blog (July, 2004)
friday afternoon and the universe
Cramjam of cars, halted in their highway escape from downtown. Not quite so interesting is the big picture as each driver's face, the emblem on a truck, sounds coming out of a window.
Heading back to Rochester again. Tomorrow to the Thousand Islands with mom -- but not yet, it's still afternoon.
I weave through traffic to a Sibelius symphony, practicing Complete Breath, rehashing the day. Tea, mugged from work, still too hot to drink.
Further from the city, the thick-of-it thins, and pace quickens. Can the classical, cut to electro-remixed big-band standards. //Moving//
Tea's on! Learn: small sips don't burn lips.
Road dinner, salad course. The same yellow pocketknife I bought to peel mango skin on a bus ride through Spain proves itself here, too -- this time with cucumber, a car and cruise control.
Now playing: Jack Kerouac's backed by Zoot Sims' sax, all words not heard for the openwindows' wind, but rhymes sound, (and sound fine!) and the innermost cucumber soft seedjunk is the sweetest.
Then some French. Etude. Now I can talk back to the CD. How old are your children? It doesn't listen. The post office is over there on the right. I put on my cellphone headset so as not to look silly. Forty-three and eleven make fifty-four. Not to feel silly. Ease through most of the lesson, then choke on the numbers, and heave frustration. Power off.
Road dinner, entree. I sharpen my tongue fishing meat from sunflower seeds. Thoreau (spitsound) shells out the window through curled tongue. Practice several seed extraction methods over the meal hour. Propellerheads album almost doing the driving for me. Props to The People's University.
I pull toll ticket from its lodging above the otherwise unused sun-visor, and, peeling around the exitramp curve in darkness, divine each coin's identity with my fingers and nails, counting $2.10 forward and backward in French. Nothing says Je t'aime to the tollbooth lady like a handfull of dimes, nickels and pennies.
Past the neighborhood mall-turned-palace, I look in drivers' faces at stoplight for some sort of recognition; don't they know I'm home?
The old street, and softly into the driveway, and the motion detector is the first to greet me.
the moment is rich
You can't breathe for yesterday and you certainly cannot breathe for tomorrow; you can only breathe in the moment, and the moment is rich.
-- Ma Jaya Sati Bhavavati, "Kali Who Swallows the Universe"
Yesterday I was Spanish and punkrock. Today I am bicycling, yoga, and burritos.
I get caught up in all I wish I were doing, and try to make breathing help, and sometimes -- if I'm lucky -- make breathing be. And I keep trying to do. And to make doing be. Or settle for doing do.
tome terms
After a morning run in Cleveland's Metroparks and a class of Yoga, I'm sitting in Phoenix Coffee, just having travelled through another hundred pages or so of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), which I was led to a few weeks ago by Ming the Mechanic's Glass Bead Games entry. I'm not up to saying much about the book, though it's fascinating -- anyway, Ming's post is enough to draw anyone towards it who should be inclined.
Free wifi at Phoenix allowed me to keep my computer next to the open book as a reference. Some of my search terms at Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and Google on this expedition:
pedagogue, refractoriness, aver, epigraphy, consign, rapprochement, amor fati, antipodal, courtesan, congeries, auspices, swabian piety, philology, ostensive, vicissitudes, cooper, refectories, nadir, suasion, furlough, chimera, sui generis, assiduous, parvenu
Run across in this webwander:
My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it-all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity-but he must love it.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
health, care
With my move to Cleveland and medical insurance benefits from the new job, I recently signed up with a local Primary Care Practitioner. A colleague at work recommended a few to me, and Dr. B sounded like a good match: his "style", as she described to me, balances typical Western (allopathic?) medicine with an openness to alternative methods and focus on health and prevention. That his office is just three miles away and none of the other PCP's were available helped sell me Dr. B's care.
I arrived today after work for the introductory appointment I'd scheduled, just barely late, down the drab thin-walled, thin-carpeted hallway into his office's small waiting area. The receptionist-cum-nurse led me through necessary paperwork and tests -- height (69.75"), weight (145lbs), pulse (66), blood pressure (110/70) -- then opened the door to leave, and was about to close it, saying "the Doctor will see you shortly," when the doctor pressed his palm and stretched fingers against the door to hold it open, while she chuckled and removed herself.
Bearded, mid-50's, just as Carole had described him. I'm thinking Dr. Andrew Weil-ish, right?
Wrong. This man is a warm-hearted, gentle, unforgiving bastard, I decided on my way home.
I managed to stay relaxed in spite of his barrage of questioning into my and my family's medical history. I smiled and "umm"ed, dumbly failing to provide solid information for each question and its follow-up that marched down the conveyor belt at me. Every broken bone of every dead great-uncle... and what time of day did I get my tuberculosis shot?
Well, no, not that bad, really. I smirked at his illegible scribbles on clip-boarded paper after each unsatisfactory answer.
He moved on from past to present. "Taking any medications?"
"No, just some vitamins."
Many doctors would be pleased, no?
Dr. B let me know his own opinions on how vitamins can be toxic and are absolutely no replacement from natural sources of nutrients -- and I'll be damned if he wanted to hear -- nevermind acknowledge -- any good in my own thoughts, trials, and learning. And not pleased was he, either, to hear I'd decided to cut meat from my diet, and even less that I try to sharply limit dairy intake. He could only vaguely site studies and as well as I, but was much more confident and authoritative in his presentation, and so I continued to play the role of the accused on trial. He tonguelashed me for drinking, finding it quaint I should worry about hormones in milk and at the same time "hand-grenade brain cells and drown my liver in poison."
No positivity -- it still bugs me. But I think he's darling for caring, and I need someone (new) to challenge me, my ways and my thinking.
I have to get my records sent to the office, schedule an appointment for an EKG, urine test, and post-fasting blood test, then ready myself for the cross-examination that will be my physical in four to six weeks.
Time for bed -- I'm lucky to have slipped being asked about sleeping habits.
Nova Spivack: Corpocracies
...because corporations are motivated only to maximize shareholder value, they have no incentive to be "responsible persons" in society, and in fact, they have every incentive to try to "externalize" costs by cutting corners, offloading problems and waste onto the public, and cheating if they can get away with it. So rather than obeying laws and being good citizens out of some sense of morality or ethics, they do so only if and when the risk of getting caught is greater than the chance of getting away with it.
...
It's strange that America is both the champion of Democracy and Capitalism -- because while these two systems support one another, corporations are anything but democratic in structure!
-- Nova Spivack, Should Corporations be Democracies?, Minding the Planet weblog
pioneer on the plain
I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and attended the Kerry/Edwards rally in d-town Cleveland this afternoon. Came for the sensationalism and stayed for the fluff and clapping.
I am a Democrat only by registration.
In line for the rally, a bald, moustachioed man in front of me giraffed his head around the shoulder of the man just up from him, and petitioned the other's thoughts on John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as running mate. The questioner didn't wait for the assent that came, but hurriedly gave accordance and produced his own opinion. A short while later he asked the same question of the older, impatient woman behind me, who approved as well. She was quick to turn away, though, and continue searching out a hiding place to stow the umbrella she wouldn't be allowed to bring inside.
I tried to -- and then not to -- prepare for my turn, which I saw coming from miles away. With every slight twist of his head toward me, he triggered a radar blip.
What would I answer? What do I know about this stuff? What do I care about these particulars?
Exasperated, I finally inched forward to blunder into interception, unprepared but unwilling to prolong an inevitability.
He caught my eye and, excited at another opportunity, clucked "So, what do you think of Edwards? Think he's a good choice?"
"Um, well, from what standpoint? I mean -- as a possible Vice President, or for enhancing Kerry's electability?"
He stared.
I goofed down my misguided course, "Like, I'm just voting Democrat as a kind of compromise anyway."
"A compromise? Oh, for Nader?"
"Well, I don't know."
"Oh, for Bush?."
And he intoned it like a question, but turned away from me like it was a statement, and a final one at that.
My mind grinded to bind together words denying such a pronunciation and endorsing an idealism and zeal that supersedes the imperfect silliness of these "leaders". But I got hung up on the fact that self-unheeded, these are pretensions, and silently dropped my words all over the sidewalk, like when I try to carry too many groceries in from the car.
This bald, moustachioed man found a diversion in the vendor approaching with $5 (or 3-for-$10) buttons depicting Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as the "Asses of Evil".
I am a Democrat only by confusion.
goin' outta business
Mr. Forgetful left his laptop power adapter in Rochester this weekend. Now he's using borrowed electric conduit to can do it.
I'm trying to squeeze the catch-up on all my unread net news I've missed.
Missed -- oh -- from the holiday weekend's relaxing, mostly untethered return to Rochester.
My thumb and index finger are yankhammering the Mark-All-As-Read keycombo trigger in NetNewsWire, but the To Reads are still piling up like virgin deer on the opposite side of the white highway line.
I oof crunched my front tire over a wayward antler on Friday night's drive, in my haste to zoom out of the Interstate-90 crack between my two homes.
This holiday weekend I...
- waded through lake weeds and muck
- watched someone dump his bbq painted/smoked ribs onto the oven floor
- laid watching fireworks, letting rain drench my clothes and drown our singing of the national anthem (or something similar)
- (and what would an All-American weekend be? without having) played family bocce and modelled clothes for the department store fitting room mirror
Show me how to process all this incredible, oops, boring, oops, what-does-it-all-mean information, and I will show you a good night's rest and a plot to save humanity.