Month: February 2017

Today:

5:38 a.m. – Wake from dream that is either filled with existential dread or a strange mixture of whatever I’m reading at the time and old friends. Shrug it off and go back to sleep.

6:03 a.m. – Urinate.

7:15 a.m. – Clean bed. Just kidding. Rise to meet the day with steely purpose.

7:16 a.m. – Enter shower after spending one full minute to travel 32 feet.

7:30 a.m. – Exit shower carefully avoiding fully stretched out Labrador occupying shower mat.

7:35 a.m. – Finish drying off in four inch wide square of shower mat not occupied by Labrador.

7:36 a.m. – Finish dressing. Typical outfit: Sweatpants, black, comfortable. Socks, black. Tshirt or three quarter sleeve shirt. Some tshirts express my fabulous sense of humor and whimsy. Most are solid color, grey, or naturally, black. Shoes, running. Grey or black. Yes. I am a ninja.

7:37 a.m. – Begin discussion with spouse. Typical conversations: Expressions of good will and fortune regarding the upcoming day. Good natured verbal arm wrestling over the nature of the day’s evening meal. Tears of joy wept over successful employment of Son. Tears of outrage over yesterday’s outrage.

7:50 a.m. – Attend to Labrador and Feline. Wife departs to stamp out pestilence and do no harm.

7:55 a.m. – Check status of Son.

8:00 a.m. – Load Labrador, Son, son’s wheelchair, laptop, motor drive assist, and backpack into car and depart for downtown.

8:50/9 a.m. – Arrive downtown and unload backpack, motor drive assist, laptop, son’s wheelchair and Son. Pet Labrador and assure that he is indeed, a good boy. Hug Son and assure that he is indeed, a good boy.

8:53/9:03 a.m. – Depart downtown.

9:28 a.m. – Arrive home. Brew coffee.

9:30 a.m. – Feed Labrador.

9:32 a.m. – Consume coffee, dare to learn of the day’s fresh outrage.

9:45 a.m. – Acquiesce to Labrador’s insistence on abandonment of outrage in favor of going outside.

9:47 a.m. – Secure home. Begin walking Labrador.

10:35 a.m. – Return home, winded. Route allows Labrador to be safely off leash, in woods, over varied terrain ranging from gentle to quite steep.

10:36 a.m. – Clean Feline waste management system.

10:42 a.m. – Wash hands.

10:43 a.m. – Turn on jazz. Enjoy snack.

10:50 a.m. – Turn on computer. Write, if fortunate. Work on what I’ve already written if not. Otherwise, sit and think.

11:00 a.m. – Experience the theory of many worlds divergence point. In one reality I am sitting here writing the words ‘writing the words’, in another I am still playing with the Labrador, in another I am engrossed on the internet, in another I am choking on a snack, in another I am talking on the phone, in another I am answering the door, in another I am playing a video game, in another I am smoking cannabis, in another I am smoking cannabis while playing a video game, in another I am calling my senator, in another I am running on a treadmill, in another I am reading a novel, in another I am laughing with a friend. In none of them am I supporting Trump. Unless it’s bizarro world and the great orange one is the exact opposite of the version I am unfortunate enough to live in.

11:15 a.m. – In half of those realities swear off that shit with a THC percentage over 25. In the other half, thank the cosmos for that shit with a THC percentage higher than 25.

11:16 a.m. – Continue writing, reading, see above.

12:40 p.m. – Call spouse, ask if she’s game for two out of three in another good natured verbal arm wrestling match regarding the evening meal. Lose. Ask about the events of the morning. Take note of any various items that may need attending. Typical items include: Various odd jobs forgotten such as folding laundry, taking out garbage, scheduling events, picking up or dropping off dry cleaning, and fetching supplies.

12:50 p.m. – Lunch.

1:15 p.m. – Clean up after lunch. Give Labrador snack. As if he’s not getting them all day.

1:16 p.m. – House duty or errands run. Otherwise cultural enrichment. This is elective time. Choices include continuing writing if fortunate, otherwise engage in some form of personal growth. Reading. Learning something new. Playing the pan flute. Catch up on current events not necessarily political. Outside with Labrador.

3:00 p.m. – Meditate. Ok, nap.

4:00 p.m. – Depart for downtown.

4:40/5:00 p.m. – Load Son, son’s wheelchair, laptop, motor drive assist, and backpack into car and depart for home.

5:01 p.m. – Listen to the world weariness of Son after less than two full weeks on his very first job. Grin like fool. Continue home.

5:50/6 p.m. – Arrive home. Repeat Son and gear unloading. Daily itinerary concludes. Upload data to mothership and download evening itinerary.

I’ve been struggling with how and to what degree I’m comfortable talking about the people in my life I love. I have no trouble telling the occasional anecdote about a past girlfriend but I think long and hard about anything I commit on “paper” regarding my ex-wives.

Not to mention my wife. Or my son.

With my parents there is a much wider spectrum I’m willing to talk about. I figure they deserve it and besides, there’s both a long literary and psychological tradition I can follow.

The cost of this website has to be one of the cheapest forms of therapy out there. I hope you don’t mind my mind. I’m lazy and I’m the easiest person to get permission to tell stories about.

I’ve read many writers remark on how it isn’t wise to let one into your life, not if you want any shred of privacy. I’ve never felt that way. Somewhere along the line I adopted the notion that while everything in a writer’s life is fair game, not everyone’s life is fair to be tracked, cornered, killed, dressed, cooked and served up according to that writer’s whim.

Ah, but that’s where the flavor is, red in tooth and claw. Believe me, I know.

The trick is to whisk, fold, simmer over a low flame, and reduce my life so the essence of what I experience smooths away the ability to distinguish one from the whole.

For example, I’ve noticed that I definitely have a type.

Now before you ladies start sharpening your knives in anticipation of me listing a set of physical attributes, I can assure you we won’t be dining on a side of male chauvinism, medium rare.

I’ve loved short women, tall women, blondes, brunettes, and redheads. I’ve loved heavy women and those who weighed 100 lbs soaking wet. I’ve loved conventionally attractive women and those considered not conventionally attractive. I’ve loved women outside my ethnicity and nationality. I’ve loved women older than me and younger than me.

They all have something in common.

All of them were strong, intelligent, intensely curious about something other than themselves, confident, funny, and passionate.

Now some of them were more of one of those things than another, but they each possess those characteristics to some degree.

It is somewhat of a cliché to describe a scene where all of one’s past romantic relationships are gathered under the same roof. Usually the subject of everyone’s shared experience is painted as feeling awkward if not extremely uncomfortable. Putting myself in that situation doesn’t elicit the same feeling.

Maybe it’s because I’m that narcissistic but I would love to be in a room with all my past relationships. There’s something I’d like to say to each of them, beginning with Mia S. (my first love – in my youth I thought it would be high larry us if my wife’s name was Mia Hero) and ending with my wife of almost 20 years now, Toni.

All those (not that there’s that many) women are chapters in my life. Many of which I’m not proud of. To those I hurt because I did not know how to love properly, I’m sorry you were the ones to take the brunt of my long and difficult learning curve. I gladly and deservedly accept the lion share of fault for the reason our relationships failed.

In some cases all the fault.

Thank you for contributing to my education and growth. It isn’t fair that any enlightenment (or at least illumination) I’ve achieved was purchased with your pain. I ask for your forgiveness and understand if you’ll be damned before you give me a single thing.

Usually, my failing was an inability to transition from the high of our beginning into the much more difficult phase of growing both together and as individuals.

That and my inability to say no to another woman who wanted me. It’s not pretty but it’s true.

In my defense, in my room of past relationships, not everyone there I like to think would be unhappy to see me. Mia, for example, is still a friend.

Most importantly, Toni would be happy to see me. She wouldn’t be happy to be there. But she’d be happy to see me.

Not everyone can say that who has been married for as long as we have.

I don’t have permission to say more.

Sometimes I miss being a student. I like to think I’m wise enough to realize that in the bigger sense, I’m still a student and will be one until my last breath. This means bringing that same sense of expectation and openness beyond the buildings dedicated to learning.

So when I say that I sometimes miss being a student, what I mean is I miss the buildings dedicated to learning and that underlying sense of excitement which always accompanies the emotions of expectation and openness.

How many of you can remember what it was like to start a new school year? Our shared youth fueling a group emotion heady with anticipation and anxiety? Being battered about by a surge of humanity when the period bell rang and the halls filled like sluiceways. The social cues of how to belong, or not, as our and others’ perceptions dictated. The hammering of your heart when that person you couldn’t keep your eyes off glided by.

And then there was the structure of the day itself. I personally believe that the factory method of instruction as explained by Zinn, where groups of students are packaged together as a unit for one hour of single topic instruction which is repeated throughout the day, is not the ideal method for most people to learn. It also puts people who aren’t inclined to learn by listening to someone lecture or by reading for themselves at a disadvantage.

Given my druthers, I enjoy learning by reading above all other ways except one. The other way is dialogue. I can listen to someone passionate and perspicacious talk about their chosen topic and remain riveted for hours. Someone passionate and perspicacious that I can question and plumb, well, let’s just say I was more than one engaged teacher’s favorite student.

I was one of those people for which the public education system did more good than harm. This includes the horror that was my middle school experience. I also had the great good fortune to attend a private Catholic high school where I unequivocally received a better education than I would have if I attended the public high school I was slotted to attend. So I know from personal experience the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches.

Later in life I chose to pursue a master’s degree in teaching, so I think I’m at least technically qualified to remark on today’s confirmation of Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education.

Let’s take my high school experience as a case study in what Devos is trying to achieve. She is an avowed enemy of public education and wants to see federal funding for it syphoned away towards her preferred institutions, charter and religious schools. Private religious schools like Salpointe Catholic High, in Tucson, Arizona.

Salpointe charged, according to my mother, $3,000 a year for me to attend. This didn’t include student fees and food. Oh, and that price was lower if you belonged to a Catholic church. That might not seem like much but this was in the early 80’s. Today, Salpointe charges $9,400 for tuition. I’m fairly certain the average American family does not have nearly ten thousand dollars per child extra in their budget for education. Most Catholics probably don’t have the discounted price either.

To be fair, I will be the first one to assert that my mother got her money’s worth. You have to give it to the Catholics, in my experience they place academic success near the top of their priorities. But not at the top. Molding good Catholics strong in the faith remains at the top. This is why they had a mandatory religion class. And why there was a definite tendency to weave Christian themes into certain soft subjects. By that I mean I never heard sister Mary Peter mention Christ in geometry.

But she could have. And I’m sure there are religious schools out there that do. How many isosceles triangles can you make out of the cross our lord and savior died on kids? This is the sort of education Devos and her religious friends want to use taxpayer money to promote, “knowledge” such as creationism, otherwise known as alt evolution.

It was already too late for any real chance of converting me, high school was my first experience with a nonsecular school and by the time I got to Salpointe I didn’t identify as a Christian, much less a Catholic. By the time the Catholics had their chance, I was reading Spinoza and convinced there was no one watching the contents of my head but me. I’m not so sure I would have been so resilient if they’d had their way with me since elementary school. And Betsy Devos, Catholics, evangelicals, and home school parents are keenly aware of this.

So what? You said yourself that you got a much better education at your Catholic high school than you would have got at the public high school you would have attended. Don’t they have a point then that private schools are better at education than public ones? Besides, I hear you say, not only do kids get a better education, they also get Christ, which will make them a better person. So why not let more kids into private school and let some federal funding in to help?

As much as I hate having to explain this to you, dearly despised opposition, here’s one reason why – private schools are by definition private. Which means they include and exclude students based upon their own criteria. So beyond the odious notion of having taxpayers fund religious indoctrination, Catholic or otherwise, they will receive public money while simultaneously being able to reject the public for whatever reason they like. Maybe they don’t want any Mexicans. Maybe they don’t want any Mormons. Maybe they don’t want anyone with an IQ less than 110 and willing to sign a morality contract. Mostly they won’t want anyone that can’t afford the $9400 tuition, which won’t go down one cent the day they receive federal funding. And if you think that belief in Christ will make you a better person, then why are our prisons filled with so many Christians and so few atheists, beyond and above their representative size in our population? Religion can make no claims on moral superiority.

One of the reasons why my high school was able to give me a great education had nothing to do with it being Catholic and everything to do with it being exclusive. I never sat in a classroom with more than 25 people in it. Most of the English and writing classes I elected to take (which, hardly surprising, were among my favorites) had less than 20. I’m convinced this is one of the reasons why I also had such good teachers. Not because they were paid any better, which I’m sure they weren’t, but because they had classrooms filled with kids whose parents could afford to send them to a private high school. Not only that, they were assured that the students in those classrooms were more or less grade level proficient. How do I know this? I had to take an academic assessment test prior to admittance. Think about how this is likely to effect the student parent relationship vis-a-vis bad grades.

I wager there are a fair number of teachers who would agree to give up a bit of salary or benefits if they were guaranteed classrooms of less than 30 kids who were vetted grade proficient and living with parents that were paying large sums of money for their education. Parents who literally enjoy both a vested interest economically while simultaneously having a vested interest in their child’s academic performance. This means their child is much less likely to be hungry. Or live in an impoverished neighborhood, which means a student better able and willing to learn. A student that can be expelled for academic failure but usually isn’t because there’s a pissed off parent to make sure she won’t.

There are problems with our public education system. I personally think the system is ripe for a major overhaul. But not in the way Devos and her supporters wish to see it.

I mentioned at the beginning that I try to bring that sense of expectation and openness which I often felt at school beyond the walls of school. Applying that in this case is not as difficult as you might think. While I fear the worst, I also see the opportunity inherent to what Devos wants to accomplish. The system is ripe for overhaul and she is eager to see it burn. Perhaps there is a way to judo her attempt in service to the greater good.

Maybe it is time for humanists to start a chain of schools, Montessori style.

A chain of schools founded on the classics; civics, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, music and humanities, mathematics and the other hard sciences.

It’s the school I’d send my kid to. The schools we sorely need.

Oh and there would be no fucking football. [Ed. Note: Future me has reconsidered this. There would be no American Football.]

So things have spiraled downhill even faster than I anticipated. Today the senate confirmed Tillerson as the incoming Secretary of State. China has said that war with the US is almost assured. Jeff Sessions is going to be the next Attorney General. Green card holders have been kept out of the country. American citizens are going to pay for a boondoogle wall that will be as ineffective as it is stupid. This is only a partial list.

On the positive side, public outrage has managed to mitigate or reverse otherwise odious measures immediately taken by the Trump administration. Victories need to be celebrated with vigor even in the face of daily developments.

Unfortunately, I keep experiencing the sinking feeling that whatever we do will be too little too late.

Trump and his hand picked general seem itching to start the bombs dropping and the troops shipping out back to the middle east. Most likely Iran. Old allies are reacting with horror to what they see America rapidly descending into.

This is very dangerous. Fear let loose on the nation state level has the potential to cause already fragile relationships to reshuffle in unforeseeable ways.

And then there’s the domestic situation.

So far, reports of citizens clashing with citizens has been low. I hope this remains the case.

I live in one of the few states where democrats control both houses of state government as well as the governorship. When I look around the sea of red where this isn’t the case, I quail at what this bodes for our country. Because they aren’t standing up to the daily insanity which is the Trump administration. They don’t care that they won with a combination of fear, hate mongering, voter suppression, gerrymandering, Russian internet hijinx, and the director of the FBI deliberately trying to sink Clinton.

They don’t care.

They see the opportunity to eradicate everything their religious leaders despise at the same time they loot the national treasury. The very thought of this caused the vampires on wall street to break the 20,000 mark for the first time in history.

Nepotism is running rampant in the halls of our democracy. The senate majority leader’s wife was rewarded with a cabinet position after McConnell successfully kept Russian involvment out of the media until after the election. Or maybe it was for making sure Obama’s SCOTUS pick was never even given a hearing.

To make matters worse, the democrats who remain for the most part are not responding with anywhere near enough outrage and obstinance. Only one democratic senator opposed every one of Trump’s nominee’s. Just one.

I do have hope.

When I see the scale and intensity of protests and the increasing amount of alarm at what Trump and his coterie of vultures have in mind, I have hope. When I notice that media is finally beginning to call a lie a lie, I have hope. When I see a nazi punched in the face, not once but twice, I have hope. When I see a handful of republicans speak out against some of the worst that Trump has already said and done, I have hope.

Hope is essential but not enough.

I wish I were smart enough to see a solution or even an outcome that doesn’t involve far too much suffering.

To think of all those people in the past who fought and died to keep our country’s highest principles alive, all for nought if they get their way. When I do, I get pissed. I get pissed for them, who I imagine, if they could see what is happening (they can’t), would want me to be angry.

Anger isn’t enough either.

I will continue to shake off despair, embrace a positive attitude, and resist.

You should too.