On Saturday coming back from The City (San Francisco) to The Town (Oakland), a man sat down next to me on the BART with two large noisy shopping bags from Ross. As the train moved along he pulled pairs of shoes out of these bags, examining them, maybe admiring them, peeling the price reduction stickers off the price tags, and sticking these stickers to the back of the seat. About five minutes into this process he told me his story: he buys shoes from Ross at a discounted price and then resells them for a profit. Buy low sell high. It keeps me out of trouble, he said and continued to pull the stickers off the tags while talking to me. I didn't mind. He showed me how to carefully pull the stickers off the tag, and then revealed that in the store he would replace stickers with the ones he pulled off from other items. So instead of paying thirty dollars for a pair of shoes, he might only have to pay $9.98 once he covers up the old sticker. One of his stickers was for $.49 cents. "It's not stealing if you're paying something at the register." I told him I would think about that, and I did. 

**

Happy Memorial Day. Thank you soldiers/sailors/pilots etc. No thanks to the silly people and decisions that lead us there. This is my last week in the White House and don't want to make you uncomfortable with the sentimental details (too many goodbyes to mention) of what happened this last week and this upcoming one, but come June 5th, Dara and I are off for New Mexico to write and read and take a break from city living for a couple months before I head to Indiana for the next FIVE YEARS. Wonderful! But I'm not sure how much internet I will be doing over the summer, and want to let you know that this blog is not going to be on any kind of schedule. Posting will be sporadic and infrequent until September when school and my days get locked down. But don't worry, I will not stop. And now that I've said something I'll probably go and do the exact opposite. And besides, there's always the hawk cam (they are getting much bigger these days).

But I do want to say one thing about leaving, that this time, having lived in many places and left many places, this time the response has been different. Unlike say, leaving college or Portland or the east coast or wherever, instead of see you later, I'm getting a lot of, "have a nice life." Not flippantly or coldly, but without the illusion that I'm going to see many of these people ever again. Of course I hope I do but this set of goodbyes and good wishes feels much more final than it has in the past. Statements of gratitude in place of future plans. Maybe it's because we're all older, and at this point, we know better. A kind of wisdom that doesn't anxiously keep the window of possibility open and instead, accounts for our progress thus far. Or maybe it's because I know, and they know, that I won't be coming back. Of course I'm not going to admit that to myself, even if it's true. I can't bear that kind of finality and besides, it's silly to worry about life beyond Purdue at this point. Regardless, I will miss my friends, students, neighbors, occupiers, homeless people, gangsters, tourists, ballers, lake birds, meditators, foodies, card players, smokers, drivers, bikers, the 72R, the DMV, my landlord, record stores, book stores, happiness, Mt. Diablo, sunsets, ocean air, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, biodiesel, stability, sunshine and all things California. Long live California! All hail California!

Wow! It's over! I leave Oakland on June 5th. In the meantime I have a long list of things that I need to get done to be ready to go. Packing and mailing and closing accounts and selling my bike, finishing grades, car stuff, and seeing people on my way out of town. On Friday I'm taking the cats to back to San Francisco for the summer, to be with their previous owner as I'm off gallivanting around the country. Come September, after settling in to my new place in Lafayette Indiana, Amy's going to put them on a plane and send them out to me. In theory. Of course they don't know this. Possibly, can't know this, but we have five more days together.

School ended well. My Thursday class was as usual, fun to be with and they did good work on their presentations. One of the best (most attentive, talkative, academically accomplished) classes I have had at the Academy, and it felt really good to be done with that class. On my way back to BART I sat in the Larry Halprin designed park just off the Embarcadero, smoked a few cigarettes and watched the sun disappear behind the buildings. Glowing. It really feels like I accomplished something in the last six plus years of teaching. Not as a teacher, (though that would be good, it's hard to know really how much or little I've impacted the lives of students,) but more so personally, that I've come a long way as a human.

Teaching was so hard for so long. Every class was exhausting and stressful. In the summer of 2010, after coming back from my second mediation course, I rewrote the rhetoric class, and ever since then teaching has been different. Something about the combination of being physically comfortable in the front of a class and the realization that students engage when they are challenged, just like everybody else. Being nice is nice but being consistent and holding people to expectations is better. For my Friday class, my official last class, I will have to fail four students when I do grades later this week. Speaking of which, I need to get on with things this morning. Happy Monday. Happy Summer.

It's the last week of school. Tensions are running high. This is the last week of my last semester. Five plus years. On Friday a student gave a presentation about using crystal meth to revitalize Las Vegas. It was an argument, and an obvious piece of satire coming from a former addict. Was it a good idea to let him present this in class? Maybe not. As is with all satire, the danger is that somebody might think you're serious, and one student did. Following the presentation she asked why he was allowed to make a joke of the proposal argument and she wasn't. I responded that he did good work, came to class on time, turned in all of his assignments, and spoke with me frequently about this project. Tensions are running high. She threatened to tell the Liberal Arts department. Teaching moments. I'm still learning.

Song

I wouldn't
embarrass you
ever.

If there were
not place
or time for it,

I would go,
go elsewhere,
remembering.

I would
sit in a
flower, a face, not

to embarrass
you, would
be unhappy

quietly, would
never
make a noise.

Simpler,
simpler you
deal with me. 


          -Robert Creeley

When does a person die? We know a person as a living organism, but when they die, their body is still alive, full of bacteria. The bacteria keeps going. Or when somebody is in a coma. The body keeps going. Of course it sounds like a silly question, because we know when a person is dead, and when a person is alive. But how? How do we know this? The medical definition is when a heart stops beating, yet that is not death either, as people come back from that condition all the time. And if they come back, where is it that they come back to?

When my dad was first sent to a care facility, for some reason at that moment it occurred to me that his condition is definitive proof that there is no heaven and by default, no afterlife at all. How could any creature, divine or otherwise, be able to make a distinction between optimal states of one's being? If I lose my hand in real life, does it come back to me in heaven? Or if I lose my marbles, does the afterlife put them back in? Of course not, as no divine force would work on a scale of human aesthetics. There is no way to separate the inner workings of a disease such as Pick's, and the expanse of one's personality. There is no dividing line. Biologist's mapped the entire brain of the incredibly simple roundworm, and found that even in a creature this stupid there is actually not one brain, but three brains in one, a network constantly modifying, responding to, and changing the neurons and synapses of the other two. Now imagine how complex our brains must be. How could anything know where to draw the line on a thing that never stop changing, and say, "Here. Here is where this creature was most perfect and from here they will live on."

Questions like these, questions that have no answers, point to problems not with divinity, but with how we think about ourselves. Specifically, that we are entities, distinct from each other and from the world around us. That we are special because we have a unique ability to articulate, observe, and control our surroundings in ways that are light years ahead of anything else on the planet. We are different from other creatures, and not only that, we are different from each other. It's a real skill and helps us divide the screws from the nuts so we can spend our lives putting together airplanes instead of searching for food. We are special because we exist on a plane once removed from the world of animals.We dwell in reason and abstraction, and because of this, we are different than cats or plants.

We don't know how or why the universe got started but we can trace it back to a single point. We can know how old the universe is by measuring the distance that light travels. We assume that life arose out of a primordial sludge. That this substance and that substance, carbon and water and maybe something else, banged against each other, randomly, and somehow, something came to life. In some pool, or pond, or crater or boulder, a microscopic spark leapt between two inanimate objects. Perhaps this happened on our planet, perhaps it happened somewhere else, and was delivered to our planet. We don't know. But we assume that we are made of the same things that stones are made of, though arranged differently.

That said, as far as we know, life comes from life. That's the only way we've gotten to it. As much as we've accomplished in the realm of science, we haven't come up with a way to create a living cell out of something that was not already alive. What's so mysterious to me about even the simplest (compared to us) organism, such as a tree, is the impulse to grow. If it really is a biochemical reaction of proteins triggering DNA triggering proteins triggering growth, why aren't we able to replicate this? Even if we are complex machines, built out of matter, what is this strange will to be alive that everything living thing has? Is it just the result of a chemical equation playing itself out? An algorithm to gather nutrients? To say nothing of our experience of being (which is more of a philosophical question), more so than reason, I feel like this "will to live" is something I have in common with everything that is also alive. We want to be here. Perhaps this is the most fundamental thing we can know about who we are.

Counter intuitive as it might seem, it makes more sense to think of ourselves as blips in a river a consciousness rather than blips in the void of space. That we appear and disappear not from nothing, but from something that is already there. It's a Buddhist idea, and most definitely something that I cannot speak to with any kind of authority. However it answers questions like what happens after death and where did we come from and what is our purpose by short circuiting the logic: we never die. I mean, we die yes, our individual consciousnesses die, but parts of us live on. The sperm and the zygote growing up and replicating times a zillion billion. And even when the last human disappears, life continues. We only die if "we" are what we think, our intellect and personality and reason. A cat pays as close attention to the world as we do, as does a single celled organism. It's just that they pay attention to different things. 

What is this thing called attention and what is the will that keeps us afloat? I've quoted it before, George Oppen and the poem "World, World--": "The self is no mystery, the mystery is/ That there is something for us to stand on." Yeah. How strange it is to be anything at all (to quote Jeff Magnum). And so ideas of the soul and the self, ridiculous as they sound now to our cynical and scientific ears, a glowing ball leaving one's body and haunting a closet or finding it's way into a new born, seem completely couched in dead end ideas of who and what we are. I'd venture to say that much of western science comes from the presumption that things, including ourselves, are distinct and separate from each other. A worldview that is wonderful for sorting and working methodically, but is not so helpful when it comes to being with other living things. Instead of stars punched out of nothingness, alone in the night sky, what if the night sky is just another way for the stars to be? What if the answers to our questions have been with us the entire time?

Warm and sunny in Oakland. Yesterday Bill and I went for a hike in the Redwoods, came back to Oakland and had a burrito. A good day. Today is Monday and I don't have to go to work and in fact, it sort of feels like the semester is already over. The fifth round of a papers is finished (though I have a few stragglers to read in the next couple days) and all that's left is collecting the final drafts and the presentations. No more deadlines, progress grades, lesson planning or student wrangling, and I can just sit back more or less and enjoy the next couple weeks. I told my Friday class, that since they're my last class at my current institution, they better do a good job on their presentations, that I don't want to go out on a bad note. As they say, the quality of your last thought determines the first thought of your new life. I'll let you know if it works.

My apologies for lack of context for last week's posting of a Ted Berrigan poem. For some reason I've always liked that sonnet. Don't know what it means but I'm 18 so why are my hands shaking? It came to mind two weekends ago during Buddyfest, but I'm not going to go into that. Instead I need to register for classes in the fall and pay some bills. The total damage of my fractured thumb (won't be able to softly pinch for three months or fully use my left hand for six months) has come to be about 1,800 dollars, which, not having much of an insurance plan is kind of a bummer. That said, my hand doctor has been really great, and has cut me a break on payment because of my limited insurance. It seems important that my left (opposable) thumb heal correctly, bi-pedal descendent of the ape and all.

On the front page of the Sunday paper was a longer article about frontotemporal dementia, which is something I know a little bit about as my dad has had it since 1999 (and probably many years previous to that). The article does a pretty good job explaining the specific characteristics of the disease (that it changes personality, language, social interactions), as well as injecting lots of narrative to "show and not tell" about the disease. Most articles about dementia are about Alzheimer's, so it's nice to read something in the mainstream about "Pick's Disease." I miss my dad.

II

Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m
dear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read
It's 8:30 p.m. in New York and I've been running around all day
old come-all-ye's streel into the streets. Yes, it is now,
How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine
and the day a bright gray turning green
feminine marvelous and tough
watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard
to write scotch-tape body in a notebook
had 17 and 1/2 milligrams
Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
fucked til 7 now she's late to work and I'm
18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better


                        -Ted Berrigan, from The Sonnets

Happy May Day. Workers of the world unite. Today is a bay area General Strike, many coordinated actions to stand against, slow down, or stop the powers that be / the 1%. Here is a schedule of today's events. Hopefully I will be able to get enough grading done to make the evening rally, though the literature says to stop everything I would normally  do. Yet there is a stack of student papers that I need to read to stay on schedule, both my schedule and the schedule of making money for the for-profit institution I'm working for. Somebody is honking a horn, somebody else is speaking on a bullhorn, and a helicopter keeps buzzing around. It's ironic and hypocritical and doesn't make any sense but I have to break eggs to make omelets. How best to revolt?