Archive for April, 2006

photo by me

Originally published on my main site: life inchoate

I think I need a little divine intervention into my life.

I’ve been out of work the last two days with excrutiating back pain. I ended up in the emergency room because I was hurting so badly.

I couldn’t even get online long enough to write – and that tells you that it has been bad.

I woke up one morning hurting like crazy. The doctor says I may have just pulled something or twisted something in my sleep. He massaged me, gave me some pain medication, told me to stretch out, and sent me on my way.

I’m still sore. It has now radiated down to the base of my spine and I hurt.

Wah wah wah.

Big whiner, I know.

I just want to be in bed right now.

photo by me

american life in poetry: column 056

by ted kooser, u.s. poet laureate

When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable. In this poem, Don Welch gives us a man who’s been fixing barbed wire fences all his life.

At the Edge of Town

Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks which run
across his hands like molehills.

Work has reduced his wrists
to bones, cut out of him
the easy flesh and brought him
down to this, the crowbar’s teeth

caught just behind a barb.
Again this morning
the crowbar’s neck will make
its blue slip into wood,

there will be that moment
when too much strength
will cause the wire to break.
But even at 70, he says,

he has to have it right,
and more than right.
This morning, in the pewter light,
he has the scars to prove it.

From “Gutter Flowers,” Logan House, 2005. Copyright (c) 2005 by Don Welch and reprinted by permission of Logan House and the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

photo by me

Originally published on my main site: life inchoate

My beloved state of Arizona is in the national news again.

Nothing to be proud of, to be sure.

Earlier this week, we made the national news because a local case is being presented to the Supreme Court.

In the summer of 2000, in the neighborhood next to mine (at the time), Eric Clark took his brother’s truck out for a midnight drive. He was racing up and down the streets with the radio blaring.

The police were called. This was supposed to be a simple public nuisance case where the teenager would be pulled over, hands slapped, parents admonished, and everyone would go on their way.

It turned into a nightmare for two families and a small city that prides itself on low crime.

Eric is a schizophrenic. His parents had desperately tried to get help for him but to no avail. He often talked about aliens and how Flagstaff was filled with 50,000 aliens and how even his parents were aliens. That night, Eric was in the depths of a delusional schizophrenic episode. Everyone he came into contact with were aliens and they had to be dealt with.

One of the people the seventeen-year-old came into contact with was Officer Jeff Moritz. Moritz was a four-year veteran of the Flagstaff Police Department, the father of one with one on the way.

In the early hours of that June morning, Eric and Moritz met up. Eric shot Moritz, knowing he was an alien. Moritz was the first Flagstaff officer shot in the line of duty.

A manhunt insued. It was a scary time because we didn’t know if the assailant was going to shoot anyone else. We didn’t know anything about him until much later. He was a few streets over from me the entire time.

The State of Arizona refuses to accept Eric’s plea of insanity. They agree he is schizophrenic. They agree he was delusional during the shooting. They refuse, however, to allow Eric to get the help he needs and want to send him to prison for the rest of his life.

The Supreme Court is going to decide if the right to put a killer into an institution for the mentally impaired is okay in light of a serious criminal act.

Eric Michael Clark is a sick young man. He needs serious help.

–

And now, the infamous Arizona Minutemen are demanding that President Bush take action on our borders. They say that if he doesn’t, they will erect fences on their own property to keep out Mexican nationals.

I keep getting images of the Berlin wall. Nearly twenty years ago, the Germans realized that a wall is a detrimental thing. It does not promote good relations. It does not stop people from crossing if they really want to. It is a blight on the face of the earth.

Sometimes I think that my fellow country-men are so backward thinking. We’ve become a xenophobic nation.

We don’t look at ourselves as citizens of the world. Instead, it’s us versus them. Us against the world.

Our government has fostered that feeling with the whole “You’re either with us or against us” talks that have occurred since 9/11.

What a sad, hateful way to live.

photo by me

Originally published on my main site: life inchoate

I’ve written about my drives to work and how scary they can be because I’m surrounded by huge pickups and SUVs my entire drive.

Things have changed recently. I’m still surrounded by all of those vehicles but my driving has changed.

I like to drive fast. It’s exhilerating. It’s exciting. It’s like living on the edge and taking a chance.

I realized, though, that I’m burning more gas doing that. I also realized that I get this aggressive feeling going when I do so and then I get that road rage thing seeping into me. That’s scary.

But what really made me think about it was a faculty member here at the university. I was working with her on setting up a blog for one of her courses. We started talking about the things she’ll be discussing and how it will be used in the course.

She works in geography and spends a lot of time working in transportation and planning. She watches traffic patterns. She pays attention to the ways things work within traffic.

She told me that the speed limits aren’t arbitrary. They are set up for many reasons, including safety and good traffic flow. She told me that when people speed, it really screws up the way traffic flows and that’s why we have traffic jams.

So I started thinking about it.

And I started leaving home about ten minutes earlier just to test it all out.

I’ve noticed a few things.

First, I’m not as stressed. Even when someone cuts me off (which they seem to do more because I’m just not speeding with the rest of them), I laugh it off. I’m going to get there. I’ll be safe when I do. And I won’t have a knot in my stomach.

Second, I tend to drive in a relatively car-free zone. People are speeding around me and passing me, leaving me to have the entire area to myself. That’s kind of nice.

And third, I don’t sit at lights a whole lot. I tend to cruise right through them.

This does work better during the morning hours when the roads are a little less busy than the evening but even then, it still works pretty much the same.

I’ve removed a stressor from my life.

And it was easy.