it's very easy, day in & day out, to think about how shitty humans are to one another. just check the news in whatever medium you want & there it is: awfulness.

when the whip comes down in some disaster, i want americans surrounding me. just like they did w/that airliner in the hudson today, just like they did during 9-11. i can't speak for any other nationality. look at the picture. those are ferries that rushed to the scene BEFORE emergency vehicles to help in the rescue. who knew if bombs were still on board yet to detonate? as rachel maddow said in her newscast, "people ran towards & not away from the disaster." folks who were on their way home to dinner ended up pulling folks out of a sinking airliner in the hudson river. they could not in their wildest dreams have imagined that that was how they'd end their day.

bless each & every one of them.

THAT'S SO CUTE!!!

awwwwwww...how much cuter can you get, right? well, yes & no. i'll let you read the caption yourself. in keeping w/my mixed messages of the day(life is a shit-hole but it can be so cute), i offer you this link. this guy doesn't nail it every time but he does most of the time (the tamarin is hilarious). it's time well spent.

enjoy

clean sweep

well, ok. things have been a little morbid around the ol' blog lately. two entries on suicide & one about the on-going tragedy in gaza. what can i say? the world can really be too much w/us sometimes, esp when we just want to party like there's a new millenium & not feel like we're getting swept out by the devil's broom. it's hard NOT to feel like the guy in the video (snatched from his bed & dragged around town like that w/everything that's good in his life a blur)but a little music never hurts.

i like this guy a lot. his stuff is everywhere on youtube & itunes. enjoy.

violating the vaughn doctrine

sometime back during the american involvement in kosovo, i remember saying to philip: "what the hell are muslims doing in that country? what the hell is going on there?" & his very simple reply: " your ignorance is a perfect example of why americans really should refrain from even having opinions about these kinds of conflicts." it made sense to me at the time & makes more sense now but this on-going cluster-fuck in gaza has really passed the "having opinions" point. from what i've read & heard most israelis(which does NOT include american jews) believe in the two-state solution & want it put into effect. ditto most of the palestinian people. of course, over 70% of the american people want out of iraq & you see where that's gotten them.

i think there were several episodes of "star trek" where the enterprise crew got themselves mixed up in a centuries old conflict between two opposing races/tribes. inevitably, after much bloodshed & usually ONE particularly senseless death(most of the time, a child or woman), the bloodthirsty crazies come to their senses & realize that things AS THEY ARE must end. of course, this is fiction & usually written by someone w/no experience of either war or the kind of conflict described.

the piece at this link(entitled "the pornography of horror") was written about gaza by someone who's fully invested there. what continues to strike me is the disconnect between the people & their leaders. that's an old story too but one that shouldn't get buried beneath the emotions of the moment. my only real opinion here is that when the leaders refuse to do the people's will, it's time for a change.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1813.html

SPORTS WEDNESDAY

i saw bo jackson play baseball once. i'd seen the great runs he'd made as an auburn football player. i'd heard all the stories. w/someone like lebron around nowadays, it's hard to remember that other "complete" athletes ever existed(who, someone might ask nowadays, was jim thorpe, my childhood hero). i saw him down in sarasota, during spring training. he was playing for kansas city, a team i never liked. he hit a bloop single to left that was fielded cleanly & quickly by whoever was playing leftfield for the white sox at the time. by the time the leftfielder had made his throw to second base(what should have been a perfunctory precautionary rote move), jackson was standing there on second, his trajectory around the base paths nearly invisible but certainly magical. there was a moment of utter silence & then the nearly reflexive roar of the crowd. it was quite a sight to not really see. bo jackson only lasted eight seasons in professional baseball & only a couple were really productive.

i thought about this moment of magical realism last night when i watched rickey henderson being interviewed on mlb network. henderson did what i saw jackson do countless times, over several decades. of course, henderson is known for being kind of nutty, speaking about himself in the third person & making odd non sequiturs. not last night. i wouldn't say he was eloquent but he was definately adequate in assessing his place in baseball history. he really doesn't have to say much though. he is simply the greatest lead-off hitter of all time. he is the most electrifying base stealer ever. he is a first ballot unanimous choice for the hall of fame. guys like this don't come up very often. w/all that baseball has gone through these last few years, having someone w/such astonishing natural physical skills going into the hall is a true blessing.

that he's going into the hall w/jim rice, the boston great whose talents & stats have been unbelievably ignored all these years, is just frosting on the cake.

life takes care of this for us

we had one more suicide this year off the golden gate bridge than we did in 2007. since 1937 when the bridge opened, there have been more than 1300 hearty souls to take the plunge. if you saw the riveting documentary "the bridge," you know that there's no soaring transcendent moment when you take that plunge. you drop like a rock & smash yourself into the concrete-like water. no womb re-entry. no human fantasy fulfilled. just ignominious death in all it's grinning glory.

anyone who survives the drop (amazingly, there have been a few)pretty much spends years in physical therapy & probably the rest of their lives in real true physically human pain. in the film, what's interesting is that the real true mental pain that drove them to make the leap is gone. vanished. for one survivor, it vanished (that real true mental pain)when he saw his hands hoisting his body up over the railing. "at that moment," he says, " i thought: all my problems, they're nothing, they could be easily solved." very quickly, his new problem became a very real physical one: surviving the drop & it's aftermath.

most of these folks (in the film, anyway)are under 40yo. they don't have cancer. some have jobs. they're only about half way through their run. they simply failed to see that their cul-de-sac was an intersection. what they also failed to see is that friends have to cope, workers(those lucky ones who get to fish them out of the bay)have to deal, & the world just keeps spinning on.

in 2008, 34 folks made the drop.

"counterfeit infinity"

a remarkable life that ends abruptly is just that. there is nothing remarkable about death. it is the lowest possible common denominator of all living things. the only thing remarkable about it is that tragic or stupid or bizarre deaths will inevitably have someone remark on them. other than that, it is base & w/o any redeeming qualities.

i used to say, half-jokingly, that death is the worst thing that could happen to us when we're alive. for the most part, i believed that. but a scene from joy williams' "breaking & entering" made me reconsider. one of the characters, a wild ex-hollywood stunt man, is constantly saying, "fuck death! when death comes for me i'm gonna piss in his face..." & then he knocks back a shot of bourbon. of course, death has other plans for him & when it shows up, rather than take him, it cripples him w/a paralyzing stroke. mute & confined to a wheelchair, he spends most of the novel being wheeled around as an inert object, cognizant of his circumstance but unable to do anything about it.

when considered, that's probably the worst thing that could happen to us when we're alive(or some variation thereof)but god knows we fail to see it. humans are capable of generating so much self-pain over such trivial things: lovers, jobs, lovers, money, lovers. when we're young we have feelings that seem so large, so all consuming that we can't imagine surviving them but we do. then, here they come w/just enough variation to blindside us all over again.

i met charles bernstein the poet once, at uva. i liked his work &, even more, appreciated its significance. i remember richard rorty walked out of bernstein's reading & my appreciation for bernstein went off the charts. i had no idea he was married to susan bee but i'd enjoyed her artworks & her work on various journals associated w/the language poets. i didn't know they had children.

i found their daughter's blog, girldrive, quite by accident. i've always had an interest in subcultures, marginalized voices have always spoken meaningfully to me. women in general & esp younger women of a certain age(just out of high school to a few years out of college, the effects of their institutionalized oppression either taken hold fully or not yet fully shaken off)are marginalized voices. emma bernstein's blog gave those specific voices a place to sound out. her own writing struck me as beautiful but facile. she was gifted w/words(as her father is)but the words seemed to inflate feelings that were small or insular. they exaggerated common experience too dramatically & produced a "counterfeit infinity." it would be easy to get lost in those words & lose track of the actual feelings or even the world itself. beautiful. dangerous. damned.

it is not natural in this new millenium for a parent to bury their child. i'm not sure it's ever been natural. this is one of those empty losses that compels everyone who hears of it to remark on it. the magnitude of this kind of loss is what's remarkable. that doesn't make death remarkable.

inward desolation
horror of
great darkness

great things
on the ocean
break

& counterfeit
infinity

21.xii.08

[italicized lines after Coleridge's notebooks]

EMMA BEE BERNSTEIN MAY 16TH 1985-DEC 20TH 2008



for more info & a link to her blog, girldrive, click on the poetics sidebar.