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

 

neural urban renewal

I take a different route. For each day's walk, I go a different way. I go my own way, to paraphrase Fleetwood Mac. Sometimes spontaneous, other times quasi-premeditated. Best is when I embark on a different compass point from the day before. How long can I maintain this variation? The array of streets, avenues, places, drives, boulevards, circles, and lanes is finite. Both the thoroughfares and each day's combination, however haphazard, are finite. The possibilities are not endless, but are they inexhaustible, given the number of days and scenarios available to me? 

Walking out the door, I have a choice. Before walking out the door, I have a choice: Which door? Exiting the Harbor Street side, I obey the sidewalk invitation and refrain from walking on the grass, the grass cancering yellow on its verges. Or I walk out the basement door, near the playground on Emerson, climbing up its steps, a sheet of wind rippling me. Less often, I proceed out via the main lobby; less often in the Age of Coronavirus because of too many chances to encounter fellow residents and other humans, masked or unmasked. 

Which direction?

Toward Tipp Hill? Downtown by way of West Genesee? Downtown by West Fayette Street? Or toward Solvay, on Milton, toward the post office, the paperboard plant, 690, or steep hills hiding munificent mansions in a blue-collar, our-own-electricity town? Maybe industrial, treatment plant-bounded Hiawatha Boulevard slouching toward Destiny? Possibly toward Camillus, zigzagging into suburbia with its mulched gardens, 5 p.m. IPAs, and lace-curtain lonelinesses? 

I suppose I could inspect a map and plot out the precise scenarios left to me. I could chart all the itineraries untrammeled, navigable, and still available. That's not me. What a buzzkill that would be. Add this to your algorithm: Walking to the other side of the street (any street or part of a street) to break up the sequence, to foster the illusion of newness.

Is that it, is that why I insist on these new pathways?

Behold, I make all things new. (Book of Revelation)

Or is it something to do with rebooting, rewiring, overwriting, reframing, and recasting? 

History is a nightmare from which I am tring to awake. (James Joyce)

Don't stroke victims need to embark upon fresh nerve patterns, new neural pathways, to accomplish tasks formerly taken as a given?

Rinse, recalculate, recalibrate.

If it wasn't a stroke, what was the cerebral/spiritual upheaval? Where was (is) its seismic epicenter?  

We are told: Do not leave the teahouse by the same path upon which you entered it.

The journey of a thousand miles . . . . etc., etc., that cliche.

The road not taken?

Take them all. All of them. Individually and collectively.

Walk them all, every which way. And back again.

Then tell us about it.

 

think feel see

"The wise reject what they think, not what they see."
-- Huang-Po

But who said I am wise or aspire to be or that I think or even see? I get it, what you are saying, H-P. Or at least I think I have the willingness to be willing to get what you're saying, or said, or wrote in masterful brushstrokes of calligraphy, maybe hundreds of years ago. (Who are you, H-P?)

Thinking? What is it? In Descartes' Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes the case that neurologically speaking thinking is not divorced from thinking; we can't think without the feeling supplied in all those neurons that make up the central nervous system; the popularly believed thinking vs. feeling dichotomy does not exist in anatomy, in our biology.

But I get, or seek to get, what you're getting at, H-P.

See things for what they are feel the world for what it tastes touch the tongue of reality's open secrets lick the corners of the cosmos on the blade of grass smell the earwax of my dumb questions.

It has been said, "you need a meeting." A meeting of mind and matter, not mind over matter; a marriage of true minds and emotions, not divorced or legally separated from out there or in here, from the business of is-ness.

Something like that, but not quite, H-P. Calling H-P.

as if, or not

I'm scratching my head over the term "anosognosia," not as if I could pronounce it.

But, yes, denial or unawareness of a disability.

Or denial or unawareness of problems, or tragedy.

Yes, I can see where it's pandemic.

This from the Times:

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Maybe it’s an effective strategy for dealing with life. Not dealing with it.

David Dunning, in his book “Self-Insight,” calls the Dunning-Kruger Effect “the anosognosia of everyday life.”[10] When I first heard the word “anosognosia,” I had to look it up. Here’s one definition:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. [11]

Dunning‘s juxtaposition of anosognosia with everyday life is a surprising and suggestive turn of phrase. After all, anosognosia comes originally from the world of neurology and is the name of a specific neurological disorder.

When people use the phrase, "it's a disease of denial," I think: doesn't everyone do that with every disease, and with death, to some extent?

Just thought I'd share this.

Cheers.

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.

Lush Life

The other night (more accurately, morning) a strange addiction took hold of me, something called reading, but not just any ol' bedstand reading, because the cliche "a real page-turner" took hold of me, became incarnate, as I kept helplessly fighting the common-sense and body-demanding notion of cease and desist, turn off the light and sink deeper into the pillow, into the wee hours, sometime around 5 a.m., the birds not yet on speaking terms, and me afraid to know how bright it might really be on the other side of the bedroom shades, even figuring that I'm going to feel dreadfully bad if I go to sleep now and wake up at 6:20 when my daughter jauntily answers her alarm (I didn't; felt okay but jet-lagged).

What book would keep you riveted like that, you ask?

Lush Life by Richard Price (a requested birthday or Christmas book I am just getting round to; each book in its rightful time).

Yes, a real tribute to an author, that he or she could have such sway and magnetic force.

Either that or the coffee I drank before the Vestry meeting had mega-doses of Caffeine Plus.

Or just something weird going on in me and my brain (I love reading the latest stuff on neurology, realizing we are pretty darn hard-wired in compelling but just-beginning-to-understand ways).

Tip of my San Francisco Giants' baseball cap to Richard Price and Lush Life anyway.

The Revenge of the Busness Gods

Late as usual to work, I get in the car. Yesterday I gladly took the bus, but this morning I had already missed the 8:04 bus into downtown, so I proceeded to embrace the auto alternative (AA) (how many countless times since puberty have I quote embraced the auto alternative unquote?). Turn on AC , drive down the avenue, mail the subscription invoice to The Economist magazine with the word Cancel in purple ink written twice on it, via my work-supplied tres au courant Uniball Vision pen. I think The Economist is a terrific and first-rate 'zine, especially the weekly obit, but during my trial run I did not find time to read it; I barely have time to read the cartoons in the weekly issue of The New Yorker I subscribe to.

Rewind the narrative. Leave car running, walk six to eight steps to mailbox, insert mail, return to idling car, which is locked! All doors are locked, with cellphone sitting in plain view on the front seat, passenger side. I have never done this. Until now. It briefly reminds me of the time Violet G., in Dover, New Jersey, left her car running in her in-house garage below our apartment and almost killed us all with carbon monoxide, including newborn One and Only Son. (This was one time FirstSpouse's tendency toward paranoia proved invaluable, infinitely so. I owe her thanks for that. Infinitely so.) Walk up the avenue, and I mean uphill, in the heat, wondering why, and how. And fretting slightly over being ever later to work. Knock on our door. Fortunately, CurrentSpouse is not asleep yet from night-before work. She opens the door.

"What happened?"

"I was at the mailbox, and . . . "

"You mailed your keys," she replied in the fashion that longtime partners have of finishing each other's sentences.

"No, left 'em in the car, running. There's something wrong with me neurologically. I've never done that."

"You're just getting old," she said evenly and without rancor.

Grab her spare key off the rack of keys near the door (just about the only steadily organized aspect of our household). Walk fast and jog part way down the hill. Feck it. Slow down, I tell myself. Enjoy the whole episode. Roll with it. I feel light, almost laughing, not scolding myself for this lapse. "No judgment," as the beloved late Anthony DeMello pronounced frequently in the tapes I used to listen to in 1993, driving anywhere.

This is grace.

No ticket on the car. Nor is it towed away. (Glancing thought: In some cities this would look like a looming terror threat; such are the times.) Open door of idling car. Enter, sweating. Crank AC to max. Soothing.

Drive to work, with good success on the several traffic lights.

Manage a smile, upon entering work, greeting Mary V., at 10th-floor reception desk.

This is my little secret with the world. No high drama, no "poor me," no endless and tedious recounting to co-workers. The grace of anonymity.

Just gratitude to be in The Game (although the bus does indeed beckon me to return).

P.S. Didn't you read "busness" as "business"? I would have.

P.P.S. Change "gods" to "goddesses" if you are so inclined.

(Photo credits: Bus is in 'Yeats Country,' with mystical Ben Bulben in the background; and Pawlie Kokonuts walking in Sligo City.)