Walk

I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen singing "The River" and it is just such a super song that I've been playing it over and over again. I used to play him all the time.

I'm going to sit here in the warm bonus room and listen to him sing his song. Hubby wants to do the movie thing.

Younger boy is ready for bed and older boy is doing his homework. I'm off to do the walk.

Get ready to walk, buddy

I did the walk yesterday and was trashed. I'm going to go today but I am soooo tired. I just wish I could clone myself and get the clone to do it. I'll stall and listen to music.

A Perfect Day For Cross Country Skiing

So yesterday, it was like summer with snow. I did not want to go out. I never do. I just want to sit in the house like some log on a fireplace and slowly burn. But hubby was in his sheepdog routine and he herded all the reluctant sheep to the door and marched us off to Gold Bar Park. Yes, we were forced to cross country ski.

It wasn't a hardship. God, it was one of those days where you actually feel your body blooming with the sun just caressing every exposed cell into glorious life. There were tons of folks there and they reminded me of a swarm of fruit flies on the white apple slice of the park. It made me feel patriotic, proud to be part of this group of hearty Canadians that brave -5'C weather to don tights and prance like horses stuck on pieces of lumber to slide up and down slopes.

I, personally was glad I had learned to cross country ski while I had been a laboratory technologist in Hinton. I took classes at Blue Lake Center (mainly to get those sumptuous meals they provided with ski instruction)and felt rather elegant shafting the snow and walking in place like a tall ostrich on sticks.

The older boy ran off to avoid being seen in the vicinity of his parents. The younger boy started off well and then started his regular tumbling bit where he would topple over like a freshly cut sapling and have to be detangled with reference to his skis. It got very annoying after a point. We stopped to see a porcupine on a tree. It was a nice, brown, compact animal with a sharp interested air about it busy stripping bark of one tree and then scurrying down that tree when we came by. He then did a sort of doodle walk from the first tree to a second tree. I watched with older boy as he (the porcupine not older boy) proceeded to make love to the second tree. Actually, he hugged and pawed the trunk of that second tree until he finally got to an overhanging branch where he inspected the bark and found it to his liking and started lunch.

I loved it at the park. I wonder why I don't get out to Jasper National Park more often and do this type of thing. Mind you it is a fair drive away but nothing beats the cross country skiing in Jasper. The country is so freaking gorgeous, blue skies minted only in Alberta, the incredible green fish skeleton pine trees, the wild animals galore, the utter quiet and sensuous breast to breast contact with the natural world that is so life affirming that if I could, I would just sink into that environment and never come back to the city.

Yeah,I miss living half an hour from Jasper. When I lived in Hinton, I'd bike, cross country ski and hike there ALL the time. It was the best education in learning to depend on oneself, being content with simple pleasures and understanding that in this life, it is contact with nature that makes my life worth living.

Homework and blog header

It wasn't as bad outside as I expected. Sobeys was packed. I got home with the goods, we had a pretty awful pizza and now I'm going to write until it is time to head out for the walk. I would do homework with younger boy but he wants to work on the header for my blog. I love it. He is so amazing. I haven't got the foggiest idea how he does it but I'm just happy to have it.

So back to Saturday's stuff but I'm just going to write it down as a blog entry on education and homework and whine about that here because I do not want to go back and rehash the stuff I wrote yesterday.

What we did yesterday morning was start younger boy who has the attention span of a winter hare in the presence of human beings (well according to my experience all the fricking hares I've encountered have been galloping randomly towards me - the predator rather than away from me)on his homework. He had lost his first math assignment and his teacher had got him to write it out by hand (something he bitterly complained about) and he was consequently late handing that assignment in. She had given him math assignment #2 and so we were backlogged in math. In addition she assigned a book report on some obscure story. I was baffled by the story and creeped out by it as well (I'm easily creeped out) and we haven't done it yet. I don't know when we will start it.

But anyway, there we were on Saturday morning with math assignment #1 an #2. I chatted with about why he had 2 assignments to do this weekend, one late and the other one still due.

I reminded him that on Tuesday, I had asked him if he had any homework and he has assured me with the gravity of a lawyer that no, he did not. On Wednesday, I received an e-mail from School Zone. This is an online educational smoke signal system set up by Alberta UnEducation where teachers list homework for all the children under their tutelage. The main purpose of this system is to:

1) increase the amount of educational information being disseminated by schools to parents about their little spores
2) allow for transparency of educational records as the spores grow up and progress through the system since it contains every scrap of information on your child from kindergarten to grade 12 eg. attendance, grades, homework (This is some sort of an Orwellian device that allows state monitoring of any future educational delinquents)
3) it eliminates the potential for parents to wriggle out of their part of the educational contract ("Hey, I had no idea that he had homework/test/provincial achievement test/behavior or conduct problems or was behaving like a psychopath in class").

How we get the information that the teacher is desperately trying to contact us? By the e-mails they send us daily. The e-mails usually tell me that either older boy or younger boy has homework/tests/report cards/field trips/newsletters that the parents should view if they want to track their kids in school.

What this means in practical terms for me is that I cannot say:
-that I had no idea that younger boy had homework
and this means that I have to keep nagging younger boy to do his homework. Older boy is pretty much nagged into voluntary compliance although there have been times when we have had to drag him off YouTube so he would do his work.

It was wonderful before School Zone. I could just avoid younger boy's attention span problems and let the teachers just deal with it. Now everything has come to a head in grade 5. I've had conferences with the teacher. I have been to his pediatrician who diagnosed hypothyroidism. And hubby and I have been going nuts trying to get him to pay attention and muster up enough attention to actually do half an hour of homework at a time.

So Saturday morning I sat down with him to start math homework assignment #1. We got it done yesterday. Today with spent a tearful one hour doing assignment #2. We both then went to bed to cry over his homework. Yeah, it gets that painful here doing elementary school homework. I think I cry more than my 9 year old.

As for the damn book report, after we had both done our crying, I just gave up on it. We finished spelling. And then I let him off to work on the header for my blog. Cute isn't it?

Sunday with snow

Well, I'm going out to the snow dust bowl outside the door. Hubby is outside already. He is building a snow igloo with younger boy who has been moping all morning because I forced him to do homework. I gave up on the book report. Maybe I'll tackle that with him after the supper is done.

And speaking of supper, that is why I am going to go outside into the wilderness of white that is Edmonton today. Yesterday thanks to the pause button of global warming we had a fierce warm day that thawed us out sufficiently that we went cross country skiing and had a blast in Gold Bar Park.

But that is all over with. Now we are back in the winter deep freeze. I'm only going out because I do not want to cook. I am going to buy a frozen pizza, sliced deli meat for tomorrow's lunches and milk since we are entirely bereft of that liquid right now. I am going to write when I get back (still haven't finished those damn Saturday files). And after? I think it is time to just watch a movie.

Sunday with snow. The type of winter weekend that flavors the rest of the week. I'm going to shop for victuals right now.

Part 8 of Saturday

Oh, god will this recapitulation of one fucking day never end? I've got darling Francis Cabrel crying over my future demise at least. I'll get hubby to play that at my funeral.

So let me ponder what my dear husband will do immediately upon ashing me to cinders and putting me in safe confinement in my favorite hideous green pottery vase from the collection I have in the basement which at one time in my life was the height of my pottery collection but now serves as a paper weight for the most part.

First he will immediately take up with a younger woman with plutonium grade breasts and who will be able to cook (he will check this out extensively before going to bed with her). In addition, she will work (preferably in some high paying medical subspecialty such as pediatric neurosurgery), thus enabling him to take care of our two boys at home in the capacity of stay at home parent (a profession that he is far better suited for than I am) and in general loaf, like I have done for the past 14 years while his future paramour pay for the bills of life. In addition, he will ensure that his wife is not of the bread knife serrations type in her conversations, is able to pander to his male ego by sucking up to him endlessly and fulfill every one of the perverse and robust sexual demands that he randomly and perpetually comes up with AND that she is of the door mat variety of woman that he mistakenly thought I was when he married me. Hmm.. maybe it is just better for me to kick the bucket right now.

I also know that once hubby has acquired a female bill paying partner that he will start to spend money. For the most part, I've kept him from this satisfying life path of endless expenditures of large amounts of cash simply because I'm a cheap and miserable spouse.

But when I'm gone, since I was the wall that stood between him and endless unpaid credit card bills, he will engage in an orgy of unparalleled consumerist debauchery.

Yeah, I'm sure he will do that. For example, right now, he goes faithfully to pray at the churches of electronic gadgetry right now (Future Shop, Best Buy and other false god places). He sighs longingly for that big television screen from the sky and like any married man who is unable to buy what he wants, he comes home to declare militantly and futilely to me that "ONE DAY, I will have that big television screen in the sky." One day, in fact, he will have a television and cable T.V. services and a beer fridge and a man's hideaway shed in the back yard that he has already planned out but not yet made because I do not want him to use that corner section of our backyard for a shed but instead, plant fruit trees. As a consequence of this impasse between fruit trees and man shelter (I mean bomb shelter) he has left that back yard corner entirely barren so that when I kick the bucket, he can immediately start construction of a house sized shed where he will take his big busted groupies for hot sex while the boys inhabit the main quarters of the house innocently perusing CSI reruns on their computer monitors utterly unaware of the nefarious and demoralizing behavior of their father.

For when I'm gone, all the "thou shalt nots" of his life, in one fell swoop (what the fuck does that worn saying mean anyway?) are obsolete and he can do what the fuck he wants, fuck who the hell he wants and buy what the fuck he wants. Paradise is just one spousal murder away.

No doubt he will:

1) No longer drink cheap beer bought at the corner Sobey's but go to purveyors of fine wine and drink himself to cirrhosis of the liver since I will no longer be around to limit his alcohol consumption.

2) He will eat disgusting red meat based products at the obesity creation factories of the Western world such as the big M where he will indulge in all the vices of red necked Albertan males (or Quebec males living in Alberta) who like their women big busted and blond and their meat Alberta beef and raw.

3)He will go to New Zealand to commune with sheep farmers. He has always wanted to go to New Zealand but the fact that I've refused to work for the plane tickets and put down any of our disposable funds on paying down our mortgage (since I do not want us to be bank serfs for the rest of our lives) means that he hasn't got there yet. But immediately upon my demise, he will reduce our mortgage payments, stop paying down principal, take out a massive HELOC, trash our pristine credit rating, run up incredible credit card bills that he will not pay off immediately and therefore have interest charges and he will go to the beach. In New Zealand. Where there are apparently lots of sheep.

4) He will have fun with other women. I mean I don't mind him having fun with other women right now. I'm a lenient sort in terms of morality. But he won't do it. How unnatural can you get? This is a painful area for me since he expects me to be the same way and since I'm not naturally so inclined it takes a great deal of poetry to get me through the night with just one sexual partner. But once I am gone? What the hell, he will lose his good old Catholic indoctrination and become as randy as every other male I've encountered and assume the traditional Tom Cat Prowl.

5) He will experience "peace" whatever the fuck that is. I mean if he wants peace he might as well just walk in front of traffic on Highway 2 and become worm meat. There is no peace in this life. Just fucking problem after fucking problem and no solutions that are recognizable. Even the so called experts don't know what the fuck they are doing when they are solving problems. They are just pretending (but it is a good act).

6) In summary, he will be sort of like a pocket full of loose change, rattling along in some other woman's pocket, mostly not used, not spent and weighing that pocket down unbearably. It is better that I stay alive for as long as I'm able and keep the poor guy utilized and functional.

No, it is just not a good thing for a hapless male to be around without a dominant wife in the picture. It is best for a man to be under the evolutionary stimulus of a good woman. And as my husband well appreciates, a good woman like me, is hard to find.

Part 7 of Saturday

God, I regret buying those damn dollar store spiral notebooks (lot #3 of writing tool #2). Also I regret not taking advantage of the computer meltdowns to just go have some fun doing what every red blooded woman was doing Saturday morning which was indulging in retail therapy at our psychotherapy clinics at WEM. Why the fuck did I spend the entire morning being a penitentiary guard for younger boy (I have to jail him to get the homework done) and at the same time, do my writing practice?

So I was writing about epitaphs. I think I'll just scarf someone else's words. So simple. So tidy. And being averse to work, so less exhaustive on one's limited stock of life energy.

But let me put on The mamas and the papas singing "California dreamin" since the boys are still asleep and they tend to get hives when I play golden oldies music from my well spent youth.

So the epitaph. Let me go search the Internet.

When I am Dead, My Dearest

by Christina Georgina Rossetti
(1830-1894)

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.


http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/crossetti/bl-crossetti-wheni.htm

I've always liked Christina Rossetti (although I may not have liked her quite so much if I'd known her middle name was Georgina but oh, well). She was a plain speaking poet, realizing that as soon as she kicks the bucket her male partner of the moment would immediately hie himself off to find female companionship and she makes it easy for him by giving him a free passport to the land of multiple female bodacious babes by penning these immortal jail freeing lines:

"And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget."

But since she is a typical woman, she wants him to have a bit of guilt while she's stone dead and adds this foursome of damning lines to make him realize that while he is having fun with all and sundry, she is unfortunately worm meat.

"I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:"

So I think I'll just use Christina's words and be done with the business. There are some problems with this piece with reference to my own death. But first let me put on Manfred Mann's "Runner" before I get into the discrepancies and errors that using this poem will result at my own funeral.

The first problem is that I'm going to be ashed in an oven near to where we live (very convenient placing of the end of life cooker) and I'm pretty sure that hubby doesn't need the instructions implicit in this poem to go find his own babe groupie. I'd better change the song now to Francis Cabrel singing "Je l'aime a mourir" so that I can feel properly depressed over his hard hearted future behaviors.

Part 6 of Saturday

I've put on Jann Arden singing "Insensitive" and now I'm going to try and write the remaining stuff I put in the journal on Saturday. But first, another cup of coffee.

So I've got my stash of butter cookies that I will consume at a run with my black and boiling,triple sugared coffee and get back to finishing the lost files.

I was reading on Heck of a Guy about his epitaph (at least I think he was writing his epitaph, I was getting distracted by his talk about bodacious blogger groupies that he apparently has in large numbers.) Hmm... how is it possible for a mild mannered man like that to attract so many delicious women of the quality of Anjani who it appears would be his bed partner in a flash were it not for the sulky presence of the God of Words himself? Could it be the power of his words or the fact that he is up to a threesome in his bed?

But anyway, sometime around midnight, sometime last week I think I encountered a blog entry or two (Who knows? I was half asleep due to insomnia and not due to the meandering quality of the man's prose) where he goes on and on about writing his epitaph since apparently his sons are incapable of penning a simple goodbye to their dad and faking a tear soaked frenzy of offspring hysteria at his funeral even though his death would release the poor boys from a lifetime of perpetual nagging and parental manipulation by their father (god rest his future deceased soul).

Now, I can relate to that incapability of male offspring to articulate words, since my own two sons prefer not to communicate with me at all. In fact, I spent much of their early elementary school years hunting them down on the playground at school. I realized, eventually that my flesh inkblots were embarassed to be seen with a woman who wore polyester, used bad words that their principal had indicated were punishable by death offences and generally did not look hip,cool, accomplished or beautiful like the mothers of their peers (all blond, fit, large breasted trophy wives).

And so I reformed. I joined a YMCA. I did my bit for son/maternal relationships by looking trophy mother like. I tried to stop swearing but I lapse all the time. I wore clothes from my older son's wardrobe that he was getting rid of. I couldn't quite manage the perky, large breast business without breast implants and surgery but I got a super supporting bra that did get me lascivious leering at the YMCA from retired menfolk who were stuck with grim, large lardy wives as their end of life partners but no luck. My boys still won't be seen in public with me and avoid any non-essential chatter with me(other than "What's for breakfast/lunch/supper/snacks?") saying that I am disgusting. Why? Now, they say I'm too slutty looking. I wear tight jeans and T-shirts. They also say that I write about disgusting body functions on my blogs. What the fuck? They don't want me fat and they don't want me thin? They want me silent and in a veil? They want me to keep my words in a private journal so they can be pure as the driven snow in their images as male studs? Well, too bad. I'm going to be the woman I want to be and tough titties for them. This talk about my boys always brings up the perpetual question that has now diverted me from writing my epitaph on this post (this diversion of my hummingbird attention span is a continual problem for unless there is a real honey pot of a subject in sight I tend to digress continually). What do men want? Besides threesomes in bed with hot babes?

But let me get back to epitaphs and not those on Heck of a Guy who is able to write his own epitaph unlike me. Having Heck of a Guy's blog around is sooo useful for me. For now I have a ready source of topics to plagiarize and put as original content on my own blog and really what can the man do? He is rearing BOYS and that should occupy him for the rest of his life and give him a clear understanding why women go mad because dammit, they are dealing with irrational creatures who are testosterone driven. But I digress again. So let me go back to plagiarism. Why should I look for new subjects by myself from now on? I'll just go to his blog, find some subject that resonates with me such as bodacious babes and attempt to work on that area of my blog.

Part 5 of Saturday

So where the fuck am I in all this whining? So I've told you the saga of my writing life. At least for the last three years. I've been sitting in writing vacuums in my house facing myself almost daily and when I'm not here, writing in dollar store coil notebooks, making poetry and in general trying to write well.

Why bother? Good question. I think the main reason I write is because I love it. If you do not love something, you do not spend time doing it. You let it go. It is similar to the reason why people get divorced. At first, they are hot as horseshoes being made in a furnace for each other. They spend time together. Then, they start having those parasites I spoke of earlier. Time together becomes a luxury like sleep, sex and private time. By the time parents of young children surface from the quicksand that they are slowly sinking into all through their life time after the birth of their children (After children or A.C. as I call it), they don't know who they are sleeping with in their beds.

And if you stop caring about who you are sleeping with in your bed well then you are screwed. You get to take the easy way out which means you go off and leave the brats. There are many times I would have left hubby (just think of his antipathy to darling Leonard Cohen) but Leonard Cohen is always in the arms of some lovely and that lovely is usually a bright young thing who can sing or act or paint or be accomplished in some extravagant way and so there was no way I was going to attract his godlike attentions and so I've been forced to rely on my wits to keep me entangled in the arms of Cohen hater.

But I wasn't talking originally about marriage and infidelity although these are certainly pertinent topics for any married woman. I mean why do we marry and why do we stay married? Why do we have children? Why do we write about these topics - the main acts in the plays of our lives?

I read a poem once and I think it answers some of the questions for many women at least. Here is that poem.

The Women In This Poem

Browen Wallace


The woman in this poem
lives in the suburbs
with her husband and two children
each day she waits for the mail and
once a week receives
a letter from her lover
who lives in another city
writes of roses warm patches
of sunlight on his bed
Come to me he pleads
I need you and the woman
reaches for the phone
to dial the airport
she will leave this afternoon
her suitcase packed
with a few light clothes

But as she is dialling
the woman in this poem
remembers the pot-roast
and the fact that it is Thursday
she thinks of how her husband's face
will look when he reads her note
his body curling sadly toward
the empty side of the bed

She stops dialling and begins
to chop onions for the pot-roast
but behind her back the phone
shapes itself insistently
the number for airline reservations
chants in her head
in an hour her children will be
home from school and after that
her husband will arrive
to kiss the back of her neck
while she thickens the gravy
and she knows that
all through dinner
her mouth will laugh and chatter
while she walks with her lover
on a beach somewhere

She puts the onions in the pot
and turns toward the phone
but even as she reaches
she is thinking of
her daughter's piano lessons
her son's dental appointment

Her arms fall to her side
and as she stands there
in the middle of her spotless kitchen
we can see her growing
old like this
and wish for something anything
to happen we could have her go
mad perhaps and lock herself
in the closet crouch there
for days her dresses withering
around her like cast-off skins
or maybe she could take
to cruising the streets at night
in her husband's car
picking up teenage boys
and fucking them in the back seat
we can even imagine
finding her body
dumped in a ditch somewhere
on the edge of town

The woman in this poem offends us
with her useless phone and the persistent
smell of onions we regard her as we do
the poorly calculated overdose
who lies in a bed somewhere
not knowing how her life drips
through her drop by measured drop
we want to think of death
as something sudden
stroke or leap
that carries us over the railing
of the bridge in one determined arc
the pistol aimed precisely
at the right part of the brain
we want to hate this woman

but mostly we hate knowing
that for us too it is
moments like this
our thoughts stiff fingers
tear at again and again
when we stop in the middle
of an ordinary day and
like the woman in this poem
begin to feel
our own deaths
rising slow within us

When I read this poem in 20th Century Poetry and Poetics Edited by Gary Geddes, I felt that this poem was true to life for most of us. We get married in a brave attempt to stay the forces of evil - aging, work that doesn't satisfy the soul, future and uncertain death and we have children because we hope that we do not as it says in this poem:

like the woman in this poem
begin to feel
our own deaths
rising slow within us

Love, marriage, children and persisting in marriages are acts of creation. We create a story that we invest ourselves in. We can and in many case need to end this story if we can make a better, far more enriching story. But in many cases, as in the case of this woman, the original story has a web attached to it that if torn, impacts not only the woman herself but those she is connected to by spider fine webbing. What do most of us choose to do? We do what this woman did. We continue with the web we are in but we also yearn to be out of this web because dammit, it, like the writing persisting in marriage is the hard way. It is always the hard way that makes you evolve. Not the easy way but the hard way. And that, besides a sheer love of the words themselves, is why I write. I write to find questions I never even knew I had within me and with the writing I stumble forward to answers that may or may not satisfy me.

Part 4 of Saturday

But back to the past. What installment of Saturday's lost files was I on? Let me go check. In the meantime, let me put on Timbaland singing "Apologise" - something I'd like those blog commenters to do now that I've been proven right on not using your house as an Instant Teller machine.

Oh, I'm on part 4 of the Saturday lost files. So I'd got lot #2 of "MY" notebooks. I eventually got through this precious hoard of notebooks thanks to depredations by my sons who did not respect the sanctity of my stash of writing tool #2. Consequently, I was out of writing tool #2 in short order and did not have the cash to get on a plane and go back to the dollar store in Victoriaville to get more of the same.

I was forced to write almost entirely on the blogs with random excursions into poetry when I was deeply disturbed (and that happens regularly). I wrote on money, life, the meaning of life, love, marriage, children, infidelity, lusting after other men, sex, education, eating bad meals that I cooked and really anything I damn well wanted because I could (it's my blog and an "I get to do what I want" type of mentality prevails here). In the process, a great of crud got put out into the Internet cesspool and I was happy to have been a main contributer to the endless stream of that sewage.

I wrote to several writers begging them for the secret to getting from writing crud to writing compost, but most of these writers had no clue what the fuck they were doing either and deeply discouraged by the lack of an easy peasy formula (for unlike bubble real estate market writers who indicate continually that yes, you can make money with no money down, there is no easy way to make writing from nothing) I considered just simply ending it all (the writing - not the life).

It was at this low point in my writing life that I happened to go with the boys on one of their frequent excursions to that Dollar store (or whatever the hell it is called) on Calgary Trail. Yeah, I go there often. Not because I am deeply depressed about the writing (which I am) but because elementary school children have tight budgets and therefore simple consumer vices. We usually go after a long, hard, arduous and painful week of educational indoctrination. I feel it is only fair to reward the boys for resisting with all their might every attempt by every well meaning teacher to make them into refined,literate human beings from the educational derelicts that they have chosen to be and so I take them to the Dollar store or whatever it is called to fill them up with candy.

So there I was, browsing while the boys filled a shopping basket with the most toxic, about to expire candy products, chips and pop they could obtain when I turned the corner and spied a freshly snowed shelf of "MY" dollar store notebooks. The writing god is lenient. Perhaps that god had realized I was at the breaking point, that I had labored for 3 years in vain and that dammit there were no easy prescriptions to writing Nirvana. The rush I got from buying the entire stock of dollar store notebooks has been sufficient to keep me going in 2009.

I now have a pantry stock of these dollar store notebooks and they sit in a hidden box under the computer that is still infected with a virus in my bedroom.

Jackie Browns

So I got my coffee and toast and I'm going to change to Marianne Faithfull singing "As Tears Go By" for a bit. Yeah, a lot of tears go by as I think back to the comments I wrote and got trashed for.

Hey, to all you blog writers out there. If you don't want fucking comments by half awake SAHMs avoiding real life and going to your blog to write bits of inane advice, then do what I do which is JUST SHUT COMMENTS OFF.

But no, they leave it on and then grouse about the quality of their feedback. What the fuck? While some comments are actually bad - this is mostly because the writer is from the Third World and did not learn English as his first language or he is from the First World and did not work at his language arts skills in elementary school and therefore did not learn English as his first language.

This is why I continually prompt my boys to concentrate on writing poetry (which unfortunately they have an antipathy to similar to their antipathy to Leonard Cohen songs) since this will serve the dual purpose of ensuring that they write fine comments on other people's blogs and making them into babe magnets (and the babes they will attract will, unlike the current crop of pink braced stupid girls I am seeing will be able to chat with me about topics other than bubblegum).

Now while my parents did not learn English as their first language (which has lead to continual and persistent language problems between me and them), I did learn to speak English as soon as my brain kicked into high gear which was around 3 years old and my mouth never quit since that holy moment. Coupled with an intense desire to communicate (loudly, persistently and demandingly) to my less than compliant parents, plus an affinity for print that unfortunately has made our home a barn for words (filled with books that are slowly but surely disintegrating and adding to my hay fever woes), I started writing. I started spending real time in the stacks of public libraries in Edmonton as soon as we got here from Kuwait and rather than groping pimply faced high school guys in the back seats of rusting red Corollas as a teenager I was forever in the arms of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and other male poets (which come to think of it was a far better place to be than in those backseats). In any case, due to this immolation in the poetry of the gods, I was an easy mark for my husband in 1990 when all the pent up demand for sex burst the dams of restraint and got me into bed with him as easily as a bull gets debulled (hmm.. what is that word for when the farmer removes the testicles from a bull?). But I digress. I believe I could write an intelligent comment on a blog and did so about 3 years ago.

Hah! Did I get pilloried. I believe it was a blog article encouraging people to never ever pay their mortgage off but instead use the money they would normally have used to get of being a life long bank slave and instead invest in other assets such as stocks and investment properties.

I had the temerity to disagree with the writer's comments. I respectfully (albeit firmly) suggested he was a mental nincompoop in financial matters. I pointed out to him that paying double or triple the original price of a house by renting the house from the bank for 25 years was akin to a deer in the headlights financial strategy and debt was sinful, immoral and just plain stupid as a way to get rich. Of course what do I know? There are bazillion people who disagree with my position and now of course these bazillion people are losing their homes to foreclosure, are begging the government to bail out stupid car companies from business foreclosure and yeah, these same folks are now becoming frugal and debt averse (well, at least the banks are since I doubt they like to have rental properties that are unoccupied by their tenants and therefore are losing money like a chicken whose neck is sliced is losing precious life blood).

I think it is appropriate to change now to John Mellencamp singing "Jackie Brown" since currently there is a crop of Jackie Browns being created and none of this personal pain would have been necessary if people had learned one simple fact in their lives - that your life is more precious than your money. Yeah, if you valued your life, first of all you would not tie it up in an ego purchase of a megaMansion without having a massive down payment available, the salary of a physician specializing in plastic surgery (preferably breast implants) and a cheap gene or two in their genetic inheritance.

Let me give you an example. My dad is a physician. He made a decent salary while he was working and is still making a tiny salary as a part time physician and he has told me that in two years time, when he is eighty, he will finally quit the sordid profession. The man has enough money. He is also cheap. The reason he has enough money is because he is cheap. He did not have any financial smarts that I was aware of, he spent money like the current Western governments are doing on poorly made GMC trucks and Toyota Camrys and finally, has a propensity to get into real estate transactions that require his daughters to devote their lives (such as they are) in attracting, dealing with and evicting tenants of dubious quality and police records. But because he is otherwise cheap and paid off his rental properties, he is not in the mess many Jackie Browns are in today. Of course, it helped that he was married to my debt averse mother (somehow I think it always helps when a man is married to a woman-they tend to make better choices in life).

But there you go. I made a comment. Bad move. I never make comments now because I prefer not to be publicly humiliated for my lack of intelligence, scarcity of financial acumen and the revelation that my genotype of being a SAHM determines my phenotype of being an utter innocent in money matters. Hah! And I say hah! again. I happen to be still in my house. What about all those real estate bubble folks who told me that I was stupid for putting every cent my poor hubby earned not on the big screen television that he has been dreaming about for a decade but on the damn mortgage payments? Hopefully, they aren't real life Jackie Browns.

Intermission

I've learned that one must suffer for ones' art. I was woken early this morning by groping hands and smacked them away as any wife married to her craft must do in order to get any work done.

Me "What the hell are you doing? I'm fifty. Do you think I'm a fucking machine?"

Hubby "But you're a very young fifty love. And look, I'm ready to go."

I made post haste to just get the fuck out of bed and return to Saturday's creative non-fiction post (the lost files). Life is creative non-fiction, except I believe it is far more creative than most of the fiction being written these days except in the case of children's literature where surely to god some of the most darling,imaginative and powerful at their craft, fiction writers hide out.

But let me scurry back to my own writing work that never ends because it serves the useful purpose of keeping me out of psychiatric wards and impedes the application of full medication by the local purveyors of mental health. Let me do my own form of writing therapy. I'll put on Leonard Cohen singing that absolutely restorative song "Take that waltz" which is almost as good as hubby asking me to "take that cock" and head back to the land of incomprehensible life that I'm attempting but failing to make coherent in this blog.

So where was I with the Saturday chronicles that I will place on line to add to the soup of generally abominable prose pieces on the Internet? Speaking of which, it isn't only the quality of blog writing that I am alarmed by (including my own inferior product which cannot be blamed on the first year English language instructors at the University of Alberta), since they obviously cannot correct any 18 year old student's years of watching soap operas and ingesting Shelley and thereby developing an inimical and fatal style that impedes consumption of the meaning of anything she writes but I've been disturbed (more than I already am) also by the intensity of hostile response to bland comments I've made on blogs. These responses has been sufficient to ensure that I never ever indicate my true opinions on anything to anyone in a public forum and instead just come to my own blog and shut off comments and make pernicious comments in this safe no-woman's land.

Let me give you a small example of what I mean before heading back to the lost files of yesterday. Since I want to confirm that this piece like all the previous ones is also poorly constructed and built, I will end this blog entry here since I have lost my train of thought and need to go make a pot of coffee first. And then, I'll restore myself like a dusty bit of china, freshly washed to the china cabinet of this blog and dazzle all onlookers and hopefully manage to sound awake when I resume pattering on and on and on......(as hubby says, thank god for the blogs or the mouth that never shuts would be in dire need of personal protective services).

Part 3 of Saturday

Then we went to Quebec for a holiday. My mother in law was stuck with us for a week. The boys drove her insane since they were boys and moved. The apartment she had moved into in Victoriaville when she sold her spacious but labor intensive bungalow was crammed to the hulls with delicate and precious Victorian furniture, knick knacks, plates, photographs of numerous and ugly grandchildren in various poses (most with bulging foreheads and nasty French noses but this large and ever expanding collection of her grandchildren did not include any ugly pictures of my children of course since they are youthful Adonis quality material and besides which I never have any grandma quality pictures for her since every time I take out the digital camera this induces some sort of Calvin and Hobbes type reflex and the boys turn from cherubs into well, children with large French noses and why should I add to my mother in law's level of pain?) and of course, delicate and irreplaceable china. Everywhere.

Now delicate antique glass is very prone to breakage when my two little inkblots are in motion and also due to language constraints there was an absence of television programming that could capture and immobilize the vermin. In Quebec, they do not speak English unless by some mischance we are in Montreal and foreigners such as myself who are brown and do not speak French are looked upon with the very darkest of suspicion for what the fuck is a good Quebec guy doing marrying across the language line?

In Quebec, the idea is this. If you force people to speak French, they will continue to speak French, never learn English, be totally handicapped in the world arena and therefore French culture will stay alive but the economy will be dead. This works and as a consequence, the T.V. programming is in French. And so the inkblots, unable to speak French due to the FAILURE of their FATHER to speak in FRENCH with them from the moment of rejection from the womb as defective products, were restive and apt to break small, costly and delicate objects. As a consequence, their frazzled grandmother hurried them to the nearest dollar store and we followed her.

They have a massive dollar store in Victoriaville, no doubt because this small town appears to be the apex of retirement destinations for old folks from Drummondville. It is also a pretty river town which I never got to explore because we spent all our time in stores such as this dollar store. Anyway, I had fun there.

While my mother in law supervised the boys, I happily picked up useless junk such as oversize clothes pins for my outdoor laundry line and a red tin bucket with the word (POMME) emblazoned in white upon it which now holds a variety of rubbish in my home (a cache of keys of indeterminate origin, some of which may be our original front door key, a mood ring bought in Jasper because younger boy was desperate to check his emotional status every second of our last summer holiday, a group of buttons which may be useful for when I actually rebutton those sad clothes hanging despondently in my closet and yes, a birthday candle and a dust bunny I have become fond of).

I also bought a round cardboard box made in Hong Kong with the words "welcome /coffee" painted gaily around its round rim while a token "CAFE" is written on the lid. Obviously the makers of said box were aware of the French language police and their stranglehold in this province. They had had the business acumen, like most makers of dollar store products that sell products to a low IQ market such as SAHMs, senior citizens and children, to put an obligatory French mote on the product they were marketing in Quebec and then just go ahead and write everything else in English. They obviously understood the concept of a minority of French seals (I mean citizens) swimming in ever decreasing numbers (despite the fact that Quebec tries to make the reproduction of French citizenry a noble and patriotic profession - hey, I'd fit in here perfectly) in a sea of English speaking dolts. The box was charming. I loved it. Like most SAHMs, I like pretty things. Hmm.. why do SAHMs like cardboard boxes and buy them? Well, I don't know why other mums at home like cardboard boxes but the reason I do is that they contain all the messes that young kids generate as some sort of slimy snail trail to mark their passage throughout a house.

I like to have my kids' messes in boxes and pretend that the chaos is at least contained. Which it is. And so when I spied this delightful round box, my instant thought was to contain more chaos and I bought it. I also bought a square box in the same family that now holds all the paper that the boys use for the printer.

My mother in law watched the shopping cart fill in horror. When she bought our family to the store, she had expected the boys to go buy stuff and me to just meander and look around. Instead, the boys were bored and wanted to go home and I was buying up the shop.

But worse was to come. I turned a corner. There on a shelf was a stack of coil notebooks in patriotic colors. I blushed with joy. It was true. There was a god. I had been rewarded for my labors in writing innumerable pages of crud for the past two years by the god of writing. I had refills of my notebooks. I gave the shopping cart to my husband and got another one. I filled it with the special, meaningful relationship notebooks. My mother in law looked queasy. I can't blame the poor woman. I'm not the easiest daughter in law to have around. I'm a decade older than her son, I have two sons who are not speaking the mother tongue, there has been a fatal failure in acquisition of the mother tongue on my part despite intensive French lessons and finally this - a shopping cart full of dollar store coil notebooks. I know what she was thinking. Surely to god, her mad daughter in law did not write?

But I did not enlighten her. I left the store in triumph hugging massive bags of coil notebooks to my rapidly beating breast. I was dragged out of the store by my husband as I spied yet another shelf of the most delicious, thick paged journal books I've ever encountered. Love. Lust. Thwarted by fate and a malicious husband. I never did get to buy those luscious journals. But anyway, they were a trifle expensive. And they weren't "my" dollar store coil notebooks.

So it necessitated a trip to Quebec and the loss of my mother in law's esteem to acquire that second batch of notebooks but at least, I had a good stock of them for awhile. They ran out within a year and I was bereft. Where would I commit my less than stellar writing (for now I'd received feedback and none of it was positive and most centered on my whining and absolute failure to write a coherent piece of prose or a unsentimental bit of poetry)? Where was I going to place my delicate webs of creative non-fiction (which I had to modify since my husband was utterly convinced that if I did not make my blog persona much nicer than I really am, we would have tomatoes thrown at us as we drive down Samesville)? In addition, he demanded in less than friendly tones that I'd better remove my name from the blogs or we would likely have some Internet stalker hose our computers with viral contagions. Hah! What does he know? But I decided to remove my real name and adopted "argent" for my nom de plume since who loves money more than I do? Where did I put my stuff? Well, that is in the next part which I'm going to write tomorrow because I'm too damn tired right now.

Part 2 of Saturday

I decided to just be lazy and split Saturday into parts since I'm tired as hell and my tea is sitting in my stomach like a fist and my current song is making me dizzy. I'm listening to Dead or Alive singing "You spin me round" and I'm really spinning.

Part 2

It took a while to get writing so those first 10 notebooks took a while to fill up. But they were eventually filled with crap writing which we are all prone to writing because we know we can get away with it (no audience and therefore no reason to do better). At least when you blog, you have the illusion of an audience and at least tidy up your spelling (well, you do if you are awake and at this point it is rather debatable if I am).

But I meander again. I filled the ten notebooks with crud. Some of them traveled to work. Some got lost. I put some in a plastic tub that holds all my immortal lines and that my sons will probably incinerate at some time in the future when they have to empty all my thrift store books in a dumpster outside (all the while cursing me for the extra labor they have to expend in order to sell the house in order to reap the profits of my death and death bed extraction of a will in which the house, my only asset is split between the two boys in return for the emptying out of the basement which will still probably not be done by the time I croak). The books are still in my plastic tub near my bed. One day, I will go visit myself in the past and see if this time capsule experiment will yield any laughs.

My big mistake when I started writing was that of attachment. I found I was getting used to "MY" notebooks. I was attached to them. I was reluctant to write in other dollar store notebooks. They felt like strangers rather than intimate partners in an affair of the heart and mind and soul.

I liked the heft, the feel, the number of pages, the abundance of lines on the pages of "MY" notebooks. To my dismay, I found the Dollar Mart (or whatever it was called) had been plundered of their stock of the coil notebooks and they would not be immediately getting replacements in. Apparently, other people liked that brand of coil notebooks as much as I did. Other wannabe ego bound writers in midlife crisis also frequented dollar stores searching for ways to express their existential angst and bought "MY" notebooks to record the rapid and imminent impact of their personal Titanics with the great Iceberg of death. Hence, when I returned to said dollar store to purchase replacement notebooks, all of them were gone.

Since words are my drug of choice, imagine my state upon the discovery that there were no more of my notebooks available in which I could inscribe my daily travails as a SAHM of elementary school boys who provided enough friction to wear the tires down of this particular maternal vehicle to warrant continuous and daily writing therapy. It was a shock. I bought some other brand of notebooks. It wasn't the same but I persevered. Happily, at about this time, I started my first blog and rattled on incessantly about the miseries of being poor (and since I did not want to work, this blog on poverty and money was able to continue fruitfully and is in fact, still alive since I still do not want to work).

I plodded on. I was beginning to realize that it wasn't all fun and games and that I really had to do something, anything on a daily basis to make my writing a fact of life rather than a hobby akin to macramé, quilt making and pushing out babies every year. This was a difficult revelation for me that was exacerbated by the continual inability to purchase replacements of "MY" notebooks.

Part 1 of Saturday

I've just put younger boy to bed. He is wrapped in his comforter, as warm and snug as a snail in its shell. I've got "Sweetest Girl" by Wyclef Jean playing softly in the background.

I got up this morning to a kiss awake from hubby and a whispered "Coffee is ready," but I just rolled over and lay dreaming in bed. I love getting up on Saturday and lying hot and luxuriant in the bed knowing the entire day is before me. I think every day is like a cup of cold milk in a cup - creamy and delicious - just waiting to be drunk up. Writing is my way of drinking up the days of my life. But unfortunately, today I had no way to write on the computer. Each of the computers was down.

Hubby had been up since 6:00 am working on the infected cells. They were all a pain in the butt to get up again. I have no idea how he did it. He is still slaving over the AIDS infected corpse of what used to be a viable piece of electronic equipment in our master bedroom but is instead defunct right now. It is like we have had an attack of an invisible wartime pathogen and the containment of the damage has been long, messy and involved several colorful sessions of swearing in both French and English.

Since I could not start the day writing on the blogs as I've been doing, I decided to do the blog writing the old fashion way - in my dollar store coil note books and then transcribe the writing into the blog when I got access restored to me. Since the bonus room computer is now functional I am writing everything in the dollar store notebook as one big entry and marking it into sections just to keep it all relatively segmental in nature and followable. But first let me get my toast and Darjeeling tea and put on Paul Brandt singing "My heart has a history". The lyrics are first. Man, Paul Brandt is just so yum in every way.


Paul Brandt, My Heart Has A History Lyrics


My heart has a history
Of hurtin' those who mean the most to me
Before you get too close to me
I think you oughta know
While other hearts are holdin' on
While other loves are growin' strong
My heart has a history of lettin' go

The first time I looked into your eyes
I knew this moment would arrive
I got a feelin' you're the one
But my heart keeps tryin' to turn and run
The problem is this happens every time

My heart has a history
Of hurtin' those who mean the most to me
Before you get too close to me
I think you oughta know
While other hearts are holdin' on
While other loves are growin' strong
My heart has a history of lettin' go

If we can take this one kiss at a time
Maybe we can tame this heart of mine
I'm telling you the cold, hard truth
I ain't ever been loved by the likes of you
And I ain't ever had this much on the line, but

My heart has a history
Of hurtin' those who mean the most to me
Before you get too close to me
I think you oughta know
While other hearts are holdin' on
While other loves are growin' strong
My heart has a history of lettin' go

Yeah, my heart has a history of lettin' go.

http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/brandt-paul/my-heart-has-a-history-4771.html

Now, lets get back to writing.

Part 1

It seems strange writing 2009 in the journal. When you write with a pen, things slow down. And when you are unable to use your computer because all of four of them are being resuscitated by the GOD of Electronic Emergency Medicine - my husband - well you have to re-remember how to slow down and pause and write in pen and paper again.
What this re-remembering is this - I sit here at the kitchen table and write in a new journal book. There is nothing quite as delicious as opening a new dollar store spiral notebook.

Mine are part of a massive lot of notebooks that I bought last year (lot #3 of "MY" notebooks). About 3 years ago, when I stopped avoiding the work of learning to write and decided to just get on with it, I also decided to invest in writing tools. But what type of tools? Since I had loads of functional blue pens all over the house, I did not bother to buy pens but now, I want to, I lust for a ink pen and will be checking stationary stores for a suitable ink pen so that I can rewrite my poems in some state of pleasure rather than misery. I hate revision. And maybe the heft and feel and delicacy of a winged pen in my hand will make the revision hell so much easier.

I had a whack of paper products all over the house as well such as left over journals, diaries and the residues of every elementary class the boys have passed through which are the backpacks of half filled notebooks that I have been unable to chuck since they have so many blank sheets in them. Somehow none of these current items filled the need for making the writing a separate event that warranted daily attention. I had yet to start writing in the blogs and I knew from past experience that if I did not have a consistent set of books, there would be sheafs of paper in plastic containers in wild disarray and I hate having to shift through poems in decay.

Now while the sheafs of paper are still functional ways of recording data you accumulate from experiments in writing, I knew that while they were functional, they did not live up to my ambitions (which at the beginning of my writing odyssey was monstrous and unbearable since I believed my ego's heartfelt directions that "if I just worked at the writing, the readers would come like maggots to feast on the fresh corpse I'd murdered for them.")

I have no longer that ego since it has been entirely crushed and reshaped by writing itself and I can safely say that when I write now, it is to amuse myself and teach myself since there is no way in hell that any of us can change anyone else unless of course that other wants to change himself. So writing will never do what adequate psychotherapy may accomplish but even there I am dubious since it appears to me that the entire brain territories are unmapped and we have no idea in hell where the soul and imagination of a human being lies. We have no idea how we even make our realities and change them. We are in the stone age of psychiatry and there is a sort of pervasive belief that if individuals are not "normal" then they are certainly "abnormal" and need treatment. In some cases, this is absolutely the case, but in a great field of human beings, there is Prozacization of a nation who cannot grow up in their entirety because they are being medicated into immaturity. Apparently, according to the Prozac site, more than 90 countries are experimenting with this drug on their citizenry which indicates to me that there is a great deal of money to be made in making sad people happy. Perhaps it might be money better spent in helping people manage the necessary phases of their biological life cycle and accept that there are challenges of these ordinary phases that require our full commitment and struggle to go through and emerge on the other side as stronger individuals. There is no cure for a broken life and there is no cure for losses and there is no cure for death. We have to learn to be sad when they occur and not medicate ourselves into denial of these states.

But I digress. I was talking about paper. So I went, where every serious would be writer in a midlife crisis who realizes that:
1) time is running out with reference to the writing business and
2) the damn flesh inkblots will never stop being time consuming (since kids never stop being connected to you by blood ties, there is no way to be rid of these parasites and therefore they will be a life long drain of one's life energy and time) and
3) that if I did not start writing NOW, it would never happen because writing isn't like eating where you just open your mouth and insert food/liquid - you actually have to work at it.

And so I looked for the receptacles that would accept my articulate outpourings and stumbled into a dollar store near ToysRUs on Calgary Trail (which may actually just be called The Dollar Store or Dollar Mart or perhaps Only a Dollar). Whatever. I searched its shelves while hubby took the boys to Zellers to purchase socks and violent electronic games.


It was one of those out of body experiences that I am sure most of us experience upon coming into contact with paper. I love paper products. I am always buying them. Short stubby notebooks to jot on in the minivan when I am in the middle of a traffic jam and there is a frozen pool of time in which to just meander on a page. Or those long drawing books where you can doodle and make a cartoon and is perfect for younger son to make his comics in. I also like the notebooks with the floppy, elastic covers that let them be rolled up like a newspaper roll and is useful for swatting the boys when they are being particularly male in their responses and behaviors. For me, finding my darling spiral coil dollar store book set that I've used for the past 3 years, has been a holy experience similar to my first kiss with my first and last man (hubby) and similar to the breaking of dawn on the summit of Mount Robson where we woke up from a tent, cramped, frozen and inelastic and came out to what is the wilderness equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Yeah, finding those notebooks was that tremendous.

There they were. "MY" coil notebooks. They were arrayed in tasteful plastic covers of blue/pink stripes or alternately of red/pink stripes. They were designed to be filled with my immortal lines (remember at this time, my ego was ascendant and uncontrollable and soon to be crushed by every critic in the Internet universe). I immediately invested the $10 plus GST (damn Canadian government) and invested in lot # 1 of writing tool #2.

Climate change, thank god

Thank god for climate change. It is warming up outside. I stopped at our nearby Sobeys and picked up meat for the spaghetti sauce. Older boy wanted chicken fajitas but I am reluctant to make chicken YET AGAIN....So I have left that for tomorrow. No doubt he will be grumpy. As I am. I'm sleepy but the flesh inkblots are to be picked up soon from school and so I will have to tough it out and not flake out in a coma right now. I've got Meatloaf real loud right now (Paradise by the dashboard light) and hopefully that will keep me awake.

I still haven't got to the revisions of my poems. I wonder why not? Maybe because I spent the ENTIRE morning sucking up Lorca like a strawberry milkshake from the big M? And as a consequence, I simply sat on my own poems. Oh, well. I'll do them this weekend.

This morning our waking up was traumatic (at least for older boy). I was so sleepy that I did not wake him in time for his full morning war paint session. He was like almost apoplectic. There were these muffled screams emanating from his jaws. Poor baby. He still managed to look stunning by the time we headed out. I wonder if this child was switched at Calgary Foothills Hospital? I mean the very fact that he gives a damn about his appearance surely means to god that his genetics are very dissimilar to mine.

I'm so toasted right now that I'm meandering in this entry. I am simply going to meander. I wish I could just get to clear writing in a few easy steps. I'm afraid, despite every attempt to find shortcuts to proficiency, I've come to the sad conclusion that work is involved in learning how to write and maybe this is why 99.9% of all those wannabe writers never actually get down to writing.

The only reason I'm writing is because despite the fact it is work, it is also so much fun. I can sit here with a dictionary and grope words. It has always been like this. I remember when my parents would ask me what I want for gifts and I'd say "Charles Dickens". Yeah, I was that type of nerdy, bookish kid. I was always in my room, with my head entirely engulfed in an octopus of books.

Man, I love Meatloaf. He is doing "Bat out of Hell" right now. The guy is so damn fine. I love his sheer energy. Despite the fact that I am as soft and pulverized as freshly ground meat right now, I'd like to get up and dance to him but no, I'm utterly soaked in the chair and my posture would shame the nuns at the school in Bangladesh where I used to get regularly flailed for bad posture.

I can't think of another thing to write about. Oh, maybe this. Once the boys are picked up, I head to the library. I then come home to the expectation that they will quarrel bitterly among themselves. Older boy's computer has to be replaced soon. The computer in my bedroom is still infected with that damn virus and is making ominous, unhappy noises as if it were in labor and were about to birth some alien creature. It may soon shut down as well. As for this computer that I am working on, it is very slow as well. I guess there must be some predetermined schedule of planned obsolescence for all electronic equipment and that the time is now for ours. But that damn virus. It just adds to the misery.

So what ever writing I do until the boys get home to scrap over the sole functional computer-this is it. I won't be able to write until midnight or if I go to bed because I'm sooo tired, then I probably won't write until late tomorrow morning. If the weather is lukewarm, we will head out to cross country ski. The younger boy is still hypothyroid and lasts about ten seconds but we can still do a couple of cycles around the ski loops and older boy and hubby can do more while younger boy pouts in the shelter with me. Well, I'm done.

Gary Synder

Oh, I can't go and make supper without one poem from Gary Synder here.

Song Of The Taste

Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed
around the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb's leap
the swish in the ox's tail

Eating roots grown swoll
inside the soil

Drawing on life of living
clustered points of light spun
out of space
hidden in the grape

Eating each other's seed
eating
ah, each other

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:
lip to lip



Hey, I'm ready for being devoured now. Such a mighty poem. Delicious. Utterly consumable.

Federico Garcia Lorca, part 5

New York
(Office and Denunciation)
To Fernando Vela


Under the multiplications,
a drop of duck's blood;
under the divisions,
a drop of sailor's blood;
under the additions, a river of tender blood.
A river that sings and flows
past bedrooms in the boroughs-
and it's money, cement, or wind
in New York's counterfeit dawn.
I know the mountains exist.
And wisdom's eyeglasses,
too. But I didn't come to see the sky.
I'm here to see the clouded blood,
the blood that sweeps machines over waterfalls
and the soul toward the cobra's tongue.
Every day in New York, they slaughter
four million ducks,
five million hogs,
two thousand pigeons to accommodate the tastes of the dying,
one million cows,
one million lambs,
and two million roosters
that smash the skies to pieces.
It's better to sob while honing the blade
or kill dogs on the delirious hunts
than to resist at dawn
the endless milk trains,
the endless blood trains
and the trains of roses, manacled
by the dealers in perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons,
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood
under the multiplications,
and the terrified bellowing of the cows wrung dry
fills the valley with sorrow
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.
I denounce everyone
who ignores the other half,
the half that can't be redeemed,
who lift their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat
inside forgotten little animals
and where all of us will fall
in the last feast of pneumatic drills
I spit in all your faces.
The other half hears me,
devouring, pissing, flying in their purity,
like the supers' children in lobbies
who carry fragile twigs
to the emptied spaces where
the insect antennae are rusting.
This is not hell, but the street.
Not death, but the fruit stand.
There is a world of broken rivers and distances just beyond our grasp
in the cat's paw smashed by a car
and I hear the earthworm's song
in the hearts of many girls.
Rust, fermentation, quaking earth.
You yourself are the earth as you drift in office numbers
What shall I do now? Set the landscapes in order?
Order the loves that soon become photographs,
that soon become pieces of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no; I denounce it all.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
that radiate no agony
that erase the forest's plans,
and I offer myself as food for the cows wrung dry
when their bellowing fills the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.



What can I say? That's all I'm going to do of Lorca since I have to return the book to the library today. But so damn passionate, authentic, true and still the same truth today as when he wrote it. Why aren't we saying what he said?

No, no; I denounce it all.

Signs of affection

Every woman has moments when she doubts her lovability, when she looks at her Buddha belly or perhaps her most recent hair cut that makes her appear like witch woman from an amateur rendition of "Macbeth" and wonder "Where is the love?" Now, I'm not saying this happens often to me but like any woman, I do like to hear those three words that mean the most to any soft as butter woman. Of course, I'm not a soft as butter woman but more like the Titanium type version but even so, I do like to hear some sort of indication from my taciturn, reserved block of Gallic uncharm husband that he is at my feet, adoring every molecule of my being and basically gaga over the fact that he is married to me.

Do I get such verbal stimulation and reassurances? NOPE. I have to fight for every sign of affection.

Let me give you some examples of incidents in the past where my dear husband has been less than a 100 Watt light bulb of a man and has in fact, been an idiot and an insensitive idiot at that.

1) Example 1

Me, coy and anticipatory, "Darling, why did you marry me?"

Hubby "Well, I was under the delusion that Asian girls were submissive, obedient and malleable entities. I thought Asian girls were like the girls in those porno movies - you know - remarkably flexible in bed, great at different impossible positions that enhance a man's sexual gratification and yeah, that they cooked a damn fine meal."

2) Example 2

Me, in a more direct fashion, "Darling, do you love me?"

Idiot Hubby, slightly miffed to be drawn out of his out of this world reverie of CSI reruns to be asked such a stupid question, "Huh, what did you say? Love? Remember what old Harris in graduate school in Calgary used to tell you? He told you that some guys have a thing for white meat and some just prefer dark meat. Personally, I prefer white meat with reference to the meat I consume and dark meat for my female portion."

3) Example 3

Me, (I'm mad now) "For the last time, you bloody dolt, was it love that got you here in this marriage?"

Hubby, now achieving the insensitive Idiot ranking as spouse, "No, it wasn't love. The sex was good." At this point, he returns to the CSI episodes with a bored air about him.

I proceed to pummel him unmercifully. He protests "Husband abuse" frequently. I cheer up. He must love me. He does. He has croaked out "I love you". Hmm... was it just to return to those damn CSI reruns?

The Joys of Poetry

Finally, unable to continue another second in a marriage where one partner continually mocks the GOD of WORDS, I had it out with my husband.

Me "Why do you hate Leonard Cohen so fricking much?"

Hubby "I don't hate him. He is ok."

Me "You're just saying that to keep the peace."

Hubby "No, I'm not."

Me "Yes, you are."

And so on and so forth. We get to bed. I'm determined to show this man the beauty of a damn poem. In other words, I want to change my husband.

As many wives can attest, changing a man, especially ones own dear husband is like taking a tiny kitchen mallet meant to pound chicken breasts to the consistency of bread slices and applying this tool to a mountain of rock. It takes time. A great deal of time. Most psychology textbooks by eminent individuals like Dr. M. Scott Peck, in one of his many books (can't remember which one) indicated that he attempted for many years to modify his wife's annoying traits and finally gave up, realizing that he would never be able to transform her into some sort of compliant lapdog of a woman (more power to her too).

I'm more determined than Dr. Peck. I feel that being a woman also is useful since we tend to be more wily. I mean it was a woman who got Adam evicted from that terribly boring Garden of Eden and into the excitement of a real world with fascinating adventures and many opportunities for evolution - right? So if one of my very early ancestors could be so smart, why would I be less intelligent?

I decided to provide darling but poetry alienated hubby with his own personalized hands on workshop by yours truly to open his mind, body and soul to the joys of poetry. Being one of Eve's own, I did what any female would do and got him to bed.

Usually in bed, my husband is as soft and relaxed as a young boy at church praying in some pre-Raphaelite pose, utterly vulnerable to my machinations.

Clinically, I inspected him. He was naked. I got on him and proceeded to recite a pertinent section of Leonard Cohen's "Take this Waltz" song. While giving him the joys of poetry in an in person recitation, I also took personal liberties with his person, with no complaints, resistance or verbal admonishments being evoked. Hubby was smitten by the pairing of poetry with sex.

Me,calmly and smugly, "Now do you understand the joys of poetry?"

My dear husband, gasping and winded, "Um, I might need a few more lessons with you."

Me "What the fuck for? I've already given you a free, no effort required demonstration of the power of poetry."

My dear husband "SLOW LEARNER."

Right. Next time, I'll get him to pay for the instruction in the joys of poetry. Well, here is that delightful portion I used to educate hubby with:

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where loves never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leonard+cohen/take+this+waltz_20082814.html