Applying for Jobs Feels Like This

I learn my name
I write with a number two pencil
I work up to my potential
I earn my name
I come when called
I jump when you circle the cherry
I sing like a good canary
I come when called
I come, that's all

Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn

I clean the house
I put all your books in an order
I make up a colorful border
I clean my mouth
'Cause froth comes out

Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn

Still Busy, Still Something

Let me get this job application process out of the way and then I'll be back to my old self.

Here's At Least Something

A new performance video.

Quote of the Week

"If Congress has the right under the constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations".- Andrew Jackson

Saturday Video

I'm not normally a beach person, but I love the song.

A Plea for Sanity

This morning I watched a right-wing pastor lecture his ample flock about the sins of the world. Any time I see someone espousing that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, I bristle. His smug, condescending, and angry opinions were what I objected to most of all. Had he been speaking from a liberal perspective, he would have quickly been discounted from several corners as a dangerous radical spewing dangerous, anti-Christian theology. Still, rather than raising my own blood pressure unnecessarily, I sought to understand rather than react in kind.

To a great extent, preachers like these reflect the hostility that comes from uncertainty and discontentment. Since I've been back home, I have seen several people in a multitude of parking lots who get visibly upset when they observe my Obama bumper sticker. And I can't help but wonder if they really understand why they're supposed to be outraged to such an extent. Fox News peddles a collection of soft news and fear-based, sensationalist, sardonically titled news stories, each of which attempts to prove conclusively how liberals are destroying the country. If you watched that for any length of time, I can imagine you'd feel pretty impotent and angry.

If we were really honest with ourselves, liberals and conservatives both would acknowledge that we don't want government to run our lives. Or, if we were even more honest than that, we would admit that we don't want government to make us do anything we don't think we ought to do. But we would then also have to admit that, contrary to what we have just stated, we also believe government should take some degree or another of an authoritarian role in our society, else others not act on behalf of their own best interest. Anytime I hear a conservative tell me that government works for them, and not the other way around, I am amazed at the degree of cognitive dissonance that exists in that statement. Conservatives have no problem telling women they can't have abortions or young women that they can't have access to birth control. In their opinion, governments ought to step in and reinforce that belief with laws and regulations. See what I mean about cognitive dissonance?

The snarky pastor I saw on television this morning made me wish for Billy Graham, whose humility was never in doubt and whose easy grace and charm made him a spellbinding speaker. I didn't always agree with the man, but I never doubted once that he was a class act. When I look around me what I often see is anything but class or rational thinking. I can't imagine that anyone seriously contemplating taking up arms or hoisting a pitchfork should be anyone's bastion of rationality, but if this is symptomatic of the times we live, I'd rather we took it down a notch and started asking ourselves some serious questions.

No one said we had the right to have things exactly the way we wanted them forever. And no one certainly promised us inflated dividends and profits from our stock portfolios, either. A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he's lost half of the value in his stocks over the last year, but he acknowledged as well that 20% of it was speculative bubble profit and not even real to begin with. So rather than building a vicious cycle of displaced worry, might I suggest we might keep a sense of class and decorum while we ride this recession out to its inevitable conclusion.

Patience IS a Virtue

If ever we needed a reminder that we live in an instant gratification society, we find full proof of it in our attitudes towards these troubled economic times. While it is true and absolutely irrefutable that people are hurting, unemployment is soaring, the Dow Jones is nowhere near stable, the banking system is in turmoil, and many large industries are utterly bankrupt, we would be well advised to heed the advice of our commander-in-chief and his inner circle. Be patient. Give us time. The change we need will not happen overnight. That in itself is not news. In short, it will take a good long while to pull ourselves out of this mess and we would be wise to pitch in and help, rather than stand on the sidelines and gripe.

Maybe it isn't the everyman or everywoman who misunderstands this basic fact of all economic crises. President Obama's still-soaring approval rating is evidence of that. Perhaps it's the talking heads, pundits, self-professed experts, and GOP legislators who look to find fault with everything to suit their own ends and justify their own existences. Perhaps I personally am sick of seeing alarmist tracts, defeatist articles, or opinion pieces masquerading as the God's honest truth in the mainstream media or on the twenty-four hour cable news networks.

It has been fashionable these days to draw the comparison between Obama's accomplishments in his first 100 days in office and FDR's reforms made in the same period of time. To an extent, this is a somewhat fatuous comparison, since the crisis that existed in 1932 is ten times as severe as that which exists now: twenty-five percent unemployment, a bank panic consuming every state in the nation, impotent, smugly sanctimonious leadership from the outgoing President, his staff, and his party, and a sense of paralyzing fear in everyone's mind that the country was quickly headed to the status of a third-world nation.

In reading Adam Cohen's new book, Nothing to Fear, which is a well-research summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first three months and ten days in office, I came across a fascinating passage which underscores the difference in attitudes between the right and the left. Nowadays, the GOP leadership believes that opposing Obama and the Democratic majority on every front is its only way to remain in the public psyche and, for that matter, stay relevant to the debate. In 1932, by contrast, only outgoing President Hoover maintained any belief whatsoever in the old ideas that had proven disastrous to the country and the world. His staff had been attempting, to the best of their ability, to get Hoover to enact even the most modest reforms to stem the bleeding. Hoover stubbornly wouldn't go along with any of it.

The nation expected Roosevelt to claim the powers of a dictator, or close to it. Senator William Borah, the legendary Progressive Republican from Idaho, had announced that he was willing to put aside partisanship and politics" and "agree to give our incoming President dictatorial powers within the Constitution for a certain period." Senator David Reed, a mainstream Republican from Pennsylvania, had declared, "I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I say that if this country every needed a Mussolini, it needs one now." Even Walter Lippmann, usually a voice of studied moderation, was insisting that the use of "'dictatorial powers,'" if that is the name for it---is essential."

While it is true that times then are not times now, I still find it incredible that anyone would propose with a straight-face that Democracy ought to be temporarily suspended in favor of a autocratic state. Today's Republicans may be true believers in failed policy, but good luck trying to get them to admit it. Back then, Republicans had lost faith in everything, even their own treasured ideals. As much as I would like to see that happen, if we have to have another Great Depression to arrive at that state, I'd rather pass.

Today's Been A Washout

I have been so busy with other things that I haven't had time to write a decent entry today. My girlfriend misses me and wishes to have me relocated permanently in DC as soon as she can, so she has provided a list of around fifty to sixty different places to apply. To say that I have my work cut out for me would be a vast understatement. The problem with attaining employment is that my work history has been very spotty due to frequent hospitalization. I've had several jobs, but I've also lost more than a few because I've had either a depressive or manic episode.

My backup plan was to record another performance video, but when tuning my guitar, a string broke. The soonest I can get a new string is tomorrow. Expect more later this week.

As I do so often when in a pinch for something to blog about, here's a short story I wrote some years ago.

___________

I don’t like you, mustache man.

When I was a boy, the family would visit my grandparents every weekend. They lived in a small textile mill town out in the country. Most Saturdays were spent in the nook of a large oak tree. The bark was scaly and crumbled in your hands as you pulled yourself up to the top. A strange smelling, sappy black residue clung to your hands; it took much scrubbing with soap to make it go away.

My Aunt had a prison romance. He was ugly and hairy and they produced grotesquely obese children.

The mustache man was one of these. He said, open your mouth boy open your mouth. He was instructive. Rodent face. Red flushed cheeks. Gangster smile. Cracker dialect.

Grandfather said, “look at the difference between the red oak and the white oak. The leaves of the red oak are jagged like the red man’s arrow points. The leaves of the white oak are round like the white man’s bullets.”

Don’t play in the well. Don’t taunt the dogs.

Jerome said this. He spray painted his name across the doghouse. He was older than you.

While it is true that such things happen everywhere. It is true that sixteen-year-old girls get married and remarried to the same aimless boy and then pop out two unwanted children in rapid succession. Girls in rodeo clown makeup with light blue cheeks. Orange faces. Girls who don’t know the meaning of “understated”, in life or in artificial pigment. Can’t even spell the word.

Don’t play near the old well.

The top was secured shut with a piece of scrap iron and dusty with red clay. The fire ants ran beneath your feet and invaded rotting crab apples.

Reading crackly old encyclopedias with yellowing pages stuck together with the adhesive of neglect and time and no air conditioning. Forty years old with no color pictures, no entry on sex other than to distinguish between penis and vagina. The Civil War was labeled War Between the States, The. On the mantle was a gray ceramic cup commemorating the centennial of the conflict.

So you sat quietly in what had formerly been your aunt’s bedroom. It was bare except for a brown vinyl covered sofa with stuffing leaking from the divet hole. A quarter sized massive cigarette burn.

Mustache man, you were there. You were the one in the bedroom with the cheap white-washing and the closed-in side door.

You can’t go out the back anymore.

Ruddy-face intoxication open your mouth boy open your mouth.

Ode To My Father

I hardly ever know what I'm going to write about when it comes time to put keystrokes to monitor. Sometimes I get a flash of inspiration the night before and write my entry out then. Often the topic is yet to be determined until I scour the news with my omnipresent two cups of morning coffee. This topic, quite unusually, came when I was discussing, with a woman at the gym, the role that fathers play in our formative years and how they influence what it is that we believe.

My father has remained an enigma for me my whole life. Since I was old enough to understand, I have noticed how he has maintained a perplexing step towards right-wing ideology and a step towards left-wing ideology, rendering him one of the strangest moderates I've ever encountered. In college, for example, he double majored in both Criminal Justice and Counseling. Dad deifies Ronald Reagan but also served on the board of Planned Parenthood when I was a child. He campaigned for George H.W. Bush during his successful 1988 run for the Presidency but by 1992 switched allegiances and lobbied hard for Ross Perot. Before my birth, as a prison warden, he sought to bring liberal prison reforms to a stodgy profession full of good old boys and as a counselor in Alabama's Byzantine public health system he aimed to adopt progressive treatments and humane measures to better aid alcoholics and drug addicts.

I could keep going. One could call his pursuits an attempt to straddle the fence or call him a true believer in cognitive dissonance. Truth be told, I often don't know the reason for his justifications and rationalizations and I don't expect to understand him ever. He could rightly be called an activist and reformer in his own right, but that's a title he would never adopt for himself nor seek. His anti-intellectual streak is on full display for all to see in this regard.

The conversation about fathers worked its way around to talking about how often our fathers cried in public. The only time I have seen my father cry was when the family visited the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, DC. This was the first time I went to DC, back in the mid 90's, the summer before my freshman year in high school. A friend of Dad's from high school who grew up in the same little east Alabama border town as he did perished in combat. Dad wanted to find the man's name on the monument. As the story goes, the friend was out to prove his manhood so he volunteered for the Marines, knowing he would deliberately be placed out on the front lines. In another reminder of how cruel warfare is, the guy took one step off the helicopter transporting him to the battle that was raging at the time, was hit immediately with enemy fire, and died instantly. I never knew any of this until that instant. Dad never really wanted to talk about it. He hasn't since.

Bad Ideas Abound, And Here's Another One

Anyone with a chronic illness often easily transforms into an activist with a cause, particularly when one has a pressing ulterior motive to see the development of more effective treatments and even daring to dream for a cure. Since I struggle with mental illness myself, I am always on the lookout for news stories like this. Shocking though this article is, I have to tell you from personal experience such things are hardly uncommon.

I've seen firsthand what happens when psychiatric patients are thrown together with addicts in an acute hospital setting. The results are frequently unpleasant. Once I saw a fight break out between two patients, one psychiatric, the other addiction, over something as silly as an argument over a dinner roll. The quality of care suffers as well, particularly when nurses and staff have to referee potential altercations when monitoring patient conditions would be time better served. Thus, dumping mentally ill patients into nursing homes peopled largely with seniors who suffer from senile dementia and Alzheimer's is another very bad idea.

In the past, it was believed that those with severe mental illness had no chance of ever living a normal life. They were therefore institutionalized for years at a time, if not for the rest of their lives. This gave rise to the sanatorium and the iconic images of gardens, well-tended lawns, and a bucolic respite from the bustling city in the quiet of the countryside. Such things do not exist anymore. With more effective treatments available from both medication and therapy, these places were shut down. Still, just shutting down an institution doesn't mean that mental illness goes away.

There are still lamentable psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, for example, that modern medicine still cannot effectively treat with much success. A goal of being able to live a normal life for someone who is delusional or severely psychotic is not very feasible. This is what has given rise to dumping mentally ill patients in nursing homes. Without a family willing to care for them or without a knowledge of more effective treatment options worthy of pursuing, the close family of someone with severe mental illness often believes that institutionalization in a nursing home is the only option remaining.

Many state mental hospitals, as mentioned in the article, have also closed their doors as well. This is largely a result of the fact that many were often poorly-funded, badly run, under-staffed, decaying with age, and thoroughly unpleasant for all. The state of Alabama maintains Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, but its barbaric conditions have been well-documented and the most it keeps a patient at any time is ninety days by court order. This creates a severe problem when patients spend three months inside, are released, have nowhere to go, live life on the streets as a homeless person, are rearrested, and then summarily sent back to Bryce. For many, this process is a revolving door that continues for years, never satisfactorily resolved.

Psychiatric beds in conventional hospitals are often in short supply, since in-patient hospitalizations for mental illness have increased with time. This creates a multitude of problems but two of them, in particular, are that patients are summarily pushed out and discharged before they are well enough; the other is that when beds do not exist at a psychiatric hospital or psychiatric unit of a conventional hospital, caretakers look for other options, nursing homes being a major one.

No system is perfect, but we could certainly be doing much better than we are. Much misinformation exists about mental illness, particularly among the undereducated and the poor.

Quote of the Week

"It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation."- Sylvia Plath

Saturday Video

Because everyone loves manic depressive folkies, that's why!

Another Busy Day

In response, I offer to thee the latest performance video.

I'm Still Not Sure How I Feel About This

Transcribed directly from the invitation:

10 Year Class Reunion- Class of 1999
Theme: "Let's Party Like It's 1999!"

Saturday, August 8, 2009
7:00-11:00 pm

$75 per person. (Children not recommended) Date or guests invited for the additional ticket price.

Hor d'oeuvres, Drinks, Valet, and Music provided. Cocktail chic attire requested.
_________

I might go. I just don't want to wear a suit and tie.

*Does the Happy Dance*

Dear Six-Word Memoirist,

You're getting this email because we're working on our next book of Six-Word Memoirs, and we like [at least one of] yours a lot.

Thanks for sharing your stories!
-Rachel Fershleiser
(six-word memoir co-editor)
www.SMITHmag.net
___________

I'm a finalist!
___________

In other news:

I'm not sure what to add to the AIG shitstorm that hasn't been said a million times better by someone else. Due to medication side-effects, my stamina for intellectual pursuits is not what it normally is. Rather than fighting against it and likely drafting something sub-par and full of grammatical errors, it's best to wait until I am more like my old self.

Here Some Politics Being Played

Currently a Democratic representative to the U.S. House, Artur Davis intends to run for Governor of Alabama in the next general election, which will be in November 2010. If elected, he would be the state's first black governor. Predictably, he is also moving to the center, even if moving to the center means criticizing President Obama, who, I should add, he knows personally because they both attended Harvard Law School, and while law students and contemporaries they became friends. Davis was one of the first politicians of any heft to publicly endorse Obama, back when everyone was sure Hillary Clinton would secure the nomination in a cakewalk. Our current Republican governor, Bob Riley, easily won re-election back in 2006 by castigating his Democratic opponent as "too liberal for Alabama." Not wishing to be painted in the same light, Davis is beginning to make the first few steps to modify his platform in a transparent attempt to appeal to a largely conservative electorate.

As a representative, Davis had the luxury of not having to hide his liberal side or progressive qualifications. Running in a district gerrymandered specifically to give Alabama's sizable African-American minority a guaranteed representative in Congress, Representative Davis' number one concern while in office was in avoiding scandal, not in political posturing. He first won election to the office in 2002, displacing multi-term congressman Earl Hillard, who had been the epitome of the stereotypical race-baiting, corrupt, dubiously ethical African-American politician representing a minority-majority Congressional district. When faced with the real possibility that he would lose his seat, Hillard knew that he couldn't defeat Davis on his own merits, so instead he brought up the specter of race, accusing his opponent of being "not black enough". Sound familiar?

This recent tack towards the center frustrates me a little, though I am not wholly surprised, even though I saw Arthur Davis introduce Barack Obama here in Birmingham back in January 2008, when the now-President made a perfunctory campaign stop (and what turned out to be his only visit to Alabama) to shore up Democratic primary support prior to Super Duper Tuesday. Obama won the state handily, due in no small part to securing the black vote almost unanimously with just enough liberal white votes to take him over the top. As for the Obama-Davis link, both men have commonalities that go beyond their history as classmates at an Ivy League institution. Neither are the traditional Jesse Jackson Sr.-style black politician and neither apologize for their high level of education or erudite oratory skills. Both relied on a combination of white liberals and blacks to maintain their base of power and get themselves elected to high office.

Davis has my vote in 2010, provided I am still here then, but I am adopting a wait-and-see approach before I wager as to whether he has a chance of winning both the Democratic primary and the General Election. This is still Alabama, after all. Davis will be beaten over the head by whomever the good-old-boy GOP candidate is for his ties to liberal Washington and liberal Obama, and the jury's still out as to whether any of that invective will firmly stick.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Editor's Note: I have many errands to do since I have returned home so posting is going to be less substantial than normal. Thanks for your patience!
______________



Though my mother's father was 100% Irish and as a result I retain many of the physical features of the country, including brownish-red hair and a generally pale complexion, I've never really known how to properly celebrate this holiday. My family never made much of a deal out of ethnic pride---most of my immediate relatives were either too busy making money or working at a textile mill. It seems most people, regardless of ancestry use it as an excuse to go to a party and get severely drunk.

At any rate, Happy St. Patrick's Day to all those who celebrate it.
______________________

And an unrelated performance video for you as well.

The Return of the Performance Video Post

My apologies for the sub-standard quality of this video. By the time I realized it had been recorded at this low a resolution, I'd already done a pretty good take of the song.

I'm also sorry I put today's post up so late. There have been so many things to do since I got back.

What Does Spirituality Mean to You?

I converted to Quakerism in part because I agreed with the minimal nature of worship. No stained glass, no ornate furnishings, no liturgy, no programmed ministry. These were elements of my religious past before which seemed like needless ritual; put simply, they interfered with my connection with God. As a matter of fact, I read later that the first Quakers felt this same way about the faith traditions from which they had come all those hundreds of years ago. This new way of worship that they developed was for them the right balance between spiritual and connected to God.

If I attend a traditional programmed worship service of another faith, it feels spiritual, but I feel a kind of disconnect, too. In retrospect, I realize that I always have. However well-intentioned it might be, the ritual gets in the way. My girlfriend, however, has a completely different response. Raised as a Quaker (though, as she points out, she is technically a Convinced Friend (convert) from the age of two onward, the pomp and circumstance of a traditional Christian worship service is interesting, but certainly not spiritual. Her meeting growing up was composed primarily of sustained period of silence, so she often finds too much vocal ministry extremely jarring and not centering. Whereas, when I came to DC, I deliberately sought out the most vocal meeting I could find, because to me, even though I have embraced Quaker worship, I still cannot reconcile complete silence with a connection to the Almighty.

I suppose the lesson to be learned from this is that God talks to me and talks to us in ways we might not have ever considered before, and the gift is to look for it whenever one can, and not limit oneself to where one might observe it. That's a challenge for me, particularly, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Quote of the Week

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.- George Moore.