nights ago I had one where I was practically stalking the Math department's advisor to figure out what my next class should be.  (You don't have to go to far back into last fall's entries the discern the magnitude of my bitchin' and moanin' about how hard my coursework is.)  Nobody in my family believes that I will or should return to school.  (I didn't enroll the spring semester.)  That, too, is an old story.  But, I have spent a lot of time with people who have been delimited by physical illness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  One of the enduring effects of any of those conditions is the the lowering of expectations.  Of being defined by what one can't do as opposed to what one can.  And once you've bought that definition of yourself, you've taken over the maintenance of your oppression.  Then it's game, set, match for the oppressor.  Math is my instrument; public school students and adult learners are my audience.  To have the math to work with them I have to do more coursework.  It's as simple as that.

And last night I dreamed that I was in prison, but mysteriously released on furlough.  I spent it at a bar with a friend talking and drinking coffee, surrounded by totebags of paperwork and clothing.  I knew that I had to return to prison.  My friend, who had been imprisoned but was now paroled left to catch the subway.  I packed my bags, and then at the last minute decided I wasn't going back.  Fuck it, I said to myself, I'm an old lady.  Whadda they going to do to me?

Which is the attitude I've been taking now that I'm bike riding again, occasionally without a helmet after a (clears throat) 40 year interregnum.  Cuthbert and even strangers counsel me to do otherwise.  Of course they're right.  I know all too well what can happen and godknows this city has more than its share of reckless and unlicensed drivers.  But, oh freedom, and all of that.  It feels so good to fly down the street and split the air.

Perhaps these latest dreams about about the poles of Freedom and Obligation.  And the dance between the two as I enter my 60th year.  Don't know; may never know.  The sun's up; weeds await me.
 

We Ourselves

Will you believe me when I say that I've been meaning to "drop by"?  That ever since we returned from Husband No. 1's motherland on August 30th (via Boston, no less) that I've meant to "get over there" and "share my slides"?  So, may I be excused as I pick up twigs, branches and the rest of the post-Irene flotsam, detox from a steady diet of pork and potatoes, open my mail and cuss copiously because I forgot to pay the one bill that racks up a 19% interest rate not to mention a finance charge.  Well, my friend BS didn't and she called me on my BS the other day and said, "you told us you were going and now you have to tell us what happened."

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I had a good time.  The end.

There.  Checked off The List.  It's Saturday.  At minimum I owe you a poem.  (I've got an inexhaustible supply, trust me.)  I'll post a poem next.  But, I swear I will share Eyelerland (Neice No. 1's pronounciation) stories.