Blink.

The thin man in the white button-down shirt opens his worn Bible, thumbs through the thin pages until his finger stops, his tongue briefly touching his lips in concentration. “Here it is, Isaiah 37. This is the scripture…” he begins but can’t get any further before Jack is on top of him. Big heavy fists on white flesh. The Bible falls, lands askew on red-inked passages. A low, hoarse mewl comes from Jack between the thumps of bone on wet, split skin.

Jack opens his eyes and the man is sitting next to him, Bible in lap, finger steadily moving along with his voice. “And God said unto man, go forth from the land of Canan, and make unto your self a Land.” He pauses and swallows audibly, like a filter gurgling in a pool then continues.

Words on St. Stephen

He shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it with a match, shaking the flame out with a flip of his wrist. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except I tell everyone. I’ve learned very little in this life, and most of my words aren’t worth the spittle that comes from my telling it. But listen to me if you ever gave a damn about something.” His Irish drawl hung in the air like the smoke around his face. Behind us, the sun was setting, our shadows stretching out before us, pulled toward the creeping dusk. “Tell your woman what you feel and allow yourself to feel. Feel hard. Be passionate. Allow life to knock you ass over tea-kettle. Because everyone one of those times that you're left reeling was precipitated by something wonderful, something that makes colors exist. Something worth living for. I see men go through life stoic, straight-faced, like something made of granite. And I think to myself, which one of us is missing something?" With that he stood up and walked away, toward St. Stephen's North, where the shadow of Fusiliers Arch bled back into the hedgerow.

Phases

I go through phases of voracious interest,
Consuming news articles like barroom peanuts;
The bland, crusted shells crushed and pulled apart,
discarded on the floor in the search for the fruit.
Words of experts and personalities,
Partisan philosophers,
Ideologues,
demagogues,
charlatans,
They all have their say, clouding and muddying
The same story. I’m left with shadows,
A light bulb burning out, a moth fluttering
Against a glass shell, seeking the spastic filament inside.

dream girl

dream girl

'when the sun comes up in the morning
(I sleep on my belly so it's always from my left)
I awaken to
that lovely golden light
and
I'm usually alone
and I sometimes (but not always) wonder why the most
beautiful woman in the world is not sleeping there next to
me?
I deserve her, I think, I deserve
her.

then I get up
go to the bathroom
splash water on my face

look into the
mirror

shudder a bit
in
disbelief

then

go sit down on
the ivory
stool

let it all
go
except for the reality

which

no amount
of
efficient
modern
plumbing
can

whirl
away.'

Distraction

"You have to lower your standards," she said. "It's amazing how easy it is once you stop caring." It was meant as dating advice, though I didn't ask for any. I wasn't really sure where the statement came from.

"I'll try," I responded. Not sure how to tell her that for the last eight months I'd been in a concussive fog of relative apathy.

The last woman that I'd felt the earth tip for had left me on my ass, with a stiff right hand to the chin - unseen though deserved. It was the type of punch that lingers, that takes you down a peg; the punch that you feel every time you chew. For months after I was reeling, unstable. I would get drunk and invite people to punch me in the face, unwilling to start a fight but eager for wanton, mind-erasing violence. I wrote feverishly in notebooks, wrote songs, listened to broken-hearted crooners. I secretly wallowed in my broken romanticism. But like all passions, it subsided to embers, smoldering in a shell of nonchalance.

I tossed myself into bachelorhood, slept with more women than I had in my entire life. Distractions and possibilities - even something that hinted of potential. Ideas not yet put to paper. But still, nine months gone and it still came back to her, a strange addiction. And so I thought of far-away mountain streams, city streets flickering in foreign dialects, island beaches, strange accents. My thoughts lingering after her like dim shadows.

"I'm serious. Life is too short to worry all the time about love, lost or future. It'll happen." She drank from her wineglass. "Or it won't."

"It will."

"You think so?" She looked at me like a child looked at mall Santas, wanting to believe.

"It happens all the time," I said and kissed her. "Every day."

Life in a paragraph.

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing through and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think that is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feelings and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"

John Steinbeck
"East of Eden"

Perhaps this is simplifying things too much, a world of lives and thoughts boiled down to a pair. Or perhaps it's true, when a life is truly looked at, the magnified parts finally scrutinized with a keen eye, things truly do boil down to those two. Good or Evil.

Personally I think Steinbeck has brought out the dramatic side in me. He tends to do that. For the next few days my mind will be filled with the philosophical implications of every moment, every thought, breath and action. Great books do that to me.

This is when I recede inward, after the last page is turned, the last sentence read. A world of words, Steinbeck's canvas splashed with my paint. The outside world fogs over as my eyes go in, reliving and contemplating what I just read. So many people I've just met, new souls. They exist as real as any other soul I've known, perhaps more so. Cal - I don't know if I've ever truly liked a character more, a bird of a similar feather.

In parting...

"Thou mayest rule over sin,' Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are other who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. "Thou mayest, Thous mayest! What glory. It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before."

Timshel.

Girl Dancing

She danced across the floor
the way a cloud of dust twists itself into a cyclone,
briefly swirling before melting away.

Her hips moved rhythmically,
throbbing.

Her thin hands, like thawing icicles,
massaged the air while she sang softly.
There was no music, only what she heard in her head.
Watching her,
I listened.

Health Care: Part I

For the next few weeks I'll be posting on the Health Care Bill that recently passed both Houses and landed on the President's desk. I'm trying to understand exactly what happened, therefore I've decided (under some urging) to do some research and interpret the information back into words. This will be disorganized, chaotic, meandering and full of opinion and my flaws. I make no apologies and I have no real opinion on the matter - I'm far too ignorant. So if at a certain point in these following posts I seem leaning to one corner, I apologize. Hang tight and I'm quite sure in the next post I'll be viewing things from a different perspective.

Part I

Despite the health care debate monopolizing much of the airwaves for the past eight months and every media outlet having numerous opinions on its effects, I’m still confused as hell. I feel like I just woke up in an alley with blood on my jeans, no shoes and wearing someone stranger’s toupee – what the hell just happened and how is this going to change my life?

I’m not smart; I’m not that well-informed; I’m not a doctor and I can barely count to ten let alone calculate budgetary estimations, but when has an inherent deficiency ever stopped me from playing the expert before? So in the next few posts I’m going to try and make sense of the health care reform, sifting through the partisanship surrounding it and what exactly it means for us.


First off I think it’d be necessary to look at the health care system prior to this bill, focusing in particular on the twin monstrosities of Medicaid and Medicare, as well as the state of the uninsured in America. This is essential to understand the Bill just signed into law by Obama and the political turmoil surrounding it. It will also do a lot to deflate the sentiment that the Federal Government should keep their hands out of the public health sector – a sentiment in my opinion that is ridiculous considering our history (you’ll see what I mean).


Brief History of the Federal Government’s sticky hand in Health Care:

Think of the most badass President – be quick. Don’t wait. Just blurt it out! If you said Jimmy Carter, you’re a dumb ass; if you said Ronald Reagan, you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid; if you said Truman or Ike, I’ll let it slide but you’re still wrong. The correct answer and most badass Prez by far is Teddy Roosevelt. In a full-on death match, I’d take TR against a tiger.

And it’s surprising to note that this mustachioed man-bear of a President campaigned under the Bull Moose Party for health care way back in 1912. That’s right, in between hunting big game and getting shot TR was a proponent of social welfare. TR lost his presidential crusade in ’12 to the sniveling douche bag Woodrow Wilson, but the notion of universal health care was far from lost.

Labor Unions and Consolidated groups of the elderly have consistently pushed the Federal and State governments to guarantee health care for their members, trying a variety of shared-cost initiatives throughout the years. Much of these initiatives fell flat, primarily due to lack of a concerted effort by reformers and the opposition by special interests groups (sounds familiar). Despite the laudatory efforts of reformers, the fact that beer became outlawed during this era makes the entire Progressive Movement the work of a bunch of teetotaler in my opinion. The fact that health care reformists were not connected with abolitionists means nothing to me – I’ve never been restricted by facts or common sense.

On a side note, it was right around this time that the opponents of government run health care came up with the notion of “socialized medicine”; it’s important to remember that this was during an era of intense backlash against anything seen as socialist or the even more vile communist (Look up Palmer Raids in your free time). Anything connected with “Socialism” was anathema to most Americans.

Next Post:

The Great Depression to Medicaid

Factors of Twelve

I don't carry much most days. Wallets are even too cumbersome for me - I travel light, staying spry. Though, one thing I always try and remember is a notebook and a pen - always a pen, what good is a forest of paper without the tool with which to inscribe? It's like having a naked, riving woman beneath you and no erection.

But just as important is a tablet. I have a long history with pocket sized pads, from the much-touted moleskin of Hemingway to thick, ornately designed paperblanks. I've washed words, lost to a garbled wad of lint; lost them in drunken, hazy evenings, some turn up, some are gone for good. Some sit besides my bed, glimpses of who I was, where my mind swirled.

Reading an entry from this month:


I am not made the same as them
Perhaps I am a metric
Broken into tenths
While they divide into twelfths
A dozen divides separate us

We are not there
Time is not lost
A stand still
Do they know?

They do not.

I ain't no monkey but I know what I like

there is nothing fake about this song
stripped of its pretension
expectations kicked aside
it is
sunlight through tree limbs,
a warm cup of coffee,
morning in the warm embrace of your bed.
it is all that is right
all that is good
with none of the take.

New Poet

I read this poem and immediately thought of a woman. One woman in particular. Although most things make me think of her...

i send you this leaf

not because of its supreme beauty or uniqueness
not because the tree it came from looks like you
yawning in the morning
not because it would be a good substitute for lettuce
on your next sandwich
not because it's a page ripped from the book of my thoughts
not because i placed it on my tongue and tasted your earlobe
not because it's the lit-match color of your nipples
not because it's the remnant of autumn's confetti
not because it's shaped like your eye when you leaned forward
and blew out the candle

-jeffrey mcdaniel

How I'm feeling today...

The office building is a corporate redundancy, red brick with a glass entrance and black trim. It reminds me of a low security prison or mid-level rehab center – welcoming exterior with red mulched flower beds sprouting speckled green conifer blooms and brightly colored tulips but a drab and muffled interior. Two heavy set women sit at the front desk, April and Cathy, their outfits mysteriously coordinated each day. If April wears a navy blue blouse, Cathy has a camisole that is vaguely similar. Each morning one of the women looks up from their computer as I walk past, flashing a bright, sickly sweet smile. “Good morning,” one croons, emphasizing the long “o”. Their smile follows me as I flash my badge at the sensor and enter the glass door.

I imagine a vapor lock exhaling as I let the door shut behind me. Beyond this point, please conform. Speak softly, refrain from eye contact with members of the opposite sex, and above all, be conservatively appropriate. My prematurely-aged cynicism oozes from me like an odor. I climb the stairs and go to my desk, my head peering over the penitentiary gray cubicle walls; orderly subjects all in a row, dutifully absorbed in the eerie glare of computer screens hide behind each. This is my life.

I’ve come to loathe the question, “What do you do?” How do I answer exactly? I count minutes.

Looking for some inspiration?

If this doesn't move you, you're already dead.

Passion

Excerpt from a book that a beautiful young woman recommended to me, Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho.

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No wants their life thrown in chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

Me either...

To know

I'm a man of mercurial tastes and fancies. Ideas slip in and out of my head like clouds skirting across a Buffalo sky. Plans are formed and discarded, convictions flame and burn in a moments time. Sometimes I feel like I need to escape to the farthest reaches of the globe, at others, to surround myself with those that I love. A future in the army, faced with certain death, all in an effort to experience the absolute certainty that comes with such an environment. To search out a grounding love, filled with the unnamed moments that stir the soul. All options I've considered in less than 7 days.

I worry that this is a trait that I will forever carry. It's not exactly a feeling that something is perpetually missing or a 'grass is greener' syndrome. More of a resistance to complacency. Does this make me constantly unhappy and unfulfilled? I think not, but then again, these thoughts will change again before this beer is finished.

Ah, such is life. Such is the soul I have created for myself. Such is...

Life...

Life is beautiful.

In Spite of Ourselves

The sun set in a yellow glob, the color of my suns when I scribbled them as a child, waxy red, orange, a conglomeration of texture and hues. The dark rushed in along with the winter chill. I sat at my desk and wondered what she was doing, a world away.

I awoke that morning with someone else: a thin, tattooed brunette who liked to crinkle her nose, sleep with her head on my chest, play fight and rode horses for a living. She was intelligent, recommended books that I had never read and could discuss those I had. She liked sex and was good at it. Yet there was something missing. That integral part of something. The fire the caught in your stomach, that defied gravity and had the simultaneous power to set afloat and crush.

I fell asleep thinking of Her while holding someone else. The One that slipped away, both from my own neglect and idiocy. Life is full of such 'hers'. We are a species of dreamers and romanticizers. I could blame it on Hollywood but that seems too convenient. The trait is universal, a shared blessing and curse. The ability to imagine. Imagination breeds dissent, breeds greed, breeds yearning, breeds the exceptional. Love is visceral imagination.

And like imagination, it largely goes unaccomplished and pending.

Always expanding.

--Currently listening to John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves

An Awakening?

I have lived a stationary life. While brief, intermittent geographical hop-scotches have occurred the majority of my life I have remained within a two hundred mile radius of the small town I grew up in.

Yet throughout this stasis I have had a continual yearning to wander. At times it is a dull ache, easy to suppress, while at others, piercing hot in its intensity. And I know now that this feeling will never leave me. It is as much a part of who I am as my stubbornness or my laugh.

Since my childhood I have had the strange notion that I will not live a long life. I remember having anxiety attacks - "spazz attacks" - as we called them, where I woke up at night in inconsolable fits - unable to control my actions but aware of everything. Only later did I recall the dreams that preceded these episodes. Huge, all-encompassing tasks at hand and only a brief amount of time in which to complete it all. It was the confrontation of infinity with brief, wondrous mortality.

The sun and moon rise. Seasons arrive and flee. Sand falls.

Time is short for all of us.

This notion used to terrify me and sent me straight into the arms of organized religion. I found little solace in such a sterile, formalized, self-denying view of the world.

I am certain of very little except that I am me and that I have but one life.