March 18, 2025: “Indictment of Senior Officers,” Boring, "Nothing Happened Today"

There are some days where I struggle to find anything to write about in my blog posts.  I literally sit and stare at my blank laptop screen, trying to conjure up any kind of interesting idea or anecdote.  I don’t always succeed

Hence, I sometimes don’t post for a few days and search for anything of note to discuss.  Recently, it’s been Agent Orange and his band of Merry Pranksters who’ve distracted me.  It always seems like people in power (however stupid or morally bankrupt those people are) inflict abuse on the less fortunate.

Sharon Olds writes about the abuse of power . . . 

Indictment of Senior Officers

by: Sharon Olds

In the hallway above the pit of the stairwell
my sister and I would meet at night,
eyes and hair dark, bodies
like twins in the dark. We did not talk of
the two who had brought us there, like generals,
for their own reasons. We sat, buddies in cold
war, her living body the proof of
my living body, our backs to the mild
shell hole of the stairs, down which
we would have to go, knowing nothing
but what we had learned there,

                                                    so that now
when I think of my sister, the holes of the needles
in her hips and in the creases of her elbows,
and the marks from the doctor husband’s beatings,
and the scars of the operations, I feel the
rage of a soldier standing over the body of
someone sent to the front lines
without training
or a weapon.

It's a pretty dark poem, written by Olds right as the United States was recovering from Watergate and the Vietnam War.  The President of the United States had been forced to resign, and the AIDS epidemic was in the wings, waiting to show its fatal face.

I don't remember much of those days.  I was fairly young and too wrapped up with my own dramas.  Puberty does that to you.  My memories are simply flashes, like a slide show running so fast the images all blur together.  I survived the Reagan years.  The first presidential candidate I voted for was Michael Dukakis.  My first kiss was so unremarkable that I've forgotten the name of the owner of the lips.  

You see what I mean.  Memory is a slippery thing, always swimming downstream on the way to an ocean or sea.  So I'm not sure how accurate my childhood recollections are.  I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night, let alone the name of my kindergarten teacher or first grade crush.

I do remember the guy who used to beat me up on a frequent basis in second grade.  (I eventually beat the shit out of him, and he left me alone after that.)  And I remember my second grade teacher who took pleasure in humiliating me in front of my classmates.  I could tell you about the person who used to take pleasure in holding me underwater in freshman swim class, and I know the days my brother and two sisters died.

I guess trauma and cruelty stick with me more than simple, daily pleasures.  I think that's what Olds' poem is getting at.  Pain (physical, emotional, and spiritual) leaves scars that don't heal.  Maybe that's why a boring day, like today, when nothing too damaging occurred to me (on a personal level--I'm not talking the horror show in Washington, D. C.), doesn't really take up too much space in my brain.  

I guess you could call my current state being and nothingness.  (Look it up.  It's an allusion.)

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about absolutely nothing, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet . . . 

In a memorable Seinfeld episode, it’s proclaimed that Seinfeld is “a show about nothing.”. Of course, everything is about something, so for this expertise, write a poem about nothing—a poem where nothing fantastic happens.  Make sure to focus on the particulars of this regular day where nothing out of the usual happens.  Focusing on the specific details will help to ensure that your poem connects with its audience.

Nothing Happened Today

by:  Martin Achatz

I ate two hardboiled eggs and kumquats

for breakfast  The kumquats made my ears

ring and jaw ache from the sour.  I answered

an email from one of my students whose car

ran out of gas on the way to school for the third

time this semester, plus he's had two bouts

of food poisoning.  Salad for lunch--spinach, 

flax seeds, boiled chicken, shredded cheddar.

Watched the sky change from blue to gray

to black to gray, as if it couldn't make up

its mind.  A writer friend stopped by 

my office to give me a copy of her new

book--poems about growing up during

Adolf Hitler's rise to power.  She weeps

every night watching the news now.

I read a Mary Oliver poem, and a Sharon

Olds and a Joy Harjo because they were

beautiful.  Ate Chinese, drank beer for 

dinner with some old friends, decided

not to have a second beer since

I had to drive home and it was getting

dark.  Took my Australian shepherd

for a walk, let her bark at passing

cars and a squirrel tightroping

across a power line.  Changed into

my pajamas, sat down with my journal,

took out my fountain pen, write at the top

of a blank page "Nothing Happened Today."

July 6: ""House," History, Great Experiment

Billy Collins thinks about this old house . . . 

House

by: Billy Collins

I lie in a bedroom of a house

that was built in 1862, we were told--

the two windows still facing east

into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,

and I think of those who have slept here before,

the family we bought the house from--

the five Critchlows--

and the engineer they told us about

who lived here alone before them,

the one who built onto the back

of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house

in black and white, a few small trees,

and a curved dirt driveway,

but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War

and to the farmer who built the house

and the rough stone walls

that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

while the war raged to the south,

with the strength of a dairyman

or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth

so as to give his wife much pleasure

and to call down a son to earth

to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength

after all the days and nights of toil and prayer--

the sun breaking over the same horizon

into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie

having nothing to farm, and no son,

the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

feeling better and worse by turns.

We celebrated Independence Day in my hometown today.  Parade this morning.  Community picnic and fireworks tonight.  I've been going to these events since I was a teenager.  (Translation:  a very, very long time.)  So I spent a good deal of time during the past 14 or 15 hours thinking about time and history.

I love the small town-ness of these celebrations, where you run into people you haven't seen in years, coupled with current friends and acquaintances.  Everyone know everyone else, or at least to whom you're related.

When my dad was alive, he marched with members of the local Elks club every year.  When my daughter was younger, she was on a float with the cheer team from her high school.  I, myself, have paraded many times for theater productions I've directed.  I've walked with roller-skating nuns, farm animals from Charlotte's Web, and an army of Oompa Loompas.  

And the community picnic, with its kettle corn and elephant ears and deep-fried everything, always fills me with nostalgia.  People like to think the times of their youths were simpler, easier.  That everyone got along, and nothing terrible ever happened.  A Lake Wobegon time

Of course, that's a load of crap.  We have institutional racism and political divisions and poverty today.  When I was a kid, I had Ronald Reagan's war on social welfare programs, the AIDS epidemic, and institutional racism (some things never change).  That's my history.  Our histories.  Full of struggle and homophobia and economic disparity.

So, when the fireworks started coloring the heavens tonight, I thought about all these things that fill me with shame for who we are right now.  However, the exploding mushrooms and cascading sparks also reminded me that the United States of America has been a great experiment since the time we defeated the Redcoats.  A grand, messy exercise in freedom.

Saint Marty just hopes we can defeat the red hats this November.