#SCOTUS v. 2022

gimme an L gimme an I gimme an F

(and an FU2)

gimme an E

womb tomb BOOM

firing squad lethal injection guns and no butter death penalty electric chair let 'em fry more guns carry conceal reveal life penalty choice no choice gimme me a gun Johnny got his give me a bomb cradle to grave

through my fault through my fault through my most grievous fault

mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa

pro-life pro-white pro-gun pro-men pro-right pro-wrong pro-lie

wave the flag

wear it

wrap yourselves in it

sashay in it

sway away

lipstick smeared

ear to ear

grinning gamely

smiling widely

in your robes

your Robespierre robes

Reigning Error

rain of righteousness

razing democracy

raising theocracy

Amen.

 

 

Mother's Day Paean

Mater Jubilaei / Mother of Joyful Things

This was originally posted on Mother's Day, 2021. I happened upon it either accidentally or providentially, your pick, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R8TefGH_4 It's a mystery to me as to who wrote the words. Is it Tosca Donati, the Italian singer and actress featured on the YouTube linked here? Is it an old hymn? After all, it's in Latin, is it not? I fake-translated the Latin words below (I can't remember how I found them) into this poem, from a memory of Latin, undictionaried, laden with a memory of my mother, who died in 2018, at 102. Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you. 

 

I look for one

expecting all: sure that more is to come

why expect so little

pray it to your falcon wings

tell me what you ask of me

seeking the core of better things

Mother of joy, joy

of motherhood, Mother of eternity . . . 

Eternal Mother

of all things Everlasting Motherness

circumspicio una
Omnes expectant : certe aliquis veniet
Cur exspectetis mini
dicite vos peregrini.
Quem quaeras mihi dic,
cor meliora petens.
Mater jubilaei, jubilum
matris, Mater aeternitatis...
Aeternitatis mater,
Aeternitas omnium Matrum

the end of fragrance?

Is it the end of fragrance? Does social distancing stretch the molecular cone of influence that perfumes and allied fragrances emanate? Will future fragrantial formulas need more potency to pierce, ever so gently and invisibly, the social distance bubble? And will new, stronger fragrantical formulations disturb the infinitely delicate harmony that fragrance chords thrive on?

Weighty questions, on International Fragrance Day no less.

And indeed what are the ends of fragrance? Why do we adorn ourselves in such evocative olfactory raiment? To what ends, what purposes?

The coronavirus moment gives us a perfumed pause to ponder answers to these unanswerable questions.

The bride throws the bouquet. The bouquet is caught. The bouquet is portentous, a sign suggesting love and marriage, says the tradition. And what of our personal bouquets, tossed by any one of us at any point on the gender spectrum? What are we to make of our fragrance bouquet?

What do I expect from wearing my signature chords, my inimitable and idiosyncratic bouquet of arranged self scent, sprayed-on or rolled-on eau de parfum or cologne or eau de toilette (typically Tom Ford, if you must know)? Do I expect a compliment, a stranger's jolt of je ne sais quoi, a passport to Dallianceville or amorous abandon? Whatever I have expected or will expect is nuanced by the strictures of social distancing, at least for now.

Picture this: a terminally ill patient in hospice. Her matted hair. His swarthy face, beard growth of five days. Her chipped, unpainted nails. He petitions the volunteer to comb his hair, to shave him. She asks for a perm, gets her nails done. Why? They ain't going nowhere, as Bob Dylan put it. 

It's for dignity. Aesthetics. Pride of ownership. Something incalculable, more solemn or sacred, having no word in our vernacular.

And the same with fragrance.

She puts it on. Wears her favorite, most alluring fragrance. She is quarantined, lives alone, will not leave the house today.

He does the same. He is running low on his favorite fragrance. He applies it anyway, judiciously and jubilantly. Self-isolation permits this. Demands it.

In fragrante delicto.

problems without passports

Space rocks of this size [460 feet or larger] are so-called 'problems without passports' because they are expected to affect whole regions if they collide with Earth.  18 March 2019 BBC News website

I wish someone had told me my problems needed passports -- at least some of them apparently do. I simply could have refused to apply for my problem passport and left the problem in outer space, or wherever passport-required problems are stored. Granted, even a problem with a properly issued passport can be kept at bay via visa restrictions. Everybody knows that. I don't dare ask how one applies for a problem passport, who issues it, which metaphysical countries require it, and what the expiration date is. Let me be frank: why would anyone want to apply for a problem passport? To what good, or cui bono as we were taught in our high school Latin classes. I suppose in accord with some sort of Freudian-Jungian psychology theory, one should face one's problems, not bury or "stuff" them. And this isn't just the advice touted in the realm of psychology or psychiatry. Many religious and spiritual belief systems teach that awareness leads to enlightenment. If so, can't we merely say, "Okay, I'm aware of Problem X. Got it. Next!" Oh, you say, we have to face and work through our problems? If you say so. But why go out of one's way? Don't we have enough nonpassportable problems without having to sign up for more? And one could safely assume that the passport problems are heftier, more intricate, and more ominous. Who needs that? Who's to say we don't have something big at work here, such as World Peace? If governments stopped issuing passports for problems, such unsettling matters would be confined. Consider how nations agree on travel quarantines to stem the spread of terrible sicknesses like the Ebola virus. Yes, the host country, so to speak, still has to manage the crisis, but it's contained. A moratorium on the issuance of problem passports might conceivably isolate the world's problems so that they can be "domesticated," if not solved or cured. Having said all that, I suggest that we aren't talking about problems on such a grand scale. I submit that problems requiring passports exist on a much more personal level. I can't verify this, but I imagine that passport problems, or more accurately problems with passports, are vexing, tense, dramatic, daunting, and life-changing. Nevertheless, they are phrased and formulated with stark simplicity: Why? Why not? Yes or no? When? Should I? Shouldn't I? Oops! I just realized I unintentionally tipped my hand. I accidentally allowed you a glimpse of my own problems without passports because I mistakenly equated simple and challenging questions with problems. Since when did a question become a problem? Hunh? But back to the beginning of this meandering maze of speculation: who issues these passports for problems? Since when? And just who do they think they are? What do they get out of it? (That's easy: control. That's what all passport issuers seek.) Back when I was in junior high (before they were called middle schools), we used to read "The Man Without a Country," a short story by Edward Everett Hale, published in 1863. (Go ahead, Google it. Or Duckduckgo it.) The protagonist renounces his country and is left to spend his days at sea, countryless, adrift and unwelcome everywhere. You can see where I'm going with this. Would it be so bad to be similarly cast at sea never permitted to enter a country with problems, navigating the world's waters without a passport for problems?

stet stat stet

Stet. "Let it stand," in Latin, meaning: one makes an edit and then has second or third thoughts and concludes, "Disregard the change; let it stay as it was originally. I erred in judgment. My bad. Proceed as you were proceeding." A nifty do-over tool. Would that we could shout it out after the wrong word has been spoken to the wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong tone. Stet! Perhaps we'd even be able to add a "stat," a call for immediate action, just before they place the paddles on the chest to try to revive the human heart. Stat! [short for statim, in Latin, the adverb for "immediately"] You hear it on TV medical dramas all the time. Oh yeah. Stat stet. Or stet stat! 

If only.

3-D rewrite

give me rewrite 3-D speaking of what other dimension none other than smell oft ignored must be offal must it not or even hearing the Darwin finches peering mystically aboard the SS Meister Eckhart or as sights for sore eyes soaring the DDD of Carol Doda no not dodo there's some bird pecking along North Beach circa 1974 that was foggy beyond the pale even with City Lights a-blazing 3-D give me reright I say none of this is original my monkey fingers typing not quite Shakespeare or even much more prose than merely prosaic just a loosening up of the neurons the neural flight paths unconstrained by punctuation which was mostly missing in Latin days not Latino or Latina but Latin as in amos amas amat amamus amatis amant if Proustian memory serves me or you well a deep subject this is not writing but typing not even that to echo Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac 3-D just another letter beyond double D's there you go again Terrance this is stupid stuff not very amusing even to me or the Author how do I stop how do I bail if 3-D rewrite were to bend the 2-D flatscreenness of banality back to the drawing board I'd go collecting scents ranging from craisins to cashews ficus coins to dusty ferns lubricious mud to wafers of waffles and ice cubes crushed by my molars the trickle of metallic blood Soren Kierkegaard thrown in to drop a name give me 3-D rewrite kid boil distill burnish run simmer reserve skim this down to haiku crystal fire

aural borealis non erat

Much of blogging is verbal. Or visual. Little of it is aural, though I can't back this up by any data. But neither do I care to back this up with data. I merely care to share some of my urban aural experience, with words, not with recordings of the sounds themselves. Why? I'm a wordsmith, and I paint with words. What's it to you?

Walking on Thursday under Route 690, known as 690, in Syracuse, I walked in the cold but glinting light, backpack heavy on my shoulder, under a highway bridge. The whooshing sound of vehicular tires was almost ominous. A planetary zip, echoing under the bridge. A cosmic skid. (Is that what this life is? A cosmic skid lasting less than a second?) I wondered to myself what sound effect in a movie these tire-on-pavement-above slices of life would evoke. Intergalactic ray gun bullets? Internal thought pulses? Erotic temptations? (In all honesty, that did cross my mnd one iota, for once.) Traffic would not be the listener's first thought. I don't think so.

Then I thought of a sparklingly exuberant blind woman I know. H. smiles frequently. This is the world she encounters. She displays a visage of delight. Not that she walks under this particular bridge. Of course not. But this is her world, isn't it? Wasn't I blessed with a tiny insight into her aural borealis, her light show of sounds, her spectral wonder encountered radically from her perspective, not ours of the sighted world?

Plus, deciding to get off my high horse of pedestrian profundity, I realized that walkers like my former colleague M. walk all the time. This is their world too.

Blessings on our quotidian, pedestrian world, its mundane marvels.

Including its Latin phrases, its sentence fragments.

Twenty Questions

. . . but not the usual, of course.

1. Why do square bullets introduce each question even though a number shows up on my screen as I create each interrogatory?
2. Why twenty, anyway -- is it related to 10 fingers and 10 toes?
3. Why the sloppiness of style, not paying a copyeditor's (or copy editor's) attention to consistency regarding words versus numerals?
4. Huh?
5. Would you make it "healthcare" or "health care" as a noun?
6. Does it bother you that the majority of Americans could not diagram a sentence on the blackboard or whiteboard or greenboard?
7. When?
8. What is my fixation with Soren Kierkegaard?
9. When was the first time?
10. When was the last time?
11. Why do many readers immediately assume that questions 9 and 10 are latently associated with sex?
12. Why is twelve, or 12, so rich in connotation, ranging from Apostles to months to inches to Steps to lists?
13. When was your last act of not only random but anonymous kindness?
14. Or mine?
15. Why is it so hard to pronounce "anonymous"?
16. What is 20 times 20 times 20, which would be 20 cubed, or does the cube melt in the dog days of August?
17. Why don't they teach Latin in public schools?
18. Who is "they"?
19. Isn't it truly difficult to change ingrained habits?
20. Are you relieved this is over?

Twenty Verbs

Hey, you've all heard of Twenty Questions, why not Twenty Answers [which is an answer enveloped within a question]? Better yet, since verbs are more cogent than nouns, why not Twenty Verbs?

This may already be an Internet sensation I am unaware of. Maybe it will become a FW:FW:FW:FW ad infinitum Internet sensation.

No matter.

Here goes.

Twenty Verbs to describe my day, not necessarily in order or proper tense or mode or mood or voice:

1. awoke
2. ate
3. drove
4. talked
   
5. prayed
6. thanked
7. listened
8. watched
9. heard
10. walked
11. touched
12. washed
13. brushed
14. communed
15. sang
16. napped
17. meditated
    
18. saw
19. learned
20. read

You?

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

After having counted thousands (more like thousandths) of votes, I can share this:

I say, "I have a pebble in my shoe" to describe an objet d'art, or object de natura, bothering my step.

Others report saying "stone" or "rock," both of which strike me as akin to saying "boulder."

Sui generis.

Age quod agis.

(What would Kierkegaard say?) (WWKS)

Kinesthetic Melody

Ran across this term in a story in the NY Times, about a woman who used to get seizures, never got them while running, but through a brain operation loses track of place and time. Her neuropsychologist says she runs according to a

kinesthetic melody.

I like that.

Good name for a band.

Or a religion, or afterlife, or this life, or intuitiveness, or synchronicity in work or play, or harmony (not the dot com one), or art, or music, et cetera, ad infinitum.

"Age quod agis," as Father Birge so wisely intoned when we were seminarians (and we hooted and hollered until he closed the door to our classroom). Little did we know.

I added "kinesthetic melody" to my list at Wordie.org.

Solipsism, Exposed.

Today, Father Jim B., in a teaching before the Celebration of the Eucharist, quoted a phrase attributed to Martin Luther (some say it goes back to Saint Augustine):

incurvatus in se

This lusciously descriptive Latin phrase describes a life turned so inward upon itself as to exclude God and others: sin, by any other name (solipsism, if you prefer).

Look Before You Leap

Yesterday, just after hearing the haunting and apocalyptic "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles on the radio, while approaching the crest of the roadway on the Tappan Zee Bridge (spelled wrong on an official New York State Thruway sign near Port Chester), with radiant Manhattan about 10 miles downriver to the left, I saw this sign, or its approximation, in the late-afternoon lambent light:

LIFE IS WORTH LIVING

along the right railing, with a "life line" phone number to call.

I suspect the signs (I saw one Saturday, coming from the other direction) are an attempt to ward off suicides, or at least potential pedestrian suicidalists (presumably with cellphones, to call the help line). One would think drivers bent on the act would not need to wait until reaching the highest point of the bridge (a lovely bridge, if I may so). Well, come to think of it, why would anyone need to reach the highest point of the bridge before leaping? Certainly, it would not be necessary in terms of the efficacy of the leap. A leap even at the first locus over water seems plenty high enough to do the deed. (But, as you all know, "I Leap for Kierkegaard.")

I also wondered: why limit signs like this to dramatic venues and vistas such as the Tappan Zee Bridge or the famously suicide-prone Golden Gate Bridge, et cetera? Are there not landward temptations to self-extinction? Indeed there are. Perhaps LIFE IS WORTH LIVING signs should be posted just as pointedly at the entranceways to workplaces, government offices, retail stores, churches, homes, rocky cliffs, flat plains, and at the doors of your local Wal-Mart, Target, The Home Depot, or other big-box store. And who but my eponymous graffiti artist who goes by the tag of LIFE should paint these vivifying signs?

Before you get all fretful about my mental state, let me add these are not lugubrious musings. Far from it.

Life is worth living.

I see the signs everywhere.

(A parenthetical word on bridges. Pons is the Latin word for bridge. Pontifex, a word for pope, literally in Latin means "one who makes a bridge." So does this mean I have been pontificating? Or am I simply bridging the gap between the quotidian and the numinous [check out that etymology!]?)

Waiting

Doctors use the term "watchful waiting" to describe a form of treatment for cancer patients. The prescription handed to me by the Unseen Hand ordains watchful waiting for me at this post-termination jobless Job-ish-feeling time (okay; I admit to just a teaspoon of melodramatic self-pity). Waiting is hard for me (and for most Americans), never mind adding an Advent-riddled watchfulness to it. So, what am I waiting for? Good question. I am waiting for that one call, e-mail, inquiry, letter, offer to make all things right. And as I write that, I see the fallacy of it. Or should I say the fallacy of IT (uppercase bold oblique underscore 48 point)?

In Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the unemployed narrator, Toru Okada, spends long silent stretches of time in a deep, dark, dry well. He spends days down there, waiting. And the waiting (sometimes watching the ever more blazing stars from the well) wasn't all that bad, was it? He did it on purpose (or was compelled to do so.) He went down to the well, to sit, to wait, to listen, . . . to be.

I am in the well.

Waiting.

I'm not very patient by nature (and after all patience comes from the Latin verb for suffer). My coltish impatience, with its unruly recklessness, sort of got me into the well to begin with. (Or did it? Was it inevitable anyway?)

But I will wait.

I am waiting.

And who isn't waiting?

p.s. I did read Waiting, by Ha Jin, several years ago. I recall that I enjoyed it, but my memory is dim at this hour.

She Said, Look Out the Window More for the Real Miracle

On the other side of the pain, I have

Stared at the crabapple's branches, skeletal fingers

Finding more December window-dressing

The day's appointed epistle

Wondering what my ashes will feel

In the garden elbowing worms

Aside no stained glass

Work's windows towering over urbanscape

Don't cast aspersions (yes, asperges me,

Domine) on the rusted rivets I bow

Before each morning in the solemn Garage of Go Get 'Em

The real miracle is that glass stains at

All and we don't for long scrubbed by time

Memory's slippery polish still

Yet still

Oral Fixation

Oral fixation, it's not just what you think. Oh sure, my oral fixation is shamelessly succulent (well, given my strict Catholic upbringing, redact that to "shamefully") and mammary. Add to that addictiveness a new oral fixation, quite literally a fix-ation.

Let me explain.

The ear-nose-throat doctor-cum-dentist tells me it's TMJ that is at the root of my non-root-canal jaw pain. (You people need to get your minds out of the pig trough: cum here is from Latin and means with. And it ain't pronounced like that word in skin mags. [The Merriam-Webster link has a pronunciation sound bite.] Besides, it's high-class porn we aim for here anyway.) More accurately, he noted that TMJ describes a muscle and bone structure, not a syndrome.

So, my oral fix-ation consists of a number of things:

1) putting ethyl chloride on the skin outside my jaw and near my ear and temple. That's kind of cool, literally. It creates a freezing. The cotton ball makes a crinkling sound. Do athletes and ballet dancers spray this directly on, say, a pulled hamstring? I imagine the danger is that in merely masking the symptoms you incur greater injury.

2) Megadoses of naproxen (Aleve), which I'm not fond of.

3) Which brings me tonight's topic: I'm supposed to do this jaw exercise:

-- Place tongue on roof of mouth.

-- Open to approximately half of normal opening; keep tongue in place. Open for 10 seconds; rest 15 seconds.

-- Repeat for 6 times, 3 times a day. After 2 days, increase to 12 times, 3 times a day. After 2 more days, increase to 18 times, 3 times a day. After 3 days, change your name to Pinocchio or any wooden marionette of your choosing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Right.

Just picture it.

I look like one of those choirboys-cum-eunuchs on a Christmas card.

Or in a meeting at work, the person on the opposite side of the table will think I'm mocking every word. (Darn! Caught again!)

Someone on the bus (if I ever take it again) will think my mouth motions are an entreaty to meet them in a back alley at the next stop for some oral hijinks.

Oral fixation indeed.

Eighteen times three times a day?

Cum on!

Not on your maxillary-dental-labial life!

A CAPital OFFense

So I get this prescription, a steroid ointment. It comes in a tube. My toes were itching and burning like they were ablaze. Eczema. Fine. I open the box for the ointment and throw the directions out. I go to apply the cream and find that a metallic seal first has to be broken. (Warning to Freudian psychoanalysts: please refrain from the obvious. Much obliged.) I use a Q-tip to break the seal, apply the cream. Great.

Then I find that the cap does not stay on. It slides off. It is too loose. I consider going back to the pharmacist. (This was last Friday, a very cold but otherwise warm-hearted, pleasant afternoon, later followed by my Saint Nicholas gig.)

"Phil, I can't seem to get this cap to stay on," I would've said.

Or, "Karen, can you help me to screw [on this cap]?" I imagined flirting with his assistant.

But, no, I don't go back to the pharmacy. I figure I'll live with it. So the cap is loose. Let the feckin thing stay loose.

But I am too anal-retentive to let this go entirely. Or at all.

I bring this issue up casually with my housemate, my partner (OK! my spouse, if you prefer).

I tell her about it.

Before I even finish a sentence, she experiences gales of laughter, paroxysms of pleasure (humorous pleasure; you all have dirty minds).

To be fair to her -- and to me -- not malicious laughter. The kind that it is easy to go along with and perhaps even laugh along with.

She informs me. No. Wait. She doesn't inform me; she silently takes the fecking cap and takes it off and puts it on via the other end.

I was wondering what the pointy cone was for. Oh! To puncture the seal! And then to reverse the cap and place it on the screw portion, the threads. O Freudimus maximus!

I told her this was easy for her because she works in a hospital. She does this sort of thing every day.

Does anyone out there know what I am talking about? Am I a retro-pre-Luddite in a modern age? Am I alone in having the universe pass me by?

If you are all laughing at me, I hate you all.

I admit to being an intellectual snob.

I may have to drop the penultimate word from that previous sentence.

Screw it. Screw you all.

Laugh. Or....

Else.