Monday, November 05, 2007
Innocent? Yeah right
This is the child who perpetrated the crimes mentioned below, and many more. I settled down into a depressed teen after my father died, driven by an unknown future.
That's bound to make anyone stop doing stupid things.
Ok, it never left.
Labels: childhood, death, electronics, recompence
¶ 7:29 PM 4 comments
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Monday, July 30, 2007
Ingmar Bergman
Something tells me I should write about the passing of Ingmar Bergman, but the only thing that comes to mind is "he was only 89?!" I know 89 is a respectable age and all, but still--I thought Bergman was well passed 90, maybe even a hundred by now.Why? Well simply because of his subject matter and the fact that his films always seemed like the films that a 60-plus-year-old would direct. Fanny and Alexander is a prime example. I thought that he directed that when he was in his 80's, but that was 20 or more years ago.
Perhaps I was just thinking of Kurosawa?
Probably.
In any case, Bergman has some of the most beautifully slow movies I've ever had the pleasure to have wash over me (weird camera angles between talking characters and all.) He also dealt with compelling subject matter that, while seeming to be so dark, also had a sort of hope to it--a sort of human density, if that makes any sense. I mean come on! Wasn't he the same age as Fellini? Actually I guess he was older than Fellini by a couple of years. Why does that age of film directors seem so ancient? Why am I surprised that Bergman just died when (in fact) I had assumed he had died two decades ago?Here's to ponderous and calculated!*
*Sorry Sleepy E, I couldn't resist.
Labels: art, calculated, death, film, ponderous
¶ 8:31 PM 10 comments
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Friday, July 27, 2007
String theory
There's a certain quality of light in the kitchenAt eleven a.m. on a mid-summer morning
That makes me wish my mother and father
Were still alive.
We could sit and drink coffee while the light
Plays out glossy gray over the walnut table,
Their hands would be old and wrinkled now,
And their hair completely white.
We could talk about what my life would be like
If either of them had died when I was so young--
If they weren't here to drink coffee with me
And watch me wonder at the quality of light.
But I know what that's like.
I drink my coffee alone while the late morning
Light shimmers, iridescent, over its surface
Labels: coffee, death, physics, poem, poetry
¶ 11:42 AM 6 comments
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Strange things we remember or I saw a man die (maybe)
When I was ten I was instrumental in hospital triage and emergency care. You see one fine June day when school was out, I was dragged along by Mom to my grandmother's radiation treatment for breast cancer. Grandma was a downwinder and witnessed many of the open-air nuclear tests that happened in the 50's from her Cedar City vantage. Now, of course, her breast cancer could have been caused by many environmental and genetic variables, but given that none of her female ancestors suffered the malady--unlike my paternal grandmother who was also a Southern Utahn and died before said nuclear tests--it seems more-than-likely that there was a link to errant nuclear radiation causing her affliction, due to the fact that she was living in Southern Utah and breast feeding in the early 50's when the tests were being conducted. (I should note that my sister in the mid-70's visited the Panguitch cemetary at night to see the glowing headstones caused by radioactive fallout from the 50's.) Of course it is more than ironic that radiation treatment cured my grandmother of her cancer (along with a mastectomy) but a diatribe against radiation and horrible government policy is not the point of this post. The point, as my initial sentence states, is that I was essential, as a ten-year old boy, in the immediate care of another human being.I remember it clearly: my mother was not a fan of letting children into certain establishments--hospitals being top of the list. She was not a modern 70's woman by any means, and followed the code of conduct established long before that hospitals were no place for healthy children. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was to wait either in the waiting room or outside. I was to go no further. So after watching the cool fish in the LDS hospital waiting room for a while swimming their exotic salt-water way around the giant bubbling tube, I felt compelled to go outside.
Of course there was nothing outside, either, but I remember sitting on the strange benches that inter-cut the main entrance to the hospital and a parking lot further on. For some reason I want to picture myself with a skateboard, but I don't think that is accurate, given my bad experience with 70's skateboards earlier that year in fitth grade. I might have had a skateboard or I might not have, in any case I was doing something out by the weird garden-in-between when all at once a blue Ford F150 pulled up all skeewumpus next to the guard rail separating the little enclave from the ring road around the parking lot. The driver was clearly in the wrong spot and he had nearly pegged the guard poles. The door creaked open and a man of average height staggered out. I was a bit scared at this point, as I'm sure anyone, let alone a kid in some weird hospital situation would be. He fell and then stood and then staggered to one of the guard poles, grasping it weakly.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
"Are you all right?" I said.
"No. No." His lips were blue and ringed with a white crusty salt. That image sticks in my mind particularly. "No."
"I'll get the doctor!" And I ran as fast as I could into the hospital to the receptionist, not minding the cars or anything.
"There is a man out front who is sick!" It sounds stupid now, but what was I to say? "I think he is having a heart attack!" Luckily the woman in the window took me seriously and grabbed her phone.
I stayed inside next, jumping up to see the woman behind the counter. Within seconds a stretcher appeared from the elevator which was off-limits to me. They went outside.
I didn't.
Moments later they came crashing through the doors and headed to the inner-sanctum of the hospital.
I hung around and looked at the fishes some more and then went back to the desk to hear what had happened. I asked her and she said "He'll be fine!"
"Massive cardio-infarction" is what she said to her coworker.
I don't know why the image of this man blue lips with their salty rim sticks with me to this day. I don't know if he died or if he lived. I only know he didn't die right there in the middle-ground between parking lot and hospital. Or maybe he did.
It is one of the things I will never know in this life. ¶ 5:20 PM 1 comments
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Monday, April 30, 2007
Conrad Aiken's Tombstone
Here are two links for you: 1 & 2 oh and what the hell, 3.
¶ 9:24 PM 5 comments
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Why I will not write on the death of Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut is dead. I was wondering when it was going to happen, given that he proclaimed he was retired from writing (although he seems to have still kept putting some smaller pieces out.) He stuck around a good long while (although of course not long enough, but such is the nature of our frail lives.)Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind immediately when thinking about his death, given that Billy Pilgrim lived in and out of time, and perhaps Vonnegut did himself. Time slips back and forth so seamlessly when you are exposed to death and destruction like Vonnegut was (like Pilgrim was). Time, in fact, ceases to make much sense at all; it is no longer linear. As a depressed, bereft college freshman I knew this because not long before my father had been ripped out of the time line. Vonnegut knew about time and death. Time becomes compressed for those whose lives are shaped by death: one minute your an 18-year-old and the next minute your 80.
I too had become unstuck in time.
I remember being asked once (and I had been reading a lot of Vonnegut) "What are you going to be doing when you are 80?"
"I don't know what I'm going to be doing next week, let alone in 60 years," was my smart-ass reply. Of course I sort of knew what I would be doing when I was 80--if I ever reached it. We who are unstuck in time, however can't tell, as Billy Pilgrim can't tell anyone, up there with the aliens (who are trying to figure we strange creatures out.)
Somehow I like to think of Vonnegut himself up there with the Tralfamadorians in a luxuriously appointed glass geodesic dome.
Labels: authors, death, fiction
¶ 10:38 PM 1 comments
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Why I will not write a ubiquitous Valentines Day post
I have nothing to say. ¶ 5:14 PM 4 comments
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Why I won't write on the Trolley Square horroshow
Dear God: 5 people senselessly killed. How many more wounded? How many more lives ruined?Trolley Square has many fond associations for me and not just with the woman that I loved so much that my heart breaks just thinking of the time that we danced in the rain with no music, right where two people were slaughtered on a Monday evening.
I am shaken.
Bodies cast down.
Life gone.
Happiness over.
Labels: death
¶ 8:13 PM 5 comments
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