BLAME

Okay, I was trying to upload this poem of mine that had an embedded sound and a background. No luck, so here’s the link to it. Just click on BLAME. And have a great blameless Saturday.
Deep Thought: A quiz: If I am my brother’s brother, who am I? (Answer: me.)
Today I am grateful for: Weekends

The Friday Five

At this moment, what is your favorite…
1. …song?
Oh, that’s hard. I’ve been making a list so I can make my own tape of favorites, so five are: Picture by Kid Rock, The Captain by Kasey Chambers, A Soft Place to Fall by Allison Moorer, Keep Me in Your Heart for Awhile by Warren Zevon, and Running on Faith by Eric Clapton.
2. …food?
Sugarfree Eskimo Pies (I’m eating one now), red grapes, avocadoes, broccoli cheese soup, and mixed nuts.
3. …tv show?
Sharon Osbourne’s talk show, Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, The Daily Show, I Love the 80′s, and, of course, Oprah.
4. …scent?
Emeraude cologne, fresh air after it rains, grandchildren, fresh brewed coffee, and roses.
5. …quote?
Is there another word in the language so unnecessary as “fail” or “failure”? No one has ever failed to fail in the end: And for the very evident reason that we’re made in no fit proportion to the universal occasion; which, as all children, poets, and myth-makers know, was made to be inhabited by giants, friends, and angels of such size the whole volume of human generations could be cupped in their hands; and very ludicrous it is to see us, with no more than enough spirit to pray with, if as much, swarming under gigantic stars and spaces. – Christoper Fry, English (born 1907)
Deep Thought: Whether they live in a igloo or a grass shack or a mud hut, people around the world all want the same thing: a better house.
Today I am grateful for: Neighbors

Golden Globes 2004 – Jan. 25

I’m a beast for award shows. Just love to see people win and lose, I guess. And wear all the fancy clothes and such. OK, let’s vote for Best Picture. Unfortunately, of these 5 I’ve seen all but Cold Mountain so I can’t be totally fair. Unlike Everybody Else it seems, I didn’t get knocked out by Return of the King. How can long can a battle go on? Master and Commander was a bit too manly for me. Mystic River I had read so I knew what was coming in the plot twists, but I adore Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. And Seabiscuit I had also read and felt it had the most credibility in terms of contributing a darn thing to our lives. Guess I’d have to vote for it for that reason. How bout you?

Deep Thought: I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don’t just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.

Today I am grateful for: Sublimation

A familiar story

I was watching Sharon Osbourne’s new talk show the other day, and a guest was Rufus Wainwright, the singer.  Another guest, Alec Baldwin (who is one of celebrity’s greatest smartasses and a favorite of mine) commented that Rufus’ father is Loudon Wainwright.  OK, I’ve heard both these names for ages now and never known really who they were.  I still wouldn’t recognize their music if I heard it today, but I decided to look up Loudon and stumbled on this charming bio he did. Thought I’d share it:.

My youth was spent in Westchester County, New York and Beverly Hills, California.³ I remember being particularly happy when we lived in Southern California.⁴ However there was romantic agony – I had a tremendous crush on Liza Minnelli who happened to be a classmate of mine in the 3rd Grade.⁵

In 1956 the family moved back East to Westchester.⁶ That year I bought my first record – a 45 r.p.m. single of “All Shook Up” by Elvis (I) and music suddenly seemed terribly powerful and important. In 1961 I was sent away to a boarding school in Middletown Delaware called St. Andrew’s (seen on screen in Dead Poets Society), where my father had gone 20 years earlier. It’s not such a great idea to go to the same boarding school as your old man especially when you both have the same weird first name.⁷ Incidentally, a few years later I wound up seeing my father’s shrink – another bad move.

I started playing the guitar around 1960 and after seeing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1962 I acquired a brand new musical role model.⁸ I was unhappy at St. Andrews, but thank God for teenage rebellion – it can get you through.⁹ I graduated in 1965, went on to drama school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh,¹⁰ dropped out in 1967 and headed west to San Francisco where all the other long-haired lemmings were bound at that time.

Suddenly it occurs to me that some of these biographical details may seem familiar to you, that you may have already gleaned these tidbits from earlier bios. Well, let’s just be professional and go over it one more time, shall we? It makes the record company happy.

Okay so now I’m about 20 years old and you’d think all that rebellion stuff would be out of my system. But as Belushi (I) used to say, “Nooooo….” I had to get busted for pot. And not in a reasonable state like Vermont or Rhode Island, but Oklahoma for God’s sake. In jail I was given a free haircut.¹¹ Good old Dad flew in from London and bailed my ass out of jail, which of course is not a safe place for any young man’s ass to remain for any length of time. Nevertheless my time in the slammer (5 days) changed my life. I had short hair and had to get a job to pay the old man back. I worked a variety of jobs – movie house janitor, boatyard barnacle scraper, and cashier-cook-dishwasher at New York’s first macrobiotic restaurant, the Paradox on East 7th Street.¹² This was also the time I started to write my own songs. Male singer-songwriters were a happening commodity back then and I was signed to Atlantic Records in 1969. The first album came out in 1970 and the career’s been up and down ever since.¹³

I suppose if you were writing my obituary today you’d refer to 1972′s “Dead Skunk” (#1 in Little Rock Arkansas for six weeks) and my 3 appearances on the M*A*S*H TV show in 1975 as Capt. Calvin Spaulding, the singing surgeon. Hopefully you’d mention my two Grammy nominations for the albums I’m Alright (1985) and More Love Songs (1986). And you’d remember and include the fact that Johnny Cash recorded my song “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry” for his highly acclaimed 1994 album American Recordings. Undoubtedly your editor would remind you to say something about last summer’s BBC II TV show, Loudon And Co. and the topical songs I’ve been writing for N.P.R. and Ted Koppel’s Nightline on ABC. If and when you do write the obituary I’m sure Virgin Records would be happy to supply you with any photos you might require. You’ll probably want to finish off the piece with a quote from one of the fabulous songs which have appeared on the 15 great albums I’ve made. How about this one from the most recent album Grown Man? “He died on Monday where he lived, it happens to us all Shot through the air expecting nets, flight and then a fall.” – Human Cannonball, 1995

Deep Thought:  If you’re traveling in a time machine, and you’re eating corn on the cob, I don’t think it’s going to affect things one way or the other.  But here’s the point I’m trying to make:  Corn on the cob is good, isn’t it.

Today I am grateful for:  Breathing

Yesterday and forever

I thought about this yesterday and just wanted to not let the date go by without saying my own thanks to Dr. King and his legacy.  Because my son and grandchildren are biracial, I have a special gratitude to any man or woman who works for healing in this area of so much tragedy and fear.

Deep Thought: One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one. I had to laugh. Laugh and laugh. Because I didn’t know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me.

Today I am grateful for: In-your-face nonviolence

A Beautiful Mind

Starting reading this biography yesterday (by Sylvia Nasar) of math genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash, who happened also to develop schizophrenia in his 30′s. Of course, I’ve seen the film which came out a few years ago. Oh, I think this is going to be fascinating reading. Here are a few short excerpts from the first pages:

Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences…”everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak”

In 1958, Fortune (magazine) singled Nash out for his achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory…In his slender 27-page doctoral thesis, written when he was 21, Nash created a theory for games in which there was a possibility of mutual gain, inventing a concept that let one cut through the endless chain of reasoning, “I think that you think that I think…” His insight was that the game would be solved when every player independently chose his best response to the other players’ best strategies

The first visible signs of Nash’s slide from eccentricity into madness appeared when he was 30 and was about to be made a full professor at MIT. He walked into the common room one winter morning in 1959 carrying The New York Times and remarked, to no one in particular, that the story in the upper left-hand corner of the front page contained an encrypted message from inhabitants of another galaxy that only he could decipher…

The origins of schizophrenia are mysterious…Roughly 1 percent of the population in all countries succumbs to it. Why it strikes one individual and not another is not known, although the suspicion is that it results from a tangle of inherited vulnerabilities and life stresses…the illness can appear at any time from adolescence to advanced middle age…More than any symptom the defining characteristic of the illness is the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferers provoke in other people…However melancholy a depressive may be, the observer generally feels there is some possibility of emotional contact. The schizoid person, on the other hand, appears withdrawn and inaccessible. If such a person becomes psychotic (schizophrenic) this lack of connection with people and the external world becomes more obvious; with the result that the sufferer’s behavior and utterances appear inconsequential and unpredictable…

On one of those gray mornings, sometime in the late 1980′s, he said his usual good morning to Nash…”I see your daughter is in the news again today,” Nash said to Dyson…”I had no idea he was aware of her existence. Slowly, he just somehow woke up. Nobody else has ever awakened the way he did”…More signs of recovery followed. A spontaneous recovery from schizophrenia is so rare that when it occurs psychiatrists routinely question the validity of the original diagnosis. But people who witnessed the transformation had no doubt that by the early 1990′s he was a “walking miracle.”

In the first week of October 1994, a mathematics seminar was just breaking up. Harold Kuhn, Nash’s closest friend, suggested that the two of them might go for lunch. The two men wound up sitting on a bench opposite the mathematics building. Kuhn got to the point quickly, “I have something to tell you, John.” Nash was to expect an important telephone call at home the following morning, probably around six o’clock. The call would come from Stockholm. It would be made by the Secretary General of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. “He’s going to tell you, John, that you have won a Nobel Prize.”
Deep Thought: Today I accidentally stepped on a snail on the sidewalk in front of our house. And I thought, I too am like that snail. I build a defensive wall around myself, a “shell” if you will. But my shell isn’t made out of a hard, protective substance. Mine is made out of tinfoil and paper bags.
Today I am grateful for: Living on the outside of a psych ward

Collective Angel

During the recent storm, my resident little flock of birds hung out in the flowering quince next to the birdfeeders I’ve made for them. Except for when I was a child on the farm, I haven’t paid much attention to birds until this past year or so when I began to resemble my long-gone mother in yet another way. She and I were so unalike during her life, but in the years since it would seem I’m finding my way home to her. She was gregarious to my shy, small and round to my tall and angular, ferociously idealistic to my avoidance of politics, and on and on. Now in my 60′s I find myself on my knees in the garden like she was, protective of and attentive to my grandchildren like she was, and yes, feeding the birds. I like to think that the birds in that bush are the collective spirit of my mother here to remind me that it all comes together in the end.
Deep Thought: Some folks say it was a miracle. Saint Francis suddenly appeared and knocked the next pitch clean over the fence. But I think it was just a lucky swing.
Today I am grateful for: Poets

centering,
balancing,
waking in the night,
slowly forgetting how to
be intimate,
quieting,
sharpening boundaries,
sifting through
thousands of memories
floating up like bits of
lint from dusty places in
the heart,
I struggle toward a
loving god.
________________________________
Deep Thought: I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.
Today I am grateful for: Senior discounts

Friday Five
1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails?

I don’t have a signature line, but my

logo is:

2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it? If you haven’t graduated yet, what would you like your quote to be?

Rats, I’d have to get out my yearbook from the dusty shelf.  Don’t have it here.  In spite of my parents’ best efforts, I was a nebbish in high school.  (See Chapters 4&5 in Autobiobraphy in sidebar.)  Probably didn’t have a quote.  I would like it to have been, “She’s a keeper.”  That saying was probably invented later.

3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read? If you already have them, what do they say?

Never have had vanity plates, never will.  Too humble.  LOL.

4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?

A beautiful silver bracelet from a former lover (now dead) that said, “When I look in my heart I will always find you.”  Plus his name and the date.  He actually tattooed my name above his heart.  And that was when I was already in my 50′s.

5. What would you like your epitaph to be?

Keep me in your heart for awhile.

Deep Thought:  I bet if you were a mummy wrapper in ancient Egypt, one thing you would constantly find yourself telling people would be, “Be sure, before I start, you have all the jewelry and so forth on the body, because I am not unwrapping him later.”

Today I am grateful for:  Paydays