20140409 DSS tonight double up session
Get B12 spray
Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 2:45 PM I am walking to Village Market to get Taco stuff for dinner tonight. Also stuff for the next couple days but I may not get everything on the list because I have other stuff to do and I am very tired. Sleep study last night. Did not sleep enough. Went to bed late and got up early and had an unfamiliar bed, an unfamilier room, an unfmailiar mask and CPAP, strange noises including a woman in the next room coughing like mad very loudly, and all the wires and itchy tape. I'm just so tired.
Worse yet, I had a few tantrums, attacks of general external and internal hatred, fury and rage. I was alone, so I didn't injure anyone, but shortly after that, I lay down and imagined cloning myself so I could chop myself up with an axe. I hope that's one of BP's revenge fantasties that doesn't hurt anything. ;-{
I don't think I ever slept, and only was down a half hour, but I had some of those waking dreams they asked about last night.
In one, a giantess was run down by cars and collapsed onto the road over the top of some of the cars as of she were filled with air and then partly deflated when hit. The feeling I had as an omnicient observer was one of terrible pain and sadness.
3:28 PM I had a horrible tie at the store. I couldn't find things, a number of things. No Canadia Pea soup, no shredded lettuce. I was going to make tacos for dinner. Hand shredded lettuce never comes out as well. And now I have too much stuff to write and K didn't come to help or drive me home. And I grazed on foods that may make me sick. (And there were a lot of other things I couldn't find) Things I ate included spicy sausage and chips with dairy dips.
I just noticed that I am singing runaround sue which they were playing in the store.
Thursday, April 10, 2014, 4:12 PM I am out walking in a skirt, blouse and long thin coat. It is vvery wndy.
I had "Jury Duty"today, and arrived at the courthouse with two books to read at 7;30 AM and sat there reading in A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnely when the TVs came on and we saw a slide slow abot Jury duty. It was both informational and promotional (rah rah). They wanted to thank is and remind of the importance of our civic duty and its value to fredom, but I think they were preaching to the choir. Absolutely nothing happened in the first hour, so that hour was totally wasted except for reading time.
Then a nice grey-haired lady gave us a pep talk and speech and apologized for mispronouncing names. She said she would put on a movie "because after all, there was nothing else to do," but no movie appeared for quite some time. Eventually, they called several sets of people, maybe around 9:30. I didn't have anything to write on or with, but I noticed other people had pens and paper, so next time, I may bring some. Computers and palm pilots and cell phones etc are not allowed.
The minute the last group of the people who were called in the first three sets filed out, something came on the TVs. (Monitors). It looked a footvall game and the volume was so low I could make it ou, but there was a series of replays of a certain play, some apparently important football play. I went on with my reading, but it turned out to be the promised movie and I had trouble reading between the zillions of monitors, the announcements, the people alking around, and my neighbors talking to me, so I gave up and just watched the movie. MY next-door (in the seats) neighbor, Leslie Nolan, who used to live on the east side but now livcs on the West side, told me the movie was called Blind side and that it was a good movie, so started trying to pay more attention.
It was at an upscale private school and some big black kid was being promoted by somebody. (Since I'd missed more of the beginning, I didn't know what was going on at first). The person doing the promoting was saying how good this kid would be at football, ad they schould have him a scholarship. The coach was demuirng and making excuses bit then started mumbling about his "Christian duty" and the took the kid on. He was a gian of a kid, the only black kid in not only a white school, but an upper class white school. He never loooked happy, and when he tried to talk to some girls, they ran away. One little boy, a kind of friendly wise-acre type, befriended him.
Then the family, the little boy, his older sister, and the parenst, are driving in the dark in the rian and they see the blck kid and offer him a ride and practically have to shove him in the car and end up taking him home and then he ends up staing on their couch and finally moving in with them. The Mom adopts the kid (well, they both do, of course, but the father is a little slower coming around)
The coach gets all frustrated with the kid because he has no idea wha5t to do and doesn't seem to take well to his yelling at him. (I suppose I won't write down the story, but of course, I liked it. A lot. It was my kind of movie.
They had the volume so low and there were so many interruptions and talking and people wandering around that I missed a lot of it, so now I'd like to rent or borrow it and see it again all the way through.
We were given an official break for smoking and visiting the coin operated machine on some other floor, and using the bathrooms and there were more announcements and more people were taken. There were 400 people there, to begin with.
Then another movie started this also with volume to low I could barely here 1/3 of it. Again, my neighbor, Lesline Nolan, told me that it was a good movie and that I would like it. It's called "Hitch" A young African American Man acts as a consultant to men who like a certain woman and want to have a relatioship with her. This movie is a comedy. It has serious parts, but was hysterically funny (to me) and I lughed my head off so hard and often that people were turning around to look at me. I couldn't help it. It was really funny. However, they kept turning it off for announcements, and eventually, they released us in groups, I was the third group to be released. I was very glad to go, but I issed the end of the movie, so now I'd like to see that, too.
After they released us and I got my paper, I went back to the car, got directs to Woodword from the parking attendant who no speaka dah engish, and went to Hannon house. But I was tired and hungry. I decidded to go to Utrech but the first building I drove through was thhe wrong building and took me to Whole Foods instead. I drove around looking for a parking place but after driving up and down every aisle and not finding one, I went to look look for Utecxh again, got lost, and finally found it, now called Blick, almost directly across from Hannon House (actually kitty corner across the street and up a block.) I got turned around and need to remember it is toward downtown from the DIA and not that far. AND nearly across from Hannon House. AND LEFT if getting off I94 from home.
Then I went to our ocal food store. I was sort of bummed I did not get to Whole Foods. ;-{
Now I am at Village.
Sonata for Syria, look up on You tube.
Get tested for B12 (blood test)
Methyl Cobalamin B12 spray. Sublingual
Opera seats at tops of aisles 31, 32, 46, 47, 15 and 16,
Saturday, April 12, 2014, 4:38 PM I am walking to R'dale, hopefully, to water the plants and download the Psion. Then I will walk back and stop at Village and shop for food for the weekend. This is, of course, the weekend. But we don't have food specifically planned for tonight. We have food we could eat, but not the regular food for this day
I pass a dead dove on the sidewalk and am not ar dead bird alley, am still n Moran.
I consider taking it for its skull, but i do not.
I was wearing too many clothes, and took off my jacket and hat --it was substantially cooler earlier. It is downright warm now.
Last night was the first night in a long long time when I did not take any medication for sleeping or itching, no ambien, no bendryll, no hysdroxyzine etc. I did not sleepw ell, but I did not get up nor lay awake watching the clock for hours.
So, that's a good thing. I don't feel that great, But I feel better than I felt yesterday after the hydroxyzine. I want to get some B12 spray or under tongue. To test it to see if it helps my brain fog.
I was sunny earlier and I wish I'd gotten outt thhen but of course, it was also cooler. That might not be a bad thing, I'm getting overheated.
I am also wearing my sandals, which probably need to be replaced. I wore last night to the opera because I could not fnd one of my shoes (which also need to be replaced.))
end Journal EJ * * *
* * * *
Bliss-Point Poetry, a Kind of Convergence
Last night, April 10, 2914, I went to a poetry reading at Hannon House in Detroit. One of the readers was Diane Wakowski, author of, among many other titles, Dancing on the Grave of a Son-of-a-Bitch. That book was an old favorite of mine, years ago, for the quality of the poetry and other reasons I won't go into, and I've always loved Diane Wakowski (Last night, she allowed me to give her a hug.)
One of the poems she read last night was "Pumpkin Pie." Stupidly, I thought it would be a pleasant little poem about pumpkin pie. It wasn't. It was a poem that contained a woman, the human experience, the world, the universe, the vibrating strands of energy holding together the cosmos.
She said she wrote it 40 years ago. She said she had not read it in more than ten years. She read it last night because the great Detroit poetry Guru, ML Liebler and company dreamed up the idea of pies and poetry. (We'd only recently been to a Pies and Pi-Day celebration, and pies and poetry sounded like just as much fun.)
I was grateful to ML and company for dreaming the Pies and Poetry idea so that Diane Wakowski had a reason to read her Pumkin Pie poem and thus gave me the opportunity to hear it. It was the high point of my day, my week, and maybe my month. The whole event made me very happy, even though I did not eat any pie. Diane Wakowski's other poems were very good as were the stories and poems of the other two readers. (I hope to address them later, in separate stories).
When I was a student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, one of my professors, Natasha Saje, spoke often of "ambitious" poems. The word "ambitious" grated a liltle. It made me think of money-grabbing capitalist pigs. Of capitalism at its worst, of Corporatism, of buying senators and representatives, of lobbying and other evils.
But Natasha Sajé was not thinking of Capitalist Pigs. She wanted me to leap. I didn't quite get it and my lack of success at leaping made me feel "not good enough." Leaps occur with dynamic purpose within both smaller, less "ambitious" poems and larger more ambitious poems, but Natasha Saje wanted the whole poem to leap, to take a quantum leap from the ordinary everyday to beyond the stratosphere and into the deep space of singularity, bigger than itself because it contained not only the everyday, but the cellular resonance of the everyday with heart, mind, soul and cosmos.
I have what some people consider to be an unfortunate habit of reading many books at once. How can you do that, they ask, how can you keep them straight? My answer is this: fairly easily (except for my galloping dementia [no-no-I will not own that]); our minds are designed to simultaneously hold many stories. We hold the lives and stories of everyone we love (and hate), as well as all the stories we read, the movies we see, news on TV, etc. The mind is designed for multiple stories.
One of the books I am currant reading is Sugar, Salt, and Fat, by Michael Moss. It is a fascinaing (if sometimes slightly tedious) book about the food industry. Michael Moss speaks about the "Bliss Point" of foods. It is actually a rane of points at which, when various ingredients are added to the food, the food reaches the highest appeal level before it starts falling off again from being too sweet, too salty, too fatty, too chocolaty to fruity or too too.
Poems have bliss points for their ingredients as well. For example, a little alliteration is musically appealing but too much can be annoying and stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. A rhythmic and rhyming poem can be very pleasing, but an endlessly repetitive rhthym can be numbing and too much rhyme can gak the reader.
Poems can contain bliss points, or they can be Bliss-Point Poems, meaning that the whole poem can leap out of the ordinary out of a solid grounding in the specific and sensory, and into the extraordinary.
Some poems, to me, are opaque and dull. They are difficult to read, have no musicality, and seriously oppress me. I could tell you which well-known publication publishes many of those, my I might get blackballed forever, so I will bite my tongue.
Some poems are nausaeatingy stupid or silly. Don't get me wrong. I have a juvenile sense of humor and enjoy witty or humorous poems. But usually, poems about farting, for example, are over the top (or, under the bottom), even for me. And any poem mindlessly stupid isn't worth finishing.
On the other hand, some poems are mysterious rather than opaque and speak to the deep mysteries of the unconscious. They speak to the heart rather than the mind. And some are intellectual, mind exercises that stimulate the intellect. Some poems address the right brain and some the left. Some poems are musical. They speak to the body. Some resonate with deep emotional self, addressing issues of hurt and healing. Other are spiritual, speaking primarily to the "higher" self. The best poems combine two or more of these elements.
Diane Wakowski's poem, "Pumpkin Pie," starts out as most better poems do, with careful detail and evocative sensory description of pie-making. Listening to her read it, my mind was filled with images of harvesting the big ornage globes, cutting them and deseeding them (the seeds, the slippery guts), peeling them and cooking them. and also, images of opening cans of pumpkin pie filling, the way it looked smelled. I'm there in her childhood kicthen with salt and cinamon, and rolling dough, and cooking the pale orange flesh.
I'm there, and I'm happy. I am eager to tatse that pie. I worry along with her about the pie solidifying, I am reassured by the reassurances, and shocked and astounded by the duplicity. All the betrayals of my life flood back. I have to reintegrate them into who I am, bt Diane Wakowski's words are to help me home to myself again.
The bliss-point poem is the poem that resonates deeply on may levels. Natasha Saje was right, of course. The ordinary is extraorninary and the unambitious can be ambitious if it can leap into real exerience, the deep multilevel experience we have have every day.
In order to make this leap, the poet must do two things well. First, she fully inhabit her experience and second, she must communicate the experience successfully and with a sufficient amount of music to make the poem a poem. Then, the reader needs to be receptive and open to allow the poet's experience to flow through and livine inside.
Diane Wakowski's "Pumpkin Pie" a whole poem that speaks to the whole person. It broke through the brain fog that the wretched Hydroxyzine and insomnia give me, penetrated and came to live inside me. It insinuated itself into my brain so that it is now a part of me. For me, it was the grain of sand that held the universe.
Because of my ADHD, I often do better reading poetry than listening, especially in a room crowded with many distractions. It takes me a while to settle, focus and concentrate. I have to admit that when listening to poetry, I sometimes miss things.
I would like to add, to repeat, that I enjoyed many of the other poems and stories and could and maybe will write an enthusiastic review of one or more other pieces.
I would also like to add that Diana Wakowski is a famous poetr. People love to come and hear her read poetry. But when she goes to a gambling Casino, for example, she is nothing but another player, losing or winning. When she sits in a movie theater, she is just another head dimnly see in the light from the screen. A person can be very fomous in one anerna and nobody at all in others.
* * * *
Taming Uncle Beast from earlier file:
*
"No wonder you aren't a minister or priest any more," I screamed at him, and pointed, at him, at the beer he was wrapped around. " You are bad! You are downright evil!" And I burst out crying.
Everyone was staring at me, including Harmon.
"Tiny . . . " Jake started. He looked embarrased, mortified, even. He did not put his arms around me, and neither did Trey.
Instead, Harmon did, and I cried on his shoulder. He held me close, and it seemed ok. I wasn't weirded out ot (embaraased) r anything. I also didn't feel like he was hitting on me or feel skeeved out the way I sometimes do when an older guy touches me.
* * * * Taming Uncle Beast New:
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.” Hafiz of Persia"
I didn't trust it for a moment
but I drank it anyway,
the wine of my own poetry.
It gave me the daring to take hold
of the darkness and tear it down
and cut it into little pieces.
-- Lala, 14th century Persian poet
Mary
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