That's the trouble with normal

Kris Kristofferson wrote, "There's nothing short of dying, that's half as lonesome as the sound, of a sleeping city sidewalk, and Sunday morning coming down."  I suppose, but I also think Monday mornings in the winter carry a similar sense of isolation.  Driving in, I pass clusters of downcast-eyed and slump-shouldered students waiting for buses, almost none talking to each other, just standing in the cold and dark. There is something excruciatingly empty about being alone in a small crowd.  Its like so much dark matter, holding them all together and holding them all apart.

Having spent last week out ill with some sort of viral crud, it is nice to be moving again.  This past week was a bad week to have extra time on my hands, time for keeping up with current events.  Any doubts about the staggering lack of qualifications (or the intentions) of our new President and his minions have now been thoroughly erased.  No President in history has ever hit majority disapproval ratings in 8 short days, until now.  It usually takes several hundred days to get to that point of electorate disillusionment.

"I'm just saying, look out the bloody window, George." - John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

There's a parasite feeding on
Everybody's bag of rage
What goes out returns again
To smite the mouth and burn the page
Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows 

I can see in the dark it's where I used to live
I see excess and the gaping need
Follow the money - see where it leads
It's to shrunken men stuffed up with greed
They meet and make plans in strange half-lit tableaux
Under the rain of all our dark tomorrows 

You've got no home in this world of sorrows 

   - Bruce Cockburn, from All Our Dark Tomorrows

On the plus side, this administration's cavalier handling of the Press (and facts, in general) has re-awoken at least some journalism in this country. That, and stirred the pot of democratic protest, raising a collective voice of resistance. We're going to need to sustain both, I think.

Art
what do they care about art
they go from being
contemporary baby kissers to
old time corrupt politicians
to self-appointed censorship clerks
who won't support art
but will support war
poverty
lung cancer
racism
colonialism
and toxic sludge
that's their morality
that's their religious conviction
that's their protection of the public
& contribution to family entertainment
what do they care about art 

   - Jayne Cortez, from, The Oppressionists

By casting the world in dystopian words and visions, whipping up unrealistic fears and, importantly, "enemies" with branded names and faces, they sell a return to "normalcy" that profits a few and takes from the many.  Give up your freedoms and rights and we will protect you from [insert contrived horror]!

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse 

Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse 

   - Bruce Cockburn, from The Trouble With Normal

That's the trouble with normal.

Today's Playlist:

• NPR, Morning Edition

Hope for the drive, for the day, for the future

The side streets were still icy this early, dark, cold morning, but the arterials were, in the main, just wet. I listen to NPR on the way in, and wonder why. I'm not sure if I'm too lazy to tap the screen and switch back to music or that I'm just that compelled to listen to news out of that other Washington (the one ending in DC), like people do when they slow down to get a good look at a horrific accident scene. I'm not enjoying the news I hear, but I can't quite look away from it either.

When everything finally has been wrecked and further shipwrecked,
When their most ardent dream has been made hollow and unrecognizable,
They will feel inside their limbs the missing shade of blue that lingers
Against hills in the cooler hours before dark, and the moss at the foot of the forest
When green starts to leave it.
     - From Half Omen Half Hope, by Joanna Klink

I'm listening for hope, I think. I'm driving here in my little car on a dark and icy morning, listening to news I don't enjoy, hoping for something I consider positive before I turn away. Like eating fresh strawberries that are disappointingly tart, but continuing anyway hoping to find one sweet berry that you will finish with. Looking to leave a good taste in your mouth.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
   - Emily Dickinson, from "Hope" is the thing with feathers

So be it, then.  I will hope in the long gift, as articulated by Miller Williams:

Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become—
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free. 

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet—
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget. 

   - from Of History and Hope, by Miller Williams

I hope for a safe commute on this icy morning, I hope for a productive day that makes a positive difference in the lives of others, and I hope for a future that isn't overly overshadowed by the bad decisions being made today by those to whom power has been entrusted.  And, bird in hand, I will work for all three.

Today's Playlist:

• NPR - Morning Edition

An appropriate dose of stolidity to play against chaos

Impatience.  If every commute is really an experiment in chaos in which a different key word is hidden each day, a keyword that can be deduced from the millions of random interactions between drivers up and down the (in our case) I-5 corridor and surrounding communities, like a chaos pattern, then my guess for this morning is "Impatience."  Or maybe, "Inattentive."  Though I think the latter is a static condition of the experiment.

I witnessed several encounters between drivers this morning that left me shaking my head like a bewildered theologian. Near misses caused by folks apparently too impatient to take their place in the plodding queue. Giving the finger, sometimes literally, sometimes via their actions, to each other.   Like the planet Pluto (back when it was still accorded the designation of being a planet) when its orbit placed it in 8th rather than 9th place (distance from the sun) for a roughly 20 year period, as colorfully articulated by Fatimah Asghar in the poem, Pluto Shits on the Universe:

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun. 

Naw. 

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

There is attitude in that poem (do follow the link and read the whole poem) that mirrors what I see in this morning's commute:

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel.

Speaking of head-shaking theologians, I got my turn when a church bus pulled out of a side street directly into my path. If you want to practice living prayerfully, folks, that's fine with me.  Just pray with your eyes open while you're driving, please.

The perils, I suppose, of having a blog revolve (more or less) around the morning commute is having to acknowledge some of our less-best behavior as a collective community.  Like holding penalties in football, which they say could be called on every play but are usually overlooked unless the infraction really stands out.

Is poetry a rescue this morning?

As for the million others, they are blessed:
This is their age. Their slapdash in demand
From all who would take fright were thought expressed
In ways that showed a hint of being planned,
They may say anything, in any way.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?
Nothing to study, nothing to understand. 

And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme
And reason is a technically precise
Response to the confusion of a time
When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.
It isn’t that their deafness fails to match
The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.
No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice 

Of idle talk. 

     - Clive James, from A Perfect Market

Fitting and applicable, but it doesn't do much to shift my attitude.  What about music, then?

My commute music today was all from a Sigur Rós streaming playlist, with all the songs that popped up having single-word titles taken directly from the physical world: Obsidian, Iceberg, Surface, and Storm.  Yes!  A pattern emerging from a random process!  An appropriate dose of stolidity to play against chaos.

Today's Playlist (all by Sigur Rós):

• Hrafntinna
• Ísjaki
• Yfirborð
• Stormur

In front of all this beauty

That moon!  All the way in this morning the moon lead the way, large, cold-blue, and ever-so-slightly fuzzy from somthing in the dark atmosphere between it and me.  It floated, limned and bright, always slighty to the right of my forward progress, visible through the front windshield or the glass portion of my car's roof.

When I arrived at my office on campus (with, I kid you not, Creedence Clearwater's Bad Mood Rising playing on my car's sound system) I stood in the parking lot, shivering, and drank it in as it glowed as bright as a street light between the denuded trees next to me. The sureal colors created by the sulfur street lamps were mocked by the moon's pristine blue-white reflection.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
   - Tory Dent, The Moon and the Yew Tree

From Bruce Cockburn's, Understanding Nothing:

High above valley,
Above deep shade coloured with the calls of cuckoos,
The ring of coppersmith's hammer high in the hiss of the wind
Wind filled with spirits and bright with the jangle of horse bells
After a crisp night crammed with stars
It's morning
.....
Weavers' fingers flying on the loom
Patterns shift too fast to be discerned
All these years of thinking
Ended up like this
In front of all this beauty
Understanding nothing

Today's playlist:

• Pure Prairie League: Amy
• America: Sister Golden Hair
• Bob Marley & The Wailers: Is This Love
• The Young Rascals: Good Lovin'
• King Harvest: Dancing in the Moonlight
• Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Mood Rising

Energy wins out

Brrrr. A clear dark sky brings temperatures in the high 20's (F, ~-2C) this morning.  The roads are mostly dry, thankfully, but little splashes of ice pop up here and there, so most folks are taking it slow this morning.

Headlamps reflecting off the tail lights and any bright-work
bedecking the back-ends of the cars in front of us;
a slow-moving procession as we wind cautiously down the
icy road on this clear-sky-cold morning. 

The cold asphalt holds the moisture tightly to itself
in a frozen embrace, reflecting streetlamps, headlamps,
the occasional faint star's light from millions of years before.
Or does the frozen water hold the street? 

No, I think it is the clear-eyed sky, darkly backlight
in this early hour, wide open to the warmlessness
of eons of deep space and far-traveled starlight that holds both
road and ice in a bracing grip: winter. 

     - Cold Road, December 2016

The usual cold morning tension: part of me would like to stay home warm and curled up with a good book, the other part of me is coiled energy ready to be up, out, and productive.  Energy wins out.

Today's Playlist:

• NPR News for a bit, then:
• Sigur Rós, Rafmagnið búið
• Sigur Rós, Hrafntinna
• Sigur Rós, Heysátan

We know this narrative's path

It is Mr. Malleable's day of the week.  The skies are dark and cloudy, the roads glisten with wet, yet it isn't raining.  There are freshly-fallen leaves strewn about the sidewalks and, where there are no sidewalks, the sides of the road where asphalt meets gravel or grass.  They have certainly fallen since the last rains came through because they still move like free spirits, not yet wet and heavy.  They move like they still live high up in the breeze zone, they don't yet know they have died.

The transit bus in front of me must be trying to catch up with its schedule. A big boxy White Rabbit, it is moving along at an anxious full legal speed (plus a little).  The freshly-fallen leaves get caught up in the bus' swirling wake and dance up in front of me on the road before sweeping under my front bumper.  If it weren't so dark out I'm sure I would be able to see them behind me, now dancing in the wake of my car.

This is the season of dark mornings and dark evenings.  Of watching for shadows that move along the sides of the road (don't they know that all-black clothing, while fashionable, is totally invisible in the dark?) against the glare of on-coming headlights, on both the morning and evening commutes.  Caution mixed with impatience adds to the volatility of the road.

Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains. 

The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door. 

     - Maggie Dietz, from November

Gas prices are down again these days. Big and excessively-big vehicles fill the roads as those with short memories happily wrap themselves in 2 tons of aggressive sheet metal so they can once again tower over the rest of the traffic.  I shake my head, bemused. They will probably be making excessively-big car payments for much longer than the gas prices will stay artificially depressed, but as we've seen this same movie a few times already I can't feel too much sympathy.  Big, small, slow, fast, weak, powerful: everyone gets the opportunity to move at the same speed, which is precisely no faster than the car in front of you.  The only variable is how much gas you consume while you move in queue.

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge,
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.  

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on. 

     - from A Partial History Of My Stupidity, by Edward Hirsch

History has been on my mind a lot of late.  I fear we're watching a rerun of things that happened just outside the immediate memory of almost everyone living today, but not outside recorded memory we are all very familiar with.  Like the gas prices movie, like freshly-fallen leaves.  We know the path this narrative flows through, so we are without excuses.

An infernal angel passed in flight
just now along the avenure
in a crush of thugs; an eerie emptiness
lit and festooned with swastikas engulfed him;
the poor, defensless windows, also armed
with guns and war toys too, are shuttered up,
the butcher who decked berries on the snouts
of his slaughtered baby goats has closed; the feast
of the meek executioners still innocent of blood
has turned into a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,
ghosts on the sand bars, and the water rushes in
to eat the shore and no one's blameless anymore. 

    - Eugenio Montale, from The Hitler Spring

We're in an uneasy quiet right now, a wait-and-see pause.  Well, I am.  Cockburn, singing at me this morning as I drive along, casts just the right mood:

Bell in the fire station tower
Rings out the measure of the racing hours
I slip through the door to the roof outside
To gaze at the sign hanging in the sky
That sailor on the billboard looks so self-possessed
Doesn't have a thing to forgive or forget
All's quiet on the inner city front.
    - from, All's Queit On The Inner City Front

Today's Playlist (all Bruce Cockburn):

• All the Diamonds In the World
• All The Ways I Want You
• All's Quiet On The Inner City Front
• Ancestors

Winter-tired in my acoustic bubble

This morning's chill is sharp, in contrast to my dull tiredness, as the garage door rolls up and back. Its springs creak plaintifully above the mechanical chugging and the clanking of metal hinges and plastic wheels. I commiserate with them this morning.  For reasons outside of my control and somewhere just beyond my ability to conciously understand I woke in the middle of last night and then tossed and turned for a couple of hours before finally finding sleep again, shortly before the morning alarm.  Thankfully not a common problem for me, though today it leaves me feeling as winter-tired as a leafless tree.

See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—
Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,
These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!
     - James Thompson, from The Seasons: Winter

I've been listening to a shuffle of Sigur Rós tunes the last few days, leaving it as-is for this morning's drive. The rich and complex tapestry of their music rolls around my little car's cabin, creating a warm acoustic barrier against the dark pre-dawn morning.  The Fiat isn't much more than a little bubble anyway, but this morning it feels totally spherical.  Snug as a field mouse's winter nest, and me a claustrophobe who likes small spaces.

Ethereal globe of thinnest glass,
Sphere of air, yet visible,
What hand of nymph or fairy
Could mold thy fragile form,
Airy, bouyant, weighing naught?
And of what clay, if such it be,
Did thy creator model thee?
     - Frank M. Schoonmaker (10 yrs old), from Crystals

Today's playlist (all Sigur Rós):

• Inní mér syngur vitleysingur (Live)
• Sæglópur (Live)
• Festival (Live)
• E-Bow (Live