"We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it." ~ Jerry Garcia

( Inspiration, move me brightly )

( My apathy, let me show you it, or I Love LOLcats! )

I can has votes nau plz?

It's been a hell of a week of flu, but I am not really quite sincerely dead yet.

The polls are up at therealljidol. If you liked my entry this week, throw me a vote -- I'm in Tribe Three, one of the n00b tribes; as I understand it, Four and Five are for returning players.

There are a ton of good entries. I guess this topic ("saying goodbye") touched a nerve with a lot of people. I can say with confidence that if I had to vote for a material object this week, it would be the World Wildlife Federation plush Red-footed Booby. 'Cause I totally don't have enough booby in my life.

I always tell my students that there is more than one "about" in a piece of literature. Sure, Romeo and Juliet is about forbidden love between teenagers, but as you shake it, you get a tumble of social critique, senseless death, and other "abouts."

One of the "abouts" of my life over the last year has been saying goodbye. I've been saying hello to a great many things as well, but in the end of marriage, there are many goodbyes -- and let it be known that I assign no blame here. Things just got to a point of what they call Epic Fail nowadays, and I had to leave.

I said goodbye to my life as I knew it. I said goodbye to a truck bed full of material stuff, and to having a washer and dryer. In tremendous pain, I said goodbye to my two kitten-kids, whom I had to leave behind in my former husband's care, because I had become so terribly allergic to them. These were Selina, half-Siamese, all black except for thirteen white hairs on her chest (I counted!) and Fonzie, who had been half-feral and covered in dreadlocks when we took him in.

There are spates of goodbye, too, wild storms of it. My mother, two weeks before Christmas 2003, of cancer. One month later, to the day, her mother -- mercifully too demented to know that her younger daughter had preceded her in death. That month, Zorro the Adventure Cat, suffering inoperable cancer, took the final needle. That month was my then-husband's cancer surgery. One thinks of Elizabeth Biahop's villanelle: "The art of losing isn't hard to master."

But then there's the Zen goodbye. Every day, you say goodbye to yesterday's bullshit. You just yank yourself by the hair roots and pull off your old skin, whole, like doffing a latex Halloween mask, and you throw it right out the window. Now you have no self, and that's a pretty good place to start.

I took lay precepts in the Korean Son (Zen, Ch'an) school of Buddhism from Master Po-hwa Sunim. Once in a while, during dharma talks, he'd mention a group of elderly Korean immigrant women he tutored. "Please die soon!" he said to them. I imagine he meant: please die to your old selves, please hurry up and say goodbye to this illusion of a permanent, unchanging self, so that you can get on with life and fulfilling your bodhisattva vow and whatnot.

He also gave a talk in which he warned us about the three great poisons: anger, delusion, and ignorance. He was quite vehement about this. "No anger!" Sunim said firmly. "No delusion! No stupid!"

So, following Sunim's Way of No Stupid, I have started saying goodbye to bullshit. In the words of Bruce "Utah" Philips, "I'm on a low-social-cholesterol diet. No fatheads." My value of "fatheads" honestly varies daily, but includes a couple of people I've had to school on disability issues. "Broken," from you, the abled person, to me, is damn near an ethnic slur. Not cool.

So, goodbye. I don't have time in this life to fix other people's problems. I have poems of my own to write, that come niggling around the edges of the big block that is my head, and won't stop until the niggle is solved on actual or virtual paper. So I can't have you in my little headspace, fathead. Goodbye.

What a curious word, this contraction of "God be with you." It can double you over like a gut shot, and it can liberate you on the wings of a crane. I will hear it and say it many more times before I'm sacred bone dust.

I had meant to start off with a Week Zero introduction entry that was all sorts of lofty and high-minded and noble. Instead, I am frothing about something fairly dumb. Bear with me on this.

As you should be instantly able to tell from my usericon, I am for Obama. I am also a Dead Head. Thus, the benefit for Obama on October 13th, tickets for which are on sale this very minute -- and I'm from State College, so crash space wouldn't be no thang -- would seem to be the very apex of brilliant news.

Reader, it sucks. I mean, the part about Bill Kreutzmann joining former bandmates Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Phil Lesh onstage for the first time since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, that doesn't suck at all. What sucks are the following aspects:

I. Tickets are $50 a Head. I'm not rolling in cash at the moment. Indeed, I have some personal loans to pay back, and some outstanding medical bills as well -- not merely above average, but positively outstanding. However, since it's a campaign fundraiser, this would be the first time in history I could (probably!) legitimately write off a Dead-related show as a donation. One thinks of good old Hotblack from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Dead for tax purposes. *rimshot*

II. October 13 is a Monday! This has two immediate ramifications:

a. I have an evening class that night. I take the teaching of my evening classes this semester as the utmost in SRS BZNS: they are Intro to Creative Writing, and Poetry. If ever I was born to teach any subject at all, those is them. I put all the fire of my soul into teaching these. It's not that I purposely slack on composition, but I really. like. teaching. creative writing and poetry. So I don't want to make everyone bog off just so I can go hit a show, even for my man Obama.

b. I've asked my boss, Dr. S., from the other school where I teach, which we'll call Miskatonic University, to come and speak that night. I could reschedule her, but that seems even less fair. "Hi, Dr. S. I'm, uh, going to a Dead-lite show to benefit Obama, so I wondered...."

c. I'd have to find or purchase a ride that could have me standing in front of my 11 am class at Misk U. the next morning, preferably not in the same clothes I'd worn the day before.

Remind me please, O world, that Jerry has been dead these 13 years, and thus that a significant part of the magic for which I endured the physical discomfort of these shows is absent -- however much the remaining boys try to take up the slack. Remind me also that by the next morning, the show will be torrented, and/or one of my friends will possess a recording in some other format. Remind me that although there are battles still to be fought, Obama's entire campaign will not rise or sink based on my personal $50.

Argh. It's like Week Zero has become Zero Wing: Someone set me up Obama! I have no chance to survive make my time!

So I guess what this entry is really about is the occasional achiness, like a tooth tender right at the gumline, of being a grownup. It's also about distracting yourself. The mild fuss of GORRAMMIT NOT YOUNG ANYMORE helps me forget that an Army National Guard unit ships out today, bound for Iraq, containing at least one of my very best former students -- and he is still young, still so very, very young.

Peace, Specialist A. You genuinely believe, for some reason, that risking getting your ass blown up in Iraq is in some way protecting my freedom to sit here and stew over not feasibly being able to make it to a concert by "The Dead"/The Other Ones/the survivors. For that belief, and for your action on that belief, I thank you.

For those uncertain about how one can be against that war but support the troops, this is how. I still consider myself free to yell my vocal folds raw shouting that the sitting emperor is naked. But you bet your ass I'll assemble Specialist A a care package containing the Redman Select (ew!), non-porn magazines, and Sour Patch Kids he asked for.

Wave that flag,
Wave it wide and high
Summertime done
Come and gone, my oh my

Y'all,

This is the first in a series of strangely public, and publicly strange, entries you will see from me, because I am about to go over and enter therealljidol.

One person on my flist, who wrote some really great shit last year and is doing it again this year, is a survivor of violent trauma and has several serious medical conditions at once. One, who wrote some really great shit last year and is doing it again this year, had, until recently, a Chiari malformation. You don't know what that is? Go look up Chiari malformation. Reader, it sucks. I know the "If X can do Y, so can I" fallacy only goes so far, but if you consider the amazing prose these people wrote, and under what daily circumstances, I really do feel compelled to at least give it a go.

Besides, I'm a poemer, and I wave that identity around so much -- or others wave it at me -- that I think it's good to make myself prose once in a while.

Peace out,
the bird

Looking at the calendar, I realize it's time for my annual public post about the state of my life. I cannot believe I didn't realize this until xydexx reminded me, but I'm such a dodo with numbers.

Longtime readers of this log are familiar with the basics. Indeed, the basics tend to be very basic. I'm no poet; I'm just Rhys. The published poet in the family is my wife, Deborah, who has just turned 44 and is my hero. Having survived ovarian cancer, she is in her first year of remission and is in the best shape she has ever been in. Our neighbors in Colorado Springs constantly see her on her custom flamingo-pink bike and cheer her on; she is muscular and positively wasp-waisted. I have no words for all the coolness that is Deb. Squishy-robot teledildonics used to be such a male-dominated field, too, but she was right in there with the innovators.

Even up here, at this high altitude in the season of the White Queen -- or perhaps especially so -- I am ineluctably reminded of my white male, WASP privilege. I won't say more than that, because to do so would seem to speak ill of my neighbors, and I mean them no harm. Indeed, nowhere else but Colorado is it possible to make such a comfortable living breeding Goliaths for the spider-show circuit. We have one female and one male ready to do the tour this year: Selina, 15" across, and Fonzie, a male about half that. (Those are just their call names, of course. Goliaths are sweeties, with really docile temperaments, but of all the spiders, they're just not the sharpest crayons in the box. They won't respond to elaborate kennel names like "Maestro Champion Shelob Doomfang of O'Reilly's Mountainside.") Next year we hope to be able to start Dormouse in the 100-yard dash and Caucus-race.

Of course, the competitive spider circuit takes up a lot of time and means leaving Deb on her own to test mock-turtle-soup recipes all over my nice clean kitchen, but it's great for meeting LJ friends I'd never get to see in real life otherwise. I had such a good time laughing my ass off with greenglowgrrl and ghymoreid in a pub and hearing some incredibly drunken story about a baby turning into a pig. (We only placed fifth at AusArachnidae in the male-Goliath category, but we consider it a moral victory for the Yanks.) dewhitton's place was inexplicably overrun by those wasps that prey on tarantulas, but our kids are so much bigger than an ordinary tarantula -- picture your dinner plate; Selina overhangs it slightly, and Dormouse has the potential to be even more massive because of good genes -- that they would have pwned those little bastards in a heartbeat. Anyway, we had a most excellent game of chess, and we met the head of Den's croquet league.

So yeah, I have to go do guy things and putter with my Vespa (and find the sonic screwdriver and hydrospanner!) somewhere in the garage. If I don't replace the crappy compression coil, that thing's gonna blow. And if you seriously have any questions about anything, ask away -- but you know me. When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. Pardon my rather scornful tone!

ETA: For serious. Deb just called me into the living room. She is in there watching a signal-scrambled, pixelated version of a food show -- the channel is all weird and psychedelic today FNAR -- and listening to a trance-y remix of Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" instead of the audio. She called the chopped-up channel vaguely-impressionist effect "beautiful." That is what she wanted to show me. FTW?

... who wasn't a drug user. Who was a fully-employed grandfather. Who, according to a source I contacted about this at PC World magazine, where he was senior technical editor, wore an American fucking flag pin on the lapel of his tweed fucking blazer. (I don't particularly care, in this context, whether you excuse my expletives.) Granted, his son is a card-carrying member of a Bay Area cannabis club, a fully examined and registered medical patient, but the late Rex Farrance has had his blood smeared by "unknown assailants" and his name smeared by the police. Because the son had his MEDICAL POT in the house, reason the police, naturally the robbers who attacked the well-known hunter who probably had a bunch of legal, expensive guns must have done so because Farrance and his wife were drug dealers. Yes, brilliant logic! "S/he was involved with drugs," too often, is police code in the wake of a home invasion (his wife is still in the hospital from a pistol blow to the head) for "We fucked up."

The SF Chronicle story, which accepts the police spin, is here. I do hope one of the alternative weeklies will dig a bit deeper. I do hope those of you who voted for GWB did not actually do so thinking, "Yeah, we should totally defame crime victims because they let their sick children use pot in the house, as per state law."