Tag: rant

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Rummaging through ornaments, I pick up three of my favorites. A trio of polar bears, made from a kind of velvet elvis-like material. They all have this innocent hey lady, where’s the hot chocolate and cookies look when really, they’re eyeing the red-lacquered wagon. And they do it every year … ha! One bear climbs in as the other two take up positions pulling and pushing the wiggly little cart across the window sill. It’s a sweet little vignette until the “it’s my turn to ride in the wagon” starts. But we’ve all been there…

The snowmen, generally a more gentlemanly bunch, find a place around a sparkly tree on a quiet sill away from the bears. Greenery gets hung around my fire place (as much make believe as the polar bears and snowmen), and I light candles in its pretend hearth. The collection of Santas, with big bellies and spindly legs, have gathered around the wood-cut fir to admire the fine glass sleigh parked there and piled high with packages. Christmas music is playing and this year, snow surrounds my little place.

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.  ~Erma Bombeck

I like make-believing. I especially like make-believing in Santa because he always has faith in what kids believe, seeing beyond wish-lists and into their innocent hearts. The right jolly old elf doesn’t just leave a doll or stuffed animal, but playmates who never tire of tea parties, building forts in forests, or turning sticks into swords . These rag-tagged companions never object to being dragged along on all the Lewis & Clark-like expeditions kids love to make.

     

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i was going to write about what i imagine it will be like to live in leiden, the netherlands. but it’s been snowing all day and i have on christmas music. i’ve done a little decorating, have the candles lit, and poured a glass of red wine.

i’ll be out of this place in a few weeks. life or time or whatever it is keeps us moving…  and we seem never to stop making changes. my nephew ryan turned 10 today. on christmas day, i’ll be 53. holy fucking moly.

but tonight, i’m happy. i love how snow quiets things down. slows things down. i love milky night skies and how moon glow backlights falling, floating drop_lets. i love snowstorms and being out with my dog. I love the way the snow catches in his fur and how he rolls on his back. i love the sun coming out after a big storm… and the glint and sparkle of the snow snow snow.

i love the way a house can smell warm when you come back inside. oh… and sometimes it’s so nice to curl up into blankets and take a nap. not really sleep though, but how you feel in those perfect moments between sleeping and waking.

i decided i should take some pictures of my little cottage-like apartment, with my few christmas decorations and the abundance of snow outside, and show you all where i am right now and where i won’t be for much longer.

and yet, right now i’m so fully here. not fully grasping deconstructing all of this. walking away from each part is an odd thing. how it all changes and the things that held you in orbit have disappeared. and you walk away. energy going forward in light years or heavy years. the drag of memory, holding you still. making you think you’re still where you’re not. it will all melt like the snow outside. the landscape. the way it looks right now. it will never be that way again.

big chest-heaving sigh.

and i’m up in five minutes and maybe i’ll just keep writing this in the comments. as i chase after myself. as i try to let go and grab onto something new, all at the same time.

hey. here i am. that’s funny now. here i am. until i melt away.

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my favorite things



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Yes, that’s correct, I’m one of those anal retentive writers who believe in spelling and capitalization and punctuation and grammar.  Links lend credibility and context.

Sometimes people mistake my style for stream of consciousness.  They would be surprised to learn that almost everything is outlined and constructed.  What I do is tell stories, like Garrison Keillor or Mark Twain or Dashiell Hammett.  Because most of them do in fact come from personal experience while they have a middle, they seldom have a firm beginning or end; though I am always trying to make a point.

In the beginning.  Where is that exactly?  First the Earth was formed, then the dinosaurs came and Jesus rode them like ponies.  Homer started his poems in medias res and at the beginning we are on the shores of Troy or Ithaca and have the great relief for the rest of the tedious tale that our hero makes it that far at least, so we have no serious concerns for his welfare.

Much of the rest may seem mere wandering flashbacks but because the reader has peeked ahead they are assured they will eventually get somewhere.

So every essay is also all about process as long as you learn from it.

Here I’ve been experimenting with form, trying to write shorter, and more political, and shorter AND more political.  An ideal Front Page piece will have 200 to 500 words and at least one graphic or blockquote for visual interest. That’s about 4 or five paragraphs.  Not much time to get to the point.

Remember when the blogosphere lit up with comments about the resignation of Karl Rove? Rove Resigns! echoed across sites across the world.

But that was too simple. Too easy.

Rove didn’t resign — he wasn’t going away. He was being redeployed.

Although I had lived, and hiked, and backpacked in the Southwest for twenty or so years, encounters with rattlesnakes were pretty rare. If one sees snakes at all, they’re usually stretched across a trail or road.  I had sure never encountered one where it posed a problem, like crawling into someones sleeping bag. The closest anyone I knew ever came was when I was hiking with my nephew, he once sat on a large large rock that had a rattler underneath.  When it rattled, he moved.  This is generally considered appropriate behavior.  He might have been maybe a little too excited,  and ran much farther than he needed to, but the move-away–leave-it-alone strategy is all one really needs to do in most cases.  The people that do get bitten are usually young, drunk, and male.  

Most people in rural areas with great hideouts like barns and woodpiles, will usually handle rattlesnake encounters with matter-of-fact blowing them away with a shotgun.

I somehow got a job at a nature sanctuary near a small town and moved there from Tucson.  I had been a volunteer for a few years and Jerry, the manager, finally had the funding to hire some help.   Meetings with rattlesnakes increased.

Lately, I find it more and more difficult to come and talk to you here.  It is hard for me to do so without saying at all times that I feel strongly that we have lost our path, are wandering further and further from it, and that our new route leads only to disaster.  And what is hardest for me is the feeling that many of us are the leaders of our departure.

The crisis before us has been well-recounted, and I do not wish to revisit all of it.  But certain things are absolute: Our constitutional rights have been repeatedly abrogated, violated, and removed by our government.  This same government, of and by the American people, has blatantly and openly committed numerous war crimes, and indeed many candidates for the highest political office in the land openly proclaim that they will continue to commit war crimes should they be elected.  This same government, having collected more taxes than any other in history and spent even more than that, also openly states that it can not and will not account for where billions of those tax dollars have gone.  This same government has led our nation into a war which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and has neither success nor victory in sight, yet as every other nation allied with us is withdrawing, our government has escalated our involvement.

As bloggers, all of us have played an important role in bringing these facts to the American people, who have rightly risen in indignation which crosses all racial, social, political and economic boundaries.  We have played an essential role in highlighting how important these actions by our government, a government which we permit to act in our name based on the premise that we ourselves have formed it by contractual agreement in the Constitution, damage the most fundamental nature of what we ourselves are – a nation of free citizens forming a democratic Republic by choice.

Put simply, a United States of America where the government violates its own laws and treaties to commit war crimes, where tax revenues disappear without the people being told of its use, where the government refuses to allow citizens the right to hear evidence against them and tortures them into giving evidence against themselves is a nation with neither meaning nor significance.  In such a United States, we cease to be citizens and become serfs.

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“What is a LEADER?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“A LEADER isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. It’s realizing that every experience develops some latent force within you.¹ You begin to understand that vision is the art of seeing the invisible² so that when you want to build a wagon, you don’t gather the other toys to collect wood or assign them tasks, but rather you teach them to long for ways to traverse the endless immensity of the backyard.³ Then you become a LEADER.”