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

May 26: Another Book Club, Tired, Crescent Weenies

I have been pretty tired all day.  I woke up tired and took a two liter of Diet Mountain Dew into the shower with me this morning.  Between washing and shaving, I slugged back Dew and tried to wake myself up.  Thank God it was a little slower at work.  I didn't have to act friendly very much.

Tonight, my book club is coming over for our monthly meeting.  Spent last night, between snatches of the mediocre American Idol finale, making crescent weenies for the get together.  I've already written about the book, Annie's Ghosts, a couple of posts ago.  I'm almost done with it, and I'm still finding it difficult to read.  Maybe the subject is a little too close to home.  I have a wife with mental illness and a sister with Down's syndrome, so a true story about a person who's institutionalized and literally forgotten isn't sitting too well with me at the moment.  I'm interested to see how my wife, sister, and mother are going to respond. 

Oh, by the way, the total for the car repairs yesterday fell somewhere between Ouch! and Boing!  And I'm not done yet.  It still needs a little more work, which sucks.  However, the rattle has disappeared, and the gate latch will function properly in about a week.  The mechanic keeps mentioning the future need for work on the head gaskets.  Not yet.  In the future.  It's like waiting for a hidden landmine to explode.

I know I promised a new poem today.  Didn't happen.  I was too busy reading Annie's Ghosts.  You will get a poem tomorrow, I promise.  I know this post isn't very inspiring or creative.  My apologies.  I'm too tired to be very funny, thoughtful, deep, or artistic.

Saint Marty settles for mediocre today.

Embrace it!

May 23: Hoping for Something Better, New Poem, Annie's Ghosts

My two "something betters"

I'm reading a book right now called Annie's Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg.  It's a true story about a man who discovers, after his mother dies, that she had a sister he never knew about.  The sister suffered from a mental illness and was institutionalized at 21 years of age.  Luxenberg's mother basically lied for the majority of her life, telling everyone she was an only child.  The narrative that unfolds is heartbreaking, full of family secrets and disappointments and abandonment.  Having a wife with mental illness, I've had a hard time reading it.

In the past, I've blogged about the fact that I fear my son or daughter will develop mental illness.  Mental illness runs on both sides of our families, so the deck is stacked against them.  I watch my children for evidence of mental problems, even though they're very young.  My daughter is ten, and my son is two.  My daughter tends to be very mercurial in her mood swings and has been for a while.  I'm not sure if this temperament is normal or the tip of a much larger iceberg of emotional/mental difficulty.  My son has no patience with anything.  I may be overreacting.  I probably am.  They may just be normal kids, but that doesn't assuage my worries.

I can't imagine making the choice that Steve Luxenberg's grandparents made.  They left their daughter is a mental hospital for the rest of her life.  Annie, the mentally ill daughter, spent close to 40 years in institutions before she died.  It goes against every parental instinct I have.  I have a friend whose daughter suffers from schizophrenia, and my friend goes between being exhausted, frustrated, pissed, and exhausted again.  But my friend has never walked away from her daughter and pretended like she didn't exist.  As a parent, I want my children's lives to be better than my life.  I want them to be happier, more successful, more content.  I don't want them to struggle the way I have, especially with mental illness.

However, I know that I have little power over mental illness.  In fact, I have little power over whether my children will be happier than I have been.  I can give them cell phones, ballet lessons, and laptops.  I can go to dance recitals and art shows and track meets.  In life, however, there are no guarantees.  I find myself constantly looking into the distant future, trying to see if there are thunderclouds on the horizon.  It's a pointless exercise.  The most I can do is live the best I can, every day.  If problems arise, I deal with them.  If the day goes well, I give thanks.  That's the definition of sanity.  Maybe that's the only "something better" I can give my children.

My new poem deals with this topic, the hope all parents have for their children.

Saint Marty hopes for something better for you today.

Something Better

I want something better for my kids,

The way all parents want their offspring

To attend college, law or medical
School.  Do something extraordinary.
We scrub toilets, paint walls, deep-fry potatoes

For thirty or forty years, put everything

On hold until we're sure our daughters

Can study veterinary medicine, our sons

Learn to x-ray broken vertebrae, tibias,

Clavicles.  My uncle drove to the GM plant

For over thirty-five years before he received

His pension, then began to paint oil landscapes

Of places he’d dreamed about in rush hour

Traffic on I-75, places full of waves,

Evergreens the color of Chinese jade,
Places he knew he'd never see,
All so his daughter could study,
Become an engineer at Ford.

I don’t want my children to teach
College English part-time, work
Eleven-hour days in an office,

Scribble poems on napkins, lunch bags,

Margins of graded essays, dreaming

Always of a time when those words,

Cut and polished and set in lines of gold,

Will buy vacations to Stockholm or Rome,

Ballet lessons and birthday parties

In hot air balloons.  I want my kids

To know a life better than mine,

Even if it means I eat bologna

With cheese every day, pretending

My cut of lunchmeat is somehow

Superior to the one my father ate

At work for over fifty years.