The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Introduction to Poetry

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I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

— Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate

 

Which is Alive? The Singer or the Song?

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Medford, Oregon, May 2, 2015 — Now that I live on Siskiyou Boulevard, next door is a sometime fiesta. That is to say, the Latino family next door has the house on the corner, and apparently a never-ending extended family and circle of friends. So often on a Friday evening there is a gathering with Spanish music and beer. And when one of the children has a birthday … oh, my.

So when I returned from an errand this afternoon, and saw an inflatable tent thing in which children can bounce and fly around, I recognized birthday in progress. Sure enough, around dark, headlights and cars arrived, families spilled out into the pools of light, and now as I go to bed there’s a wonderful party going on next door.

It’s summer, and I have the window open beside my bed, so I can enjoy the party almost as well as if I was there. Past my window, in their back yard, children run, and scream, and yell stories, accusations, laughter, curse words, and insults. In other words, they’re having a good time.

You might think this would disturb my sleep, but it doesn’t. Somehow I like it, and despite the startling loudness and excitement, it’s pleasant and soothing.

I drifted off, smiling, and then … [Read more…]

Margaret’s Lime

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Henrietta, Texas circa 1970: Darrel Blain went to school with my brother, David Strickland, and sometimes rode his bike out to the farm near Hurnville to visit. Like any kid growing up in Henrietta, his mother bought his clothes at John’s Drygoods, and the Library Rummage Sale was a big deal.

But he was enterprising, and he got a job at the ‘Lo Boy, cooking burgers and making cokes.

Then one day, there was this lime.

The limes were kept inside the grey metal ice-maker, in a bucket. At that time, lime cokes were a hot item at the ‘Lo Boy. The formula is simple: make a fountain coke, cut a slice of lime, and squeeze it into the coke.

But not this lime. It was too beautiful.

Large. Deep green. Unblemished and perfect. It was just too pretty to slice up and put in a coke, so Darrel stuck it into his pocket instead.

Later that day, it happened that he biked out to the Hurnville farm. to visit with my brother David. While he and David were lounging around, my mother, Margaret was her name, saw the lime.

She said gee, that would really be good with tequila. She asked if she could have it.

Startled, he was. Actually somewhat shocked, for he had never seen anyone actually drink tequila, much less have it with a lime. He handed it over.

She smiled.

Accumulation

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Nocona Texas, 1969: Bob Standley is my brother-in-law, because he married my sister Mary. But some time before they got married, when he was in high school, he had a Chevy Malibu.

He had a little job, I think it was at the boot factory, and he had to be very careful with his money. Each week on Saturday, he took $2, and he’d fill up the gas tank — it was a long time ago — and there was money left over to go to the drive-inn movie, and to buy a nasty little cigar called a Swisher Sweet.

Every week he followed this $2 routine, and so as to conserve his money, he drove his car only when he had to, so that the gas would last through the week.

But then one Saturday, something strange happened.

He was at the gas station, and he started to gas up.

But the gas splashed out of the tank.

He thought he’d made some sort of mistake, so he stuck the nozzle in again, and gave it a squirt.

Again the gas splashed out of the tank.

Suddenly he realized what had happened.

Just like saving money for a rainy day, his conserving the fuel had left him with almost a full tank, and the tank just couldn’t hold any more gas!

So he had the entire $2 still in his hand, today.

That night, he and his friends went to the movie, and they had cokes several times, and then they drove around, all over the place, all night long.

On This Day: Bay to Breakers

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San Francisco, May 7, 2004: Once again, today is the famous Bay to Breakers race where thousands of runners run from the San Francisco Bay to the ocean. That is from way downtown, up Market Street, and then out past the Panhandle Park and through Golden Gate park to the beach.

In years past, I’d wake in my fourth-floor garrett at Lyon and Oak, fuzzily wondering what was the hubbub. Peering down from my kitchen windows, I’d see the runners — many in oddball costumes — pouring up the street and through the skinny park. There, watching them and drinking my coffee, I would ponder life and experience the gratitude that comes of not being among them.

This year, there’s bad news about running naked.

It seems that every year more and more people run the 7.5 mile race without clothes, and let me tell you some of these folks are way too floppy, but in the main, skinny people run, and so it generally works out, if you follow me.

Last year, more than 200 skinny-dippers trundled through the streets, sort of like very late streakers joining the party twenty years later. However, this year the police have decided to issue citations to naked runners.

In fine San Francisco doughnut shop fashion, however, the police have announced that they will only issue citations to the folks who fail to clothe themselves after the finish line. After all, a tradition is a tradition, right?

And of course, when interviewed, it came out that the policemen felt that running into the race, demanding a driver’s licence, and writing up a ticket while trotting alongside the nudie runner … well, it’s just not their thing.

Basic Buddhism

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India, Long Ago: Gautama Siddhartha sat beneath the Bo tree, and stubbornly refused to rise until he’d reached enlightenment. (He’d tried many other things in that past.) One day, he reached enlightenment.

The enlightenment he attained permitted him to express the basic problem of living–which is how a person can gain freedom from suffering–and his realization is summarized in four points, which are called “The Four Noble Truths” …

  1.  Our experience of living often consists of suffering. For example, we experience suffering from losses, illness, hunger, and death. The suffering comes from our insistent mental reaction against the “bad” thing. That is, we insistently desire to have a thing that was lost, and so we experience suffering. (As an example, you throw away a piece of paper and it is lost but you do not suffer. But you lose the deed to your home and you insistently desire that the situation be different, and you suffer. But if you give away the deed to your home to your child, then you do not suffer.)
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  2.  The suffering comes from the “grasping desire” for the thing lost. It is demanding that “what is” be different, and then suffering because it is not different.
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  3.  And the answer? To eliminate your suffering, eliminate the grasping desire.
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  4.  To eliminate the grasping desire, follow eight important rules. In these rules (called the Eight-fold Path) are proscriptions against the things that often result in unhappiness (such as killing other folks), and prescriptions to engage in practices such as meditation, to learn to still the mind (and thus still grasping desire).

Want to Stop Suffering? Here’s How …

What this means in more modern language is that suffering comes from RESISTANCE to what is. For example, mentally *grasping* after something that you do not have right now. Or mentally *resisting* something that you don’t like. When you compulsively resist, you create–in your mind and in your experience of life–the thing we call suffering.

If you can relearn the mental habit of resisting what is, grasping after what you don’t have, and resisting things you dislike … the suffering in your life and mind fades away. Often immediately.

And remember, those troublesome mental habits are only habits, and habits can be changed. Presuming that (a) you *want* to change the habit, and (b) you’re willing to put in a little bit of practice.

Now, in truth, sometimes you can simply *decide* to let go and cease resistance.

But for most of us, years or decades of bad habits require us to put in a little effort, to *practice* the new way.

Even Shorter:

Want to stop suffering? If yes, then (a) adopt the basis (grasping causes suffering) as a working theory, (b) make an ongoing attempt to increase your skill at “letting go,” and (c) it helps if you learn how to allow your mind to go still, which helps a lot, and which we usually call “meditation.” The Buddhists describe your new understanding and your attempt at relearning as having “Right Mindfulness,” and it’s one item in the Eightfold Path mentioned above.

If you understand the cause and the cure (given here) … if you will attempt to change the grasping … then your suffering will fade away.

And it feels really, really good.

Get it? (Got it.) Good!

 

 

Carrie Street Station

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St. Louis, Winter 1967: I was saving up my money, so I got two jobs.

Days: Yard clerk at the Rock Island Railroad.

Nights: Night Manager at the Hilton Inn.

With different days off, only three days had me working both jobs. At night from eleven, until seven in the morning, I ran the front desk at the Airport Hilton Inn. (Usually pretty quiet, except that time the Stones arrived). In the wee hours, I balanced the NCR 1600 bookeeping machine, and in the morning …

I walked through the halls and past the aviary — a large cage with the tiniest, quickest tropical birds, bright as a paint kit, and full of song so early, with cheery quick eyes askance — onward, to the Olde Weste Coffee Shoppe for my free breakfast. Oh, that was grand!

Then, piloting the volkswagen home to my unheated trailor, just off the end of the jet runway at St. Louis International Airport. Though the planes were very loud, I slept soundly.

A quick sleep it was, as needs be I’m up and dressed in Sears insulated underwear, thick roustabout clothes, and big brogan-style boots. Off to the Rock Island Railroad, Carrie Street station.

Not a passenger stop, no. A rough-looking switchyard in a rough part of town. Here’s how it works:

There is a local railroad called the Terminal Railroad. Their only job is to go around St. Louis, to the real railroads: Southern Pacific, Santa Fe, Rock Island. Railroads hand off cars to other railroads, and Carrie Street was the Rock Island switching station.

When the Terminal Railroad showed up, I stood beside the track. They have 54 cars for the Rock, that’s us. Our switch foreman, Danny, would tell them to put the cars into our switching tracks 7, 8, and 9. As they backed the cars into these tracks, I stood alongside and wrote down the cars and their numbers, as fast as I could. (If I could write them as the cars passed me, then I didn’t have to walk up and down the tracks writing them down.)

The conductor on the Terminal Railroad would give a thick wad of the “Bills of Lading” to the Bill Clerk. These are forms that show where the cars are going, and what’s been laeded into them, laddie.

The Rock Island Line

Me and the bill clerk sorted them, to discover we had sixteen cars for Kansas City, fourteen for Oakland, and so on. The switch foreman Danny figured how to move these long strings of cars around so as to get all the Kansas City ones together. It took most of the day.

Then, our train took off to Kansas City and points west. I think that, on the other shift, some of those cars went back east, but I never saw them, and for all I know there are thousands stranded somewhere out west.

Danny, the switch foreman, was a young fellow, and acted very sour. I think it helped him control his tough-guy crew. So I would often annoy him by striding through the bitter cold, along the track outside the switch shanty (while they huddled around the coal stove). I’d swing my arms wide, taking big strides.

In a loud voice, I sang, “Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! Oh, the Rock Island line is the road to ride! Oh, the Rock Island line is a mighty fine line! If you want to ride, you gotta ride it like you find it, get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island line!”

Sometimes my voice cracked, but it was never less than completely chipper and enthusiastic. And loud.

This goober act never failed to amaze Danny and the switch crew, and they pretended disgust with such cheerfulness, while I in turn pretended not to notice nor comprehend in any way.

Just before eleven each night, in the office bathroom, I’d change into my suit and black shoes. Then off to the Hilton Inn, to balance those books.

In the St. Louis winter, daylight comes late and night falls early. Some cold and snowy days there were when the sun hardly showed. During one stretch it had been over a week since I saw the sun, and snow fell heavy that day.

That evening, trudging across the yard toward the office, underneath the yard’s lamps high on their poles, I noticed that all the falling snow ahead of me, and the snow upon the ground ahead, glittered in sharp bright points, so beautiful they were, glittering.

Glittering before me like gold.

A Hot Bath in the Cold Rain

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Ben Lomond, CA in the Santa Cruz mountains, November 7, 2010: So I was scheduled to assist at a Tantra Yoga Beginner’s Weekend Workshop with the SourceTantra folks, and therefore on the day after my “How to Feel Good Fast” event, I packed, kissed my dogs good bye, and drove down to the Santa Cruz mountains.

But then, as it turned out, the person with whom I’d volunteered to assist hadn’t passed on the info to the person who passed on the info to the person who coordinates that event, and so … they didn’t need me to assist at all.

But since I’d already blocked off the time in my appointment book, and didn’t want to have wasted the time I spent writing it down and all … [Read more…]

 
 

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