speaking of...

I finally figured out how to upload (with this dinosaur Dell) my audio diaries from my delivery route days. It could take a while but there are some jems in these tapes I just have to find before I croak from a heart attack. These audio clips are all that remains of worth to me from this time period, the only art, so to speak - except of course the immediate memories of raising my beautiful children (when I was actually present, that is!)! Here's just a few of them. The rest will be compiled on a separate archive blog .


white collar, blue collar, red face



needin somethin else



from splinters to smoking


pallet jacked up mouths to feed


every consumer is a princess

out of sync(hronic -ization)

Over the past month or so I've been obcessing over leaving a trail of sorts and, as well, keeping a detailed software calendar for managing my time. Criminy, isn't this what they mean when they say burning the candle at both ends?! Well, no, not exactly... but now that my own brain's memory is failing and so too is my laptop blue-screening me to utter frustration - I'm thinking perhaps it's time, literally, to stop depending on faulty time-pieces and to just sidle over to the park and let the sun take care of things: "Pierce Transit can have my bike, which I left on a bus rack, and Child Protective Services can have my kids that are waiting for me to pick them up from daycare..." uh...Hello! Wait a minute! Wrong! Okay, so I get out of sync, being so ch(i)ronically compulsive about this -ization, that to get back in sync I blame time itself for my troubles! Hmmm.... But all that really gets me is a kick-in-the-ass and a re-boot! So, I am forced to start that calendar all over again; but this time leave pebbles on the path instead of bread. On the subject of documenting the past however there is no such thing as double time Quicktime.

tacomauriculum

I used to get upset about the smell here. "Tacoma aroma" they call it.. Frankly the Rouge river in Detroit was far worse! But what I really want to talk about is the sound of this south Sound area: specifically the Fireman's Park area and its audible reach further west toward the Theatre District. Perhaps if one does not live in these downtown areas this is not something one would even know about. But I do. I live smack dab in the middle of it, and every sunday afternoon instead of show tunes rehearsals I am forced to listen to Christian hymns sung overlong and loudly - too loudly -by very bad singers. Apparently they are ignorant of the decibles too and how far they travel - or maybe not. Perhaps this is just another instance of a call to prayer.

Bee-keeping and dance

My grandfather was an urban bee-keeper. My mother says she remembers fondly her selling of his honey in their small town neighborhood (Ayer) just outside of Boston. He worked for the railroad, and a small cemetery there as well; but I seem to recall bee-keeping was his passion, and forgive him my first bee-sting. He had the craftsman in him as well ( as a child I could have sensed no flaws in the pool table he made for us, but made it he did, Shaker that he was!) - and by blood, he was also part eastern native american. Anyway, I'm thinking fondly of him today, a fathers' day in America, and craving badly a return to village industries.

Here's where we are today, on the east coast anyway, where bee-keeping is concerned in urban areas:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/environmentandenergy/archive/2009/03/11/underground-bees.aspx

And so I was reading about Chopin. Huh. What's that got to do with bees? Well, I came across this passage that suggested that certain rythms in the Mazurkas and Polanaises seemed to necessitate particular dance choreographies. (Halina Goldberg)

Okay, so being me, I thought can we call magnetic fields subliminal rythms for bees, and thus with the fragrances of flowers like pitches on the wind, we have the tail-wag dance?

Joe plumber and Adam the carpenter...

First this quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: "A carpenter in London, and in some other places, is not supposed to last in his utmost vigor above eight years."

As an answer to this business leaders finally adopted a so-called five-day work week from a four-day. Pensions and medical "benefits" were also introduced into their "partnerships" with their workers. These words (benefit and partnership) suggest an ulterior insincerity on the part of business. Health and allegiance are not just privileges - they are absolutely required for any business to succeed. What is a business without its league of laborers?!

So... Adam Smith seems to have acknowledged this; but today corporations seem to be in denial of this obvious truth, that bodies break down over time. Affordable health care therefore should be available to all - however, as in 1740, this appears to be a "year of scarcity"; and while laborers may seem to be willing to sacrifice and work for meagre wages (for the scarcity of opportunities), corporations are even less willing to sacrifice and offer access to health care for these workers! Pensions as well have seemed to go the way of history for many loyal employees.

Apparently Joe and John must turn to folk remedies or the shaman for their ailments! And the upper classes are left with "physician build thyself!..."

Living life beautifully as we approach Fathers' Day.

For some reason I was drawn to review a book titled the Aspects of the Masculine by C.G. Jung. Let me quote a few passages first:

"Ageing people should know that their lives are not mounting and expanding, but that an inexorable inner process enforces the contraction of life.... How many of us older ones... [are] prepared for the second half of life....?"

"Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning... must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure."

"We must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts."

In response let me say first that for many years now I have aspired to finding beauty in the events that occur around me - but not for the sake of mirroring them in a painting. It has been the act of living that I wanted to glorify by mere attempts to be original, to seek a beautiful response to all that came to me. I won't profess to have succeeded entirely, or rather consistently - but all along this has been my goal.

Sadly, in some respects, it came to be true, that a kind of social footing was sacrificed for this aim. However I think over all it has been worth it. I am thinking of another quote which I will paraphrase: "[The test of a true intelligence is the ability to retain two opposing ideas in the mind yet continue to function.]" (F.S. Fitzgerald)

Is this not the job of the parent and especially the father?! He must play and yet retain the steady footing of the guardian. And as he approaches the latter half of his life he must also continue to be open to the vagrancies of events, not be so stoic as to succumb to his age, but supply as much creative egoism as ever he has displayed.

This is what is required of the father at all times. Creative solutions must always be at hand - for this is what the child longs for; and is the most worthy of being emulated, the example of how else it can be done - this bringing of beauty into our lives in an original way. I will continue to be a kid in spite of my age for just this reasaon - no matter the scowls or ridicule I might endure.

Universe on the bus: "How it looks" to him vs. how it looks to me.

The other day I was traveling on the #2 bus and two men got on the bus independently after the girls and I. We were all toward the back with the new comers furthest back. The girls and I were the only white people on the bus. This doesn't really matter to me - except for when this inescapable reality incites others to speak against my whiteness as "whitey," which is what the elder of the two new comers did.

He spoke very graphically about how it was "whitey's turn now" - especially if "he messed with [his] Obama." He boasted of the weapons his 13 year old son had and the huge cache his "homeys" had gathered in readiness for... what? And why?

But how could I personally understand where his anger was from much less his reality; the origin of his hatred was far from my origin of understanding our differences. Then he proclaimed his age to be only a few shy of mine, and that his means were old school. But even I have used this term, "old school," for my own aprroach to my tribulations but I have never considered armed aggression. Regardless, here it was. Reality denying me access.

The other of the two men, it must be mentioned, was much younger and dressed in the way that is often presumed to be gangster attire, complete with the cloth that raps the head tightly and drapes over the nape of the neck ("doo-rag"?). It was this young man, however, that tried to convince the older one to calm down, and even in a few instances appeared to be in danger of the older ones wrath. But nothing happened other than an occasssional appology from the older one who claimed justifications like, "I'm just keepin it real brother - but I'll stop," and "I'll bite my tongue," as if it were the body's fault that anger got out.

So, there you have it. I could have made the foolish mistake of assuming - had there been no verbal exchanges at the back of the bus - that the older of the two new comers and I had a generational bond, and that it would have been the younger one who might have posed the racial intimdation. Alas, all of our curved realities are twisted too to the effect that we will never get one unified point out of it all; and thus we will remain incomprehensible to each other.

One might wonder how we will ever come to picture a singular shape for the universe if we can't even figure each other out.