Monday, December 29, 2008

Shebeen

I never get drunk, she says.
Let’s try your tolerance, he replies.
He makes an eloquent toast.
Hers was Cheers.
Cold liquid runs down their throats.

Is alcohol the panacea we are looking for?
Once again they raise their drinks to their lips and swallow.
A slight sting.
They speak of deep secrets and dark pasts.
They cry deep inside and swallow their tears.
They make a last order.
For the road, they chorus.

Brief Lives

I dreamed that we were laughing at our brief lives
While making newspaper boats float
In a puddle of tears
That streamed down our eyes.

I dreamed that we gazed at the stars
And they started falling one by one
And turned into a ball of fire
That consumed me.

I dreamed of clowns and mimes and fools
And shook my head at each illusion they created
(And I once believed.)

Then one day I stopped dreaming
And my hopes vanished altogether
And I died.

Monday, December 22, 2008

A poem I sent that may be forever lost in the COSMOS

A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Friday, December 19, 2008

Nice.

Here’s a quote from Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger.
The original idea was to put this as a tag on Christmas presents.
Salinger for a Christmas greeting is pretty cool now that I think of it. I find this a happy thought:

“[Zooey] said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you’d keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look ‘very nice’.”

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!!!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Narcissism and other things run in the blood

An interesting read. The author is my brother. He is talking about himself, obviously. :0)

AN INTERVIEW WITH TOMMY
ACT 1, SCENE 1 ENTER QUESTION-GUY AND TOMAS

Q: Hi. What’s your name?

TOMAS: Call me Thomas. Tom for short. Tomas if we’re friends. Tommy if you just feel like it.

Q: Are you by chance related to Thomas the Doubtful in the Bible?

TOMAS: I doubt it.

Q: Um, you said in your blog that you came from Dueñas. Do aswangs really live in your town?

TOMAS: Not true. There are no aswangs in Dueñas. No, nada, nil, null. All aswangs make a living in the city, especially in government offices.

Q: Oh... Um, what are your hobbies?TOMAS: What are hobbies?Q: Hobbies are the things you like to do.

TOMAS: Well, I like doing nothing, so I guess that’s my hobby.

Q: What is your motto in life?

A: My motto is, A person’s worth cannot be measured by his or her peso value. There is no accounting for a human being.

Q: Can you explain your motto?

TOMAS: Yes I can.

Q: Good… Um, what do you think is the purpose of every living person in the world?

TOMAS: I think that the purpose of every person in this world is to find a purpose. To create order out of randomness. Without it, we would be going nowhere.

Q: Oh. (cough). Anyway, you hate smoking and drinking, right?

TOMAS: True enough. You seem to know more about me than I do.

Q: Why do you want people to stop smoking and drinking?

TOMAS: Why not?

Q: I mean… For example, why do you want your friends to stop drinking and smoking permanently?

TOMAS: I have personal reasons. That means you’re getting personal.

Q: …?

TOMAS: Just kidding: I don’t drink because first, I have history of liver disease. Second, I just don’t want to consume “sin” products. Third, I abhor the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. I get physically and psychologically irritated by just the smell. Fourth,…

Q: Okay, that would be enough. So if I tell you I’m a chain smoker and a heavy drinker, what would you do?

TOMAS: Nothing. Go ahead and die.

Q: Urgh. Um, if there is one word that would best describe you, what is it?

TOMAS: Can you rephrase the question?

Q: Describe yourself in one word.

TOMAS: Water.

Q: Water?

TOMAS: I have no permanent shape, and I can harden like ice or evaporate like steam. Literally and figuratively.

Q: If I were in your shoes, what would I be like?

TOMAS: You would look the same, except that you’re wearing my shoes. I’d then probably ask you to give them back.

Q: (Cough) Anyway, what would you like to say to the people who want to know you?

TOMAS: To understand others, one must understand oneself…(EXIT)

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

La Vida Loca Part II

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...
Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957US novelist (1922 - 1969)

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Terry Pratchett

There should be a particular word for that instance when your reaction to something is the cross of crying and laughing. My reaction after reading Terry Pratchett’s speech can be described that way. It was the same emotion I had when I was on the last few chapters of Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” the first time I read that book.

For those who don’t know who Terry Pratchett is, he is the genius behind Discworld, a collection of books wherein the stories take place on a flat, disc-shaped world balanced on top of four elephants that stand on the back of one giant turtle. Side by side with Neil Gaiman, with whom he co-wrote “Good Omens”, he is one of my favorite authors. I remember an answer I made about “People I want to meet”. I said “Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I wish them both long lives so they can write more of their beautiful books.”

Terry Pratchett has announced that he has Alzheimers. It is admirable how he can retain his humor and talk about his condition in a jocular manner.He just donated a million dollars for research on this disease. It does not surprise me. Terry Pratchett may be the reason why I can now take the concept of death with a grain of salt. Read the Death Trilogy. It’s hard to be afraid of Death when he is characterized as someone who can be melancholy

There is no justice in the possibility that this great author, a weaver of the most fantastic tales I have devoured with relish, will slowly lose his memory. Life has a sense of humor. Pratchett’s having Alzheimer’s reminds me of the popular Sandman line, “There is no Justice. There is just me.”

Below is a copy of Terry Pratchett’s speech:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts
Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 2:56:20 PM by Hetty_Fauxvert
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard. So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin, author (b. 1929)

(from Wordsmith)
"In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me."Ralph Waldo Emerson; Nature; Addresses and Lectures; 1849.

(from Wordsmith)