Trapped in a motel in Escanaba

[/rant mode/ alert]

And now I feel like crap. I was feeling okay awhile ago, but then feelings rush over you like the weather, and your internal weather changes in an instant, and that's that.

What am I doing in a hotel room again? Well, I was hoping to camp these past two nights, since it was unseasonably warm. But that didn't work out, in part because on neither night did I really have the energy to do it; plus as soon as I get really tired, I begin coughing like a consumptive, a leftover from that cold/flu I had three weeks (or more) ago. It's like the dread night fungus keeps growing in your lungs, a mad parasite of neglect. *cough cough* I just didn't have enough spoons for camping. I'm a little annoyed about that. I'm also determined to "Escape From Wisconsin" again in the near future, and go camping when it's a few weeks warmer, and I'm a few weeks more rested.

Escape From Wisconsin.

No offense, folks, but Wisconsin has turned into a toxic sludge morass hellpit for me. I must leave. I must find better pastures elsewhere. It's not your fault, unless you voted for anything Republican in Wisconsin since 2008, in which case it's at least your fault that I can't find work, that the economy in WI tanked and hasn't recovered, that our current Governor is a hollow man who only ambition is personal and who has done more to tear the net of the social contract than any past Governor of WI ever dreamed possible, creating a social climate in which sociopathy is in ascendance and empathy is a quaint notion of yesteryear. In which case, we are reaping the whirlwind that you sowed, and gods bless you and keep you safe. For me, not so much. So my big job over the next several weeks is basically finding the best way to get the frak out of Dodge City, in such a way as to not destroy my health again in the process.

I'm also feeling trapped and unhappy in this Escanaba hotel room because tomorrow I have to go back into the venomous black hole sludge pit that Wisconsin has become for me. When I hit the road to head up to Minneapolis, then up to Duluth and Lake Superior, I was quite calm and even happy. As soon as I turn around to go back into Wisconsin, I begin to feel like crap. This has happened every time I've had to go back home in the past two or three years. Why? Because my life has been a hell of loss and desolation, and all of that happened between Beloit and Madison.

Trust me, though, there have been some astoundingly superb, wonderful and good things that have also happened in that same tanged timespace locus, and for which I have only good memories and grateful feelings. Yet the scales are nowhere near balanced. The good is no longer either necessary or sufficient to maintain a desire to try to make things work out, in a place where nothing has worked out (well, mostly nothing), and every year of the ten years since I moved back to WI has been worse than the previous, not better. I moved back to be the full-time live-in caregiver for my parents, giving up my own life and career—with no regrets—during which I almost died. I mean that literally: an undiagnosed chronic illness that I had had for at least 15 or 20 years by that time was driven into an acute and near-lethal phase by the strain of being a full-time live-in caregiver, and then having to deal with everything that followed upon the deaths of my parents. There was a house with thirty years of Stuff to sort through and get rid of, just for starters. It was more than I could deal with, and I did have a lot of help dealing with it—for which I will forever be grateful, because without that angelic help I'd probably be dead. Literally. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not being a drama queen. I am reporting what my doctors said to me over the past few years: without help, I'd be dead.

If you are ever ashamed of asking for help from your friends, get over it, grow the frak up, swallow your pride and your shame and your guilt, and FUCKING ASK FOR HELP. It will be there. Maybe not always, and maybe only in limited ways, and maybe not in the forms that you expect it to be in—but it WILL be there.

I'm feeling like crap tonight, and writing it all out. You are not required to read it, or respond, or do a frakking thing about it. The truth is very simple: sometimes all I really need is to fell like just one person has actively heard me. And then I can go on. This does not require "fixing." It requires listening. Nothing more, nothing less.

I used to have friends, now apparently former friends, who are now afraid of me, apparently, because I'm too intense for them. Well, I would respectfully point out that almost dying (twice, not just the once reported above) can kind of make you so aware of the basic realities of life that you do get a little intense. It deeply sorts out your priorities in life, and fairly brutally. I am so very aware that No One Here Gets Out Alive. So get over your fucking ego selves and just start being good to each other.

That's all. That's really all that it's about.

We might all be born into the species homo sapiens sapiens, but that does automatically make you into a human being. It gives you the POTENTIAL to BECOME a human being, a fully realized, adult, grown up human being, capable of both competency in life and being aware that the Golden Rule basically reduces to: Don't be a dick to each other. Just fucking be nice to each other. Apparently this needs to be shouted from the rooftops far more often than it has been; certainly centuries of social and spiritual evolution have yet to convert the majority of homo sapiens sapiens away from being monkeys throwing excrement at each other through the bars of their cages. Which is what you get if you don't develop your potential to become a human being. You need to take that potential and DO something with it. Otherwise you're just a smart mammal, and not a fully realized human being.

I readily admit to the vice of impatience, because my hyper-acute awareness of mortality, stemming from almost dying, twice, leaves me with no desire to see love wasted, or time wasted. You are no longer allowed to be bored: you don't have time for it. Life's too short. If you ever find yourself approaching the Kingdom of Boredom (which ultimately lies within you), take another road immediately, towards something much less deadly to the heart and mind. Life's too short to waste being bored. Seriously.

Before I began typing out this annoyed longish rant, I wrote an annoyed little song lyric, for a bad song I'll never actually write, which began with the phrases: "Trapped in a motel in Escanaba / there's nothing wrong / but there's nothing right." That's when I knew I was feeling bad, rather than good. Sometimes you don't know what you're feeling or thinking till you make art about it. Which is another frakking reason to make art about everything. Figure it out.

Here's the whole song lyric. Oh, and by the way, [/end rant mode/]

Trapped in a motel in Escanaba
there's nothing wrong
but there's nothing right

If I'd had my way
I'd be camped by the water
drinking in the campfire light

But here I am in a cheap motel
the water's fine but the heat don't work
the night's fooled up, the neighbor's a jerk
but somehow we'll have to get through because
we're all trapped in a motel in Escanaba

Floating in Space

I suppose my mood is being affected
by a lot of dying right now. I'm reading death poems
by the saints and angels, the Zen masters
who on their deathbeds would dictate one last poem,
haiku, tanka, Chinese syllabic quatrain, whatever.
The enlightened masters gave one last lesson
when departing. One of the greatest of masters
left us with the haiku: "Now that I'm enlightened,
I'm just as miserable as ever." I suppose that must
be true, or at least hopeful. Meanwhile I read poems
from Jim Harrison, of late life, the darkest things
I've read from him since "Letters to Yesinin," where
he wrote to Sergei as a way of not joining Sergei,
not killing himself and becoming another dead poet.
That whole book, and one other, inspired me to do the same,
not kill myself, when I was dying, or so close to it
that I didn't want to live. I didn't care. Nothing
was less fun than living, just then.
And today the news is full of the last words
from another saint, David Bowie. Someone once asked
John Coltrane what he wanted to do, now that he had changed
the entire face of jazz. He said, "I want to become a saint."
And he did. THere's a church in San Francisco
dedicated to Trane's sainthood, where they wroship
with an all-day free jazz jam. I can't think what's more fitting.
Now Bowie. I'm not sentimental. I never cry when expected.
I reserve my tears for when I cannot prevent them,
which is rarely the usual suspects or times.
Some movies will make me weep consistently, who remains
dry-eyed at most funerals. The truth is, when you're too full
of feeling it stops you up rather than brims over.
When it's too much, you go numb, at least for awhile,
and nothing can come out without explosives.
The tributes that get to me are the ones as weird as
who inspired them: like Chris Hadfield singing
on the International Space Station, a free-fall rendition
of "Ground Control to Major Tom." Hollywood, never the best
at being tasteful or sublime, couldn't pay for a backdrop
or special effects like that. Actual guitars floating in space.
Now this long distracting mournful stretch of a day
is ending. All day I've tried to focus on what must be done,
and never got as far as chores or duties. I was stuck
on the cusp of contemplation, a tired man sitting on a stump
in a desert thunderstorm, weeping.
What else is there to do? I'll tell you:
If you want to make a tribute to the artists who have changed
your life, do something at least as amazing as what they did
that changed yours, or at least inspired you.
DOn't settle for weeping with the herd. Make a fire.
Here's a random guitar. Place it on the funeral bin,
or set it slowly spinning down the length of the tin can
out there in space, with the Earth rotating out the window.
Don't imitate, steal. Be just as good as your gods.
After all, that's the minimum tribute they deserve.

•

Chris Hadfield performing Bowie's song "Space Oddity" on the Space Station

on the shore of the last sea

and we meet them on the shore
of an endless sea in blue twilight in bright sun
brighter so bright one can barely see past sun tears
as more and more of our beloved dead gather
to greet us to love us to say hello and farewell one time
more in the promise of something we cannot contain
the lost restored to each other
all sorrows healed
not papered or scarred over but gone as if they never
existed

and we meet them on the shore
as the light of that long bright afternoon fades
to blue wind and lapping waves
rising out of the waters we are born from
and to which we inevitably return
when our span of suffered growth is done
given to each other given our sons to the sun
held in hands blessed with infinite brilliant
light

and we meet them on the shore
where at the edge of vision gold sunflowers
stand tall offering of vigilance
a requiem of attention
shadows of clouds reflected in wind-bled waters
sound of waves of that lapping last shore
sound of breeze in tall grass and flowers
sound of sigh of breath of sleeping children
sound of trees beyond the windows
all one sound the same sound same sigh same breath
all one

and we meet them on the shore
as they go forward into silence
fingers sliding apart last touch after long merge
until we too we also
meet our own children our own loves
from the other side of this meeting place
we dead now those who go on
and return to water in blue
eternity

Hull Breach

from the Surgery Diaries

It becomes clear to me why having this ostomy makes me feel so unattractive. I'm fat, I've got an ostomy, I've never felt so sexually unattractive as I do now. And I've been rejected numerous times precisely because of the ostomy. Then again, what do you expect? Most people can't deal with things outside their normative boxes.

And I figured out why, this morning, knowing that friends have been sleeping together in the next room, and myself wanting to go nude today but knowing that I probably won't. I feel completely open and naked already, so why bother?

This isn't a warm-up to a pity party. It's a moment of clarity. It just happens to be about stuff most folks never want to have to think about.

It's that this ostomy is like a breach of integrity. A hull breach. The appliance is like a patch job on an oceangoing vessel, and you have spend a lot of attention on the patch job so that the ship doesn't sink. A breach in structural integrity. If you don't give it lots of attention, this ship will fail.

There are days when I hate it. Hate having to give it this much gods be damned attention. Hate having to think about it all day long, as it constantly demands my attention. Hate having to deal with it when the appliance does occasionally fail, ad there is a mess to clean up. I have lost entire days to this, where nothing else gets done. Some of my friends who have had friends with ostomies, or have themselves had a short-term ostomy, think they understand, and they mean well, but they don't, really. A colostomy is not the same as what I have, a high flow ileostomy. A colostomy is still a once or twice a day thing. But I have to empty the bag multiple times every day, and if I wake up in the night, usually then as well. It's like a demanding baby that won't stop crying. It's like a Siamese twin you cannot ignore. It requires hours of your attention daily. Not minutes. Hours. So there are days when it is hard not to resent it, even when you know it has saved your life and is keeping you alive. Even though I am grateful for being alive, and no longer have a deadly chronic illness, I have this shitbag now, and my quality of life is not significantly improved, nor has it reached the level promised to me when I first agreed to this surgical journey. Life hasn't always gotten better, although it is sustained. I am alive. I am still here.

This breach in hull integrity not only makes me feel unattractive, it is proven to turn people away. No one wants to hear about it. It brings out in many people that same kind of uncomfortable avoidance and insecurity that you see when someone who has never thought before about their own mortality confronts a dying child: when what they have always taken for granted is called into question. People might care for you, but they no longer know how to express it. With an ostomy, even a hug can be a problem. You can have no idea how isolated this hull breach can make me feel. It is capable of denying me even simple basic human contact. How would you feel when you see even people who care about you become tentative about giving you a simple hug? When you need hugs more than you ever have before?

I am struggling with this isolation, even alienation, a lot right now. This entire week has been a battle to just stay afloat. Yes, its depression, shut up with the convenient and misleading labels. I struggle against throwing a self-pity party. I struggle all the more when I see everyone around me making contact, making connections, and I feel excluded. People ask me why my mood is not better, when so many things seem to be going well for me, or at least better. They want me to be upbeat and positive, and the best I can do right now is not be dark and brooding. Call it neutral bouyancy. Call it trying to trim the battleship so that the hull breach doesn't sink it.

A couple of months ago I wrote a song. It was one of these occasional pieces where I sit down at the table or piano, with no plans, then inspiration takes over and a few hours later I have a finished poem, a finished song, a finished essay, usually needing little revision. Experience has taught that I can rely on this kind of inspiration happening often enough to be pragmatic about it. I don't take it for granted, and I also know it will come over me a few times a year. So a couple of months ago, I sat down to play and started working. The words came with the music, at the same time, which is a little unusual. The song, more lieder than folk song, is titled "Still/Here."

It's a simple song, musically, but there's a lot of emotion in it. The song is about survival, about having survived death, on a level that's underneath the surface of the words. You are still here. You are still, here. What lies underneath a song like this is hard personal experience. Its not obvious in the lyrics, although as with poems if you look for buried layers of meaning underneath the metaphor you can find them. What have you survived, that you are still here. What have you lost, that returns to the light.

Last night, I performed this new song for the first time in a concert setting, before a room full of people who had never heard it before. You could hear a pin drop. It was perhaps a little scary. The song ripped something open in me, opened a door to these emotions and deep feelings I'm talking about this morning after. I felt naked. (I feel naked, still, lying in bed in the morning, here, not having put clothes on yet, and not really wanting to.) What small amount of the gift of bards that I might possess was in full operation. I really felt the song as I was singing it. Felt it on every level, more than I ever had. There was applause, although I pretty much ran off the stage. I had to step out of the building, and get my feelings back under control. You know, lest I be weeping uncontrollably, that sort of thing. Getting back to center took awhile. And I have been feeling open and vulnerable ever since. I got almost no comments about the song afterwards, which I don't know what to think of. It would not be the first time that an audience doesn't know how to respond to something of mine. I can guess why, and I don't feel like it at the moment.

I don't feel fragile or hungover this morning, the way an emotional experience can leave you the next day. I feel strong. I also feel very open and very vulnerable. I will be performing the song once again tonight, though I doubt it will be the same. I imagine it will be much more controlled, less of an upwelling of deep waters flooding. After all, the flood already happened, the waters are still settling. I am very much feeling my feelings this morning, so there won't be any surprises on that front. The emotional hull is breached as well as the physical. How do we go through our lives with these walls keep us so separated and safe? When that's an illusion, the grace of this wound, and it is a grace, is that I have no more illusions about safety, security, or boundaries. I don't take any of this for granted anymore.

I am still here. The rest of it is a matter for moment-to-moment attention. Keeping the ship afloat, checking the hull patch every so often, making sure we're trim and sailing on. It's enough to just be still here.

The Day After the Day of the Dead

Some of these guys look a little hungover. Too much fun the night before, maybe. Or blood.





When I went out this morning to start taking down my decorations, I found someone had put a Peanut M&M in the mouth of one of the hanging skeletons. So even the hungry ghosts got fed last night.

New Songs for an Afterlife

Interrupted sleep is still sleep. At least nine hours,
broken into stems, this long weekend. Each night
recovering a lost sense of self. Restless, unnerved,
woken from intense dreams about gathering crystals
from a business going out. Crystals of color, electronics,
a microphone stand with bizarre gear attached,
stack of high-end video cameras might still work.
Afterlife of quartz and silicon.

Last night, poet, a small god's song lyric.
Not a shock, once immersed in songwriting,
the obvious poem come out as lyrics. Words dreamt.
Three new lyrics this past month, poet, steady
trickle if not flood. Only half-rhymed, structurally
loose, looking for a new word to say what's familiar,
feeling forward into the unknown. Three new songs
sit by the hearth of dreaming. The more you dream,
the more you write. Gradually gathers into new sets,
a new book. A scattering of words. Some connection
to leaves fallen across grass and flesh alike.

Chain links between paint and film, conflagrations
of carpet fiber, ash, gravel, lost keychains.
Charms for an afterlife of trash and dead symbols.
An angry dying painter makes collage, painting words
into the swirling vibrancy of his last large paintings.
Paintings about dying, paradoxically full of life.
Serenity and rage beside each other, holding hands.
Two saints of agony and ecstasy, roped barbed-wire
cattle dragged to the dullest seaside ledges.
Journals of paint and alchemical magic. Dancers
waltzing the skulls of their gone lovers
in the apocalyptic sundown. Make me a ribbon to wear
from the sinew of your broken thighs.
Write poem lyrics with withered skeletal hands.
An afterlife for songs, long past the singer's
expiring exhalation.

Boneyard

Decorating the house and front garden for Halloween, planning on having the spookiest house in the neighborhood if at all possible, again, I found myself the other day out looking for decorations to use, and my heart wasn't in it. I wasn't seeing what I wanted to see. Granted, this year things seem smaller in terms of what's being offered for sale, few new designs, little new marketing in the usual stores, that sort of thing; perhaps a reflection of the overall economic gloom and political fearmongering that has dominated public discourse all this year. When I was out driving, and engaged in shopping, it seemed to me people are ruder than usual right now, too; perhaps because they're distracted by their own worries into being less observant, less courteous. On the flip side, the wingnuts certainly seem to feel more empowered to express their sociopathic tendencies by the current political climate, empowered by heartless example, out of the mouths of wingnut politicos.

So it's strange times. As we approach the Day of the Dead, and the walls between the worlds get thinner, my dreams become more vivid, as usual, and my own restless spirit feels the need to wander. The political is also the personal.

This past year, having almost died, having come close to seeing my own guts spill out, held in only by staples over a suture after my surgery to have my ailing colon removed, i've been more close than ever to a sense of my own mortality. This Day of the Dead I can't help but think about myself as one of them, almost. I still feel very close to death—not to dying, as I am recovering on schedule, and coping with life as best as one can—to death itself as an experience and an abstract concept. I am more aware than ever of my own mortality, the limited span of life I have left, barring accidents or illness, and more aware than ever of how much i want to get done.

The experience of illness and surgery has made me impatient with people who would thoughtlessly waste my time; I was never a very patient person to begin with, but if anything has changed it's that I don't censor my mouth the way I might have before, and if someone is wasting my time I don't suffer their presence as well as I used to. Conversely, and hopefully to my credit, the long, mutually-supportive talks I have had with my best friends who are fellow artists have deepened and become more profound, more durable, and more inspirational. Now I have no reason anymore to put off making art, and I make art every day, one way or another. I hope I have enough time left to make the art that I'm supposed to make, before I'm done.

I am looking at the autumn cold nights, the chill in the air, the fallen leaves, the crisp fall air, and can't help feel annoyed that once again I completely missed the summer. Last year I missed summer because I was too ill to do anything, and this year because of the curative surgery. Not in two years have I been able to bask in the July heat, as I was too frail each time to survive it unaided. Now it's getting cold, and I feel, for the second time in a row, that I never got to experience feeling warm enough to satisfy my needs. I am having flashbacks to the time when my family returned to the US from India, when I was almost seven: it was in fall, and I spent that first year shivering. After an early life spent in tropical heat, the thin sunlight and cold winters of North America were a profound shock to my young self. I still love to linger in tropical heat, whenever I can get it.

So, in wandering around thinking about the Halloween decorations I want to put up, perhaps it's my brush with near-death this past year, perhaps it's my increased sense of mortality, perhaps it's the feeling of having died and been brought back to life—and all I want to decorate with this year is bones, bones, bones.



Bones, bones, bones. Skeletons, skulls, bones hanging from the tree. The revealed flesh of mortality that melts away. The skull as a symbol of what remains behind after we're gone. A symbol of the dead, but also of immortality. The skull and bones that endure after the soul has moved on, making symbols of what remains as a sign of what doesn't die. Do we all die, or do we all live forever? Which is it? What is there, after the body dies? No one really knows. We all have beliefs, and some of us who have almost-died bring back images and narratives of afterlife and near-death experiences—which are remarkably the same, no matter where or when they come from. So maybe there is something to it. Whatever you believe is not my concern. I know what I know. I don't care if anyone believes what I know. It doesn't concern me.



The shaman's path can be a lonely one, but then again, you're never alone, because you're always surrounded by the spirits, those hollow voices in the wind, the song of the skull, and the jaguar that drops from the tree to rip out your diseased guts in the Otherworld, and the bears who fill you with healing bread that nourishes your spirit-body and heals your scars. You die and are reborn a thousand times in this life. Some deaths are more enduring, but you always come back to life. You go on, having died. The spirits kill you many times, in the Otherworld, and you bring back something of being healed when you return, to be used to heal others, and yourself. And there is a platter of wisdom that comes with each disembowelment, a bit of self-knowledge gained, as well as the knowledge given you to be passed on to others. Death and rebirth, an endless wheel of schooling.



This Halloween, this Day of the Dead, I feel very close to the Otherworld, the thinning of the Veil between worlds is very personal for me this year, not abstract, not theoretical, but gut-real. So in decorating the tree and garden and front door with skeletons, bones, tombstones, skulls, and more bones, I feel a very personal reflection. I am mirroring my experience of recent death and rebirth. I am seeing my own "skull beneath the skin," and I am mirroring artistically and creatively what I feel in my bones was a near-miss, a near-death, and I am commemorating that near brush. It's not a superstitious keep-away kind of anti-magic, the way many Day of the Dead celebrations are. It's an acknowledgment of the truth of my own mortality.

Bones, bones, bones. I make poems, a jumble of words, a jumble of bones. I make food for the living and the dead. The dead eat the essence of the food brought to the gravestones by the living, the night of the Day of the Dead. While they wander, we feast, too. Everybody says hello, one last time. It's a chance to finish unfinished business, neglected and unfinished conversations. It's a chance to connect to eternity, and to heal the world's wounds. Not just yours, not just your family's wounds, but the hurt that chasms the dead from the living. Even this mortality was a rare chance for growing up. Bones are growth, have growth rings like trees, bones are how tall you are, look how much you've grown, your height in life, seeing around the open grasslands to the horizon, bones take you taller from the ground till you fall down again. You stand to die. You contemplate your own mortality in the images of the wedding of the dead. The dead marry the dead, and the living. But they're not separate anymore, not on these cold nights when the Veil is thin. Let the dead bury their dead. But they don't stay dead, they come to visit. Bones, bones, bones. Rattle and play. Them bones gonna rise again. Rattle, rattle, bones, bones. Music of humming bones.

Jumble of Bones

What's left of the poor saint
but this jumble of bones?
this grinning sodbusted palette,
these fragile winglets of ribs?

What's the end of every quest
but a scatter of fossil and blood?
this empty airfilled dugout
where a brain once claimed to mind?

What's the future of bones
but to be forgotten, not forgiven?
all come to dust, but bones in situ,
remains of a silo of ended dreams?

Blood Warhols

More Warhol-style collages made in Photoshop, from photos made during my most recent blood transfusion.


Blood Warhol 1


Blood Warhol 2


Blood Warhol 3

The blood is the life.

Hands into hearts filled with blood.

Three collages made in Photoshop from photos taken during my most recent blood transfusion, in the hospital outpatient ward, a needle in the back of my hand, not always pleasant, sometimes painful, but worth remembering.

When you sit down to make art out of your life experience, sometimes it's worth it to make art you don't like to look at. I get a lot of flak for making this kind of art, and even more flak for writing poetry about it. (Particularly from poets, when those poems challenge them in ways they don't like to be challenged, formally, or in terms of content, or with ways of writing poems alien to their own. Poets, probably because they're so insecure in the market-driven world, are often very intolerant of difference. Gays and lesbians, too, can be intolerant of difference, and sometimes for the same reason: we can be very uncertain of our place in the world.)

But that is the essence of Tantric practice: facing directly those things you don't like to look at, whether they are fears, toxic patterns, death, life, love, sex, hate, or other sometimes corrosive emotions and situations. It's a list of things we'd all rather avoid, most of us, and the list is as long as your personal list of phobias and neuroses. At the root of most or all of these lies fear.

The point is to embrace those things you'd rather flee from, use that power they generate in you when you face them, and redirect it towards your own greatest good. Betterment. Enlightenment. Whatever you want to call it.

Most people run from their fears. The Tantric practice is to run towards them.

In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, a monk was sometimes sent to practice graveyard meditation, which is the practice of going to the burial yards, and meditating all night long while sitting on a fresh corpse. If that doesn't push your buttons, bring out every feeling of fear and revulsion you've ever felt, then you're not human. It's supposed to push your buttons. That's the point: When your buttons are pushed, then you're engaged with your whole being with the moment.

And that's only one short step away from what enlightenment really is, which is not what most people think it is. It's not nirvana, it's not some magical blissful cessation of all upset, chaos, or drama. It's not the end of strife. What it is, is living in the present moment, without emotional or mental baggage, with a sense of being one with everything, and being able to sense the connections. The Lakota say "All My Relations" at the end of their prayers, invoking and connecting to all of Creation. The Navajo finish many sacred songs with the phrase "It is finished in beauty," which is one translation of the word "hozho," which means "balance" and "peace" as well. See the pattern yet? At the culmination of the corpse meditation, after you have contemplated your own death and the ephemeral and groundless nature of your own emotions, there arrives a peacefulness and tranquility and detachment wherein you realize what matters in life and what doesn't, what's worth paying attention to, and what's not worth getting upset about. Which is most things. Most personal dramas get put into perspective when you're meditating all night while sitting on a corpse.

Which is why I keep coming back to the photos I have taken of my own medical procedures, of the blood transfusions in particular. Remembering what the needle feels like in the back of your hand while looking at the photo: that is a Tantric practice. It's like meditating while sitting on your own corpse, on the temporary nature of your own incarnation, on the limitations and short duration of their lives.

The Universe will go on a very long time after we're all dead. That puts your drama into perspective.

I might not survive another day, another week, another year. The medical treatments I still have to undergo, not the least of them a life-changing surgery, could be the death of me. Each blood transfusion could kill me as well as save me: it is always a risk. Even if a small risk, because the medical technicians are really good at what they do, it's still a risk.

I've never thought of myself as particularly brave or heroic or as anything special, and I've always run towards the fears instead of away from them. I learned very early in life that that's what you have to do. I've never felt there was a choice, even when I didn't really want to do it. There are just some things you have to do, and you can't avoid doing them.

I learned that by growing up a gay boy in a hostile culture: we all learn to navigate dangerous waters very early, we learn to be observers of life and people, almost the same way an anthropologist in the field observes the people in the culture she is studying, we learn to hold back our personal truths from public scrutiny, and public discourse. We learn early that we have to cope with doing things we'd rather not do. I learned a lot of life-lessons from being bullied for many years in school. One of them was to always turn towards the lion's roar, rather than to try to run away from it. If you try to run away, you get eaten.

I don't want to get eaten. I'm the spiritual predator, the Black Dragon, not the sheep, the spiritual prey. I'm the Warrior who can be killed but never defeated. And I'm the Vampire, the dark archetype that even at the last fights to his utmost to survive. I'm in love with the world, and with life, and I'm not ready to let go of it. Not yet. I won't be here forever, so every moment is all the more precious. The preciousness of life is in direct proportion to our awareness of its short, ephemeral nature. This, too, you learn from sitting on the corpse all night: That what cannot less is therefore all the more rich.

So I run towards the fears. Nothing in life terrifies me more, right now, then the surgery and recovery and life-changing things about to happen to me. The outcome may very well be a real improvement to my life. But I'm not there yet. Today, that hasn't happened yet, and there's no guarantees. There is no "reward" for good behavior, for doing everything right, for thinking the right thoughts, for following good advice, for right livelihood. You cannot think your way out of these problems. Sometimes you can only endure.

If I must face this fear, I will. It doesn't seem like there's a choice. Avoidance and denial are not valid choices. Running away only postpones the inevitable. My aunt who avoided and denied illness and death her entire life was not in the end able to avoid either, and her last illness killed her. Nobody here gets out alive. When you fight back against the bullies, they stop. Well, first they escalate, but once they figure out you're not easy prey anymore, they go in search of easier prey than you—that's because bullies are fundamentally lazy, stupid, and ignorant: they are ruled by their own fears, and they always run away from the corpse. Facing up to it is the last thing they want to do. So when you run towards your fears, the bullies scatter. Another thing I learned early in life.

So I make art, and poems, out of this illness, out of these fears. And the fears scatter. At least for awhile. For tonight is good enough. And if you don't want to stare at this corpse, don't: no one is forcing you to look. You can make your own choices, and they don't have to be mine.

A Rose for Memorial Day

The Blood Is the Life

(More from the Anemia Diaries. Other entries here.)

May 19, 2011

Noon.

Just back home from the hospital outpatient ward after another blood transfusion, another two units of red cells via IV. That makes five blood transfusions in the space of a year. Probably will be one or two more before the upcoming surgery, which is now only weeks away. I have to go back to the hospital in four hours so the lab can draw blood for a post-transfusion hemoglobin count, to see to what level the transfusion raises my count. I've been anemic so long, I'm afraid my body's partially adapted.

Every time I go through this, it wipes me out. It wipes out the whole day. It's a shock to the system. It's invasive, even to be honest a little traumatizing, even if it's good for you in the long run. I feel icky. I've got all these foreign cells in my body now. There are always risks with an IV donation. I am not allowed to give blood because of the dengue fevre I contracted and survived when I was in Java, Indonesia, in 1986; as with malaria, those factors stay in your blood forever after, and they can't be filtered out.

I did Reiki energy work on the donor blood bags before the blood hit my veins. It went in cold, from the refrigeration they use to keep the bags fresh. The veins in my wrist on the IV side were noticeably chilled, compared to my other wrist. All those foreign cells in my body. I'm doing more Reiki on myself now. Assimilation, subsumption, absorption: making the foreign blood mine. I feel like a vampire who drank too much, got too high on the rush. Kinda woozy, both good and icky at the same time. How do other vampires do this? I guess they get used to it. I may feel like a vampire, charged up with new fire in my veins, but I also feel disequilibrated.



I've known for some time that I carry a Vampire archetype: everyone carries twelve sacred contracts, or archetypes, and I know what most of mine are, including the Vampire. At those bad times in my life, when I've lived off the generosity (life-force) of others, and doing so all unconsciously, it has been something that kept me alive, if not always ethical. These blood transfusions that literally keep my body alive, this past year: I never thought an archetype could be so literal. Symbolically, though,

Beyond the sexual level, we sometimes form psychic attachments to others because we desire their energy, a desire that manifests through a need for approval, a need to have the "other" take care of our survival, and a fear of being abandoned. What has been defined as a co-dependent relationship could easily fall under the Vampire template. You may find it hard to identify yourself as a Vampire, yet it is essential to review this archetype personally. Patterns of behavior such as chronic complaining, over-dependency, holding on to a relationship emotionally or psychically long after it has ended, and chronic power struggles are all indicators of Vampire patterns. Holding onto someone on the psychic level is as real as holding on to them on the physical.

So, both symbolically and literally, medically, clinically, for me, now, the blood is the life.

•

I have a short mini-concert with Perfect Harmony this evening, too. Only a short drive away, fortunately. There's another concert I could be part of in Milwaukee two days from now, but I'm not going to go: four hours of driving just to perform for ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe if I was still in my twenties and perfectly healthy, I'd consider it. But not now, not after having been in hospital again, not that much tiring driving for so little performance time. I need to rest for a few days, now.

Funny taste in the mouth from IV saline push, and the other meds they shoot into you, Benadryl for allergic reactions, a diuretic so you excrete the excess plasma. Is this too much information yet? Funny tastes linger in your mouth whenever you go through an IV transfusion like this. Every drug has its own taste, and the blood has a taste, too.

My (GP) doctor decided to tranfuse me since I've been feeling run down and out of sorts, the past few weeks. My last blood count was right on the threshold, in terms of the numbers where he starts wanting to give me a transfusion, and if I'd been feeling good, we would have just tested again in two weeks. That's where we've been for a couple of months, since the last transfusion, but the past few weeks I've been feeling run down again. Although there has been no noticeable bleeding caused by the chronic illness, and my hemoglobin count in fact had risen slightly over the last two weeks. (The first time that's been true in a year.) But I just haven't been feeling good.

Two of the more annoying side effects of anemia, at least for me, are insomnia, and itchiness. I have itched in places I did not think it was possible to itch. Not just on the surface, either, but inside the flesh. And the itch moves around, springing up sharply just as you're about to nod off to sleep. So you lose sleep just from the itch, and the anemia also has its own tendency to mess up your sleep schedule. It doesn't help that this has been a bad spring for my allergies, too. Not to mention how depleted my immune system has been, between the illness and the various treatments. So when they transfuse you, they shoot you full of diuretic and you pee all day. Although I get a reduced dose of the diuretic drug because I already flush out a lot of water due to the chronic illness. Not having a fully operational colon means you lose a lot of water. I'll be at risk for kidney stones from here on out, unless I drink an extra gallon or so a day and keep peeing all the time. Just have to keep flushing it through. Too much information yet?

It only took the nurse two tries to get the IV into the vein on the back of my hand, this time. The really good nurses get it in one, and painlessly. The nurse today was not that good. Took her two tries, and the first one really, really hurt. So new puncture marks on the backs of both hands.

They also scheduled me for an ungodly early hour this morning, so not enough sleep beforehand. As if it wasn't stressful enough, just going in to hospital. I did nod off in the chair briefly, but mostly I sat in discomfort and read. Took along writing and drawing materials, but brain too foggy to write, or even think too hard. Must. Wake. Up. Brain. Brain. Hurts. Fire good. . . .

I'm so exceptionally tired of all this. I really am tired of being sick, and tired, for so long. We'll see if this latest blood influx perks me up at all. Probably at least the itching will go away, tonight. I hope. After the concert tonight, sleepytime beddy bye night night. Oh hell, nap now, even.

And I still feel icky. Food first, then maybe a nap. Then afternoon blood draw for testing, then concert clothes and driving to the concert. I think I'll request that I be allowed to sit down afterwards.

•

Later:

Sunset.

Concert went well. It was an LGBT garden party put on for several of the Madison and Wisconsin LGBT organizations, out in the farm country west of Edgerton, WI. A really beautiful spread owned by a gay man. Gathering was a fundraiser, but also informational, a bit of networking. The Chorus was some time ago asked to perform as part of the event. We did two short sets of music derived from our upcoming concert featuring the music of Freddie Mercury and Queen. There were only eight of us from the Chorus there, which is only about a third of us. But as an octet we actually sounded great. Several people said nice things afterwards.

It was a beautiful setting, really pretty, big green lawns divided by hedgerows and stands of trees, with interesting buildings. The lilacs were in full bloom, and the sun had come out after what had been a cloudy day. I drove back home through the farm fields as the sun was going down, and stopped to make several photographs, as the light was perfect, and the setting was bucolic. Farm spreads, clouds, cows among the trees, beautiful falling-down barns.

I left my hospital ID bands on from this morning, partly because I needed to leave them on for when I went back to the lab for the afternoon blood-draw—but also so I could show the guys how I'd spent my morning. So, how was your day? I used it as an excuse to sit down when I felt too tired to want to stand anymore.

Showing off the hospital bands was kind of perverse fun, actually. I have a twisted, dark sense of humor at the best of times, but lately, with, shall we say, nothing left to lose, I've been playing with my own existential situation, finding the humor in the absurdity of it all, whenever possible. When life is like this, you laugh or you cry. Hospital humor is very dark humor. Actually, since my father was a doctor, I've been around hospital humor my whole life. The only thing that has changed recently is that I've stopped editing my sense of humor in public.

To be completely honest, when I showed up for the concert, and the guys asked my how my life was going, I showed off the hospital bands from the morning hospital business, and told them the absolute truth: I've had a long day, I'm tired and surly, let's have fun and get this over with. But it did go well. Naturally, the food tent provided for the garden party had nothing I could eat. But that was expected; these sorts of fundraiser shindigs almost never cater to gluten-free diets, or even vegetarians, for instance. I was too tired to want to cook my own meal this evening, so I got some quality takeout on the way home and ate when I arrived.

The blood transfusion I think did give me a little more energy. We'll see how the next few days go. I feel less icky now, after food, nap, concert, more food, getting out of formal concert clothes, and now just lounging about at my leisure.

I'm going to take the rest of the night off. Maybe watch a funny movie.

I feel like getting on the studio computer and making some music. I've started a new spacemusic album. i've been making loop-based drum and ambient tracks, which I'll layer over with bass and Stick live tracks later. It's going okay so far. It's got my attention, as does writing out the new music commission.

Doing something creative every day makes me feel better about the day. Even a stressful day like today is not a total waste, if you have something artistically productive to show for it. Making art is the best revenge. Not only does it keep you going, not only does it provide you some hours in which you're positively distracted away from your medical issues, at day's end you have some art and/or music to show for it. It keeps me sane. I carry a couple of art-related archetypes, after all, and they also need to be nurtured.

This story is nowhere near over. There's a lot more going to happen in coming weeks and months. So I guess I'll see how it all goes.

•

Midnight.

As sometimes happens, your humor gets you through the day, dark and gallows humor though it be. Then, just when you're starting to unwind, at the end of the day, in a kind of delayed reaction, the invasive trauma, the shock to the system, comes swarming back to you, maybe when you're watching an emotional scene in a dumb movie, or even dumber TV show, and suddenly, "for no reason," you burst into tears. Just crying a little. The scene that triggers it can be a very positive moment, a moment of lovingkindness, even. The only consistent trigger is that the emotion is deeper than words. The content of the emotion is less significant than the intensity of the trigger.

I've learned to just let it rain. If you need to weep for 30 seconds, or 2 minutes, then just go ahead and weep. There's no loss of dignity in weeping, and no loss of mythical manliness in needing a good cry.

That is heresy to the macho-bred, of course, or the stoic, emotionally-repressed post-Viking culture of my mother's people. Or the English, who have always impressed me as being among the most sentimental people of all, despite their practice of keeping a stiff upper lip. (Maybe that's one reason the English upper crust always used to vacation in the southern Mediterranean, like Italy: one some subconscious level they knew they were more alike than not.) But the Irish, my father's people, knew the value of a good wail, a good drunk, a good keening.

Sometimes I think that I am keening, as old women were hired to do at wakes and funerals, because it triggers something even deeper inside, that must come out. Something very large, and usually speechless. A beast without a name, perhaps, that lives on in the interior, whose occasional appearance makes the hair stand on end in numinous recognition: we are, after all, possessed of deep feelings, and in our deepest natures remain half-angel, half-beast.

But this quick cry at day's end is how I shed some of the trauma of going through all these medical moments. It can be a daily trauma, some days more so than others. As good as the doctors are, as good as the procedures are for you, in the long run, as healing as they are, they can still feel traumatic and invasive. And you must shed those feelings as you go, alongside the more physical toxins also passing through you along the way.

If you've never received a blood transfusion, you might not be able to fully imagine how very emotional it is. Someone gave this blood, this blood that today is saving my life. Someone made that gift. As alien as it feels going in, and even if it feels weird for some time after, the sheer grace of that is an incredible gift.

It's not something you can ever give back, or ever repay. You can only pay it forward, hopefully passing on the life, the healing, the grace, to someone else, down the road.

How Can You Write A Poem When You're Dying?

(More from The Anemia Diaries:)

March 21, 2011

There was a poetry anthology published a decade ago, titled How Can You Write A Poem When You're Dying of AIDS? (London: Cassell, 1993. Ed. by John Harold) The anthology collected poems written by people who were, in fact, dying of AIDS, responding to ads the editor placed in the UK LGBT press. Not that the question asked in the title is rhetorical; rather, that the contents of the book answer the question. Indeed, how can you not write such a poem?

The anthology takes its title from a poem by James Sykes, an impassioned rant that starts out in metered, rhymed verse, then in the third stanza explodes into free verse of varying line lengths. It's quite striking to see a poem begin formally, then blow that up in rage: a clear example of form following function, of a poem's form reflecting and repeating its contents. It's a poem that takes things very personally. Sykes' inarticulate rage grows throughout the poem, through various stanzas of responses to the title question: the medical details, the inability to talk about a lover already gone, a rage-filled appropriate response to the absurd question "how do you feel about dying?" The poem ends by asking the title question one last time, with a final reply, paradoxical and personal as it is; I can't . . . can you

I'm taking things very personally at the moment. I have now had a chronic illness of major proportions (ulcerative colitis, with anemia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other complications) for several years, in active phase and in relapse for going on two years now of continuous treatments, medications, blood transfusions, debilitating exhaustion, IV drug therapy, and more, with all the fallout one gets from all that. Fallout equally physical, mental, spiritual, and psychological; indeed, the whole person is a synergistic system encompassing all those modes, and others. The past few months, it seemed as if the IV drug treatments were working, and I was finally making some progress, feeling better, getting stronger; only to discover this past week that that has been an illusion, and I've only been dying more slowly. From the existential philosophy viewpoint, of course, we are all dying slowly, all the time, and we will converge on that end-point of the void between, each unavoidably in our own good time. Most people spend most of their time avoiding thinking about that, or distracting themselves away from that fatal truth.

This past week, it was discovered after yet another blood test that I am still dangerously anemic, only it took months to get there instead of weeks. So I had another blood transfusion, followed by a CT scan, to figure out what's going on. My hemoglobin and red blood cell count did go up, but not much, not as much as I would have thought. Still, there's been no apparent bleeding for almost two months, so if the blood is draining away, where's it going? There's no obvious sign, no reason why I should be anemic. They also drew more blood for more tests, the third time in a row within two days, leaving me by week's end with band-aids covering multiple needle-points. I'm getting tired of so many needles. My veins are getting stiff and scarred again. I've got all kinds of track-marks everywhere on my arms, like a junkie.

I'm looking out on the robins hopping around in my beloved back yard pear tree, which was almost destroyed last fall by a wind storm. What was a huge full covering canopy has been reduced to three smaller trunks and a few branches. But the branches and twigs that are left are beginning to bud out with new leaves. The March weather is temporarily warm now, accelerating the greening. Daffodil shoots are beginning to emerge from the ground, and the crocus in the sunny corners are already up and blooming. So are some of the striped exotic tulips I've planted beside them. The crocus bloom first, the daffodils second, followed by the rest of my garden. Spring is returning. Of course, March is the most difficult month, here: we're bound to have at least one more snowstorm, or at least a week of very cold temperatures, before winter withdraws completely. March is the hardest month to endure because it yo-yos around between spring and winter, tempting you to relax, then slamming you down again.

I feel like my entire life these past few years has been like the month of March, because my illness operates on exactly the same yo-yo temptation principle. I've learned not to trust feeling better, because it inevitably gets slammed back down. I don't know what to trust, what to believe, what to do. I am completely at sea about to think or believe. Who do you turn to for answers, for solace, when every new piece of news adds to the confusion rather than the clarity?

This leaves me feeling furious, frustrated, annoyed, continuously enraged at a subsurface level, short-tempered, and impatient with the complacent stupidities of those surrounding me who are in denial of their own eventual mortality (which is just about everyone). I find myself not knowing what to think or feel, how to act, what to do next, completely unable to decide if anything I have been doing or ought to be doing in future is worth it. I've tried everything; it doesn't matter what I do. I can "think positive" and the slam-down is the same as when I was depressed. I can do everything right, and it all still falls apart. I follow the advice of my doctors and other supporters, and it doesn't make any difference. Every setback ruins my attitude, because each setback reinforces the truth that I'm not getting better, or stronger, or healthier. This most recent setback, this past week, has set me completely adrift. I don't know where to turn, or where to go, or how to proceed. I feel completely lost? How can I write a poem when I feel like I'm dying? I readily admit that I am not coping well with setbacks of any kind, right now.

There's a ground-level, biological urge to survive. For life to find a way, somehow. To go on living, no matter what, no matter how bad it gets. A stubborn clinging to life even in the face of inevitable loss. Like my wounded pear tree behind the back porch, damaged last autumn, almost destroyed, yet this spring putting out new buds. The tree says, I will grow back, I will survive, no matter what. There's a similar animal tenacity in us, the root-level urge in our very DNA to keep going, no matter what knocks us down. The coyote will gnaw its leg off to get out of the bear-trap that caught it. The eagle with the broken wing will still try to fly away to safety. When natural disasters happen on a large scale in populated areas, people gather together, the survivors immediately begin caring for each other, rebuilding shelters, looking for food and water.

We all want to live.

I talked over my frustrations with a friend during the medical test days last week. He said to me that he thought the anger I was feeling—I was too numb to feel anything else anymore: I'm bored with weeping, self-pity is boring, thinking positive is boring, all the usual emotional cycles I've been through so many times that I'm sick of all of them—was an expression of that same tenacity to want to keep going, to keep living, no matter what. My friend is probably right. I still feel that anger, today, sustaining me, keeping me sharp and hot.

But there are quality of life issues involved. I am simply not having any fun right now. The chronic nature of this illness, its continuous gravitational tug every day, its daily grind and demand for attention, have all worn me down to the point where I have nothing left to give. I take no joy in life. I take a little pleasure, in food, in sex, in reading, but it's an hour stolen from a day and, often enough, a sleepless night. Insomnia has become a real problem, as I'm too tired to discipline my racing worries, powerless to push them away, so I often lay awake at night, taking a long time to get to sleep.

In the midst of all this I suddenly find myself writing poems again. It's purgative. It's a formalized, restrained means of expressing the incoherent screaming and yelling and jumping up and down and punching my fist through the wall that I really want to be doing. it's a pressure-valve letting off the steam.

I don't know what to do, what to believe, what to think. The only thing I can do is keep moving forward: without hope, since hope leads to desperation; without expectations, since expectations lead to anger and depression when they're never met; without any idea if this bad time of life will ever end. I don't really believe, right now, that this illness will ever end—every time I think it's getting better, instead it gets worse—or that I will survive the proposed radical surgery described as a cure, at the end of June. I don't really believe the surgery's going to be the end of this, it's all been going too long. I can't really see any light at the end of the tunnel, because the tunnel has kept getting longer and longer as time has gone by. I don't really imagine I'll come out of this, even if I'm finally cured, with any money left to my name: I still can't work, I'm depleting my savings, since I have only minimal insurance the surgery is probably going to bankrupt me and leave me homeless and destitute. There are no guarantees. Even if after the recovery from the surgery I am able to work again, there's no guarantee that my depressed part of the country will have any work I can do before my money runs out and I have to sell everything anyway.

That's the emotional reality; that's what keeps me awake at night. It doesn't matter if it isn't logical or rational. This is the emotional reality. I'm scared to death. The surgery terrifies me; even if it goes well, it is life-altering, and things will never be the same afterwards. I'm told they will be better, but all I know for certain is that they'll be different. The alternatives to surgery are undeniably, eventually fatal. It's a question of how fast you go, and how miserably. The aftermath of the surgery could leave me still unable to earn an income, destitute and homeless. I am really, truly freaked out by all this. This is the emotional and psychological reality I have been living with for a very long time now. This is Big Stuff. I have a right to be freaked out, to be scared, to be terrified.

I tried to put all of this emotional reality "on hold" while I dealt with losing weight for the surgery, regaining my strength in preparation, and also writing music—but then this most recent setback happened, and it's all back, weighing on my mind. I try to put it back on hold again, and it's a struggle. No part of me really believes this long-duration ongoing hell will ever come to an end. Not until my death, that is. Maybe I'll die on the operating table. Maybe I won't. But at the moment, I really don't care. That's the level of "quality of life" I'm dealing with right now.

So I find myself having zero patience for the whining of people who are addicted to their personal dramas but don't really have anything to complain about. I have empathy for people who find themselves in dire straits genuinely worse than mine. I have no sympathy for complainers who just complain to complain, but there's nothing really wrong with their lives.

The only means I have to cope with any of this is to make art. So I find myself, surprising myself in the doing, writing more poems when I didn't expect any. I continue to work with papier-maché, just to have something to do at night when I can't sleep. I am trying to focus on the music writing, but honestly I'm too angry just now, and need to vent. Writing poems can be palliative, even though they''re not a cure. Writing poems, journalling about my situation, talking to friends about my troubles: all necessary and useful venting.

I look at the origin of the current form and style of poem I'm writing, what I've come to call the Letters form, after the initial poem in the series. I cannot help but think this poem-form is directly connected to my chronic illness. Inspired in part by Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, a masterful book of poems written in a dark period of the poet's life, written in a form that inspired this one. Re-reading Harrison's Letters last summer, at a point in my illness before the current treatments began, where I almost bled to death, where I had a near-death experience I still haven't been to fully integrate, I guess triggered these new poems. My own Letters-form poems are connected to the process of this illness. They are a response to it, I suppose. Without trying to be too glibly simplistic about it, I guess these poems are a result of my illness. They certainly help with the emotional reality. The poems are, as I said above, a very restrained form of the incoherent, panic-laced screaming and shouting I feel inside. I am not a fan of raw process in art: I appreciate a little aesthetic distance. But again, don't read too much into that: it's not a statements about poetics, or how I believe art "ought to be made." I carry no beliefs of any kind about how art "ought" to be made, other than those I've acquired through personal experience. I have not critical axe to grind about art-making, only that art will always need to be made. We all want to live. Making art is what keeps me alive, right now. That, and forward momentum.

Who am I writing these Letters to? I left the name-plate blank on purpose. At first I just didn't want to say. I didn't want to be derivative. In truth, I don't have a specific person in mind, living or dead. I could answer glibly by saying, if the letter feels like it's addressed to you, feel free to write your name in. I could answer more thoughtfully, saying that I don't know who the Letters are addressed to, it's a mystery even to me. This in response to a plausible questioner wanting to uncover yet another biographic authorial mystery (the usual fallacy of thinking we can know about the art by interrogating the artist's life): Who are you writing these Letters to? The truth is, there's no big mystery to it, only a little one. I really don't know. I am content not to know, content not to have specific person, place or thing in mind. That the poems are connected to my personal process is evident; some of the poems even sample bits of what's going on right now, bits of dreams, bits of significant moments in my medical trajectory, bits of emotional reality.

The only thing I can do, short of gnawing my leg off to get out of this trap—remarkably, that's just what the upcoming surgery feels like—is keep going forward. no destination in mind. No sense of an ending, either the when of an ending, or the how. Going forward with no hope, no expectations, no anticipation of an ending. Going forward like driftwood on a river, not knowing what's around the next bend.

And I'll keep making art. Keep making poems. I never expected these new ones to appear. I thought I was done with them. I guess this is a multiple relapse: a medical setback, a poetic relapse. I'm not overly interested in the why of that process: I merely notice that it keeps happening. If I don't survive this, and I cannot say if I will or won't, if nothing else, I've left a pile of art for my survivors to sort through. At the moment, I find it hard to give a damn about anything else.

Cold Fires

towns like little self-contained wastelands
surrounded by vast geologies, volcanic plains
and fog-bound snowfields

cold fires, no one left at home
fences and barns crumbled from neglect
the world's ending passed through
spat, and marched on to kill the next hearths

now no one lives here, or can
those able left long ago
following the work
as the plows broke themselves
on this fertile, rocky, mafic, pitiless earth

snows pile up inside unglazed windows
a broken cradle, a threadbare one-eyed doll
and the rags of a grey shawl
batter themselves apart in the wind's harp

till even the horses are bare bones
skulls and antlers nailed over gateposts
over range roads that fade into the desert
in last warning

•

And that's what I was thinking, as I drove through several of these little Idaho towns along Hwy. 20/26, looking cold and abandoned, in bleak afternoon light: I could never live here. Why would anyone want to live in such places anymore? I mean, I love small towns, and I love living in rural areas; but these looked so dead and forlorn, so alienated from the rest of creation, that they sickened the spirit. I even stopped for gas at one small town, and there was no one at the station; it was all automated, the "Open" neon sign was lit in the building window, but there hadn't been anyone there for ages, the other windows were all painted over and everything was locked up. Is this the way the world ends, in cold, and snow, and silence? If so, Fimbulwinter has come to rural Idaho. And so I drove on, and on, till I reached easternmost Oregon, and the feeling that the people here are still alive.

The Anemia Diaries

Don't ever let anyone convince you that the mind and body aren't one.

Those ultra-brainy philosophers walking around in a mental fog; those cyberpunks who want to merge with the Net, achieve cybergnosis and leave the "meat" behind in some kind of digital ecstasy; those mavens of the mainstream culture who are all head no heart; those poets who think it's all a mental puzzle box game; those writers who are so locked into their words that they forget they have lungs; those denizens of everyday life who live in their heads all the time, and forget they have bodies, or wish to.

None of that. They're all wrong.

That the mind and body are one has been brought home to me, forcefully, this past week, with events that serve as a reminder I'm not likely to forget any time soon.

Before I go any further, this is going to be one of those rare personal essays wherein I give more information about what's been going in my personal life than I usually reveal. The reason is, there’s a good story here, and some good lessons, that emerged out of the adventures of the past few days.

Another thing I rarely do, I also do here, that is: to write this in diary form. A lot happened in a short period of time, and even leaving out the inessentials, it’s a bold tale to tell.

•

Monday, May 24

Last night was a rough night. I think I have another ear infection. Swallowing is incredibly painful, yet I must do so regularly, because fluid is draining into my mouth from my eustachian tubes, or sinuses.

Today I went in for a doctor’s visit. The urgency was the pain swallowing, but I also wanted to talk over everything that’s been piling up these past few weeks. I have been feeling progressively more tired and sick for months now, and life had become an uphill struggle, a depressing daily grind just to survive. I felt like I was getting worse, and I wanted to talk things over. Because my mind was feeling foggy, I even wrote everything I was concerned about down, so I wouldn't forget.

The doctor visit was good, actually very reassuring. My concerns that could be addressed were addressed, or at least acknowledged. There are still some things in play. I was in misery, because the night before a growing pain when swallowing had blossomed into what the doctor discovered was a fully-blocked eustachian tube (which at first I thought was an ear infection), and swallowing that day was literally making me double over in pain; so I had eaten almost nothing. They irrigated my ear, and gave me some drops to help with the blocked tube, and by nightfall the pain had decreased enough that I could eat. (A few days and drops later, I can swallow without pain for the first time in a week.)

The clinic also drew some blood, to run some tests, and check on where my various levels were. The last time blood had been drawn, a couple of months prior, I had been slightly anemic, but otherwise my bloodwork was quite good. (My doctor has more than once told me that, despite my chronic illness, I have the bloodwork of a healthy man much younger than I am.)

Later in the day:

Feeling like crap. Hours spent at the clinic and at the pharmacy waiting to see people, and the follow-ups, and finally getting my meds. I actually was so tired at times that I managed to almost nap. I’m home again now, and I’ve actually turned on the air conditioning, to cool off the house somewhat. As much as I love this unseasonal tropical heat, I can’t handle it when I’m this weak and sick. The doctor and I went over everything I’m concerned about, all the past medications, my current foreground pains and worries. I got some clarifications and questions answered, and feel better about things.

It still hurts like hell to swallow, and I’m tired out from the pain. Now I’ve put some prescribed drops in my ear, and hope that I’ll be able to sleep without too much pain tonight. Also a migraine brought on by this long stressful day. So, pills taken, eardrops done, resting now, in the cooling air. Even with the AC I’m not going to cool it down to ridiculous levels; just below 80 is fine, down from 90-plus outside. In the evening, in the cooler air, I’ll turn off the AC and open the windows again for the fresh air.

I am so wiped out. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I’m trying to get some blood sugar in me; it’s slow going, because of the pain when swallowing.

Later, late night:

Two rounds of ear drops and the pain is thankfully greatly lessened. I’m drinking chamomile tea, and getting ready for bed. Another round of drops before bed, then hopefully I’ll sleep like a log. It was a tough day. But you know, I don’t fee depressed, and I don’t feel despairing. I’m not ready or able to jump up and down in glee, just yet, but I don’t feel like hell either. I feel pretty good, relatively speaking. I got through a very challenging, painful day.

•

Tuesday, May 25

Well, I said I was sick. . . .

And now I’m in the Beloit Hospital tonight getting two units of red blood cells.

I went in to see my doctor at the clinic yesterday, because I have continued to feel bad ever since March, and wasn't feeling like I was getting any better. Also, starting Sunday night I had a bad earache and extreme pain when swallowing; I've had ear infections before, and it fit the pattern. It turned out that it was a blocked eustachian tube; they irrigated my ear, and gave me some drops, and I felt much better by bedtime last night.

But they also drew some blood for some tests, just checking stuff. The next afternoon, today, I received a phone call from the clinic nurse, telling me to drop everything, get to the hospital Right Now, so that could give me a transfusion of two units of red blood cells. My red blood cell count was dangerously low.

This is not the sort of thing one likes hearing on the phone while waiting to check out at the grocery store. But I followed instructions, dropped everything and drove to the hospital Right Now.

Apparently my CBC (red blood cell count) was 6.4, which is half of what it's supposed to be. Apparently, my chronic illness, which involves bleeding ulcers in the colon, had depleted my blood count over the past few months to the point where I was two quarts low and needed a refill. Who knew? The leakage was gradual enough that I had adapted all along the way, and even though I felt bad, it was normalized, not a radical change. It's amazing what you can come to think of as normal, if the process is gradual enough.


(taken with my camera phone, since my camera was at home)

The hospital bureaucracy was a real mess. I was supposed to be an outpatient, but it was late in the day before I got the message, so then they wanted me to check in overnight. Which is fun when you're unemployed and have no health insurance. Well, I'll have to deal with all of that later.

My status now, some hours later, after I’d been given a bed, changed into a gown, and they started the transfusions, is that they did switch me back to outpatient status, but still I'm in a bed in a shared hospital room, receiving two units of blood. I'll be going home tonight, but it will be really late at night. I’m okay with that. I don’t want to spend the night here. A friend will take me home if necessary. It'll probably be 2am, but I'll be in my own bed for the night, and resting better.

The nurses say that I may actually be okay to drive myself home; after all, the transfusion should bring me back to a semblance of normal strength. They gave me a Benadryl, and they do monitor the start of each bag of red blood cells, to be sure there’s no allergic reaction. The nurses like me, and I like them; it comes from being a doctor’s son, I know all the gallows humor that hospital staff have to keep themselves sane. The nurse sits with me as each bag starts, to monitor. Your blood pressure goes way up for a few minutes, as the inflow raises the pressure; these are the highest BP readings I’ve ever had, 178/80, for example. Then they come back down to normal, as the flow steadies. It’s a very strange sensation, feeling, the pressure of the saline and red blood cells mixed, going into the back of your hand, where they finally placed it IV; they were better able to thread the vein there. I could feel the pressure of the fluids coming in, and I could taste salt and sweet in my mouth as they began. I sat there thinking: who owned these red blood cells originally? where are they from? And I felt deep gratitude, even as I also felt that I was being invaded by something foreign, alien, not yet mine. I guess that it takes a few days for the red blood cells to incorporate, and stop feeling alien.

My imagination veers over to an X-Files scenario, where these new cells are fizzing, full of nuclear energy, acid-green-glowing supercharged modules coming into my bloodstream, taking it over, mixing it in. I swear I can feel some aura energy left over from whoever originally owned these cells; like a lingering static charge. You lay there in bed, and takes a couple of hours per bag to get them into you; so you have lots of time for your imagination to wander.



In the morning, I'll go over to the Health Center and get another blood test, to check levels, and if they need to they'll give me another unit tomorrow.

Well, I've been bleeding from the ulcerative colitis since last October, since this current episode began, so this has snuck up on me. It sure explains why I've been feeling tired and sick these past few weeks—feeling worse and worse. I guess it crept up on me gradually enough that I didn't realize. So here I am.

I'm not asking for anything, except maybe for some good thoughts to be sent my way. I could use the spiritual support. I just wanted to let some people know what had happened. I almost don't want to tell anyone, but I don't want to do the Stoic Norwegian thing anymore. So, thanks, and help.

I'm not feeling depressed. I'm stressed but not freaked out. I like the nurses, they like me, because I can give hospital humor as good as they can—it helps having had a doctor for a dad, I've been around ER humor forever. A couple of the nurses have said I'm a real pleasant patient, I guess because while I ask questions about everything I also cooperate. Actually, I do want to get this done, and go home, and I do feel better.

It's funny—I'm not depressed, not even ia little bit. Even with this massive IV sticking into the back of my left hand. (It doesn't slow down my typing, yippee.) It helps to know that I'm supposed to get out of here tonight.

Hope your day was way more fun than mine.

•

Wednesday, May 26

They filled me up with two units of red blood cells, and let me go home, after all, at 2am. I was able to drive myself home. I actually felt really good, and newly energized. They say that's normal. It's also normal to get a "hot flash" when getting a transfusion, and I did get that.

Halfway through the second bag of red blood cells I felt my brain come back online. I felt sharper of mind than I have in months. It was like a switch was thrown, and all my mental and spiritual circuitry was re-energized, powered up again. I guess I’d been operating on a trickle of power for a long time, and hadn’t even realized it.

Today I went over to the Health Center, where they drew some more blood, just to check my CBC. I also spoke briefly with the doctor again.

I feel ridiculously energized. Almost too much. I feel giddy, and I talked too much at the Health Center, like I was wired or manic or over-caffeinated. I freely admit that it’s hard to trust this giddy manic energy. The contrast between Before and After is incredible. I haven’t felt this energized in months, probably since sometime last year. It’s a little overwhelming. Maybe this is how it feels to be manic, if you’re a manic-depressive. I feel like I can do anything, even though I’m restraining myself from doing anything too stupid. It’s not an entirely comfortable feeling, and I don’t entirely trust it.

I drove around town doing some errands after being at the Health Center, and I realized my senses were much sharper, and I was more attentive while driving. Again, the Before and After is a big contrast. My mind is so much clearer today!

I’m trying not to overdo it. I came home and rested for awhile. A little later, I want to do some weeding in the front garden; I’ve neglected it for weeks, because I just haven’t had the energy.

I wonder how long this fizzing energy buzz will last? All those little alien blood cells, fizzing through my veins, giving me the strength of ten.

•

Thursday, May 27

Another hot day. I’m feeling tired from the tropical heat. I’m sitting on the porch, a little thoughtful and quiet this morning, slowly drinking my orange juice.

It’s starting to hit home with me that I dodged a bullet. It could have been much worse than it was. I just missed an incident that could have been genuinely life-threatening. So today I’m feeling quieter, less giddy, more thoughtful.

I’m feeling tired again, but it’s “normal tired,” not “anemia tired.” The weather this week is record hot, temps in the 90s all week long, and that’s always tiring for everybody, anyway.

I think I overdid it yesterday. My back is a little sore, possibly from weeding in the garden in the late afternoon, in that burst of energy I was feeling. I probably did too much, and thus overdid it. I’ll pay for it with sore muscles for a few days—but those muscles have been idle for many weeks because I didn’t have any energy at all, and was exhausted all the time. Now, today, I don’t mind a little soreness, because it’s a signpost on the road back to something like normality.

Still, I have to stop and think about things today. I still feel more energized, and stronger, than I have in weeks or months. I’m just feeling a little more mortal, as well.

•

Friday, May 28

Writing a letter this morning to my family and friends, about all this, a summary, an update, a warning to myself of my own mortality:

Don't ever let anyone convince you there's no connection between mind and body. The next day after the blood transfusions, when I woke up, I was really energized, fizzing with alien bloodcells (sounds like an X-File, I know), and charged. I got myself over to the Health Center for another blood count, and a brief talk with my doctor; they were going to run the test, then let me know if I needed another unit of blood. I haven't heard anything yet, so I'm guessing my blood count is okay, at least for now. Anyway, I had such renewed energy yesterday that I was practically giddy at times. This anemia had probably come on so gradually that I didn't realize, it had started to seem normal, and the contrast between Before and After Hemoglobin has been intense, even shocking. Like I said, fizzing, and giddy. I got a lot done yesterday.

I'm also wondering how much of the feeling sick and tired and crappy over the past couple of months was really all about being anemic. I suspect more than I realized. I'm going to pay close attention over the next few days, and see what feels different.

Today I mostly rested. I woke up feeling tired—but normal tired, like you might feel after tiring yourself out the day before from having worked to satisfaction, not like super-low-energy-illness tired. I may have overdone the physical exertion yesterday. I did a little weeding in the garden, and grocery shopping. I may have overdone it, because my lower back and my bad knee hurt today. I'm going to have to watch that, and not overdo it anymore. This is going to take getting used to.

The next thing to deal with is plugging the leak, as it were. I'm seeing the GI doctor in a few weeks, and then my regular doctor again. (Medical bills are going to start piling up for me, which has me a little worried, but so far not totally freaked out or panicky. And I don't feel depressed, either.) This might take time to work out. I've got the forms to apply to the Hospital for financial assistance, and I'll get them figured out over the next few days, with help; those kind of forms are challenging for me, at the best of times.

Also, my mind feels much sharper than it has in a very long time. I realized yesterday that I had sort of come back "online" mentally, and all my senses were super-sharp again, like when driving. The transfusion has really made a difference. Now I just need to go on from here.

Anyway, that's the news. I just wanted to follow through with an update. I feel much better now! I think I’ll go for a walk!

•

Saturday, May 29

The Memorial Day weekend. I plan to avoid the crowds. I went over to the Veteran’s cemetery, though, where they always have a beautiful flag display this time of year, and made some photos. I also finally located the gravesite of a couple who had been family friends, in my Dad’s last years, and who had themselves since passed over, from age and illness. It was a quiet hour communing with the beloved dead.

I’ve been sleeping well. So well, in fact, that I wonder if all that insomnia I’d been having for months was related to the anemia. Other things are also not bothering me like they did.

I’m not well yet, though. I still have bleedings. It seems wasteful to be given two bags of blood, then continue to bleed it out again. But that’s my chronic illness, for now, still active, not fixed. I see the doctors again, soon, and my goal now is to stop the leak, and get well. All my focus is on that, for now. It’s more than enough to cope with.

In the meantime, I have all this renewed energy. So I am working on art projects and self-marketing projects (such as material for selling my photography services for weddings, etc.), while I have the clarity of mind and focused strength to do it. I’ve made great progress, this past week, on choosing photos for a possible future expedition, and getting them printed. I feel alive, again, even if there is still a shadow on the horizon.

So I’m working as much as I can on those projects that will hopefully help me move on with my life, once I’m well. You can’t wait to do this stuff till alter; you have to do it now, even as you might have to spend more time in hospital. If you wait to do it till you feel all better, or until you’re cured, you’ll never start, and you’ll never get it done. No waiting. Just get on with it. And, to be honest, it keeps my mind focused on mostly positive things, and keeps me from worrying too much.

Honestly, I still don’t feel anything like depression or despair; some worries on the horizon, some anxieties, some late-night phone calls to friends asking for moral support. But nothing like before. Nothing like the void, the abyss, the dark night. There have been lessons emerging as fast as arrows shooting by, if I can but catch them out of the air. Some of the lessons are very grounded and simple: Don’t worry tonight about what you can’t do anything about till tomorrow, anyway. Just let it go, and pick it up again when it’s time. Meantime, make of the day what it can be.

Words & Wizardry

The past few weeks, late at night, if I've been feeling sleepless, rather than poison my dreams with inane bursts of noise from the television, I've taken to curling up on the blue couch under a single reading lamp, and delving back into beloved works of high fantasy literature. Sometimes I've had the row of lava lamps turned on across the room; one lamp in particular casts light onto the blank white wall above it as though it were the sky filled with the aurora borealis. Or perhaps the gaseous shifting fringes of the sentient planet Solaris, from Stanislaw Lem's SF novel of that name. You take your solace where you can find it.

I've been re-reading, mostly by dipping in and out, and re-reading favorite scenes, sections, and segments of each book, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in a handy if huge single-volume paperback edition; Patricia McKillip's trilogy of The Riddle-Master (in a similar single-volume paperback), and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series, all six books.

Of the latter series, I have the original trilogy in a boxed set, with unified illustrations in every volume; I have the more recent books in their hardcover first editions, glittering with light and air and the coppery fire of the breath and scales of dragons. Dragons everywhere, changing back and forth in shape between human and dragon, never quite knowing which you'll meet today, always wild, fierce, and loving.

So my head is full these days of words and wizardry.

One of the tenets that all wizardry, and riddlery, appears to share is that, to name something truly is to know it, and to have power over it. To love something is to know its true name, yet let it be free and not seek to control it. Over and over again the lesson rings through that to try to control something utterly is to destroy it. Even the attempt to master death, to be immortal, causes more grief than solace. It's unnatural in the original sense of the word: to be natural in this creation is to be mortal. Even stars eventually die; some quietly, some violently and with spectacle.

But death isn't the end. R. Buckminster Fuller once said, to give solace to a friend whose beloved near-son had just died tragically, There is no death. There is only a change of state. It's a chemical, or alchemical, sort of comment to make, and it does bring comfort. It's the sort of wisdom a wizard might give at such a moment. I'm not the first to think of Bucky Fuller as a sort of modern wizard.

So death isn't the end. The story goes on, and stories do. We can make stories even for things we don't know about, which are important but which we can't understand. Some of these stories we call myth, which mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell once defined as The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Other such stories we call fiction, especially that sub-category of fiction with fantasy, or magical realism, or science fiction, or make-believe.

These stories are lies that tell more truth than so-called truthful stories. (Let's be blunt: there's no such thing as genre fiction, because in fact even non-genre fiction, so-called mainstream literary fiction, is just another kind of genre; so it's all one or it's nothing.) In each of them truth is revealed through narrative and dialogue, which are orderly lies we use to shape time into thought, to give comprehensible structure to an otherwise lumpy flow of chaotic memory.

Yet within the tenets of wizardry, words matter a great deal. Wizards are identified, in one sense, by the care and precision they take with how they use words. There is no casual or ordinary speech. That's a truth about life that we could all learn to live by, even as the lesson arises from fiction. Some days it's hard to separate what happens in fictional worlds from the so-called real world: which is, after all, a lie bound up in Indra's Net, what the Buddhists call maya, illusion. Ask a quantum physicist how real you are: you might discover you're not really here. Are the tenets of riddlery, or wizardry, then, so foreign, so fictional, after all? Perhaps they're more real than we think. Since, after all, words do have power to change the world; if not by magic, then by persuasion, by the magic of charisma and being in the right place at the right time, holding a long lever made out of great words that express great thoughts. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the steps of a monumental edifice in our nation's capitol, and said, I have a dream! And the world changed. If the world is but a dream, maya, then we dream a world into being each time we think we wake to start our day in the real world, awakening from the world of dreams. Chuang Tze woke one day and said, I had a marvelous dream! In my dream, I was a butterfly flitting from place to place. Am I am man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming he is a man> Such are the tenets of riddlery: Answer the unanswered question, and the unanswerable questions. Who was Chuang Tze, and was he a butterfly indeed?

In no way is wizardry—or poetry, for that matter, that other art of words—about having all the answers. But it is very much about asking the right questions.

There are cardinals nesting in the thick pines beyond my window. Robins everywhere, more than you see in most years, building nests in the budding trees, scratching like chickens for seeds in the grass. Spring brings back to life what once had died.

Sudden

I heard today that a good friend of mine died unexpectedly yesterday. He collapsed suddenly and couldn't be revived. He was a math professor at Marquette U. in Milwaukee, but our circle all knew him as the Friday night jazz DJ on the community radio station, WORT-FM in Madison, WI, and as a great improvising bassist, and all-around good person.

And I knew him as a good friend and a great person. We were in a couple of bands, mostly in The Barbaric Yawps. We played a few other gigs together, in other bands, as hired guns. We meshed well as a bass-and-Stick rhythm section.

"Uncle" Larry Hancock was a great bass player, but he also had a real gift was making everybody laugh, sometimes really hard, during band practice and gigs. I loved trading solos with him. I'd take over the bass line in a piece while he soloed, then he'd drop back into the groove while I took my solos. I played Stick, he played fretless bass guitar. He could also play clarinet, while I played percussion. I suck at clarinet, bad. Unk had a really sly sense of humor, very sideways. The tone of his humor could be very cynical and pointed; but at the same time he was raising two adopted children, and doing other quiet acts of service to the human community. It was all nicely balanced. Sometimes Unk and I would get to trading puns during a break in rehearsal, making everyone else groan mightily. Trading solos got to be almost telepathic at times; he was a good listener, which all great musicians are.

For my own Sunday night radio show on WORT, Unk lent me some albums a couple of times from his huge library of vinyl. Some really bizarre stuff that he'd collected. My show was one of the Sunday night experimental music shows, one segment of my show was called The Difficult Listening Hour, and it was well-named. All of us Sunday night DJs played avant-garde and experimental music. One set of LPs Unk loaned me was a set of recordings of various kinds of calliopes, and home-made instruments like the car-horn organ, a home-made instrument consisting of 25 car horns played by a homemade keyboard, all built by Wendy Mae Chambers.

I was on the air for over 7 years. I programmed mostly experimental music, avant-garde jazz, and so forth. But I also did a lot of live radio-performance pieces. One annual show I did was a live performance of John Cage music on the evening closest to his birthday. It was a piece using Cage's methods applied to recordings of his own music, that I titled Collections and Re-Collections Re: and Not-Re: John Cage. It was usually a big audience hit. Once I played the Six Gallery recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his poem Howl while in the production room at the radio station I set up my Stick with my bass amp and speaker cabinet so that it continuously howled with feedback; which I mixed in behind Ginsberg's voice, reading.

Unk was on the radio much, much longer. His show was called Crazeology, and the thing he did was play jazz that had been recorded on today's date. So, if it was Friday, April 24th, all the music he played from 11pm till 5am was recorded on April 24th of various years. His knowledge of jazz was encyclopedic, but he always had a light touch on-air and in life. A very good soul, who never got too heavy. Something of an enlightened being, if I dare say.

I remember a few gigs we played in particular, in jazz clubs around Madison, and once or twice for the Madison Art Fair On The Square in summer. We also did a gig with the Yawps on the Madison community cable access channel, Channel 4. We had a lot of fun together. Lots of good memories. It's funny, I was just thinking about him earlier this week, thinking about calling up and saying hi.

I'm going to miss him a lot.

I'm starting to feel like this place I live now, this small town back in Wisconsin, is a place where I've come to watch everybody I know die. I feel like they're all going to go away, one by one, a few each year, till none are left, and I'm alone here. Maybe at that time, I'll move again. Or become truly nomadic, sell my house, and live out of a camper van. After a certain point in your life, the dominant themes being to change: one of the big narratives becomes death, when it used to be eternity each morning.

So be gentle with yourselves, and with each other. Anything can happen to anybody at anytime. The world has seemed to me a very fragile place, lately. Tonight even more so. Be good to each other. You never know what your last words to those you care about are going to be, or when. Make them good words.

•

Update:

I spent a couple of sleepless hours last night going through my archive CDs of the Yawps recordings we had made in the studio in 1997 and 1998. There may be some rehearsal tapes, in a box somewhere, that I might find another day. WORT-FM asked me to send them the Yawps music that I had, for part of their on-air memorial for Unk. I think I may have donated copies of our "official" Yawps CDs, From the Rooftops and Spiritcatcher, to the station's library years ago, but they may be missing; it doesn't matter.

Listening to that music again put me a really good mood. I remember how much fun it was to play it. There are other tunes I wish we'd recorded, I liked them so much; but I don't think we did. Much of the Yawps music was influenced by African or South American music, or other music from other cultures. Tom Lachmund would write out parts, fairly detailed, sometimes quite complex; but the mood was always raw, sometimes a little tribal, with a lot of energy and force behind it. The written music was really structured jumping-off points for a lot of free playing; at some point there was usually a groove section over which we would solo, sometimes appearing as a gap; for other pieces, we'd solo over the complex polyrhythmic structures. In jazz, you play the tune, called the head, then everybody takes solos over the repeating chord-pattern of the tune, called the changes. With Yawps pieces, we played the head, but it was not a traditional head, then soloed, then played the head again. Some few pieces were fully notated, with a section for this person to solo while the others played something notated; then there'd be another section for another soloist, with completely different supporting material. So it was both open and structures music. It certainly kept us on our toes as players. The group's strengths were thus both in complex notated music and in free blowing. It was a band that combined both, never letting go of a slight wildness; we rehearsed weekly, but even so we managed to preserve a rawness in performance—another kind of mix of structure and wildness. I listened through the recordings last night, including three tracks I'd forgotten that we'd recorded and mixed, but hadn't released on our "official" CDs, and the memories made me smile. A lot of great music in there.

For my own selfish part, I think that's what I'm going to miss most: playing music that was this much fun to play, with musicians that were this much fun to play with. It was a good period of my life, and I'm glad there's some record of it preserved in recordings.