If I Were Lucy,

I'd be in the marmalade sky, with diamonds and tangerine trees, not here, just catching my breath.








Reader, how was your day?

How We Do It, Part XXXIX

I don't really want to write about the messy part of caring for a disabled individual -- the grind of soiled linens, how difficult it is to pull a mattress away from a wall and pull the fitted sheet off, the stains, the smells. I busy myself. I am efficient, my hands deft, my back strong. In my mind, I play with words, how I'll write it. Why will you write it, The Other asks, what's your point? I'll flinch, snap the sheet off the near corner, position Sophie on the floor, away from the wet and the smell. No one likes a confessional, I concede, but I can't help myself. I've cleaned her up, sprinkled powder, pulled up the soft pants, handed her the beads, the jingle bells and walked down the hall with the laundry and the diaper in the bag, my head turned. She probably notices when you grimace, The Other says, and I wince, again. Are you going to write that? As I open the window in the room, I let in air, the words in my mind, then out, sweet motes of tangerine trees. The Other's words scrabble, hoarse, pipe down, go silent, and I busy myself with a match from the box, a tidily decorated matchbox, a whale, a mermaid, la sirena, a house for a stick with a black tip that I strike just so and light to Vetiver and Cardamon, Elysian Garden, Snow Gardenia, Hesperides Grapefruit, Driftwood and Stargazer Lily.

Synchronicity, part 67,431,459

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring -- What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                  Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
from Leaves of Grass (1892)

Mao's Kitchen

A menu hanging on my front door

Popping popcorn, eating a mess of candy and soda, watching Stand by Me (oh, the beauty of that young River Phoenix!) followed by Seinfeld reruns wasn't enough to dispel the gloom around these parts. I've been folding laundry for the masses and mulling over the recent disappointments -- the baseball, the Switzerland trip -- thinking about dreams and resetting and life's purposes and otherwise making mountains out of molehills, allowing boulders to occlude what's beyond. It's like living in the present when the present is as interminable as the future. We're all in the thin of having head colds and grumpy. Sophie is sleeping much of the day, and I'm hard put to understand whether that's a good thing or a bad. I'm still reading The Goldfinch or, rather, slogging through The Goldfinch. I wonder if it's just me, projecting the current soul-less state of the union over here or whether it's just The Goldfinch, but I might need permission to call it a loss (I bought the book instead of downloading) and a day.

Anyone? Anyone?

Her voice on her birthday

portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Frye (1917)

This gives me the shivers:




There's this, too:  Literary Jukebox

This thrills me

Pipeline Winter 2013 from Eric Sterman on Vimeo.

Saturday Three-Line Movie Review

Stephen Frears' beautiful movie Philomena has great open spaces where more is unsaid than said, and the story of the quiet determination and strength of Philomena, an Irish woman looking for the son that was stolen from her as a girl, is at once a testament to living with faith and grappling with overwhelming tragedy. The story is a true one, and it's a harrowing depiction of the cruelness of the Catholic Church, without being a diatribe against it, of the centuries-old suppression of sexuality and of the conflict between dogma and faith. The movie is also hilarious and perfectly charming, beautifully shot, and Dame Judi Dench is a goddess with Steve Coogan her unlikely yet perfect foil.

Other 3-line movie reviews:

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

Scorching the retina

It's been a week of heartache and colds, heavy, with a front of humor.

Here's a poem:

Poem Not for My Son

There are things you can't tell
a child -- they'd sit too heavily
upon him, like the crowns
of young royalty:
Tutankhamen holding up
that twelve-pound crust
of gold and emeralds
on his slender neck.

So I gaze at my boy
only when he's sleeping,
when the torrent
won't sweep him off
the cliff, when the beam
won't scorch his retina.

He works out now,
lifting cold black
barbells, his muscles rising
like good bread.

Think of every great thing:
rush of grain
through the elevator shaft,
the crush of water
fathoms down, glaciers
calving, the surge and weight
of tectonic plates. I shut
the door on my love.
Just a faint glow seeping
under the crack.

Ellen Bass

The Beatles, Airport Dreams, the NFL, Medical Marijuana, Vaccinations and Octopi

At the Little Santa Monica-Wilshire Blvd intersection in Beverly Hills, I spotted four men with guitar cases and slyly took their photo and imagined them to be the Beatles, circa 1969, Abbey Road.

I dreamt last night that I was supposed to get on a flight to Morocco but couldn't find my ticket. I wandered down stainless steel hallways and knew that the person to call was my father who came to get me. I keep dreaming about planes and trips that I just miss, airports and hotels and frustrated efforts to get somewhere.

I felt bitter when I read about some spokesperson for the NFL, stating that they would consider "allowing" pro football players to smoke pot if it helped with their concussions and brain injuries. Evidently, football players smoke a lot of pot for pain. I imagine the hurdles to help these men will be minimal -- as compared to the legion of families who are working their asses off to get medical marijuana for their children suffering from devastating uncontrolled epilepsy. Does anyone else see the insanity of a sport/industry that gives people debilitating neurological problems yet commands fanatical attention and earns billions of dollars? I hate the American Football Sports Machine and the reek of money and profit. The smell of bullshit is bitter, bitter, bitter.

I read another anti-anti-vaccination diatribe today on Facebook and jumped in the fray despite the futility of it all. This is what I said in response to a person's comment about the "reckless behavior of those who don't vaccinate:"

Yes, those of us who have a child with a severe refractory seizure disorder because of vaccines live every day recklessly as we change their diapers for twenty years, pick them up from the floor where they lie, seizing, give them medications, scientifically "sound" that cause hideous side effects and mull over questions on whether it would be better for our child to die before us or after -- and then have to read the pablum that the mainstream media presents, pitting crazies against crazies with literally no nuance or attempt to understand the very real fears of many of us. My question to you is whether you believe my daughter's life is a worthy sacrifice for the "greater public good" -- I will pass no judgement if you believe this to be so, but I sure as hell pass judgement on those who never once entertain that THIS is what many of us have to grapple with as we make decisions in our families. And I'd add that the acknowledgement of that would go very far in persuading people to vaccinate -- much further than the incendiary language you use or the facile calling up of superficial goofball celebrities.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am decidedly NOT against vaccinations. I just think people should stop before they call people immoral or reckless and think about how AFRAID many of us are -- AFRAID for good reason. We are afraid and not crazy. How about talking to the legions of parents who allow their young children to play a sport that could very well cause their brains to be jarred against their skulls and, over time, alter the exquisite and beautifully wrought neurons of which they're made.


I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been
In his octopus' garden in the shade
I'd ask my friends to come and see
An octopus's garden with me
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus's garden in the shade
We would be warm below the storm
In our little hideaway beneath the waves
Resting our head on the sea bed
In an octopus's garden near a cave
We would sing and dance around
Because we know we can't be found
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus's garden in the shade
We would shout and swim about
The coral that lies beneath the waves
(Lies beneath the ocean waves)
Oh what joy for every girl and boy
Knowing they're happy and they're safe
(happy and they're safe)
We would be so happy you and me
No one there to tell us what to do
I'd like to be under the sea
In an octopus's garden with you
In an octopus's garden with you.
In an octopus's garden with you.

Where else do you read about The Beatles, Beverly Hills, the NFL, vaccinations and marijuana and have it all tied up in a neat little package?

Boy Conversation Number 3,456,792 and The Biebs

Not long ago, Oliver lectured me on how I need to stop lecturing. This morning, as I navigated the city on my hollow steed, my trusty sidekick beside me, he began to tell me that one of his best friends recently acquired some more electronic gadgets. His best friend is an only child and is one of those kids that has the latest in literally everything you can imagine, a source of great conflict for Oliver. My boy is at once incredibly materialistic with dreams of being a billionaire and preternaturally sensitive to what really matters. I told him so. Sadly, I didn't heed the no-lecture warning and launched into one of my best -- a treatise on conflict and envy and filling up one's soul with things and emptiness and that's when Justin Bieber stepped in. You know, I said (or droned, to Oliver), having too many things and too much money is really confusing for a lot of people. Like Justin Bieber, for instance. Since I had my hands on my steed and my eyes on the road, I didn't notice whether Oliver was rolling his eyes or even awake. I heard last night that The Biebs was arrested for drag racing his Lamborghini, and he was drunk! Just the word Lamborghini perked Oliver out of his dolor, and I realized I had his attention, so the lecture continued. That kid just got too much money and fame too fast, and just look at him now. He's too young and he can't handle it. Oliver, who is as conflicted about The Biebs (outwardly revolted by him as liking him would align him with teeny bopper girls, inwardly admiring, I imagine) as he is about his friends' possessions, said with disgust, Mom, Justin Bieber is a gangster, now. Like, he's a bad person. I said, Well, he's so young and just can't handle everything. Oliver said, Mom! He's not young! He's like twenty-four! You don't know anything!

I wish I could say that I dug in my heels, urged my steed forward and continued my lecture, but I felt haggard and old and needed to stop to rest.

Breaking News: Mixing it Up

No, it's not another miracle. Henry did not actually make the varsity baseball team, hence the confusion; Oliver did not get picked up by private jet and taken to Switzerland to join his father; Sophie did not stop seizing entirely and start quoting my favorite poems, and I did not get a request from Javier Bardem to have a child with him as he decided Penelope Cruz is too thin.

The Captain and Tennille are getting divorced.

In lieu of becoming a Bourgeois Dirge Blogger, I thought I'd write a series of stupid posts and chronicle things like Lifetime television movies (hence, the Gabby Gifford story) or My Celebrity Memories.

My memory of the Captain and Tennille is, of course, the same as yours if you're of a certain age. The photo above is my fifth grade school picture -- or maybe sixth grade -- circa 1975 or 1976. I have vivid and exciting memories of lying on my side in bed on a Sunday morning, listening to Kasey Kasim's Top 40, thrilled when Love Will Keep Us Together came on as the number one song, week after week. I can see their album in my mind's eye at the front of the stack of albums resting on my green shag carpeting, just below my stereo with the smoky gray lid. I remember like it was yesterday when a group of us on the neighborhood subdivision swim team, went to Six Flags Over Georgia and listened to them the whole way there and back. That was the same trip that we were disciplined by park officials after throwing ice and soda over the sky buckets onto the heads of people below (I had no hand in this other than being in the group that did such outlandish things, which became a sort of pattern for me being the good girl with the wild friends and boyfriends).

Anyhoo.

I might have gotten chill bumps when I heard Muskrat Love, listened to Do That To Me One More Time while chewing on a Sugar Daddy and reading a Harlequin Romance novel. Have I ever told you that despite being quite well-read, I went through a period in my tweens and early teens when I was a member of a Harlequin Romance Novel club? Yes, sirreee Bob.

I told you the Dirge Blog was being replaced by a half-assed TMZ replicant that uses expressions like Yes, sirree Bob and Anyhoo. 

Back to the Captain and Toni. Yes, they're getting divorced, evidently after 39 years of marriage. The Captain is 71 years old and reportedly didn't see it coming. Good lord, Daryl (has the name Daryl come back, yet?)! I hope they both find happiness apart. I also learned that the couple were discovered by Neil Diamond, no less, in Burbank and that Daryl and I share the same birthday! Just the day, obviously.

I believe my life has come full circle. When I lay on my back with my big head-phones, my Hollie Hobbie necklace dangling down my turtleneck, listening to the Captain and his big-toothed lady, Burbank was like another planet, and now I live just down the road!

Yes, Siree Bob!

Why?

Why did someone make a movie about this girl? Is she a figure skater?

Why did Oliver's passport sit at the post office for one week after being delivered there?

Why did Mickey, the post lady with whom I talked, tell me how sad this was for Oliver but that there might be a hidden reason that I landed up with my baby at home? There's always a reason for these things, she said.

Why did Mickey not get on my nerves despite her cloying cliches?

Why am I eating entirely too many donuts these days?

Why is Sophie's nose so stopped up? Is it a cold? Did her nose break when she fell on it over a month ago? Is she allergic to the marijuana plant?

Why do we carry worry when there's nothing, literally nothing, to be gained?

Why have I not gone to a yoga class in a year?

Why am I not flush?

Why am I so lush? (too many donuts)

Why can't I throw out the stack of New Yorkers that I have still not read?

Why did I dream of myself the other night as pregnant at fifty, milling through a party where other women carried shopping bags filled with guacamole that they insisted were their own babies?

Why can I not get Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road out of my head, and why do I still remember La Marseillaise, the French national anthem as well as Robert Frost's Two Roads Diverged in a Wood both of which I memorized in seventh grade for my batty old French teacher, Madame Marie Smith, but not my one true love's middle name?

...
Le jour de gloire est arrive. 
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'etandart sanglant est leve

Aux armes, mes citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu'un sang impur!
Abreuve nos sillons!

I have no idea what I'm doing today

or what I'm thinking or how I'm going to do it.

What's happening in your parts? Not pants.

What to do when you're not in Switzerland**

photo by J. Werndorf

Go boogie boarding at Zuma Beach in Malibu with your friends. Warm air, cold water -- gratitude.

photo by J. Werndorf

**The weather in Swissland is evidently cold, rainy, foggy and no snow.