February 11, 2025: "Sex Without Love," Tuesdays and Thursdays, "Dentistry"

So, today was . . . not a bad day.  Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester are a sprint, from the time I wake up until I get home at night.  I haven't taught a four-day-a-week class for many years, and I find it difficult switching gears so many times in one day, from library to college to library to college again, and then, possibly, back to the library for an evening program.  My mind is doing backflips to keep up, and I'm not finding a whole lot of personal pleasure in the schedule.

Sharon Olds writes about being responsible for your own happiness (sort of) . . . 

Sex Without Love

by: Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the    come to the     God   come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

It's kind of a revolutionary idea, even in the sexually liberated time in which we live--sex for pleasure, that's it.  That's what Olds is saying in this poem--don't mistake the priest for the God.  You are responsible for your own pleasure and joy, nobody else.

This idea applies not only to sex.  It applies to life, in general.  The day you hand over the reins of your happiness to someone else, you have given up agency over your life.  Everything--pleasure, sorrow, hunger, lust, love--doesn't belong to you anymore.

So, me bitching about my miserable Tuesdays and Thursdays is a direct result of me choosing to be miserable.  I could opt to be excited or energized or happily challenged.  Instead, I've picked dread and exhaustion.  I need to cut that shit out.  Considering all the terrible things that are going on in the United States at the moment thanks to Agent Orange, my crazily busy days are chump change.

Saint Marty chooses to live the dream, not the nightmare.  Here is a poem he wrote about a nightmare, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem about a recurring nightmare.  Do not begin your poem "In the dream," but instead, launch straight into the telling:  "My parents and I were driving from Kentucky to New Jersey, but suddenly the car veered left, and I was on a roller coaster made of Jell-O."  For more inspiration, read some of Charles Simic's poems to get yourself in a surreal mood.

Dentistry

by: Martin Achatz

The first tooth pops out
like a cork from a bottle

of Merlot, my mouth flooded

with blackberries, plums,

notes of clover and cedar.

The next tooth turns soft

as melted butter, drips

down my chin as if I'm

at an all-you-can-eat

crab leg buffet.  Number

three shatters when Morten

Harket hits the high note

in "Take On Me" on Q-107,

four and five lost to

raids by ICE agents rounding

up undocumented incisors.

Six and seven become

hummingbirds, hover, drill

the air tornado green.

One by one, teeth migrate

from my mouth, perhaps

because they no longer

want to grind words

into poems anymore.

Instead, they join

a cloistered order

around a monk's tongue,

feasting on silence.

 

 

July 20: Saint Margaret

I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was younger. Because there were nine kids in our family, my mom and dad always had a full-size van to chauffeur us around. This was before the days of minivans. My parents' vehicles were large enough to fit our entire family, plus my grandma, comfortably. When I rode anywhere in the van, if there were fewer than two or three passengers, I felt like I was cruising in a movable cave, a place on wheels in which a child my age and size could get lost. And never be seen again.

Perhaps that impression was the seed for my nightmare. In the dream, I woke up in the back of my parents' van. I could hear the wheels humming on the road, the high-pitched tone of highway travel. When I sat up, I was alone. No brothers, sisters, or grandma. No mother or father. The van was simply navigating itself down an endless road, driverless. It wasn't swerving or out-of-control. It was purposefully moving down a two-lane freeway, through a landscape of fields and power lines. The thing terrified me about this dream was not that I was in a van being driven by some unseen presence or force. The thing that terrified me was that I was alone and had no idea where I was going.

As an adult, I've learned that one of my biggest fears is being lost. I can't stand the panic that invades my body if I find myself in unfamiliar surroundings, unsure how to find my way home. It's that loss of control, that helplessness, that makes my heart race. I like being grounded, knowing exactly my place and role in the world. It's all about control. If you haven't figured out I have control issues yet, you need to go back and review a few of my older posts. Doesn't matter which ones. You'll get the idea. Go ahead. I'll wait...

Okay, now that you know I'm a total neurotic, I'll continue.

There a very few times in my life when I don't know where I'm going, what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and why I'm doing it. One of the only times I've travelled by air alone, I got stuck in Detroit Metro for two hours, not knowing if I was going to make my connecting flight. How did I get through that? Two Ativan and about three glasses of cheap red wine. I don't endorse alcohol or prescription drugs as coping mechanisms, but I made it through the rest of my trip with little to no anxiety. (I also don't remember too much about that final leg of my journey.)

In some ways, though, that childhood nightmare is a pretty good metaphor for life. We may choose husbands or wives or significant others to be partners on the journey, but, when push comes to shove, we're all travelling in that ghost van alone, hoping whatever's driving is taking us somewhere good.

As a Christian, I'm supposed to believe that my van will wind up pulling into the Mickey Mouse Lot of God's Magic Kingdom. That's what's supposed to get me through the rough times.

When I was driving to work this morning, I thought about that nightmare. You see, I leave my house at around 4:50 a.m. It's dark. Really dark, even in the summer. A stretch of my 25-minute trip takes me down U. S 41 where the road is bounded by forest on both sides. My headlights provide me with a little ability to see what's ahead of me. For the most part, though, I'm travelling along at 60-plus mph, hands on the steering wheel, aiming my car into a darkness that may contain any number of dangers and calamities. I can flip on my high beams, but it still won't let me see the deer standing in the middle of the road a mile away. Only God has that kind of GPS. I may think I'm in control, but I'm not.

Margaret, the saint for today, had her share of deer in the road. A convert to Christianity, Maggie was kicked out of her house as a girl by her father, who was a pagan priest. She was eventually imprisoned for her beliefs. In prison, she had a vision/encounter with Satan taking on the form of a dragon and swallowing her. Thank goodness for Margaret, the cross she carried got stuck in the dragon's throat. Quicker that you can say "purge," Satan vomited up Margaret. Eventually, after several failed execution attempts by her Roman captors, she was beheaded.

Now, if I were Margaret and saw the whole dragon puke/decapitation thing in the headlights of my car, I'm not so sure I would have signed up for saint duty. That's why I'm not a saint and probably never will be. I spend most of my life with my hands on the steering wheel, trying to avoid all the dragons coming my way. It's my futile attempt to control the trajectory of my life. Once in a while, I know, I just have to sit in the backseat, buckle up, hold on, and trust.

Deer happens.