Notes from the Bunker #4: There's more than one way to baptize a cat

 What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.  - Hal Boyle

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.  - Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? ― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

 There's something comforting about having to start over. At least, there must be -- since I tend to do just that, in some form or another, over and over again.

In my latest regeneration, I'm working as a waiter/grunt for a local catering company. That's my paying gig, anyway. I'm still at work on other projects like my podcasts (The Kentucky Muck Podcast and the up coming Alidade: an audio map), my poetry, and some new short stories. I'm applying to go back to school -- not to study English*, or Creative Writing**, or God help us Rhetoric and Composition***, but to work on plying my skills elsewhere where the machine isn't so broken and the culture not so apathetic.  But for now, the Parsons/Hay household needs more than one salary and "unemployment insurance" that does not insure any kind life above bare sustenance. And while I have spent the better part of six months looking for work using the skills and experience honed over the last 13 years, I am back to working with the one thing I have always been able to count on -- my back.

When it come to work, I'm not a snob. All work is noble and deserves respect. I've held enough jobs in enough fields^ that I know there isn't any difference between the respectability of "white collar" and "blue collar" work. When I was a janitor and when I was a college instructor, I saw work in fundamentally the same way:

Work is a massive and inevitable inconvenience that I seem unable to shake off.

 As I mentioned in a previous video update, my motivations for working have less to do with me than with wanting to be a good husband. I don't mind work, of any kind, as long as I have a reason. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that staying alive should be enough of a reason. You're thinking that I wanting to contribute to society should be enough. You're thinking that not wanting to be a bum should be enough.

Clearly you don't know me at all. But that's ok. Read enough of me and you'll figure it out.

Some might see my exit from 13 years of higher education experience into a field where I have
hardly any experience at some sort of decline. People who view life in this way -- as some mountain to climb, a la Sisyphus -- might see this as tumbling to the bottom only to have to try and roll the rock up to some unattainable pinnacle.

Embracing that kind of metaphor can be tiring, and I have too much to do that. Once I let go of the fundamental illusion  of "until" and "someday", life ceased to be a mountain and it became a river. Sometime it ebbs. Sometimes it flows. Sometimes, over the course of years, it changes course. But the current always knows where it's going. I doubt I'm going to retire from the line of work I'm currently in. But I know why I'm doing it, and I'm grateful to have the work. I may not be able to avoid the inconvenience of it just yet. But I can follow the current.


____________________________________________________
*Not Again.
**Writers learn to write by writing. And failing. And more writing.
***Hell, no.
^I can honestly say the only kind of job I haven't had yet is a nightwatchman. But I'm young. There's time.

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

Notes from the Bunker #2: Return of the Baboon

Ain't no money in poetry, 'cause that's what set the poet free. Well I've had all the freedom I can stand. - Guy Clark

I am like a night raven in the house. - Psalms 101:8 (DR)

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. - Dr. Johnson

The best lessons are the ones you have learn over and over.

Most of the problems I encounter are entirely self-created. This is true for the majority of people. At the onset, the previous statement is not considered to be an especially sexy one in this day and age of the perpetual victim, the labeled and disregarded, the self-disenfranchised, and the botched afterbirth of an aborted american dream.*

It's true that the machinations of the dominant culture in these, the days final days of American Empire, are constructed on a model similar to the kind of economic Social Darwinism that grand designers like Milton Friedman, Henry Kissinger, JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller saw as the only way to yoke the possibilities that absolute democracy present. The cards are stacked against the very myth our civilization ** insists on pushing on its people --

that hard work alone will create the success we believe we are entitled to simply because we are Americans.

This being true, however, does not remove from an individual the responsibility for learning how to act in, react to, and walk through the world. 

One of the fundamental mistakes people -- usually the young, the inexperienced, or the naively optimistic (I've been all three, sometimes simultaneously) --  make at this point is to generalize and make some outrageous claim like 

IF EVERYONE JUST DID _____________________ THEN WE WOULD ALL BE ______________! 

While it's always fun to play the Socio-economic Edition of Mad Libs, it's not especially useful. The

problem is that while we're all in this together, every single person has to figure out their own path to where ever it is they want to go. The truth is that the truth really is a pathless land.*** If you're walking in someone else's tracks all the time, you're trusting someone else's instincts to get you through. 

My first mistake in ensuring my or my family's survival is signing away my self-sovereignty. I do this for a lot of reasons that are all well and good, and for a few reasons that are simply reactions to some deeply-embedded issues tied to my father's death and my sometimes tendency to look for father figures when I don't need one. On some level, I will never be sure Dad would be proud of me because I can't hear it from him. 

When I feel my lowest, when I feel powerless, when I feel like an absolute failure, it is almost always when I allow myself to fall prey to that old issue.  When I doubt myself, I chain myself to an image of manhood that does not address the angels and the devils in my nature. 

And when I walk through the world honestly and with power, I bring all of myself and I lumber through this world like a mad baboon. It's impossible for me to exist in the world without embracing my limitations and failings as much as I embrace my successes.When I ignore those things, a giant hole opens in my soul that swallows all of me. When this happens, I'm no good for anyone.

 

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

______________________________________________________________________________
* It may have been true once. Maybe. I tend to think that the "American Dream" is like "Tastes Great, Less Filling." It's one more commodity we have been sold to keep our noses pointed to the ground.
**I use that term loosely, as the United States demonstrates more each day that it is not anywhere near civilized. I blame this on the failure of memory. More on that another time.

*** Jiddu Krishnamurti

Poem Draft: Baptism in the Nose Bleeds

Hope rises expectant on Opening Day.

Last season’s transgressions are forgiven.

For a moment, we are wide-eyed.

For a moment, we are in love with the scent of a well-oiled leather mitt.

For a moment we are eager to knock off old dirt

and silence everything

except the welcome canticles of beer and hotdog vendors.

For a moment we shut out the prognostications of cynical game announcers.

For a moment unbelievers pray the Yankees don’t buy another pennant

and the faithful prepare to have their faith justified

or risk persecution by the All-Star Break.

For a moment all our digital distractions disappear –

politicians and their polished shit soliloquys are shushed

and all the noble rivalries rise to the surface.

You judge your friends by whether they watch the Cubs or the White Sox

and if they know Tom Seaver’s number

and if they embrace the dream of seeing Pete Rose in Cooperstown.

For a moment

the day, the hour, the minute, and the weight of all the ages past

rest upon whether that first pitch and the sound of the ball hitting the bat.

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons
You can also leave a tip if you'd like. Thanks for reading!

Don't get no respect: back to school, wobbly-style

 I'm heading back to campus today to line up the last bit of what I need to do in order to teach on Thursday. Between the usual decline in course offerings and my separation from the local alternative dining and concert guide*, this winter, like most every, will be a tight one. I'm always on the look for more work, and I'm going to be diving into some projects and working on my poetry and fiction. I'm uncharacteristically prepared for the semester to begin, actually... primarily because I'm simplifying my teaching methods and focusing on what's really important in a writing class.

Practice.

People ask me all the time what I teach. When they're kind, or when they know I write poetry, they immediately ask if I teach creative writing**. I have to, for the sake of conversation, clarify that I teach academic writing***, tossing in some scholarly research methods and some interesting stories and little known history. I've been using Labor History the last few years as the subject matter for my Intermediate classes; I think it's important try and highlight little known facts of history that get overlooked in the narrative of manifest destiny.

This semester, I'm trying something a bit different because what I find in teaching labor history is that many of my students are incredibly disconnected from the events I wanted to talk about and the stories I wanted to tell.  I also found that in my attempts to ensure I was doing my job that I lost some the fundamental elements of my teaching style that made it fun and interesting.

One of the things I'm doing is simply changing research topics, for a while. My classes are going to be examining some events from local history: the 1855 Bloody Monday Election Riots, The 1937 Ohio River Flood, and river stories and myths. We're going to talk about how these narratives -- and the narratives of more current events -- impact ourselves as individuals, as a city, and as a larger culture.

So basically -- I'm going to tell stories, read and talk about essay drafts, and focus the important stuff.

And, you know, take attendance. Can't escape the all the tedium.

But I am grateful to have some kind of work
 _________________________
*The latest article of important was about how Louisvillians in their 20's move to Germantown, where the rent is cheap. You know... like they have for the past 20 years.
**I have written before about how the term "creative writing" annoys me because it implies that some kinds of writing isn't creative or part of a creative process.
*** Academic writing, apparently, has no creative process. Don't get me started.


If you like what you read, please consider helping support the author. Thanks for reading!

Poem (Draft 2): Fourth Sunday of Advent

On the seventh day we crucify our fathers again.

Whole landscapes of past generations impaled and wasted,

left out to feed our carrion overlords.

In the city and in the town all our best known haunts are dismembered

and the attending memories subject to excruciating mastication

with a sprinkle of Potter’s Field ash

and a dash of an orphaned grandson’s tears for flavor.

This week’s prayers fell shy of their projected outcomes.

The analysts in the front row sell short and exit quickly after the benediction.

By noon we have beatified our mothers –

especially during football season.

Fourth generation redacted anti-feminists replace

mascara with face paint, while the grandmatrons make sandwiches

and mutter sweet incantations against the damnation of their granddaughters.

Commercial breaks sell the wonders of a Central American vacation

while the ghost of Cortez nibbles on what’s left of Zihuantanejo after the fall of Ixtapa.

Eight pesos and an American flag will get you

your very own native bellboy to teach English

and ritually savage in the name of civilization.

By five in the afternoon we seek resurrection in eyes of our children.

Monday means the beginning of Christmas Break

so we will have to continue the fertility sacrifices in January

under the cover of snow and darkness. New year. New tests. Fresh meat.

They show no interest in the old bedtime stories

so we decree and mourn the world’s decay.

Projections for Generation X were high but fell shy.

School counselors retired quickly

and snuck out the back exit hidden in the janitor’s closet

carrying bootlegged bottles of rum and leftover empty promises.

A new prospectus on the up and comers is circulating –

potentially high profit margin, but not without considerable loss.

Oh well. Perverting a mother’s common wisdom,

you can’t make a society without breaking a couple of skulls.

Let them watch the news in case our bedtime stories work better,

and pray we will not be forsaken next Sunday.

Overheard Communique / Ellis Island Internment Update No. 5 -- 2 poetry drafts

Overheard Communique

We speak of grand historical tragedies

as if they were the salad days

and imagine ourselves heroes of the Reich.

North America is sliding into the sea;

that new coat of paint does not repair

or replace the rusty underpinning.

Ticket sales to passively participate

in the last, great gargling death rattle are reportedly high—

more this quarter than last. Reports come in by the hour,

intoned by the three-headed beast we trust best for news

about civil unrest in cities we have forgotten how to find on maps.

Plans are coming together

but we must leave out crucial details

for security’s sake.

You never know

which acronym is listening.

Ellis Island Internment Update No. 5

Rapture is only a few days away –

or so the penitent pray.

They fill the streets with tears

and with impolitic prostrations.

They pack haphazardly,

like tenants three months past due on the rent

preparing for a midnight retreat.

They hope they’ll be picked up before dawn.

Predictably, all these plans fall apart

when the sky does not fall

and the grid does not collapse.

A dictator’s flag is still something

in need of a salute

and the tortured confessions still sound pious

in spite of the absence of an amen.