The · New · Republic · of · Chelemby

Today, what's left of it, is Armistice Day. Yeah, call it whatever the hell else you want, but originally it had a very specific significance and an unfulfilled dream -- a last war. A war after which there would be no other battles. No, it won't happen in my lifetime, but I believe. Go ahead -- call me a dreamer.

My grandfather, Sgt. John Angus Alexander MacDonald (1876-1965), Canadian Engineers, fought in The Great War. He was gassed and somehow survived to ripe old age. Made 'em tough back then.

So I took my time out at 11:00 a.m. to speak with my family members who have passed along, bringing them up to date on the doings of the family, just keeping touch, retelling a couple old stories that are as well-worn as my shoes. It is important to have such moments.

But today I also learned that I am going to be moving. After far, far too long on the couch in JJ's studio, I will be moving back to Concord and taking up a housemate situation. I think this will be excellent for all involved, despite having to manage the shekels rather closely, or maybe because of that. I will have my own room again, which will feel almost magical after the last few years. My commute will still be a bit hiccupy, due to local transit, but at least it will be far less expensive. And the nearby laundromat will be an absolute godsend.

Anyway, details will follow. Over the next two weeks I will be in transition and sometimes out of contact, but it will all be to the good.

So, I had to call in sick today due to fever and laryngitis. Actually, this is not too bad -- I feel ill and I don't want to spread it too much to customers and staff. I used to play Iron John that way and just tough it out; at 50, I try to be smarter about this.

For years, as both emotional and job counselors have pointed out to me, I have placed myself in very feudal relations with my bosses -- my superior is my Good Lord/Lady, while I am the Loyal Vassal. One job counselor asked me when I would become the Lord myself; I was puzzled by the question. I always assumed there would be someone above me in any chain of command, barring my independent work.

Currently, however, I find myself in an interesting situation -- I have no real Good Lord. Oh, I like a couple of the management team well enough, but due to the combination of the circumstances of my work, the calibre of the top management, and strangeness coming out of corporate, I am really feeling as if I am strictly an independent contractor, doing my job to the best of my ability, but with no strong tie to the franchise. I am friendly to customers, have several regulars (one of whom told my manager that the only reasons she shops there is because of me ... which is weird, but I'll take the compliment), pull my weight (and then some), and try to keep on top of cleaning, shelving, etc. But that is the extent of it -- no higher loyalty and little expectation that the management, much less the chain, has my back.

One of the things that is strange about this job is the amount of pressure I am under. You would think that low-pay retail wouldn't be that stressful, but it is. I actually feel a lot more day-to-day pressure (the kind that is harder to shake) from this job than I did when I was working for the aerospace engineering firm that was making part of the International Space Station or the medical device firm with its FDA mandated studies. Did at least X% of people use the store club card? Did at least X# of people reserve this book in advance? How is recovery going? Why aren't the shelves dusted? Etc, etc... We have been, until this last week, working with absolute skeleton crews, so it has been hard enough just keeping up with the basics of customer service, much less any extras or worrying about percentages, but there is a constant drumbeat on the topic, with threats of losing the job ... all of this for just about minimum wage. And this probably explains why I have no feudal relations here -- such matters are supposed to be reciprocal ... and here they clearly are not.

Ah well, dum spiro, spero. I'm still alive and that is a good start.

Yesterday I was heading into work and found I was early due to Daylight Savings Time. Much better than being late, certainly, but I had no desire to get into the B-place all that early. Luckily the Fruitvale district of Oakland was throwing its annual Dia de los Muertos festival, so it was easy to spend an hour doing something a bit different.

And, as I was there early, the Aztec dancers were out in force...

I went up to watch a troupe of them, dressed in cotton, leather, and feathers, with shining armbands, painted faces, some driving out the rhythm on drums, others with nut-shakers, and a few with conch horns. Lots of incense was being burned and the dance steps ranged from simple group to a few true fancydancers. They went through an invocation of the directions, which is always interesting to my mind as they dealt with all five -- North, South, East, West, and HERE.

As I watched them, I felt myself drawn into the whole spirit of the matter, the notion of the continuation of time and family and I thought of the father and the mother lost so recently to my friends. I was just on the edge of tears. My emotions at this point were so confused: sadness at loss, sadness for my friends, the joy of grasping a bit of history to my heart, the awe of the ceremony, the trepidation of being an outsider, the excitement of the rhythms, the acceptance of the offrendas altars scattered about for those lost this last year.

At this point I started looking around the crowd and I noticed I was being stared at my a small latina baby. She had one of those serious-serious faces you see on pottery produced by the Aztec and Maya and we locked eyes for a bit, me smiling shyly back at her. I felt this connection, almost an unspoken communication of, "Hmmm, you don't look like you belong here, but your heart carries the right message, so I am a bit confused, but I will accept you." I was probably reading too much in, but I felt lighter.

When the ceremony ended, I walked back towards BART and found that a couple had set up shop selling marigolds. I was seized by an intense need for a bundle of the flowers; between my very poor Spanish and their poor English we got the concept across and I purchased them. The old woman looked at me with a puzzled expression as I moved towards the BART. "Why?" she said, pointing at the flowers. "Para mia familia," I replied. And she nodded with a smile.

A little girl dressed as a butterfly with a painted skull face, no more than 6 years old, was coming out of the BART station with her parents, all excited over sounds and smells. She beamed at me; I stopped, and said "May I?" to her parents, while holding up a couple of marigolds. The father had a puzzled look, but the mother just beamed like the daughter and indicated yes. So I handed them to the girl and she practically danced for joy; her mother tucked one behind her left ear and we waved at each other going in different directio

I know, I don't post as often anymore. Ah, the joys of irregular (in every sense of the word) employment...

But I wanted to put something Hallowe'eny up, and this is always close at hand. Maybe not 100% the thing, but I still look upon this as probably my single best poem:

WINTERHYRN
(Winter, 1988)

Is this the womb from which the world will be reborn?
This shrouding of thick and silky grey covering clouds?
Harvest is gone, so the time of Saturn arrives
And another sad year sees its end;
Samhain is in my blood.
You, Mother, must now await your husband’s warm return,
Sitting, waiting, all blanketed in.
No sounds of the children now; they’ve gone elsewhere.
But now Hecate, trivisaged and dark,
Rules the hour which used to be yours and yours alone.
Then the stars held their breath.
Then the Walls gave way.
Now there is uncheering cold in the bones with no relief at hand.
The season of patience, hope, and stillness
Has given way to the long, cruel, and evil-iron days
During which all is dead.

(Actually, I have always envisioned this as the Monologue Speech by the main character of the utterly nonexistent lost Shakespearean Irish play ... maybe something about Brian Boru or something...)

From Edna St. Vincent Milay:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

Well, I have really been burning that candle of late...

Work has been very, very stressful. We have been running with absolute skeleton crews, including one morning where I had to act as both cashier and information clerk at the same time, a tricky point to say the least. I have been staying up too late, sleeping too little, eating irregularly, and generally not treating this two-and-a-half score body very pleasantly. I need to slow down, but I have too much on the plate at the moment. The advantage is that matters will slow down soon ... and then I'll hit the Xmastide Rush. ;-)

Still and all that, I am looking forward to The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054606/

...wow...

What a random entry...

Once again, Lisa, Rowan, I am so, so sorry for you.

Lisa's father died Wednesday; Rowan's mother this morning.

There is something truly hollowing about the loss of a parent. A friend of mine, after my father died, asked how he could prepare when he faced the tragedy. I told him, "You can't. You can take all kinds of precautions, but all sorts of legal matters in order, but until you face the reality you simply have no notion how you will react." There are few times in my life that I have, sadly, spoken truer words.

My father is dead these ten long years. I still think of him, usually positively, but sometimes just missing him ferociously. It took him a long time and a short time to die. He was suffering from lung cancer brought one by asbestos, as he had worked in the engine rooms of naval vessels in WWII. As his physician had said, if it wasn't for his lungs he figured Dad would have lived to be at least 85, probably closer to 90. As it was he died at 71. But the odd thing was that the cancer didn't get him; he drowned. What was a man with half a functioning lung doing swimming? Well, I have my own guesses.

By the time I arrived at his hospital bed in Florida, of all places, he was already mostly gone. The three of us (Alex, Sarah, myself), and the awful appendage that was my Dad's not-quite-girlfriend Avril, discussed matters, but in the end I went by his living will -- no heroic measures. The doctor was relieved that I took that line because my father's brain activity had already seemingly ceased. He was on a heavy respirator unit; the doctor said that once they took Dad off of that he would be dead within a matter of hours.

So we waited.

For six days.

When he finally died, very early in the morning when no one was watching (I think Dad just wanted to go privately), we were all asleep in a hotel about 5 minutes from the hospital. We got the call and went over. He was so still. No more big laugh. No more cookies. No more stealing the checks away from us. No more rooting for Stanford to spite my Mom during The Big Game. And I had to touch him to knew it was true; he was so cold. And I wept, I wept hard and long, and felt a little relieved and a little guilty, but mainly I was missing the man I loved so, so dearly.

Nothing could have prepared me for that moment.

So, my angels, two of the four I love so dearly and deeply, I know something of your pain, your loss, but not entirely; we have led different lives with different parents. Please know that I care for you, will continue to care for you, and will do all in my power to help you through this time. Know that offrendas will be placed this year for yours that have passed. And know that the hellish pain and loss does subside, but it will take time.

Peace & love.

As I was listening to Loreena McKennitt tonight, I was struck with a thought that has been in and around my head for quite some time, regarding our current inchoate conflict (War in Iraq? Against Terror? Against Evil? Against Religious Extremism? Against Whatever This Week?).

Music, as many people from the time will tell you, played a large part in turning the younger generation (of the time) against the Vietnam War. It served as a form of underground discussion; heavy-handed counter attempts (The Ballad of the Green Berets, for example) were usually ridiculed or parodied, but rarely effective, at least as they were intended.

A similar musical discussion has been going on over the past 9 (yes, nine) years, but on a subtle level, at least comparatively. Listen. Do you here that? A doumbek. A zill. An oud. A qawwli chanter. Middle Eastern rhythms have come to infuse a lot of popular music, especially amongst the "fringe elements" of society. In Hip Hop, in House, in Trance, in Club, in Steampunk, in Dark Cabaret you will find these gatherings of such musical elements, establishing a dialogue with the "enemy", with the Other Culture, and finding something admirable there.

And this has primarily slipped under the radar of many people in this country ... even many of the people who have incorporated those tropes into their own tunes. The bridging of cultural bounds leads to understanding, thus less ability to see "The Other", but rather "another person/culture", a neutral-to-positive view instead of an automatic negative one, the view that is often so necessary in a war if it is to be carried forward.

These ideas are obviously still formative, but there is something here...

I am Depressed.

No, not at the moment, not for a while.

I am a Depressed individual.

This is something that is hard to speak about and harder to understand, especially for people who have never had to live with the situation. My emotions are, and have been, and will be, unbalanced. It is often easier for me to see the negative in things, at least in regards to myself, than to see the positive. I have a difficult time finding enjoyment even in things I love dearly when I am in my low-spin cycle, not books, not roleplaying games, not Alice In Wonderland, not octopodes, not King Arthur, not tea. Nothing. When I am down, I see a mass of problems stretching back and forth over time, all of them insurmountable because they do not and cannot appear individually and the current issues are based on echoes from my past where I can only concentrate on the failures, not the triumphs. And, of late, I have been in one of my down cycles for a variety of reasons.

When I was in high school, my brother Alex summed it up accurately: "The Ref has his ups and downs, but his ups last for hours and his downs can last for weeks." This is often the way of things with me and people like me -- we have a hard time breaking the chain of negative. It becomes harder and harder to focus on the ups when you are in the downs and thus we cannot "just get over it". Like an alcoholic craving a drink, we are drawn to our own undoing, but we have a bitter foe; that alcoholic might, through effort and internal fortitude, make sure that there is no liquor in his presence, but the Depressive's foe is his own mind. That is hard to escape.

Medications can help. Counseling helps even more. The combination, as I have found in the past, is probably the best, but is hard to get, especially if you are on the lower end of the economic spectrum (coupled with the current mania for drug-only treatment). The drugs help turn down the volume of those internal voices that defeat you; the counseling helps you uncover some of the trigger mechanisms that send you down, some of which are in your past but many of which are constant. Depression is not something you "get over" or have "cured" -- it is something you live with, learn to cope with, manage, and try to break when you find yourself in one or another recursive internal loop of despair. Just like there are no ex-alcoholics, there are no truly ex-Depressives. Constant vigilance.

It is all in my head. Yep. It sure is. And I live in my head, just as you live in yours. That is the truth of it and there is no getting around it. Imagine one of my "Bad Nights" -- I wake up in the morning from these, not recognizing the particulars, having slept like shit, if I slept much at all, and you hear fading away in your brain essentially an internal looptape of "You are inadequate, you have failed, you are alone, you never accomplished anything, your father would be ashamed of you..." Lather, rinse, repeat. Yes, my own brain has been beating up on me all night and has been essentially brainwashing me to only remember the negatives of my existence. It is all in my head, which is on top of my body, and which controls how I see the world, how I interface with the world, and how my body will function.

Even though psychiatry in its many forms has been around for more than a century, there is still a huge stigma attached to it. As such, many people who need help never achieve it, sometimes due to expense, but more often due to shame or the standard American "I can go it alone" attitude. That cowboy image is hard to break. When you break your arm, people can see that you are bleeding and in pain; obviously you need professional help. If you have asthma, you are recognized for having a chronic condition and are shown how to manage it. If you are depressed, many people don't even see the symptoms, or dismiss them as something that is happening now ("He's a little down today.") instead of seeing a continuing problem. Most of us refuse to even acknowledge this problem in ourselves simply because we think it is something we should simply be able to get over all on our own! Why? Because there is still massive social stigma attached to being depressed. And so we don't try to get help, we feel ashamed when people tell us to cheer up, and we withdraw, more and more and more. And some of us withdraw permanently.

Once again, alcoholism is more accepted and recognized in this country than depression.

I am Depressed. I have friends who are Depressed. We are not always down and it isn't really catching. There are times when we need understanding and love and times when we need a kick in the ass to help us break our own cycles. But we are our own responsibility in most ways.

We live in our heads. We have to learn to manage our pain and self-deriding tendencies. And we will do it ... but you, those of you who have never felt this, need to realize that we are struggling and that we will continue to struggle. That is how we survive.