Poetry & Blindfolds

Ah, Friday.  That magical day of rituals.  I have never been one to say ‘thank god it’s Friday’ – and not because my personal belief system is secular.  After all, I say ‘oh shit’ without having to necessarily believe in excrement.  No, I have simply found ‘thank god it’s Friday’ to be the weary moan of a working class that I cannot identify with.  I work when I work; I don’t when I don’t.  To champion a deity’s input for a five-day workweek followed by a two-day respite is absurd.  I have never been the type of employee to cheer the end of a working day, nor am I one who delights in seeing how many employees can fit in an elevator at 5:01pm.

Efforts to chip a crack into the sadness that has dominated my mood over the last fortnight have been met with quasi-success.  I’ve taken to grabbing books at random from my bookshelf in the morning en route to the train.  As a result, I have read respectable segments of Henrik Ibsen’s final play, ‘When We Dead Awaken’,  as well as the journals of Sylvia Plath.  Remind me never to recommend books to those who are depressed.  For some reason, though, I have found slivers of comedy in choosing such maudlin, distressed pieces by such beautifully damaged people during a time of personal sadness.

A brief note on Plath’s journals: I love her voice, I hate Ted’s.  Ted Hughes, her husband, was a principle editor of Plath’s journals, and as a result, his British overbearing is felt in most entries.  “I dislike Ted sometimes because he has a tiny [omission].”  That’s not a direct quote, mind you, but merely an illustration of why a former spouse is not the best choice for editor of the writings of his dead wife.

A further brief note on Plath’s journals: it is fortunate or unfortunate, but I tend to write in the style of the last author I read for a few hours, so I apologize if this entry is paraphrasing Plath’s style too keenly.  Too keenly?!  Yeh, I said it. 

I have also taken to bringing my Mac to work and forcing myself to have full-hour lunches.  Usually my lunch hour lasts as long as it takes to get food and bring it back to my desk; I occasionally think that I am an ideal employee because of it.  Rare lunches, no ‘thank god it’s Friday’.  Still, if management notices such behavior, they are experts at keeping it to themselves.  But I digress.  I have been writing and recording an album of trance-like music (if for no other reason than I never tried) on my Mac.  So, this week, I have hidden away in the corner of my workplace’s library and spent an hour tweaking, editing, chopping and channeling.   The results have been pleasing to the point where I had to share some with the wife, poor thing.

When my worldview becomes so coal-black that sadness becomes a bit of a comfort, the best I can seem to do is squeeze it for all its worth and hope a diamond comes out the other side.  Still working on that.  In the meantime, I’ll continue reading Plath’s diaries and maybe pick up a few hints (preferably not involving stoves).

I am lifting this from my friend-in-law, Jessica Gardner, who writes a great blog called LITTLE MERRY SUNSHINE.  She herself lifted it from AmeriBLOG, the writer of which lifted it from somewhere else.  However, it’s a really good, smart piece about life in these here United States in 2009.

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This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

And then I log on to the internet — which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration — and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

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Read this (again!) and Jessica Gardner’s other material at http://littlemerrysunshine.blogspot.com/.

-Vincent Truman

Crazy people are, let’s face it, pretty common.  It seems, for every person walking down the street whistling, there is another person who is whistling out an orifice that is more troubling.  I’ve seen my share of crazy people and am tied to a few, loathe as I am to admit it.

In the realm of science fiction fandom, there are those who are not satisfied to enjoy a tale and let the possibilities and promise roll around in their heads.  No, there are a select few who wear head masks that could be mistaken for a swollen testicle but which is really the dome of a Klingon.  There are those who hold brooms differently now, as if a certain grip could lend to that broom the power of flight.  There are those who see sand dunes and, instead of thinking of temperature or humidity, allow their minds to think of giant worms sprouting out of them.

These are my crazy people.  I have long been a fan of science fiction, from ‘Star Trek’ to ‘Doctor Who’ to ‘Babylon 5’ to the original ‘Battlestar Galactica.’  I am fully aware that my ‘mainstream’ enjoyment of these stories, books and films contributes to my crazy people.  For without mainstream interest – that is, interest that permits a story, book or film to travel beyond its creator’s walls – there would be no crazy people.  So it is inevitable.  My appreciation of William Shatner’s portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk feeds into a crazy person’s pride at being the first person in his or her group to know that the ‘T’ stands for ‘Tiberius’.

Likewise, in the realm of music, I have my crazy people – in fact, I was one of those for a very long time!  You could name a Beatles song and I could tell you how long it was, in addition to scores of other random and incredibly useless trivia (to pick a song at random: ‘Come Together’ is 4:16; track 1 on side 1 of ‘Abbey Road’, b-side to ‘Something’, originally a fast rocker but slowed down thanks to Paul McCartney’s swampy, bouncy bassline, etc.etc.  — all of these facts are just in my head).  Although I have grown out of that kind of crazy, that doesn’t mean that kind of crazy ceased to exist in the world.  Indeed, you can still find people who know the time of day that Pete Best was called by Brian Epstein to inform him that he was no longer in the band.  I’m not one of those anymore, but I am well aware that my mainstream enjoyment of the Beatle boys keeps the crazy folks percolating out there somewhere.

If one can conclude anything from the above, it’s what I’ve said: mainstream appreciation of anything, be it a genre or a music or television show or a actor or anything, creates conditions in which crazy people can grow and flourish.  In fact, crazy people can only exist because of mainstream appreciation.  I think this is a pretty sound theory.

And then there’s Scott Roeder.  He can be called crazy – in fact, some friends and family have already called him as much in the few news reports I’ve read about the man himself.  Scott Roeder was a religious man (“very religious in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way,” according to his ex-wife).  He thought government was doing a bad job (and joined a militia to express that disappointment loudly).  He once subscribed to a magazine suggesting “justifiable homicide” against doctors who performed abortions, and apparently likened Dr. George Tiller to the Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele.  And Scott Roeder shot Dr. George Tiller to death while the doctor was acting as an usher in his church.  Operation Rescue, an pro-life establishment that has been around for years, did not literally applaud Roeder but went on record as saying the doctor, who did abortions and late-term abortions within the scope of the law, was a “mass murderer” and that his practice was “truly demonic.”

Who’s in the mainstream for this crazy guy?  

You?