Saturday, September 24, 2011

a rainy day here, with a wet soccer game that i gratefully stayed home from, and sogginess settling into what's left of the garden. my son turns 24 today, the 24th, so i'm doing two things, besides arranging a present of some kind for him, which i won't mention again. first, i've made a new site, here on a vast empire of google weblogs, that will simply collect and sort various resources on africa for as long as i can take it, until others take the reins and do some of the work for me. i think that actually finding and doing the news posts is rather easy, but setting up the resources in the background may prove to be a little more challenging; to that end, if you have design skills to offer, please join the discussion at africahubcollective, where people who do the site will gather and discuss it.

second, the whole birthday thing has caused me to review a little, in my mind, what it was like to be 23 or 24 myself, and put some of it down in writing in hopes that it might benefit him or others who are young and noticeably, obviously, at the bottom of a very bleak-looking ladder that appears to be going into very polluted clouds within a few rungs.

when i was 23, it was completely different times, and i had no clue what i'd do with my life, which caused me, one day under pressure, to break down crying publicly, as if someone else could do something about it. it was like, no matter how much i tried, i just couldn't find an answer or even a reasonable strategy for the question of what to do with my life. i just had to live a little more of it to find out. i didn't have the pressure of lack of insurance looming, or the poor job market of today (some people even said to me: there are plenty of things you can do, just get started and do one of them). I was working at a restaurant. lots of crazy things happened and we had passionate discussions about what to serve and how to do business. we did well; there was lots of work. i got paid poorly, but didn't mind. i ate well; it was a vegetarian restaurant. i was happy because most of my previous jobs had involved cruel bosses of some kind and i liked the collective idea of everyone owning it and doing their best for the whole group. it worked out fine for that stage of my life.

it's just that, when i thought about what else i could do with my life, besides running a restaurant, i came up blank. nothing worked. nothing made sense. after fourteen years of school, going back to school for anything sounded unpalatable.

i had this attitude about women; i felt that they should accept me for what i was, even with no plan, even just working at a restaurant, even if i didn't have a degree or a life plan. unfortunately they by and large rejected that idea. i think women are generally looking for someone who has a life, has a plan, and has a hope of getting there. my relationships would last a week or a few days until they figured out that i really truly wasn't going anywhere, at least for the moment.

at the restaurant we'd have conflicts that only large unruly groups of hippies would have trouble resolving. one was over whether to get a new mixer for the bakery, pinning the anti-technology folks against the futuristic developer-types who said, make more bread, earn more money, move up and move out. one guy in the restaurant believed strictly in not wasting a single piece of food, and he would throw even celery leaves (which are bitter and acidic) into the soup as a matter of principle. the more refined tastes in management wanted to put the best soup in front of the customer, one which is free of all hint of waste.

i had no trouble living without a car, or a house, or any property to speak of. at home this woman kept breaking into my refrigerator (i lived in a rooming house), but even this was not an issue; i ate mostly at the restaurant. virtually everything could be reached by walking. i was in good shape, being young and working all the time.

when i had a baby the world really expected me to produce money and pay child support, and i couldn't really, because i didn't have enough income, and i fell behind. i was mad at the world and didn't feel that the "system" or the "establishment" had a right to tell me what to do. actually, with the baby, the involvement of the "system" just made it all more complicated, because, when i met the baby, i had no problem loving her or wanting to support her, yet, notices from the court and the government were very intimidating, and got my resistance up. i remember having very mixed feelings about not paying, or putting it off, and that was because the baby would get its support whether i paid or not; it was mostly me vs. the system in my eyes.

having traveled for a year and a half, i was pretty used to not paying rent or getting away with stuff, and didn't much believe in private property although i wasn't inclined to steal either, not valuing "stuff" really in any way. but for example i'd leave my door open, in my first rooming house, not just unlocked but open, and this would drive the landlord nuts and he finally was glad to be rid of me, but not because i'd played loud music or caused any other trouble. i was a quiet gentle guy, most of the time, but i didn't want to shut my door, and i figured that if i paid all of $60 of rent, i shouldn't have to.

i remember two lights in my life that helped shake the cobwebs out of my mind and move into a healthier mode of relating to the world. one was the guy who owned the gaslight village where i lived, henry black. henry black had let his property overgrow with trees, flowers, bushes, and weeds, and then grew roses amongst the weeds. he'd bought up the house next door and then built two houses behind them moving back into the woods, letting the woods move in and take over part of the property, until the place housed about sixty independent hippies and families, myself included, and i was allowed at one point to work off my rent and paint all summer. he told the story of being sued over a dandelion and saying in court that, to you it's a weed, but to me it's a flower, and i want it there, and i have a right to grow it. henry black would have me drive around in an old cadillac, buying paint and supplies, and this for some reason really impressed me, partly because people gave cadillacs respect, out on the city roads, but also because henry and i had a kind of unlikely alliance, an alliance of the unorthodox, the anti's. and he taught me: use your energy. make what you want. be what you want to be. don't let your neighbors intimidate you into mowing your lawn if you don't want to or don't believe in it (mowing a lawn was, at that time, my idea of buckling to the expectations of "the system"...)

oddly, another light in my life was a young girl, possibly 8-10 years old, who may actually be reading this blog, who just simply became a good friend of mine, and restored my innocence to some degree, because i liked her and didn't want her to see me stumbling or ingesting bad substances or messing up. she was feisty and often in my face, but was always sweet, and i was her genuine friend, playing cards with her and doing stuff that she couldn't find people to do, because the hippie community was sadly short of 10-year-olds to play with or even people who had any time at all, so I just sort of filled in the gap. what she did for me was, she just told me i was ok. that is, in spite of my war with the rest of the world, at my base, in my heart, i was ok, and i could still just play cards and have fun. and that meant a lot to her and also to me. being somewhat estranged from my new daughter, on a daily basis, made me feel like some kind of bad guy, but i wasn't a bad guy, and needed to get back on the road to making my life a better, brighter kind of thing to look at. it was hard to do, but it helped to hear it from the eyes of a young kid, and try to explain it to her why i was such a mess. it was ok with her, that i didn't know what i'd do with the rest of my life.

one friend from college visited me and it was a football game sunday, and we were totally unable to find a television or watch the game he wanted (maybe it was the super bowl?) and i was embarrassed at being a bad host, and not even knowing the bars (that had televisions) that well as i didn't really use them much. it showed me how far away from "normal" i was and at the same time, i was totally comfortable in a world that had no television for miles. this friend left town, miffed somewhat i think, still wishing he could watch that game.

the day henry black died i heard about it at the restaurant, and i went out on the front stoop of the place and cried. pigeons lived there; it was an old catholic school, long abandoned, and sitting out there you'd encounter them along with the traffic, unconcerned and busy, whizzing by. the other day at work they put paper on everyone's back and asked us to write good words about each other on that paper, so that the person would get lots of positive messages once they figured out which paper was theirs. i found myself totally unable to put my various and plentiful feelings about each person into single words, and therefore let my colleagues down in this respect, but i feel that to some degree you find older people and resonate with their model of relating to the world, and then you do your version of what you liked in them. nowadays my life is quite different from what it was then, but i still remember working hard, being at the bottom of the world's perception of what was "successful," yet feeling that somehow, no matter how hard it was, i'd find a way to fit into it that would make me able to welcome people, show them my life, and be ok with it. you compare yourself to others, but in the end, you open the door yourself, and show them your own sitting room.

Friday, September 23, 2011

talk of a strike at our university has everyone wondering and dredging up memories of growing up in an uncertain world; the father of my director, i thought i heard her say, was an air traffic controller, and another colleague's father's company went down with a strike forcing him and a family that depended on him to move to new jersey. i myself didn't grow up in a union family, or even one that felt strongly, as my father was a chemical engineer, but i grew up in towns like pittsburgh pennsylvania where everyone had memories of bitter and violent labor action in which people died and nobody could ever forgive or forget the evil owners. in coal and steel country strikes were always violent, always terrible, left bitterness for generations and the best thing to do was to just pack up and get out.

they send these armed guards down the river in a barge, this was 1892, and they shoot at the steelworkers on the banks and take over the mill and this image hovers over the city for like eighty years and is still there when i show up, but now it's being played out in caricature, because faculty at our university are derided as spoiled public employees in a world where they are the only ones left with health insurance. and the cost-cutters who wield a mean knife from the top see health insurance as well as unions, as something to be gotten rid of. so we can say the barge is on its way down the river and the best thing i can think of is to say, all of a sudden, i have problems in the family and have to head out to the chihuahua desert for a spell to be with the folks. and maybe this story makes sense since it really is my turn and my brothers and sister, all have taken theirs recently; i wouldn't, in fact, be lying.

the president of the university is a scrapper, involved in the electrical and plumbing unions at one time, was asked to serve in the state senate and did, but this was at a time when he was trying to finish his degree, so he plagiarized part of his thesis on his way out the door and then went on to have a successful political career although the cook county contingent wasn't quite enthusiastic about his candidacy and he lost a big election for governor. nevertheless governors go to prison in this state anyway so it was just as well, and he ended up president of the university, so it was all water under the bridge, except that in an earlier union dispute some union members found his dissertation and exposed him, which put him in a fighting mood and now he doesn't care for the faculty union much and this shows in the nasty turns the negotiation has taken; it's almost like he considers his own union background to be genuine, yet has no respect for faculty as working people of the same status, and even has a grudge to pile on it. this is what a neutral observer would say upon wondering why an ordinary negotiation could take so many turns toward the nasty and toward inexplicable and unreasonable hostility. is it because we're in coal country? with towns like pittsburg and our own which has a name, most directly translated, of "coal town"...does that explain why everyone would rather fight than reason? don't know, but the barge is coming down the river.

autumnal equinox came through, and a cooling rain, and a fall fog, a fog hanging low on the fields out in the hills where we had a faculty retreat out by a golf course and some million-dollar homes that, the best i can figure, aren't getting much business. the first of the fallen leaves hang wet on the ground and wait for the fall dryness to relieve them of their dead weight so they can blow around and become next year's mulch. i don't see the deer but there's plenty of evidence that they've been enjoying what's left of my garden which i could also say, needs a lot more of my attention. it's a time of year when i should be making excuses to go stand out there, get a little bit more of that clear fresh air, the sunlight, the fresh feeling of leaves above, about ready to set sail and drift. my thoughts go to living without insurance, without income, driftless, as if the new world depression settled in and left me completely without work, without identity, home, family. reason enough, maybe, to vote against a strike. or better yet, reason enough to get online, develop another income, start looking for other horizons...

chou, more later, these squares i'm making, they are mostly for my own entertainment, and the development of my own weblog system, which goes outward from here, and includes lots of links...

Saturday, September 17, 2011

squares, for use on the'll see.

got a new mac, and that's what makes me want to do graphics (like below) a lot and even fix up and begin to manage the weblogs better; it would be about time i'd get to some farflung places but here's one for example that my students use, and it's interesting, but i have to keep up on its template and keep everything current, etc.; it's an ongoing job but more pleasant on a mac. in fact everything is more pleasant on a mac, especially listening to music as i sit, or playing with photos, in general; i even dream better at night; i wake up, and if i have an image i don't like, i just mentally drag it over into the trash where it will go out of my consciousness. if your mac is your conscious mind and everything is visible, clear resolution and pretty, and manageable, then that's much better than having this PC-like vagueness where everything is possible but you have to be in the know to really get to it. it may all be a matter of feeling, but feeling is what counts sometimes.

so a soccer season started, and the kids all got out there, and it was a little too intense for me to report on, so i'll save it for later, and some family members are in the hospital, and i'll keep that to myself also out of respect, but plenty of other things are happening in this world including riots down in the student district and my neighbor being caught up in a scandal which i'd also better keep to myself for the moment at least. in high stress times maybe the best thing is to stick to i-tunes and picnik (that being the picture-distorter, see below). an important person in our lives, my son's roommate, also disappeared from the face of the earth; i didn't know you could do that these days, maybe they'll find him, but this of course will wreak havoc on the world as we know it, as this guy paid the bills and organized everything.

so the question of why everything would happen at once definitely comes up, along with the question of whether the sharp turn toward fall weather marks a distinct turning of the earth and leaning toward change that is of course not always good. and you see gathering clouds of trouble around the world; i watch the news, of course, as part of my job, and so one question might concern whether the world is ending, or whether it's just a period of rising instability and horrible job market. and in any case it doesn't seem like it's going to be an easy world for the young folks, might not even be so great for me, and i still have lots of options. i spill them out here, because this is a personal place and one where i like to talk about this stuff.

so i had three scams a while back, and now i can only remember one of them, but i might look back and see what the heck the other two were. at that point i'd never even mentioned my main one, africahub, a good idea which i'd never given up, but which i'd shelved for a while while i tried to figure out some other options for how to proceed. the idea behind africahub is that the world needs an online resource for news and information about africa, which could start with news but move into music, languages, environmental information, etc. and could be developed almost infinitely out in many directions. and a person would learn a lot of programming skills this way; in its appearance it would start out like google news, but in its development it would end up being more like the sense that each page, say a page about mali, would have links to places like malian musicians, malian languages, history of mali, etc. and each one of these would be in an area that would be connected to other similar topics. so it could be developed onward and outward but would primarily be a link resource where you could find all kinds of things african.

and yes, i've always loved africa. always wanted to go there. always wanted to see that african sun and grasslands, the infinite continent. one can do that, these days, without necessarily leaving this chair. one can, and one should, since avoiding the new colonialism will be the primary political impetus of the new world. by that i mean, african countries will want genuine allies rather than resource-exploiters, and they will begin to be more shrewd about who these people are, once they lift the yoke of oppressive dictatorship (a difficult process only now beginning in some places)...the future will really be about alliance of people who are careful with the world, versus those who would simply exploit it, and this kind of alliance must be nurtured and promoted. ah, but a person also needs a vision, and a future, and in some cases, must cast eyes abroad to find it. and travel forward, with no fear.

speaking of which, the tale of harding county south dakota moves forward, as i tell my friends more about it, and these are friends who have at least been there, and know a little what i speak of. we can only speculate about what exactly lies on the eighty acres of harding county that i could reasonably extract and call mine, but ironically the same friend who has actually been there, has also at one point in his life been a surveyor. so it might technically be possible to find out what this land is really like. i'm excited; it gives me hope. meanwhile the boundary waters, that other place that filled my heart, that spoke to me, the far north, land of frigid dark & long winters beyond imagination, clear cool and blue waters of the largest of the lakes, that place is on fire, burning beyond control, who could imagine. a land of ten thousand lakes, at least half of them are in that northern zone, they go on forever, so maybe these fires won't dip down and take the whole continent. but it makes you wonder. my heart starts to longing for the open spaces, the summer outdoors, and i'm beginning to realize: it's a crowded world, not much space left untrampled. and what there is, might soon get more crowded.

more later...chou

Friday, September 16, 2011

so i agreed to take the bicycle off my son's hands, since i had a pump, and could get a new tire more easily, and an inner tube, and whatever it needed, whereas he lived down in the student ghetto and didn't really have the tools. but i took the wheel into walmart hoping to find a new tire, and, upon coming back, noticed that the bolt was gone, presumably lost in walmart somewhere. and they didn't even sell tires; i could only get an inner tube. and now i couldn't even get the wheel back on.

in truevalue thay spent twenty minutes looking for a bolt but couldn't find it, and i got nervous because the chinese food was waiting for me. at work a friend of mine had to be airlifted to st. louis but, as the week wore on, it turned out she was ok. so was my dad, who was put in the hospital yet again, and, i think, is getting tired of that hospital-type experience. it was kind of a somber week, with a deep hard rain coming through and bringing a severe cold front with falling leaves all over the place.

but, after the rain cleared up, i saw the bolt on our own driveway and that saved the bike; i put it back together and returned it. found out that my dear friend survived surgery and will be on her way back. on the bike today, i made a wrong turn and ended up in the hospital parking lot which would seem to be a horribly depressing wrong turn. but in fact the mere fact that i wasn't there visiting loved ones was kind of a relief.

life is tenuous; life is frail; sometimes you have to have faith that the human spirit will prevail and we will survive all the various hardships thrown at us. one is that this depression is claiming a few victims and people are having a hard time just getting by. another is that people we know and work with day by day can just one day be gone, swept up by a helicopter to a better hospital in a better place. and finally, life's schedule can be so grueling that one comes home and can barely do much besides fall on the pillow. i did, however, get a new mac to play with, and it's with that i share some graphic pictures of yours truly, in better times, playing the fiddle. until later...fall is coming, and the pillow calls.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Saturday, September 10, 2011

a huge storm appeared to be coming in, with lines of thunder lasting a whole minute, and lightning in the west that would set the dry grasses and woods on fire, if it were to land before it rained, and i stayed inside rather than risk it, gladly anyway since i've been sick a few days, but it never really rained, it just kind of teased us, with a few drops here and there landing on the sizzling grass and gardens. it's cooled off; leaves are falling; it's definitely turned, if not completely, it's at least started. and that's a refreshing change.

so the nearby town, county seat of about three thousand people, compared to our twenty thousand, had a house blow up today that immediately got everyone talking and set a couple of nearby houses on fire also. of course everyone said it was a meth lab, and who knows, they're probably right. people are all into that out in the country, there aren't any jobs, they can't seem to get on at the local wal-mart, and even if they did they wouldn't have insurance. it's a hard and bitter world and it appears that turning to trouble is a common way for lots of folks but trouble is, they don't know what they're doing and they blow whole houses up. everyone says that right away but we'll find out in the news eventually.

way out in harding county south dakota they've lost population steadily for a hundred years to the point that the entire county only has twelve hundred, a quarter of what it started out at the beginning of the century. you'd think when four thousand settled there, back in the cowboy days, it wouldn't take them long to figure out that it was hard to make a living, and head back to gentler land where it's easier to farm. either that or it just became easier to raise a thousand head of cattle with a single guy, as long as he had a helicopter, 4 x 4 and binoculars, so they didn't need the help anymore. whatever, the county seat, town of buffalo, only has three hundred some, and the natural wonders, slim butte and the cave hills, stand out like sore thumbs. if it's 97% white, that means there's maybe twenty or thirty that aren't.

one place that caught my interest was sky ranch for boys, which was 40 years old in january of this year when it closed down, or said it would. what they said was that they only had twenty boys, down from forty, and counties weren't funding boys like they used to, that was a trend that wasn't turning around, so they were shutting their doors. the concept was simple; get wayward boys out onto the open prairie with a horse, a fire and the wide blue sky and that will straighten them out quick, and apparently it worked well, for forty years. we could point to it as one of the bright spots of our culture that we'd think of such a thing, but as i thumb through the pictures of custer national forest and the history of the area i begin seeing it through the eyes of the native americans who mostly got run out of the place, and i can practically hear them saying, yeah, good idea, taking a boy away from his family and original environment, and putting him out here where he probably should have been right from the start. i wonder how they tend to look at the fracking that has made the dakotas the only place left in the lower forty eight that still has jobs. it has jobs because people are willing to dig down a ways and then blow the beshpungus out of the rock in every direction sideways, until the whole thing is undermined. and they wouldn't mind doing it to sky ranch, slim butte and the cave hills, i'm sure.

so i got a letter from the guy who i share this three hundred twenty acres with, if we'd split it i'd have eighty, and he wants to be sure my dad deeded it over to me, which he did, and that makes me rightful owner of eighty acres of wide-open prairie, or some such thing, somewhere in harding county, if i can figure out where. and there's no telling if i could have my pick of which eighty, out of the three twenty, i'd want, or if there was anything anyone could do with any of it. harding county is in the far northwest corner of the state, up by montana and north dakota, north even of the wyoming line, west of the two big reservations, and the big river coming down through the state that seems to divide the arable land (where it's settled, with farms and such) and the wide open grassland. some pictures show roads going off into wide flat spaces, going on forever, but google maps shows gouges and cut valleys, some woodland, dry hills, more like badlands. it could be a combination of both, what do i know?

so here's my plan. this place, sky ranch for boys, obviously needs saving; it needs someone who will move in, use it for its proper value, and revive it. it could be a quaker school (sky ranch was originally heavily funded by the alcohol industry, which is not to say they wouldn't still fund a similar venture), could be a university, could be just about anything. perhaps they've thought of it. i'm not sure why i care all of a sudden.

it was sioux country; the sioux were a wild and free people who still harbor great resentment and probably see even the name "custer national forest" as ironic; i remember passing through southwest south dakota thirty years or so ago, and thinking, there's more racism here than i'm used to, and there were definitely hard feelings on both sides. the hot wind blew from the west, never a cloud in the sky, it seemed; it dried you right up and you'd go for shade and where there was sure water. down there in the south, where there are trees, river valleys, and lots of people, they have rapid city, a town of more like fifty or sixty thousand, and sturgis, deadwood, spearfish, and belle fourche, a whole passel of towns which are all there presumably because it's beautiful, or at least tolerable. who knows what it's like straight north, up in the corner, but my guess is that it's beautiful in its own way, and kind of scary in others. it hasn't voted 20% democrat in, say, about twenty years.

but hey, things aren't perfect down here either, folks are wondering if it'll ever turn around, and if job-man perry comes 'round then obama will have to quick create a couple of thousand jobs just to get reelected. but it won't solve the problem, which is that we sunk half a trillion into afghanistan, another trillion into iraq and airport security, and we can't get it back, and smart money is heading out where people have a little better sense. these south dakota ranchers are the ones out there voting for these stooges, but it doesn't matter, we voted a peace candidate in and he's still mired in it, billions a minute, because he can't figure out how to get out. meanwhile we're back here trying to decide whether to pay firefighters or teachers, or flip a coin, or just eliminate another pension. you can't have everything. and, if you blow the beshungus out of the ground beneath you, it might just cave in someday, i've seen that too, when this tiny town on route 66 way down in the other corner of kansas, just caved in. it makes you wonder, especially when you live in coal country, and there's a history, and nobody talks about it much, 'cause the people who made all the money took off for better horizons, and the only folks left are the descendants of the ones who had no place better to go.

i will say this about the nine-eleven tragedies, though, and that is that it was a huge tragedy, a terrible thing, and all the trillions in the world wouldn't take that away, or even ease the pain, and i'm not even sure we could have avoided throwing a few trillion around in our rage and anger, an entirely natural need for vengeance and closure, but it was truly futile lashing out on our part, didn't help at all; i don't recall feeling any better, even after they grabbed bin laden and dumped him in the sea. i still feel sick about the whole thing, i feel related to the whole city of new york, worldly that they are, and any random terrorist fatality, whether it's in pennsylvania, new york, or gaza, is entirely tragic and unnecessary. and the worst thing about it was, on that day ten years ago, and for about a week following, it was clear and blue, absolutely stunningly gorgeous fall weather. nobody wants to mention that, but it's true, i remember it clearly. and that's proof, if anything, that the weather is just that, it's not related to anything, it just comes along, and maybe it rains, and maybe it doesn't.

so playing the bog, the usual suspects come up: pseudonym, jack grace, onion dip (the longest running one to my knowledge), laxo, fort worth tom. but one contestant wins a single game and disappears: it is what it is. i'm not sure that has to do with anything either. but i'm here to tell you: it was a winner. just once.

Thursday, September 08, 2011

somehow last night this gigantic cold came over me and settled in my head where i now seem to weigh 20 more pounds, all in the nose area, and have to carry around this sinus issue as i walk around in this beautiful fall clear weather. it reminds me actually of the old ragweed days when, on august 15 every year, my head would explode as the ragweed burst out in its pollen glory, and i would get this vicious cold which would return on october 15th when i'd finally shake it off and move into winter; the cold was the body's way of saying, ok, this is war, in we go with all our soldiers and the entire firepower of the autoimmune system.

labor day weekend started out hot and steamy, but we knew a rain was coming; unfortunately rain at this time of year is often a kind of teaser and clouds come over, but don't really share anything. sunday, the clouds came over, and actually sprinkled a kind of mist for a while, and then left, and then it was actually cooler; on monday, labor day, it was a lot cooler, and we went out to the lake and used the last three passes of a 20-swim lake pass so that, having finished the pass, we won. a clear, cool, sparkling day, beautiful lake, hardly another soul around, and three kids splashed and played the whole afternoon. the turtle was nowhere to be seen; he was onto the fall idea and was probably investigating mud holes at the bottom.

so stunningly it goes from the worst season to the best, and i'm aware that the heat is not quite over, but there's been a bit of the cool, clear air, the gently falling leaves, which as usual is accompanied by football which should be illegal. but what i wanted to say is that i do get my bicycle out into it, i huff and puff, up the long hill to work, sometimes with a flat tire (a slowly leaking tire) which actually gives me more exercise, but wears me out considerably, me being about to keel over and all. but, whereas it doesn't make any sense to have one's busiest time of year also at the most beautiful, one also can take some time, and deliberately see it, and watch the green stuff change its color and dry out and get ready to fall. one problem though, is that, in turning west, as i always must do to get home, one is hit with a sun that is so clear, sharp, dry, piercing that it could be deadly. and i often have to pull down the visor in the car, and the hat, and it's still not enough.

deep out in harding county south dakota is a patch of three hundred twenty acres that my grandfather and some other people split, shared and leased out in order to get natural gas income, which in fact i've inherited, come down through my father, and actually get a small check once or twice a year when the well is working. i'm talking about a hundred dollars a year, which comes in handy, string money and all, but actually i'm more interested in the land. i occasionally google harding county south dakota, get pictures of wild sunny fields of plains, slim butte rock formation, girls basketball team south dakota champions some year or other, or harding county courthouse, which is a small, modest kind of building as if the old stone structure was burned down back in the fifties or something, or maybe the seventies. anyway i become somewhat obsessed with this harding county, the wild prairies, out west of the indian reservations, where the wind is strong and sun beats down with a clear blue sky every day, almost, even in the summer and winter. and i wonder about life out there. what if i were to claim my eighty acres, step them out, find the best ravine and put a house in it? or hillside, if that's what people do. or riverbank, or shade tree. where does one put a house when one moves out there? i can only imagine.

then the other day i was calling parents i know to find a playmate for a six-year-old who is literally climbing walls and furniture in need of someone his age to talk to. two of his best buddies were sick and their mom stopped me in the hallway to tell me that she was sorry; they just couldn't come over. labor day was like that but, as you see from above, it all worked out in the end. what i meant to say was, that was it, that's probably when i got that cold; it comes through kids; it goes right up through parents, and then when parents talk about this endless driving about, going here and there, trying to take up where the school buses have let us down, it's an opportunity for the bugs to do their thing.

so life goes on here; i have a cold, but i'm in less trouble than some of my students, who are already having trouble waking up at eight a-m, or at all, in this gorgeous weather, and having more trouble actually reading, or knowing which side of the paper is the top. two missed the first part of the exam, another missed the whole thing, and at least one entered class not having a clue that it was even exam day. such is life on a college campus. oh to be young, and to pretend that everything is ok. as for me, i'm heading home as soon as possible; i'm not feeling well.

Saturday, September 03, 2011

september is the cruelest month; nobody seems to get my reference, so i'll explain it briefly. when i was a kid, i used to hear april is the cruelest month; this was a common saying around the end of the spring in the north, and referred to the animals, many of whom very much enjoyed the beautiful warm spring weather, but were completely abject at the total lack of food that resulted from the long winter. so winter was over, and you could go outside, and you could enjoy the sun, and thawing out, but all the while you were starving and had no chance of finding anything out there; it was all still pretty much frozen.

so now, september comes around, and a tease of fall is in the air, sometimes cooler, sometimes even reasonable, sun still out, but the long treacherous summer finally shows sign of letting up, and we animals might be able to come outside for a while, but alas, summer comes back for one more hot spell, it lasts about a month, until around the first of october. so september really is the last month of summer, as it's still plenty hot, and tends to even stay that way. the food is not a problem; the garden, after wilting in the july and august heat, gets a second time around, and even grows new vegetables. baseball turns into football and once baseball itself gets serious, and the weather gets good, people seem to forget about it, and it's one of those summer sports that ends up playing in winter, just like the winter sports play biggest in june, and it's all so backwards i tend to lose track of it all.

now i have to say there's a september birthday in the crowd, and it happened one year in seoul in an apartment by the highway not far from the great bus terminal that sent korean holiday travelers fanning out around the countryside for the chusok holiday that always happens at the peak of fall's clear beautiful blue-sky dry harvest weather. when a little boy is born in seoul one puts red peppers on one's doorway and then people leave you alone for about a month assuming that you are struggling to keep the baby alive. after one month, you come out, show, celebrate, line up the baby and welcome him into the world. in the dry season if the dry culverts and the concrete washes aren't full of water they are often used to dry red peppers which are spread out by the local people and catch the sun in a very sharp way, though if this was supposed to represent maleness (girls got paper on their doorways) i was never quite sure how that happened. there was red pepper in virtually everything you ate, and it was usually fresh, sharp, firy. there was a lot of diesel fuel in the air, smell of barbeque, hot things to eat, people selling things off hand-drawn carts. buses would be more than full of people but the smell of good food would be everywhere- when you got on, when you got off, when you'd drive by a little place, when the window of the bus was still open.

the smell and cool wind of fall is supposed to give me a burst of energy and often does; i even feel, somewhat like others, the feeling of hope accompanying a new school year. actually in the stifling swooning heat of a day like today i feel the desire to sink low in my couch, fan on me, play the bog, with or without my brother and sister (who, when they both join me, rock and often beat the whole bog situation; the other night we racked up a stunning pile of points and knocked off pseudonym, team axolotl, the whole gang)'s labor day, or at least the labor day weekend, day of rest for workers; i'm set back by pure tiredness, which translates into laziness, desire to not leave this couch. it's supposed to rain and get cooler later; maybe it will, and maybe not. twenty four years later, i look back on a long ride, a good kid, he gets a good feeling when he has red peppers, and much of the rest of life seems, i'd guess, to be a little overwhelming. hang in there, i'd say, clear days are ahead, life isn't easy, and one has to find one's own way in it. it's a series of tough breaks, hard turns, difficult choices, and in the end you're on your own. down at the army base in the center of seoul an army rabbi gave him a bris, as a baby, cut him, and he cried hard until they put a finger of wine in his mouth, and he settled down a little while, realizing that even those who loved him most, his parents, weren't always going to protect him from the pain of life...the weather cooling off, clear, blue sky, in seoul as well as here, yet you would never be so exposed ever again. and, people celebrated. maybe what's to celebrate, is not having to endure such pain forever.