one flew over the cuckoo's nest

I went to the play last night, then talked late into the night about it: about lobotomy and shock therapy, about the play's connection of shock and therapy language with loss of democracy and "democracy" as control. We talked about how Nurse Ratched was the face of oppression and masculinity (sexual potency, independence, the Tall Tale Americans of Paul Bunyan and John Henry) was the apparent cure. I drove up with Kevin Claire and my brother Peter and read bits from my dissertation on the rhetoric of lobotomy and its connection to mind control.

Later I thought about my own reactions to ADD medications, and considered that.

Now I'd like to write the play/book into my dissertation chapter as part of the revision.

Sharpied

I woke up today with a telephone number Sharpied on my arm: 916-498-8452.

The sun was exactly where it usually is in my bedroom in March, and I got up and woke up my 16 year old and he hauled his always tired in the morning body to the shower. My wife had been on call all weekend (midwifery's least favorite feature) and was fast asleep. Our house guest met me in the kitchen on his way to a 14 hour day of work on Liz's new office, more drywall and carpentry, and off he went. Craig our friend and renter poked his head in and asked me how it had gone, and it was then, right in the middle of scrambling eggs and toasting bread and making chai, that I remembered the number.

I'm in my fifties, late ones at that. Married, and for a long time at that. So this isn't the kind of number one might have in one's twenties. Or thirties for that matter I suppose! And it wasn't the kind of number you write on your arm to make sure you know who your ride is from some giant event, or who the designated driver is and how he might be contacted at last call.

No, it was the legal support number from Occupy Sacramento. I"d written it down partly because I did a nonviolence training in the Rotunda corridor at 5:30 (the building closes at 6 and the many CHP officers were getting ready to issue a dispersal order to the couple hundred people still in the building). And of course I also wrote it down in case, as can easily happen, the police aren't too picky about who wants to be arrested at a civil disobedience action, and who would prefer not to be, thank you very much.

I'm going to grade papers now - back to mundane reality - and then talk more about the action, and what I felt and learned, and some thoughts on Occupy 2.0.

Perfect Day day part 1

Some days are like words spoken lightly; ephemeral, they float off. Perhaps they are stored in the memory's body fat, accumulating until a host of everyday days are burned off by some wild bender.

Some days, you wake up and suddenly it dawns on you (yes that was a terrible pun): now THIS is going to be one of those days. And sometimes they are.

At 10 am on Friday I was sick. I knew I wasn't going skiing. Even though the snow is new and fresh and calling in the way only snow can call. At 1 pm I was wavering. Maybe I'll feel better. At 4 I was packing. At 6 I was in a car on my way to Kirkwood. At midnight I was at altitude, ready for that strange sleep I get: air different, sleep light, easily disturbed, rarely more than five hours, and then waking up one eye at a time. How am I? Groggy like a boxer losing in the fifth round? Elated with breathing the rare air, light on the earth?

Wake up to rituals of fending off certain illnesses: netti pot with salt, zinc in capsules, doing that thing that person told you to do to imagine getting better. Then breakfast: the fresh ground coffee brought from the flatlands, the eggs with the right salsa, juice and toast and eat it at the kitchen bar on a high stool in front of the computer. Make the new playlist for that day because you have a feeling it might be one of those days. Mixing, listening, talking to Ian about writing and Pete about skiing, cleaning up, finding every bit of ski gear right where you left it.

Leave the house with this playing in your helmet:

Endless Reverie (Zaman 8 Remix)            Azam Ali                       

Innocente (Falling In Love) (Mr. Sam's Remix)            Delerium Feat. Leigh Nash           

Big In Japan            Alphaville                        Forever Young

love letter to japan            the bird and the bee           

The Answer (Feat. Big In Japan            UNKLE           

Young Forever (feat. Mr. Hudson)            Jay-Z           

Joan      Talvin Singh           

Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll            Blue Öyster Cult           

(Dawning Of A) New Era            The Specials

Don't Go Back To Sleep     Vision II- Sprit Of Rumi/Graeme Revell

Star Shpongled Banner            Shpongle                       

Always            Blind Pilot                    

Vibrate On       Augustus Pablo & Upsetters           

Man in the Street            The Skatalites

Our Lips Are Sealed Dub            Fun Boy Three


Step into the brilliant sunlight, another bluebird day, and hoist the skis and the boots. Three, four hundred yards to the lift, as the lungs get used to the effort and the body shifts and it occurs to you that you aren't ill, in fact...the opposite. The mountains are forever, and this life is not, unless this moment is forever, and the mountains as well, and all these bipeds doomed to die, and their muddles and fears and glimpes of eternity.

Man Cave 2: The early days

Man Cave 2: The early days

Yes, I understand that the early days could easily be simple: cave men are men in caves. But we don’t know a whole lot about how these caves were appointed, as it were. Did early tool use lead to the first Laz-E-Boys? Were the first cave paintings precursors to NFL and Bikini team posters? It is hard to say. But I’m guessing, no.

Instead, the early caves were probably more like studio apartments in the current economy: dad, mom, vulnerable progeny, too-small stove, bad ventilation…or else, as theorized in various places, caves could also be very short term rentals. As in, humans find cave, fall in love with cave, move in, and have an enjoyable day or twelve until the previous owner – sabre tooth tiger, perhaps, if those were around in the early humans making housing mistakes era – returned. Then, fairly nasty eviction notice followed by a dinner of “homo sapiens du jour.”

No, the early days I’m talking about begin around 1570, when Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance essayist, decided to retire from his job. He had just been denied a better job due to politics, and was sick of his job in the Bordeaux parlement.  So at the advanced age of 37, he decided to pack in the daily grind and retire to the first and perhaps greatest of all man caves: his Tower.

Montaigne lived in pretty sweet digs for the 16^th Century. Imagine one of those swank estates they are always showing in Downton Abbey or Upstairs/Downstairs or Ivory/Merchant films. Now take the estate, and put three huge castle walls in front of it; then (for some reason I always think of Legos) put two four-story towers on the front two corners. Plenty of woods and land to ride your horse (precursor of the ATV). Servants. 

Man Cave #1

1. My friend Kevin has a man cave. And when I say cave I mean door is blocked by man stuff so you have to climb over boxes of computer hardware and old programming textbooks, spilled boxes of CDs of various ilks, snake-cables in search of VGA connections. Musical instruments. Piles of books hunted and gathered from the local used bookstore. I mean a couch that hasn't been sat on for weeks because it is covered with man-ivy: tendrils of telephone wire and Ethernet connections and aforementioned cables woven into clothing and plastic bags of unknown provenance.

The story goes that a friend took a photo of Kevin's office in Washington and when people saw it they assumed that it was the after shot of the earthquake that had recently hit. Nope. Pre-earthquake. No one would have known that an earthquake had hit Kevin's office. Or if thieves had ransacked his place looking for those small thumb drives with information that could convict higher-ups in the FBI.

Kevin has a man cave. It has a moat (an anteroom you must maneuver, often filled with dangerously unstable piles of gear  and bicycles propped against walls like traps to snare the unwary). It is dark. It has a big desk that covers two walls and a big monitor that lets you watch film of the Grand Canyon at actual scale. It has a real turntable but also a digital thingy to take the turntable's weak original signal and turn it into a badass male signal worthy of the shielded speakers lurking darkly in the corner.

It is clear. A man had been here. Alone