a leap day post

Not that I have much of anything to say. Is it emptiness that I cannot really write anything beyond babble or is it something else? I don’t know, je ne sais pas, no se, mi ne scias.

The other night I dreamed that the turkey’s beak broke off. Or part of it. It made me very upset and I tried to comfort him and tell him that I would take him to the New Bolton Center and they could give him an artificial beak.  Strange.

On some other night, I dreamed that someone was trying to stick a burning cigarette into my right eye.

Yesterday, I found out about the islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, which are actually French territory and sit to the south of Newfoundland. I then ended up learning about a movie, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, or The Widow of St. Pierre, a movie about a man executed with a guillotine. In French, la veuve is a slang term for guillotine. It makes me think there could be a good poem written and titled La Veuve, but I have no idea what the content could be, what sort of images there would be, because it’s like I’m empty of content and images. When did that happen? I don’t know. I think the last real good poem I wrote was back in 2009, in the early spring. After that, there were some ideas which almost took good shape, but were lacking some. Then things kept diminishing and disappearing, dwindling, until now where there is only emptiness and nothingness.

Perhaps that’s okay. I’ve slowly grown accustomed again to the conversation in my head and am no longer so troubled by the concept that it’s a conversation with myself only. Not everyone in this world is good at being sociable, and that’s long been me.

It’s raining today, dark and gray. But there’s a lot more light again around here than a couple of months ago. I don’t feel quite so suffocated by the darkness of winter anymore. It’s a relief that when I get home after work, there is still some light left. And now there’s the very first glimmers of light when I rouse up from the bed a little after 6 in the morning.

So that’s where it is for this, February 29, 2012. There’s a pretty good link about La Veuve de Saint-Pierre on the French Wikipedia. There’s a good story in there, both the historical and the movie account. I’ve never been a good storyteller, but there’s always some element or bit of story in a poem. But I don’t have stories anymore, or the stories I know have so thoroughly dismayed me I can’t bear to tell them.

half and half

Woke up from a semi-nightmare a little after 4 and couldn’t get back to sleep. Dreams are ghosts, maybe.

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After that 84 a couple of weeks ago, I’ve regressed back to shooting in the 90s. On Saturday, the driver and putter worked very well. I drove the ball the best I have all year, putting a majority of drives in the fairway, and only one bad pull to the left. But I struggled with the irons. Ended up shooting 93, with only 30 putts. 63 shots to get on the green and putting is way too many. 63 shots to get on the green after putting myself in play with good drives is way way too many.

2 standout holes. Hole 4, a good drive that hugged the inner corner of the dogleg to the left, leaving me about 140 yards to a pin on the right side of the green and a bunker looming on the left. I hit a good hard 9-iron that ended up about 10 to 12 feet from the hole and I sank a fairly straight putt for a birdie.

Hole 16, a decent drive, still well short of where I could be if the shoulder was healthy, I hit a fairly solid 8-iron to the green but tugged it a tiny bit left and it landed in the bunker. The pin was on the left of the green, and cut on the slope from the shoulder down from the bunker. It was not going to be an easy bunker shot, short and very little green to work with. I opened up the face on the lob wedge, chocked down on the grip, a couple of fingers touching the metal shaft, and made a good swing, firm and not slowing down. The ball popped up with a high trajectory, a little left of the pin, landed with enough spin to not take off down the slope and came to a rest 1 foot behind the hole. I tapped in for par.

—-

I got an invitation to Google+ on Friday. I joined it. On the weekend, I searched for people who identified themselves as type 1 in their profiles, and began forming a circle of type 1 diabetics.

—-

In the shower in the morning, I try to converse with myself in French, just to help me improve with trying to think in French. I think I’m getting better, but it’s frustrating some, especially when I try to listen to French dialogues that I have no text for. I will catch bits of it, sometimes I will parse out sentences, but sometimes I get overwhelmed and will have my mind drift off into thinking in English.

dreamscape

Well, I continue to wake up often from bad dreams. In some ways, I’ve become acclimated to it, although there is no real way to become fully acclimated. They wake me up and it’ll usually take an hour or more to fall back asleep. If I do fall back asleep quickly, I often return into more disturbing dreams. Last night’s wasn’t so terrifying, just incredibly sad.

I’ve gotten back to more diligent study of French again. I’m reviewing the lessons in Assimil New French with Ease. I’ve noticed a few things. After some initial reramping up of my listening ability, I’m having a much better go of it at distinguishing the words and vocabulary of the dialogues. Not all of it, but a much larger percentage that I can hear, repeat it in my head while forming an image of the words on a page.

I also now have a better appreciation of how Assimil would constantly bring things back from prior lessons.

I’m also looking more closely at the review lessons, every 7th lesson, looking at what they said. There’s a lot of good information in those lessons. If I were to do a new course with a different language, I would spend a lot more time on those review lessons than I did when I went through NFwE the first time.

crashed

The sleepiness was overwhelming by about 7:30 last night and I went to bed. I woke up from a dream a little after 2 and then had a long wakeup, maybe around 1.5 hours til I had a short sleep that a dream woke me from, another microsleep with a dream that woke me up, then sleeping with eerie dreams til the alarm went off. I still felt tired and hit snooze 2x before getting out of bed.

I’m more confident that the shoulder is healing. Every day somehow, it just feels a bit better, maybe not actually better enough that I can actually reach higher or farther, but just further removed from the discomfort and pain. Hopefully the swelling of the joint continues to go down and the shoulder capsule space is expanding in size. Along with that expansion, hopefully synovial fluid is filling back in — I suspect that synovial fluid is important with helping to remove the adhesions that are mucking things up in there. As the capsule space expands, the body creates more synovial fluid to fill the joint, and one of synovial fluid’s jobs is to remove waste materials and debris. During the time there was little to no synovial fluid in there because there was no capsule space, debris built up and became the adhesions that freeze the shoulder and arm.

That’s my speculation. If it’s correct, it’s also why trigger point therapy can’t heal frozen shoulder. The shoulder isn’t locked up because the muscles are locking it down exclusively, the shoulder locks up because of the shrunken capsule space and resultant adhesions. I think maybe that the muscles can develop trigger points and that can contribute to some of the locking down, and trigger point therapy can be helpful in alleviating that, but it won’t fix what’s going on inside the shoulder capsule.

Robin’s nest, chapter 7

The nest and eggs are still there and the momma robin continues to incubate the eggs.

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Awoke from crazy dreams around 3:15. But fell back asleep quickly, into more crazy dreams that woke me up around 5 and then 5:30. Then the alarm went off at 6, but I actually felt reasonably good enough and didn’t want to tuck back into bed.

Robin’s nest, chapter 6

It’s a full week now of 4 eggs in the nest. There’s nothing we can really see changing on the outside, they still look like eggs.

————

Had a wakeup around 4, started drifting back into sleep with wild dreams after 5. It was a huge jolt when the alarm went off and mostly I wanted to shut it off and tuck back down into bed. But I got up. I feel tired.

I had a moment on Saturday when I felt a sense of loathing towards my left shoulder and arm. I want my arm to work fully again. I’m tired of it being restricted. And while I’m glad most of the pain is gone, I’m not happy there is pain if I push the arm to the edges of the range of motion.

frustrations

It’s a bit weird. Some days I’m good at tuning out external stimuli and I’m able to remain focused on the thinking I want to do. Then there’s days like today, where I’m reaching a point I would just like for all people around me to disappear so I wouldn’t have to overhear the conversations they are having. Very frustrated, very tired right now from it, I almost wish I had a quiet dark room that I could take refuge in and finally have only my thoughts making noise in my head.

I wonder why this is. Why is it some days I can handle it and then there are days like this? I don’t know.

I can’t even begin to tell you what a relief it was just now to finally have one of those conversations come to an end just now. Finally, peace. No more snippets of other people’s words. Finally. The sound of silence is beautiful. Or I ought to say the sound of only keyboard clicks and computer fans is beautiful.

I’ve been continuing to work on learning French. It’s a frustrating business at times. I certainly comprehend a great deal more as time goes by, but there are times when it seems like all I comprehend more of is how much more I still don’t know, still have to learn. Which is what I’m in right now, a sensation of too much incomprehension. I’m having trouble enjoying what I do comprehend. It’s a bit of a contrast to a couple of weeks ago when I had 3 or 4 nights where I had dreams in French. I can’t vouch for the quality of the French in those dreams, but the people around me were speaking French and I was answering them in French. I was thinking in French in those dreams. But only little bits of French have shown up in dreams since.

I’m working my way through Assimil’s Using French now. I think I need some more structure again and Assimil will provide that. I had a period earlier in the year where I got away from learning French, in fact I did very little, just sometimes reading a bit here and there. That had occurred in response to something and it took a bit of time for me to clear out the bad sensations I had. Then I got back to more exposure to French again — reading, watching movies with French dialogue, working on Pimsleur French 3. But nothing much structured except for the Pimsleur.

I’m frustrated with being diabetic right now too. I feel tired of it. My control is still superb, but I’m tired of the poking and prodding it requires to be controlled.

It doesn’t matter, I guess. Ça ne fait rien. Eventually everything will be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten. My life would be a happier one if I was good at forgetting. I suspect happy people are forgetful people. It’s the forgetful who see regrets vanish. Memory brings on madness.

I saw a news item the other day about how some puppies had been euthanized. But not all were completely euthanized. One of them was later discovered to still be alive and he was rescued, I believe, from a dumpster. What freaked me out about that was I had an awful imagining of what if Pippin had not been fully euthanized. What if some time after I had buried him, he had woken up? And I thought about that and began crying at the awfulness of it. What would it be like to wake up and find yourself buried in a box, in the dark, conscious and aware?

I’ve been having nightmares since.

It would be a lot easier if I could forget everything.

Take note of this

My life serves mostly as an example of how not to live, how not to be. Communication only works between two parties with shared assumptions. When assumptions are divergent, there is only confusion, hurt, and anger.

But it doesn’t matter. Everything is essentially meaningless. It hasn’t mattered one bit in the past when people felt they were communicating with each other. It’s all trivial. Everything is trivial. My beliefs are trivial. And trivial is probably overestimating them. My beliefs will never be an answer on a Trivial Pursuit card.

That’s it. There is nothing more to say. If you want to be happy, don’t think or be like me at all. At all. I’m an asshole. I’m a dick.

Mute

Yesterday summer beat us
all back inside to gloom and shadows.
Night didn’t turn out

much better, we suffocated
even when stretched out naked
on a bed without blankets or sheets.

The west opened up some time
when you were dreaming about ghosts
who come back without permission.

There’s always a graveyard within
a mile or two. You just need to know
where to look, behind a church

or maybe underneath the large rock
with moss on the northern side.
Damp and cool, that is death.

I would like it so much if in a dream
I went to speak and morning glories
burst forth from my chest. What a story

for one who cannot speak. So today
the weather cooled, relief at last
with its dark and distant heart

beating underneath — winter comes soon.
The corn will fall and shrivel, the crows
will flee and there’ll be digging again

for funerals until the ground freezes.
When that is so, the gravestones will
shine with frost on a distant hill.

The Mid-Term Elections or America’s endorsement of ignorance

I believe I’ve grown up and lived in a rather remarkable country.  I believe for the most part its results and influence have been positive ones in the world. It would be somewhat silly for me to think though that I deserve some sort of respect or credit for those — those were accomplished by the generations before, I have just been the lucky recipient of circumstances, the accident of my birth. And I suppose now I have to wonder what will this generation, my generation of the United States of America, will be remembered for.

So 2 years ago, the United States elected Barack Obama as its president as well as Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature.  They arrived in Washington at an uneasy time, one nearly as uneasy as that which greeted the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the House and Senate of 1932. The economy was a mess after an economic bubble popped, an economic bubble that had been formed from deregulation of the financial industry. Our American fascination and sometimes near-worship of unencumbered free markets. Which is remarkable when we know the history of nearly unregulated free markets, what economic results we’ve had — bubble booms with eventual collapse; what ecological results we’ve had — pollutants spewed into the environment because there was no real way for an unregulated free market to bring the full cost of production into the power of the consumers’ decisions. Yet we still have a large segment of the population who can be fed buzzwords of liberty and economic freedom like those are words more powerful than abracadabra.

But let’s go back again to what I mentioned above, about environmental impact and how that cost doesn’t get accounted for in unregulated free markets.

If you’re my age, around 40 years old, do you remember acid rain? At first, the slow acidification of rain caused by sulfur dioxide emissions from industry was unseen. Then when its effects began to show up and scientists began documenting them, at first industry denied what the evidence and scientists began to demonstrate were the causes of acid rain. How the heck is a consumer’s choice going to effectively counterbalance the concentrated monetary interests of industry like that? It is naive to believe that unregulated free market is going to be able correct itself effectively, with enough rapidity, to make a needed difference.

Do you know how acid rain got curtailed? Cap and trade. Yes, cap and trade, that which a certain portion of the American political body reviles as being anti-liberty, anti-economic freedom, as being horrible government intrusion upon the free markets. It’s a funny thing, considering just how market-based the cap and trade idea is. It creates a market to push things along towards a necessary solution that a free market in isolation to itself cannot find.

This is one of the purposes of goverment. It is one of the Constitutional purposes of American goverment — “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,”. Posterity.  Our Constitution speaks not just of individual liberty, but of providing it successively to our descending generations.  Our Constitution speaks not just of individual liberty, but of general welfare. It is naive to believe that general welfare is secured perfectly by unregulated free markets. If we had let unregulated free markets handle solving acid rain, we could have seen the deforestation of large areas of New England and eastern Canada. But unfortunately for those who are so enamored with economic liberty, that raving commie Ronald Reagan  used the cap and trade idea to remove lead from gasoline, and then his successor George Bush built upon that success by using cap and trade to fix acid rain.

That’s what happens when you let commie socialists like Reagan and Bush mess with the free markets.

But you want to know something? Compared to fixing leaded gasoline and acid rain, the United States genuinely faces something which could be many magnitudes greater in scope and cost than those.  It is climate change or anthropogenic global warming. And it is here that I will now explain my title for this post — in the 2010 elections, Americans elected a large number of climate change denialists to Congress.  As a result of this, the House committees responsible for Energy and Commerce, Science and Technology, will now be led by Republican representatives who somehow believe they understand evidence and science better than the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject — that the planet is warming up, and that it is warming up because of human activity and industry.

It appears that the years of the American rightwing’s pandering to those who celebrate ignorance of reality has come to fruition. The American people have elected a large body of representatives who think that reality can be what we can close our eyes and wish for. Who think that reality can be best described by someone like Lord Monckton, the man who was the man the GOP called upon to testify before Congress about climate change.

America’s worship of unregulated free markets has resulted in this. We deny that there is a growing problem because a certain portion of the population has this belief they consider sacred and unassailable — that the free market is best left alone. It has been further exacerbated by another pernicious meme — that government is always a problem, that government never gets anything right.  And that is bullshit. Government is not perfect, but it is best suited in many ways to build infrastructure, like interstate highways,  which is then infrastructure that free markets can use to expand their wealth.  Government is not perfect, but is the best market regulator for big issues with costs that are hidden or distant from the immediate consumer, issues like lead in gasoline and acid rain. And climate change.  But this unholy pairing of free market worship and belief that government can’t do anything has brought us to this point.  A point where our government may fail in its Constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity. To our children’s posterity.  But here in America, we’ve forgotten that and now have elected ignorance in as our leaders.

If you interested in learning more, I highly recommend Climate Denial Crock of the Week and that person’s Youtube channel. Also recommended for understanding the economic interests is The Manufactured Doubt Industry by Jeff Masters and The Rough Guide to Climate Change.

It’s time for this country to stop one-sidedly thinking that free markets are perfect solutions for everything, and start remembering the idea of general welfare. Individual liberty is best preserved when the general welfare is secured as well. You can also see this idea echoed in how military officers such as Rear Admiral David Titley have come to see what risks continued global warming poses for the security of nations in the future. Men such as Titley cannot be dismissed as leftist wild-eyed hippie environmental whackos, Titley is someone whose interest is in having good data supplied to him so he and others in military command can make sound strategic decisions and plans to present and future threats.  Keep that in mind any time you read or hear someone dismiss global warming as some sort of leftist conspiracy meant to topple capitalism. Titley listened and studied the information provided to him and has found it reasonable to use the scientific consensus on climate change. Or I guess he’s just some sort of communist dupe.

I wonder sometimes what’s happened with the political right of America. I believe there are some good ideas in American conservatism. I too would like to see some better fiscal management of government funds. But why is there this prominent streak of attacking scientists as seen in such things as global warming denial and creationism (if you are familiar with the debates between evolution and creationism, but not climate change, but then begin to look at climate change, you too will likely see, as I did, the astonishing parallels in argument quality used by climate denialists and creationists).

I have sometimes voted for Republicans, but now know that before I might cast a vote for a Republican again, I would want to know if they are going to accept the science of climate change and work to craft legislation that will protect the general welfare of this country, of the country’s future generations, of the world that we inhabit along with our neighbors and not so distant neighbors and those countries halfway around the world like Bangladesh who if sea levels continue to rise, will caused the displacement of a huge number of people and create more misery, more instability. More misery and instability all stemming from a selfish motivation to “protect economic freedom and liberty” and from a willful ignorance. Willful ignorance is not healthy skepticism although that’s what the ignorant like to portray it as.