Fire starters: motherly advice

I remember fire when I was a kid. I used to lay under the dark and cool lattice porch. The sun dappled the dirt on the edges of my wooden cave sanctum. I would write my name in dupont cement, that rubbery glue in a tube, then I would light it with a match. Art, emotion, and super cool light effects.

Today someone might call me an arsonist and say I was a troubled child. The fact is, I grew up and became a superior welder. I love heat and understand it, in an intrinsic physics kind of way. I know that the metal gets excited by the fire and then starts stalking it. So one moves the torch and the metal will follow, like a well trained dog.

I digress.

A kid who starts fires may just be curious, wanting to learn fire. In a cave man sort of way control of fire is power.

So I wanted power. Who doesn't? Children ARE powerless and what kid worth their salt wants to feel like that, vulnerable and weak.

LOL, that a complete repudiation of my original claim. Or is a kid wanting to feel powerful wrong.


-- Post From My iPhone

Manarola Suicide

These vineyards are lovely and hard.

Terraced rock.

The heat from below pours up

and drowns me. 

Can I cliff dive from here?

The azure ocean calls.

Donna, bye.

Like DNA, we weave close, then apart, then close again.

Donna Spence died after a long struggle with cancer.  The last time I saw her, before I saw her dead body in the casket, was a while ago at the old WalMart.  We talked about K Mart and Ames and the new WalMart.  We both preferred Ames, which had closed to accommodate K Mart which had closed to accommodate WalMart.  We met over these animal print and very stretchy, tight pajama gowns.  Donna told me she had bought one and wore it as a dress, she suggested I also do so.  I grabbed the leopard spotted one and I still have it although it does not look the same on me anymore, or I do not look the same in it, one or the other.  Now I just wear it as a nightgown.

We talked for quite a while, catching up, as one does with these chance encounters.  She asked what what I was doing and I told her I was a nurse. She told me she just found out she had cancer (I think uterine) and we talked about treatments, etc.  It killed her.  The words we spoke are all gone in the wind.  My intermittant memory, the only record of girls who became women but never changed, really.

When I saw her at WalMart she was round and happy and womanly and filling out her nightgown dress beautifully.  When I saw her in the casket she was skeletal and dead.

I choose to remember the spirit and personality that Donna was, servant to humankind, lively and vital and strong and wearing cool animal prints tight against her sexy body that turned it's back on her, and killed her.

Zaha Hadid-A Show for Academia, Not the World

My mother, two other family members, and I attended "Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion" at the Perlman Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday.  I was looking forward to the day but was severely disappointed by this star architects show. Walking into the gallery, one is instantly disoriented, kind of like a fun house in a carnival.  Several of the people I was with had to sit down as their equilibrium was affected.  Personally, I find Hadids work, visually incongruent, almost dizzying (as it literally was for my companions).  So, while impressive for their reach, her buildings are not for general consumption.  In fact, her objects and buildings are so confusing in their flow that they are essentially disturbing.  All sense of beauty is swallowed up by the visual discordance.  My brain became too occupied with trying to find the glitch rather than finding the beauty in the form. 


I also wonder as to her clearly obvious and impractical choice of form over function. From the smallest, an oddly shaped spoon that made me want to scoop some broth to see if I could actually eat from it, to the videos showing her largest buildings, I could only see a desire to impress with none, not one little iota, of practicality.  These buildings are a legend in her own mind and will not stand the test of time.  


Please, beauty and form can go hand in hand with practical considerations.  Ms. Hadid seems to think that they are exclusive of each other and it shows in her work.


I am not a fan.

Here is a photo of my bedside table.  No arrangement or cleaning.  Bedisde table raw.

As you can see my bed is not made.  Why make it when I am going to mess it right up again. The sheets are clean.  That is what matters.  The book is a school leftover that I did not want sell on Amazon.  The class was accelerated and left a lot of stories, plays and poems unread.  I am reading through them.  The bottom middle is an electric blanket controller.  I had to get rid of my favorite down comforter.  I cannot tolerate the down anymore, sneezy all night long.  Boo Hoo. The lotion is this really great, minty foot cream with tea tree oil.  I rub it into my feet at night.  It feels so good.  The black thing below and right of it is my sleeping mask.  I used to use it when I worked nights.  Below and to the right of that is a little piece of Hershey's chocolate with almonds. Chocolate needs no explanation.  The white thing next to my phone is a never used in a toilet toilet bowl brush.  A patient of mine had one with her in the hospital.  She told me they are the best back scratchers around.  She was right.  National Enquirer on top of the books.  OJ was beaten in prison.  I wonder if he got even a little idea of how his dead wife felt when he beat her?

So tell me, what's on your beside table?

Okay, here is a story about me.  That IS what this blog is about...me and my perception of outside of me.  That IS all I know, after all.

If you follow this blog,you'll know that I am a nurse.  When I first started being a nurse I worked on the general floor in a small hospital.  I cared for mostly wide awake people who needed much teaching in order to promote best outcome, health wise.  I used to get a lot of elderly women who had urinary tract infections moving towards sepsis.  Most of the women, when asked how much water they drank, would tell me something like "Not much, when I drink water I have to pee all the time."  I would explain to them that it is important to urinate often because the urine kills and washes out the various bacteria that wants to climb up your urethra. (sometimes I would say pee and pee hole, depending on the patients sensibilities).  Now, I am that old lady.  So drink more water Susan.  Your urethra is begging you to.

"Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk

January 4, 2011

Choke

I am reading a book called "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk.  I'm on page 37 and I am crying.  The reviews I read said it was "humorous", called it a "riot" and pointed out how "gritty and perverse" it was.  The perversity IS the sadness. That the little boy who just wanted his mother to love him could have been mistreated into becoming the wretched protagonist of this book breaks my heart.  This story, while fiction, is fact.  This stuff happens every day and I do not find it humorous. It is gut wrenchingly sad.  Self absorbed parents treating children like less than pets...Oh the humanity.

So our society encourages self expression even if the passion blasting the self into the nethersphere is born of pure pain inflicted on a child...even if that lust is nothing more than an insane repetition of an inhuman past craving resolution.  I do not think it is okay to wallow in the shit that has been heaped upon us since birth.  Shit contaminates, it is poison. Sexual perversion is not the result of a happy childhood.  It is the result of pain, of sorrow inflicted on a child and any adult expressions of that pain are merely reenactments of the same.  It is like a vortex that keeps one prisoner due to it's very lack of solution, like if one keeps putting oneself into that hell it will, one day, turn out differently.  It will not.

We are God's.  He wants to free us all from the chains that bind us, some literally.  He wants to redeem our lives and allow us to become the person we were born to be, not the the person we became, endlessly looking for a different ending to the same play.