Category: essay

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On either side of the black hole: Ten for Today

September 23, 2016

She smiled. Big, rangy, opened mouth, showing teeth in disarray, pebbly whites leaning this way and that. She might have passed on the 6 years of braces and a jaw breaking operation to fix her over bite had she known.

It’s been weeks, maybe months since I’ve seen one. Stoic, plaster of Paris’d grimace with etched, rheumy eyes of wandering distant dimensions cast her face in alabaster stillness most days. But this one came with direct eye contact–so rare these days–followed by an electrocution of recognition, and light, light, oh heavenly light in her eyes. 

She was happy to see me. I said, “I love you,” and with doughy mouth, corners tucked upright into flaccid folds as if hung on clothesline wooden clips to her cheekbones, she garbled a few syllables in reply. And then she made a silly face, rolled her eyes, wobbled her head side to side, like a drunken clown, and muttered a mocking kind of bubbubbub with her deliberately deep voice. Sarcastic self-deprecation, her specialty. As if to say, what the fuck can I utter with this face, with this chaotic, misfiring, brittle brain disconnected from its humanity? 

“I miss you, Mom.” I didn’t want her to see the ache. So I smiled even larger. If I could make her know. If I could just…

6 seconds and it was over. We lost ourselves once more to our distant galaxies, each on either side of the black hole.

 
Black hole: pixabay.com

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Coddled College Kiddies: Ten for Today


It’s the gap. I teach from 1 to 3 then 5:30-9:45 on Wednesdays. So, I work in the adjunct faculty room in between classes, lounged on the couch, correcting papers as it so happens today. Last night, I had 8 more to correct for tonight’s class, which is right next door to the faculty room. 

Two other young instructors inhabit the room. A knock at the door, and I let in a muscular, sleeveless t-shirted young man, who could be a very young adjunct (they all look young these days) or a student. He drops his backpack next to one of the room inhabitants as he whisks past me without so much as an acknowledgement of my existence. He is intent.

Beginning with a list of his laudatory behavior loudly proclaimed–I completed this chapter, did this review…Will there be a quiz on this today?–he engages his young, dark, curly haired instructor with the milk chocolate skin and thick, black eyebrows. She has a gentle manner. 

“Yes, good, good. Very good…”

But then he moves on to the speech he made the other day in class, when he came to class dressed up in formal clothing, something not so easy for an out of state student who pays high fees to attend. 

“It’s unfair, you know. You kind of beat me down, took my wind a little, you know. I mean it was a great idea, dressing up, and then, you know, you go make it a requirement that everyone has to dress up. And it’s not fair. You know what I’m saying?”

She’s listening patiently, and so am I, though my thoughts are racing with this kid’s typical college student at this community college by the beach stance: the classroom is a democracy and I get to voice my feelings about what the teacher did, how it’s run. I shake my head motionlessly. 

He would do well to sit in on my class where I make it clear that college is not a right but a privilege. Don’t take my class if it doesn’t suit you. It’s not high school. There are other teachers for this intro course.

“I am trying to understand you. What’s not fair?” She replies to Mr. Whiny pants.

“Well, I thought of the idea of dressing up and then you make it a requirement. You know some people can’t afford to dress up for a class, like lower income people. And you made it a requirement. But you know I thought of it, kind of my advantage, you know, and then you made it for everyone to do. You took away my leg up.”

I groan–audibly. I’m not cut out for teaching any more, maybe. I get my carcass up from the couch and leave the room. 

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Decay Doldroms for the Season: Ten for Today


September 19, 2016

I haven’t written in a while, not here on the blog anyhow. Not for ten minutes or any minutes. My time has been taken up with ghost blogging and raising some cash. Writing under deadline drains me. That and mid-night walks with the puppy. Not sure how I’m still standing and working this late hour.

Jump starting the ten minute write is just what I need to get my groove back. I fear the return of the malaise, the block—the doldrums. Don’t want to go back there where I could not write a word as my mind swore there were no more to write. The mind trap viciously snaps shut. Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing to be done about it.

Another September, approaching fall, which has always been my favorite season, full of the color of dying, a ravaging display of decay and splendorous leaf parades (not that we get that much here in Southern California) and summer heat relief. There will be an Indian summer here in a bit—if the weather isn’t totally deranged as it has been (no such thing as global warming). But then the crisp Halloween night will remind me that it’s fall, time to bring the crockpot down from its box atop the refrigerator.

I like cold weather foods—roasted root vegetables and butternut squash soups and pumpkin everything (not latte, please)—and I like cold weather wear: big bulky sweaters, leather boots and wool beanies. No, there’s no snow here, but we can look like we are expecting it at any moment. Pullover sweaters are the reason for the season.

The year winds down. The count down to my most unfavorite time of the year, holidays and forced cheer, overspending and time pressures. This year I may find myself alone for the holidays with my family going overseas, but I think I might welcome that more than dread it. Perhaps not on Christmas Eve, but that’s never been my tradition, except for my kids’ sake, and so I’m always slightly estranged from the spirit and light of it.

I might actually get time off without the hassles of shopping—my least favorite thing to do—and agonizing over selecting, wrapping and presenting gifts. I’m not a Scrooge. Just over it after too many seasons. Ah, who am I kidding? I am Scroogie.

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Puppies, Language and Gender: Ten for Today


September 14, 2016
 
Between classes in the adjunct faculty lounge, I researched a little for those 600-word blog posts due in a couple days and then decided to lie a bit on the couch before my class in an hour. Teaching a two-hour afternoon class and a four-hour night class, Wednesdays are double espresso shots over ice with soy milk days. It’s just too long. And with the sleepless night discovering that 5-week old Husky puppies howl like wolves when they’re small, scared and lonely at night, I almost went for a third shot. That might have made me jump up and down in class, scaring students.
 
The lounge/work station/office is usually empty when I enter with maybe one or two other adjuncts tapping keys or eating lunch. Today there were two, then just me for a stretch, until five minutes ago when the mom-toned, 50-ish, Spanish teacher came in with the young Vietnamese student. She encourages the young man with the thick Vietnamese accent in her thick Spanish accent. She is gentle. He is intent, trying to understand nuance, detail and idiosyncrasy of the language. He frets over Spanish gender words.
 
For good reason. Gender confuses me too these days. I agree with Judith Butler and many who followed after her: gender stretches out over the arced spectrum of identity, biology and psyche. Binaries are a relic from a bygone era. But the English language hasn’t caught up to reality, how people live. It lags. Pronouns shift; grammar is slow to follow. The plural “they” is now more apt a singular designation for the individual, neuter, than a plural. 
But aren’t we all a plurality of identities? Ethnicity, nationality, biology, anatomy, culture, class, IQ, ideology, lifestyle, and a myriad of other particulars–including gender? Tracking gender in language, on government forms and in questionnaires is obsolete.  

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Fear and Loathing: Ten for Today


September 11, 2016

“I’m sorry, so, so sorry!”

She apologized like this several times over the two-hour class that had begun at 7:20 a.m. that Tuesday in 2001. Her words flew automatically, frantically from her mouth—apologizing. But she might as well have wrung her hands or put her face in her hands, saying she didn’t understand—like the rest of us.

We were stunned. I made them write about it. Some could just lay their heads atop their papers on those small college desk/table units. I was teaching a comp class in the then Home Ec building on campus. It has since changed to Writer’s Row.

The kid from Texas was the first to read. I still imagine him with a cowboy hat on his head, but that could not be true, just too stereotypical. His writing was full of anger and blame. He didn’t say he hated Muslims, but he knew someone had to pay. Something had to be done about who got into the country and how. Fear.

Someone else read. And then she said it again. The young twenty-ish Syrian woman with the hijab, pretty face, stand-out from the first day of class a couple weeks before because of her dark coverings, often full body black and flowing.

She was in tears. She faced the class with pleading in her eyes, distorting her cringed face, tight and angled with panic. Pain. Fear. No, they won’t understand. Saudi Arabians the news plastered over the burning tower images.

Before I left for school that morning, so early that I sleep-walked into the spare room where from 5 to 8 my husband watched the market, I first saw but did not register. Seeing me enter his lair, he pointed to the burning towers on the t.v. and said, “Look at this.” I looked. I then turned to the shower while thinking that it was too early for disaster movies and wasn’t he supposed to be working, anyhow?

When I came back into the room, showered and dressed, he said, “No, look at this. The second tower just blew.” And I looked. My mouth fell open involuntarily though my brain barely comprehended. How could it have happened? Why? How? I had to go teach.

By the third time she said it, I spoke firmly but with a slight chuckle, “Unless you had something to do with it, you don’t have to apologize. Though I understand why you want to.” She quieted.

It wasn’t long afterward, maybe three days after the united great good will of the U.S. turned to the business of blame and retribution. The airstrikes were already in the making. And there at the college, a political science teacher was disciplined, maybe even resigned, after pointing in the direction of a Middle Eastern looking group of students in the 200-seat forum during his lecture about something other than the events of the previous days and boomed, “You, you did it.”

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Nothing 


“If you don’t have good intentions, please just leave me alone. I’m tired.”

Right on. My gut reacted that way to these adorned, bordered words on my morning Facebook scroll. At second blush, however, this sounded grumpy. It’s the “leave me alone” part. A command that demands aloneness inevitably appears angry, sad, just a bad decision. I mean, who besides me would want to be alone? Well, many more might be better off if they were. They might not only be okay with it, but crave it after a while.

The world is always too much with us whether we live in the bush on the African plains or in New York city’s heart. We toil. We care. We think about how, what or if we feel from the moment our eyes open upon awakening to their closing in sleep. 

We think of doing. We do. Our minds embalm themselves in constant “voice,” mostly noise. Our sensations form perceptions and the senses are always on, no matter how much we try to shut them down, tune them out or mute them with volume reducers (drugs, alcohol, love, food…). 

We are lost in a thrumming hum of sensate being. How can we ever be alone? There is no alone, no solitude, except for sleep or death, and those only by outside appearance. Who knows who or what accompanies us in either? Our minds are constantly populated with people, thoughts, memories and plans with, about or in avoidance of those we carry. 

We are never alone.

No wonder we’re tired.

So the demand to be alone is necessary. It seems nearly impossible to accomplish without intolerably long, hard dedication to removing thoughts–all of them–in practiced meditation.

And those–people or thoughts–with bad intentions whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious, it’s all too much. Each of us is on overload merely in the pace of one moment to the next–the bombardment of living with others, even among nature only. Nature is not benevolent. It too harbors malignancies, intended or not. 

But those who move bent on destruction (think of the fearful-angry vibrations they emit and hit us with like sonar) overburden us beyond our sitting, resting, active capacities and raise our hackles, elevating our hormones with alarm bells. We, poised in self-preservation, fight or flight, consume and are consumed by nothing but the bad intent, defense in crush or aggression, certainly guardedness. Where does that lead? 

Not to equanimity, nor to conditions amenable to hearing the silence, being with solitude, clearing the mind. We become filled with the chatter-ful greed, jealousy, deceit, mischief or envy of another. We endure gossip, lies and other violence. Our skin tingles and tightens with breath, tremor and howl.

We may suffer with our lives momentarily or forever.

It is not an unreasonable request–to hold out a stiff, unbending arm that impedes the onslaught of another–whether that takes the form of someone bumping into us, screaming hate or fear at our eyes, or onrushing our bodies to steal or otherwise injure.

We can act. We can will it, say it: “Leave. Don’t come near. Let me remove you from my mind. I can do it with or without your consent.”

In the end, it–all of it–is in our heads. Nothing. Everything.

So, usher in aloneness. Yes. I’m willing. 

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Breaking Down the Wall: Ten for Yesterday


September 6, 2016

The music never stops outside and inside my head. Sometimes the melody pounds in time with a pumping, thumping drum beat of a heart. Sometimes the violins screech and thrust me deep in a Psycho movie scene, stabbed over and over again with high pitched wails and screams, decibels higher than eardrum capacity.

But it’s just the neighbor toddlers yowling and the dog yapping. And that spinal column creep of approaching slippered steps of an interruption about to happen. My neck tenses awaiting the final knuckle knock knock, a rapid five or six in a row.

And all the while, the pings and bings of phones, IPads and computers tick away at flesh, flying skin chips scattered everywhere. My attention shattered in shard millenia. That’s what it’s like to write at home. Life music blasting me and my mind all day.

But my mind has steeled itself impenetrable against so much more than noise before this. My constitution has weathered barn storms and hurricanes far greater, like three, grueling, sleepless days of exams preceded by years and years of mind-numbing tedious study. And then untold hours, thousands upon thousands, invested in a slow-bleeding, fast burning career life-suckingly anchored, financially and personally, that eventually landed me inside the court house walls.

Dismantling a person brick by brick, thorn by thorn, thought by thought, nerve by nerve, takes a long time. I got away with a quick turn, only 56 years building and breaking. Some take a life time. And it’s not over for me—or anyone. We turn like the worms we are.

No lives matter, not in the sense that we think they do. They merely breathe and do and be—just like everything else. The rock and me, we stream steady, hold our ground and pass unnoticed by most. Human fate, being just another assembly of matter and particles. I don’t understand why it feels so different to be human than to be a rock.

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Tightroped: Ten for Today


Stay just where you are. Don’t cross that line. We drew it for a reason. Once you cross, it’s all over for us. You see, we’re only good so long as we each pace our own squares, our own patterns and affairs. The space between us, well, that’s what keeps us together.

When we meet, right there at the line, on the line actually, we can do death defying feats. We tightrope that line of yours and mine. We get tunnel vision. We narrow our gaze to the line, but see, your face takes up the view just as mine does yours. So—on the line—we only see each other’s eyes, not where the rest of the line beyond us leads.

And I rarely peek over the line into yours just as you rarely glimpse over at mine. And we keep it that way. I think we like that. This balancing act on the line.

Your square is larger than mine, yet narrower. In fact, it’s really an elevated rectangle with thick supports. Everyone supports your rectangle like scaffolding that undergirds the mansion perched on the hill. You can see the lumber dug deeply into the ground, keeping the place afloat in space, like struts smoothing out a bumpy ride. All the pot holes repaired, groomed.

My square is square, equal on all sides, though the area is smaller. The numbers–height, length, and perimeter– like an old geometry quiz, reveal significantly smaller space than yours. But there’s enough to go around for us who take up that square to meet the corners of our lives, breathing, laughing, eating and thriving. We take up less than those who seem to need more.

But it’s not just rectangles vs. squares. There’s other stuff too. Enough difference that might make mine think yours misshapen and yours view mine as distorted. You’ve said so. I’ve said it too.

So best you squelch curiosity, dampen desire and drop the dreaming. You know the allure is solely the forbidden stepping over the line—to know, for sure, what’s there. So stay there, where I can find you.

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Reaching Out Reaching In: Ten for Today


August 22, 2016
 
How do I make it through this election season without losing friends, lovers and hope? I have never been particularly political in the sense that I cared not overly for the outcomes of elections. In my 40 plus years of voting, I may have voted FOR someone on the ballot twice. And only one presidential tenure had me gritting my teeth and angry too often.
 
But for the most part, my life is lived locally and interiorly. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the results. I do. But I am fortunate enough to live a charmed life where I can choose to live in a cocoon. Going about my daily chores, cares and doings, I burrow down deeply and ignore the rest of the world, or participate to the degree that I wish.
 
Perhaps that’s called first world or birth privilege. I don’t take for granted my genetic demographic winnings to be born where and to whom I was. I vote. I discuss. I inform hundreds of students a year about the world, locally and globally. I am not nihilistic. I hope. I care. I do my civic and personal duties.
 
But this election is different, to belabor the obvious. And not just because of who is running and how. I think I’m different. My eyes and sensors seek the world more, and so am more susceptible to it. My practice leads me to confront this headache nation, this raucous populace, with equanimity. I’m finding it difficult, prone to suddenly remembering books that need urgent reading. 

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