shake it up, baby

 

doc said I have essential tremors

I get that

who doesn't

I know, right

a little trembling is downright essential now and then

you got that right

especially in this day and age

it's the dawn of another age

or another rage

for real

maybe an earthquake is the planet's essential tremors

letting off seismic steam

try a little tenderness

is it contagious

ain't no cure for love

Love Potion Number 9

keep searching

my teeth chatter

who could blame them

the words they've uttered

makes me judder

in my own skin

my nervous envelope

as Proust said

remembering things past

and present

 

Broken Windows and Silver Doorknobs

Bad neighborhood. Sketchy. Rough area. Borderline. Ghetto. Have you heard any of these descriptions, however offensive they may strike you? Have you heard either more negative terms or their euphemistic replacements?

Come, take a walk with me.

No. Right now. Don't be afraid.

Observe this block. Schuyler Street. Take in the parade of two-story, two-family houses, built in the 1920s and '30s. Lawns manicured, adorned with daffodils, mulch, shrubs, trees. No litter. Structures not thirsting for paint or carpentry. Across the street, much the same: different architectural styles, smaller, more modest. Up the block, historic Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Graves dating to the 1800s, including that of a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Several blocks distant, over on Milton Avenue, a house overrun by fallen maple limbs and uncut grass, by weeds, a house choked by its longtime neglect, its metal fence interweaved by sprawling hedge branches, an empty pack of Newport 100s, a discarded Brisk ice tea, a crumpled invoice for car repair, a lone latex glove. An official notice of condemnation posted on a window and door. Blue recycle bins, tires, broken trikes, and split-open trash bags on Herkimer and Emerson. And up the hill, on Pharis Street, overlooking city and suburbs, a pristine lawn with a sign warning against having your dog use the lawn as a private bathroom, in front of a pristine Arts and Crafts bungalow freshly painted yellow, brown, and black, with a shock of red on the door.

Care and neglect coexisting. Pride and privation. Gain and loss. A fabric of multicolored threads and textures, sewn and patched, stitched and shored up. Some more than others, some less, some not at all.

Let's walk some more, keep pace, stretch your stride, down the hill, toward the creek. Oh, you'd rather not, this is a "bad neighborhood"? Be brave. Suck it up. Trust me. Really.

True, that broken, rusted pickup in the driveway looks unsavory, so does the mosaic of tossed Burger King wrappers and soda cups. An eyesore. It makes my eyes sore.

But look across the street, that Victorian painted lady, emerald and cream with surprises of vermilion. Do you see its new siding, every storm window sparkling new, the shiny metal roof? The rebuilt porch? That house could pass for brand-new if you didn't know better.

I am sure this is obvious, but I can't help noting it: we are not dodging bullets, street-corner hustlers do not catch our eye, wondering if we covet their gaze and proffered wares.

Form your own conclusions, as you will. 

In my Age of Coronavirus walks, the gods and goddesses of surprise have been my tour guides.

Surprise, surprise.

If we look for broken windows, they appear. If we search for silver doorknobs, we find them.

p.s. Ever hear the expression "my mind is a bad neighborhood"? (It's popular in wellness and recovery circles and can possibly be traced to an Anne Lamott quotation, but its provenance is uncertain.) As with the physical neighborhoods described above, be careful what you look for. As Leonard Cohen suggested, "look among the garbage and the flowers." You never know what you will find.

skinship

She is Japanese but was in Paris. She is Japanese and speaks some French and some English. In a note to me, she used the word "skinship." We were talking about loneliness. The need for human contact. The need for human touch. When children are undernourished and underweight, not growing according to accepted benchmarks, pediatricians talk of "failure to thrive." Many factors are typically at play. Might emotional starvation via lack of touch be a candidate for causality?

How about adults and their failure to thrive? Many factors are typically at play. The presence of absence. The absence of touch. Skin on skin. Skin to skin.

Skinship.

At first, I thought she had coined this portmanteau word herself by a lovely accident owing to language hybrids and differences. I had thought she had stumbled upon it unconsciously. She said, no, it's a thing; it's a term in Japan; a mash-up of two languages that catches on. Nevertheless, I was arrested, taken by the word and what it evoked, in me. I was, and am, excited by the possibilities the word incites.

Skinship.

Is it the kinship of those who possess skin, or of those who indulge in skinness, in subtle skin-drenched tactility, ("I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch..." Leonard Cohen), or is it the kinship of those parched from touchlessness, arid and brittle, perhaps the kinship of those who ache for skin kinship but have lost the thread of emotional genealogy? Is it a skinny vessel sailing to unseen horizons, a ship with no cargo except the heavy burden of empty skinship?

We don't know.

Reports are sketchy.

Rumors abound.

The Premier President Prince of Skindinavia will be making an official statement on these matters presently.
 

hear ye, hear ye

Did town criers really say "hear ye, hear ye"?

And did they ever weep, or did "cry" always refer to voice volume?

As for me?

Read all about it; or rather read all of it.

My latest book.

My ninth: Journey to the End of Love: In Search of Leonard Cohen -- and My Self.

benevolent amnesia

"The thing I really cherish about the work is the done-ness. When it's finished I tend to develop a benevolent amnesia." 

-- Leonard Cohen, as quoted by Rob Sheffield (@robsheff) on Sept. 18, 2014 on Twitter.

Don't you love that phrase "benevolent amnesia"?

Who doesn't need or want some benevolent amnesia now and then?

Bloomsday blogaversary

Either by coincidence or by providence, I began this blog on June 16, Bloomsday, in 2006, not pretending to be a pedestrian protagonist of a digital age, a reblossomed Leopold Bloom, nor an associate of Ulysses or Joyce or Dickens or Cohen or an inchoate echo of Ecco, but rather a solipsistic spinster of spindrift syllables in Syracuse, no more, no less, chasing punctuation marks off the screen, nudging meaning to the margins, mumbling along the half-desserted streets of summery scoopers of Gannon's ice cream.

going Global

"They" can say what they want about the dearth or death of newspapers as we know them, but let me tell you, you electronic readers (we co-conspirators, if you will):

The (Toronto) Globe and Mail is as bright and shiny an example of journalism as you are likely to find anywhere, either in the tactile medium of tree-originated, new-fashioned paper or the tap-tapping medium of click-click-keyboarding.

The Globe and [no ampersand, folks] Mail has lively writing, superb international coverage, and sit-and-read-for-a-week comprehensiveness. Essays abound. And The Globe and Mail devotes a reverential amount of space to books. Books!

I rediscovered this fact this past weekend in Kingston, Ontario, when I was treated to the luxury of idly reading the paper at one of Kingston's fine coffee shops in the aftermath of the Leonard Cohen concert. (Americans may not know this, but Canada's Sunday papers come out on Saturday. Sort of. In other words, the Saturday paper is the big one; getting the Sunday New York Times-like paper on Saturday is kind of like celebrating the vigil of a feast in the Roman Catholic Church the eve before the feast, or like going to church on Saturday, for the same reason.)

The Globe and Mail is truly world-class.

He's Our Man

Last Friday, attended a Leonard Cohen concert in Kingston, Ontario.

A cathedral chapel cabaret connection.

This online reviewer captures the evening well.

Worth the trip.

And then some.

Just A Hunch

Under the delicious deluge of autumn rain this morning, I (umbrella-less) hunched my shoulders as I scooted from parking garage to street to sidewalk to building entranceway, a short distance.

Did the hunching help?

Did it make me less wet? Did I think hunching would protect me?

Hunch. A great word. Merriam-Webster declares its origin unknown.

Hunch conjures up combinations of huddle and scrunch and hump, which if performed simultaneously would tie one up in potentially orgasmic-enhancing or orgasmic-squelching knots. (Take your pick.)

The fecklessness-of-hunching metaphor raises this question (or raises nothing at all, if one is rendered impotent by such contortions):

What other hunch illusions do we fall for?

After all, does your flinching matter as the I-beam sliding off the semi slices through your windshield?

That sounds dark and gloomy, but isn't, really.

It is meant to underscore the illusion of power we live by, afraid to surrender to the reality of powerlessness. We do this as individuals and as a culture (and as a government).

Powerlessness is really such a relief.

Alas, easier said than done.

My letting go (or failure to do so) typically leaves a bloody trail of claw marks on the object of desire.

(Pare it down, and you've got a Leonard Cohen song or poem.)

Kaizen, the Kokonuts Way

I like the term kaizen, with its evocation of ongoing improvement. (The folks at Kaizen Chronicles got me thinking about this. Kudos to them for quoting a Leonard Cohen song. By the way, guys, is Bo Steed a nom de plume, so to speak, of a porn star?!)

I forgot I had encountered the term in the workplace years ago, during an aggressive rampage of so-called Total Quality Management (TQM), continuous improvement, blah-blah-blah, et cetera ad nauseam. Of course, it was mostly a ruse, a vehicle for "lean manufacturing" (incidentally, we didn't manufacture anything), an opportunity to supposedly do your job better, so your position (as well as many other positions) could be eliminated, so the company could be sold, raking in oodles of money for the owners, the purveyors of "quality." (All of that did eventually happen.)

But Wikipedia informs me that true kaizen must be practiced with something called respect for people (why does Wikipedia put it in quotes, with initial caps?), or else it is something called kaiaku, which -- no surprise -- means "change for the worse."

I was wondering, though, is kaizen a polar opposite of the acceptance and resignation of zen?

Oh well.

How Now Tao Wow.

What about today?

Today my kaizen consisted of a total and complete, up and down, across and behind, under and over, cleaning of the Kokonuts domestic bathroom. Every spot. I started it because it bothered me to distraction. Not because I was asked to or was nagged or was guilty about it. (Sheesh, maybe it was because of my public letter about flirting in my previous post! (I inserted all that to see if Dr. Andrew and his legions weigh in.) (Enough already with the parentheses!) With my wife joining in, it soon became a collaborative, and rather fun, task. (Refreshingly and rarely collegial.) I told my daughter when we were done that we could eat off any surface in there if we so chose. This binge cleaning (initiated by a binge person) of course evoked evangelical and crusading thoughts such as, "hey, let's do this every Saturday!" (soon amended to "every other Saturday," since my spouse works every other weekend), almost immediately amended to "how about we just confine ourselves to this one day."

We would've enlisted the energetic resources of our young daughter, but she had an overnight guest over, so we went easy, making both of them haul out the detritus of old shampoo bottles, dusty ornamental things, and other junk.

This episode led to a spousal leisurely lunch at a North Side Italian bistro (another rare event) (daughter went with friend) (I even tried some latte; not for me), some residual soreness, a skipped afternoon nap (we were too late into the afternoon, past its nap-taking tipping point), and a fairly positive outlook on life while gazing out the window into the chilling but lambent northern sunlight.

Kaizen, the Kokonuts Way.