August 31: Busy Work, Classic Saint Marty, New Cartoon

Well, I spent most of the day doing busy work.  Correcting quizzes.  Setting up my grade book for the semester.  Creating attendance sheets.  At least three hours of pencils, pens, red ink, black ink, and computer files.  But, I am done now.  I don't have to think about school again for a couple of days.

Tonight, I'm going to hunt around in my attic for some white Christmas lights; my niece needs them as decorations for her wedding reception.  After that, I plan to watch a Charlie Chaplin movie with my wife.  Then I'm going to read my book, which I'm thoroughly enjoying.  I'll talk more about it when I've finished it. 

Tomorrow, I don't plan to do anything productive.  I'm going to sleep as long as my body will allow.  I'll blog.  I'll read.  Maybe I'll go for a walk, if it isn't raining.  In the evening, my family is having a barbecue.  The last of the summer.  I will do no labor on Labor Day.

Today's Classic Saint Marty first aired three years ago.  I was obviously not in a good state of mind.  So, things haven't changed all that much.

August 31, 2011:  Not Any Better, Skeletons, New Poem

My mood hasn't improved greatly since this morning.  I did succeed in registering patients and teaching a class without telling a single person to suck my ass, which was an accomplishment.  Now, I'm dealing with Blogger's new browser, which I'm not really liking very much at the moment, and I'm thinking about skeletons that people keep in their closets, secrets they don't want anyone to know.  This line of thinking is inspired by a book I'm teaching right now, Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg.  It's all about family secrets.  Today's poem is a result of that and my current bad state of thought.

Saint Marty will try to snap out of it by tomorrow morning.  (If you enter his new contest, it may help him feel better.)

Skeletons

I've surfed porn sites for hours, viewed men and women, women and women, men and men doing things to each other I never dreamed of as a teenager, things that made my middle-aged face fill with blood, hot, fevered.  I've doubted God, questioned whether anything divine would make Hurricane Katrina, fill a city with water, then sit back, watch the dead pile up like swamp mud along a levy.  I love eggs scrambled with hot dogs, served sloppy, the way my grandpa ate steak on the farm, just cooked, raw in the center, dripping and red as a butcher's block.  I've hated my wife when she took knives and carved her arms, when she became addicted to strangers, when she followed her messed-up brain down the rabbit hole, away from me.  All these bones hang in my closet, rattle against each other, make ancient music, the kind that drove David to Bathsheba or Cain to Abel.  I've locked the closet door now, hidden the key.  Tomorrow, I'll buy lumber, build a wall, so when they pile dirt on top of me at the end of my life, my daughter or son won't hear this poem whisper skulls and femurs, tibias and clavicles in the dark.

Confessions of Saint Marty