Back home after an insane weekend with old friends a couple hours north in a rented house on a Point Reyes ranch. I can't stop crying, not from sadness but as a result of my depressed and abused system. Twenty minutes after leaving the ranch I vomited four times out the left passenger door. Relapse and recovery. On the brighter side, friend Cole came in early last week and we toured the city on bike. We looked at art and ate burritos, talked about music and went to a Kurosawa movie, met up with friends and went grocery shopping. On Thursday more friends came in then on Friday we went up to the ranch. So beautiful and calm. Sheep and a swampy pond. Home to the Strauss creamery, which happens to make my favorite yogurt and we ate dinner. Joked and made jokes, smoked cigarettes and drank. On Saturday we went hiking up to Bass lake and beyond to a water fall by the beach. Followed by drinking. Followed by multiple layers of hangover. I wouldn't have it any other way, but only once a year.

Tomorrow I leave for Kentucky to see my uncle, cousins, second cousins, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. On Friday I leave from Kentucky to go up to Wisconsin to see mother, step-father, aunt, aunt's wife, step-brother, old friends, and my dad. I'll have four full days so it's not much time but enough. I come back here a week from Wednesday and start school on Thursday. Much to do today to get ready to go and be gone and be ready to come back. Unlike last week I will have my computer and will be in touch. In the meantime, here's a Kimiko Hahn poem from the June issue of Harper's. I found it on a scrap torn from the magazine while cleaning out my bag this morning:

Xenicus Longipes

The four known species of bush wren in New Zealand
are, by now, endangered or extinct.
Possessing trifling tails and wings, none fly far—
instead they hop and dart
in whatever undergrowth scrapes the landscape.
Those on Cook Strait's margin of rock
entirely lost the capacity for flight
and in 1894 were destroyed not by farmers,
hunters, pet traders, rats, disease,
natural disaster or want of food—
but by Tibble, the lighthouse keeper's cat.
Oh, what we think we need to survive kills others:
I have consuming need for my beloved, he knows—
and I hope he is not sorry.

3 Reasons to Write

Missing hearing the sound of English and reading, sitting up in the room drawing, but more importantly the realization that my Japanese professors didn't read the papers I wrote, I started writing about ridiculous things, Haiku and moon men for poetry class, urinating in the alleyways for a class on Japanese law. It was so easy to write what I was interested in, rather than force my words into imagined expectations. Wow. It blew my mind, the idea to write whatever I want to write, and the discovery that there lots of things to write.

__"In the first half of the poem, I said that our school had the finest teachers there ever were. And in the latter half, I said our class was the greatest class ever graduated. So at graduation, when I read the poem, naturally everybody applauded loudly."
__"That was the way I began to write poetry." Langston Hughes,
_____________________________________-The Big Sea

Morning in San Francisco. I've been dreaming of acid reflux, the feeling I get when failure appears. Dreaming dreaming dreaming. I dreamt I had no Christmas presents to give. I dreamt of fighting with students. For a while, two weeks ago I dreamt of things bigger than myself I dreamt I kept moving, not giving up like Senator Joe Biden or the McCain campaign.

Update on Sunday's post / sick and dying news: they gave him anti-biotics and attribute these to knocking out the bacterial infection, thereby the fever and thereby he's able to ingest liquids and food again because he is able to swallow. It is relieving to hear this though it only puts off the inevitable. "Of two minds," whether to keep him going or let him go. I feel relieved because I don't have to think about it anymore today. I feel embarrassed, amongst some, because I was so upset over the weekend.

One of the hard to explain realities about Pick's disease is the on-going, non-finite nature of disintegration, and his now, 5 year long stasis in a vegetable like state. It's been almost twelve years since diagnosis. On average, when a person is diagnosed with a form of dementia they live seven more years. It's been almost twelve since he was diagnosed. How does one die from dementia? Usually from a bacterial infection, like pneumonia, which the body is unable to fight off because parts of the immune system have shut down. Or the brain eventually loses its basic motor functions, like that of swallowing. Because he was relatively young upon diagnosis, and because of the nature of Pick's disease, attacking some different parts of the brain than say, Alzheimer's, he manages to keep going.

Part of me is proud of this kind of fortitude, the idea that I'm descended from these genes, the kind that fight with other patients and try to escape from institutions. The rebellious and difficult kind. Another part of me would like for the ambiguity of his situation to be over. It's a sunny day in SF. It's been getting incrementally warmer over the last four days. On Saturday I saw the movie "Inception" alone, at ten in morning. I highly recommend this as a way to see movies. I thought it was pretty good. Smart and well made and beautiful. In the afternoon I spent time with a friend who has gone though similar situations as the one with my dad. Nothing feels better than being understood.

On Friday morning my sister called and told me that that the care facility in central Wisconsin had called to tell her that my father had gotten a fever and had lost his ability to swallow. How the two problems relate to each other I don't know. The question my sister had for me, and my brother who she called just before, was the question of giving approval or disapproval for a feeder tube. We unanimously said "No. There's no point to keeping him alive in the condition he's in." His main nurse was off for the weekend so they said let's wait and see. Maybe the fever will pass and he'll get his swallow back. On Saturday night my sister wrote an email reporting that my dad had swallowed around 340 ccs of liquid. We'll know more on Monday when the nurse comes back. It's been a difficult weekend.

Karma

I sat with my brain dead father in the crazy ward, and got up to leave not wanting to be there any longer. I asked my mother if she hurt herself.

I went to Sunday School to get out of church.

Jerry and I picked Kurt up from the bottom of the stairs and set him in a chair.

I let the student fail.

"I'm tired of feeling superior to other people."

One student gave a proposal presentation yesterday that involved distributing a Whopper and speaking in front of a giant American flag. He advocated handing out MREs (meals ready to eat, standard military issue) instead of welfare payments that could be abused. Another student used pictures of the class, including me, from our visit to the SF Public Library, and placed thought bubbles coming out of our mouths with captions such as "Weed!" and "300! Go Spartans!" My caption had me referring to my students as my "sons." She also included a picture of herself in her power point presentation, and bullet points listing her traits including "worked in the video game industry" and "beautiful." It was one of the better presentations.

This 202 section has been great, very laid back and fun to be with. Even better, all of them noticeably improved as writers, or at least improved as far as writing the way I advocate. Thier papers and arguments came out: maybe Esperanto is the only second language anybody needs to learn. Maybe I will support Prop. 18. Maybe we should put a finger print reader on video game consoles. Maybe we should have a mandatory two year conscription policy. Maybe vocational programs in high school should be prioritized. Maybe we should promote morally responsible television programming. Maybe this experience off sets the terrible section I had over the spring semester. Maybe I'll put off grading papers and doing final grades.

*

It's difficult to say goodbye. The end of a class always makes me a little bit sad, and a because I'm holding back; a little bit awkward. This awkwardness leads to paranoia, and all of a sudden I'm interpreting the statement "the child's face is pure but in fact they are lying to their mother" and its accompanying visual argument to be about my secret life as a scuz bucket. Sad feelings mutating into strange, self-centered thoughts. The question is to embrace the sentimentality or avoid it. Either way, the end of class is an odd mix of relief and apologies. Maybe it's just difficult to accept the end of anything. And yet, I'm still here, regardless of whether I accept it or not. "It's always the same damn day." And I mean that in a good way.

This weekend I helped C the subletter move some of her things into her new place in preperation for C the roommate's return this evening. The cats have been confused all summer long. It's been cold. They're used to it. Bothways. All the moving around inspired me to reorganize my room, which makes it sound like I'm thirteen, so maybe I'll call it my space which is a little bit more sophisticated but again takes us back to something else. It's not my apartment so I can't call it that. I got it: my bedroom, which isn't exactly true, since my bed is in the closet, but it's close enough. My office / sitting room / cat palace. Who cares. Anyway, I moved stuff around from four in the afternoon on Saturday until two o'clock in the afternoon the next day.

It was a total waste of time. Friend S suggested that it was theraputic in the sense that it fulfilled a need to destroy something. Mm. Maybe. But I pretty much put everything back where I found it, coming to the realization that it had gotten it right the first time around. Anyway, in the process I did some mega cleaning and found this piece of paper, written when I was nineteen and fresh off the plane in Japan (click to enlarge to read):

In more current discoveries, I've been really enjoying the new Mount Kimbie album "Crooks & Lovers." This song is my favorite thus far but it's all nice. That, and the new Joanna Newsom album, which came out four or five months ago, where it's taken me this long to listen to the three discs enough to get to know it as something other than homework. Such an amazing writer she is. Okay. The sun is out and I need to go where they pay me. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester. Ya.

2 Poems About Food with Similar Endings

Beans & Rice

Eat this food
park dude.
Don't fall asleep
in the dark, because if you don't
somebody else might.



Scooping Granola

I've begun to go
for the rasp-
berries because "If I don't
somebody else will."

Wens-day mor-ning, clap-clap clapclapclap It's kind of cold in San Francisco. Not cold like an ice cube or a cat ear, but cold like it tends to be here in the summer. Temperate, but in and out come the winds and clouds. Since June, it's overcast in the mornings until the sun burns the clouds off, which is usually around noon; it's nice for about 3 or 4 hours, and if the wind isn't blowing you can sit on the grass and read a book or find a big bag of pot like I did on Monday (the third one I've found in this city: imagine the stoned dude who's pocket it fell out of, and his moment of realization). But around five the wind comes back with the clouds and I'm so cold when I ride my bike back from school/work. Dress in layers they tell us. In theory, summer here doesn't start until August, and September is one of the warmer months. Weather weather weather weather. Weather weather.

Here is an article about higher education that Cole put up on Google Buzz this morning, another article that basically says universities suck and degrees have no value, the teachers are overpaid, the administrators are greedy, text books are a rip offs, adjunct teachers (like me!) are slaves, etc. etc. and all of this may be true, but it's a little disheartening to read all these comments about money to say nothing of the value of an education or more fundamentally, the impulse to improve ourselves and the faith in unseen results that it requires. That said, it's supposed to be difficult. When I say it, I mean everything. In my case, it's freaking hard to teach. It's not hard to show up, but having been doing it for almost five years, only recently does it feel like I'm doing more good than harm. Maybe people who post on the internet experience a similar learning curve.

Anywho, the cats are cold. Kitty Girl is laying on top of Jinx. I've been slowly reading a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, which I've been enjoying. It's kind of pop philosophy about work, annoyingly overwritten but really funny because pretentious verboseness is a strange way to talk about the cookie manufacturing process in England. That probably didn't sell the book but oh well. That's the update. The semester ends a week from today and then I'll have three weeks off to gallivant about; do a little construction, spend time with old friends, and head back to the middlewest to see family. In the mean time:

p.s. you may notice that i've removed the "comment" tab that usually appears at the bottom of postings. two reasons: a better visual flow, and to get rid of the awkward decision to comment or not. please send me an email if you have a response. or, if you really want the comment option back, let me know.

Sunday at Dolores

Two kids playing on the grass
"Don't throw~(unintelligible)", a young mother commands their attention.
Two boys.
"No More, No More."
"Gabe, bring it to me."
Gabe is throwing something.
He doesn't know what he's done wrong.
"Wha'd you find, a pine cone?" said the non-father young man.
"Why don't we start a little smaller."
He's not entirely comfortable: I wouldn't listen to him either.
"Luke you have to stay close, man."
I'm afraid for him but am hopeful he'll find a way.
"The sun is in the way? Why don't we go there."
This is a question.
Little friend has had enough.
"...you probably could but I'm not going to be able to catch it."
"I'm hungry," says older one.