STATISTICAL STASIS

Well, it’s come to this:

flip a coin when stasis sets in.

John the Ambiguous was always 

a great one for a coin toss to decide fate

like to have a kid, break up, or to get married.

So whatever flummoxed him was always reduced to

a 50/50 chance, & the odds were always in his favor

because that way he didn't actually have to choose.

A good thing coins aren’t like dice cubes.

It would have increased the odds.

We were a gamble anyway.

9/29/04

rev 1/2/14

WITH THE PROGRAM

He’s been around so long 

he’s bypassed his own due date. 

He returns to his natal grounds, 

naming schools and streets. 

This hindsight into the past. 

We visit Frick junior high, 

were the dead across the street 

sometimes wander over 

from the cemetery to write 

a little poetry with us.

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

Permaculture, freewrite

That which shifts down into the substrate, is permaculture, soil, rocks and bones… What we’re not aware of is what defines us, it is our secret garden. What we do without knowing why we do or say it. Our secret harvest, what we take for granted. Sometimes permaculture gets separated from the source and we’re left wondering why this or that action was required, and for a moment we’re left outside our skins, as if having gotten up, dressed all wrong. Who remembers that first day of school. A reoccurring dream: I took off my red princess coat only to discover I was dressed in my underwear. I forgot to put on my outer clothing. The shame and humiliation was too much for a first grader to bear, defrocked and dethroned all at once. I was too young to know about, Freud or symbolism or dreams. But that was permaculture. Something in the frozen tundra of self, thawing, leaving us vulnerable and lost. But wait as I bend down to touch the lichen, a miniature garden with willows no higher than my thumb, tiny lingonberries and bogberries ripening under the summer sun, small, red eyes, sweet and tart on the tongue. Substrate permeating up into awareness, into loam. 

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

The lake so smooth, not a report on the water, freewrite

Mornings were best, the drive to Sonoma State on backroads, I cherished beauty, the way the fog wrapped itself around the hills, like a bride‘s négligée with emu, feathers. And they would hug the hills, cling to them, so that the lake, so smooth, not a ripple on the water, was like glass. And the world was one vast mirror of hill, fog and sky.

It took me years to grasp what beauty was, having grown up inside of beauty, I had no eyes to see. I had to go away way in order to return. Prodigal beauty was a jail sentence. Me, peeking out from inside the word, holding the iron bars, wondering what all the fuss was about. 

But this lake, though man-made, reflects the fog and sky—beauty’s cnstant mirror, and I was a dust mote rising only to fall into that surface were sky in fog and water one thing—primordial—existing without my presence or witness. But beauty came dressed in fog to shroud the hills and the lake stood its ground, an eye of the sky watching me. 

A fish rises and mouths a speck, concentric ripples, spreading out, catching me and its stare. First day of fall.

9/24/2004 writers group. 

Letter to President Bush on Public Schools

In the National Mobilization for Great Public Schools petition box provided for personal comment I wrote:

Dear President Bush,

Having worked in nearly 100 California schools since 1979, I can emphatically state that the public schools have NEVER been in such dire straits as they are now, thanks to increased federal and state legislation that has negatively impacted our schools—coupled with a growing lack of state and federal funding. A deadly coctail for education. As a result, schools are seriously overcrowded. New legislation, including the futile "Leave no Child Left Behind" campaign, has left schools so crippled, that we've lost sight of what a school does: to educate children.

Public education is no longer about educating students but it's about crowd control, and it's about teachers jumping through meaningless administrative hoops in order to meet legislative mandates. A teacher's politically mandated curriculum teaching hours leaves little or no troom for actual meaningful teaching.

In addition, to become a credentialed teacher is now an expensive, time-consuming, meaninless pursuit, harbinger of things to come, namely, dealing with bloated school beaurocracy. Compound that with overcrowded classrooms, lack of funds for basic classroom needs, and poor salaries, no wonder new teachers are leaving the profession at alarming rates.

Thanks to government lip service, our children are becoming increasingly illiterate with little or no critical thinking skills, let alone, basic job skills—and they are America's future! Public education needs massive state and federal funding incentives ASAP to save the current generation from being left behind, because, Mr. Bush—and you are not  MY president: My president would give more than lip service to education, he would nake it a top priority.

Your lack of foresight and negative legislative actions have all but crippled what once was the best education system in the world. Sadly, these children are the victims you have left behind with your policies and they will be our future citizens of tomorrow. Alas, they will inherit this future.

Lesson Learned: Vote

If there was a lesson to be learned, the presidential election of 2000 taught us that every single vote literally counts. Some cast votes were counted incorrectly and some chads were pregnant, spawning an election where, several days after the polls closed, we still didn’t know who our president was. It proved to be a bad omen, and here we are, four years later, convincing friends to vote in 2004.

There’s a saying, Friends don’t let friends vote Republican. Here, in the Bay Area where, where the majority of voters are liberal, we’re preaching to the converted. But what about preaching furhter afield, what about family? What do you do then?

Like a dark secret, lately many of my liberal friends are confessing that their families are staunch Republicans. I have never before admitted in public that my enormous ecelctic, whacky family too is Republican to the bone. As in Orange County Republican. We have more than our fair share of laywers, judges, policement and doctors. 

At family gatherings, politics are always a hot subject. One of my earliest memories is of my grand uncles and aunts pounding the table, whiskey jars jumping in unison like amber soldiers. But you can’t divorce an entire family. I tried that for a few decades but it only isolated me from my roots. I mourn those lost years of self imposed exile when many of my relatives died.

There’s a popular anti-Republican joke set in the Midwest, where a Republican teacher asks a class to raise their hands if they’re Republican. The whole class raises their hands except a lone student, Mary, dissents. She claims that she’s a Democrat by virtue of the fact that both her parents are Democrats.

You wouldn’t find me raising my hand in that classroom either though I’m from a family where both my parents are Republicans. And their parents were Republicans. And that’s about as far back as it goes. Most of us are newly arrived to this continent.

And when I don’t know which way to go, I flip a coin, freewrite (photo)

Yes, it’s come to this, flip a coin when stasis sets in. John the Ambiguous was always a great one for a coin toss. Have a kid, get married, whatever impasse flummoxed him was reduced to a 50-50 chance. 

A good thing that coins aren’t built like dice to increase the odds. Otherwise, we’d be all day setting up the parameters and permutations for radical changes in life. Or not. So once we were at Casa Bombeck in Chiapas, he flipped a coin either we go to the Lacondon, jungle, or, the Mayen village of Chamula. We chose our coins carefully. The Quetzalcoatl head came up on the antique five peso coin. Feathered serpent grinning at our feet. 

And so we rode green horses into the jungle, to the village in deep in the San Cristobál Mountains where gringos were still an anomaly. When I showed him the coin, the old man at the Mayan church took a shine to me, it must’ve been the aguardiente he was sipping—for strictly religious purposes. 

He gave us a personal tour of the church, which was once Catholic and the floor was strewn with pine needles. Their sweet smell unreproducible with chemical scent, the rafters draped with bolts of calico cloth, and all around the walls was an army of obscure saints all wearing smoking mirrors on their chest so that a worshiper saw themselves in the saint’s image. Self affirming. I recognized a few of the saints, but saw my face blazing on the pectoral mirror of each one.

The old man set up a small portable altar on a shoe shine box with Coca-Cola, copal and aguardiente. I put the Quetzalcoatl coin on the altar and he was pleased. We had somehow broken through the culture and language barrier. By that action, none of us having any language in common, other than the language of the oppression between us. All of this came down to a toss of the coin. The ringing sound of destiny on the floor. We never know what the wish was, or what it offered up.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Up with the chickens, freewrite

Rising with the chickens is not exactly my cup of tea, nor is it within my parameters unless the night is long, and the craic is good and and the idea of bed is but a distant thought. Of course, when the moon is full, it tends to confuse the chickens who will cluck all night long, and lay eggs under the moonlight. The roosters are plum-tuckered out by daybreak, having nailed everything in sight for the past 24 hours. They stand on the fence and beat their wings, but can only manager rough croak, more like a toad than a fowl.

I met a Scottish dancer at the Clan Gun banquet who is studying avian science, nothing exotic like herons or snow snow egrets, but poultry science. She said she loves chickens. I like them fried and baked, barbecued, fricasseed, but not live beneath my window at night during a full moon. They nice enough to look at nestled in the trees weather in Key West where there’s a wild wayward chicken for every resident, or the wild jungle fowl that roam the streets on the backside of Kauai’i. With their brilliant feathers  they’re like exotic ornaments. I’m reminded that chickens came from China, so it is said, but it must’ve been a long time ago by way of the silk road because they’re central to so many cultures whether Roman, Celtic, or Mayan.

Once I had to take care of the neighbor’s chickens, we began with 40 chickens. but as the days passed, the flock grew smaller and smaller. The sly fox in the henhouse, such a cliché. It could’ve been a raccoon, I suppose. One moonlit night he polished off half the flock. The neighbors were distressed, having named all 40 of them. And when they returned home, they were only nine chickens left out of 40.

We always wanted to hypnotize the chickens, draw a circle and put their beak in the center, or flip them upside down and stroke their bellies—but catching them was the biggest challenge. We weren’t up to when they were all nearly as big as we were, and were not above chasing us or the dogs. Come daylight, they were fierce as tigers, but in the darkness they were sitting ducks.

Me, I liked slipping my hand beneath their feathers, to feel that promise and weight of eggs, warm to the touch, some eggs were the color of moonlight and others, the color of the sky, and some were speckled as if strewn with shade but the egg timer went off and that’s the end of this freewrite.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group