THE NOISE OF QUIET

Sometimes

when we think it's quiet

it's not.

A cup of warm tea next to a window

filled with pale blue light 

and the thought:

It's so quiet this morning

But listen

the hum of the refrigerator

there's water running 

and somewhere nearby a neighbor fell asleep with the TV on

A walk through the woods

a canopy of green above and a carpet of leaves below

the fertility of generations

thinking:

I love these woods, so peaceful and quiet

But listen

the birds above call to one another

a morningsong of joy and the labor of living another day

the dog as he pads and pants joyfully

the leaves of the trees rustle 

petticoats in a Viennese waltz.

And so it is with life.

When we think it's quiet

it isn't

When we think we're alone

we are not

When we cry out and think there's no one there

to hear us

or to answer us

We only need to open our ears

This morning I knelt on wet grass

the long shadow of a house of God behind me.

Before me were flowers

a few days old

and flags

rainbows and equal signs

and notes

written to people who will never read them

and again I wept.

UNTOLD

Orlando, 6/12/2016

On the screen in my living room

the newsman sits

calm

benevolent

groomed

Over his shoulder

a name

a number

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

             (21!)

maybe a selfie

or a picture from his little sister's quinceañera

"He lit up a room" they'll say, or

"He'd give you the shirt off his back"

and we might learn that

he was a pre-med student

or worked in his father's bakery.

But that's not the whole story

The whole story is how

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

called his grandmother every Sunday

even though she had dementia

or how the roast caught fire at his first dinner party

and they ordered Domino's instead

and everyone said it was the best dinner party they had ever been to.

The whole story is how

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

spent the last moments of his life

afraid

bloody

crying

and lying on a dirty nightclub floor.

The story of Alejandro Barrios Martinez

took 21 years to tell

multiplied by forty-nine

plus fifty-three

plus the lives of everyone at that dinner party

and one grandmother 

On the screen in my living room

a name

a number

And I can't bear to look

but I can't look away

because

on the screen in my living room

the name

and the number 

are mine

It was the mother who told Thelma she was a "born storyteller." This was false. She had a phenomenal recollection of detail- what any true writer could have done with that!- but no sense of what made a story worth telling. As they waded through baked trout, artichoke hearts, and a not-bad Chablis, Thelma rambled through a childhood recorded but not really taken in. Listening to her was like viewing someone's vacation slides. Of course, Thelma had a story- everyone has a story- but she did not seem to know what it was, and didn't know she didn't know. Knowing what your story is, Amy was fond of telling her classes, was what separated writers from everybody else.

-from Amy Falls Down
by Jincy Willett

First-World Problems

Here's how it plays out: The end of any typical day, perhaps spent working or cleaning house or stuck in traffic. A decent meal, the dog's been walked, and the endless, pointless, mindless drone of "Murder, She Wrote" or "The Good Wife" flickers from the TV set. Dishes are mostly taken care of, except for the odd glass or dessert plate which sit in the sink. Your limbs seem to fill with wet sand. It becomes physically impossible to hold your eyes open as some neurochemical courses through your veins shutting off the proverbial lights and drawing the curtains. You fall into a fitful drowse, despite the fact that you are sitting upright and your jeans are cutting into your waistline and in the back of your mind you keep telling yourself that you have to rinse off that fork in the sink. For an hour or so, you drift in and out of consciousness as your spouse tiptoes off to bed, as you wake yourself up snoring, or as Jessica Fletcher finds yet another dead body in her living room. Each time, for that brief moment before drifting off again, you think to yourself that you need to get to bed and you remember that stupid fork in the sink and it's all so overwhelming that you have to just rest here for a minute longer...

Eventually, your Iron Will as an autonomous human being vanquishes the melatonin and seratonin which have been marinating your brain, and you manage to lift yourself off of your chair or your couch or futon. Eyes half-closed, you blearily rinse the goddam fork. You stumble into the bathroom and take care of your teeth. Leaving a trail of clothing which makes it look like you've been on a drunken honeymoon for one, you shuffle into the bedroom, where the husband and the dog are already blissfully sleeping. You fall, practically face-first, into the bed.

And you are wide, wide awake.

I want a President...

Zoe Leonard,1992

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

My mom watched the CBS Evening News as far back as I can remember, back to the days when you wouldn't be shocked to see one of the newscasters light up a Lucky on camera. She never called it "the news", though. It was always "Walter Cronkite", as in, "Jack! Turn the TV on! I want to watch Walter Cronkite." Even after it was Dan Rather, it was still "Walter Cronkite."
I wish I could say that I inherited that habit from my mother, but in truth I can't say that I did. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, so for me at least part of the 6:00 news every night included body counts and stories about places named Quảng Trị and Khe Sanh, and Walter Cronkite had me so filled with pre-teen angst about actually reaching adulthood that the news was the last thing I was interested in. That all changed in September of 2001. One of the countless changes, big and small, which took place in our world on that morning was that I suddenly started to pay attention. But, even if I didn't inherit my mother's interest in "the news", I did at least inherit her preference for which of the Big 3 networks to sit down and watch every evening. I can see her now, smoking away on her Chesterfields and picking loose tobacco from her teeth, often snuggled into a fluffy bathrobe because she was always cold. I think she would have liked Scott Pelley, although she still would have called the program "Walter Cronkite."
Now, many would argue that network TV news is pablum for the masses; and some would say even worse, that we are being manipulated by a small number of shadowy entities who control what information we are given and how it is presented. And I would agree 100% with nearly all of those arguments. Luckily, I also inherited my mother's ability to consider many sides to a story, her curiosity, and her ability to read books. Plus, I know that if a news story is truly important or truly momentous in history, I will be hearing about every possible side of the story and every ridiculous argument, every morning for months when I turn on my laptop and scroll through my Facebook news feed.
But I digress.
My observation here has actually nothing to do with the news, but rather the commercials which are being shown to those of us who watch the news.
I have long been interested in a concept called "target demographics". This is where a particular product, or service, or advertisement, whatever, is being directed to a specific portion of the population, for example, white men aged 18-25. This is a very important concept in the modern marketplace, because if a company is spending millions of dollars on a commercial campaign, they want to be sure that the commercial is being seen by the right people, that is, by potential customers. You don't make a commercial for Chick-Fil-A and then buy airtime during "RuPaul's Drag Race". 
So, anyway, what I have decided is that the only people, apparently, who watch "Walter Cronkite" are the aged and the infirm, because 99% of the commercials shown during that half hour are for Buicks and prescription drugs.
I read somewhere that, when non-Americans are asked to list things about America which they find strange, the fact that we have commercials for prescription drugs is right up there with "portion sizes". And it is odd that millions of dollars are being spent marketing a product to us which we can't even actually buy. Think about that for a minute. How many people actually walk into the doctor's office and say, "Hey, Doc, I'd really like to get some Xarelto!" ?
It's even odder when you look at how these medicines are marketed to us. Disease and treatment have been reduced to a sort of silly cartoon, or like "Candy Crush". We see people portrayed as little origami paper-fold-people, as copper plumbing pipe-people, or as inflatable balloon-people. We see happy diabetics tossing a Frisbee to one another as we hear about "Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Syndrome Type II". In one commercial, a woman is being bullied by her little animated bladder, who won't even let her ride the bus or go bowling in peace; then we see the little bladder sitting in the doctor's office, listening attentively while they discuss overactive bladder. It's all just too surreal, when you think about it.
They've all been topped, though, by the latest campaign for a drug called "Xifaxan". Xifaxan is an antibiotic. An antibiotic! Anyway, it's supposed to be useful in treating IBS: Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The commercial? You guessed it: a little, pink, animated colon. In the first commercial, we first see him? it?... a non-threatening little anthropomorphic ball of intestine, as he runs off, presumably to the bathroom with a case of "urgent" diarrhea. Later, presumably after treatment with Xifaxan®, we see the little bucket of guts admiring fish in an aquarium, and finally able to enjoy a meal in a nice restaurant, albeit all alone. See what being an irritable bowel will get you?
Well, it gets even worse. They actually released a new Xifaxan ad for Super Bowl Sunday, and the little pink bowel has even been given a name; "GutGuy." Well, in this one, we see "GutGuy" at The Big Game, tailgating, high-fiving (gross), even being searched by one of those hand-held wand metal detectors. I mean, really? Think about everything that that implies. At the end of the commercial, GutGuy, a little, pink, animated bundle of intestines, ends up on the JumboTron, his little colon-mouth hanging open and waving at the crowd like the Pope.
Can I really be the only person who sees this stuff and just thinks to himself, "What the fuck.....?"

PERSPECTIVE

You Matter :)

Remember, you're one of a kind. :) <3 #LoveWhatMattersVideo courtesy of Cobi Sewell

Posted by Love What Matters on Monday, February 8, 2016

I Am NOT Black, You are NOT White.

Humble and Kind
This song is so special to me. I really wanted a video that showed the universality of the message of Humble and Kind. Thanks to Wes Edwards for executing this vision and to Oprah Winfrey for lending us scenes of Belief from all over the world. I hope you like it as much as I do.
Posted by Tim McGraw on Thursday, January 21, 2016

">

JUST ANOTHER DAY

I don't know what those last words were

don't even know who said them

I don't remember what we ate

couldn't even specify a date

Did we kiss, or hug, or just walk away

it was just an ordinary day

Could anyone have known back then

I'd never see your face again

We must have thought "he'll call" "she'll write"

"We'll see each other Thursday night"

But Thursday came

one week, another

a new boyfriend, or a sick mother

The weeks became months became years became lives

Lives lived on our own

became husbands, became wives

If somehow we had known, on that "ordinary day"

What would we have done? What would we say?

I hope we'd embrace, and smile,

maybe even laugh,

and press our foreheads together softly for just a moment

and memorize each other's smells

maybe say I love you

maybe say thank you

and say goodbye

PANDAS AND ME (Facebook post 1/03/16)

Man, not even 24 hours into "The Box" endeavor and I'm already becoming an emotional basket-case. I've been handling old birthday cards and thank-you notes as if they were holy relics, because in a way many of them are; and I still haven't figured out who the hell Tracy from Seattle is. One of the hardest things, I think, is the fact that all this stuff I would normally be posting here on Facebook, I now have to start thinking of as "the work"; which means, in other words, that I really can't be posting this shit on Facebook. Maybe I can sneak in some abridged versions or some "cutting-room floor" stuff, we'll see. And today's post doesn't count.
Now, normally, things like letters and greeting cards don't generally refer to the mundane, the unpleasant, the arguments over what's for dinner, so they tend to portray a rather lopsided, ideal picture of life. But what is striking me at this moment is how fucking awash in love I've been in my life. And I'm not talking about Easter cards from Granny, either, although there are some of those in there. I'm talking real-life, nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty Love. with a capital "L". And what's really getting to me today is the question, the lack of memory, the self-doubt: what did I do with all this Love? Did I give it back? Was I an asshole? Did I see what I had at the time? I bet the honest answer to all of those questions would be "yes" and it would also be "no". And that gives me this kind of dull, pit-of-the-stomach ache, as if I'm watching a Nick Sparks movie (something, by the way, I would never actually do) and I suddenly realized the star-crossed heroine was actually me.
Take Chris, for example. In all the world, I think there is only one person alive right now who even knows that I had a relationship with a guy named Chris, but even that person, I think, never laid eyes on him. But Christopher was possibly the first Great Love of my life, at least the first one that ever actually went anywhere. He was devastatingly handsome, in an early-80s Ralph-Lauren-meets-L.A.Tool & Die-pornstache kind of way; at least that's how I remember him. We were together for about 2½ years, which at age 21 is the equivalent of ten years today. It ended pretty horribly.
We had just moved into a new apartment maybe a month, six weeks earlier. Christopher blindsided me one day with the fact that we were, apparently, breaking up; and it suddenly became clear why he had insisted on looking for a 2-bedroom. Long story short, the next 10 months were spent sharing an apartment with an ex-boyfriend whom I had never actually fallen out of love with. Yeah, not fun, especially as I smiled weakly and waved at his various dates who came over. Then, one afternoon, I got a lift home from work with a friend who was going to come over and smoke a little wacky-tabacky. We opened the door to the apartment and walked inside. While I was at work, apparently, Christopher had packed up the entire apartment and moved out. He left me my toothbrush, the light bulbs, and whatever was in my own bedroom. I haven't laid eyes on him since that day, in 1984.
As you can imagine, I never really looked back on that relationship with a whole lot of fondness. Until yesterday, when I started finding cards, and notes, and drawings, and they were all from someone who, at least at the time, really loved me. It's hard not to read those words and not feel it, even now, a lifetime later. I had been remembering the breakup, the stupid arguments, the bitterness; when what I should have been remembering is walking home hand-in-hand through Arlington after Teppanyaki with strangers at Benihana, at a time when two guys simply didn't do things like that. I should have remembered first nights in new apartments. I should have remembered lazy days in bed watching "The Jeffersons" on TV.
He signed one of his cards simply, "Pandas & Me". At first I had to think, just to figure out who it was from. Then I remembered, one of those stupid, silly inside jokes that 21 year-old lovers would have.
He may have broken my heart, but Christopher also filled it up a great deal.
So, 24 hours into "The Box", and I have already learned two important lessons: 1) sometimes, you won't really know what the fuck is really happening until 30 years later; and 2) I still have some forgiving to do.