April 2016 Poem A Day #22 Conditions for Constancy

Am getting silly here. The prompt was use the word star____


Conditions for Constancy

Human beings
require a certain stability. Therefore
it would be best if the constellations
held steady on, not wobbling about
or shooting off into another paradigm
skipping into another multiverse
or tripping oversubtle event horizons
lurking at every bend of light waving,
or every twist of history's winking
or twinkling. Yes, to  remain
would be best so always
use starch when laundering
an inhabited universe.

April 2016 Poem A Day #21 Not going anywhere

The prompt today was to write a poem to another poem.  So, growing up there was a picture in hall of a little boy sitting under a tree on a hilltop, fishing pole near, schoolhouse in the far distance. Under the picture was a poem expressing a wish not to be bothered doing so much but to rest a thousand years. I read it over and over, through many years. I thought of it whenever I was stressed. But all in all it was a bad direction to take!

Not going anywhere
.

He wished to be
a little rock
not off to work
not deep in hock
.
He wished to sit so very still
in wind and sun
on crest of hill
beneath a tree
without a thrill
.
I think he rested
far too long
his influence on me
far too strong
.
I dreamed and dreamed
without a peep
I sat too long
whilst thinking deep
.
I spent my life
all half asleep.

Supposedly enlightened closet chauvinist

Last week I had very unfortunate series of electronic exchanges with a senior citizen who runs some sort of poetry/jazz/improv open mic over in Westchester County, New York.

This man was berating a friend of mine on her Facebook page for her involvement with slam poetry and with her boy friend who is also involved in it. She asked me to look at the posts which she thought were a bit creepy. And wow, he'd said some pretty gross things on her pages. Later - he more or less excused it all, saying enlightened people are never wrong. ( How 'bout that! )

He had taken the position that slam is "evil." He said he knew two women with tragic lives he was trying to "help" who left off consulting or consorting with him and turned to male slam poets instead, and they had come to no good ends. he said. Now, one of those people was someone I knew who'd had a whole constellation of problems not one of which stemmed from slam. The things he said about her were just wrong. Yet he thought he knew better, than anyone else, as a paternalistic "enlightened" male guru just trying to guide a few poor confused women.... (grrr)

Essentially he was saying that because some men involved in slam hurt some women who were involved - we should ban slam. This seems pretty self-serving for someone who runs a series that competes with local slams for venues, funding and community involvement and of course, women poets.... And by this logic we should ban men because sometimes they hurt women. And the opposite could be said as well. It's all pretty silly. And the self-declared "enlightened" seem to be an catastrophically unreliable source for life guidance. More like a fount of bad advice.

BOOKS: The Road To Wellville by T.C. Boyle

don't rock the boat, fish quietly while it sinks

fanatics, followers & blind  belief

Pompous quacks, big business chicanery, na'r-do-well sons, accidental electrocution, nudist picnics, infidelity, arson and the unrepentant human willingness to believe, no matter what - The Road To Wellville T.C. Boyle's hysterical historical fiction work has it all.

On The Road To Wellville, it is not only the characters but also the reader who must sustain a “suspension of disbelief,”  in order to continue page to page, enjoying this wild and crazy saga - all the more unbelievable because it is based in a true story.  Major characters and a number of minor ones are all being duped by someone. And they are complicit in the deception. Ask any con man, the mark wants to believe. And when someone offers us a path to good health - we want to believe that too - to hell with the evidence. (Otherwise no one would be selling homeopathic remedies these days.)

In fact, -- the road to human well-being is most certainly not found on the road to “The San”  the Sanatorium in Battle Creek.  – it's the Kalamazoo  Road that the emergent and unlikely hero Will Lightbody impatiently traverses to finally take action, to stand up for himself, his wants and his wife - that is the road to heath and sanity.

As his name would suggest Mr. Will Lightbody, Eleanor's “gawk” of a husband, is a lightweight in the will department, choosing repeatedly to ignore things that would send most sane folks running for safety or at least for to the phone to call a good litigator.  Mr. Lightbody allows himself to be ignored and put off by his wife, literally starved and cowed by Dr. Kellog and his variously persuasive nurses, despite the mounting list of mishaps.  After a truely bizarre electrocution scene in the sinusoidal baths, Lightbody immediately forgets his own courageous action in saving Alfred Woodbine the attendant.  His own quick thinking and courage are set aside, and the whole event  frightens him enough to inspire a drinking bout and a meat-eating rebellion.  Yet, even after pointedly rubbing Dr. Kellogg's nose in the messy fact of Praetz's death, Lightbody still, unbelievably, allows this self-righteous socialite quack to send him for an indefinite punitive mechanical enema:

"A blister, swelling and swelling till it bursts – that was Dr. Kellogg. He was blind, he was deaf, he was a god on a cloud: the name of Homer Praetz had never been uttered. Such impudence didn't merit  responses.[...] “put him [Will Lightbody] on the enema machine until further notice.” 

A little later Lightbody lets Kellogg send him under the knife - intestinal surgery to remove an imaginary “Kellogg's Kink” !

Yet no one, including the great doctor Kellogg is immune to the need to believe the improbable. He never once suspects that his son George burned the  first Sanatorium building years earlier, and he immediately has faith in glowing scientific reports of radium, (never mind if a patient or two keels over), and he believes his own overblown public reputation. He is also duped by fellow vegetarian fanatic Badger and The Manipulative Therapy doctor as are quite a number of satisfied women, including Eleanor Lightbody.

Besides The Manipulative Therapy nudist picnic, one of the most interesting sideshows is George Kellogg, the filthy, drunken adopted son, the “err”' apparent. He is the salient inconvenient consequence of “Dr. Vegetable's” actions and philosophy. George, the ugly underside of the “Dr. Anus” is the potential terminus of some rather lucrative illusions.  Supposedly the bad seed, his need for, and to torment the Doctor is acute; the essential quality of their relation is blame rather than deception.

George's opposite is the aspiring Charlie Ossining, son of the gatekeeper, taken in by the wealthy Mrs. Hookstratten.  He wants so desperately to be an entrepreneur that he is duped endlessly by Bender despite  an incredible array of evidence that the man is a shark. Bender dupes Ossining into duping Mrs. Hookstratten and Will Lightbody.

Yet in the end, Ossining persists and eventually succeeds in business. His wealthy Auntie Amaelia Hookstratten was after all, a reality “hook” for straitening out the young Ossining. Her prodigy, though estranged, finally succeeds and makes the perfect tonic. George, (Kellog Jr.) the perfect ingrown hair does not.

The last meeting between Dr. Kellogg and G. Kellogg Jr - with fire, white wolf, chimp, torn clothing, insults and  bottled excrement unleashed - is pure slapstick melodrama. No wonder they made a movie out of it. George's death is also the perfect METAPHOR for what the Dr. is doing to his patients: drowning them in stinking, slippery fanatic unfounded so-called-truth. They, like George could have escaped, but they prefer  blind belief  to figuring it all out for themselves.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker
author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding,
editor and writer at The Metaphor.atorium
and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly.
originally written in November of 2003

Case of the disappearing O's & quote for the day

"Have you ever tried to CRUSH a Cheerio?"

This was  not Genghis Khan nor Sally Sour speaking. It was not a sardonic Brit, who couldn't get the last word as an opponent left the argument.  It was a hungry, white-haired elder trying out a Stop and Shop muffin recipe that called for this odd ingredient: X amount of crushed Cheerios.   A Cheerio, being so little and round, and good-natured, might sound like an easy target. Guess not.  She said  that when a large spoon was applied, the little buggers just leaped out from between the spoon and the breadboard.  I suggested a paper bag and a sledge hammer or the hopelessly modern device: the food processor. Both suggestions were booed.

The baker, not to be derailed from baking, put the Cheerios in the muffin batter whole. Guess what? Not one whole or partial Cheerio was found in the tasty finished muffins.  Despite the ignored instructions of the marketing department, the laws of physics triumph once again.....

REMEMBER WMDs? This gambit seems strangely familiar....

My letter to  the White House,  one letter of millions that no one will ever read:

Sent to: comments@whitehouse.gov, vice_president@whitehouse.gov, president@whitehouse.gov

Dear Executives:

Well,well, when you said IRAQ had weapons of mass destruction, I thought oh surely you must know and now we have spent 500 billion making war on the wrong country. Fooled me once. That's enough. Now you say, OH WE HAVE TO SIMPLY HAVE TO SPEND a trillion dollars, immediately,  without oversight, bypassing all the established protocols on spending and contracting.  Big surprise.  Could the end of the financial system you are declaring be a lot like those weapons of mass destruction we never found only the fraud is even more expensive and would enrich your pals for years and leave main street drained dry...  You have cried wolf fraudulently once too often and I for one will urge my representatives and senators to vote down paying your pals trillions.

MM Walker

-- 

That is the letter. However.  Big trouble may arrive even if  they buy up a trillion dollars worth of bad paper. Across the globe everything economic is grinding to a stall or might in the next week or month.  Untenable derivatives/credit swaps, and deals so complex and flagarently under "collateralized" if you will,  are so utterly unregulated and opaque, that the treads of causality can not be untangled.   A simple solution will not be found for this one.  Maybe Uncle Hal was right.  (YIKES)  

Henry Paulson blames the borrowers

I am listening to Henry Paulson's speech and I note that in his first few paragraphs -- he blames the borrowers not the banks. He said that "borrowers took out loans they couldn't afford" and this is the root of this crisis. As if the trembling would- be-home owner, who was swayed by a so called "expert" bank official offering a variable rate mortgage with a balloon payment bears all the blame. The question remains to be answered -- WHY DID THE BANKS GRANT THESE LOANS?

Sept 11, Can't help but remember

I was sitting safely in my Northville apartment, making toast. I had just been hired for a new job and was feeling quite positive about the course of life.

Then the phone rang. It was dear old mom. ”Turn on your television set, right now,” she said. ”A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” I turned the set on, then spent the rest of the day in stunned silence as events unfolded, as a plane hit the second tower, and later as both towers crumbled to dust on live TV.

It seems incredible now, all these years later, that in response we attacked the wrong country and have now spent $550 billion plus on that spurious activity. It won’t bring back our dead. More deaths and more debt won’t make the path right.

Comcast: the right hand doesn't agree with the left hand

I don't mean to complain. But I will.

After losing a few channels in the Comcast lineup which have gone "digital" we thought we'd check out what the digital package entailed. I registered online, to mange the account. Then I searched for what packages you can sign up for. Then I couldn't figure out if the $29.99 price for digital starter was in addition to our current 60 dollar bill. so i entered a "chat" - and I had to wait nearly an hour to get into it -- I think maybe I was connecting to India or somewhere very remote from Comcast. Who knows. After extensive questioning as to whether it would cost MORE than our current bill - and requestioning to make sure (I really grilled her) I concluded that as I was told, it would just cost us $29.99 for six months and $52 dollars plus change thereafter.

Then I tired to sign up and with a few clicks I was in another chat. But that person told me I wasn't eligible for the 29.99 basic digital starter, because I was already a customer....

Comcast. We are bidding our time. But you will be disconnected from this house....

I have both transcripts.

Ethanol - more short-sighted foolishness

Think Ethanol will save us from big oil? Ethanol IS big oil and big money.

Naturally our All-Cronies-All-The-Time government gives conservation credits to energy businesses that BURN UP a crop that used to provide cheap food for people around the world. Plans for several proposed Ethanol plants by U.S. campanys have been put on hold in the last month because the rising cost of corn is now making Ethanol untenable as an alternative fuel.

It wasn't so long ago that vegetarian argument against eating beef was that it used up too much of the world's corn. Science says you can grow more pounds of human being per bushel of corn, than you can grow from that same corn, if the cattle eat it, and then the humans eat the cattle. Or course how many miles per gallon does a human being get exactly? Haha. Yikes what a world.

I heard there is a plant going in in New Milford, or proposed for that town, that would create energy out of weeds. Not sure what to make of that yet.

Watch out when business people recommend their clients

When a friend recommends someone to sell your house, tile your bathroom or pull the engine out of your antique VW, stop up your ears and run for cover. Pause, steep some tea, pour yourself a glass of sherry or amaretto. Have a beer or a latte. Sit and contemplate alternatives. Or at least ask a few questions and do some research. Sure your friend means well, but good intentions and good advice are not the same thing.

Especially beware when friends, relatives and others recommend people who are clients in their businesses. Just because the client successfully buys services or goods doesn't mean they are good at providing goods or services themselves. Many businessmen espouse the motto, "One hand washes the other." So, they try to throw a little business to their clients by recommending them. They don't necessarily know anything about their clients practices or reputation as a service provider, and are not aware of complaints or legal actions pending against them either. All they know, is they guy pays his bill or they hope he will soon...

The unmerited assumption that a business person is trustworthy can play out badly for the one doing the trusting. I know this from painful experience.

A friend recommended a real estate agent to me several years ago, quite a few years ago, THough th ending was eventually a good one with a different realtor it cost me a year of time to right it. The lesson I learned was this - don't fail to investigate and read the fine print because you think this person your friend recommended has your best interests at heart 

I recently heard another sad tale right in the family. My cousin-in-law who is a nice fellow and a very good businessman, recommended a mortgage banker to my Uncle, told the guy, the Uncle needed a fixed rate mortgage.

When the Uncle, after also asking for a fixed rate mortgage himself, reads the mortgage contract he sees that his interest rate is guaranteed for two years only. BUT INCREDIBLY HE SIGNS IT ANYWAY. After all his daughter's husband who is very smart, recommended the guy and he must know..... NOT NOT NOT! Next year his interest rate will sky-rocket because he assumed this was the best he could do since his daughter's hubby recommended him. Or in his case,  it likely has more to do with his irrational belief that the world would end before the two year initial interest rate expired....

ALWAYS investigate. May I take my own advice.....