Sibling Assignment #81: War

Our sibling assignment came from Silver Valley Girl:

"As our thoughts are centered on the men who fought for and defended our country this week, write a post with the focus on War."

Both of my siblings have posted their pieces. Silver Valley Girl's is here and InlandEmpireGirl's is here.

I'm a little late with this post and I lost my Veteran's Day vibe. But, Silver Valley Girl's prompt triggered a memory.


Being drunk for days on end transformed how I saw the world.

I always had a slight headache, a headache I learned to long for. The pain circled around the most exurban fringe of my nerve centers and didn't debilitate me. The slight ache sharpened my senses, making my world more vibrant and memorable.

I had this slight headache most days in the late winter and spring of 1973 during my freshman year at North Idaho College.

I spent most of my time at Baco and Robert's apartment on the Fort Grounds of Coeur d'Alene, at place we accurately, especially when we left out dirty dishes at night, called Cockroach Castle.

It was the best of times. Baco, Robert, and I were in an American Literature course together and on late afternoons we filled the icebox with Lucky Lager beer and Marl-bater cigarettes and listened to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and drank beer and read passages aloud from T.S. Eliot and the National Lampoon and Playboy interviews and from the Walla Walla College course catalogue (Baco and Robert were Walla Walla College dropouts) and listened to Cream and Led Zeppelin and Free and Jethro Tull and KHQ-FM and went to the Topper for Double Whammies when hungry. And smoked Marl-baters.

I had the greatest girlfriend. I wish I hadn't squandered Liz's affections. Liz loved bringing Cat Stevens to the Castle and teaching us Catholic catechism and drilling me for my U.S. History exams when I read five chapters the night before the test and she encouraged me, telling me she couldn't believe I could keep details of Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan clear while trying to finish reading "Deliverance" while maintaining my rigorous beer drinking schedule.

I remember one day in particular, not for what Liz and Bocco and Robert and I did, but for the day itself. It must have been an April day. I remember the relief. The sky was sapphire. The temperature climbed into the low seventies after a long gray North Idaho stretch of days in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

I'd been drunk or hungover for several days in a row and Liz and I drove down east Sherman in her Ford Fairlane to the Sherman IGA to buy a case of beer and cash checks for cash.

The dull ache in my head from too much drink craved the warmth and clear light of this April afternoon. Liz radiated with good humor and enthsuiasm to get back to drinking. We ecstatically cussed the day, peppering our praises for Lake Coeur d'Alene and the Ponderosa pines with our own liturgy, repeating our single cry of praise: "I can't believe how fucking beautiful it is!"

We held hands, bought our beer at Sherman's IGA, got back in the car, and romanced the parking lot. We held each other, shared long kisses, held each other's faces with our eyes and in our hands, and kept saying, "I can't believe how fucking beautiful it is."

Liz fired up the Fairlane.

We had the radio on.

At that moment, God intervened. The waves of the Holy Spirit joined with the radio waves and filled Liz's car with joy and rhythm and the reckless pleasure of being nineteen years old on an endless April afternoon by gracing us with "The Cisco Kid".

By War.

If you'd like, watch and listen to War perform. Light up a Marl-bater, snap open a cheap lager, and join Liz and me in the parking lot of the Sherman IGA; get your War funk on, lift your eyes to the sky, cry out, "I can't believe how fucking beautiful it is!", and let your spirit (and maybe your body!) dance.

Led not Dead Live from the Filmore West

Three Beautiful Things: 11/19-21/08: Jeff, Rumi, Stacey: Three Keys to the Noble Life

1. Jeff and I have been friends for twenty-two years, ever since our days together as graduate students at the University of Oregon. We have traveled a lot of miles together to go hear a lot of music: Grateful Dead, Zero, Richard Thompson, Renegade Saints, Nine Days Wonder, Crosby,Stills, and Nash, Floydian Slips, and a lot of music and music talk passes between us, especially at LCC where we are both English instructors. This whole week has been one of our most robust in music talk: conversations about David Gilmour, the rest of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Zero, but the best talk has been about the great pleasure we get from the Grateful Dead. If there were doctoral degrees in Grateful Deadness, Jeff would have earned one long ago and he's generous with his knowledge (it's all about the music, not the Scene), happily shares his recordings, and puts up with me dropping by his office almost every day to talk about the ways the Grateful Dead made music and the many musicians who are part of the Grateful Dead family tree and jam band tradition. The Grateful Dead kicks the hell out of Paxil as an anti-depressant!

2. Rumi.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

I haven't been writing as much here on my blog lately because I've been devoting as much time and energy as I can to reading student writing and trying to help my students in their work. This is the best part of the term: in my World Literature class, my students are able to write with more feeling and depth about what we are reading and this week has been a particularly happy one for me as I read my students' diving into the mysteries of Rumi.

3. Stacey said in class Tuesday night that her way to live a noble life is to act upon the kindness and compassion that rises inside her when she remembers that we are all dying. She didn't mean this in a morbid way and last night in WR 121, we spent over an hour discussing Stacey's insight and I left class buoyed, with the highest regard for my students' intelligence and their longing to learn more about living a noble life and putting what they learn into practice. My gratitude has to go out to Dan O'Brien for the way he explores this idea in Buffalo for the Broken Heart. I'm sorry to see our study of this book come to an end.

Three Beautiful Things 11/18/08: Noble Life, Zero Tribute, Bootleg Dylan

1. I deeply enjoyed my evening WR 121 class's discussion of what it means to live a noble life in response to Dan O'Brien's exploration of the same in Buffalo for the Broken Heart.

2. I purchased and downloaded the 08/08/08 Zero tribute concert to Martin Fierro, their lyrical and mirthful saxophone player who died March 13. Listening to "Gregg's Eggs" and "Catalina" and "Horses" and other tunes took me back thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years ago to WOW Hall or to the Hilton Ballroom and night after night of improvisational jam jazz rock blues with Zero and the long, often dreamy meditations of Martin Fierro, as well as his playful antics with windup toys and verbal nonsense. If I could go back in time and relive any concerts from my past life, I'd go back to those great nights on the floor of the packed WOW Hall with Zero.

3. I fired up my pathetically tiny MP3 player with thirty-nine tracks from Bob Dylan's "Tell Tale Signs, the eighth volume of his bootleg releases. Dylan is old. I've never enjoyed him more. The gravity and weariness and depth of his aging voice makes his singing more accessible to me. He genuinely sounds at time deeply vulnerable and at other times he sounds like a wizened sage.

Three Beautiful Things 11/17/08: Quiet, Mmm, Molly

1. Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
-- Rumi

2. Today the grilled cheese and bacon sandwich I fixed for lunch pleased me. Sometimes that's all it takes.

3. My stepdaughter Molly and I had a great email exchange today. She's getting married in June and the wedding plans are kicking into high gear, as well as some of the family tensions that inevitably arise when planning a festival. Here's Molly, her fiancee, Hiram, and their dog, Yzerman:

Three Beautiful Things 11/16/08: Grateful Dead Dream, Worship, Writing Grows

1. The Grateful Dead is in my head. Last night I dreamed that Jeff Harrison and I team taught a course on the Grateful Dead at LCC. I wrote Jeff as full of an account of the dream as I could. I've posted my description of the dream below.

2. I have attended services at St. Mary's Episcopal Church three out of the lasts five weeks. I think I'm getting back into the swing of worshipping. I was a bit reclusive at church today, but the worship felt right, necessary, and fulfilling. I felt at home.

3. Some of my writing students are really starting to get it and as their writing grows in power, my sense of enjoyment, stimulation, and happiness grows.


The Dream:

So, as is my habit now, I tuned the XM radio to channel 57 so the Grateful Dead would serenade me through the night and possibly get into my dreams.

There we were, Jeff: team teachers, giving a Grateful Dead course at Lane Community College. We built the course around the idea that the Grateful Dead were ancient and modern at the same time. We taught our students that the lightning bolt in the skull

is a yin yang symbol and that the Grateful Dead constitutes an infinite number of co-existing opposite principles in an eternal flux of assertion and recession. Sometimes the dark asserts and the light recedes, but they are of each other, and we taught that the Grateful Dead's music and musicianship give us a constant experience of moving fluidly within oppositions.

So, it was the last day of class and I raised the question we had started the course with: how can we understand the Grateful Dead in terms of the yin and yang of the ancient and modern.

A student shot up her hand and wondered how we could understand the elements of psychedelic drug use in terms of the ancient and the modern and you quoted, without a book or notes, a series of wisdom teachings from ancient Jewish mysticism and pointed out how lyrics in several Robert Hunter songs grew out of and paralleled this ancient mysticism and that tripping on LSD was a way of asserting modern mystic experiences in relation to our receding knowledge, in modern times, of ancient Jewish mysticism, but that the modern and the ancient were present in both the Grateful Dead's music and in the hallucinogenic rituals that developed in the scene surrounding the band.

You held up a large print of the lightning bolt in the skull and reminded the students that the lightning bolt is the ever fluid threshold between opposite forces and by thinking of the ancient as blue and the modern as red, we could see ways in which there are moments when the ancient blue is dominant in certain Grateful Dead moments and other times when the modern red dominates, but that the Grateful Dead, you reminded the students, should always be understood as portraying the endless interplay between the ancient and modern.

That's pretty much the dream. I don't know what tunes were playing on the radio during this dream....Dark Star maybe? or maybe Cosmic Charlie?

All I can say is thank God for Channel 57.

Three Beautiful Things 11/15/08: Special Olympics Breakfast, Snug Cruise, A Purple Umbrella and a Fifty Cent Hat

1. Got up, threw on an ugly ensemble of rumpled brown highwater slacks, a half milk, half cream colored pair of dollar store socks, Whitworth hoodie, and ebony crocs and told Deke I was going to Appleby's for a five dollar Special Olympics benefit breakfast. I figured I'd be going Hans Solo, but the Deke wanted to go and so we did.

The breakfast was perfect: fluffy pancake, modest heap of scrambled eggs, three slices of bacon, not crisp, but cooked through, just the way I like it, served on a festive oval platter accompanied by a pint glass of iced orange juice . I loved that Appleby's served everyone the same plate of food: no menu, no decisions: just sit down, get some coffee and juice, wait a few minutes, and a steamy plate of morning energy appeared. And, it was all you can eat, but Deke and I stopped at one plate!

If I found out a restaurant took this one plate, one pancake, scrambled egg, tender bacon, five dollar, no order needed approach to breakfast, I'd be there every Saturday.

2. Snug and I went errand hopping and software windowshopping and we listened on the radio as the Ducks screamed to a 45-17 halftime lead over Arizona, but by the time we took a stroll in Westmoreland Park and came home to debone the whole chicken that had been in the Crock Pot all day and by the time we ate our dinner, the Ducks had squandered all but three points of that magical lead, but hung on to win 55-45, and in celebration Snug ate a Pig's Ear.

3. My midmorning, post Appleby's tooling around town featured the XM radio tuned in to the Led Zeppelin channel and I nearly ecstatically crashed into the front of Old Navy when "Hearbreaker/Livin' Lovin' Maid" jumped out of the sky and into the tinny speakers of my '93 Honda Civic.

Three Beautiful Things 11/14/08: Thanks, Tony; Good Luck, Kanette; A Masterpiece, Rick

1. Tony reads my blog sometimes! Before class got rolling this morning, he asked me to clarify the sibling assignment concept. He seemed to chuckle at the thought of me screaming down Chestnut Hill on that unknown item Silver Valley Girl photographed, sent to me, and assigned me to write about.

2. I met with Kanette today at the Daily Grind. She's taking a careers course at the Univ. of Oregon and, as a course requirement, interviewed me as someone who works in a field she might be interested in. I've been available to be interviewed by students in this program for several years and it's a lot of fun to yammer about my work and give my couple of cents of advice.

3. Rick Wainright's Friday 55 poem "Lost Time" is a masterpiece, as is his thirty second slideshow, accompanied by the poet himself reading the poem. Click here, watch, listen, weep.

(Some of you might know Rick as Myrtle Beached Whale, who writes with a smirk. For this piece, Whale dropped the smirk, wrote as Rick, and. . . well, check it out.)

Three Beautiful Things 11/13/08: Trance, Satisfaction, Joy

1. I felt myself move into a new dimension of consciousness as I tried to explain to my students how Dan O'Brien's efforts to restore his Broken Heart ranch by raising buffalo had the effect of restoring his soul, of moving more deeply into living a noble life. I wondered if my students could tell that, because I feel Dan O'Brien's experience was so profound, I fell into a trance in front of them in class.

2. My World Lit students' ten minute reflections on the Coleman Barks/Rumi videotape were arresting, stimulating, admirable, insightful, energetic, gratifying . . . .

3. When Melissa learned that her essay on joining the Army becoming the way she lost her pursuit of the American dream had earned the maximum seventy points, her chin quivered, her chest shook, her stomach somersaulted, and a huge smile covered her face.

Three Beautiful Things 11/12/08: Grateful Satellite Radio, Coleman Barks is Rumi, Not Guilty My Ass

1. Got an email today from XM Satellite radio telling me that with the merger of Sirius and XM, I have a new line up of channels to listen to. OMG! Channel 57 is the Grateful Dead channel. I love having the cosmic country sounds of the Grateful Dead as the soundtrack to my life and I can hardly wait to have the Grateful Dead channel on though the night. I've always loved to sleep with the Grateful Dead playing. I mean, I love them when I'm awake, but it's great dream music and triggers all kinds of wonderful stuff in my unconscious mind while I sleep.

2. Today I played the hour long Bill Moyers interview with Coleman Barks to my World Lit students and I loved the silence that fell in the room as Coleman Barks tried to explain the mysticism of Rumi and as he read Rumi poems accompanied by the Paul Winter Consort. For me, this is the turning point in the World Lit course. With Rumi, it's like we are entering into a world so strange, so unlike what we are used to, and this is just what a World Lit course should do for me and my students.

3. It felt good to cut loose with a string of the vilest profanity when MB told me that her stalker had pleaded not guilty to breaking the stalking order. He came, in full view of me and Margaret and campus safety and later the sheriff's officeto LCC six weeks ago to bring MB a gift wrapped knife. I hope his not guilty plea doesn't fly with the jury and pisses off the judge and, when he is found guilty, the judge punishes him severely.

Three Beautiful Things 11/11/08: Steely Dan, Veteran Wainwright, Veteran Bennett

1. It's funny. I get older and music that was popular twenty-five, thirty years kind of went by me and now, in my mid-fifties, I'm recovering it. Pink Floyd's the prime example. Today, it was Steely Dan. I graded essays most of the day and gave myself a Steely Dan concert via Napster and, well, I've neglected Walter and Donald too long.

2. Veteran's Day highlight: I've know Rick over at Myrtle Beach Ramblings since I was five years old. At his blog, he writes with a smirk, but for Veteran's Day he put the smirk aside and wrote this piece on his military service and later wrote a deeply moving poem that (I think) he'll be posting on Friday. It'll feature him reading the poem and accompanying images. I'll link to it when he puts it up.

3. Melissa, WR 121 student, veteran of the war in Afghanistan wrote a haunting and moving essay about how she sacrificed for her country by going to war. She also sacrificed the very American Dream she went to war to defend. Very sobering essay.

Three Beautiful Things on Freaky 11/10/08: Nathan Obama, Marge Reunion, Cassie Asks Hard Questions, BONUS! NMc's Feminist Groove

1. So last night I had this harmless dream about the Obama family and Barack Obama had a son about six feet six tall with curly/wavy brown hair who I recognized as my former student Nathan. I was fun thinking about Nathan as a member of the first family and I liked how Pres.-elect Obama jived Nathan about being a white kid from Newport as he put an encouraging arm around his shoulder. I woke up this morning smiling about Nathan Obama and went to work and conducted my 10:00 World Lit class, thinking I hadn't seen Nathan since midsummer when I was out walking Snug and Nathan was on his bike and stopped to tell me about his plans to work hard and move to Germany to live with his brother and focus his energies on writing and art so I went to my office after class and was fiddling around when I heard a knock on the door.

It was Nathan Obama.

Freaky.

2. Lately I'd been thinking about a student of mine from the 1990's who took all my composition courses and some Shakespeare, too, because I see a woman around school whose looks resemble hers and after today's swim through The Ramayana in World Lit I didn't even get to my office before, lo and behold, there was Marge. I hadn't seen her in at least ten years, she'd been on my ind, and as if on cue, she appeared. Freaky. I'd been on her mind, too, and she decided to stop by and see how I'd been and to tell me the latest about her life as a mother, a resident of Salem, and her continuing struggles with MS.

3. Sooo, I went over to Margaret's office after Nathan Obama shuffled off and we were talking about mental health and teaching and our team teaching when one of our Fat Cats students popped in, out of nowhere, and Cassie told us about her idealism and her blunt honesty in workplaces and the difficulty she was having holding jobs down and what was she going to do with the rest of her life, anyway: Did we have any ideas? MB did. I didn't. I was too preoccupied with how freaky it was that Cassie just showed up at the same time MB and I were discussing our teaching of the very course Cassie took from us two years ago.

Bonus Track!

4. As the evening stretched out, I read deeper and deeper into my World Lit. students' Antigone essays, a deep pleasure. I got to NMc's paper. Neil writes his papers from a feminist perspective and Antigone was a banquet of fine food for getting his feminist groove on. His essay provoked, stimulated, and stretched me. About three quarters into his essay, NMc addressed his displeasure with women feminists who claimed men couldn't be feminists. I gulped. Freaky. Only three hours earlier, I had taken on the same subject in this blog post. Freaky.

Discovering I'm Not a Feminist

During Whitworth College's spring break of 1983, I rode the Greyhound to Seattle land back to hang out with some friends, go to a few movies, and just enjoy being on a short trip.

I was a working as a full-time, interim instructor in the English Department. I was twenty-nine years old, newly divorced, and trying to secure some direction in my life. Through my youth and enthusiasm and liberal-mindedness, I quickly won the trust of quite a few outsider students at Whitworth, most notably a group of women who met regularly for dinner together off-campus to discuss their emergent ideas about gender. Several, but not all, of these students were lesbians.

In casual conversations at the store or in the cafeteria or in my office, I asked questions, not to challenge, but to understand what these students were discussing and tried to understand their perspectives. I was ignorant. They loved helping me understand their questions and how they talked about things -- and always made it clear that I would never be invited to their meals for women!

One of the students suggested that I read Adrienne Rich's collection of essays On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

I read Rich's book on the Greyhound bus between Spokane and Seattle.

The book puzzled me. It challenged my assumption that consciousness, how we think, perceive, remember, and generally experience the world was a sexless/genderless experience.

I thought of feminism as a movement centered on equal rights for women under the law and on equal opportunity in the workplace and on women earning equal pay for equal work.

It had never occurred to me that on a metaphysical level, women experience the world differently than men or that women have different ways of arriving at knowledge and of deciding what kinds of knowledge they find reliable. Nor did I ever think of questions of morality or ethics as being anything but a universally human concern, not a concern that women experience differently than men.

Rich challenged my universalist philosophical assumptions more strongly than they'd ever been challenged. Rich helped me begin to think of feminism as concerned with deeper issues of consciousness, with consciousness shaped by gender.

I felt a little threatened at first. I didn't like the idea that the experience of being a woman was quite different from mine, as a man. I wanted to believe that, at the level of perception and cognition and affect, men and women had more in common than differences and that if men and women could work things out socially and legally, if we could hammer out institutional equality, we could stop thinking of women's issues and focus more on human issues.

In other words, I'd thought of feminism as a legal/political/social movement. I was, and still am, a proponent of this kind of equality, so I thought I could call myself a feminist.

After riding a Greyhound bus between Spokane and Seattle in the spring of 1983 and after reading On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, I never thought of myself as a feminist again.

Ever since that bus ride, I have regarded feminism as a fundamentally philosophical way of women working to resist the idea that men and women differ only in terms of reproductive organs, the ability to give birth, and in other physical respects.

I came to understand that the differences between men and women are deeper than physical and chemical.

This difference is fundamental: men and women perceive, process, think about, sort out, understand, negotiate, and understand reality in fundamentally different ways.

The memory of my bus ride between Spokane and Seattle, my conversations with the feminist students at Whitworth, my years of further reading and countless conversations and discussions listening to women graduate students and faculty at the University of Oregon and fellow instructors at LCC all came back to me when Barack Obama was elected president last week.

Not only do men and women perceive, process, think about, sort out, understand, negotiate, and understand reality in fundamentally different ways, so do members of different races.

And that's where I'll pick things up in my next blog entry. How has being white (and male) shaped my consciousness and the way I experience the world I live in? I don't see the world the same way an African-American does.

It's why I don't think we can think of a post-racial world.

It's why in my happiness that we elected Obama president, I also feel very somber. It's not that I don't want to be led by a man who has and does experience the world fundamentally differently than I do.

It's the challenge Obama and our country faces that leaves me somber.

Enough for now: I'll pick this up in another day or two and try to sort out the question of racial whiteness as it applies to me, a North Idaho boy, and how being white has affected the very frame of mind I carry with me into the world.

I'm hoping that eventually I can explain why I think we should be saying that if we voted for Barack Obama, it was because he's black. And how I don't see anything wrong at all about voting for a candidate because of our response to his race. I think such a response is healthy and inevitable.

Three Beautiful Things 11/09/08: Sibling Assignment, Winded, Thanksgiving Shaping Up

1. I had a great time writing this week's sibling assignment and my sisters did too. It's really fun when these assignments we give each other hit the mark!

2. Snug and I went up to the Laurelwood area of Eugene and did some uphill walking. We both needed to get the blood flowing and the breathing accelerated.

3. Ed called. Our guys get together weekend in Cd'A is shaping up. I can hardly wait to make the trip, see my family, and be with the guys again.

Sibling Assignment #80: The God Machine of Snow Speed

I gave this week's sibling assignment. It's offbeat. I hope it works, or at the very least, I hope my sisters and I have fun tackling this one.

Take a picture of something weird or of something not weird in a weird way.
Try to make the subject of your picture either unrecognizable or take a picture of something really odd that your viewer won't know what it is.

Post the picture and write a post about it in whatever way you want. You might try to identify what's in the picture or you might write what the picture makes you feel or think about or whatever.

Silver Valley Girl posted a Pulitzer Prize worthy poem, "Keeping My Eyes on Kellogg", here. Go right now and read about the great ice cold slug bait beer search in Mom's garage, courtesy of InlandEmpireGirl, here.

Here's the photo Silver Valley Girl sent me and my story follows:

"Do you think it's big enough?"

"Yeah. It's big enough. How big you think it needs to be?"

"Big enough for my ass, I guess."

"There ya go. So put your ass on this sucker and let it rip."

I have to admit: I was apprehensive.

I'd waxed the rails of my not quite flexible Sears and Roebuck Flexible Flyer knockoff and flown down Chestnut Hill plenty of times. I'd borrowed the Morgan boys' Flexible Flyer and marveled at the whiplash eccentricities of its touch runner power steering and just last week I screamed down Chestnut with Cara and Mary and Jim on the monster logging truck inner tube Randy Dolphin's dad hauled over in the back of his three quarter ton burnt sienna Ford F-150 pick-up. Last year Randy Winterowd brought his turquoise Wham-O Spinmaster Tilt-a-Whirl Flying Saucer and when I dizzied myself through the Chestnut and Mission Street intersection, I never enjoyed throwing up hot chocolate and marshmellows more.

But what was this? It was not a tricked up ride, no maple polish, no Arctic lightning bolts tattooed across its top, or flashy Northern Lights color design.

It might have been a paint pan. It looked like the underneath of a ditto machine. It was as flashy as the front strut-mate mounting kit Dad bought last month when he and Art Listoe tried to shore up the suspension of our Chevy Impala.

But Lloyd promised me a great ride.

"Okay. I'll give it a try."

I dragged Lloyd's ride to the top of Chestnut Hill and then went a bit farther on a trail we'd built between the bushes on the little mountain above Chestnut Street hill. It meant barreling a few hundred feet down the mountain and then taking a hard right onto the Chestnut Street hill itself and screaming three steep blocks to Mission Avenue at the foot of Chestnut.

A wind had picked up and it blew the snowflakes like pine needles into my face. Whizzing down Chestnut on Lloyd's faceless snow glider was going to hurt, but if it was a great ride, it would be worth it.

I hit a couple bumps coming down the mountain that lifted me off the ground. My heart leapt into my eyes. The wind and snow wet my eyes, but I managed to lean into the hard right onto Chestnut. I laid back, just like the lugers in the Grenoble Olympics. My face felt flat. I zoomed by Carol Lee and Suzie Mac and the Absec boys and roared past Lennie.

Some of the kids stopped in their tracks. Later they told me that I streaked so fast they could barely tell who I was. Other kids quit climbing Chestnut and started to run to the foot of the hill to see me when I finished this run.

I'd ridden the Jack Rabbit at Nat Park and water skied behind the Ross's inboard/outboard on Beauty Bay and I'd cannon-balled off the high dive at the city pool, but nothing compared to the feeling of speed and power and dominance I felt as I flew down Chestnut Hill and blew through Mission Street and rocketed all the way through Mullan Street and finally came to a stop at Riverside.

No one had ever sledded down Chestnut Hill and made it all the way to Riverside. When I came to a stop, I looked back and all my friends were running toward me, hollering, whooping, laughing, jumping up and down, speechless in their ecstasy to have seen me achieve the impossible.

I never rode Lloyd's slate king of speed again. After my ride, Lloyd took his snow glider home and never used it again.

"I wanted my god machine of snow speed to go out on top," he told me a couple of weeks later. "No one will ever match what you did that day on Chestnut Hill."

I almost retired from sledding myself after that ride. I didn't, though. I went back to riding, savoring every ride from then on.

I never expected to have a ride like that again.

And I never did.

Three Beautiful Things 11/08/08: They Laugh, XM Success, Rain Energy

People they laugh when they hear you're from my town
They say it's a sour and used up all place
I defended its honor, shrugged off the put downs
You know that you're poor, from Tacoma

1. This Neko Case song popped into my mind this evening while I was conemplating my racial identity. I've always listened to almost the entire song as being about Kellogg -- "People laugh when they hear you're from this town"... I hope you'll take a few minutes and listen Neko Case singing it on You Tube.

2. I love my small brushes with materialism and its pleasures. Today I had an XM Satellite radio installed in my Honda, and after some trouble shooting on line, with a robot customer service machine at 1-800-XM Radio, finally at 8:10 this evening my Honda Civic is now tricked out with satellite radio.

3. I know it's miserable and bone chilling, but the rain gives me energy. I've been energized all day and much of the day was sopping cold.

Lots on My Mind

The election of Barack Obama has plunged me into contemplation about race in the United States. I'm not quite ready to write it all out yet, but last night I did what I enjoy doing most when I am in a contemplative mood.

I drove over the Coast Range to Florence, my mind quietly working over the ways I've come to understand racial difference in our country. The drive did me a lot of good.

After all that thinking, I did what I enjoy doing when I need to let my mind relax from its thoughts. I played slot machines at the casino and lost myself in flashing lights, Diet Pepsi, bells, animated figures, and the suspense and tension playing slots helps me feel.

I had a meal coupon and so I took a break from playing and plunged back into contemplation over salad, cold shrimp, crab, breaded scallops, razor clams, breaded jumbo shrimp, seafood pasta, and more Diet Pepsi at the Friday night fish buffet.

The buffet was not very well attended, so while a pianist played the greatest hits of Celine Dion, Elton John, and the early Bee Gees not far behind me, I thought more about race and what it's meant to me be white and a native North Idahoan.

So often, when the word "race" is employed, it's in reference to people who are not white.

Last night, I needed to think about myself and my family in terms of race, our race, in terms of being white, and how strongly my consciousness and feelings of belonging, especially in North Idaho, are grounded in the fact that I'm white.

I'm not very interested in white guilt. I'm interested in looking as dispassionately as I can at what being white means to a guy like me who has lived, worked, and played with almost exclusively other white people my whole life.

But, I'm not quite really to bust my thoughts into words yet.

I am getting closer to understanding my vote for Barack Obama and closer to understanding why I have expressed my joy at the prospect of his presidency in sober, somber reflection.

I think it all began in the basement of my parents' house, when at ten or eleven years old I used to spend a lot of time reading Life and Look magazines' presentation of the Civil Rights movement.

My consciousness about racial difference in the USA began then and all these forty-five, fifty years later I am still retreating into the basement of my inward self, trying to understand.

If this sounds interesting to you, I hope you'll come back and read more of what I've been thinking as I slowly, somberly, and seriously start to write about my vote for Obama and my thoughts about being white.

Three Beautiful Things 11/07/08: Gilmour Tears, Ramayana and Crayola, Snug Walk

1. I sat in my office this morning and listened to David Gilmour's "Live in Gdansk" album. I don't often have tears running down my face for any reason, but as "High Hopes" progressed and as I listened to David Gilmour's lyrics and listened to him play his lap steel guitar solo, I wept, silently, hoping no one would visit my office. Beauty moved me. (Click on the green eighth notes icon if you'd like to hear the song. You can view David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and the rest of the band, accompanied by the Baltic Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, playing "High Hopes" Live in Gdansk, here.)

2. I loved watching and listening to my World Literature students talk and laugh and work with crayons, color pencils, charcoal sticks and other media as they drew, colored, and pasted pictures on large pieces of sketch pad paper. Their assignment was to work out their insights into The Ramayana and its treatment of dharma and make it visual.

3. Snug and I went for an autumn afternoon stroll. It's difficult taking pictures with Snug on the leash, but I did manage to capture leaves on the sidewalk and a shot pointed at our neighborhood's Baptist Church.

Three Beautiful Things 11/4-5/08: Obama Somberness, Sopa de Pollo, New Sheriff of Bunn, Burke, Eagle, Clarkia, Delta, Avery, Gem, and Murray, Idaho

1. Barack Obama is our 44th POTUS. His win triggered deep somberness in me.

2. I bought this spicy Mexicany chicken from Trader Joe's and used it as the basis for a soup with chicken broth, string beans, spinach, onion, and egg noodle. It's spicy, bone warming soup.

3. The country's election I cared the most about was finally resolved: write-in candidate Mitch Alexander defeated primary winner Gary Yergler for the Office of Sheriff of Shoshone County, Idaho.

Three Beautiful Things 11/02/08: Tsunami Nearly Over, Bacon and Eggs, Country Pop Rock

1. I'm getting caught up. I'm still behind in my paper reading, but I finished and returned over thirty essays today and I have quite a bit of time to work on papers tomorrow. Another deluge will come, but I'd like to be done with the last deluge before the new one.

2. Two slices of medium cooked bacon, a slice of Trader Joe's sharp cheddar cheese, an egg fried over medium sandwiched between two toasted pieces of bread made for a terrific breakfast this morning.

3. I didn't see it coming, but suddenly today I was in a Pure Prairie League/Poco/Marshall Tucker Band/Brooks and Dunn kind of mood and through the magic of Napster, I treated myself to a concert.

Sibling Assignment #79: Christian Brothers Cribbage

InlandEmpireGirl asked us three siblings to write a piece on this:

Many hours of our childhood were spent playing games. Share a memory that involved playing a game(es).

You can scratch your Yahtzee with InlandEmpireGirl, here and tear through Mr. Anderson's bushes playing hide and seek with Silver Valley Girl, here.

All I remember about playing Canasta is that it involved about eight decks of cards and about a pack of Pall Malls for Mom, and it must have been a sad game because someone always cried when we played.

All I remember about Monopoly is that Grandma Woolum told us she got so sick of her kids fighting when they played Monopoly that one day during a heated game she tore the board away from her kids and threw it in the trash burner and torched it.

I do, however, have much happier memories of playing cribbage with my father.


I must have been about thirteen or fourteen years old when one of my aunts or cousins from Orofino gave me a cribbage board for Christmas.

I had no idea what it was. I took the board out of the box and all I saw was holes. They weren't numbered and I could see no purpose for it.

"What's this?"

"I'll show you later, Son. Wait until things settle down."

I don't know if things settled down that Christmas Day, but in the next day or two Dad got out a deck of cards, poured himself a brandy over ice, lit up a Camel straight, and began patiently explaining 15 two, 15 four, nibs, crib, double runs, suited Jacks and the other ins and outs of cribbage.

We played a few hands where he showed me what to do and then a game where he showed me what to do and before long I was on my own and Dad and I found something in addition to watching games on television that we enjoyed doing together.

Our games were calm. Unlike Yahtzee, as InlandEmpireGirl described, where Dad would blow into the cup and rattle the dice under his arm pits and plead with the "bones" to do his will, when it came to cribbage, we played quietly and respectfully.

I began to learn how to form a good hand for getting points in the first play, how to disguise my hand, what the juicy hands were, and how to keep my concentration and make difficult decisions about which cards to keep, which to throw away.

For some reason, I always enjoyed Dad drinking brandy when we played. Because we had to give a lot of attention to our cards, Dad drank the brandy slowly and I enjoyed watching beads of condensation form on his brandy glass as the ice slowly melted and diluted his brandy.

When I turned nineteen and was of legal drinking age, I started drinking brandy on ice when we played.

Our drinking together over cribbage made me feel like I was becoming an adult and that Dad and I were on more equal grounds with each other, not only in cards, but as guys.

Sometimes, usually around Christmas, Dad would buy a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey. This was long before single malt scotches and bourbons began to clutter the landscape of fine liquor. For us, Crown Royal was the top of the line. If we drank Christian Brothers brandy slowly, we took almost imperceptibly small sips from our Crown Royal glasses and heaved sighs of pleasure and eloquently expressed our pleasure: "Now, that's good shit."

In my early thirties, I decided alcohol was getting the best of me and I quit drinking. That was January of 1985. Dad and I still played the occasional game of cribbage when I came home to Kellogg for the holidays, but it wasn't the same.

The cards were good, but I could tell Dad didn't enjoy drinking his brandy or whiskey as much alone as when we sipped them together.

In the fall of 1996, I decided to see if I could drink alcohol again.

But, Dad had died in June.

I started drinking again too late.

If I had it to do over again, I would still have quit drinking alcohol in 1985.

But, I wouldn't have been so rigid. I wish I would have said to Dad, "You know, I quit drinking this shit, but I think for a few games of cribbage, it won't hurt me if we have a glass or two of Christian Brothers brandy with you."

Sibling Assignment #78: Sitting Around at Stein Brothers' IGA

Silver Valley Girl prompted me and InlandEmpireGirl to post an essay exploring the following:

Pick a business in Kellogg where you used to "hang out" in junior high or high school and tell a story about an incident that happened at this location that was really memorable.

InlandEmpireGirl remembers scarfing Awful Awfuls at the Brunswick Cafe in Coeur d'Alene, here, and here, Silver Valley Girl takes readers back to Pappy's Pizza and a Powder Blue Cadillac in Kellogg.

A lull.

A handful of shoppers, most just grabbing a box of Oly or a six pack of Lucky Lager. No need for a boxboy.

The store's shelves were restocked.

It wasn't time to start sweeping and dry mopping the aisles.

Grab a Darigold crate.

Have a seat.

Let's shoot the shit.

My favorite hangout in high school was the stock room at the back of Stein Brothers' IGA where I worked as a boxboy for three years.

It didn't matter if it was Merle or ReillyJ or ReillyT or Boosh or Jimmy or Dickie or Dale or LeRoy or Chico or 'Sidro or Red or who it was, when Kellogg mothers had finished buying out the store and when the price changes were done or when the canned green bean display was built, I loved pinching a pint of chocolate milk or a cream puff in the bakery or a can of Pepsi from the cooler and pulling up a milk crate or a box of Carnation Evaporated Milk and sitting down with my fellow boxboys or bosses and shooting the shit at Stein Brothers' IGA on Hill and Cameron in Kellogg, Idaho.

We talked about Led Zeppelin and Neil Diamond, basketball games and biology tests; the National Football League and high school football; high school girls who came in the store, and the couple or three gorgeous checkers LeRoy always hired to keep customers coming in the store; we told jokes, lied, picked on each other, and kept our morale up.

The work at Stein Brothers' IGA wasn't bad. We carried customers' groceries to their cars, kept product on the shelves, incinerated scores of cardboard boxes, cleaned up broken jars of Nalley's Dill Pickles, delivered groceries to a handful of shut-ins, and kept track of weekly bargains and answered customers' questions.

But, it was hanging out in the stock room that I loved the most.

I still pull up a milk crate at work and shoot the shit now that I'm an English instructor at LCC.

Outside MB's office a small round table sits in the corner and from time to time MB and sometimes KZ and sometime PM and pull up a chair at this table and shoot the shit.

We talk about Pink Floyd and student essays and the politics of our workplace and we crack jokes and tell funny stories.

It keeps our morale up and makes our work sweeter.

Now my favorite place to hang out is the round table in the corner by MB's office. It's just like sitting on a box of Del Monte cling peaches in the stock room.

I get stuff off my chest, laugh, and learn about the world I live in in a way that keeping my nose to the grindstone denies me.

Like drinking pinched Pepsis with Merle and ReillyT, it's what makes the workplace a pleasure.

Three Beautiful Things 11/01/08: Back, Gary, John

1. I posted again today. That really felt good. I've been overwhelmed lately with work and I've been struggling with some fatigue, and it was invigorating to write a blog post again and feel back in this groove again.

2. I ran into Gary, a former student of mine at LCC, and his wife, Jennifer, who was also my student once, at Border's today. Gary took about five or six courses with me and we became good friends. He is a veteran of the Navy and a very bright guy. We've lost touch since he left LCC and graduated from the U. of Oregon with a couple of degrees. I hope our reunion means that we'll get back to having a cup of coffee or something together again. He's a great guy.

3. I ran into John at the store today. John is a photographer and used to do a lot of work at LCC, but rarely works there anymore. It was good to see him. He's been through some personal grief and had some health problems. When I told him he was looking a lot better today, he smiled and told me that, indeed, things were going better. That was really good news.

Sibling Assignment #77: Raymond, The Christian Skeptic

About three weeks ago, I assigned this prompt to my sisters and me:

In honor of the upcoming production by the Sixth Street Theater of the musical "Godspell" write a post explaining what your spiritual experience has been with "Godspell" and, if possible, how that experience is similar and/or different from your spiritual experience with "Jesus Christ Superstar".

Silver Valley Girl's post is here and here is InlandEmpireGirl's.

As I posted in my last piece, I live my life skeptically, never really knowing if what I see or hear or feel is true. I experience the world as an unsettled, unpredictable, puzzling, inconstant, fluid, riddling place where we live our lives acting on partial knowledge, fallible judgment, and fractured perceptions. It's humbling. As much as I'd like to think I'm knowledgeable, exercise keen judgment, and am impeccably perceptive, I'm not. I do the best I can, but I'm living in a fog. I think we all are.

Therefore, I am a Christian. I have to live by faith in a mysterious reality of resurrection and forgiveness. Otherwise, I'd go mad. By all scientific and social scientific measures, to live a life of faith in what I cannot see or touch or taste or hear or smell and by a reality that cannot be measured, is to be a fool.

I'm a fool. I'm a Christian fool.

Over the last couple of years or so, I've not been going to church, primarily because my struggles with depression combined with my introvertedness combined with the demands of my work make church attendance draining. It's weird. Church fatigues me.

But, two weeks ago, I recommitted myself to church worship again. After services both Sundays, I came home and slept for an hour or so.

Church still fatigues me.

But, entering again into the liturgy of the Anglican tradition and once again drinking the wine of the blood of Christ and eating the bread of Christ's body at the Communion rail invigorated my spirit, fatiguing as that might be.

Returning to church is awakening what I think is my most Christ-like quality: my skepticism.

And this brings me to "Godspell".

I saw "Godspell" the first time at Cowles Auditorium on the campus of Whitworth College (now University) during the summer of 1974. The performance was put on by a group of Christian actors giving benefit performances in various cities in support of Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

I'd heard that "Godspell" offended some Christians because Jesus is portrayed as a clown.

I thought it was perfect. Clowns are skeptics. Clowns subvert the world as we know it, taking what we assume to be true about the world and showing us, no, that's not true. There's more. We think a small car can only hold a couple of people. Then we discover a small car can hold a thousand clowns.

Jesus was skeptical of common understandings of the Law, of the human tendencies toward strife and grudges, of the what the world says is the place of the poor and the infirm and the prisoner.

He was skeptical of the finality of death. Where others saw finiteness, this clown Jesus saw eternity, everlasting life.

"Godspell" helped me understand the subversive nature of the parables. We expect the holy men to help the man beaten on the road to Jericho, but it's the slimy Samariatan who aids him; we expect the prodigal son to be yelled at and punished by his father, but he his return is celebrated, laviciously; the world would say that if a shepherd had ninety-nine out of a hundred sheep in tow, be satisfied. Ninety-nine out of a hundred ain't bad. Jesus subverts that idea. In the subversive Kingdom of God, the shepherd searches and seeks and doesn't rest until he's found his one lost sheep and returned it to the fold.

I don't remember all that Jesus the clown does in "Godspell". It's been too long since I've seen it. But as one who is skeptical of worldly values and of worldly pursuits as ends in themselves, Jesus as clown helped me see worldly values turned upside down.

I can't change the nature of the world I'm so skeptical of, but I can live in faith, seeing through the eyes of Jesus, seeing things in reverse, living by a reality that transcends the one I'm so skeptical of.

But, there's more.

Complementing the experience I had with "Godspell" was the very different experience of "Jesus Christ Superstar". I first saw Jesus Christ Superstar as a movie, first with Silver Valley Girl when she was about a fifth grader and then again my junior year at Whitworth when it was the Saturday night campus movie and Cowles Auditorium was packed.

I'd been told in my high school youth group at the United Church of Kellogg that I should be careful about seeing "Jesus Christ Superstar" or listening to its music.

The musical presented Jesus as human. The show did not portray the resurrection. It looked at Jesus as a product of his followers' public relations and marketing. Was Jesus Lord? Or was Jesus Christ a Superstar, a Beatle, Joe Namath, Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe, or Marlon Brando?

Put another way, I began to think the musical was raising questions regarding what happens when Jesus, in the 2oth/21st century is not so much Jesus Christ the Lord, but Jesus Christ Superstar.

I saw "Jesus Christ Superstar" live in London in the summer of 1975.

Afterward, I walked the streets of the West End, questions erupting inside me about Jesus Christ.

Who are you?

Are you what they say you are?

Is it all hype?

I heard the voice of Mary Magdalene: "I don't know how to love Him."

My faith grew as I questioned, as I gave in to rather than suppressing my skepticism. I experienced spiritual expansion. I experienced God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost urging me to doubt more, to ask more questions.

"Jesus Christ Superstar" opened the way for my interrogative living of faith. Even these thirty-three years later, questioning is my chief way of knowing God through Jesus Christ.

I don't want to worship a Superstar.

I continue to do, as I did that night walking the streets of London: in the words of Paul, I work out my salvation with fear and trembling.

Homer, Shakespeare, and Election 2008

Homer and William Shakespeare have had more influence on my world view than any other writers or thinkers.

Both see the world and reality as in a constant state of flux and see human beings living precarious lives because our ways of perceiving and understanding what's happening in the world are so limited and flawed.

Neither poet puts much stock in empiricism. Both dramatize the senses, especially sight and hearing, as highly unreliable and both dramatize characters acting on what they think they've seen or heard, only to find out their senses betrayed them.

Things are never what they appear.

I'm not a negative person. I am, however, very skeptical.

Homer and Shakespeare's shared vision of mutability and the human inability to understand things very well rings so true to me, I am so deeply skeptical, that I give others as much benefit of the doubt as I can.

Human limitations on knowledge and knowing move me to me lenient with others. I know things are never what they seem to be to me and that the same is true of others. Things are never wha they seem to be to others either.

We muddle through and the miracle is that we do as well as we do.

Daily, I read twenty or more political blogs, trying to understand what's happening in the election of 2008. I enjoy reading the perspectives different newspaper and citizen bloggers have regarding electoral strategies and campaign developments.

I read it all very skeptically. My skepticism is not born of distrust. It's born of Homer and Shakespeare.

I know these experts can't really know what's happening and what's going to happen. They write compelling analyses, make brave forecasts, survey the terrain of key states, and assert what they think has happened and what will happen and, ultimately, which candidate benefits, which is likely to win.

But they don't know.

The image of Odysseus tossed about the winedark sea, seduced by the Sirens, played with by the whims of Poseidon, lured to the Land of Lotus Eaters comes to mind. Odysseus is never sure what's coming next, doesn't know if what he sees and hears is actual, and so must shoulder forward with courage and skepticism.

I don't necessary share Odysseus' courage, but I sure don't know what I can rely on and what's coming next.

It makes me skeptical.

Three Beautiful Things 10/17/08: Darcy and Kelly, Homer's Tender Moments, KHS Homecoming

1. Two years ago Darcy and Kelly enrolled in courses of mine and we became good buddies. Today Darcy dropped by my office to rekindle our buddyship. We hadn't talked for over a year. I left my office, trudged out to my car, and there was Kelly, trudging to her car and we stood in the parking lot and swapped stories. What a great day: Darcy and Kelly within minutes of each other.

2. I love Homer. It's the small moments I love the most, the tender moments when in the midst of huge events Homer creates, with the lightest of touch, moments of intimacy. Athena tells Telemachus it's not time to be shy as readies himself to talk with Nestor; no one recognizes Odysseus when he returns to Ithaca, except his old and dying dog. My students probably think I'm a nut when I read moments like this in class and show them the goose bumps on my arms.

3. Ed and a handful of my fellow Class of '72 friends called me tonight from the grandstands of Teeters Field in Kellogg. They wanted me to help them enjoy Homecoming.

Three Beautiful Things 10/13/08: No Court, Winedark Sea, Pasta Pleasure

1. Turns out I won't be going to court to observe a hearing of MB's stalker. Tomorrow's hearing will only last about 30 seconds and will focus on whether the perp has an attorney.

2. In World Lit. we started our study of The Odyssey and it is awesome reading Fitzgerald's gorgeous translation of Homer's stirring hymn aloud. Just the simple words "winedark sea" stir something eternal in my soul.

3. The Deke bought these cherry tomatoes and put them over pasta with basil and garlic andolive oil it was as tasty to my palate as "winedark sea" is to my ears.

Three Beautiful Things 10/12/08: Stalking Resources, Gilgamesh Joy, JBelle and the Mothers of My Lai

1. Why would I include studying at the Stalking Resource Center and watching an eighteen minute video about law enforcement and stalking as a beautiful thing? I'm trying to learn all I can in support of MB. When her stalker appears in court this week, I'm going to the hearing and I want to be prepared as best I can.

2. The ancient epic Gilgamesh is terrific story, but never easy for students studying Survey of World Literature. But, I spent this afternoon reading my students' first essays on Gilgamesh and they were, for the most part, engaged, insightful, curious, and probing essays. This class has thirty-four students and we've only met for two weeks. I don't have all the names and faces quite connected yet, but I'm looking forward to arriving in class tomorrow and learning better who's who in this class!

3. In email correspondence today, triggered by mention of her in yesterday's 3BT's, JBelle reminded me that she wrote a post at her blog, Notes from the 'Kan EWA, about what a spiritual experience she had bicycling through Vietnam. The mothers of My Lai moved JBelle profoundly and I'd like you to share in her experience, feelings, and reflections, here. In a time when some are crying out in fear of Obama and others of McCain, the mothers of My Lai remind us to turn away from fear and "walk toward a new future in forgiveness."

Three Beautiful Things 10/11/08: Friends With Differences, JBelle: Fair Play/Good Thoughts, The New Yorker's Perspective

1. Friendships and good working relationships at my job mean more to me than politics. This goes way back for me, in part, because my way of seeing the world has often been at odds with many of my best friends and I grew up in a political environment, in Kellogg, where my father's best friends were divided between labor and management, but left those divisions outside the door when they gathered to watch sporting events, play cards, go on road trips, bowl, and be friends with each other.

Therefore, when I discovered last night night that my wonderful blog friend MGM and I discovered that we are opposed to each other in every way regarding the upcoming election, I found deep relief, and it strengthened my affection for MGM, when we acknowledged our differences, and moved almost immediately into what we care the most about in our correspondence: our families, our love of North Idaho, our honesty with each other, our concern for one another's welfare, etc. I love being friends with people I don't agree with on social and political matters. Mainly, I enjoy listening, testing my outlook, reveling in variety, and admiring the many ways intelligent and passionate convictions take form among me and my friends who genuinely want what's best for our country, states, cities, families, and, lastly, ourselves.

2. Thinking along these lines of what we do with our disagreements and how we engage those we oppose, another wonderful blog friend, JBelle, comes to mind. I don't know if JBelle and I see things the same politically, but at a Spokesman-Review blog, Community Comment, commenters were heaving nastiness about Gov. Sarah Palin around. JBelle intervened:

I was in My Lai Viet Nam last December. I was astounded that under the circumstances the mothers there not only allow their children to talk to Americans but encourage it. It was then I realized that hate and fear are taught; I realized then as I do now that peace begins with me. The mothers of My Lai should be nominated for Nobel Peace Prize because they refused to let fear nor hate invade their children's psyche nor soul. Their powerful example stays with me so I encourage you to ask yourselves why GSP sparks your fear and then ask you, respectfully, if there isn't a better place for your fears than in "hate posts" here. And I ask you to think good thoughts for all the Presidential candidates and their running mates and for the people of the United State of America. We need it. In the most desperate of ways.

I don't know if JBelle and I have serious differences, but we know we are different: in our taste, lifestyle, ambitions, and worship. We have North Idaho in common. Something in that region affected us similarly and we both want fair play, good thoughts for the candidates, good things for our country. Reading her post in the comments at Community Comment was a beautiful part of my day.

3. It's no surprise that The New Yorker strongly endorsed Obama. I found the endorsement not only ringing but eloquent. You can read it here. In the same article, George Packer goes on the road in Ohio and investigates issues of class and race in the election, here.

Three Beautiful Things 10/10/08: Weight Loss Comfort, Strap, Stalker

1. A student waiting for the elevator explained to the student she was with how she had lost 100 pounds and now she was cold so he took her hands in his and warmed her.

2. Kelly came to the elevator and joined me and the two aforementioned students and they spent the whole ride, from floor 1 to floor 4 talking about Kelly's backpack strap and how much they wished it was theirs. Kelly emailed me later today and thanked me for having her back!

3. It was a very serious meeting, but truth telling strengthened us all. My fellow teacher and long-time friend, MB, has been the subject of a man's obsession for over ten years and with the help of a campus safety officer and a representative from Sexual Assault Support Services, the faculty in our division learned more about what MB has been through and what to do if the perpetrator should return to campus. He's banned. In fact, if comes within five miles of her, he will have broken the dictates of the stalking order the court has issued to protect MB. I've been close to this situation and was really relieved today when more of my fellow teachers learned more about stalking in general, and this situation in particular.

Three Beautiful Things 10/09/08: Good to Go, Invigorating Students, Mayor's Race

1. After my annual physical examination today, Dr. Ghandour issued me as clean of a bill of health as possible, given my chronic kidney disease. I am relieved to know that the other areas of my health are in good shape.

2. I had a great time in both my WR 121 sections today as students discussed what they saw the short film "Family Tree" had to say about loss, survival, and reconciliation. Their insights triggered the coursing of adrenaline throughout my system!

3. A tight mayoral race is under way in Eugene and the campaign manager for Jim Torrey is in my evening WR 121 class. I have enjoyed her enthusiasm for his candidacy. Among my friends and in my neighborhood, he's not a popular candidate at all. I'm undecided and find it refreshing to listen to my student. I'm not sure when I'll make my final decision.

Sibling Assignment #76: This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco

InlandEmpireGirl posed the following assignment to Silver Valley Girl and me:

Think of a movie theme song that stayed with you long after you saw the film. Share an experience about that movie or the theme.

Silver Valley Girl draws a surprise connection between HP's original laptop computer and "The Way We Were", here and InlandEmpireGirl explores her emotional history with waters and "A River Runs Through It", here.


Few movies inspire joy and nostalgia in me quite like Jonathan Demme's concert film of the Talking Heads, "Stop Making Sense".

Since the movie is a series of songs performed live in concert, it doesn't have a single theme song. Or does it? Is it"Psycho Killer", when the elastic David Byrne puts a cassette player on stage with a rhythm thump playing, hypnotizes his audience with an oddly joyous acoustic version of his homage to urban paranoia and 70's anxiety; or is it "Life During Wartime", an oddly upbeat and joyous homage to urban paranoia with war as a metaphor for the way Byrne saw life in Regan's America, and listening to the song today, well, is the theme that the Reagan years would last forever?

I don't know.

The movie's title "Stop Making Sense" comes from lines in the song "Girlfriend is Better", performed by the wiry Byrne in a huge business suit, making him look twice his size.

The concert and its music is all about multiple identities, lost identities, unknown identities, about the absurdity of living in a world so alien to what sustains life that we find ourselve not knowing who we are, constantly changing identities to try to adapt. We end up, as Byrne performs, as creatures whose gestures are disconnected from the words we say/sing and whose emotional responses are so confused that we dance joyously during war time and while someone is burning down the house.

This past summer, I attended a concert by the Pink Floyd tribute band "TheFloydian Slips" and as I listened to song after Pink Floyd song, exploring themes of death, alienation, numbness, hypocrisy, materialism, etc., I watched as audience members rocked out, cried "Whoo-Hoo", waved their arms deleriously over their heads, smoked pot, got drunk, and partied on.

It was absurd.

Merrymakers were partying while listening to songs evoking the most troublesome elements of modern life.

But it fits.

We do it all the time.

We live in a world defined by alienation, dehumanization, war, anxiety, displacement, loss of identity, wide gulfs ripped between language and reality and we party on.

We have to.

That's why I love "Stop Making Sense". The movie's a dance party soundtrack, with joyous dancers and singers, upbeat world beat rhythms, aerobic exercise, Byrne trotting around the stage, flailing about mirthfully, tirelessly.

But running counter to this joyous sound is the verbal substance of the songs as they portray the absurdity and alientation of modern life.

What else can we do in such a world? Mope? Despair? Turn off the music? Stop the dancing? Quit laughing?

No.

All co-exists. And "Stop Making Sense" makes the simultaneous existence of our anxiety and mirth an evening of sobering uplift.

I'm trying to think how many "Stop Making Sense" dance parties I attended in the mid-eighties.

Three. Maybe four. Five? We were all in on the joke. I remember with deep nostalgia how at Doug's apartment, in Kathleen's living room, at a political activist retreat, and elsewhere all of us at these parties laughed, danced hard, tried to imitate David Byrne, and opened our throats and sang hoarsely, with happy disconnect, the paranoid and chilling words of David Byrne:

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
This ain't no mudd club, or C. B. G. B.
I ain't got time for that now

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
somebody might see you up there
I got some groceries, some peanut butter
to last a couple of days
But I ain't got no speakers
ain't got no headphones
ain't got no records to play

Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time?
Can't write a letter, can't send a postcard
I can't write nothing at all
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
this ain't no fooling around
I'd love you hold you, I'd like to kiss you
I ain't got no time for that now

Three Beautiful Things 10/04/08: Sausage Mix, No on Palin, Refreshing Rain

1. Sometimes a bit of happiness comes from a couple of chopped up link sausages fried with potatoes and scrambled eggs poured into a warmed flour tortilla, covered with melted sharp cheddar cheese.

2. I can't do this all the time, but today I devoted hours to national blogs reading more about the election, about the candidates. I admit it. I succumbed to Palinmania, except I came out of it admiring her less and less; I find her more and more dispiriting. It's difficult for me to write this. I recognize Sarah Palin as a fellow small town, North Idaho born, former North Idaho College student. In ways, at first blush, she reminds me of girls from Kellogg I like a lot. But underneath that first blush of charm is her small town bred insecurity and feeling of inferiority (I relate to this) which she masks with bravado and her forced folksiness. I find her ugly. She resents intelligence, she's petty, defensive, and vengeful, lacks compassion while mouthing words of compassion, and tries to make verbal and flirty bullshit cover her lack of knowledge and curiosity. I'd love to be able to support her and I tried. I can't.

3. Pounding rain refreshed the air and helped green up the brown of our lawn.

Sibling Assignment #75: Misery Lit. at Kellogg High School

SilverValley Girl gave me and InlandEmpireGirl this assignment:

Look back on your years as a student at Kellogg High School, and write
about a memorable moment in one of the classes you took. This could
be a postive or negative moment, but it has to be a very vivid memory,
and one you can retell with much detail.

Silver Valley Girl inspires high regard for her English instructor Dale Bachman, here and InlandEmpireGirl invokes the beauty of To Kill a Mockingbird, here.


My sisters wrote glowingly about their experiences studying literature at Kellogg High School.

I envy them.

My experience "studying" literature at Kellogg High School demoralized me.

It's miraculous that I went on to major in English in college and pursued graduate studies, let alone have become a college writing and literature instructor.

My senior English class encapsulates the passionless, bloodless, cowardly instruction I encountered.

I didn't know at the time, in my senior English class, that we were reading masterpieces of the English language. Our fiction anthology included D.H. Lawrence's "Rocking Horse Winner", Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer", James Joyce's "Eveline" and other late 19th and 20th century monuments.

These stories experiment with point of view, shattering traditional ways of telling stories, and are poignant tales about the condition of the human person, especially in light of the changes in the world as the 19th century became the 20th.

We read these stories. Our teacher focused attention on literary terms: symbolism, atmosphere, point of view, images, metaphor, description and we memorized definitions of these terms and looked at examples of them.

But we didn't explore for a minute how these writers employed these strategies as a means of exploring human consciousness, of probing the difficulties of making one's way in an increasingly industrial, secular, and capitalistic world.

We just learned the terms.

When the writers used words we might be unfamiliar with, the anthology's editor marked these words and defined them at the bottom of the page.

When it came time to write an exam about these stories, our test was on the literary terms (never in the context of their use) and on these vocabulary words.

We never wrote about the little boy in "Rocking Horse Winner" feverishly rocking back and forth on his hobby horse, hearing the voices in the walls crying, "There must be more money"; we never talked about what his successful picks in horse races connoted or even about his death and what died with him.

If we discussed such matters in this class, I don't remember it. I remember the stifling heat of the classroom, feeling drowsy; I remember daydreaming, trying to escape the drone of our teacher as she went over vocabulary words and talked abstractly about foreshadowing.

I read these stories later in college. These stories have been on different syllabi I have taught. In my college courses and in my own classes, we've dived deep into these stories and wrestled with the anxiety they portray, wrestled with the how subjective consciousness and perception is, and how that makes human connection, at best, difficult.

I'm no longer angry about my Kellogg High School experience. For years, the experienced fuelled me as a teacher never to deal with literature superficially, to investigate stories and poems as fully and deeply and honestly as possible. This kind of instruction defines my teaching practice.

The disappointment of my KHS experience climaxed my sophomore year at North Idaho College.

I was back home in Kellogg, shopping at Stein Brother's IGA, and I ran into my senior English teacher.

I was excited to see her because I had fallen in love with literature.

We exchanged hellos and she asked me how I was, how school was going.

I enthused, "It's going great! I am having a great time! I really love poetry! It's really exciting."

"Oh," she replied, "I never really liked poetry."

Three Beautiful Things 10/03/08: Wonderful Students, Unexpected Attention, Pork and Chicken

1. Last night used the aid of computer projection in my WR 121 class and failed to put the mouse back on the charger. Consequently, this morning, when I presented some stuff from the computer to my World Literature class, the mouse didn't work. I was flummoxed. Members of the class patiently guided me through keyboard strokes that helped me overcome my mouse addiction. They were kind, solicitious, and eager to rescue me. My cup of gratitude runneth over.

2. I went to Mucho Gustos today and ordered a burrito and the burritoista who built my order chatted me up with rare friendliness and stopped me on my way out of the restaurant to ask me if I'd enjoyed my meal. It all caught me off guard, somehow. It warmed my day.

3. I splurged a little today and bought some meat products at Trader Joe's and look forward to fixing dinners this week so that the Deke will have supper ready when she arrives home in the evening from her exhausting new job as a fourth grade teacher.

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

From Aden Nak:

Three Beautiful Things 10/02/08: My Own Private Utah, Attention Whores, Creamy Potato Soup

1. Three guys in my WR 121 class attended after being absent Tuesday for the first class. I randomly asked them if they were from Utah and it made the other students laugh.

2. CC started writing an essay on loss well ahead of my even assigning a paper and as we talked about what she was contemplating, she helped me see more clearly and deeply into the world of teenagers, some of whom will do anything for sympathy and attention. CC's not one of them.

3. The Deke made a marvelous potato soup over the weekend and I ate the last bowl of it when I returned from teaching evening school and I'm already longing for the next creamy pot.

Sibling Assignment #74: Fog Stroll

Sibling Assignment #74 comes from InlandEmpireGirl:

As autumn approaches think of a perfect fall day you have experienced. Using words and pictures, recapture that day.

InlandEmpireGirl posts a scrapbook of lovely autumn Lake Roosevelt images, here, and Silver Valley Girl recalls a fall getaway trip to Central Idaho, here.

Fall reaches perfection for me in early November. Trees stand bare. Sunny days give way to grey ones and the clouds lower to shoulder level, encasing Eugene in a damp, cold fog.

It's reverse humidity. Instead of the air being thick with heat, it's thick with chill. The sun's glare is gone. The fog moistens the skin. The grey relaxes the eyes. I feel alive.

On one such November day, in 1986, Doug and I walked from near downtown to the University of Oregon. We had no purpose. We just enjoyed the bracing effect of the cold and fog and enjoyed looking at the scarves and stocking caps and heavier coats people wore as they, too, were out strolling on campus.

The fog comforted me. It wrapped around me, like a quilt.

My girlfriend was in London and had told me she was with another guy.

The news devastated me and in this fog I felt closed in, protected, as if only the four or five feet ahead of me existed and the rest of the world had vanished.

Doug and I ran into a former student of mine, Kathrine, deeply intelligent, whose entire presence, from the black wool coat, white wool scarf, and pale green gloves to her receptive blue eyes and eager smile vivified Doug and me when we ran into her.

I introduced Doug and Katherine. We chatted. We went our separate ways.

That was it.

It was perfect. The fog. Doug's friendship. Our stroll. Katherine's loveliness. The cold. Our wool coats.

And the way the cold fog protected me from my inward torment.

It was the perfect fall day.

When the November all-day fog returns in several weeks, I'll walk in it, kick a few leaves, and remember Doug and Katherine. I'll shiver at the thought of how near that day twenty-two years ago feels.

Even as it recedes.

Three Beautiful Things 10/01/08: Two Years, Two Thai Dinners, Never Too Many Insights

1. I started writing this blog on 10/01/06: today marks two years.

2. The Deke said, "Let's have some Thai food" and I was out the door to go get it. I can't remember the last time we had a take out Thai meal together. We sure enjoyed this one.

3. My World Lit students and I paused for a few minutes and explored the many ideas and experience the image/metaphor "cup" stands for in the 23rd Psalms (my cup runneth over). Especially fun, for me, was to listen to the students' insights who had never read this hymn/poem/psalm before. It's so fun to listen to students for whom a familiar piece of literature is totally unfamiliar.

Sibling Assignment #73: Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Meaning of Life

It's time to really get back in the swing of things on this blog. I'm dreadfully behind in writing sibling assignments, so one of the first things I'll do is caught up.

InlandEmpireGirl raised this question for Sibling Assignment #73:

As the school year here is the assignment. Write about a school experience that was significant to your school life. Describe the experience and why it was significant.

InlandEmpireGirl remembers being a public poet in the sixth grade here and Silver Valley Girl explores arriving at a deeper understanding of the relevance of essay writing, here.


When I enrolled at Whitworth College in 1974, I don't know what I thought I would discover through my study of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course was required for my English major. Eileen, whom I would marry in two years, loved Shakespeare and we decided to take the course together.

In my two years at North Idaho College, almost all of my study of literature was concentrated in the twentieth century. I fell in love with the modern study of stories and poems that explored the lonely, alienated condition of the human being in an empty and meaningless world and the great weight of responsibility the modern human being carried to make meaning out of h/her existence in a world devoid of essential meaning.

I had experienced this meaninglessness in the summer of 1973 when I was nearly killed at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. The accident resulted from a random human error. It was purposeless, unprovoked, and unrelated to whether I was a good person or to anything I did.

I was blinded. During the days I was blind, my eyes turned inward and within myself I saw the very nothingness that modern writers explored as the one universal truth about life. I confronted the benign indifference of the universe within myself.

I came to believe that forging meaning in such an empty world was up to me. Through my study of literature at North Idaho College, I obsessively worked to figure out the meaning of my life and life itself.

When I commenced my study of Shakespeare, I thought I would find in Shakespeare's plays a well-ordered world, free of the absurdity of the modern world. I thought I would find these plays outdated, irrelevant to the struggles of my existential crisis.

The first day of the course, our professor, Dean Ebner, introduced Shakespeare by telling us that we would be entering into an exploration of the meaning of life. I gasped. Why would studying Shakespeare's plays and his characters involve exploring life's meaning? I thought that "back then" it was figured out and that it was thanks to the obliterating impact of the two world wars in the twentieth century that the meaning of life had been erased. I thought the question of life's meaning was a modern question.

Early in the course, the plays did not shake me up. I didn't feel the tremors of anxiety and doubt about the meaning of life I had felt studying modern literature.

But then we studied Othello. Iago began to shake me. I couldn't believe that an "old writer" from the turn of the 16th into the 17th century could have imagined and created such an amoral and duplicitous character so energetically committed to evil. I couldn't believe Iago's glee.

I was reading Othello in the basement of South Warren Hall and began to tremble. The character Othello was in an existential predicament. The world of loyalty and trust that Othello had assumed to be intact started to unravel. Absurdity, chaos, unpredictablity, all engineered by Iago became the dominant reality of his world. He couldn't make sense of it. Fear and rage fuelled by his outrage at the deterioration of his world view began to destroy him from within himself. Othello lurched from extreme distraction to murderous calm, unable to forge meaning out of his disillusion.

I was getting it. There is no such thing "back then". It hit me. Human beings have always wrestled with how to make sense out life, out of the excruciating demands of mutablility, out of the pain and disillusion of things in life never being what we might idealize them to be.

As we moved forward to Hamlet and especially King Lear, I spent more and more time leaving my dorm room and walking through the November fog that encased the towering pine trees on Whitworth's campus, feeling the passion of Shakespeare's tragedies, exploring how my life at this very young age paralleled the uncertainty, painful self-exploration, loss of idealism, and riddling mysteries Shakespeare brought to life in the actions and interior monologues of these characters.

To this day, thirty-four years later, Shakespeare is the philosopher and artist I look to with the most trust to help me understand what a dicey, often unfair, and inherently contradictory experience human life is.

Shakespeare's plays and poetry helped light my understanding of all other writers and all other philosophers I've studied.

It was through my study of Shakespeare that I have come to understand the complexity of the stories of the Bible and the parables and poetic words of Jesus.

No other writer has so profoundly shaped my perceptions, insight, wisdom, or understanding of love, war, politics, despair, redemption, restoration, human nature, and the condition of human life itself.

Reentry

One night, while back home in Kellogg over the last three and a half weeks, I happened upon one of my all time favorite movies: Apollo 13.

Tonight, as I reenter my blog, I find myself thinking about the climax of "Apollo 13": would the Odyssey enter the Earth's atmosphere too steeply and burn up or might it enter at too shallow an angle and bounce back, irretrievably, into space?

I'm straining this metaphor, I know, but it's fun.

I find myself wondering how reentering the world of my blog will go. Will I reenter too steeply and burn up or might I come back shallow and bounce into the eerie darkness of the blogosphere, lost forever?

I'm hoping I come back in at the correct angle. I look forward to getting caught up on sibling assignments. I'm three or four behind. I want to write about the outing my sisters and I had at Green Bluff and confess my love for the movie, "Mama Mia".

I look forward to writing about reunions I experienced in North Idaho. I have a lot on my mind about Pink Floyd. I listened to the final day of the Ryder Cup match on XM Satellite Radio as I drove back to Eugene and it will be fun to reflect on the success of the USA and to try to explain why I love listening to golf tournaments and matches on the radio. It will be fun to get back to those daily Three Beautiful Things, too.

And there'll be more.

There. I feel oriented. I've posted again.

I think I can navigate this blog back into action and splash down just fine.