Tag: Politics

Notes on a Crack Up

Prelude to a Crack Up

Sunday morning around 9:30 AM, errands around Queens: An old Chinese woman in a wheelchair stuck in a groove of the automatic door of a grocery store, when the pusher popped the chair over it, and then I saw he was an old Chinese man, quite small, evidently her husband. How do we do it, we wretched creatures, I thought. And yet off they went, continuing to the next errand. Ahead was a 30-ish brown-skinned man, Arab maybe, with red highlights in his closely shorn hair, new-looking boots and navy pants, rubbing a scratcher with a coin, eagerly, turning this way and that as he scratched. What does he want the money for? Beyond him was an old fat lady like myself, except that her big hair, sans hat, was dyed brassy reddish brown, roots in her center part, and I wondered what kind of a person I would be if I were the sort who dyed her gray hair. (And when I saw this woman I experienced a rippling puddle of a memory of a dear poet friend, who had dyed her hair (this was years and years ago now) a dark brown before I arrived at her apartment, where I found her panicked with a violent rash around her neck and ears, and she needed me to take her to the Urgent Care clinic; and I remember being sort of relieved, because she was always so smart and strong-minded and perfect, that I finally got to see her humanized, even if only by an allergic reaction.)

Further walking for the second set of groceries (the first round involving a 5 pound sack of flour and chicken thighs and cans of broth) found me passing a tall, slender young man (gay, I’d say) upright in a navy pea coat, hands in pockets, and a young woman in a short parka and pom pom hat, both of them white, he talking of sound engineers and an orchestra, her saying “yeah.” As I passed them, I couldn’t help noticing that, between 50th Avenue and 48th Avenue, 45th Street looks a lot better than 46th Street, and I have to wonder why.

Sometimes I think in poems.

At the Liquors Store on Greenpoint

You know there’s a son in Italy, or a daughter

Trying to explain to their dad, or grandad,

That no one needs wine bottles this heavy,

That the same 750 ml of wine can be delivered

In bottles with a third the amount of green glass,

That it’s a waste of resources, a needless expense

For red wine $13.99 American,

And that the grandfather, or father, is misting over

For a time when the full weight of any endeavor was

Worth its weight in green glass, in wine, in gold.

Cracking Up 1, A Self Destroyed

Yesterday I learned that a dear old friend’s 48-year-old son took his own life on New Year’s Day. Nearly a decade ago he had a complete mental break, coincidentally occurring the day I was driving country roads out to visit them all from New York. It was a shocking episode that led, after a long hospitalization and months of tests, to a diagnosis of treatment-resistant schizophrenia. An author of a dozen books and hundreds of scholarly articles, a professor and head of an MFA writing program, a happily married husband and gentleman farmer from a great family, he showed no signs of anything like a coming collapse, simply no warning. The deterioration of his brain led him to, among many other awful changes, divorce his loving wife, who never knew what hit her; retreat to a cabin with a dog; try to write only to find the voices telling him to smash his laptop. There’s much more to this story, deeper, harder, uglier; also moments of great success, almost normalcy, too; until his brain became, according to the mutual friend who messaged me yesterday, a doctor herself, “treatment refractory.” I’m still in shock myself, and a few texts exchanged with his mom, my friend, after she didn’t answer the phone, told me she was still in shock, too, also full of rage over mental health services and the lack of them in our country, still after 100 years to know better we still don’t really act better on what we know. (Even in New York City, once again, the mayor has begun institutionalizing homeless people against their will based on nothing but, say, a police officer’s random gut reaction.) I think about how immediately all of the life you have known can be destroyed, and quickly; or horribly slowly; or in the blink of an eye at the hands of the ignorant and stupid.

Cracking Up 2, A Self Recovered

On the other side of that mountain, my friend Chuck Tripi, a poet, just published his third collection of poems, Wander Where They Will, and this is something to celebrate. Chuck himself has come through a great deal, and out of catastrophe many years ago, Chuck moved from airline pilot to poet, creating a wonderful poetry collective in the Paulinskill Poetry Project in New Jersey and publishing two collections I just love, Carlo and Sophia and Killer Pavement Ahead.

The year before Covid, Chuck’s beloved wife Barbara, a poet and photographer, died. After Barbara died, Chuck struggled in many ways while living in an assisted living facility when Covid hit. I spoke to him on the phone only once, and he was a shell of himself; he never thought he’d leave the place alive let alone write again. So this volume is nothing short of miraculous. I wouldn’t mention any of the particulars of Chuck’s life except that he has now poured his experience into this new volume, which is a heartbreaker because of the lucidity of his lines. Chuck’s is a soul that inspires me in its expansiveness and generosity, sure, but goddamn this man dives deep into every emotion that scares the shit out of most of us, and I love him for it.

Cracking Up 3, A House Divided

What is there to say about the Republican Party, so transparently craven, selfish, hateful, dangerous? A week of a shit show without shame that debased the United States in every new low, lows beyond what we thought was the nadir of January 6, 2020. But no. In his pursuit of the Speakership, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave away whatever it took to win, including the dissolution of the House Ethics Committee, which promise didn’t seem to make the cut as of yet. The spectacle is only beginning, in that no one in the Republican Party is in office to serve anyone except themselves and to do whatever it takes to hurt Democrats. (I just don’t get why a Constitutionally guaranteed free press would deliver Republican lies as equivalent to Democratic facts.) The Republicans have created the wedge that is cracking us up. The press helps them, as does the worst of the Christian Church.

Here’s what makes me crazy: Like the Republican Party, the Church asks for your money to help them keep their institution going, while expecting you to solve all your problems with prayer. Why do so many people—who would have enough but don’t because they fall all over themselves to pour out all their tithes into the coffers of church pastors for whom no amount will ever be enough, apparently, to buy their flock into heaven—never learn? And they transfer that addiction to tithing over to their elected officials.

Deliver us from the ignorant and the stupid and the mean, those who would destroy because they can.

Here we are, after a month of binge eating and binge drinking, coupled with this desolation of spirit, and I can’t help wondering about why we think food will fill the well where a soul should be. For me, poetry is a balm. Why is it we keep failing to heed all those millennia of lessons and poems?

Cracking Up 4, Enough is not Enough

So many posts on social media, including my own, ask for nothing more out of 2023 than for everything to calm the fuck down. Just…boring. Be boring. Just for a while. Boring is not sustainable, of course, because boring makes us sleepy. I feel like there’s not enough energy to feed on right now. Why do nearly all the musical artists now sound like they are falling asleep in mid verse? Ref: See Billie Eilish and that cute trio on Instagram, great talents all but but but. I like my music to make me dance, to wake me up, to quicken my blood and mind. And I love a soft song as much as the next person, but mostly I enjoy music that makes me feel something, even sadness, but not music that makes me want to give up. As the poets show us, there is a needed tension between longing and fulfillment, catastrophe and recovery, repentance and redemption, Tom and Jerry. Where was I?

In my travels I came across this quote:

“The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life.”

― John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

The way that Chuck was able to turn his tragedies into art, I want the nation to be reborn out of the dregs. I want to see myself and others find something deep in us to create something life affirming out of our shocks and agonies. Here’s my horoscope for December of 2022, and I want it to guide me into 2023.

Horoscopes by Rob Brezsny

Week of December 1st, 2022

 TAURUS

 (April 20-May 20)

Of all the objects on earth, which is most likely to be carelessly cast away and turned into litter? Cigarette butts, of course. That’s why an Indian entrepreneur named Naman Guota is such a revolutionary. Thus far, he has recycled and transformed over 300 million butts into mosquito repellant, toys, keyrings, and compost, which he and his company have sold for over a million dollars. I predict that in the coming weeks, you will have a comparable genius for converting debris and scraps into useful, valuable stuff. You will be skilled at recycling dross. Meditate on how you might accomplish this metaphorically and psychologically.

The year 2023 has already hit us with a lot of debris. I feel like our souls, like our earth and our politics, are stuffed with detritus that threatens to overwhelm us, and most of us don’t know what to do with it.

I shouldn’t presume—I guess I mean my soul feels sort of shredded up or filled with too much of the wrong stuff or distracted. It’s a shame and shock to let all the shit crack us, er me, into bits, if there is anything within out power to change that, because not everyone is given a choice. All we can do is use what we have and try to make something. I’ll keep you posted.

(FYI: I started my 2023 blog with a new web address, missoshow.com, committing to my WordPress experience by paying for the privilege of posting. It seems time. I thought about changing the blog name to The Miss O’ Show: Reading Glasses. We’ll see.)

Miss O’

Uncategorized

Under Covid of Darkness

I’m on Day 12 of Covid, contracted I think on the New York City Subway System, being the only masked person around coughers and sneezers; or else in the brief unmasked walk from Port Authority to the subway entrance on 7th Avenue. However one gets it (only 5 days into my bivalent vaccine, I wasn’t yet efficacious) it’s been a helluva bedridden ride of waves of all the various Covid symptoms I’ve read about. As a result of the positive test (taken a few days prior to heading to Virginia for my 40th high school reunion, with a sore throat and runny nose, oh shit), I’ve found myself living in bed and relying on the kindness of my friend Cathy and her husband and son, who check in daily, pick up takeout for me and a few groceries. I’ve been subsisting on V8, apples, brown rice, beans, some Chinese soups, and tea. And The Graham Norton Show via YouTube. I tested positive again after five days, and again after ten (though a lighter line), so I’ll try again on Wednesday, which will be a full two weeks plus one day. I’m running out of tests. But at least I’m dressing for the day again.

Recently I (in my return to social media after a three-month hiatus) saw that above quote on Harvey Fierstein’s Facebook wall in the context of gaining sobriety, but I truly appreciate this in the context of Covid recovery. I have not been living my life properly in the past few years. I am a recluse agonizing over rising fascism, without intelligence or talent enough to do anything useful to stop it. As of November 8, when the Republicans take over and impeach Biden and Harris, install the Speaker of the House as president, hang Pelosi, and deploy the military to overrun the liberal cities and imprison all of us…because I think that is more likely than not to happen should Republicans take the House and Senate…it will be too late to do more. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

Amidst the coming end of democracy as a concept, I’ve also been thinking about age, how we change, or don’t. It’s all part of the mix of my brain fog.

Reflections on the High School Reunion I Missed 

My friends Mark and Carl urged me to go, so I signed up, and then I got Covid, as I somehow knew I would, so I kept myself awake that night to find out who they got to see.

The boys sweetly texted me pictures of the kids (who are all 58), many of whom I’ve known since childhood—the Arrington twins; Juanita the piano prodigy and probably the smartest kid I knew. Then there was Janet, who was voted most talented from a high school senior class of 1,000—still a tall drink of water, same long blonde hair, a toned and tan former gymnast who could still fit into her show choir ensemble and her high-kick team dress and wow them all with a smile, the one who gives you hope. Lots of people for whom high school may or may not have been a blast, as they say, were there, too.  

Prior to the reunion, I posted on our page the following memory, wondering if everyone was hoping we’d “sing”:

Lisa O’ and Mark Robinson, ca. 1981, promoting the Junior Variety Show we hosted, and more recently.
Friends since 2nd grade, or thereabouts, Mark and Carl and I were always somehow involved in music, our last outing together ca. 2018 found us singing karaoke, “I Love the Nightlife,” in Rehoboth Beach. As Mark reminds us, three separate people said we were great. So.

I sent along to them a sickbed selfie, and it caused me to reflect on aging; when I attended a group 50thbirthday party years ago, my brother Jeff took a photo. When I posted it on Facebook, my friend Jen said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you were born to be 50.” I think I was. However, it was the last photo in which I looked like myself, a Lisa O’ anyone would recognize. A couple of years ago I became old—see sickbed selfie. It was time.

Miss O’ at 18, 58, and 50. I blame lovers of Trump.

I loved all the pictures Mark was sending, but I didn’t understand his constant texts: “EVERYONE is asking about you!” I responded first with a “Ha!” comment thingy. But he persisted. And I couldn’t understand this sentiment because I was such a dull kid, not a standout at anything; just kinda skated through school, tried to be helpful, did my work, did a few plays, stayed out of trouble, head down, big laugher at the jokes of funnier people. 

And you realize that all of us, whatever we thought ourselves, were part of one another’s stories, and that we are somehow still dear to one another, part of one another’s memories. We all can’t be beautiful or stay young, whatever that is, and what is even the point of the concern? In the end the Republicans will gun it down.

I recently read this definition of Beauty: “the adherence to the balance and structure of the Universe.” Seen that way, most of us can feel just fine.

Vanity: Reflections of a Royal Philosopher, from Ecclesiastes, 2-11

It’s Sunday, so here’s a little of the Bible that most American Christians (given their actions in favor of dead mothers and gunned down children and their worship of a narcissistic, unapologetic adulterer, conman, and cheat) clearly haven’t read, but a surprising number of my Jewish, agnostic, and atheist friends have.

1 
The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

3 

What do people gain from all the toil

at which they toil under the sun?

4 

A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains for ever.

5 

The sun rises and the sun goes down,

and hurries to the place where it rises.

6 

The wind blows to the south,

and goes round to the north;

round and round goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

7 

All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they continue to flow.

8 

All things are wearisome;

more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

or the ear filled with hearing.

9 

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done;

there is nothing new under the sun.

10 

Is there a thing of which it is said,

‘See, this is new’?

It has already been,

in the ages before us.

11 

The people of long ago are not remembered,

nor will there be any remembrance

of people yet to come

by those who come after them.

The friend who posted this on her wall asked: “So, like, what EVEN is the point.”

The existential questions are the worst. What I’ve never understood, when I look at all the guns and people threatening people over their race or gender, for example, is that if this is all we know—this time on earth, this life—why would anyone choose to spend it glorifying themselves, playing the lottery, and spreading misery? And that leaves the rest of us in a power struggle with those people, scratching for our bits of joy where we find them. There’s a great play called Every Brilliant Thing I saw a few years back at Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, about a little boy who goes on a quest to try to help his depressed mother—and he finds the joy in himself. Love people, find the joy, eat the chocolate. Do your best.

“We all have regrets and most of us know that those regrets, as excruciating as they can be, are the things that help us lead improved lives. Or, rather, there are certain regrets that, as they emerge, can accompany us on the incremental bettering of our lives. Regrets are forever floating to the surface… They require our attention. You have to do something with them. One way is to seek forgiveness by making what might be called living amends, by using whatever gifts you may have in order to help rehabilitate the world.” – Nick Cave

This quote can be found on the website The Marginalian, curated by Maria Popova. She shares ideas from artists, their quotes, and then her own reflections. What Cave got me longing for, or reminding me of, is the idea of being an artist. I really wonder what that must be like. (Whatever light I have in potential, I learned years ago, must be kept hidden or it upsets too many people; you have to trust me on this.) At least my one real joy as I age is that I can still enjoy art. 

“Art does have the ability to save us, in so many different ways. It can act as a point of salvation, because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. And that in itself is a way of making amends, of reconciling us with the world. Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins… By “sins,” I mean those acts that are an offence to God or, if you would prefer, the “good in us” — that live within us, and that if we pay them no heed, harden and become part of our character. They are forms of suffering that can weigh us down terribly and separate us from the world. I have found that the goodness of the work can go some way towards mitigating them.” – Nick Cave

In my search for more about suffering and surviving it, I happened on a couple of TED Talks that only pissed me off. On Being with Krista Tippett, now defunct in terms of its old format but still out there, is a good bet. Still, when I go hunting to try to understand all the shit, I find things that exhaust as well as inspire. 

Ultimately, Bruno Latour (1947-2022), the scholar who passed last week, took nothing for granted: not science, not society, not even “reality” or “existence.”

– The Nation header on Facebook

And I realized, reading that banner, how TIRED I am of reality and the lunacy of existence—the realization that we’re all stuck in an overwhelming cycle of …

In the meantime, life goes on, somehow. 

Preoccupations on Reflection

In my last blog post I paid tribute to the remarkable theater artist and teacher Maureen Shea, who died unexpectedly in September of this year. Shortly after posting, my old Virginia Tech friend Todd located and “liked” this Facebook post from 2020, I guess because of the attached photograph he must have recalled. Todd was very close to Maureen, too. Here is the post, in full:

Miss O’, ca. 1987. I’m posting it because I have always hated this picture, but kept it because mentor Maureen Shea is in the background, on the left on the hill, in a cast, and it does capture a moment in time. Oddly, this is often other people’s favorite photo of me whenever, back in the old days, we’d flip through one another’s photo albums.
Similarly—and stay with me here—while I was the favorite and most beloved teacher of some students, I was just as often the most reviled and dreaded teacher of other students; and still others didn’t even remember being in my class when I’d say hello to them as seniors. Think of them as pro / no / undecided voters.
Here’s my point: Yesterday I saw the “well, I’m not voting for Biden if it’s Harris” posts begin. Here we go, I thought, 2016 redux, “but her emails,” any excuse to not vote a woman into office. Because I believe, truly, however evolved people think they are, that that is what it comes down to. These folks can rationalize it all they want, but it comes down to misogyny. They’d rather end democracy, keep Bill Barr and Trump and Miller, and destroy the Supreme Court and even the planet, for the rest of their children’s natural lives, than vote for a woman—for whatever her “sin” is, it’s always one hundred times worse than the sins of the men who are caging children and denying a pandemic and allowing Russians to own our elections and put bounties on the heads of our soldiers in the field.
America, don’t do that; don’t be that voter all over again.
Because let’s face it: I’ve always hated this photo of myself, and yet I now have to admit I am adorable in it. All those years of self-loathing, and for what? 

It’s 2022, and here we are AGAIN. Voters, Americans, for fuck’s sake: Do the work, love the people, be good to the earth, find a purpose, appreciate art. Get over yourself. And vote Democrat. 

Until they take it away, use what you got.

Word Clouds

A commercial for an orange tube-y snack food shows a hip hop artist waving his fingers across bricks in an urban landscape and a colorful mural appears; he passes a child playing plastic buckets and the boy is now sitting at a red and chrome full drum kit. The plain glass buildings all begin shimmering in color. 

Because in America, at least, you can’t enjoy anything, not even a junk food treat, unless you are changing the world. And it’s not enough to have a tasty bite. You have to gorge on a whole fucking bloomin’ onion, loaded nachos, and whipped cream on the dessert, with a table filled with family or friends, or why did you bother to go out? 

And it’s not enough to enjoy the 4th of July with a sparkler; you need to listen to the incessant sounds of explosions all over Queens and watch the aftermath of a mass shooting of 30 spectators watching a parade in a small town in Illinois.

Art by Rebecca Morgan, as seen on Instagram

And I don’t know about you, but this kind of “go big or go home” bullshit is starting to give Miss O’ more than hives.

What’s the Meaning of All This?

Back in 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said: 

“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Fifty-eight years ago, McLuhan also said, “Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness.” Director Mike Nichols, in an interview in the 1990s, talks about how much McLuhan got right, though McLuhan seemed to be dropped from our consciousness. (I say “to be dropped” because we live in a disposable culture.) People used to receive information at different times, Nichols noted, and in different forms—newspapers, letters, magazines, telegraph, newsreels. News used to reach people weeks or months, or years, after an event occurred. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed in 1863, did not reach enslaved people in Texas until June 19, 1865, and deliberately so—the goal being to keep this from them for as long as possible so the farmers could get another harvest out of the enslaved for free.

With TV, we all saw the Kennedy assassination aftermath play out immediately, for example. Nichols, speaking of the challenges of directing new scripts, pointed out that because exciting real events—from assassinations to the moon landing to wars—come to us in real time, fiction just can’t measure up. And so now instead of deep, simple human stories to sell tickets, we reach for Superheroes and Armageddon for entertainment.

Nothing seems to be enough to sate us. The news media and its audience now hear of mass shootings and barely register an “oh, god,” just before the yawn; you see that it’s getting increasingly harder to satisfy our sensory desires. Overloading on porn and all its vulgar unrealism is why all those Incels (involuntary celibates) can get no pleasure from sex with women. The medium is the message: sex isn’t about intimacy, but rather gratification and power.

“We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”

~ Marshall McLuhan

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964

Miss O’ Wonders

Query: What message are Americans told, by one another, is the message of America?

Response: Freedom.

Query: If your culture’s primary tools (or mediums) are guns, unmediated information highways, evangelical Christianity, and self-proclaimed “influencers,” what is the actual message?

Miss O’s Current Response: The message is that one ideology pushed by a lone individual’s power to kill or influence others is the single most valued aspect of the culture.

It’s a question of lenses.

A philosophy professor of mine once taught about hedonism. He said people misunderstand it, thinking a hedonist is someone who debauches and can’t get enough of pleasure. In fact, Prof. Smith said, “A hedonist is supposed to get an orgasm from bread and water.” Hedonists in fact set up a philosophy with forced, unsustainable expectations for actual humans. Bread and water will never be orgasmic, however nourishing, unless you are first dying of starvation and thirst. 

From Instagram

In its latest attempt at a national philosophy, America has set up a forced, unsustainable set of messages for Americans through the medium of video, meaning we all see and hear these messages. 

  • First, we are supposed to place the needs and desires of the individual above society, unless that individual is Black/brown, poor, and/or a woman. 
  • Next, we must yield to the power of guns and ones who wield them over any individual’s freedom to speak, assemble, worship, or report news, unless that person is a white male with shit tons of money. 

If the medium is an unmediated Medium, is the message that we are living in Babel?

I often spend whole mornings just deleting email junk so I can free up my email storage for more junk.

If the medium is an unstoppable garbage bin of random communications, is the message that there will be respite from the noise of humans and technology?

I have seen tweets of mine go mini-viral and had panic attacks.

I have tweeted, blogged, or posted on my wall things that I find vitally important and not one person agrees with me in even the form of a like.

I begin to value myself based on the mediums.

Which medium are we going to amplify? Which message will sound off and win in the end? Is there an end?

Is there anything duller and less surprising, however continually shocking, than American politics? Republicans can only stay on brand by grabbing power and rejecting anything democratic; the Democrats can only stay on brand by rejecting revolutionary progress and staying steady. 

If the medium is the message, what is the proper medium for politics? What is the MESSAGE of our political life?

I keep getting stuck on these questions. “Stalemate” comes to mind. “Bartleby the Scrivener,” too.

Because a stable democracy is dull copy for our hundreds of 24-hour cycle “news” outlets, whether on a cable network, local television, or a newspaper, the Big Stories I see are almost never to do with public good so much as public titillation for ratings or sales. (And now this commercial message.)

The collective message is what exactly? Consume mass quantities and die already?

I awoke this morning, the Fourth of July, 2022, as I have every morning for months, in a pit of despair. Between the climate crisis-induced collapse of an Italian glacier and the invasion of Ukraine, along with the naked Republican attempt at every level of government over the past three years to end our constitutional democracy—and a press that does little more than pass the popcorn—it’s hard to write anything, create anything, feel there’s any point. And as I stood in my hallway after the coffee, half naked, holding a bra, vacillating between putting on real clothes to leave my apartment so as not to listen to the lone skateboarder on the asphalt playground who decided to practice his tricks right next to my little abutting porch (knowing that will also be in for an endless night of illegal fireworks); and falling into a ball of lonely weeping, as I do rather a lot these days; I mercifully remembered I have friends. I texted everyone I love and care about that piece of art by Rebecca Morgan, up there, because they all would instantly get it, and they did. And they answered.

My friends Carl and Mark, buddies of mine since 2nd grade wrote back too. Both of them are gay. Carl lives in our home town; Mark lives in Delaware with this husband. In response to our group, Carl said, “Not feeling celebratory. Low key chill here. Cleaning and organizing.” Mark said, “America doesn’t deserve a birthday celebration this year 😤.” I said, “I’m writing a blog.” Carl said, “Excellent.  I hope you include my disappointment.” Mark sent his love, calling us, “MY FAMILY.” And that just broke me up. You know? That sudden burst or wave of love. And if I hadn’t broken the grip of depression, pushed past the despair by becoming outer directed, I suppose I would have started drinking wine at 10:30 AM and not really looked back.

And wine is a lousy medium for any message. Here are some better ones:

  1. Honeysuckle
Photos by Miss O’
  • Postcards to SCOTUS
Miss O’ uses up some postcards.

Most of our important commentary anymore comes through in the medium of satire, including comics, cartoons, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and TBS’s Full Frontal. The medium is the message: We treat our existential truths like jokes. The “breaking news” of the NYT is often the equivalent of “What happens to Jolly Ranchers when they stay all day in a hot car?” The medium—the paper of record—is the message, and that message is “accentuate the trivial and don’t mess with existential truth in between.”

Like millions in the world, I write what’s on my mind and post these ideas for free for all to see. I have no mediators. No one, not a partner or friend and certainly not a paid editor, is around to read behind me, suggest where I might improve, strengthen, or refocus. Nor does any publisher or advertiser pay me for my thoughts. 

And it’s still only one voice trying to mediate all the other voices and create a message that is coherent and true.

I still don’t know how to do it. Nevertheless I persist.

Miss O’ Makes a Word Cloud

On Turbulent Flow, Part 2

Ordinary Life, Queens

I wrote the paragraph below around March 5:

It was nearly 60 degrees in Queens yesterday; it’s snowing this morning. This has happened two weekends in a row. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about turbulent flow, the reasons for which I’ll get to, but first I’d like to open with an apology for my own flow: I used to be funny. I used to have a capacity to write about things in an energized and witty way. And then that one guy became “president” in 2016, the world turned upside down, as Americans started voting against their own best interests, hell, their senses, and in direct opposition to their self-proclaimed Christian faith, and called it righteous; Earth started turning on us in earnest in response to our neglect of our responsibility to be stewards of the planet, i.e. to not shit where we eat, and our abject failure to do this. I can’t walk down the aisle of a supermarket, department store, or dollar store and not think, “All this is heading directly to a landfill, and there are millions more aisles like this of packed shit none of us need, not a bit of it,” and I start weeping. 

Tile adorning my bookshelf, gift from Colleen Cosgrove 2022

Written around the same time:

This past Monday I spent part of the day chasing down a running toilet. I heard the telltale hiss, on for 15 seconds, off for 10 seconds, through some stack in my kitchen; down in the basement it was louder. It wasn’t my toilet—the source was somewhere else in the building. Around 8:30 AM I emailed my immediate neighbors in my small complex, and they too heard the hiss. A couple next door heard it at 11 PM the previous night, and all night, but had been too tired to do anything about it. Next, I sent a group email to the other 16 units: Hi, everyone…anyone got a running toilet? Some replied that they thought is was related to our dysfunctional boiler and steam heat hit and miss; but the fuel company guys (whom another board member—that’s right, I’m on the Board! —chased down at the same time) assured us there couldn’t be any connection. Running toilets are more than just annoying sounds; it’s a water leak and the money adds up. In a small complex like ours, it’s not something you can ignore, but we all want to, don’t we? So finally the culprit revealed herself in a private email to another Board member. Sheesh.

Later that week:

At the supermarket this afternoon, I introduce a little turbulence into the normal flow of a cashier’s day: My order comes to $21.86. I have a $50 bill I want to break, but I already have a lot of ones and pennies, so I give the cashier, a Muslim woman around age 40, I’d say, $52.01. She has finished bagging my groceries, placing them in the bags I brought (this act used to cause turbulence, but not any more, so that’s progress), and as I hand her my odd cash I explain, “I’d like even change.” She looks confused and says, as I suspected she would, “But your total is $21.86.” All I could say was, “Trust me.” “Okay…,” she says, and taps in 5-2-0-1. She turned to me with wide eyes after seeing “30.15” come up on the little screen. “How did you do that?” she asked. “I used to be a cashier, and back in my day we had to figure out the change up here,” I explained, gesturing to my head. I took my 10 and 20 and nickel and dime and put them in my wallet as she said, “I always tell my kids, you got to learn the math,” and I agree, saying, “This is when it comes in handy,” and we exchange “have-a-nice-days,” and I hope we will. Turbulence as magic.

Back to the present, March 20, 2022, the first day of spring. 

Tasks of Note:

Got my taxes done this week. For many years it was the EZ form for me—small income, no mortgage, as I was a lowly public schoolteacher who would never see $60K. Now in NYC, at a corporate job and with a co-op apartment, so many forms, I needed help. But what used to take me forever in the way of finding and pulling all the forms is just another task anymore, whatever the technology needs are to make it happen.

Washing coats and scarves, another task this week, used to be an event to me; now in my late fifties, I just wash the coats one day. Hang them up. Go on to the next task.

Baking sourdough bread and keeping up with a starter was something I found arduous in my twenties, since I moved a lot back then; in my late fifties and in one place for nearly 19 years, I think nothing of making my own bread with a starter. Toss in various kinds of flour, water, molasses, salt. Knead it, stick the round in a greased bowl, let it prove a couple of days. Feed the starter, keep it out to grab yeast from the air, stick it in the fridge. Stir it once in a while and feed it in preparation for the next loaf. Bake a loaf, cool, slice, freeze. Bread for a month. (Thanks to Anna’s husband Michael.)

How Ordinary Becomes Precious

Now imagine all those necessary complex and simple tasks under fire. Imagine the work of your everyday world under mortar shelling, your papers and photos and textiles destroyed, that collapse, life reduced to huddling in a basement for weeks on end, little water, little food, no power. I should have really imagined all this long ago—it should never have seemed “other”—but until Trump’s improbable rise and Putin’s recent mental crack-up, I guess I just didn’t realize how possible The End is now. How probable. And what’s worse is 40% of my own fellow citizens would take Putin’s side and kill people like me with abandon. Seeing the footage from Ukraine, in cities that look like New York, it’s surreal and all too real.

You’d think, with all the natural calamities that flesh is heir to, that in 2022 we’d have just fucking stopped war, that we’d unite globally to save the planet that we have trashed. Every generation, though, seems to become simultaneously more evil on the one hand and more evolved on the other. The divide widens. The turbulence increases.

On his death bed, the physicist Werner Heisenberg is reported to have said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” (It’s quoted in Chaos by James Gleick, but I’ve read that the quote is probably apocryphal, so I guess that by continuing to possibly misquote or mis-attribute such a quote we only add to the chaos. We do not, however, lose the intelligence or humor of it, so does it matter? Dammit.)

Being in this Moment

I, the pagan Miss O’, follow blogger John Pavlovitz, a pastor and writer, who is himself a devout Christian whose political writings rail against the co-opters of faith as a means to destroy others and gain money, power, or fame for themselves. In one his blogs from 2020, “I Don’t Want Unity with Hateful People,” he writes:

I am not morally bound to make peace with a heart that dehumanizes other human beings because of the color of their skin, their nation of origin, their gender, their orientation. And to have embraced Donald Trump now, is to unapologetically brandish such a polluted heart; to be actively perpetuating inequity and stoking division and manufacturing discrimination in this very moment.

I steadfastly refuse such an alliance. I am a loud, conscientious objector in their war against the world.

More recently, Pavlovitz wondered why it is that all these “Christians” believe God will protect them from a deadly pandemic without the need for masks or vaccines, but somehow still feel the need to carry a concealed weapon everywhere they go. I mean, which is it?

The trick for the rest of us, then, the ones who wrestle with it all with compassionate hearts, is how to keep the flow of life going on a planet inhabited by not only good people but also by hateful, hypocritical, destructive people. In these moments of despair, many people turn to faith, but faith as a concept let alone practice has never appealed to me. So your Miss O’ has been doing some digging lately to better understand why that is.

Krista Tippett, who has been suggested to me so many times by dear friends that I have become a regular listener, replayed an episode from her podcast On Being which featured the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who died recently at age 95. Hanh was such a powerfully popular figure in spiritual circles that I decided I should give him the respect of a listen. In the interview, he explains that suffering—all this agony and despair—is part of the point. In Christianity, for example, people are promised that in death they will be sent to a place where there is no more suffering. Hanh does not accept this in his mindfulness practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Yeah, because I could not like to go to a place where there is no suffering. I could not like to send my children to a place where there is no suffering, because in such a place they have no ways to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. And the Kingdom of God is a place where there is understanding and compassion; and therefore, suffering should exist.

Tippett: That’s quite different from some religious perspectives, which would say that the Kingdom of God is a place where we’ve transcended suffering or moved beyond it.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Yes. And suffering and happiness, they are both organic, like a flower and garbage. If the flower is on her way to become a piece of garbage, the garbage can be on her way to becoming a flower. That is why you are not afraid of garbage.

(So, Miss O’ understands him, turbulence, suffering, garbage—it’s all part of the experience of living. )

Hanh continues:

I think we have suffered a lot during the 20th century. We have created a lot of garbage. There was a lot of violence and hatred and separation. And we have not handled — we don’t know how to handle the garbage that we have created, and then we would have a chance to create a new century for peace. That is why now it’s very important for us to learn how to transform the garbage we have created into flowers.

Tippett: I look at the violence that marked the world in the period when you were a young monk — there was the Cold War; there was a certain kind of violence and hostility. A lot of that has changed, has gone away, a lot of the terrible threats and the sources of the worst fighting. And now in its place we have new kinds of wars and new kinds of enemies. I’d be really interested in, as you look at this period of your lifetime, is there any qualitative difference between the violence that we have now and the violence that we had then? Is there anything like progress happening, or is it the same pattern that repeats itself?

Thich Nhat Hanh: Yeah, you are right. It’s the same pattern that repeats itself.

Tippett: And does that make you despair?

Thich Nhat Hanh: No, because I notice there are people who are capable of understanding, that we have enough enlightenment, and if only they come together and offer their light and show us the way, there is a chance for transformation and healing.

(And within weeks of the replay of this podcast, it’s worth noting, Putin invaded Ukraine, upping the garbage quotient exponentially.)

Miss O’s own qualm with the art of mindfulness is that it seems, somehow, incompatible with joy, humor, ecstasy, agitation, and fun, and synonymous with silence, chanting, bells, quiet, slowness, and dullness. This is not fair, and surely not accurate, but I’ve never heard an interview about the need for mindfulness that includes even one chuckle. And the second I hear Eastern chants and gongs, I think to myself, No.

And so it is that I’ve come to understand that humor is, essentially, a response to inner turbulence; that without this turbulence there would be no reason for humor, no reason to laugh, and life without laughter is…what? And where does faith fit in? And what about the role of art in our lives?

And like MAGIC, my friend Kevin Townley, a practicing Buddhist and teacher as well as actor and writer and Met Museum tour guide, came out this month with a wonderful, funny, deep, personal, and insightful book to help guide me to a new understanding: Look, Look, Look, Look, Look Again: Buddhist Wisdom reflected in 26 Artists. I’m only a third of the way through, because I’ve found I have to read it with my pencil. The best books require that—so many observations to underline and reflect on. “Most people who embark upon a spiritual path don’t do so because they’re feeling fabulous,” he writes. And I laughed out loud. And so I came to see that the reason religion or a practice of any kind seems negative to me is that people seek faith for a release from depressive habits and feelings. So it makes sense, really, that it was hard for me to equate Buddhism, as I said, with joy. Kevin manages to link his irreverent humor and love of art with his spiritual practice, and in writing about it he threads in joy and creates openings for skeptics like Miss O’. Thanks, Kevin.

Miss O’ holds her very own copy, and you can, too, if you want!

Why relativity? Why turbulence? Artists often seem to hold the key. There is a Ted Talk on the unexpected math behind Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, a painting I have seen in person at MoMA here in New York, but it’s usually so crowded I’ve never had a chance to really see it. This talk, written by Natalya St. Clair, will blow your mind. In turbulence, “Big eddies transfer their energy to smaller eddies, which do likewise at other scales…,” and scientists have discovered “that there is a distinct pattern of turbulent fluid structures…hidden in many of Van Gogh’s paintings.” Gogh know! Artists are the reason to live.

“Seek and Ye Shall Find, and then

…when you find, you will become troubled; when you become troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.”

~ The Gospel of Thomas (one of the Gnostic Gospels that the papal crowd decided to pull out of the New Testament; because god forbid a person feel empowered without a pope to lead her)

So I have to wonder: could the purpose of turbulence be that there is beauty in turbulence? And without turbulence we have no beauty? That Hanh is right, that without suffering there can be no joy?

Last week I noticed the bird’s nest under my neighbor Bob’s second floor air conditioner, a nest that has been there every year for the past 18 years; the chirping heralded spring, and I remembered: baby birds are coming. Then two days ago I looked up and the nest had vanished. Wind? Rain? It’s happened before, somehow the nest is gone, but miraculously, resiliently, the house sparrows are not. There they were, out flitting on the fence, and I saw one fly back up with a small twig in its beak. Rebuilding.

Ukraine will be next. And the earth after that. Take a memo.

Card by Turkish paper marbling master that reminds me of the symbolic colors of Ukraine.