The view from here

     Words are flying out, but atoms are settling down, so caught in the cross currents, the doldrums.  Nursing, still sick.  Lungs still sound like ripping cardboard.

Basso profondo

     Basso profondo.  Voice so low, elephants in India bump into trees.  I can play didgeridoo without a didgeridoo.  Sing Barry White.  My phone tuner says I hit Ab1, 51.9Hz.  I don't believe it.  I can hardly move my vocal cords.  

     Back at work today, though!  My freshman kids called to auditorium for something called Project Success!  Okay.  Except no one considered the ramifications of cancelled classes, mixed-age classes, where kids go if they're not to go there.  "Read your email" was the explanation.  Emails didn't explain.  Voicemails about training.  More emails.  Couldn't keep up in English with Flipchart lesson flipping back and forth from interactive Moodle, and an interactive Google doc, and the reading of damn Tortilla Flat. It's no wonder kids haven't read anything.  If they're anything like me, they have too many access points, choices, and they're not skilled enough to put shit down.  I'd say drop all that and pick up the damn book and if you're not in the book, you're doing it wrong.

     Anyway, then an ESR meeting, a very chatty mom telling me all about what she has taught her sons, for an hour, and then time to collapse for 5 minutes in the lounge, go to physical therapy, then come home.  

     Atoms settling around my basso profondo voice.  I see sinking bubbles.

Hot rain on the Roman intersection

     Eyelids closed horizontally, in front of white drapes closed vertically.  And the world is filtered in tictactoe. 

     Dreamt without falling asleep of a Roman intersection we crossed in 2008 on foot.  Right by the Vatican.  The sheer size of this intersection, maybe visible from space like a Tinker Toy hub with multiple streets, criss-crossed by cars, buses, trains, bikes, and pedestrians, seemed a football field.  

     I picture it empty now, blazing in sunshine, a broad, white, convex, beautiful, concrete field.  And then the rains smack down sizzling on it in sunshine, only to steam straight back up to heaven again.  The water runs everywhere, ankle deep.  We take off our shoes but not socks to buffer the pebbles or glass, and we run in the rain till our socks flop around and slap our ankles, and we almost trip.

     That's all I saw, even though I embellished it a bit.  Okay, a lot. 

     Could I do any school work on this sick day at home?  No.  I'm sorry.  I'm a bad person.  

Annoying things like death

     Why should Johnny have died from cancer at that age, at that time, a time and age I'm approaching every second?  When my stomach acts up (IBS, or dyspepsia, they used to call it), and I've had nonstop issues since adolescence, why am I passed over?  And knock on wood;  maybe I'm not; hope I am.  Maybe I'm relegated to dyspepsia.  Thomas Carlyle had dyspepsia.  A lot of writers did.  A lot of them "played through," played injured.  Johnny and I both got sprayed in the dark by my dad's hissing can of mosquito killing DDT (I'm sure it was deadly!) as little boys in our bunks at the cabin.  I wish I could see the rusty label on that pump spray can.  We both got exposed to any number of toxins growing up.  How come he developed this appendiceal monster?   

     Now I've lost the poem I had that made me jump up out of bed.  F***in' a. 

     It's the next day now.  The poem was a style I call a builder, or a diminisher.  With succcessively diminishing lines.

     Damn.  The thing about approaching your bed and pillow is this:  your head is usually already filling with cotton candy, laden with sand, and if you don't off-load the creations swirling away from you like pinwheel galaxy dust, the words "flying out like endless rain into a paper cup," you'll have lost them.  You can't get them back.  They evaporate.

     Another concern, and I'm far from the brooding initial thought here about Johnny, is what happens to the words that I have saved?  They're stacked up single-file, a long column on Blogger, and hopefully that's where they'll stay.  If they lose them, now, well, that's another thing.  Who am I going to sue?

     So maybe I should get back to Johnny.  When the hell did that evil mutation, the C word, sink root into his coil?  I hate the bastard.  Johnny?  No, well, we weren't close anymore.  I mean cancer.  I grudge that horrid word.  Johnny and I, as brothers or buddies, ended nowhere, without any denouement, no coda, no epilogue, no epitaph, about as friendly as negatively faced buzzing magnets.  Earlier in life, I asked, I begged, I walked, I ran to him.  He gathered me close.  We hung out together before the words "hung out" were around.  Well, maybe people said, "hang out" in the early 70s.  "Wanna hang out?"  Others I used were "Wanna goof around?"  "Wanna hack around?"  "Wanna mess around?"  "Mess around how?"  "I don't know."  "Throw sticks at squirrels."  "Play chicken on Sting Rays down Harriet."  "Do wheelies."  "Peel out."

     I just remember the sight of the empty front yard after he'd left.  No clue where to.  He could've still been in the garage, having remembered to run back and grab bottles of warm pop out of a case from the gas station for his friends.

     This was all I had for this post for now, which admittedly, could be all forever. 

Creative alteration or fatal flaw?

     How long can a group of educators be forced to sit and listen to the packaging of material inappropriately chosen for their students, ineffectually presented, illogically measured, and yet mandated like a hammer or a constant Sword of Damocles dangling:  "Is changing it a creative alteration; or a fatal mutation?"  La-de-fricking-dah!

     Makes me laugh!  Then I cough my grungy lungs out till my eyes water!  I get that demonic twinkle, that finger pointing, "I'm 'bout t'say somethin' to somebody" look.  "'Cause this here?  This here be doing too much."

     I know it's way too referential, the what-to-which I refer, but I'm sick!  I'm sick of having training rammed down my throat that won't work with my kids.  So yes, I will enact that fatal flaw that ISN'T fatal, that actually breathes life and ditches this junk in favor of lessons kids can use.  Man, I just have to make it all up myself; that's the killer about it.

     So that's what's what.  It's 4:43.  Can't believe this day.  Can't believe it.

Changing of the guards

     The morning changeover from night to day is huge.  Couldn't think of better adjectives.  The movement from this black orbit towards the limb of gray and day, from night to light, to blue and dew, is just soul blooming.  I drove to the grocery store for some eggs, juice, and milk, and saw shadow rabbits popping around in the cold, and I just thought of all the birds huddled and cuddling under their feathers.  I wondered how any of them can stand it.  How can I stand these interrupted-sleep nights.  I don't know.  But then the sun rises.  And all bets are off as hope streams in.

Such stuff?

Dreams rounded by sleep.  Currents.  Pity for our little lives from without.  I don't know.  I know what it's saying but I can't 'splain it.  Something about life fitted into a dream, surrounded by sleep. I think.  And I know he often imagines life as though it's not really real. 

Here... to there

     From this messy, chenille bed filled with my wobbly sick body, which has a spotted sore throat, heck-ache, and hurting hairs, to that writerly life over there in the future jampacked with fruitful ideas, multiple books in progress, scripts and manuscripts spilling everywhere, and bereft of paranoia and trepidation of imminent poverty or homelessness, I just -- I don't know how to get up and cross that broad river.  

Red sky at dawn over Como

I thought this shot a little bizarre, but I didn't have any filters on it.  The tree branches are in focus.  The round library rooftop at bottom.  I felt like a dork, waiting while other teachers trudged into the building before snipe-aiming my phone at the sky.  So.  It just looks like Maxfield Parrish or something.

The low mosquito-whee of sunshine

     As I sit and nurse strep throat on a useless day at home for a teacher (there are no kids today!), my mouth a primordial playground of infection, I snap this shot of sound and vision, of my iPad readied for writing something.  As sun-dust circles to settle like a humble dog in his raggy bed, last summer's dim cobwebs on the January window screens lit like silver threads, I lazily nestle myself into rough, baggy shirts, and gritty flannel socks.  The sound is a micro decibel reminiscent of a swaying tree bough at a half mile, or tinnitus.  Maybe a muffled music triangle ting'd accidentally by a fingernail.  Some sinews and sibilance.  Maybe papers shuffling in an office down a hall.  Ductwork fwoom.  Sparkles, sundogs riding the sprays in the photo below.  Rivulets of light.  The low, mosquito-whee of sunshine.  

That's pretty much it.  What's on the world's docket?  What hubbub clamors in hotspot after hotspot?

0 to 60

     I go from zero to sixty, incompetent to competent, and back to incompetent, in record breaking time. 

Julius Ceazer Slocum

     "Ceazer!  Julius Ceazer, where you at?" Tina barked without even pointing the phone away from her chappy, gap-toothed mouth.  The high school had Ms. Tina Slocum on the phone, and Mr. O'Shea, the teacher and case manager, eardrum shocked, jerked it away from his ear.  Mr. O'Shea had told Tina that her son had been out of school for two weeks.  He had a tiny study hall in his class of 15 desks. 

     "Well, where's he been?" she said.

     "That's what I'm calling you to find out," Mr. O'Shea answered.

     "Where you been, Ceazer?"

     In the background could be heard some muffling, shuffling, and "What?  He sayin' I ain't been there?  I been there yesterday!"

     Starting in ninth grade, Julius Ceazer Slocum typically attended high school in September, went to jail by winter, got out in spring, and finished in June with a couple credits.  Now a twelfth grader, he was up to 46, aiming for 86 bonified credits.  While in juvenile jail, Ceazer learned a couple things about home repair, and cleaning supplies.  "It's real good to let scrubbing bubbles sink in before you scrub, so you don't have to scrub so hard."  "Just let it do what it do."  "Markers don't get you high, neither."  He claimed to have gotten a sharpened-toothbrush tattoo of the Minnesota Twins logo on his shoulder.  Lastly, he knicked his eyebrows into clique hashmarks that totaled 10+3, which stood for a gang clique, but that clique hadn't thrown up any Facebook posts since 2013, so he wasn't "for sure if they was still goin'."

     "He been sick, see?" Tina said.  "He did have the diarrhea comin' out.  He said he was up there at the school yesterday."

     "That's right," the teacher replied.  "He came late second hour and then left for the day."

     Again she blasted:  "HE SAID YOU COME UP THERE LATE SECOND HOUR AND LEFT FOR THE DAY."

     "What?" Ceazer shouted from their kitchen, which was a block and a half from school, and the teacher thought if he stuck his head out his classroom window, he might've heard both of them just fine.  "They lyin' on me!"

     "He said they're lyin' on him," Tina said.

     Mr. O'Shea looked at his studious class, phone away from his head, their noses solemnly buried in the deep research of Instagram and Snapchat.  Several looked up, snickering at him because they could hear Ceazer's mom hollering.

     "No, he's been out for two weeks, and every teacher marked him gone," the teacher said, unable to stop the smile intruding at the pratfall level of humor.

     "HE SAY YOU BEEN OUT FOR TWO WEEKS!"

     "THAT AIN'T RIGHT!" Ceazer replied.

     "Now Tina, Ms. Slocum," the teacher explained.  "Ceazer's not going to walk the stage and pick up a diploma in June if he doesn't get right in here and talk to me and his counselor.  I mean I don't even think he...."  The teacher vaguely detected the mother and son accuse each other of "snoozing the alarm" and not waking him up in the morning, and as he cradled the landline phone against his chin, he grinned in sudden calm at his yellow oak desktop mess of laptop, papers criss-cross-stacked, printer, thermos, broken metal file, pull-out writing board, and he lifted and tossed expired Post-it note after note from the front lip of his work surface.

     "Who he need to talk to?" she squawked.  "YOU GET YOUR ASS UP TO THAT SCHOOL!"

     Mr. O'Shea couldn't suppress his lop-sided smirk, questioning whose ass Tina was talking to, and the sense of "up or down" hill that people employ when describing any geographic location dead level in elevation, and only three blocks away.  A ninth grade girl across the room covered her face with her phone.

     "I CAN'T BE WORRIED ABOUT YOU NO MORE!" Tina blared into the phone at her son for the teacher's benefit, and he now advertised her shattering voice to his class without revealing the student identity.  They all beamed at him with huge appreciation that someone else's mom had now worked up a lather.  Or down to a lather.  Tina wrangled her home-bleached hair into a twisted up-do over her spaghetti straps with the phone in the crook of her neck.

     "He eight-TEEN!  He grown!  I got little ones round me with this daycare I'm trying to run, plus on top of my own kids.  I ain't got time to keep chasing him.  Put your pants on, Ceazer.  You gon' to school!"

     More ruffling, muffling, shuffling ensued.

     Mr. O'Shea almost invisibly-slowly shook his head, his smirk in danger of spreading from lop-sided to full blown grin.

     "I always been chasing him up to that school since elementary days!  Ceazer, what you gon' do?"

     [Ceazer in background, muffled]:  "Mr. Jenks, the work co'rdinator at McDonald's he say I don't need go back no more."

     [Tina]:  "He say the work co'rdinator say he don't need to go back to McDonald's no more."

     [Mr. O'Shea]:  "No, that's not true.  He's just not shown up."

     "YOU JUST NOT SHOWN UP IS WHAT, YA DUMB BUNNY!"

     "Tina, tell Ceazer if he wants to walk the stage and pick up his diploma this June, he'll need to get in here and talk to me."

     "Julius Ceazer Slocum, you wanna walk the stage --"

     Suddenly, Tina banged the handset clattering on its cradle and hung up on the teacher mid-sentence.  That's all her signoff apparently demanded of her.

     The teacher looked at his class with a dead phone line, and laughed.  "Just like on TV, guys.  She hung right up on me without saying goodbye!"

     While Mr. O'Shea switched hanging files to make a phone call to another home, the class got back to work, plumbing the depths of Instagram, Snapchat, and role playing games.

Bitter-Sweet

     The problem is, I know!  No music for like three days!  So here's what's in my head. 

http://youtu.be/wN38ZIcF44I

Idiot

     There are times, completely... bits out of the blue in my business, when you think all is going as well as it possibly can, which isn't very often so hot, that a flash convergence of bad stimuli, face-to-face disapproval, kid behaviors, a micromanaging email, a flopping lesson, all reminders of humanness (he says now), can knock you flying.  Knock you out, scrambling, checking your self-esteem pulse.  I'm having that.  A lot.  Feel a slap like a yellow jagged bolt up the sinus, electrocuting eye sockets. I've known it, like a 10:00 Sunday night phone call saying sorry I didn't get the job.  When it steamrolls through a short half hour, layering uncooperative talk among adults on top of kid misbehavior and supervisor disrespect, I double over.  Nowhere to turn, feel safe, be okay.  Anyway.  Idiot.  So hard not to feel like an idiot.  Idiot.  

Meng is my n***a and my bff

     The little ninth grader rips my classroom door open each morning at 7:20 a.m., bears down, and zings like a hummingbird straight for his desk.  Meng checks left and right -- the coast is clear -- except I'm watching him, he whips his hood up, tightens it into a snorkel, and puts his head down.  I see his cheap tennies untied and criss-crossed under his little frog legs.  The brief daily blaze of energy subsides once he's in the room, and he exhales.  It winds back up at 8:23 when the bell rings, and out he zings to second hour.  His notebook reads, "Yong Vang is my my nigga and my bff."

     Meng doesn't know very many words, especially not for a 14-year-old.  He doesn't know what he doesn't know, either.  Meng is usually wiped out, usually unclean, usually speaks at a whisper, if at all.  What?  What?  Speech articulation disorder, learning disabilities, social work, doesn't read much or write, but he draws little stick-like people seated with ant-arms with name tags at stick-like, though elaborate banquet tables, and oh forget it, just look:

Do you see their whiskery little ant arms?  Of course, this boy is annoying, you think.  What the hell?  Why doesn't he just do his work?  Just at least try!  What's even more annoying is that, when he opens up and says anything, it's not the right time to say it.  

     "I want to go home go SLEEP!"  

     When he gets up, he often sneaks and draws penises on the white board and then zings back to his desk.  Dude, not okay.  Knock off drawing those penises.  Take your snorkel off, do your work!

     I don't know, man.  He can't work, I guess.  Meng puts less and less into work, so I've emailed and called some people about what I see.  

     But now I see something different.  He's writing more, but it has nothing to do with writing prompts or filling in a form that says, "Check for visual clues," or uncovering predictions, examining evidence.  He doesn't have words.  

     I'm so glad I've called the social worker and his case manager, because he's in a tail spin I'm afraid.  

     "this friday coming up I go to my old school is community school of excellecne I will tell my mom go to the doller tree and I will buy 2 gum and I will share my old best friend bff  Yong Vue Za Seng Matthew Che Meng ... my gum I will give them 5 or 10 for my best friend them."

     "za xiong I want to be popular again with you guy I will come to Harding and be popular."  

     Is your heart breaking yet?  I suck, it's January, and I haven't read this guy's notebook often enough.  Probably just because I can't scrutinize him.  He's zinged past my radar for four months.

     "Yong Lue za Seng Matthew Chee meng. I miss you guy So much you guy are my best friend for evvers.  Yong Chee Meng Za Seng Lue Matthew you guys are my bff."

     They can't hear him.  They can't see him.  They don't know he's hurting all alone.  If they're real, and I gotta believe they're real like roman candles in the night.  

     My words are sawdust, chaff, useless.  Meng's words howl, like little prayers, and these little howls have to be answered.  There's nothing I can teach before I reach him.  Work to be done now.

     "You are my best friend for ever I never make new friend because last year I give you guy gum to eat I only have fun with you guy Za you guy make me laugh every day Za I want to be with you guy for every ...."

     I can't stand it.

Lives matter

     Had coffee at Kopplin's, and walked to the East River Road today with a buddy.  We beat back a pillow gray sky.  After much talk about people we know, about jazz, and wading through our combined creative processes, we made a plan to resume our novel in the weeks ahead, said our goodbyes, I went to Target, and I accidentally homed in on a major protest sponsored by Black Lives Matter.  I had been clueless!  There were state patrol (I call beige shirts, but aware of the deadly comparison to brown shirts) scrambling to block the protest that wanted to block eastbound Interstate 94.  I couldn't see the protesters yet from six blocks away on the Hamline bridge.  All I could see were flashing law enforcement lights, and TV news helicopters flap-flap-flapping overhead.  This went on while I dumbly walked into Target with earbuds in, trying to tune in St.Paul Police radio and discover what the heck was going on.  I checked FB and Twitter.  Obviously a protest, maybe MLK-related, I thought, but where?  Where was it happening?  I'd been tuned out of social media for a day or so, and even if I'd been tuned in, didn't know if I followed anyone who followed Black Lives Matter closely enough to have known it in advance.  As I exited Target on foot, senses working overtime, police radio chattering in my earbuds only about 250 lb. men in alleys casing garages, the choppers still hovered over Target, the people advanced, because I could hear drums, bullhorns, and see the swirling cop car lights.  Still, all St. Paul Police radio indicated were little hints over the air about it.  Then #BlackLivesMatter was close enough for me to run over and join them.  The closer you get, the more thrilling it becomes.  As I reached them on University Avenue and trotted alongside the protest, trying to understand its pulse, wondering if I belonged, and hearing the chants, "This is what democracy looks like!" and "Hands up!  Don't shoot!" trying to learn something, I began to cry.  I cried for the dead, yes; but I cried for all the living people, all these intent faces, many laughing or serenely smiling, turning away and hoisting up their children, lovely bundled weights against the fulcrum of prejudice, to see this history being made.  I saw white/yellow/brown/black, all clad in puffy winter nylon and polar fleece, some faces ferocious with impatience for change, voices now being heard on this big broad avenue, its trains, its bystanders at benches, its black windows, and its black tar feeling them shuffle overhead.  I felt a whirlwind of thrill, no way to swallow.  A dust devil of abandonment.  I searched for my students and their parents, a union colleague, and briefly locked onto so many faces, a couple of instantly lost friends, I dried my eyes, and turned back against their shoulders of progress to my car.  I felt nowhere.  Like a smashed atom.  I mean, happy, but not a part.  Glad for them, glad for their voices, to which I added a couple "Hands Up!  Don't Shoots!" but reminded of my place on the periphery.  I hoped I could move from the little eddies in the doldrums to the currents of progress.  With my one-kid-at-a-time approach.  I'll post again about him, the other time I caught my breath and cried a bit today.  For a lonely kid I'll call Meng.

Waiting at the car wash

     This is a post from the waiting line at the car wash, where I sit dumbly, listening to gbv demos, inside a warm car, staring out at cool wet black tar dotted with slush and ciggy butts.  When you're lockstep in a queue, there's nothing for you to do, nowhere to go, everything to ponder.  The sky is your playground.  What's the current music?  I hear demos, like I said, thrumming, jangling guitars, the voice-over plaintively seeking the melody.  The bleeding edge of creation.  That's what I love.  The bleeding edge of makebelieve.  The territory where no one has ever been. Even this well-tread, well-trod parking lot, tamped-down receptacle to so many fine crusty broken cars, home to $.75 air pumps, gas pumps outfitted with TVs, muted, dead vehicles, hazardous material signs, dumpsters, scattered nuts, downspouts dribbling effluent, light-gray painted shed, this multiply-scarred lot, which seems so humble and harassed, renders new angles, new sightings never before seen. Or if seen, not recorded by anyone.  And how could that be?  Do people see things without savoring them?  I know I do.  My endless loops of celluloid on my cutting room floor.  God.  Such an overused metaphor.  I'm sure it's boring as hell for anyone else to see repeatedly. Well that's what I do.  I just practice shit up on here.  With my thumbs. How self- indulgent I know. Just like playing nunchucks alone in a broken attic. Or in a broken backyard.  Stupid nunchucks. That's my writing.  Kinda...  Or else pitching... blasting my rubber ball for an hour a day at 70 mph against Fuller Public School as a 13-year-old.  Good old Fuller.  Gone to the wrecking ball in 1974. Good old lefty pitcher's arm.  Gone but somehow still hanging off my left clavicle.  But sometime I have to unwind these doodles and write stories. 

Ambling down the street

     Opening up a new blog post is like walking down a street and stepping off the curb without even looking up or deciding if this is my direction.  The likely explanation for my idiopathic sucess or morbidity in this realm of Letters.  Ganglia, clustered, misfiring synapses.  Can't explain things better than that.  Lagging, hangtime with executive function leads me off curbs.  Off curbs.  Sniffing the roads.  In Catcher in the Rye, I believe, Holden keeps stepping off curbs and seeing himself disappear.  Now that was a sustained chord for that author, knowing he already suffered from post traumatic stress, shell schock, just war weariness, and knew, "I'm a dash man; not a miler."

     Anyway, this is fricking miles away from where I was, and it's not the fun I'd intended.  I wanted to just wander off, whipping a switch against other sticks, doodling, as with a grass stem in my teeth.

     Like, how does this work?

     Where does this go?

     What if I press this key?  

     But my neck hurts more and more!  I know: whining.  The MRI & Xrays earlier this week showed the cause of the pain, and what'll likely come next:  first 6 weeks of PT, maybe steroid injections, if they overcome my objections to deadly stuff, then another laminectomy, where he'll go in through my neck and pull out the old screws and clamp in a plate that'll span three vertebrae instead of just two.  Feels like the screws are already loose.

     Okay, now ibuprofen is helping.  

     Where does this sentence go?  If I use expository muscles, and make claims, evidence, and explanations, I'm following this barbed-wire fenceline, down to the corner of the pasture.  I want to break free.

     I remember this moronic spot between our back cornfield and the back-40 pasture acres, around 1975.  A right-angled, convex corner of the cornfield yawed down to a bushy ravine.  Barbed-wire fencing ran along that angle, but the ground had washed away.  The wood posts hung in mid-air, trembling on wire tension, their whittled bases like seven-foot vampire stakes.  I could walk right under them.  That kind of stuff ate my dad's guts, and mine too.  If the cows on the downhill side had been bighorn sheep, they could've walked right uphill to freedom.  Only supercows could've escaped that gulch.  Domestic cattle are pathetic clods.  But we were worried about our buffalo escaping, themselves nearly as sure-footed as sheep.  When they get out, you might as well get out of farming, and claim no responsibility, just tell sheriffs to shoot them on sight.  Which is what happened in 1979.

     Anyway again, see?  I ramble, and I gamble.  I wonder, as I wander.

     This is an installment that veers right off the farm down into a dry gulch, where you can almost hear the wind whistling down rusty barbed wire, a humming sound like a saw hammer.  You know those crazy instruments?  Or just put lips together and blow empty radio waves.  Man, I loved the solitude on those hot afternoons, as long as I had my family to return to, to constantly play off, joust, heckle, and return to my closet room with the Royal Quiet DeLuxe typewriter at a little monk's desk.  And a high little window under a gable that looked out on a pond with beehives and apple trees.

     That's about it, boy.  That's what you need.  That smell of 100-year-old dust clapping off the wood windowsill.  But I also need bright flashing lights, loud music, theater, leather, and Beatle boots, young souls scorching themselves and leaving a burnt black trail down the street.  The combustion, oxidation of the creation process.  That's where I'll leave off for now.

Home.

     I am so glad to be home.  The feeling is pure, cloud-like, liberating, like coming around a gate from a corral into the wide open prairie, no fences, only five foot grasses bending under blackbirds.  

11 January, Sunday noon

     Always doing something I probably shouldn't do, like blog when I'm about to be observed again, teaching some wrong-headed, AVID-prescribed lessons for kids in special ed. study hall.  The kids in study hall who need help to pass finals in classes they were inappropriately, and I believe, forced to take in violation of their IEP rights.  

     I could be talking about my appearance at an upcoming professional issues committee meeting with the district, and how I feel about that.  How to go in.  Go in humbly questioning, supplicating, or accusing?  Or reporting on unfair policies? violations of kid rights?

     I could be thinking about religious evil in France, against Charlie Hebdo, with ISIS in Saudi Arabia, or Boko Haram in Nigeria.  All the dead bodies.  All for Allah?  All for Jesus?  All for Buddha?  No, they're evil mutations, and have nothing to do with faithful, spiritual people.  I guess there's a 2-million-person march of defiance in Paris.  These would be valuable uses of my writing.  

     But all I want to do is get back on the horse again and write my ruminations focused on kids, on relationships, on nature.  Because I've been away and everywhere but my blog.  I see like a little kid at times.  I see endless film slides, slide projector slides, super 8 film, looping around, recording, loose ends spilling, losing treasures of content on the floor, and I just hear flapping.  Constant flapping.  

     I see shapes and colors.  Like Sam and Juju saw as teeny kids.  Contrasts of dark and light, of red and yellow, orange and green.  A fiction dominion.  I live in make believe.  The only place I feel at home.  Hate to be away from this home.  Yet I'm "never home," like a salesman.  Have to get back, like a dandelion after the breeze.

Slipping into unconsciousness

     Sliding... sliding....  It must say something if you only can scrounge a few thumb pecks when you've given up on innumerable obligations and have nothing left but to slip into unconsciousness.   

Getting better

"Have to believe it's getting better/It's getting better all the time. (It can't get much worse.)" the Beatles. 

     I'm feeling better.  Takes me back to a song I wrote for my dad post open heart surgery in about 1986.  I rhymed "better" with "zipper" that ran down his chest.  Nice, huh?  Unreal I could sing that to him in the hospital.   Gotta quit temporarily. 

    

To bed

... apparently sicker and gruffer by the hour.  Exhaling without vibration left in the throat.  Sorry I'm such a drag.  I'll get better. 

T minus 48 hours & counting

     There's never a time now when I don't feel completely distraught and dread-filled on Saturdays, Sundays, and after vacations, that I have to go back to a life sucking workplace.  The kids always used to invigorate me and replenish me with love.  But I can't do the job to which I've been magnetized and riveted since 1995, when I was a volunteer reading tutor.  I always feel inadequate, incapable of doing it.  That feeling that I'm a terrible person.  The endless, 1,000-yard stare-down at paperwork inside tiny scalable windows, like tiny windows that each need washing, but you're a window washer alone on the Dubai Burj Khalifa tower for one kid, and the washing doesn't really clean the windows, but it matters so much even though I'm no match for its infinitesimal complexity, then another year suddenly matters so little that I'm yanked away from it daily by pointless teaching in a mixed room where kids are inappropriately placed with multiple needs, incapable of comprehension.

Cross hairs

     Illness is triangulating me, narrowing its coordinates.  From my bloodshot eyes for past three weeks, through sore throat and basso profundo voice today.  Body aches and hurting hair.  Just in the wrong nick of time for Karen's retirement party Saturday.  Damn.  I just keep scraping along.  Need time. More time to sleep, snore, perchance to dream and awaken to words.  Words, magical words.