February 9: He Might Scream, Kubler-Ross, Self-Preservation

Here is President Zaphod Beeblebrox making his grand entrance on the planet Damogran . . .

He twisted the wheel sharply, the boat skidded round in a wild scything skid beneath the cliff face and dropped to rest lightly on the rocking waves.

Within seconds he ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at over three billion people.  The three billion people weren't actually there, but they watched his every gesture through the eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered obsequiously in the air nearby.  The antics of the President always made amazingly popular tri-D:  that's what they were for.

He grinned again.  Three billion and six people didn't know it, but today would be a bigger antic than anyone had bargained for.  

The robot camera homed in for a close-up on the more popular of his two heads and he waved again.  He was roughly humanoid in appearance except for the extra head and third arm.  His fair tousled hair stuck out in random directions, his blue eyes glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins were almost always unshaven.

A twenty-foot high transparent globe floated next to his boat, rolling and bobbing, glistening in the brilliant sun.  Inside it floated a wide semicircular sofa upholstered in glorious red leather:  the more the globe bobbed and rolled, the more the sofa stayed perfectly still, steady as an upholstered rock.  Again, all done for effect as much as anything.

Zaphod stepped through the wall of the globe and relaxed on the sofa.  He spread his two arms along the back and with the third brushed some dust off his knee.  His heads looked about, smiling; he put his feet up.  At any moment, he thought, he might scream.

Saturday morning.  I'm at McDonald's with my wife, sitting on a sofa, having breakfast with my wife, trying not to scream, like Zaphod.  I realize that angry blog posts are not fun to read.  In fact, they are tiring.  I don't like reading them (unless they happen to be about Donald Trump, and then I will read them, comment on them, and share them with friends).  So, for this post, I promise to set aside my angry eyes, as Mrs. Potato Head says in Toy Story,  Anger is not going to solve the situation that I'm in right now, anyway.

Of course, if I am going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, I know what I'm in for in the weeks to come:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

So, I think I've been in denial for several months, thinking that the other shoe wasn't going to drop.  (Deep down, I knew this was coming, however.  I just didn't expect it to happen as suddenly as it did.)  Now, I'm in anger.  So, if I follow the Kubler-Ross list, I just have to check off bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  Then I'll be back to the old Saint Marty.

I need this weekend time, away from my jobs and teaching.  Time to process.  Come to terms.  See this whole situation as an opportunity, not a death.  I have a feeling it's going to take a while for me to get to that place.  Most of the other people who work at the surgery center don't have as close a connection as I do.  (Some do.  Some of them were my sister's best friends.  They were at her hospital bed when they told her she had a life-limiting illness.  They came and visited her when she was home and on hospice.  They know.)  However, for the rest, it's just a place to punch a time clock.  

Humans are just like any other creatures on this planet, in a way.  It's all about self-preservation.  This weekend, most of my coworkers are in self-preservation mode.  Scrambling to figure out how they're going to find new jobs.  I get that.  I started that process myself yesterday at the cardiology office where I work on Fridays.  People have health insurance to keep, bills to pay, family to support.  Self-preservation.

For me (and a few others of my coworkers), it's more personal.  On Monday, I have to walk through the doors of that surgery center and tend to its death, because I work there (for now) and that's what is expected.  I can't change what's going to happen.

Now, this blog post is sounding a little more like bargaining, maybe even acceptance with a little depression mixed in.  Grief is such a mysterious thing.  I have a sense that I'll be pinballing between steps one through five for some time.

Please vote for Saint Marty (Marty Achatz) for 2019/2020 Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula at the link below.  Last day!  Polls close at 11:59 p.m. tonight:

Vote for Marty Achatz for Poet Laureate of the U. P.

November 3: Aracelis Girmay, from "The Black Maria," Our Time

from "The Black Maria"

by:  Aracelis Girmay

        after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden
          Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was
          confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to
          study stars.

“I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power.

And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”
                                                 —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007

                    Body of space. Body of dark.
                    Body of light.

The Skyview apartments

                    circa 1973, a boy is

kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who

                     (it is important

to mention here his skin

                    is brown) prepares his telescope,

the weights & rods,

                    to better see the moon. His neighbor

(it is important to mention here

                    that she is white) calls the police

because she suspects the brown boy

                    of something, she does not know

what at first, then turns,

                    with her looking,

his telescope into a gun,

                    his duffel into a bag of objects

thieved from the neighbors’ houses

                     (maybe even hers) & the police

(it is important to mention

                    that statistically they

are also white) arrive to find

                    the boy who has been turned, by now,

into “the suspect,” on the roof

                    with a long, black lens, which is,

in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &

                    depending on who you are, reading this,

you know that the boy is in grave danger,

                    & you might have known

somewhere quiet in your gut,

                    you might have worried for him

in the white space between lines 5 & 6,

                    or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding

your breath for him right now

                    because you know this story,

it’s a true story, though,

                    miraculously, in this version

of the story, anyway,

                    the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives

to tell the police that he is studying

                    the night & moon & lives

long enough to offer them (the cops) a view

                    through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,

if I am spelling it out anyway,

                    is the instrument he borrowed

& the beautiful “trouble” he went through

                    lugging it up to the roof

to better see the leopard body of

                    space speckled with stars & the moon far off,

much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing

                    out) the distance between

the white neighbor who cannot see the boy

                    who is her neighbor, who,

in fact, is much nearer

                    to her than to the moon, the boy who

wants to understand the large

                    & gloriously un-human mysteries of

the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”

                    has not been killed by the murderous jury of

his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem

                    wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.

This boy on the roof of this poem

                    with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body

as I write this poem my body

                    is making a boy even as the radio

calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,

                    the Ohio coroner’s news.

2015. My boy will nod

                    for his milk & close his mouth around

the black eye of my nipple.

                    We will survive. How did it happen?

The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.

                    My milk pulling down into droplets of light

as the baby drinks & drinks them down

                    into the body that is his own, see it,

splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.

                    Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.

by time, into, at least, this song.

 

This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”

caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,

then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.

 

The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing

only things ordinary

as water & light.

_____________________________________

This beautiful poem, which I first encountered last year, reminds me of what's at stake this coming Tuesday when I step into the voting booth.  It's about the soul of my country.  About how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves.  About compassion and love.  Acceptance.  Ending hatred and violence.  Taking care of the most vulnerable people in the world.

When I wake up on Wednesday morning, I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and be proud of being an American citizen again.

That's Saint Marty's hope for our time.

September 25: Old Gang of Mine, Best Friend, Lobotomized

Now an optometrist called for attention.  He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia, whose anniversary it was.  According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, "The Febs," sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed.  Everybody's eyes were shining.  "The song was "That Old Gang of Mine."

Gee, the song went, but I'd give the world to see that old gang of mine.  And so on.  A little later is said, So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals--God bless 'em--And so on.

Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion.  He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords--chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again.  Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords.  His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack.

I am luckier than Billy.  I have close friends and best friends.  I'm not talking about people on Facebook who send you greetings on your birthday.  (Don't get me wrong.  Those are wonderful messages to receive.)  I'm talking about people who get me on a much deeper level, who have seen me at my absolute best and worst and still love me.  Billy really doesn't have that.

It may be a cliche, but my best friend really is my wife.  She knows me like no other person.  I would like to believe that all married couples have that, but, if Billy and Valencia are any indication, I know that is not always the case.  People fall out of love with each other all the time.

I'm lucky.  My wife and I have had our share of troubles, for sure.  Addictions and mental illness.  Separation.  Almost divorce (we even had custody papers drawn up).  But love won for us.  I wish I could provide some sage marital advice to couples out there, struggling to stay together.  I can't.  I really don't know what saved my marriage.  Forgiveness certainly.  Compromise.  Acceptance.  The ability not to judge, to remember why you fell in love in the first place.

Of course, all that has to come from both sides.  If only one person is doing all the work, the marriage is doomed.  I guess my wife and I are stubborn people.  We never gave up.  We came close, but we never took the final step.  And our secret is that both of is keep forgiving, compromising, and accepting.  We keep falling in love every day in small ways.

Sure, we still irritate the shit out of each other.  Sure, we yell sometimes.  Sure, we disagree about whether Fannie Flagg is a good writer or not.  That's normal.  Well, maybe not the Fannie Flagg thing, but the rest is regular as oatmeal.  Love doesn't mean you're lobotomized. 

But love does mean that you have someone to come home to at the end of the day who knows your failures and still, for some reason, thinks you're pretty damn cool.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the love of his wife.

January 16: Time Was Ripe, Nonconformists, Martin Luther King Jr.

"Don't lie to me, Father," said Barbara.  "I know perfectly well you heard me when I called."  This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano.  Now she raised hell with him about the letter in the paper.  She said he was making a laughing stock of himself and everybody associated with him.

"Father, Father, Father--" said Barbara, "what are we going to do with you?  Are you going to force us to put you where your mother is?"  Billy's mother was still alive.  She was in bed in an old people's home called Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.

"What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?" Billy wanted to know.

"It's all crazy.  None of it's true!"

"It's all true."  Billy's anger was not going to rise with hers.  He never got mad at anything.  He was wonderful that way.

"There is no such planet as Tralfamdore."

"It can't be detected from Earth, if that's what you mean," said Billy.  "Earth can't be detected from Tralfamadore, as far as that goes.  They're both very small.  They're very far apart."

"Where did you got a crazy name like 'Tralfamadore?'" 

"That's what the creatures who live there call it."

"Oh God," said Barbara, and she turned her back on him.  She celebrated frustration by clapping her hands.  "May I ask you a simple question?"

"Of course."

"Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?"

"I didn't think the time was ripe."

Barbara doesn't believe Billy.  She thinks her dad is going a little bit . . . cuckoo.  Little green men.  Time traveling.  Distant planets.  If my father started talking like Billy, I would probably consider putting in him Pine Knoll, too.  The problem is that Billy is telling the truth, but he has no way of proving it to his daughter. 

Any person with ideas that don't conform to the norm are considered cuckoo.  A lot of the time, the nonconformists suffer for their beliefs.  Some pay the ultimate price.  Jesus Christ.  Abraham Lincoln.  Gandhi.  Today celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.  Now, King didn't accept the status quo.  He questioned, probed, argued, marched.  He knew that he was right, and he refused to back down, even in the face of great adversity.  Of course, he paid for his beliefs in blood.

I've been thinking a lot about Dr. King today.  His courage and moral fiber.  Certainly, he wasn't a perfect man.  He had his flaws.  Everybody does.  Yet, his cause was true and right.  That's what was important.  Dr. King didn't live to see the fruits of his efforts.  If it weren't for Dr. King, Colin Powell probably wouldn't have been Secretary of State.  And Barack Obama would never have been President of the United States.

On the cusp of the inauguration, I celebrate everything that Martin Luther King Jr. stood for.  Equality.  Acceptance.  Integrity.  Faith in humanity.

Saint Marty is grateful today for Dr. King.

November 3: Publication, Tough Teaching Day, "Web" Dip

Well, first things first:  I received notification this morning that an essay I submitted for publication was accepted.  In fact, the exact words of the editor were, "This is really beautiful." 

It's a Christmas essay, and it's going to be published in December.  I'll post the specifics when they become available.  I'm really excited about this acceptance.  It will be the first prose piece I've ever gotten published.  I've been writing short stories and essays since high school, but I've only ever submitted a couple of short stories to local writing contests  (with no success).  So this news is really affirming.  Times like this make me feel like I really am a writer.

I really needed this good news because I had a really tough teaching day.  I can't get into specifics, but, suffice to say, I had to put on my stern professor persona.  It was very difficult.  The situation isn't completely resolved yet, but I think everything is going to turn out fine.  I found the whole ordeal a little exhausting, however.  I stressed about it all day and then, afterwards, felt completely drained.  If I were a drinking man, I'd be on my third or fourth gin and tonic by now.  Instead, I'm sitting here, typing a blog post about how much I want to drink.  Does that make me a virtual alcoholic?  Or do I have to virtually black out a few times first?

It is Web dip Monday, and I do have a question that's been bugging me for a while now:

Is life ever going to get any easier?  (Imagine me dragging myself out of bed at 4 a.m. for work, this question on a repeating loop in my mind.)

And the answer from Charlotte is:

"That remains to be seen.  But I am going to save you, and I want you to quiet down immediately.  You're carrying on in a childish way.  Stop your crying!  I can't stand hysterics."

That is not a clear answer.  It's more like the answer my mother used to give me when I was a kid and asked stupid questions.  Instead of saying "no" immediately, my mother would say, "We'll see."  She left the door open just enough for me to believe anything was possible.


Saint Marty appreciates that open door policy.

I ain't afraid of the po-po, neither

April 16: Secret Visitor, Publication, Rejection

In spring 1909, Elwyn drew upon his experiences with the secret visitor in his bedroom and wrote a poem, "To a Mouse."  The budding author, not yet ten years old, bravely sent the poem to Woman's Home Companion.  To his astonishment and delight, they accepted it for publication--and even awarded him a prize for it.

E. B. White published his first poem in a national magazine when he was nine-years-old.  Nine.  He won his first writing prize when he was nine-years-old.  Nine.  That's pretty impressive.  I could be snarky and say that the standards for acceptance must have been fairly low.  I could be even snarkier and say that it was only Woman's Home Companion, which sounds like the equivalent of Good Housekeeping.  But I'm not going to stoop to such levels.  The thing that sticks out in this whole discussion is that little Elwyn became a nationally published author when he was only four years out of kindergarten.

I didn't publish my first poem in a well-known journal until I was in graduate school.  That would put me about, oh, almost 17 or 18 years behind E. B. White.  Not that I'm competing.  I'm not.  Really.  I can't wait to find out when White published his first book.  He was probably all of twelve or thirteen.  A late bloomer.

I used to be really lucky.  For a while, every poem I sent out received an acceptance.  It was kind of crazy.  I submitted my first book of poems to one publisher.  One.  And it was accepted.  Like I said, crazy.  Of course, that streak ended quite a while ago.  In the past few years, I haven't been very successful in the acceptance department.  One or two poems, here and there.

That comes with the territory if you're a poet.  I had a student once ask me for the most important advice I'd give to any aspiring writer.  My answer:  "Get used to rejection.  A lot of it."  Poetry is an ego-bruising endeavor.

Thank God I've developed such a thick skin.

Now, if you'll excuse Saint Marty, he's going to curl into a fetal position and suck his thumb for a while.

Get used to feeling like this...

November 10: Ice, Charlie Chaplin, Change

Well, the snow came down but good last night.  I left work a little early, and the drive that usually takes me about twenty minutes lasted over an hour.  At one point, I thought I was going to be stuck in an unending traffic jam.  My gas gauge was at less than a quarter tank, so I was looking at running out of fuel on an icy hill with five thousand angry drivers behind me.  However, I made it home safely.  My wife and children made it home safely,  as well.  I was truly thankful to God for my life and my family's lives.  For the rest of the evening, we just holed up, had dinner, and got on each other's nerves.  It was great.

Having said that, I'm still in a pretty crappy mood this morning.  I was speaking with a coworker recently (a person who has many more reasons than I to be in a crappy mood), and she told me that if she gave in to negativity, she wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning.  I'm trying to keep that piece of wisdom in mind.

Just call me Charlie

I went for a walk this morning before work.  The storm has blown away, and now the world is covered in snow and ice.  There's a lot of beauty in the early morning after a big snow.  The quiet is physical, like gauze in your ears.  When I drive to work on mornings like this, it feels like I'm Charlie Chaplin in a silent movie.  The trees move.  Cars glide by.  But it's all in silence.  In my mind, I actually imagine somebody sitting at a pipe organ, accompanying the scene.  It's really peaceful.  The walk helped to calm the barking wolves in my mind.

I'm still anxious/pissed about the departure of my coworker in December.  However, it's something I can't change.  (There's that stupid word again.  C-H-A-N-G-E.  It should be banished from the world.  Some changes are good--a baby, a marriage, a book deal, a Pulitzer Prize, a Nobel Prize in Literature.  For the most part, change sucks.  Let me put it in mathematical terms for you:  CHANGE = SUCK.)  Therefore, getting back to my original statement, I know I can't do anything about the change about to take place in my work situation.  I'm going to be losing a good friend in the office.  I'm going to be losing a great work partner.  I'm going to be losing a lot a freedom in my hectic life.  It's going to happen.  I can either accept it and move on, or I can wallow in self pity.

Saint Marty's choosing self pity at the moment.