May 20: Needless Temptations, Bad Bigfoot Movie, Howard Beale

Santiago and temptation . . . 

"It is strange," the old man said. "He never went turtle-ing. That is what kills the eyes."

"But you went turtle-ing for years off the Mosquito Coast and your eyes are good."

"I am a strange old man."

"But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?"

"I think so. And there are many tricks."

"Let us take the stuff home," the boy said. "So I can get the cast net and go after the sardines."

They picked up the gear from the boat. The old man carried the mast on his shoulder and the boy carried the wooden box with the coiled, hard-braided brown lines, the gaff and the harpoon with its shaft. The box with the baits was under the stern of the skiff along with the club that was used to subdue the big fish when they were brought alongside. No one would steal from the old man but it was better to take the sail and the heavy lines home as the dew was bad for them and, though he was quite sure no local people would steal from him, the old man thought that a gaff and a harpoon were needless temptations to leave in a boat.

Temptations are a strange thing.  They're always present.  Perhaps, if there's some cold pizza in the fridge, you are tempted to get up in the middle of the night to have a slice.  Or if someone's gossiping, you may feel the impulse to stop and listen and participate.  Temptations can be small (a frozen Hershey bar in the freezer) or huge (Internet porn).

It was day three being at home with my son.  He's in a better place than he was on Tuesday, when I was ready to hide the knives and medications in the house.  I think he actually had a good day.  We watched a bad Bigfoot movie in the morning, and, this evening, we went to an escape room with some family and friends.  He laughed.  A lot.

As I said a couple days ago, I know my son is not perfect.  He's a 13-year-old boy with 13-year-old boy temptations.  He also has ADHD and impulse issues.  Perhaps, if you've been reading my last few posts, you think that I'm a parent who's being fooled by my son.  That he's a kid who manipulates and lies.  All teenagers do that.  I did.  If you're any distance from teenagehood, you did, too.

However, this situation with my son was not handled properly, from beginning to end.  He wasn't given the opportunity to tell his side of the story.  Instead, classmates who have been bullying him for over five months were interviewed, and my son was punished solely on their version of events.  That may work in countries like North Korea.  It doesn't quite work like that in the United States.  In fact, there's a little thing called the Constitution that kind of insures things like that don't happen.

Nothing I do from here on out will reclaim for my son the experience of his last middle school chorus concert with his favorite teacher (who's retiring).  Or his eighth grade school trip to Great America.  The temptation now is simply to try to ride out the rest of the school year, get my son to his eighth grade graduation ceremony, and then breathe a sigh of relief when he walks out the school doors on the last day.

But here's the thing that bothers me:  if this happened to my son, it has probably happened to other kids, as well.  And it will continue to happen, unless enough people stand up and raise their voices, Howard Beale-style, and say, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

That's what Saint Marty is going to do.

September 30: Saint Marty's Day, Book Club, Classic Saint Marty

Most of my loyal disciples are probably wondering why I haven't been speaking of the big, upcoming holiday.  Well, it's because I've been too busy to give it even one thought.  Today, however, I intend to start my holiday preparations:  dragging out the decorations, putting up the tree, playing traditional carols, baking cookies, buying and wrapping presents. 

That's right.  Saint Marty's Day is almost upon us.  As of this moment, there are exactly four days, eight hours, and 21 minutes shopping days left.  So, it's time to deck the Saint Marty's Day halls.  And don't forget the traditional dessert for Saint Marty's Day:  tapioca pudding. 

I know what you're all thinking right now:  I forgot to send out my Saint Marty's Day cards.  That's alright.  You still have a couple days left.  Saint Marty's Day is Friday, so, if you get your cards in the mail by Tuesday, they should reach their destinations in plenty of time.

In case you are a Saint Marty's Day atheist, let me share a few pictures from Saint Marty's Day celebrations around the world.

Japan:

Greece:

Rome:

England:

North Korea:

As you can tell, everybody from all 'round the world is getting in the Saint Marty's Day spirit. 

Tonight, I'm hosting my book club.  It's our annual Saint Marty's Day meeting.  That's right, Saint Marty's Day nog will be consumed this evening.  At the end of the night, we will hold hands, stand in a circle, and sing old Saint Marty's Day carols like "We Wish You a Merry Saint Marty's Day" and the old English "In the Bleak Saint Marty's Day."  It will be a lovely time.

A year ago, I was contemplating time and Saint Marty's Day as well . . .

September 30, 2017:  Standing on Thin Air, Randazzo's Fruit Market, 50th Saint Marty's Day

Billy now moved about the party--outwardly normal.  Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen.  Most of Trout's novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things.  Trout believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved.

"You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?" Trout asked Billy.

"No."

"The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him.  He thinks he's standing on thin air.  He'll jump a mile."

"He will?"

"That's how you looked--as though you all of a sudden realized you were standing on thin air."

Standing on thin air.  I frequently experience that feeling.  I can be walking along, smell something like an orange or banana, and suddenly I'm walking through Randazzo's Fruit Market in Detroit with my mother when I was five or six.  I shell a peanut, put it in my mouth, and I'm sitting at the Shrine Circus, watching the tigers jump through a flaming hoop.  I'm in thin air, between now and then.

Billy knows a few things about becoming unstuck in time.  This week, as I approach my 50th Saint Marty's Day, I'm going to be a little unstuck, too.  You're going to have to forgive me if I wax nostalgic about my past.  I'm standing on a mirror, looking down and up on myself.

I have a daughter who's a junior in high school.  She was born in the first year of the new millennium.  She never knew the twentieth century.  Can't remember a time when iPods and iPhones didn't exist.  I have a son in the fourth grade.  He thinks that Barack Obama was and should have been President of the United States forever.  (He and I agree on this little point.)

I will be cleaning my house this afternoon.  Then I will go to church and play the pipe organ.  For dinner, pizza from Pizza Hut.  These are things that I have done on Saturdays, without too much variation, for years.  Not exactly traditions.  More like comfortable routines.  That's what I see in the mirror I'm standing on today.

Saint Marty is thankful for routines.


I feel all warm and fuzzy now.  Don't you? 

Saint Marty's Day is on the way!

April 27: Golden Gleamings, Masturbation, Summer Plans

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out- a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.

Moby Dick takes on supernatural powers as this chapter progresses, able almost to bilocate from hemisphere to hemisphere.  This paranormal aura is enhanced by his ghostly white hue.  He appears off the coast of Greenland in the morning and then is sighted in the tropics in the afternoon, the waterways of the world all connected in some mysterious way.  Again, superstition holds sway.

Let me reiterate in this post that I am not a particularly superstitious person in most areas of my life.  Having been raised Catholic, however, I do carry around a certain sense of divine justice.  For example, as a young man, I used to believe that masturbation was the source of all kinds of bad things in my life.  The act caused small and large disasters to occur as punishment.  Flat tires.  Flooded basements.  The death of tropical fish and my mother's mother.

As an adult, I now realize that things don't really work that way.  A boy having a few minutes of pleasure in the privacy of his bedroom will not cause North Korea to launch missiles toward Hawaii.  That is the power of irrational superstition.  It makes the ludicrous seem plausible.  As far as I know, there has been no proven scientific link between spanking the monkey and nuclear escalation.

This Friday night, I'm sitting in the relative quiet of my living room.  My life is rarely peaceful.  I always have projects to work on.  Rooms to clean.  Poems and essays to write.  Workshops and lessons to plan.  I'm nearing the end of my year of teaching.  I haven't been offered a summer course, so I'm facing four months of relative free time.  However, with the lack of a paycheck from the university, my recreational activities may be limited to an occasional trip to Dairy Queen, but I will also have more time to focus on writing.

In the past, I've always begun my summers like this--big plans to write a novel or finish a collection of poems.  I'd set myself goals, and, by the end of August, found myself in a swamp of regret because I'd accomplished very little creatively.  So, for the last couple years, I've become somewhat superstitious about summer plans.  Like New Year's resolutions, summer plans are a recipe for failure.  If I say that I'm going to write a collection of short stories based on characters from The Brady Bunch, I will only write the titles of each chapter in my journal (ten of them--"Mike," "Carol," "Marcia," "Jan," "Cindy," "Greg," "Peter," "Bobby," "Alice," and "Sam the Butcher") and do nothing else.

When I was a teenager, I futilely tried to give up masturbation.  Told myself that, as a Catholic, I should instead focus on things like the Bible and prayer.  It didn't work.  I'd start my morning with the Gospel of John and end the day with a five-page spread of Claire the Redhead in Penthouse.  Failure was inevitable.

My point this evening is that I'm going to set myself some goals this summer.  However, I'm going to keep those goals modest.  And, just for insurance, I've already enlisted the help of two close friends to keep me on track.  By doing this, I believe I stand a better chance at success come Labor Day.

If I don't reach those goals, the world is not going to riddled with mushroom clouds as a result.  God is not going to smite me if I don't write enough poems.  I'm leaving superstition out of the equation.  Instead, I've got people who are going to lovingly harass over the next few months.

And Saint Marty is thankful for those individuals.

August 11: Unusually Tired, Cost of War, Walt Whitman, "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night"

It has been a long week, and I find myself unusually tired this evening.  Usually, on Friday nights, I have a lot of energy, am excited by the prospect of having a few days off.  When I got home from work this afternoon, however, I sat down on my couch, put my head back, and promptly fell asleep.

Yes, I had a lot going on these last five days.  A reading, an open mic, a workshop.  Plus, 40 hours of work, and the stress of listening to Donald Trump goading North Korea toward nuclear war.  I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in the United States is sleeping on their couches.

A friend of mine posted pictures of the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on Facebook this evening.  Terrifying, horrific pictures.  I think that anyone who supports the idea of nuclear war with North Korea should be forced to look at these pictures.  Sleep with them.  Have them taped to their bathroom mirrors.

Saint Marty thinks people need to be reminded of the costs of war.  Constantly.

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

by:  Walt Whitman

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;

When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,

Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,

Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,

Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,

I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)

Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,

Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,

Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,

I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,

And buried him where he fell.

August 10: Poetry Reading, Walt Whitman, "Long, too long America"

Tonight, I'm giving a poetry reading at Peter White Public Library, in Marquette, Michigan.  My musician friend, Linda, is going to be performing with me.  It's going to be a great event.  Not sure how many people are going to show up.  It's billed as a "Meet the U. P.'s New Poet Laureate."  I'm not sure if that's really going to draw a huge crowd.  If I get five people, I'll be happy.  If I get ten people, I'll feel like a rock star.

And really, now is the time for poetry.  I keep turning to poets as a remedy for all of the Donald Trump news.  Right now, he's having a pissing contest with North Korea, threatening "fire and fury."  The sad thing is that there are people in the United States who think a nuclear war would be a good thing.  That concerns me.  A LOT.

So, tonight, I am going to provide the remedy for anybody who shows up to listen.  I am not going to stop a nuclear war with anything I say or read tonight.  But maybe I'll calm a few troubled minds and hearts.

That's the best Saint Marty can do.

Long, too long America

by:  Walt Whitman

Long, too long America,

Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,

(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)

April 29: Small Dream, New/Old Job, Nuclear War

Last year I had a very unusual experience.  I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream.  It was a small dream about time.

Dillard has a waking dream.  It's about death and time and infinity.  Living in the past, present, and future.  Dillard's dream is full of flowing scarves and planets, mountains and caves, and an ocean.  Nostalgia and continents and France.  If this sounds confusing, that's alright. Taken out of context, it makes little sense.  But the entire passage about her dream is full of poetry and longing.

Today has been kind of amazing.  Like a dream even.  Earlier this week, I interviewed for a new/old job.  My position at the outpatient surgery center where I worked for 17 years was suddenly available.  I applied.  Just before I left work this evening, I was offered the position.  I accepted.  Dream number one.

Right before I left work, I also found out that I have a teaching contract for the fall semester at the university.  Two sections of Introduction to Film.  It's one of my favorite classes to teach.  I haven't been offered this course for over a year.  It is going to be a great semester.  And that would be waking dream number two.

Two waking dreams in one day.  Now, the rest of the weekend is going to suck more than a little bit.  Tons of stuff to grade.  It all has to be done by Monday at noon.  That means that I have to submit my grades by Sunday night because I'm working all day Monday.  So, as the seven dwarfs say, "Hi ho, hi ho!  It's off to grading response papers and research projects and argumentative essays and final exams until I go insane!"  That's a loose paraphrase.

Of course, the evening is not over yet.  A freak tidal wave could hit the Upper Peninsula and wipe out the entire population of Marquette County.  A tornado could swoop down and turn my neighborhood into a pile of popsicle sticks.  North Korea could launch a nuclear strike, turning the entire world into a grey shadowland where beetles become rulers of the planet.

All of this could happen, and the day would be ruined. 

Thank God that Saint Marty has a half bottle of wine in his refrigerator to celebrate or crush beetles with.  Depending on how the day ends.

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