I also went out to eat Saturday by myself, which was not the plan. Yet, I am guessing good things are meant to be excrutiatingly slow and measured sometimes, although I cannot tell myself enough that my right of decision is my own, as is my ability to allow feeling to be exhibited over it all or not to allow the same to be put out there.  I often think that only during grocery shopping does my chances of getting what I want the way I want it average higher than 80%,  Beyond that, there is always this thing about being subject to the whims of others and not really thinking that is healthy, no matter if it is natural.  This is why I have been on my own for so, so long.  I used to worry about how I would not be much good to others because of personal problems I used to let control me.  Not anymore.

Unless I hear from family or work that needs something from me, there are no reasons for me to be thinking of contingencies.  I can operate freely and am subject only to the amount of money in my pocket or dates to gain said money.  Everything else is ephemeral.  You like being around me?  Great.  You find me nice?  You don't know the whole of it.  On the other hand, I don't make it easy because I don't like getting tooled.  It will be a long sweltering day free of ice water before I let anyone keep me on a coat rack.  I am unwilling to give myself up for adoption.

Of course, I threw them out long ago.  The checks.  The writing is nearly in the same pile, but just nearly.  Since the last time I had written, I ended a terrible experience at my regular college in which suicide was on my mind a lot during those days.  I cannot recall ever having such an urge to just forget trying to fight uphill against the matrices of human desires owned by myself and others who purported to hold authority over me.  I say "purport" because it either is, or it isn't.  I either recognize it, or I do not.  I am a good soldier and will go to the wall for most anyone except those who are corrupt or detrimental to my daily hunting and gathering.  Sadly, but with a fond invigoration, I recalled that there are enough dishonest people out there who will insist upon finding out about my mettle time and time again.  They keep me grounded and realizing that I must stay in shape mentally and physically in order to overcome their lack of jurisprudence and self-propriety.  In the end, they will fall away like the window dressings that flimsly shield their selfishness and misanthropy.   Much has been done and the book's not yet at the publisher.

Another worthwhile experience was the learning of a foreign language.  As much as I was thrilled to be visually capable of doing some translation, I was saddened that I could not yet become verbally competent.  The course was far too intensive for me to take on, I realize.  Yet, this was not a mistake and was by and large a blessing that I was able to turn into one of the most positive experiences that I can recall having had in quite some time.  There was a great amount of comfort in knowing that some of the smartest minds in this country need to still learn a few things about living life and that I was counselling them and trying to set the examples I only wished I could have had growing up.  More and more, I feel humbled by coming into contact with people who manifest personality flaws in degrees that I too found myself exhibiting and trying to cauterize with firery liquids. 

Despite the overwhelming amounts of stress and road burn from dealing with so many people and their bags and bags of turmoil, I stayed sober and driven.  I get to now rely upon experience as a guide instead of just brute force.  Still, I felt my endurance hit an all time extended pothole last year and it was as dehibilitating mentally as it was physically.  Luckily, the pain from the most recent surgery finally went away and I can work out again.  It feels good, but I have lost a a lot of strength.  My approach from here on is just to add armor and to stave off atrophy. 

God bless Henry Rollins, but I do not need to get that crazy.  That old man still has it and is still punishing himself in the gym simply so he can do the best job he can when giving concerts.  How you can't admire his reasoning is ludicrous.  Still, he is a lonely fellow and mostly by choice.  I relate to that.  The seeking of intimacy and the revealing of the same was not something that was taught or shown to me growing up.  That was a luxury that has passed me by and is now only available mostly with me in the role of an inadequately prepared teacher, or a student who is to be listening to the sage words of those who have spent the better part of their lives getting it wrong themselves.  I sincerely doubt that the middle ground that contains mutual deep respect for one another as human beings with as much value to the other as they show toward his or herself exists.  On my end, I am doubting whether I could muster it, so how could I ever expect someone else to have it? I have often heard the cliche, of "growing old and alone" as being bad.  I really don't have too much of a problem with it.  Can I handle having my colostomy bag filled with blood and having a nurse ignore me for hours on end while my mind is already gone, as had occurred with my grandfather?  Who cares!  I am not my own problem anymore.  Society will be boxing me up and I really don't care if it is the greater or the more exclusive paring down of it.  I will just be a number and a bedpan to clean by then, so ha.  I get the last laugh on my way out the door. 

In the meantime, I will do my part in helping out others so they might make good on their destinies.  I have been lucky, really lucky to have made it this far, and though I know some reading this will not think I am very grateful, I am.  I just don't have the layers of onion-skinned chipperness to hold up as a shield anymore.  The self has risen and I think it's right where it needs to be at this place in time, honestly, or otherwise. 

Hi,

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America is an organization and resource network that I was just made aware of.  They seem to have networking capability for veterans who are having trouble making the transition back to civilian life.  It also seems to have resources to help guide those of us who have these vets in our family or set of friends.   There also seems to be a social networking site, but I have not checked into that quite yet.  Here are two of the websites that should get you in the know:

 http://iava.org/

 http://supportyourvet.org/.

 Please pass this info along if you know someone in need and save it incase you run across someone who is.  From personal experience, I know this would have come in quite handy when I got out.

Lastly, while I doubt any of my friends would do this, please don't reply to this message with any kind of anti-war rhetoric.  I won't be nice whatsoever if you do.  Thanks in advance.

Not much has been happening around here.  Went to the doc today and have hernia surgery scheduled for August 7th.  Any standing over a half-hour puts my in flare-up land.  The other side took about ten years to get to where this one did in two years.  I thought I had another year to fool with it, but the recent wrestling clinic, in which the hardest physical labor I did was walking a gym floor and filming, told me something was seriously amiss.

I'm about finished with Sin in The Second City by Karen Abbott.  After that, it's back to poetry and class (teaching) reading until class(IUSB learning) begins.  

Recent music bought on the cheap:



     



 

 

My synapses have been firing quite well in recent days.  Perhaps I owe a humongous thank you to David Dodd Lee and his warm presence at a poetry "class" I had attended weekly for about two months or so.  The other workshoppers who were there, Charmi, Neil, Kasey, Rachel, Dane, and Chad (someone had to be last!) were also very helpful to me in the kind and honest critiques of some of my older work and certainly some of the most experimental poetry I have made yet.  It's not just that my confidence gained a boost, but that I have refined my vision of what writing poetry is, what it takes in cognition and vision, and also the variances of approach I can now feel comfortable in using to produce work.

The authors showcased were excellent and new to me completely.  What's more is that DDL took the time to help me find the portals into the unfamiliar through what I was already reading.  Also through the authors, I viewed some original voices and representations of living life and viewing one's humanity under a myriad of settings, emotions, states of mind, and of course, the assembleges of the words to express them.

I'm getting a chance to delve back into American literature outside of poetry for the first time in several years and it's more fun than I thought it would be.  The English department at my school just singed a new contract with a textbook provider, so we are getting all new editions for all classes save for AP.  All of the teacher materials came in on Thursday, so I was the lucky designee that picked up all of the boxes and brought them to the building.  Since I am getting a teacher's edition for all h/s grades now, it worked out that I was able to inspect all of the books and materials to see what's here or not.  After I sorted the duplicates and layed everything out for the other teacher on staff and the eventual (I hope) new hire, I sat down with the grade 11 textbook.  Sadness began to drown me, as I noticed the powers that be who decide what goes into the books found it perfectly acceptable to fill the book with stories I taught while student teaching eighth graders.  

Perhaps there is a logic to repetition, and of course, not all of the material was the same, especially in terms of several longer works, but it's no wonder kids are bored and underperform.  All they have to do to be turned off, is to do as I simply did:  open up the table of contents and get an unwelcome case of deja vu.  Sure, sure, I know that it takes a decent teacher of English to delve deeper and make clearer and more mature connections with the works.  But, no matter how you look at it, the bookmakers are copping out.  Standardized test manufacturers are also guilty of this, but we'll let them off the hook for this post.

So, instead of teaching my students randomized stories about the Zuni and other tribes' various and endless cycles of stories indigenous to each nation, I am going with a couple of chapters from Leslie Marmon Silko's  Yellow Woman and the Beauty of Spirit  that are excellent for making the connections between oral written, and visual narratives from the Puebols perspective.  If you get no other essay collection on N.A. language and culture, let this be your guide.  After that, I will roll out an excerpt of Winthrop's well-known speech on "the city on the hill" and hopefully land with an essay that awakens the students to the multiplicity of viewpoints that formed the voices in our culture then, and most importantly, to identify the echoes of them as they still ring.

Off to Ft. Wayne for a wrestling clinic for the next three days.  Toodles!

shame their sovereignty was unphased

by the new boss or the SPF of the world bodies’s skin

works of the hand were not going to be

triumphed by some odd bookcooking alone

masks upon hydraulic pedestals need to fall

just hard enough under the right sunken treasure

that simply will not be held by any level

earthly best to drill into; love or leave

expectations became beliefs when the lust

gained enough practice and appreciation on

how to work out all the demands; it makes

a lengthening of arms shorten the close reach

of the surgeon, who switches the ventricles

he sees in the bedroom ceiling mirror;

little falls was not all canals and quartz

girls and prayers fell apart there in peaks;

big mouths tilted up at burning fields

and epileptic dobermen shook eastside

of drawbridges and center gaps as

windows shattered from solitudes

and crack-ups without a punch line.

farmers’ markets had the usual fresh

fruit questioners squeezing tomatoes

and babies’ cheeks day and night;

incompatible with affinity, they

limped into cooperation with the public

and said their sorries before going home,

their world-worn loose-garmented home to wait

for the next resentment to come like chains

of origami welcoming in a new spirit to

take its old place among the nutcrackers,

bifocals, shoe horns and projected maladies,

the depth of whose healing is determined by

elected people for the people watered down

by the prolonging of decay, a product of beauty

and the collective of consciousness that we

all agree is merciful and convenient and above all

functional and conducive to more living room

couches being imprinted with prototypes of

representatives roll called and otherwise occupied.

The .38

I hear the man downstairs slapping the hell out of his stupid wife again
I hear him push and shove her around the overcrowded room
I hear his wife scream and beg for mercy
I hear him tell her there is not mercy
I hear the blows as they land on her beautiful body
I hear glasses and pots and pans falling
I hear her fleeing from the room
I hear her fleeing from the room
I hear them running up the stairs
I hear her outside my door
I hear him bang her head on my door
I hear him trying to drag her away from my door
I hear her hands desperate on my doorknob
I hear the blow of her head against my door
I hear him drag her down the stairs
I hear her head bounce from step to step
I hear them again in their room
I hear a loud smack across her face (I guess)
I hear her groan – then
I hear the eerie silence
I hear him open the top drawer of his bureau (the .38 lives there)
I hear the fast beat of my heart
I hear the drops of perspiration fall from my brow
I hear him yell I warned you
I hear him say damn you I warned you and now it’s too late
I hear the loud report of the thirty eight-caliber revolver then
I her it again and again the Smith and Wesson
I hear the bang bang bang of four death dealing bullets
I hear my heart beat faster and louder – then again
I hear the eerie silence
I hear him walk out of their overcrowded room
I hear him walk up the steps
I hear him come toward my door
I hear his hand on my doorknob
I hear the doorknob click
I hear the door slowly open
I hear his step into my room
I hear the click of the thirty eight before the firing pin hits the bullet
I hear the loud blast of the powder exploding in the chamber of the .38
I hear the heavy lead noise of the bullet swiftly cutting its way through the barrel of the .38
I hear it emerge from space from the .38
I hear the bullet of death flying toward my head the .38
I hear its weird whistle the .38
I hear it give off a steamlike noise when it cuts through my sweat the .38
I hear it singe my skin as it enters my head the .38 and
I hear death saying, Hello I’m here!

Built on the chalked and carpeted-over basement of unborn babies’ bones and

midnight ravers made of half-truths, hickeys, observations and absolutions,

the living and dead ghost tales tell themselves self-righteously and incompletely. 

No one, and that means no one, can be held responsible or responsibly without the crush of magnetic pride, image erosion, and other secretions completing its diamond-pressured transmutations.

 Destinies altered, greater schemes of things and jokes that ladies take a lot into deflection

and sub-allegories.

 Improprieties in speech; the perversities in vulgarity and also in expressing propriety

High-born sublimations redirected toward ego fufillment when they were about to pop.

 Here, me as your friend, there are no mere tandavas, being a wallflower and such. This is just a single life in a domain and it just corkscrews into invisibility under skylights and other loose thatching that leaks.

Some time during the last few years, you submitted your email address to receive notification about Poop For Peace Day. Good news: in two days, the world will once again be pooping for peace.

For the sixth consecutive year, PoopReport.com is spearheading the celebration Poop For Peace Day: a non-partisan effort to focus attention not on the differences that divide humanity, for once, but the commonalities that bind us.

Poop For Peace Day is motivated by the realization that with so much driving humanity to conflict -- our skin colors, our religions, our politics -- the only way to achieve empathy is to focus on the one thing we all have in common.

On April 18, poopers everywhere will meditate on their movement, thinking about Kim Jong Il on his gilded throne and George W. Bush on his porcelain one, and understanding that whether it's from chili or kimchi, every single human being suffers equally under the tyranny of the bowel.

Visit Poopreport.com/Peace to find more information, to download posters and web banners, and to add your name to the list of those pledging to poop for peace. And forward this email to anyone who poops!

On Friday, war is over -- if you grunt it.

What Depends on Me

I see doubly the vision of youth restless.
I am their canvas.
Their brushes paint me lightly.
I gave no complaint.
I wrinkle a bit over a little less texture,
but remain useful in a setting that`s mine.

The young dilettante mixes the approved tint,
formed in the truest hands tempered under heat, with the unknown, newer shade.
This first impression counts as much then as for any other time, as reality chatters, chatters and gulps.

My landscape, now breathing on its own flood of camouflage, eclipses the sunset by the unchangeable
drawn hand of the horizon. Held in comfort, my sun is drawn under the rising road, the path leading to itself, encircled and agreeing with everyone else dwelling yonder, but never here.

Splitting into reformation, the youth sleeps and puts down the brush. His next dream began at the painting`s end.