Three Beautiful Things 02/22/09: Body of Christ, Wings, Mama Mia! Snubbed

1. Bishop Thornton got me thinking yet again about the body of Christ. I'm glad I don't have to be the brain or the mouth of the body of Christ, but I don't think I'm much of a foot either. Maybe I'm a bladder.

2. I enjoyed the many, many suggestions for where to eat Buffalo Wings sent to me on Facebook. I might also have some company for future meals. That'll be fun!

3. I enjoyed taking on a new cause on Facebook this evening: "Mama Mia!" got snubbed by the Academy! No awards? No nominations? WTHell?

Three Beautiful Things 02/21/09: Ticket Sale, Slumdog Hedonism, In the Garden of Eden

1. I went to the Bijou and a woman in line had a ticket to sell and it was fun working with her and the older couple she was with to get our transaction and making change all figured out. The ticket selling trio and some people ahead of us in line got some laughs at my expense. I'm easy to laugh at.

2. The movie "Slumdog Millionaire" overwhelmed my senses in a way I enjoyed and this hedonistic element of experiencing the movie was better for me than the movie's story.

3. I love it: every Saturday night at 8:00 PST, Deep Tracks, XM Radio, Channel 40, plays "In a Gadda Da Vida" and it sounded especially robust to me tonight after I listened to the Duck's men's basketball team win their first conference game of the season against Stanford. What a relief.

Sibling Assignment #90: I'm a Long Term Dope

For our 90th Sibling Assignment, InlandEmpireGirl raised this question:

As Valentine's Day approaches, think of a specific film, book, poem, or work of art that helped you understand the emotion of love and explain why.

It was very melodramatic and totally fraudulent. It was so ninth grade. It was so 1969. Scott Stuart and I decided to start a rumor that we were going to commit double suicide at the site of the dump out by the Smelterville airport.

It wasn't that fun figuring out how to do the deed. We figured some kind of rubber hose connected to the tailpipe of a running car leading into the car itself would suffice.

The fun part was planning our funeral. We went to all of our friends and asked them to be pallbearers. We made plans for where the funeral would be and we began to stop people in the hall to tell them to plan to come, that it would be a great show.

(Are you thinking what I'm thinking right now? If Scott and I had been ninth graders in 2009, we would have been pulled out of school and marched into a room in front of a battalion of counselors and doctors and pharmacists and placed in a juvenile mental detention center and put on a regimen of drugs to pull us out of our melancholy. Luckily, bullshit was bullshit in 1969 and we were able to make these bullshit plans and no one was the worse for wear.)

We were being dopes.

Our most ambitious plan for our funeral was the music. We committed ourselves to having our favorite song played by our favorite recording artist.

Scott planned on inviting Mason Williams to perform "Classical Gas".

My plan was to invite The Association to sing "Cherish". (You can read the lyrics to "Cherish", here.)

I was obsessed with the song, "Cherish". I was also obsessed with Debbie Wakefield. I had taken the words of the song, "Cherish" and built a whole love life around them and projected it all on Debbie Wakefield.

When Debbie and I quit going to dances together and talking on the telephone, that was when Scott and I made our bullshit suicide pact.

That was when I wrote out the words to "Cherish" so I could memorize them and when I heard that Debbie was going to a dance with Mike Farley, I waited until the house was empty and I sobbed and shouted while tears burned my cheeks:

Oh I could say I need you but then you'd realize
That I want you just like a thousand other guys
Who'd say they loved you With all the rest of their lies
When all they wanted was to touch your face, your hands
And gaze into your eyes

But my love was sincere. And silent. I was not going to have Debbie Wakefield think I was like a thousand other guys. I was pure. My love was pure. I was a dope.

I was such a dope, that I took the next verse a little too much to heart:

Perish is the word that more than applies
To the hope in my heart each time I realize
That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams
That I am not gonna be the one to share your schemes
That I am not gonna be the one to share what
Seems to be the life that you could
Cherish as much as I do yours

Thus, I was ready to perish and have The Association sing "Cherish" after I'd offed myself with Scott.

I suppose I've cheated this assignment a little. We were to write about a song that helped us understand the emotion of love.

"Cherish" didn't help me understand it. "Cherish" deluded me, filled my head with unrealistic, exaggerated ideas of love that could never come true, but that have had a grip on me for the last forty years.

It's amazing to me that the fifteen year old in me remains so alive and that the feelings I had about "love" and romance are still so close to my skin. Intellectually, I know that "Cherish" is a pretend song, that it expresses a totally bogus vision of love.

Nonetheless, it got inside me forty years ago and as I look back over the years and look at what a dope I've been and am when it comes to love, the work of art that most shaped my misunderstandings was "Cherish".

It's humiliating.

My sisters, by the way, wrote much more sensible pieces. InlandEmpireGirl's is here and here is Silver Valley Girl's.

Three Beautiful Things 02/20/09: Melissa's Baby, 3:10, Molly's Baby

1. This morning, in our Fat Cats and Underdogs course, I was sitting next to Melissa while we were watching "People Like Us" and she leaned over to me and said, "Bill. I'm sorry. I have to leave. My contractions are fifteen minutes apart." I asked if I could help out and gave her some aid with her jacket and backpack. She turned to me and said, "I'll be sure to email you if I won't be in class on Monday." And people ask me why I love teaching at Lane Community College!

2. I loved watching "3:10 to Yuma". I was enamored with Christian Bale's intensity and the way Russell Crowe played an evil man with a sense of aesthetic beauty and a who has a small corner of goodness in his soul. I loved the horses. I loved the train. I loved the scenery. The story and the gunfights were exciting. So was the historical context. And, lastly, please, please Hollywood directors, cast Peter Fonda in more movies. I might like him even more than his father!

3. Molly's ultrasound pictures revealed that she will be giving birth to a girl. She's elated. Moreover, the baby's health is good. Molly's ice cream while bathing diet is working well for her baby!

Three Beautiful Things 02/07-08/09: Snug's Content, Food Contentment, Warmth

1. I am really happy I dragged myself out of my sick bed and spent an hour at the dog trainer working more with Snug. He gets rewarded for relaxing and he gets that great mouth half open contented look on his face.

from the Snug photo file

2. I ate. Finally. Bacon, eggs, toast, hash browns. Black tea. Hot cereal. Pasta and sauce. Liquids had been refreshing. Food, though, deepens my contentment.

3. I enjoyed the comfort of hour after hour of resting the heating pad on my chest. It kept me warm. Now I'm warm without the pad. That's better.

Three Beautiful Things 02/04/09: Shite, Hero, Sick Leave

1. I enjoyed looking over "Shite Gifts for Academics" and playing a bit. It's clever.

2. It was fun discussing "Sky of Stone" as a story playing out the hero's journey.

3. I have tons of sick leave saved up. I might need to use some tomorrow.

Three Beautiful Things 02/03/09: On Task, Bubba Burrito, Perfect Dinner

1. I was so organized this morning that I was able to leave the house a tiny bit late, stop at Starbucks for a coffee and scone, realize I wasn't wearing my glasses, go back home and find them, and still make it to class on time and in calm, unhurried fashion launch right into a discussion of the abstraction in relation to the concrete. I even found my car when I returned to the parking lot. Right away!

2. It was a gut bomb, for sure, and I really enjoyed my Laughing Planet Bubba Burrito.

BUBBA 6.25
grilled chicken, organic sweet corn, pintos, rice,
Tillamook jack cheese, spicy barbecue sauce,
pico de gallo

3. After my night class I fixed and enjoyed a grilled Trader Joe's Sharp Cheddar Cheese and bacon sandwich on Cottage Grove, Oregon's Farmhouse Bakery's Whole Wheat Sunflower bread with a side of salad topped with Sandpoint, Idaho's Lighthouse Bleu Cheese dressing.

Three Beautiful Things 02/02/09: Pear, Solar Panel, Pit Bull

1. I remembered where I parked at Market of Choice by lining up my car with a neon pear.

2. I remembered where I parked at LCC today by lining up my car with a solar panel hooked to a street light.

3. I think that calm, disinterested, enlightened, and stunningly handsome albino dog who rests on the floor out in the open in the shopping area at Healthy Pet is a Pit Bull Terrier.

Three Beautiful Things 02/01/09: Gary's Coffee, Live Blogging, Super Bowl Supper

1. I dropped into Gary's Coffee at 5th and High for the first time just as it opened and the guy working there seemed anxious. I had on church clothes. I didn't think I presented danger. I awkwardly made my order, not knowing how things were done at Gary's. My ignorance relaxed him. He told me it was his first day working the shop alone. I told him it was my first time in the place and that he'd been a good teacher. As I left with my coffee, we told each other to have a good one about seven times.

2. I had a blast live blogging during the Super Bowl. I probably wrote more about the gut- wrenching experience I was having than what actually happened in the game.

3. I fixed myself the simplest of post-Super Bowl meals: a grilled bacon and sharp cheddar cheese and a bowl of tomato soup with saltine crackers. I know it pales in contrast to the BBQ ribs, pots of chili, appetizer spreads, chips and dips, pans of lasagna, pasta feeds, pizzas, and other ambitious party food others consumed today. I'm happy for all the mirth and good food people shared. But, I liked my sandwich and soup and crackers. A lot.

Three Beautiful Things 01/31/09: Puppy Horse, Goldmember, Dada

1. Snug's trainer, Debbie, kept moving the puppy horse closer and closer to Snug and gradually he became more and more comfortable until finally he was sniffing the puppy horse all over and was not afraid or threatened by it any more.

2. Molly taught me the phrase, "Not you, henchman holding wrench" and I feel oddly empowered.

3. Molly's short videos posted on Facebook embody a delightful dada absurdity.

Sibling Assignment #89: Fun with Phoebe and Mona and Nick and Kitty and Kelly and Jeff and Mary and Tara and Phil and ....

The 89th sibling assignment comes from Silver Valley Girl:

Think about a television show you watched growing up while you lived at home. Write about what you enjoyed about that television show, and how that show may have influenced you in your adult life.

This is a tough one. While growing up, our television was on all the time and I enjoyed cartoons, baseball, basketball, and football games, golf tournaments, bowling tournaments, situation comedies, news casts, news specials, hospital, court room, and police dramas, variety shows, talk shows, game shows: I enjoyed The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, the NBC Baseball Game of the Week, Monday Night Football, the NBA All-Star Game, the NCAA Final Four, the Masters, the U.S. Open; I enjoyed Dick Weber, Earl Anthony, Dick Van Dyke, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, All in the Family, Ron Bair, Jack Dunhaver, Bob Briley, Peter Jennings, Frank Reynolds, Huntley and Brinkley, Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, Judd for the Defense, Storefront Lawyers, the Mod Squad, Merv Griffin, Laugh-In, Carol Burnett, Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Johnny Carson, Seven Keys, the Dating Game, Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy, Concentration, You Don't Say, Match Game, to name a few.

When did I play baseball, read the Hardy Boys, swim, golf, hang out at the triangle park, shoot baskets, go the YMCA, listen to LP's, listen to the radio, go to Rose Lake, go up the river, all of which I loved, when the television was on so much? When I watched so much tv?

I don't know.

But the assignment is to choose one. It is to choose one that has influenced my adult life.

Well. Did you notice a genre I didn't mention in my copious list above?

Soaps.

Not only did I enjoy soaps, they have had the a longer lasting effect on me than any other television.

Two soaps stand out: "General Hospital" and "All My Children", but I think I'll reflect on "All My Children".

Now. Don't be afraid. I'm not going to go all literature instructor on you here. I'm not going to pretend like I enjoyed soaps for their deeper meaning, their sociological importance, their way of reflecting current social issues.

No! None of that!

"All My Children" was fun.

What is more fun than knowing someone who watched "All My Children" back in its early days and followed the trials and tribulatioins of Phil and Tara and Jeff and Erica and Mary and Phoebe and Dr. Martin and Ann and Nick and Ann and Brooke and who can forget when Palmer came on the scene and Cliff and Nina and how about Myrtle and Mona and on and on?

Some of my best times in marriage have been recounting "All My Children" storylines, laughing about Linc or remembering Kitty or Tom Cudahy, and spinning one yarn after another, testing memory, looking stuff up, and taking delight in all the outrageous things that have happened.




When I was injured at the Zinc Plant, Mom watched "All My Children" every day in my hospital room, except when it was pre-empted for the Watergate hearings, and the hearing Nick sing or watching Dr. Tyler solve family problems helped relieve me of the irritation in my lungs and the headaces from the injuries to my eyes.

But what makes "All My Children" the best in my adult life is laughing with my sisters and mom. Mom watches "All My Children" religiously each day. When I visit her, it takes about one or two days to pick up the current story lines and then, as if we were geneologists, we start tracing back, remembering character histories and then when my sisters and I get together, if the subject becomes "All My Children" we laugh and laugh about all the great things that have happened over the years and the things we remember from thirty, forty years ago.

It's simple. It's mirth. It's feeling merry. It's laughter. It's remembering stories. It's why "All My Children" has influenced and made my adult life more enjoyable.

Three Beautiful Things 01/30/09: International Workers of the World, Radio Neighborhood Tour, Au revoir Caroline

1. In Fat Cats and Underdogs we watched the 1979 documentary film, "The Wobblies" and listened to a series of men and women bear witness to the labor struggles of the early 20th century. It's a chapter of USA history that's been largely silenced.

2. I arrived home from school, parked in front of the house, and was so enthralled with a radio story on "Day to Day" about a New York City U. S. Attorney who survived a violent robbery and kidnapping that I took a slow tour of the Whitaker neighborhood until the story was over and then I parked in front of the house again and shuffled into the house.

3. The latest issue of "New Yorker" published a profile of Caroline Kennedy that casts a somewhat sympathetic light on her decision to withdraw from consideration as a candidate for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. I found the piece enlightening. I'm saddened by her withdrawl and I understand better that such a public office may not conform well with her personality, character, or way of life.

Three Beautiful Things 01/29/09: 3BT Makes the Classroom, Verbs Buzz, Coffee Change?

1. Daphne talked with her WR 105 students about Three Beautiful Things. Could seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary help LCC students in their scholarship applications? I sure hope so!

2. My energy has picked up considerably in the last five days. It's contagious. WR 122 buzzed this morning as we explored the power of verbs as a way of invigorating one's writing style.

3. Willa's piece in The Torch made me wonder: should I go a few blocks out of my way and pick up morning coffee and vegan danish at Wandering Goat in the mornings?

Three Beautiful Things 01/28/09: Essays, Pepper Laugh, Snug's Growth

1. In Fat Cats and Underdogs this morning, student after student reported on and read from compelling paper after compelling paper they had composed about ethics, solidarity, class stratification, aspirations, class markers, and other concepts we are studying in our class.

2. I opened the door for a couple nearing eighty years old at Carl's, Jr. and once we got in line the man not only told me his age, he said he was going to have a jalapeno burger and we had a good laugh when I told him, "That ought to get your blood flowing!"

3. When Snug and I first started to play ball, he was awkward, uncoordinated, and comic; today I marveled at his grace as he flew off the ground to snatch the ball from the air, his timing perfect, his motion poetic.

Three Beautiful Things 01/27/08:Going Deep, Owl, Bill D. at Dover

1. Many of my writing students are seeing the wisdom of seeing the world from a Buddhist perspective as a way of thinking critically and analytically and exhaustively about a subject. It's fun to shift out of traditional ways of thinking and see how we can be enlivened by other ways of understanding reality.

2. Russell told me that his very young son uses the word "owl" when he sees a bird and also when he wants something. We had a good laugh when I said, "Maybe he thinks 'owl' is a way of saying 'I'll' and he's saying 'Owl have that!'".

3. I became Facebook friends with my nephew, Bill. He's studying in Canterbury. When his dad told me he'd be at Canterbury, the first thing I thought was that he'll love the castles of southeast England. Today I saw pictures Bill posted of Dover Castle, and there was Bill and I could tell he was letting his imagination take him centuries back and he was a medieval soldier helping protect his country.

Three Beautiful Things 01/26/08: Pepto Starbucks, Harlan County, The Americans

1. Last evening's chili had me feeling queasy this morning, but a cinnamon scone and a grande house with room at Starbucks miraculously helped settle down my internal combustion.

2. Our students in Fat Cats and Underdogs expressed high regard for the men and women of the coal mining town of Brookside, Kenucky in their struggle for justice while striking for union representation in the astonishing documentary film "Harlan County, USA". It was really gratifying that our students felt such respect for working class people who are often looked down upon and made fun of because of their speech patterns, clothes, dental problems, and the work they do.

3. I don't remember having heard of Robert Frank and his influential and controversial 1959 collection of photographs, "The Americans". Bob Edwards devoted his radio program to this collection today and I spent time looking at Frank's brilliant pictures online. I can hardly wait to find a copy of the book and examine it more closely.

Three Beautiful Things 01/25/09: Mental Fog, Papers, Blog Breakthrough

1. I think my mental fog is lifting.

2. I finished commenting on papers I should have returned a week ago. The mental fog slowed me way down. It is lifting.

3. I finally wrote in my blog again today. I wrote about the mental fog I've been living with, here. I think the fog is lifting.

Sibling Assignment #88: Fog

I have disappointed myself with this sibling assignment: and I'm the one who gave it! I like the assignment. I just wrote the word "fog" to my sisters and they posted beautiful pieces. You can find Silver Valley Girl's here and InlandEmpireGirl's here.

My disappointment is pretty simple. We had a series of foggy mornings here in Eugene and I had planned to grab my camera and take fog photos.

Every morning, I forgot my camera.

Crap.

So why my forgetfulness?

Mental fog.

If you've read much of this blog at all, you know that I struggle with mental health problems, namely depression, and I take medication to keep the chemicals in my head in some kind of balance.

The medications are a good thing, for the most part; they help keep my mood even and help my behavior be more predictable. But the medications also rob me of a certain range of feeling and when I don't take this medicine, my dreams stimulate me with their absurd plot lines and fantastic images.

So, sometimes I take a vacation from my medicine, and I make a contract with myself. As soon as I begin to have feelings of self-destruction or of sabotaging myself or as soon as I can tell I'm getting needlessly cranky, snapping at people, I go right back to taking my medicine.

Well, I went quite a while without taking my medicine, but about a week and half ago, I started again. I felt myself getting cranky and moody in ways that I knew I needed to treat before a destructive momentum built up.

Taking the medicine again made me dizzy, nauseous, and sick. That was the physical part.

Mentally, fog has rolled in.

The fog of fatigue. The fog of lethargy. The fog of procrastination. It's a drowsy fog, a paralyzing fog. It's a familiar fog. It's a fog a dread. Hours of fog pass by and I've done nothing: no writing, no grading, no reading, no cooking, eating, walking, just sleeping. Sleep helps me escape this fog, but when I awake, the fog is still settled into the valleys of my consciousness.

At work, I exert a lot of energy masking the fog, trying to keep my voice upbeat, my performance in the classroom lively. I crack jokes. I engage my students. I can feel the energy draining from my mind and body, from my muscles and my bones. I push forward. I can hardly wait to get back home and sleep.

No one can know that I'm in a fog. Especially my students. I confide to MB that I'm a little foggy and she understands and, as we share the teaching load of our team taught course, we look out for each other. She's in a different fog of preoccupation with a criminal in her life, and we both know what each other is going through and respect the impact of the mental fogs we are in.

As I write this, I realize that I haven't posted on my blog since January 12th. It was the 14th when I started taking my medicine again. That's the fog at work. It separates me from what I enjoy and in some areas of my life I don't have the will to fight it.

Today, I am fighting it, though. I've written this post. I don't have pictures of fog for it like I wanted, but maybe you get the picture.

Maybe you sense that the fog is slowly lifting.

Three Beautiful Things 01/12/09: Free Play of the Mind, LCC Fog, Hash Brown Dinner

1. In Fat Cats and Underdogs, when we got somewhat deep into Robert Grudin's arguments regarding the free play of the mind, a still wondrous silence fell over the room.

2. Coming over the 30th Avenue hill to LCC, fog encased the campus, except for a sliver where the clouds broke apart and the Center building peeked out. This was a transcendent moment. It had to be. The ugly pile of concrete looked enchanting.

3. An early evening dinner of hash browns, bacon, eggs, toast, and Diet Pepsi hit the spot in a crisp, fluffy, chilled, soupy way.

Sibling Assignment #87: A Perfect Day

For this sibling assignment, InlandEmpireGirl challenged us to describe a perfect day. InlandEmpire girl's perfect day is here and Silver Valley Girl's is still to come.

I can't actually write about what would most fully be a perfect day for me because it would involve passions and pleasures I just don't write about in my blog. So, I'll keep my real number one perfect day a private dream and I'll write about another kind of perfect day that I'd enjoy having.

My perfect day would occur in Kellogg and the surrounding area. It would begin with my sisters and mother and by the end of the day would involve friends I've known for forty to fifty years or more.

To start, my perfect day would begin with a Jimmy Dean sausage and eggs and potatoes and toast and coffee breakfast. No homefries. No herbs. No omelets or eggs benedict. No. Just fried or scrambled eggs with hash browns and toast with strawberry jam or preserves canned by Mom or one of my sisters and plain ole coffee out of the can: MJB maybe. Mom usually has Yuban. It could be Folgers or Maxwell House or anything else ordinary and normal.

Mom and my sisters and I would jump in the car and start driving the Silver Valley. We'd go up Wardner, check out the progress of the construction up Deadwood Gulch, drive through Smelterville, identify where people live and used to live, remember where Farmers Market was and tell tall tales about the Happy Landing and Frontier Days.

If we wanted a pop break: the Boat and then a swing through Page and checking out the construction there and come over the hill into Pinehurst and circumnavigate the golf course. I'd want to see if we could identify the tree planted in memory of my dad.

Then I'd want to head east of Kellogg and drive up Elizabeth Park and Montgomery Gulch and go up Moon Gulch and Big Creek and tell more stories about people we knew and know all these places and have Silver Valley Girl give a local history lesson about all these places.

My perfect day would then take us to Murray and the Sprag Pole for burgers and fries and on the way back we would find some obscure road Silver Valley Girl knows about and come back to the Valley via it, possibly retracing the tracks of Noah Kellogg or some other early pioneer.

In my perfect day, we would return home in time for Mom to catch at least one soap and then we'd start frying chicken, lots of chicken, and making potato salad, lots of potato salad, and start filling coolers with Heidleberg and Olympia beer (no microbrews allowed) and friends would start to arrive for a chicken and potato salad and beer party in the back yard.

Since it's my perfect day, it would happen in a perfect world and old Silver Valley friends would travel from as close as Kingston and as far away as Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and come over to Mom's backyard to eat, drink, bullshit, laugh, and enjoy each other.

Washing over the top of the party would be the sounds of Steppenwolf, Chicago, the Carpenters, James Taylor, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Johnny Cash, CCR, Carole King, and all the other music we all enjoyed in high school and soon there after.

My perfect day would lengthen into a perfect evening and stretch into a perfect night where all my great Silver Valley friends, men and women alike, would be filled with the joy of one another's company and good cheer.