Sleepless in Seattle, Topless in Ontario, Bottomless in the Bronx

What a world.

Air Quality Alert

Here

Determined to Duplicate

I've decided I will try to make my favorite foods since I can't buy them. First on the docket is learning how to duplicate Jeanette's Spinach Pies and Calzones.
Read.

Home Cooked Family Meals

There are very few people who actually bake and cook anymore in the neighborhood I live in. It's tragic and scary.
Article

Females are too Fierce

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
- Margaret Mead

We've Noticed

"Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible."
- Margaret Mead

Peanuts grow in a Fascinating Manner

We keep a five pound box of peanuts in the freezer for quick snacks.

Peanuts are almost ubiquitous in the U.S. culture: baseball games, circus elephants, cocktail snacks, and the ever-popular peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Yet, contrary to what their name implies, technically, peanuts are not nuts. They are, in botanical fact, legumes and are related to other foods in the legume family including peas, lentils, chickpeas and other beans.

Peanuts grow in a fascinating manner. They start out as an above ground flower that, due to its heavy weight, bends towards the ground. The flower then burrows underground, where the peanut matures.

Pancake Breakfast for the Neighborhood

My latest fantasy is to host a pancake breakfast for the neighborhood if I can afford to get or rent the gigantic professional grill. Stay tuned! Our parking lot is land of happy kids and parents now that the drug dealers moved away. Hurray!!

Loving to Cook

I've always hated school but loved learning. When I was in college I'd skip out at 2PM and bicycle home to make chicken soup or bake bread. I was broke. I got hired to be a prep chef and I bought a blue used VW bug. I learned more about EVERYTHING and had more fun than at my expensive college. Participating in the making and preparing your own food is the highest form of self-love. I'll never understand people who give up cooking and eating just because they live alone. The scent of bread baking and soup simmering is one of life's most sensory pleasures. Sharing home made food is the most sincere of gifts.

Archetypal Mythological Madness

Story

Pens and Needles

Article

In a life properly lived, you’re a river.

Paris Review: Jim Harrison Interview

In a life properly lived, you’re a river.

[...]

Antaeus magazine wanted me to write a piece for their issue about nature. I told them I couldn’t write about nature but that I’d write them a little piece about getting lost and all the profoundly good aspects of being lost—the immense fresh feeling of really being lost. I said there that my definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality. I don’t think, for instance, that Márquez is pushing it in One Hundred Years of Solitude—that was simply his sense of reality. The critics call this magic realism, but they don’t understand the Latin world at all. Just take a trip to Brazil. Go into the jungle and take a look around. This old Chippewa I know—he’s about seventy-five years old—said to me, “Did you know that there are people who don’t know that every tree is different from every other tree?” This amazed him. Or don’t know that a nation has a soul as well as a history, or that the ground has ghosts that stay in one area. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring. As Rimbaud said, which I believed very much when I was nineteen and which now I’ve come back to, for our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything.

[...]

If you can hoe corn for fifty cents an hour, day after day, you can learn how to write a novel. You have absorbed the spirit of repetition. When you look at my wife’s garden you understand that; the beauty of the garden—the flowers and the vegetables—that’s how an artist is in his work. And I think the background that at first nonplussed me—that rural, almost white-trash element—stood me in good stead as an artist, in the great variety of life it forced me into, the hunger to do things

[...]

I can only think of one American in our time who’s lived up to the full promise of his talent, and that’s Saul Bellow. He’s the only person who brought his talent to the fruition that seemed promised way back with his first work.

[...]

The idea of getting bad reviews is not nearly as bad as getting no reviews, frankly. And it never stopped me from writing poems and novels, it didn’t slow me down a bit. That comes from too deep a source. It’s something you have to do. And at any given time during those fourteen or fifteen hard, impossible years I could have taken a well-paid teaching job, because I had that cachet as a poet and a novelist, but I refused to do it.

[...]

Do you still keep in touch with Nicholson?

HARRISON:Sure, we’re friends. He’s an extraordinary person, really literate and intensely perceptive. I don’t know any novelists who are more perceptive than he is, which after all is central to his profession too—to be perceptive about character. He’s always aware of how people around him are changing, just as he’s changing. He never tries to locate people or make them stay in one place.

[...]
INTERVIEWER: You said earlier that one’s dream life is the foundation of art.

JIM HARRISON: It is for everyone whether they like it or not. Or that sleeping/waking period early in the morning. Your brain has spent the night evolving a sequence of metaphors that allows you to survive the day, and sometimes it comes out in such poignant, distinctive terms.

Here

Vertical or Horizontal, no in between

Since I was very small I have been fascinated with motion. I made a sculpture: two blobs of gray plasticine connected by arched colorful straws. "tell me about it", my mother said.
It's the motion of the bouncing ball!" I exclaimed.
No much has changed except it is telling that I get motion-sickness from nearly everything. I wanted to animate my drawings and when I did I got sick. Movies, iPads, wind farms etc flip my stomach. Terra firma s'il vous plaît.

I have been thinking about this since I broke my foot because I hate to sit. It stops my brain. As my friend Jeff Marchand said "Now we know where your brain is!" He's right.

I work standing at my desk, easel, kitchen. I walk my dog to think. I swim laps to rest and rejuvenate. I'm vertical or horizontal, no in between.

How to Become Mentally Flexible

Article

Gratitude is Happiness Doubled by Wonder

G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations.

Article

Deb Word: We don’t Need to put this kind of Trauma on a Child’s Soul.

About 14 families with gay or transgender members have registered to attend the four-day World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia just before the pope’s arrival. Deb Word, president of Fortunate Families, a support group for Catholic parents seeking full inclusion of their gay children in the church, said her group applied to have a table in the exhibit hall, but was rejected. She was also interviewed by a World Meeting organizer as a possible speaker for the only panel on homosexuality, but was ultimately not included.

“We wanted to go and share resources on how you can safeguard your child’s long-term health by using loving acceptance in your home. It doesn’t sound like a scary message, does it?” said Ms. Word, who lives in Memphis with her husband and has taken in 17 homeless young gay and transgender people over many years who were rejected by their families.

In Philadelphia, she will be wearing a small rainbow ribbon pin and carrying a bag of literature for Catholics she meets who express interest. If she could meet the pope, she said, she would tell him the story of her son, an altar server and a faithful Catholic who did not come out until he was 23.

She and her husband had known for years that he was probably gay, but he delayed telling them because he was so worried he was going to hell.

If she could say only one thing to the pope, Ms. Word said, it would be this: “We don’t need to put this kind of trauma on a child’s soul.”
-Deb Word, president of Fortunate Families,

Article

David Casarett

Editorial

by David Casarett is the director of hospice and palliative care at Penn Medicine and the author of “Stoned: A Doctor’s Case for Medical Marijuana.”

As a palliative care physician, every day I see firsthand the suffering my patients have experienced, and the lengths to which they’ve gone to manage their symptoms and control their lives. They stockpile medications in case their pain increases. And some buy illegal drugs on the street because their physicians won’t prescribe opioids. So is it any wonder that people like Robin with serious illnesses want to take matters into their own hands?

Yet it seems that many of my physician colleagues haven’t considered the possibility that patients are turning to medical marijuana because the health care system has failed them. In general, their reaction to medical marijuana has been one of detached amusement, tinged with avuncular concern. And when they recognize the challenges that patients like Robin face, they point out that they don’t have enough time in a typical 15-minute visit to deliver the kind of personalized care that Robin needed.

Fortunately, Robin’s story offers solutions. I’ve identified at least three lessons the medical marijuana industry holds for our health care system. And none of them require doctors to spend any more time with patients.

First, we should give patients a chance to learn from one another. In marijuana clinics and dispensaries, I’ve seen as much advice and support offered by patients as I have by physicians. That’s the beauty and attraction of websites like PatientsLikeMe, which has created communities of patients who support one another. Who better to offer advice about how to get your prescriptions filled on the weekends, or how to swallow those large pills, than someone who has already figured it out?

Second, if physicians can’t spend more time with patients — and, in general, they can’t — we should give patients more time with other office staff members. Robin didn’t spend any more time with a doctor in that clinic than my patients spend with me. But she spent much more time with the marijuana clinic employees, none of whom had any formal medical training. They gave detailed answers to her questions about various marijuana strains, the unpredictable absorption of cannabinoids in edibles and even how to clean and maintain her vaporizer. That advice took time, but none of it required an extra minute with a physician.

Third, we should give patients more ability to manage their treatment. What Robin wanted was a chance to treat her symptoms in her own way, using strategies that worked for her. She wanted to try, and maybe fail, and try again. She wanted to be in charge.

Giving patients more control doesn’t mean handing over a blank prescription pad. Patients can gain more control — safely — if they understand a drug’s effects and duration, and if they have some leeway in when and how to use it. For instance, when I prescribe as-needed pain medication, I’ll give my patients permission to figure out for themselves how much to take and when.

These suggestions aren’t difficult, or expensive. Nor are they only for patients like Robin, or for physicians like me who care for seriously ill patients near the end of life. They’re changes that any clinic could start making today. The medical marijuana industry has learned these lessons well, and our more mainstream health care system needs to catch up.

Cat Scan: Milwaulkee Creature on the Loose

Article

Poet John Ashbury

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
-John Ashbury, Writer's Almanac

I figured I might as well tell the stories

It is terrifying to a child to be in hospital. I remember two mean old lady nurses giving me a sponge bath when I was in hospital to have my tonsils out I was 5. I remember being given ether through a small metal thing like a colander over my mouth on the operating table and my mother waving and smiling and walking backwards.

I remember they had me peeing in a bathtub at the hospital when I was three and a half. I was covered in red-orange Mercurochrome from my belly button to mid thigh. My mother had called my bio dad to come to the hospital. He was 6 foot 4 and towered, lumbering down the hallway beside me.

My mother insisted on taking our temperature with anal thermometers well past infancy. It like okay you think you're sick, bend over, I'm taking your temperature.

My brother was eleven when the ambulance came. They had to take him away on a stretcher so the thermometer wouldn't break. She said "I lost it" She had lost it up his ass. The whole neighborhood was out in the street watching the ambulance pull in and park in our driveway, asking what happened.

When I turned 30 I was squatting in a stone mill. The walls were three feet deep. I was hitting pillows crying and screaming trying to get to the bottom of my rage. I had been working with a rape crisis counselor at the time.

One day I worked up the nerve to finally call my mother. "Mom, I'm calling because I want to know why I had surgery on my vagina at age three and a half?"
"My baby, my baby is calling!'" She said to whoever was in the room with her. "Mom, I have some questions. I started crying and asked Bill for the toilet paper to blow my nose" Where are you? she said, laughing. I'm home, I said, blowing my nose.
I'm calling because I have some questions about why I had surgery on my vagina.
" It was a hormone thing, you would've filled up with urine and died." She said defensively
(Big Pause)
"You only have two holes," - she shouted angrily.
"You looked like a mannequin, you had no lips".

I was in shock because I knew I had and always had all of my parts. Her descriptions were hysterical. Is this how she saw my body?

I had called my childhood doctor but he said When you phoned I realized its been 30 years, so I took your records from my attic and threw them out.

I hung up on him

I phoned the psychologist Mr. Brown who had to go to every week for an hour often it was twice a week from age seven to age fifteen. He tried to record my phone call.

I hung up.

I remember my sister and I ages five and seven all dressed up in black velvet and white lace dresses with big white bows in the back and white tights and black patented leather Mary Jane's. We were going to my step father's office and being allowed to draw on big smooth white vellum drawing pads my mother set up for us on the black linoleum office floor. We had just been to Chock Full O' Nuts downstairs and had eaten brownies on turquoise high swivel stools at the counter. I remember my mother took our tights and underpants. Had we had an accident in our pants? Both of us? We were drawing on our knees in our little dresses with no underwear. I still shudder thinking of it.

there's more. Yes it is sexual abuse. It's all profound abuse especially for young poets.

I remember reading a story in one of Anais Nin's diaries or book of letters that Henry Miller's parents promised him a trip or a gift and instead they took him to get his tonsils out. These things are profound.

Years ago my friend was changing her daughters diaper in front of her former college teacher, at a visit to the school. I was totally keyed into the shame her daughter was feeling completely exposed in front of strangers a college classroom. Her infant daughter was crying. My friend was so preoccupied with wanting approval from this teacher for her new motherhood she wasn't noticing.

It was Christmas, the dining room had two oblong tables making a T-shape covered in red tablecloths at my parents house. The tables were filled with food and seated around them were extended family and a few close family friends.

My mother suddenly blurts out "Emily always had her hands in her pants, a real woman"
I looked around to see if this remark was upsetting anyone besides me. I remained silent. When dinner was over I began questioning my cousin and siblings "Did you hear what she said?" I was packing my bags to return to Rhode Island. My step father knew something was wrong and dropped a bunch of mini candy canes in my green canvas L.L.Bean bag.

I stopped going home for Christmas, holidays, parties, anniversaries, weddings. They invited my ex-boyfriend to their holidays, the one who raped me.

They continue to send me photos of themselves with descriptions of what countries they've recently visited and what expensive foods they've eaten.

We don't like you because you've never been anywhere and you don't read the paper.

You live in amongst the tenements.

Nice starter house!

My mother covered her eyes when I tried to show her my studio.

10 years after I was given an award from my college, at my step father's birthday party my mother mentioned to me her personal architect who was an alum of my college, had showed her the write up about me. She couldn't be proud, she waited ten years to drop the bomb.

It finally hit me, I didn't have a mother.

--------

I was 15 my parents were eating dinner alone in the closed off dining room. I came in to say hello.

"Your father and I were just discussing we don't think you have sexual feelings" she said.

That summer I was sent to a nude co-ed summer camp.

-----
In college I got pregnant, my mother called me at 6 AM and screamed into the phone "He's the guy who screwed you, He should pay!"
--

My brother was cleaning his glass ten gallon fish tank which was his hamsters cage, in the yellow bath tub in the bathroom and the glass broke cutting his wrist. My mother gets a police escort driving 90 miles an hour to Port Chester Hospital.

----
My earliest memories were the stormy nightmares I'd have that a person named Dee Dee was coming in the window to take my poop which we called doody. There was a loose wire that snapped against the windowpane during wind and thunderstorms and I would wet my bed. My mother would come in and angrily change the sheets propping me up on the mattress ticking covered guest bed, a mini Castro Convertible couch. All of this was when I was two and three years old. The walls were cobalt blue and a clown painting hung over the bed. I remember the fabric of the curtains a busy blue and gold pattern. I used to isolate the shapes tripping out on the pattern.

My mother later told me she used to use the anal thermometer as a stool softener by poking me in the ass with it. Doctors orders. I was an infant.

I used to get screamed for saying 'hey'. The neighbor said "Hay is for horses" I couldn't understand these tall scary adults.

My bio dad screamed at me for stirring my ice cream when visiting him in his NYC apartment.

I asked if God was dead.

I got bundled up. We saw Thanksgiving Macy's day parade. I had to pee.

I got abandoned in apartment house elevator when my sister and bio dad walked out.

I got lost at the YMCA in NYC with my older sister when visiting bio dad we were 4 and 6.

I was always getting lost in the supermarket with my mother. She would say "Your father abandoned you, not me!"

I was often lost at other people's birthday parties at Jones beach. Lifeguards were always kind and tried to give me my favorite food; a hamburger. For once I wasn't hungry. I was sure this time I had been abandoned for good.

I nearly drowned in a motel pool on a family on vacation the same vacation my 2 year old brother fell out of a moving car as we turned, and the door opened.