The Best Thing About This Post is the Book Angel Food***

Question of the Day:

When does being patient mean you're being an asshat and actually need to be impatient?

This morning I did the usual scanning of the headlines, not stopping at the inferno in Gaza, the contemplation of bombing northern Iraq, the alleged beheading of children in Iraq by ISIS with their heads on sticks, the drought in California, the increased security at USC due to the recent murder of a Chinese student -- shall I go on? I honestly didn't read further, but I did laugh aloud at an Onion headline and article that reported on a new Glaxo medication for people who just feel weird. Maybe we should just read the Onion and call it a day every day. I was thinking about people who don't "believe" in global warming or who continue to water their lawns into emerald greeniness in defiance of water restrictions here in southern California. I wondered if these kind of people just have an earlier snapping point than those of us who kvetch about global warming, feel dread about impending catastrophe, buy sulfate-free shampoo and eschew toxic laundry detergent and dishwasher soap. This isn't a judgement of them, just a wondering. This morning, as I showered in my Barbie bathroom, I looked up and noticed the paint peeling at the top of the tile which made me think that it had been a while since I'd wiped the ceiling there with bleach or Clorox and it probably harbored all kinds of mildew and bacteria, invisible to my eye. I don't think I ever think about cleaning or laundry or household tasks without thinking about environmental poisons, and then I feel not just exhausted but like an elite idiot who has way too much thinking time on her hands. Just freaking clean it with the toxic stuff, I thought, what does it matter? We're all doomed. Maybe the reason why some people don't believe in global warming is because they've just reached that breaking point a tad sooner than I. Or maybe not. Maybe they truly believe that God did indeed give us dominion over the earth and we're in charge. Or maybe they're just stupid. That was a judgement.

I've already done a bit of back and forth with both the neurology office and the company that is ordering Sophie's wheelchair, and it all calls for patience. Evidently, MediCal stops at Sophie's epilepsy diagnosis and wonders why she can't just be plopped into a regular wheelchair (the kind that elderly people order at airports to take them to their gate) so we can all call it a day. What is the medical necessity of this ordered wheelchair with its positioning and shoulder straps and what, exactly, are her disabilities beyond the seizures and severe developmental disabilities, including no self-awareness, no protective safety reflexes, being non-verbal and cognitively delayed (yes, we have the medical report from the neurologist, but it's not enough!)?We need more documentation! We need more paper! Patience. Patience. Patience. I shall be patient, even as I strain to show impatience. 

The Onion might have a headline like this: Woman Orders Over-the-Top Wheelchair For the Hell of It With Plans On Pulling One Over On Medi-Cal for Each of Her Children. She Also Submitted A Request for a Winged Chariot.

I feel weird today and should probably take one of those pills that Glaxo is selling.

***If you peer up at the left-hand corner of the photo above, you'll see a copy of my friend Brittany's novel Angel Food, open to its last pages. I will write a review of this crazy, beautiful, rocking book soon, but until then go and buy it here. It's definitely the best part of that scene photographed above -- the papers, the papers, the papers.

Tiny, inexhaustible voices

When you're weary from "the news," when you're thirsty for something hopeful, something good:


Watch this, even if it does take 20 minutes:



via Messy Nessy Chic




Listen to this, William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Alice, Mystery, Wonderland

It is to Alice’s credit that she doesn't hesitate for a moment to discard her preconceptions when she comes across situations that patently refute them. In doing so, she displays an admirable readiness to encounter reality on its own terms, a receptive cast of mind that many philosophers would include among the most important “intellectual virtues” or character traits that assist in the discovery of truth.

George Dunn and Brian McDonald in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

via Brain Pickings 

 

I don't know what the hell was wrong with me yesterday that I felt so upset the entire day. I happened to read a bit more about the high school football rapists in some godforsaken town in this country and I also listened to some economists talk about the cost of the Iraq war -- not just in dollars but in lives lost, both Iraqis and Americans. I heard Terri Gross interview someone talking about the toll of that war and the one in Afghanistan on literally hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and how that toll will be tolling for decades and decades. I briefly thought about George W. Bush whacking weeds on his ranch in Texas and Dick Cheney exulting with no regrets at the evil he wrought. I wished that they, like the two young football players who raped a drunk sixteen year old girl could sit in a jail cell with regret imposed on them like a pall. If I were an evangelical, I'd pray for the soul of America which seems, on some days, to have been swallowed up and spit back out in the form of people fighting for their right to protect themselves with assault weapons. I don't know what the hell was wrong with me yesterday other than that, the news. I took a walk in my neighborhood by the purple lavender bush scraggly on the Orthodox lawn. I ran my hand over the papery pink bougainvillea draped over a chain link fence and squinted my eyes at a Louisiana sheriff's car parked alone. The encyclopedia I carry with me told me that vampires could very possibly be in that house behind the car. I might have eaten a dark-capped fungus and shrunk to a size commensurate with a long tunnel, the dark a mystery, light at the end.

I Limoni

Bad news is just relentless, right? Driving around today, any good feelings that I might happen to have (for a change) are insistently knocked down by what I hear on the radio or read on the front of the paper. I'm tempted to go on a news blackout but then I'd also have to stop opening my mail and paying bills. My head felt almost dizzy tonight when I was cooking dinner, dizzy with information.

I picked a lemon tonight, off of my Meyer lemon tree. When I sliced a piece off, the juice sprayed out and onto my hand, and hours later it still smells. Clean and flowery. I love lemons. And I love this poem by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale.

The Lemon Trees

Listen; the poets laureate
walk only among plants
of unfamiliar name: boxwood, acanthus;
I, for my part, prefer the streets that fade
to grassy ditches where a boy
hunting the half-dried puddles
sometimes scoops up a meagre eel;
the little paths that wind along the slopes,
plunge down among the cane-tufts,
and break into the orchards, among trunks
of the lemon-trees.
Better if the jubilee of birds
is quenched, swallowed entirely in the blue:
more clear to the listener murmur of friendly
boughs
in air that scarcely moves,
that fills the senses with this odor
inseparable from earth,
and rains an unquiet sweetness in the breast.
Here by a miracle is hushed
the war of the diverted passions,
here even to us poor falls our share of riches,
and it is the scent of the lemon-trees.


See, in these silences
in which things yield and seem about to betray their ultimate secret,
sometimes one half expects
to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the link which
will not hold,
the thread to disentangle which might set us
at last
in the midst of a truth.
The eyes cast round,
the mind seeks harmonizes disunites
in the perfume that expands
when day most languishes.
Silences in which one sees
in each departing human shadow
some dislodged Divinity.
But the illusion wanes and time returns us
to our clamorous cities where the blue
appears
only in patches, high up, among the gables.
Then rain falls wearying the earth,
the winter tedium weighs on the roofs,
the light grows miserly, bitter the soul.
When one day through a half-shut gate,
among the leafage of a court
the yellows of the lemon blaze
and the heart's ice melts
and songs
pour into the breast
from golden trumpets of solarity.