For Those Who Struggle...

Down and down we go

...myself included. Found this at Whiskey River a moment ago and it seems to define the battle (regardless of its nature) each of us has to face at one time or another.

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Three Js

Here are my reasons for not getting my housework done on my day off. What's yours?

Jimi, Jimi, and Jimi
Janis and Janis

Joe, my man Joe

Hot Jazz on a Cold Sunday Morning (Revised)

Cool cats

...with rain on my roof providing the counterpoint backdrop. I'm listening on YouTube with my loss-leader earphones, my body swaying and swinging to the sweet sounds of Django and Stephane. Sex without the sweat, cool cats! (Click on the link under the picture. Here's another one.)

.......

Go-o-od mo-o-r-rnin', Blogland!

9-28-09 Note: I was advised that an expression I used to indicate the kind of dancing I was doing (like Lauren Bacall did in To Have and Have Not, more of a strut, really) to the music, above, didn't mean what I thought it meant and was, in fact, politically incorrect, in addition to being just plain wrong. So, I edited my post to remove the offending expression, and to apologize for my ignorance.

Melancholia

Passing Through

There is an unsettling stillness to the house that has begun bedding down in my brain, in my heart, now that the confusion of moving Kareema and Donovan out has passed. Even though we get together each evening, the quiet of the rest of the day cancels out the noise and chatter left behind after their visits. I hadn’t anticipated this. Just another adjustment to be made.

I went to bed early last night, around 9:30; early for me, anyway. Despite feeling bone tired as I slowly climbed the stairs, I couldn’t get to sleep right away. Tossed and turned so much that I loosened the sheets and got up around 12:30am to remake the bed. Went downstairs to check that all the lights were out and I had locked the doors. Picked up a small flashlight to take up to my room, in case the power goes off, not that I had reason to believe it might.

As I lay in the dark, trying all the old go-to-sleep tricks my mother used to tell us to do, the house talked to me, creaking and groaning, as it has every night for the last 24 years that I’ve lived here. I still don’t know what it’s trying to tell me, though I listen hard and with an open heart.

Just as I began drifting off, the Canada geese squadrons flew overhead, honking to one another, the drill sergeants calling out sharply to the stragglers, the ones out of step…out of flap, I guess. Each fall, I would listen for them; try to catch sight of them in the night sky. I’ve been so preoccupied with divorce, financial woes, and taking care of daughter and grandson over the last three years that I hadn’t heard them. I opened the window near my bed to hear them better. For almost fifteen minutes, squadron after squadron of honkers passed overhead, going south. Don’t know if there were more after that, because I fell asleep to the soft honking. Such a wonderful sound.

Today has been rainy and dreary, which I usually don’t mind at all. I usually call these days “beautiful Seattle days,” but today I just feel melancholic. The house is growing cold, the temperature falling below 66F last I looked. I’m trying to resist turning on the furnace until the thermostat reads 64 or lower – trying to make the fuel oil go a little further.

The kids are coming for supper in awhile, so I’m headed to the grocery store. When I return, I think I’ll make a pot of delicious, malty Assam, do a load of dishes and prepare the fixings for homemade pizzas – always fun to make.

(c)2009 Martha McLemore

Haruki Murakami

Haruki

Before I have coffee or anything else in the morning, I log onto the computer and visit my favorite blogs. One of those favorites is Whiskey River, to read the quote of the day, which gives me something to think about while getting ready for work.

Somehow, over the last few days, I missed a quote, but found it this morning. It is from Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, someone I've not heard of before (I lead such a shallow life, it seems), but I did research a bit this morning. The quote at WR made me laugh, which is why I'm including it here:

"What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things."

It's the jellyfish part that got to me. I used to imagine, when I was a kid, that the world beyond what I could see was squishy, not solid, and was probably like jello or ...jellyfish. The world, therefore, became solid - real - only when I walked toward the horizon, toward what I couldn't see. Kids are so self-centered, so ego-centric, to think they create the world by their being.

Anyway, after chuckling over the quote, I googled Murakami's name and discovered he is a fellow Baby-Boomer and (evidently) a well-known writer. Time for another trip to the local library...as soon as I can make the path there solid with my steps.

Good morning, Blogland.

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Odd Socks

Mismatched

This is not about socks, odd or otherwise. Not much on my mind today (how did that happen?!), but a couple or so observations, and things I found while wasting time cruising the Internet.

• Had to drive to the east side of York this morning for an appointment with my therapist, Beth. I've been seeing her, off and on, for a couple of years now, since shortly after I filed for divorce from Ex-Beloved. I was a basket-case then, but, as John Aston's character used to say, on Night Court, "I'm much better now!" Anyway, the sun hadn't risen very high when I left home so the heavy dew on the vegetation along my route sparkled like I imagine diamonds do. There was the beginning of a burning-off mist rising from the fields and off the trees, through which fingers of sunlight seemed to search for something they had lost. I was reminded of Lucy's photos taken in her garden earlier this year. Remembering her artistry brightened my mood measurably, and heightened my enjoyment of the sparkling landscapes before me.

• On the ride home afterwards, I recalled something I wrote in an email to a blogger friend, about my criteria for what makes a good father. I wrote, in a smart ass tone, that my expectations "are that he doesn't beat his children, that he doesn't denigrate them, verbally or emotionally abuse them, and that he provide for them as best he is able." The recollection made me think about my father, who, sadly, did all of those things above - usually when in a drunken rage - and was an unreliable source of support due to his alcoholism. As I was growing up, I used to think that his abuses were because I was a rotten kid, that I didn't deserve any better treatment. I carried that misperception (self-deception?) into both my marriages and other relationships for too many years, until I was shocked out of that notion when the truth of my second marriage became abundantly clear. The first sixty years of my life had been influenced negatively by what I believed about myself from my dysfunctional childhood. Yet it is also true that the changes I'm making in how I live (want to live) the next sixty years is being positively guided by that same childhood. I will never settle for that kind of life ever again. For all his shortcomings as a "good" father, I learned many valuable things from my father, and I dearly loved the man. Go figure.

• When I returned home, I sat my wide caboose down at the computer and went surfing. I went back to an earlier post, Listening, and played the links. While there, I stumbled onto another blog, Concrete Beat...way cool! It's about street musicians in the subways and on the street corners of New York. I didn't read through all the posts, but I'll be going back there soon.

• Also checked in at Whiskey River and read a quote from GBS (George Bernard Shaw), Irish playwright and intellectual. And NO, intellectual and Irish are NOT mutually exclusive terms, as one of my years-ago English professors said. But, what can you expect from a guy who looked like the comic book character, The Hulk?

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

The Troubadour

Ride Credit

Troubadour

The erstwhile dog-day troubadour
Beats upon his belly’s kettle drum,
His song a steady tuneless thrum -
A maddening, constant, screeching hum -
From dawn’s soft light through setting sun,
Courting death in his frantic search for amour:
This summer’s-end winged troubadour.

For three lustra and two circuits of the sun,
Our hero suckled on tree roots underground,
Until his way to the surface could be found,
Where females strained to hear his sound.
When, at last, he felt his wings unbound,
When Magicada’s imago cycle had begun,
He plumped – dried – his wings in July sun.

The assassin, too, listens for his song,
And, when it’s heard, she takes to wing;
Oblivious to her, he proceeds to sing.
He does not flinch upon her sting,
Though a squirming death it will bring.
Her egg inside him will hatch ere long,
After her venom stills his shrill song.

The valkryja glides her prize to her lair,
Where other Sæhrímnirs line the hall,
Providing grisly meat and mead for all
Her wriggling einherjar, still so small.
The troubadour’s carcass begins to fall
To dust in a chamber filled with dank air,
Inside the wasp’s subterranean lair.

The troubadour’s rêve de mort is brief,
Like his life; a fading, melancholy review
Of all the things he had hoped to do –
Songs to be sung, the pitching of ardent woo –
A simple life, really, not much for him to do.
His early demise brings Troubadour deep grief,
Abridging a life-span predestined to be brief.

Adieu, little dog-day troubadour.
You’ll beat your kettle drum no more.

© 2009 Martha McLemore