About Vipassana (part 2)

It's turning out to be a sunny day in Oakland. About ten thirty. I don't teach until Thursday (Friday Saturday) but volunteered to sub for a class this afternoon. I'm waiting to hear back. It will be good to go back to work, as yesterday was a tough transition from the meditation course. After two weeks of a very controlled schedule it was difficult to have a full day at home with nobody to tell me what to do. Um, did this then did that, then did this, etc. As a result, when dinner time came I wanted to eat something big and cheesy because it felt like I had earned it. Which is a kind of preview into how the cleanliness of the ten days unspools: reacting to vague and broad feelings (in this case, a generalized anxiety about time and work and things to do) instead of hanging out with them. Instead of sitting across from them, chatting and listening and maintaining one's own autonomy. Our constantly troubled friends driving us to drink.

But oh well. Kitchens eventually get dirty, and one the first things I did on Sunday was to eat a chicken burrito, thereby cracking the delicate shell covering my "sila" (morality): not killing, stealing, lying, sexing, sexting, sensual entertainments, or anything that would rev up my juices. Cutting all this stuff out makes it much easier to pick up on the less obvious things that are going on with the body. But since it was going to end anyway, I thought I might as well get the pursuit of perfection out of the way. In the past, coming back from a course I haven't written much about the actual experiences of being there, a little embarassed of if being a mediator meant being religious or a "buddhist", and as I was sitting, wandering away, I thought that I'd write in detail in this blog about that. But those thoughts were early on in the course and I don't remember exactly what it was that was that I wanted to communicate that was so important.

So here I am trying to write about the past. In the future, I have twenty minutes to finish before I need to put some shoes on for basketball. I heard back from the ESL people and they don't need me to sub. Maybe get back to 1Q84, the new Haruki Murakami book (it's great!). Since I haven't looked at a newspaper yet (avoiding it) I have no stories to report though I will ease myself back into the habit soon. I thought about so many things up there but they come and go, like clouds, one day something seems so important, and you're sitting there, paying attention in a particular way, and then somewhere somehow this thing that was generating so much trouble and stress is no longer there. And eventually something else comes up and the same thing happens. It's like cleaning out an attic, you have to get through the stuff on top before you can get to the really old stuff. Kind of like writing, writing, writing, writing, before we can remember what it was that was so important.

About Vipassana (part 1)

Ah. Back to my empire of ego. Whew. Feels good. Vipassana meditation is not easy. Neither is learning to tie your shoe, how to ride the subway, or play a realistic flight simulator with all those terms like "yoke" and "yaw" and the fact that when you pull back on your mouse the nose of the plane goes up and when you want to turn you have to plan way in advance. Not that any of things are comparable to the meditation, but come to think of it, these are things I've had trouble with. I didn't learn to tie my shoes until middle school. My mom got me elastic shoe laces so I never had to untie them. I didn't learn to ride a bike until fifth grade. I still get lost on trains, sometimes, especially the New York ones (the BART not so much) and have no interest in ever playing a flight simulator again after summer afternoons with Adam and Matt, playing the Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer on their dad's super powered Mac.

Instead it's more like sitting still all day, or trying to. Lots of time to think, but eventually it becomes more interesting to pay attention to what's going on with the body. For me, this time, I didn't get to this point until the 8th day. In the last three and half years, this is the third time that I've done a ten day course and they haven't gotten any easier. I try to make it through an hour so I can make it to the next one. Then to breakfast. And then to the next hour, and then to the next one. Time passes really slowly but usually that phrase indicates a kind of boredom, which is not really the problem. The problem is more of a survival issue, trying to make it though each day. It feels like an enormously long time in part because I'm usually not focusing my attention as consistently and repeatedly as I do while there. Instead, at home, I'm doing one thing or another, reading a newspaper or watching a car go by. Mostly responding to external stimuli and letting my environment dictate where my mind wanders.

Over and over, even before the actual Vipassana meditation starts, we spend three and a half days focusing our mind, over and over, feeling "sensation" for as long as continuously possible on the patch of skin just above the lip. If we wander away we come back. All that to have a fighting chance to expand this area of sensation to other places on the body. So as, the body becomes a kind of landing pad for a continuous parade: a puff of air, an itch, a tingle, a warmth or a chill or whatever. There's a zillion and one ways our bodies hit the world and we're responding to these sensations whether we're aware of it or not. Regardless, once this kind of eyeball opens and begins to look around it turns out that there's a lot going on other than what we're thinking about. Why is this important? Because when we're looking at a thing, for example a back pain, instead of feeling the pain, we can instead hang out with it. Ask it questions. See how big it is, how long it will last, and eventually we see that it goes away. Or with bigger kinds of feelings: how long will this anger last? How big is it? What does it feel like and eventually, we see that it goes away.

___________

Tomorrow I'm going away for a little while, about twelve days, for a meditation course. Also known as a "retreat", which isn't exactly an accurate word as sitting for twelve hours a day ten days on end actually brings most things a little bit closer, but, the point is, I won't be around. No email or cell phone, and no blog postings. The semester begins day after I get back, so will all of a sudden be back in the swing of things, Spring 2012 until the middle of May. Non-stop, and I'm sure you'll read me complain about it many times between now and then.

The good news, at least in my own lists of things to do, is that most things that I set out to accomplish in these last three weeks got done: finished my grad school application to the best of my ability and will hear back sometime this spring. Spent a couple intensive weeks working on two collections of poems, improving little bits, here and there, sequencing and sorting. That and sending out some submissions, individual poems and manuscripts, as well as submitting to a residency. I didn't get to finishing any music projects, cleaning up old files well enough to share them (I counted 78 MP3s of "songs" that were borderline finished) but there's time for that when I get back.

So as, like many, I've been busy, and now I don't have too much pressing as I head out tomorrow. It's nice to have time to work, though it's necessary the person who teaches reading and writing actually have time to read and write, or else one ends up teaching the same thing over and over again, like a boring high school history teacher. At any rate, in the spirit of automation, please enjoy this video while I am gone. The world is full of mystery. See you in February.

Greetings from Oakland California. This post is not a post but a way to put off working on the personal statement that I must complete to complete my application to graduate school that is due is six days. I should of written it earlier and I did but it was bad, twice, and now I'm on my third foot dragging draft of trying to explain my desires in a way that doesn't transparently pander and stays true enough to the nebulous and unformed ideas of what I like to call myself. I'll get on that in second, but first, no news but no news, I've been very busy this last week working on a couple different writing projects, mostly prepping pages to send out to publishers, collecting and revising and stringing together days in a row of writing time, which unfortunately never ever happens during the semester. So it's been really productive. It feels good to get back to these things in earnest.

But, even though it's been a week since I posted last, I figured all anybody really needs when it comes to reading is that last paragraph I posted (see below). Probably one of my favorite little pieces of writing, though it actually comes at the end of the book, so as, maybe I fill that paragraph with all that came before it and maybe it doesn't stand alone on it's own. Don't know and won't know. Not much else to report, no thoughtful short essay or joke to make or picture to post. The weather has been warm and the cats have been sleeping. Saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud/Jung movie, that I quite enjoyed, have been watching basketball, running a little, hanging out, and also getting over a little bronchitis, which actually, though it was kind of painful, forced me to keep a reasonable schedule that lead to getting much done, unlike today, where it's eleven in the morning and I haven't started. Okay. That's enough. See you.

But oddly because that was two paragraphs I feel compelled to write a third solely for the sake of symmetry or balance or something like symmetry or balance like lining up a fork with the wood grain on a table, folding a napkin neatly or lining up my foot along the edge of concrete the mildly OCD impulse to square things up live, in action. Of course it's difficult when there's not as much to say and instead the only impulse that fills space is the impulse to fill space and if I were you I would just stop reading right now because I'm not going to say anything interesting or of note for the next six lines, entirely self-referential makes me think of a little article I read in the paper about Animal Studies, studying animals outside the context of biology and instead in a field like philosophy they cited Derrida who wrote, "An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?"

Happy New Year.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

_______________________________-Cormac McCarthy, from "The Road"

I heard them because I accepted the limitations of an arts conference in a Virginia girls’ finishing school, which limitations allowed me quite by accident to hear the blackbirds as they flew up and overhead.

John Cage from “Lecture on Nothing,” 1959. It occurs in a passage where he's talking about structure, that we need it to see and hear life. That life without structure goes "unseen" but structure that contains no life (read: heart/reason for being) is dead. Take for example a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster or network sitcom. Things that go through the motions quite competently but ultimately don't move us or leave us with anything meaningful, or worth remembering. The new Mission Impossible movie probably fits that bill. Or on the other hand, those who have a lot to say but don't intentionally push into mainstream channels don't get heard. Without structure, one that makes sense to others, one that is visible, the content and quality of ideas can be lost.

He goes on to talk about his experience at the "Viginia girls' finishing school," that there he was, listening to a lecture, and he looked out the window to hear birds rising from a field. Simple, but he was only able to experience this moment, to hear this "sound de-licious be-yond com-pare" because he "accepted his limitations." What exactly are his limitations? He accepted his situation, whatever that may have been. From the passage, it reads as if he was a little bored, maybe bored with the speaker, and turned his head to look out the window. What's remarkable is that he was ready to hear these birds. It's one thing to turn distractedly away from a thing, be it a speaker or a TV show or a man on the street holding a sign, but it is entirely different to recognize this impulse to do so. And once he does, he's able to accept where he's at, and move on.

Easier said than done, to accept where we find ourselves. And it's hard, and at least for me, takes a lot of talking and processing to even begin to understand the "limitations" of a situation. But it's a quote I always come back to, partly because he doesn't seem to blame his situation. That a thing can't be anything more than it already is. The speaker was not boring, but the arts conference was not for him at that given moment. It is from this same distance, this same perspective, that allows him to hear the blackbirds rising from the field. A kind of ethic or posture, and in his terms, a kind of structure that allows him to experience clarity. Once he comes to the one moment of clarity (which may have taken him days/weeks/years to arrive at. Who knows) it's no coincidence that the world suddenly becomes beautiful. That his ears and eyes are suddenly in tune with a bigger world.

Whell, back in Oakland. It's sunny but a little chilly, not warm and not cold. In Wisconsin the newspaper said it was going to be a "brown Christmas." Meaning the landscape was going to be muddy and gray. Grey. I don't know. Either way I was back here. Went for a hike on Christmas proper and ate Chinese food. Saw a movie but left before it was over, as it was putting D and I both to sleep along with some other patrons at the movie theatre. Because I don't want to use this platform to spread slander I won't name the movie ("The Artist"). On Boxing Day, after sleeping in for half the day we got some groceries and made breakfast. Later I watched bits and pieces of basketball games over the internet, and now, Tuesday, it's back to work. Not school work but writing and other projects. Which is really really really really really really nice, to have nothing pressing to do. No big stress or immediate deadline for the next month. It feels good.

Mr. Exstein helped my brother and I learn to play tennis when we were kids. Mineral Point. Summers in the late eighties. He would stand in the middle of the court with an old wooden racket. He didn't have to move, and couldn't really anyway because he was old and frail, and I'm not sure what we actually learned from the handfull of hours we spent with him, but I remember the drool that would fall out of his mouth when he would talk. A string of it with a bright wad at the end. He'd wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. A couple years later my dad took us to see him in the hospital. I don't remember what was wrong, but my dad thought it was important to visit an old man who didn't have much family or hardly any other visitors coming through. I asked a few questions about tennis, not that I really cared, and we sat there for fifteen minutes in the glow of a television, and left.

I think my dad wanted me to experience the ambience of the hospital, and demonstrate a kind of ethic. There were others. Florence, who lived in Dodgeville, was another old person that us kids had nothing to say to, or do with. Yet he made a point of all of us going to dinner once a week during the summers. Either Pizza Hut or Hardee's or possibly Narvey's, it didn't make sense to me why we were spending time with these people who we didn't know and really couldn't wait to get away from, to get home and get back to video games.

Yesterday I went up to visit him at Clearview, where he's been for the last six or seven years. They just openend a new building, much more modern than the fifties insitututional architechture of the old one. Juneau, Wisconsin. He was slumped over in a wheel chair and drooling. Like a baby, his back muscles are too weak to support his body after the many years inactivity. Mentally it's a wash and has been for a long time, but physically his body gets weaker and weaker. I wiped his mouth a few times and tried to get him to sit up straight. Some nurses came over and wheeled him into his room, and he went right to sleep as soon they got him into bed. After all that, I thought. After all that here he is, surrounded by strangers. I don't know what this means. It's been 12 years since he was diagnosed, and there's not much left to visit. After all that. I left him the clothes my sister ordered, some sweatpants and a shirt, kissed him on the forehead and drove back to Madison.

Dispatch from Wisconsin: it's not that cold. At the barber shop today the lady who disinterestedly cut my hair said she wouldn't mind having a cook out in December, and I wouldn't mind that either but I was starting to get annoyed by the clippers that were running a little bit too fast over my head that pulled it as much as cut it and I paid up and left a two dollar tip and went to go eat breakfast. It was eleven in the morning. I spent the next couple of hours doing a little Christmas shopping and now I'm back at my mother's house working towards a nap. Which may or may not happen but Jerry just yelled at the dog because the dog is barking at the ice cream maker and earlier Jerry said "I know you hate that noise" to the dog and then she barked again and then I said "I didn't know she didn't like that noise" and now I do and now we all know she doesn't like that noise and Jerry keeps telling her to keep quiet and now she's outside barking.

Yesterday I sat down in the blue chair that sits in the living room and finished reading my student's papers for the semester. That felt good, to finish, and it generally felt good to grade my student's papers, as it's the last round and these papers are usually in the best shape. Last semester I kind of did a half-ass job grading the final round so this semester I made sure to be careful and considerate. It took about eight hours, all told for both classes, to finish these papers, and calculate the final grades. I really wish I got paid for this time as in a sense my employer encourages me to do a half-ass job as one "gets what they pay for" and we are supposed to be thankful for just having a job. But the good news is that it's done and I have six weeks of unpaid furlough to recuperate and regenerate and remember what it's like to read for pleasure.

All in all it was a good semester, a long semester full of Occupy and Dara, but also full of classes, two good ones, and international students. BUT MAN, I'm tired. I didn't realize how tired until the plane ride here, though I got plenty of sleep the night before for I just passed out. And then yesterday while grading papers I just passed out. And as soon as I get done writing this I'm going to go pass out. And as the semester came to a close I wondered to myself if I was going crazy but now I'm realizing I was just tired, and instead of sitting down at a computer or with a friend and distracting myself silly it's good to be here in Wisconsin, where there is not much continuation from Oakland. And that is all. Like John Cage says, "If anybody / , / is sleepy / let him go to sleep / ."

Well, the port shut down was successful in Oakland last night. It was a lot of walking, a little talking and a little listening, and then we went home. It's really strange how long it took (four and a half hours) compared to how long it felt it took (about an hour). Time flies when you're doing things that I'm not sure are good. And there it is: I'm still not sure blocking the ports was a good idea based on the comments and news stories I've been reading. On the other hand, it really feels great to be out there with everybody, amidst the chaos and the conversations and the signs and spontaneity. Who did the blockade hurt? The workers? That seems to be what most newspapers are reporting, as well as what the sentiments of the comments pages generally leads to.

As an alternative here is an excerpt from a Democracy Now news story, which seems to represent the perspective of the blockaders:

AMY GOODMAN: And the media quoting many of the truckers saying, "Why are you doing this? You’re hurting us more than you’re hurting the corporation. We are the 99 percent," they are saying, Anthony?

ANTHONY LEVIEGE: That question was asked a lot throughout Monday’s protest. And I decided that I’m not going to even respond to that question, because that’s just a device to keep people from dealing with the real issues at hand, because today’s action, if that hurts the trucker or anybody, that’s a sign of the times, that we do need change, that people are so dependent on missing one day’s pay, that they can’t make it if they miss one day’s pay. Those are some of the reasons why we definitely need to have change.

Anthony Leviege is a member of the ILWU and Amy Goodman is a journalist. The rest of the interview can be found here, but herein lies the problem: that on the one hand the larger system, the one that makes it impossible to miss a days work, needs to be changed, whereas, when other people who are not directly invested in the specifics of this change are advocating for it (for example, I do not work with the port and did not lose a days work), it can feel "paternalistic," that those who don't work at the port are deciding what's best for port workers.

Most of the commentators and comment-ers and editorials cited this lack of official support (that is, support not by individual members, but by the union leadership) and the harm a port blockade would do to the longshoremen and truck drivers' daily wages. Oakland's mayor said that the 1% would be laughing at the action as it was so obviously misguided, and suggests that the blockade will ultimately weaken the general public's support for the Occupy movement. As I write this, I don't mean to reiterate these points because they make me feel like a dupe for coming out last night. They make so much sense yet, I'm on my way somewhere else, more along the lines of Anthony's point, that to frame the conversation in oppositional terms of who did who to what is to overlook the big picture. "Paternalistic" is really just a word to end the conversation (boo! scary!) and paints an ugly picture of the Occupy movement as a misguided and elitist group of irresponsible 20 somethings.

Which is a problem if you're like me, the kind of person who believes pretty much whatever they read. I think, yeah, those are good points. But what's important to note, is that these commentators and opinions that float around (where do they come from?) don't actually have any more claim on the truth than you or I. And if I had to choose who to throw my lot in with, I would rather be with those who aren't living on a diet of didactic cliche, and rather, be with those forging into unknown territory. Aesthetically (which does matter), one of the most revealing and meaningful aspects of Occupy is that it is not a continuation of the political and cultural rhetoric that got us here in the first place. Refusing to participate in these tired discussions, and instead, stumbling towards one's own vocabulary, means and methods, making mistakes and breaking eggs, is how beautiful things get made. For this reason alone, the experience of Occupy itself, de-intellectualized and lived, I come to being once again.

Happy Monday. Today is the West Cost Port Blockade, coordinated by the Occupy movement. Here is, in the words of Occupy Oakland, why this is happening. Or here is why it's a good thing in the words of the 100+ thousand American Port Truck drivers who are heavily effected in their day to day by the multinational corporations who own and ultimately, make the policies that run these port. Coming from the drivers themselves, this letter is the justification I needed to participate with a clear conscious in these closures that have been widely decried by the media at large (as usual) and in particular, by the San Francisco Chronicle. Which almost, almost, convinced me that these blockades were doing more harm than good. I really need to stop reading that thing but I do like to read the sports and the comics.... Thus, as of eleven AM today, The Ports of Oakland and Portland have been shut down, while San Diego and Long Beach have, from what I've read, been not as successful. Seattle is in progress. I get off work at four and will be joining the second shift. Come out and show support if you can.

Niece

The streets of San Francisco,
She said of herself, were my

Father and mother, speaking to the quiet guests
In the living room looking down the hills

To the bay. And we imagined her
Walking in the wooden past
Of the western city ... her mother

Was not that city
But my elder sister. I remembered

The watchman at the beach
Telling us the war had ended--

That was the first world war
Half a century ago--my sister
Had a ribbon in her hair.


_________-George Oppen

In the last couple weeks in the pronunciation lab, now that we're past the initial curriculum of the three parts of stress, word reductions, and linking (and why spoken English sounds nothing at all like written English) we've been moving into sentences, sentence meaning and emphasis patterns. The idea that I can take a sentence like "I never said she stole my money." and depending on where I place the emphasis, the meaning of the sentence changes. So as, "I never SAID she stole my money...(I implied it)." Or, "I never said she stole my MONEY...(I said she stole my pride)." Pronunciation wise, the work is not so much the meaning (which is fairly evident from our animal ability to read emotional nuance) as much as what emphasis sounds like; how to embody these little melodic patterns in ways that are clear and comfortable.

To do this, we need not just CAPITAL LETTERS, but some pretty sophisticated recognition skills. For example, "Did you eat breakfast yet?" sounds more like "J'eet breakfast yet" when we're out there in the "real world." We talk fast and not so clearly. In the latter version, I only actually hear two words: breakfast and yet. The first part of the sentence I hear as a cluster of sound, one that I've heard before many times and can recognize as meaning "did you eat," like a word in itself: j'eet. Now, I'm not going to get into the hardcore linguistics theory about what all this could mean (in part because I don't know the hardcore linguistic theory about what all this could mean) but what's interesting to me is the idea that we don't actually listen all that carefully to what each other is saying. Instead we only hear a few key words, and assume the rest.

I don't know if this is cultural, or having specifically to do with American English, or 2011, or internet conditioned attention spans, but it's hard to put in the necessary time and energy to actually listen to what a person is saying. And at the same time it's hard to say exactly what we mean to say. The non-native speaker wonders, how is it that they can understand each other, because I could only make out a few words....The answer, unfortunately, is that we don't actually understand each other all that well. You could look at American politics or the one billion and one forms of dysfunction we're immersed in and come to the same conclusion. Whereas, on a micro-scale, like a dog tearing after a squirrel twenty yards away but ignoring the sparrow flitting around in front of its nose (unless it's a bird dog but that's another story), we don't see what we're not looking for. And we don't hear what we're not listening for. My point is, it's hard to listen.

Two weeks left in the semester. This year, when it's over (all over), mi familia is aborting Christmas. My brother and his wife are going to be in Paris, my sister and her family (brother-in-law, neice, nephew) are too complicated to travel to Wisconsin this year, and my Mom is going to Africa two days after Christmas to ride horses. Which is all very exciting but doesn't make for much of a family gathering, so I'm traveling to Sconny (Wisconsin) for four days, and leaving before Santa notices that we have no tree. The last time I missed Christmas was in Japan, and Aric (who was visiting) and I went out into the cold night to observe the romantic holiday that Christmas is in Japan. It's a shopping season for couples and close friends to buy each other gifts and is not so much the firmly realized family tradition it is here. New Year's fits that bill. But to be perfectly honest, I didn't miss it much asides from the being with family part.

So I will be here but won't be alone, am excited to do things a little differently. There's a lot of writing and other projects that I'm really looking forward to having time to spend on during the later days of December and the first half of January. The second half January is for a meditation course and then the semester begins again. In the mean time, two weeks left and asides from the the stack of tests next to me, grading the final essays, and calculating the final grades, the bulk of the work is done. It's been a pretty good semester but it's winding down and we don't mind. In other news, a week from now, today, Monday, the Occupy Movement is coordinating a strike to shut down all the ports along the West Coast. This will require an enormous effort from a lot of people to get the word out, and to get bodies into the streets. I will be there.

Last, this coming Saturday is the George Oppen memorial lecture, hosted by the Poetry Center (in SF). Here is one George Oppen poem:

Boy's Room

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelly
At the lake and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body.

Hi. Good to see you. Happy Thanksgiving. I mean I hope you had a happy thanksgiving. If you celebrate Thanksgiving. I'm not saying that you do. I hope I didn't offend you. I'm really sorry for presuming that you celebrate Thanksgiving. Again, sorry. Meanwhile, I was down in LA to see J & G, and on the way back saw J&J and their new child, J. Drove a truck. Living large. It was fun. When I got back on Saturday I finished off the last two episodes of Mad Men, so as, now I am caught up. Not that that means anything, but it's nice to come to an end thus far, and now I can talk about it with others, like my mom. One of my favorite parts of the show was its pacing. That is, a lot of these TV shows rely on the cliff hanger to get you through, whereas with Mad Men I felt like I could watch an episode, maybe two and go to bed satisfied. A show like The Wire was intense and non-stop, and was really difficult to pull myself away from. It didn't feel good. It felt bad, like when you're looking at the last third of a roll of cookies and thinking, well, I may as well just finish it off. So thanks Matthew Weiner for not jerking me around. Okay. School work to get to.

On Thursday (and Friday) in class we discussed this article, about putting a tax on junkfood and using that money to subsidize healthier foods. Tied up in this equation are the current government subsidies for corn, which explains why it's cheaper to buy a Dr. Pepper than it is to buy a pepper. That there's a much higher demand for corn syrup than fresh vegetables, and that's why obesity, and the healthcare costs that come with it are such a problem in this country. Because it's more profitable for big food companies to feed us junk. Anyway, we read it in the context of the Proposal Argument (the third essay that students are required to write for the rhetoric class) because it's such an elegant solution to many problems all at once. A solution than not only makes people healthier, happier and takes the money out of the hands of the powers that be, but also pays for itself and generates additional revenue. The question we discussed in class was not the question of do you all think this is a good idea (which, lefty Bay Area us all, there wasn't much "The government can't tell me what to eat!" represented in the room), but the question of if this is such a good idea, why doesn't it happen?

Stephen, the ESL supporter in my Thursday class, brought up the tobacco companies, how it took twenty years for the facts of the relationship between smoking and cancer to gather enough political will to actually lead to legislation. That it takes a long time for a new idea to rise out of these facts and into our our collective imaginations. The parallels for the Occupy movement are obvious, and in this context of long term change, the come down that the Oakland Occupy movement has experienced (or maybe that's just me) does not necessarily mean the end of anything.

In that light, there was a march this Saturday in Oakland that felt redundant and purposeless. It was mostly younger people, not a particularly diverse crowd. We marched through downtown and around the north side of the lake and then stopped in front of the Grand Lake movie theater. There was a truck with a lot of speakers that played dance music that we walked behind for most of the route. It was kind of fun, but it didn't have a whole lot to do with, say, taking money out of politics or putting money back into schools. It seemed like a street party with a vaguely political theme. Later, after we left, some of the occupiers moved to a vacant lot to reoccupy it. Which was cleared by police the next day. The Snow Park encampment, the one just down the street, was cleared this morning. Compared to the Oakland General Strike, which had a real sense of purpose and a real turnout, it was kind of depressing.

Which I think is an unfashionable tack to take but oh well. So be it. Occupy continues. The events at UC Davis were serious, as were the events in Berkeley last week. This Davis video is remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them only happens if you keep watching: how the human microphone actually seems to make the police officers leave. About seven minutes in. Keep watching. And really, if you're interested in all of this, you don't have to camp or scream at police officers to show support, but simply, talk about it. Ask your friends and your family, what do you think?

Today I made this in a support class:

A sunny and warm day in Oakland. It's a little past noon. Yesterday morning the occupation of the plaza in Oakland came to an end. Today there is a march up to Berkeley to support their occupation of the campus and tomorrow the General Assembly will discuss where next to occupy. Which is the question right now, what to do next. This coming Saturday there is another larger march planned, akin to general strike, which is supported and backed by many unions here in Oakland, which partly answers the question of what to do next but only in the short term. Personally, I'm not sure where my support lies, as I agreed with the main stream narrative that occupying downtown was not going to accomplish much more than it had. My hope is that the occupy movement continues to raise awareness, moves indoors, now that they have some funds, and continues to do the work of organizing people towards practical solutions to the immense, long term problems that center around the economic injustices we perpetuate. It moves on. Here is a comment from an article in the Times (name withheld). Regardless of you how you feel about people in a park, here's some hope:

I have an MBA in finance and work in investment management on Wall Street – and I love money more than any Republican. But I see a lot of shallow comments and mixed-messages posted from all over the country criticizing OWS protesters as ne'er do wells and anti-capitalists.

They should appreciate that the protests have inspired introspective dialog among many thoughtful business professionals – top to bottom. Not all wealth trickles down and capitalism is as virtuous or evil as the people involved.

Hi!

Today is my 33rd Birthday. I am 100 years old. I heard Tom Waits say on the radio that when he was young he wanted to be old. My cat just fell off a slippery coffee table. She is getting old. The other cat is already old. He is very wise but not very smart. My sister and brother sent me a frying pan in the mail. It will be awesome. I will make two pancakes at one time. Ratios are old. Like Euclid or Donatello. The one with the triangles and the one with the bo staff, respectively. About me: I am one billion years old. Did you ever read that Dune book, God Emperor of Dune? The one with the sand worm king who lived to be thirty five hundred years old. That's not old. One billion years old is old. Have we been around that long? I don't know. The dinosaurs have all changed into birds. Earlier today we killed off the Neanderthals. Psychosis is one of the oldest professions. When I'm older, I hope to be a professional young person. Like MF Doom says/raps, it's nice to be old. But I guess it's relative. By that I mean some of my relatives are getting old. And some of them are getting young. Can we say that? Is this thing on? Sorry, I'm not good with technology. I need to go eat supper. Goodbye.

I haven't had much to do with the Occupy movement since last Thursday morning, briefly surveying the remnants of Wednesday's general strike. Except for closing my bank account at Chase, which, finally was possible after about two weeks of little steps; opening a new account, dropping direct deposit, and changing a few billing plans. When I went to the bank on Saturday it took about five minutes. The bank's representative asked why I was closing my account (Chase makes me feel bad) and if large bills were okay (yes). Easy. And now I can feel good and and righteous about where I put my money. Cleaning the platform on which I stand, and from which I speak and write. It's an impossible and entirely vain dream to be all of one thing, to be all good (or all bad), but the few moments I gain from not having to enter Chase's ubiquitous corporate temples twice a week, I'm happy to have.

But back to occupy, I was a bit depressed about the whole thing following Wednesday's decent into chaos. In particular, this video that shows somebody (black bloc? paid police instigators?) messing up a Whole Foods (where I occasionally shop) and punching a few protester's who were trying to stop them. If you read the comments attached to the video, most of them suggest that these provocateurs were not part of the movement and were paid by outside forces. Personally I think that's true, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter as whoever did it was successful in taking the focus off of Occupy's message(s). Obviously they need to do a better job in preventing these kinds of small groups, whoever they are, from creating this much havoc, in order to keep the support of those whose are still not sure about the Occupy movement.

Kind of like me when I'm reading the newspaper, which is why I felt a little foolish on Thursday. Did I get swept up in the hype machine? Did I actively support a movement that didn't represent my interests? Was I fooled? Short answer: no. Of course not. Occupy is absolutely correct in their criticisms of our economic systems. Sympathizers in the media at large have been to saying yes, I agree with Occupy but they need to become political in order to be effective. Criticisms closer to home, have been more about the damage that the encampment has been doing to downtown Oakland businesses (though this report contradicts that report. I'm so confused). It's difficult. Making omelets and breaking eggs. Something is going to have to happen soon with the encampments. One idea it to move the occupation to indoor spaces that have been foreclosed on, which makes a lot of sense, not just for occupy but for people who have lost their homes. And is already happening. When there is so much available space and work to be done why does so much of it sit empty? But the best part so far is this, what we did.

Briefly: last night was huge. Ten thousand people? I have no idea but when we arrived at the port, a couple miles walking, I had friends who were just getting started. That many people. Short version is the actions were a success. The port was shut down. Why is that important? To send the message that if we wanted to and were somewhat untied, we control our fate. Or more directly, that we're "producing for an economic system that doesn't produce" for us. And we have a choice in the matter.

The long version, and the one that will be and is being covered in the media (it's unbelievable how wrong places I trusted have been) will focus on the violence, which was carried out by a handful of misguided people and instigated, in part, by the police themselves. For those who say, "you're crazy and paranoid...the police wouldn't do such things." Think about what you would do if you had a week to prepare for an action against your authority. Would you come up with a counter plan? Or just let 'these people' do what they want to do. The police are as smart as any of us, and of course, it's in their interests to overshadow the days' successful actions and in turn, weaken the movement. They just want the occupiers to go home so the streets will be peaceful, and their jobs will be made easier. I can relate.

Anyway, I need to get ready for class. If you're interested, dig around for the real story and skip the The New York Times.

Poetry is a Religious Act

I thought I saw God
in a dark mass of rain
in the puddles on the roof.

I am not prone
to hallucinations or hauntings
but a shape swirled

like a galaxy forming
out of raindrops gathering
on tar paper, bits

of blackened sand
carried by the invisible current
of rain.

Time stopped as I
watched it spin from one darkness
to another.

Yesterday I paid off the rest of my student loan. "Pay Off Account" and I clicked the little circle next to it and then it was done. Eleven and a half years. I wondered when I first started paying my school loan, living in Seattle and writing checks for the first time, where will I be when I pay it off? What will I be doing? Now I know.

**

Tuition at my undergrad has gone up more than ten thousand dollars in the last ten years. Living the wealthiest country in the world; the rate of poverty, education, healthcare, etc. in comparison to other places that have far less than we do, is astounding. Today is Halloween. Tomorrow is November, and Wednesday is the Oakland General Strike. Below is a pretty good primer on the movement:

Yesterday was a big, peaceful protest in Oakland. Lots of people and lots of enthusiasm. Plans made for a general city wide strike on November 2nd, but the more immediate good news to come from the last couple of days, Mayor Quan has said "nonviolent protesters would be allowed to re-occupy the area near City Hall." Wow. I mean, wow, I guess this protesting stuff actually works.

Yesterday evening around six I walked through Snow Park, that for the last couple weeks had been an outpost of the Occupy Oakland protests. It was over spill from the full up Oscar Grant Plaza, but yesterday it was empty. The police must of taken it down, I thought, and when I got back home I looked it up via the Occupy Oakland Twitter Page and saw that yes, the helicopters I had been hearing all day were part of the police effort to evict the occupiers. And I also learned that people were assembling and marching downtown, about four blocks from my apartment so I put on my shoes and locked the door and found my neighbor doing the same thing. And we walked down there together to join the tail end of the march from the plaza down to Snow Park, and then back again.

An hour later, when we arrived back at the plaza it began to get a little tense. Lots of police officers were lined up around the plaza and the march halted, the organizers organized and then proceed another block to the intersection of 14th and Broadway where there was the biggest mass of police officers. I stood and waited and watched with the thousand (at least) or so others for a few minutes before a recorded announcement that told us the assembly had been declared unlawful, and that we had five minutes to leave before they would use force. Five tense minutes went by and then a few more, and then they fired tear gas canisters and most of us hurried down 14th away from the gas.

The march resumed down 14th and then circled back to the plaza, though in-between, I witnessed an over excited kid break a window with his skateboard, and at that point decided to head back to my place. When I turned down a side street there was a line of police in riot gear so I went back the march and went down a different street and made it home. I ate a piece of toast, had my picture taken as I looked out the window by errant marchers walking down my street, and then went back out, this time a little more prepared with a scarf to wear over my face just in case I got gassed, back to the plaza, and found my neighbor again. Occupied the plaza until others suggested we keep moving, occupied 14th and Franklin where my neighbor and I met up with Sarah, and we hung out there, in the middle of the street until they police fired tear gas again into the intersection of 14th of Broadway and we, along with the throngs, went back down 14th away from the trouble.

I went out one more time with Dara, around eleven thirty, and the crowd at 14th and Broadway had shrunk considerably. There was still a large enough mass to hold the intersection but this time we didn't stay around long enough to be gassed, and went back to our respective homes. These are just the facts of my experience. I'm not going to get into the why . But I will say, beginning at six, there's a general assembly (GA) at 14th and Broadway in Oakland. I don't know what exactly is going to happen but I can't imagine things will be any easier for anybody (protesters, police, citizens of Oakland) tonight. Regardless, I'll be there (I live there!), if for no other reason other than to be there.

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."

_____________-Abraham Maslow, from Motivation and Personality

(the image above is the Michelangelo sculpture "Atlas Slave." This is this blog's 500th posting.)

Hi. I want to write something but I'm a little short for time right now. Not super busy but headed to work in a half hour and have a few things to do first (do my hair). Today inbetween classes I'm going to open an account at a credit union, in preparation for pulling my money out of my current bank, which only became my current bank because Chase bought Washington Mutual. Remember that? And then expanded their empire just like that. The national day of closing accounts is November 5th. So as, I have to do some leg work now so I can still write checks. Right? "Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility" if you know what I mean...

(previously there was a sestina here. i have removed it from the blog in order to do some revisions. have a nice day. my apologies for any inconvenience.)

A little preface for this Frank O'Hara poem, it appeared on an episode of Mad Men (which I've been watching and enjoying). From the fourth section of the poem "Mayakovsky":

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.