Umbrella

May 8, 2014
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Unfurled, it is your private shield, protection on a pole

Much needed in a downpour or to give Romance some Soul

Bestow a small one on a drink & let the good times roll

Regardless of how much you’ve had, you’re gonna want Samoa

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That last-word Punchline Pun owes something to my college days in Tucson in the mid-Seventies, and a TV commercial for a Pacific Islands restaurant called Kon-Tiki. They had a Big-Kahuna-type guy say stuff like “Little Chief LIKE Kon-Tiki!” in a fake Polynesian accent. His next to last line was “Little Chief misses his island home!” and the curvy hula-skirt-clad girl by his side asked, “Samoa?”, whereupon Little Chief grabbed at a goodies-heaped plate, dropped the Polynesian accent, and said, Texas style, “Ah don’t mahnd ef Ah DO!”

How to Be Your Own Best Psychic; or, What Did Jeane Dixon Have that You Don’t?

May 6, 2014
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A few days ago I read a heartbreaking article in Reader’s Digest about Jude Deveraux, best-selling novelist, being taken for approximately $17 million by a predatory monster who claimed to be a psychic. Years before, I’d seen an infomercial for Dionne Warwick’s “Psychic Friends,” and noticed the disclaimer at the bottom For Entertainment Purposes Only or somesuch.

Now, I don’t call myself an atheist or an agnostic, but my tendency is heavily toward skepticism; even so, I LITERALLY don’t know what to believe. I ardently hope there is more to the Universe than random purposelessness. Being a sentient being with a mind and what amounts to free will, I am free to decide what makes sense, and what my own reason for living is–subject to change, of course. Consequently, I will find myself at night looking at the inside of my closed eyelids and seeking answers from beyond my insignificant self. I’m sure almost all of us have asked: What’s my next move? How do I handle THIS major issue? And one overwhelming question, which comes in many forms: What’s wrong with this picture, and what needs to happen to make it unwrong?

When we ask these questions, and dream on them, and hope for an answer to come to us in the form of a thought popping into our heads unbidden, or other sign from outside ourselves, we are being our own psychics. I am positive that Jude Deveraux would have been much the much better off if she had been her own psychic. The trouble was, she was insecure; she didn’t trust that she’d come up with good answers on her own.

So now, let’s walk through it: If we’re going to be our own psychics, how are we going to be the best psychics we can be? Here’s what I’ve come up with, but I am 100% sure that you who read will come up with something that suits YOU, and YOUR circumstances, better.

1. Learn what you REALLY want out of life. Do you really want to be a millionaire? Do you want to be suspicious of someone you don’t know wanting to be your friend? Do you want constant demands on your time and your money by people who think they know better than you do what to do with your time and your money? (By the way, your time is of equal or greater value than your money; I’ll try not to waste yours here.)

2. Formulate five questions you’d like God, or Nature, or the Cosmos, or Whoever, to answer. Here are mine:

What is the best use of my time, today, this week, this month, and this year?
Who in the world do I most need to learn from?
What do I not know that I need to know?
How much lifetime do I have left?
What is making my life more tragic, what makes it more joyful, and what can I do about this?

These are kind of fudgy questions in that there are subquestions in some of them. But my important question list is subject to change, especially if I learn something new (and I’m bound to) or my circumstances change. The thing is to keep asking these questions, and keep looking for the answers both actively (“Time to go to the gym and put another brick in the Life Extension Wall”) and passively. (“Hey, look at that! There’s my answer right there!”)

3. Beware the easy answer. It is tempting to, seeing a rainbow, infer that God or the Universe is trying to tell you something. But a rainbow is merely the organization of visible light at certain frequencies via its refraction in a myriad of water droplets. You can have a rainbow any time you want one if you have a sunny day and a garden hose; just use your thumb and turn until the angle is right. But if you get a burning bush, or gigantic text carved out of a mountain before your very eyes, I’d pay attention–BUT I’D STILL QUESTION THE MESSAGE. Try the answers you get out on your intuition, and do your best not to inject your own wishful thinking.

4. Live for more than yourself. When you do that, your psychic connection has more than you to answer to, and will consequently give you (and yours) a clearer picture.

Essay/Lecture over. That’ll be Zero Dollars and Zero Cents please. [smiles]

Susan Groce, Printmaker (take 2)

May 5, 2014
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Some images uplift; some claw & dig
Some put your thoughtstream in a whirligig
Uplifting, whirling, digging–a Creator
Unleashed her Chi, then ran it through the grater
She rosined up her plate AND bow–allegro
Sustained her dark/melodic Montenegro
A g r e a t Intaglio’s an Analgesic
And fitting as Buckminstrel’s geodesic
Non-toxic seekers on the astral plane
Now find her in Orono–that’s in Maine

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I put the poem before the image because I think I was more successful with the former than the latter. There is sometimes an inverse relationship between how much I worry about a getting certain subject RIGHT and the quality of the image that results. Simply put, I tried too hard on this one, and it got out of hand.

But that’s OK, because–as I indicate in the signature line, deliberately made to look like a signature at the bottom of an intaglio print (and notice that the poem is subtly framed in what vaguely looks like the beveled plate-edge of an intaglio), that this is an a/p, which is printmakerese for “artist’s proof.” It’s another way of saying “work in progress, not yet suitable for an edition,” or “I didn’t go yet.” And indeed I hope, perhaps in my retirement years, that I’ll have access to an intaglio studio and press, and I’ll turn this crude drawing into old-school gold.

The thing is, the Intaglio process is obsolete. It was invented sometime around the 14th Century almost by accident, an offshoot of the engraving of gold with incised accents, which were then rubbed with contrasting pigment. It became a way for artists to translate one image into many salable prints. But it’s a demanding process: take a copper or zinc plate, sand off the milling marks and then polish it with jeweler’s rouge, bevel the edges so they don’t cut into the roller, and then incise the plate with an image that is the reverse of the one you want, using a burin or other engraving tool; or coat the plate with carborundum and use a carbide scribe to etch through the coating, then to be submerged in an acid bath; or put the plate in a box full of rosin dust and diffuse the dust into the air above the plate, so that it settles on the plate to become maskable tone dippable in acid–ah, it is so much more gratifying to DO these things than to describe them, but it is a real chore to learn how to do them with skill. Susan Groce has taken time and pain to translate her kaleidoscopic visions into editionable form, and for that she has my respect and admiration. She stuck to it, made a career out of it, and flourished.

And she’s taken a concern with the environment and with physical health to investigate non-toxic means of printing. A good thing, too: the print room I remember had air that was a minestrone of fumes: carborundum, burnt plate oil, kerosene, denatured alcohol, the mustiness of paper soaked too long, nitric acid–and I’m far from done; haven’t even gotten to lithography chemicals, which were in the same room. Good for her for seeking safety for herself and her contemporaries.

And good for her for her multi-talented creative soul. As I indicated in “take 1,” she is an accomplished violinist. Thus the line “She rosined up her plate AND bow–allegro” refers to the fact that both the Aquatint printmaking process and the bow of a violin require rosin. I was also glad to mention “Buckminstrel” Fuller in her sphere, as he was a like multitalent with a care for the environment and human quality of life. His notebooks and Susan’s have some overlap, and I commend both to the viewer’s attention.

I invited Susan to offer a quotation from any of her artist’s statements, or a link she’d like readers to be steered to, for me to include in the image. She graciously declined, being very busy with the Semester-End Madness aspect of her professorship. But she’s easy to find as department chair at the University of Maine at Orono, and I hope any interested parties take a look at her artwork and her benign-materials investigations.

The Lifetime Asymptote–a Parable

May 4, 2014
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Once upon not far from now a rogue computer designed by a brilliant yet crazed paranoiac hacked onto the cybereverything. Its master had given it the mandate Maximize the Survival Probability of Humanity. Soon world markets were heavily into space colonization via a modification of Gerard O’Neill’s L-5 Society as interpreted by Joe “WORLDS” Haldeman. Smart Alecks were renditioned into little rooms where they grew new technology under threat of death. In less than a decade and a half the sky glittered with protoplasm-bearing life modules.

“Live and let live” was the Golden Rule amongst the space colonies. Proselytization was permitted within the hulls of individual colonies, but forbidden in inter-colony intercourse. Meanwhile, on Earth, there were more renditions, these of geneticists. The human genome was cleaned up and trifurcated. Laissez-faire with world markets then resumed, and an airborne sterilization vector conceived long ago by P.J. “Seventy Years of Decpop” Farmer did in future generations of non-modified-genome humanity.

In the year 2345 the work of that long-obsolesced computer was complete. Not only had Humanity survived, but hundreds of versions of it headed to the stars, and some of them would survive the red-sun-death of the Earth. But they sure were funny-looking, according to the aesthetos of the crumb of Original Humanity left, out of sentimentality, intact.

The End

Chandler, Raymond

May 3, 2014
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This page has been hanging fire since a year ago March, and since I’ve got the breakthrough-I-hope HEIRLOOM TOMATOES and SUSAN GROCE, PRINTMAKER acrostics waiting in the wings, I thought it’d be a good warmup and character-builder to finish it. Chandler wrote detective fiction that was about more than slinky dames and flying bullets. John D. MacDonald and Michael Connelly, I am sure, would cheerfully acknowledge a debt to him.

Here are the words to the double acrostic:

Cull California for its Vine, its Creeper
Have Scheming Dames all lure for Loot: what Drama
And Big Sleep may not be for Big nor Sleepy
Nor Loveliness fare well when Tomcats tom
Detection with its Dicta and its Tao
Lets Danger threaten Life & Limb & Hymen
Entice, intrigue, inveigle–draw a Shroud
Rig Marlowe with a case as hard as Diamond

Susan Groce, Printmaker (take 1)

May 2, 2014
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Long ago, on a college campus far to the south-southeast of where I am now, I was enrolled in a printmaking class. It was in that class that I first became aware of the person and artwork of one Susan Groce. Our paths did not cross much at all, but I could see that she had something in her artwork that would serve her well and take her far.

Just shy of a week ago I was on YouTube, looking for a version of Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” that included lyrics. I found it and was listening with pleasure, (“Oh–MOVING me down the highway–check”) when the long gaze at his last name sparked the recollection of Susan of the quite similar last name. I then wondered what became of her, and soon I found out: She’d bloomed as an artist, exhibiting internationally in at least three continents, and had become a full professor and department chair at the University of Maine at Orono. WOW! That’s a career in the visual arts beyond the dreams of just about all of us aspirants.

More on Susan, and a triple-acrostic poem (SUSAN/PRINTMAKER/GROCE) will follow in a soon-subsequent post. Meanwhile, here is a study of the good Professor playing Celtic fiddle, surrounded by thumbnailesque images from her notebook and from electron microscopy. Stay tuned…

 

Limbo, with Public Service Announcement

May 1, 2014
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National Poetry Month ended last midnight. Tomorrow at 11:00 AM I check in to Verde Valley Medical Center for a screening colonoscopy. So today I’ve been in limbo, albeit an eventful one, the event being the spring-cleaning of my lower GI tract.

They give you this powder in a jug with the fill line at one gallon. You have the option of adding a flavorant they provide, and suggest you may wish to augment it with Kool-Aid or Crystal Lite. Additives mask, but do not hide, the true flavor of this stuff, which I’ve come to think of as Beyond the Grave Potpourri. (I am going to encourage people of my graduating class to do what I’m doing now if they haven’t already, but I’m not going to sugar-coat it.)

You drink eight ounces or more every fifteen minutes or less till it is gone. Around about the third round, the magic begins to happen, the substance ingested acting much like the Liquid Plumr product they call Foaming Pipe Snake. You make the first of many trips to the bathroom. What you do in there is your own business, but I defy you not to think of a seltzer water dispenser, dispensing. You come out of the bathroom a bit shaken, sit down gingerly, and two to eighteen seconds later stand right back up again for another ride on the bucking bronco. Meanwhile, you’re drinking more of the miracle potion, which far before it is gone seems to have taken on the volume of the Atlantic Ocean.

Eventually, though, it is gone; eventually, the last of it goes through you and out the back. You stabilize. There are a few after-tremors, but a mere five hours after you started, you’re mostly fine, and what’s to come is all good: they’ll make you happy-sleepy and before you know it, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Katie Couric, Robert Kline, Meryl Streep, and Billy Connolly have all done this, Friends, and if you’re pushing or over 50 and haven’t done it yet, or, like me, HAVE done it but not for a long time–I hope you will do it as well. Colorectal cancer death is preventable via excision of precancerous polyps and biopsy of found growths–yet colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death. It killed my grandfather on my mother’s side; and the last four months of his life were hellish indeed.

So, please: join me; go on the Five-Hour Quick-Weightloss Diet. Have some fun with it, as Billy Connolly did. (Do an internet search on Billy Connolly Colonoscopy and watch the video; you’ll laugh like a hyena, I guarantee it.) But do it; for yourself, and your loved ones.

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 44th

April 30, 2014
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a smile at the corner of your mouse

on your face a mouth that smiles
in your head a mouse
wiggles waves and scampers miles
thinks your skull’s a house

string cheese is his guilty pleasure
stolen from your bites
puts it with his other treasure
secrets and delights

that is why at times a tickle
in your throat or nose
tells you that his path is fickle
as he comes and goes

you may say he isn’t really
anything at all
but his tale’s a peach a dilly
he will answer–call!

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 43rd, 2014

April 30, 2014
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goldibear & the three glocks

one was a flaxenpelt child of the woods
one was a fabled land far & away
one was a weapon well favored by hoods
one was a thin-metal tonic array.

she played the third glock* sadly–golden yet blue
and daydreamed she lived on the shore of the first**
the second*** she shot in an old switcheroo
on film and in cinemascope: “i could burst.”

in the tradition that scholars call oral
stories are told to your children for teaching
this tale’s for grownups & here is the moral:
“old switcheroos are ofttimes overreaching.”

THE END

* glockenspiel
** glocca morra
*** glock 9mm

This is a happy day, Friends. It’s the LAST DAY of National Poetry Writing Month, and with this poem I fulfill the requirement I set for myself of writing at least one poem each day of the Month.  I feel like I am crossing the Finish Line; even so, I might try to squeeze off seven more poems/posts for a nice round 50. (Or might not. [smiles])