The night before my father's memorial service, my sister informed me that my mother had been diagnosed with ALS.

Prior to this diagnosis we had been told that her increasing difficulty speaking was due to a series of minor strokes.

A visit on 12/1 to The Stanford University School of Medicine, Neurology Department confirmed that my mom had not suffered any strokes and that most likely the diagnosis of ALS was correct.

Further tests await, and such meager treatments as are available, and no doubt tears and pain and love and death.

But, hey, that's life, isn't it?

As promised, another fine doodle -
The Carnival is Over, pencil & ink, 1994
Posted by Hello

Once I had so much to say.

Or so it seemed

anyway.

Now the page becomes a void,

white to black and staring back.

Inspiration once illumined my blood,

now it feels
as if my veins
must be thick with mud.

Could it be merely
that it is twenty 'till two?

I'm not so young as once I was,
it's true.

(Are you?)

Tired.
Mired in worry,

I've failed the Muse today

with these wakeful hands.

To sleep!
To sleep!

I have promises to keep
in dreamland.

. . . only the neighbor

calling her dog, thank god, not

voices in my head. . .

I was hoping to wake up last Wednesday (11/3/04), along with 56,158,908 other Americans, and who knows how many people globally, with a new president in The White House . I was hoping to wake from a 4 year nightmare of fear, war, mockery of Democracy, selling of the planet and, above it all, that smug smirk I have come to loathe with something like a visceral repulsion.

But, alas, some 59,651,290 of my fellow citizens seem to be quite happy in the dark depths of that very bad dream. They sent a man who should be in prison back to The White House.

They must be sleeping, right?. Or just incredibly dumb.

I am a pacifist

because I know

if I owned a gun

I would use it.

Briefly and in no particular order. . .

10/28 - More than 300 people attend my father's memorial!

10/31 - Sarah and myself intended to see Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary @ The Pacific Film Archive but ended up staying home due to low energy and watching The Corpse Grinders on local channel 32 KMTP.

10/30 - Sarah, Molly and myself spent about two hours at a phone bank in Berkeley, on The Ohio Democratic Party's dime, apparently, calling potential undecided voters in Columbus, Ohio, reminding them to vote on 11/2 and providing them with information re: their polling places. I spoke to more dead voicemail space than people.

A few days ago -

• Voted via absentee ballot
• Home computer crashed

Right now - Computer still down, these words stolen from Sarah's work laptop. I'm so tired.

My dad is dead.

With this thought my father has been with me more or less constantly since the beginning of events described in the post and comments below. As his mortal remains are with me now, 8 pounds or so of silty gray ash and ground bits of I don't want to think what sealed in a plastic bag, tucked tidily inside the shiny gold box which temporarily houses these artifacts from the life of a man, this debris, this dust:

Kenneth Cody

Cremation No. 25162

Sarah and myself saw him into the fire on the 19th of this month. Or, more precisely perhaps, we saw his body into the fire. And possibly even more accurately, we saw the box containing his body into the fire. I didn't want to see him, really. By the 19th, he'd been dead for more than two weeks, five of those days in the water. . .

For five days (October 1-5) he was not dead to us but missing.

Hope eroded, of course, as those days unfolded and Jane's Addiction played the same song endlessly in my head:

I had a dad
Big and strong I turned around me, man
I found my daddy gone

- Had a Dad, Nothing's Shocking, 1988 -

This is not the first time I found my father gone, of course.

He was much taller then, and I was much smaller.

But that's another story.

My father is missing.

Presumed drowned in an apparent boating accident.

Feeling submerged myself right now.

Yet strangely lucid, as if the water that engulfed me was deep, indeed, but clear as crystal.

Your boat found adrift

against the rocky levee,
all your gear aboard.
And where are you?

Only the swift currents know.

***

A beautiful day

on the waterways, searching
for my drowned father.

Big Sur was wonderful, as always. Five uninterrupted days to lose and then find ourselves there between the Santa Lucia Mountains and the great rolling bowl of the Pacific. Better than last time , when the end of our three day visit found me only just beginning to unwind, to shed the skin of apprehension and anxiety which grows around me in the urban places, when we were packing up the car and going the wrong direction down 1 (for surely our home is there among the trees?)

Photographic evidence of the latest escape will follow eventually.

Right here, right now, a few haiku(ish) snapshots:


Big Sur (Deetjen's - Top Antique)

9/2/04

Redwoods

inscrutable trees
rooted in long shadow
crowned by golden light

9/6/04

Window in the bathtub -
cool breeze across my chest,
warm water cools the rest.


9/7/04

slow pirouette
of a Redwood needle, down

through dappled sunlight

aren't you momma's good little boy...

- left as a comment on this post -

My response, too big for the comment box:

What's this?

Anonymous vitriol in my tiny comment box?

Funnily enough, I was just thinking - idly sure, but thinking none the less - that I have maintained this public and more often than not personal web log for over two years now and have never been touched by the caustic likes of anonymous vitriol or any other purely negative energy as a result.

Sure, I have entertained controversy in this space. Some of you may remember the narcissist blog question that I unwittingly stirred up between Tom Shugart, Tony at Abuddahs and myself a while back. Some of you may not.

In any case, I must admit that a comment like this gets my goat. Luckily, I have more than one extra goat kept for just such contingencies and am thusly able to maintain a balanced view on the matter.

I realize, for instance, that by defining anything as negative or positive, I am capitulating to the limits of dualistic thinking.

But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, that comment , like I have wretched up bitter bile; and I wonder if the motive of the comment in question is just what it seems to me to be or if it is merely idle trolling.

If the former, I say that I (pardon the expression, please) piss on the idea that I or any other male human is in any way emasculated by loving and being loved by a good (oops, there I go again with the Dualism!) woman. Nor by celebrating that relationship in poetry, song or interpretive dance.

I piss also on all narrow definitions of gender identity, or sexual persona if you will, just as I piss on any poisonous seed of bigotry or intolerance I find trying to root in my head. Flush it away. Please.

The sooner we stop identifying ourselves primarily as Male or Female and start thinking of ourselves as Human, the better.

There is a quote, attributed to Jesus in the apocryphal Book of Thomas, which often occupies my mind:

Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Pretty subversive thinking, huh? I mean compared against the firmly established media, state and church rules which define what a man or a woman is or isn't. No wonder it's apocryphal.

But I digress, certainly, quoting Jesus in response to a dirty, yes, but also tiny amount of anonymous vitriol.

Still, that goat of mine was gotten.

It was no doubt an easy one to snag as it was one of those goats of ever-braying patriarchal thinking which underlies concepts such as "momma's boy" and "wimps" and machismo.

The suggestion of some Oedipal subtext in our union is not a new one. Sarah is 17 years older than me, after all. The question of our perceived "age difference" seems to make this an inevitable line of inquiry. Not to mention the fact that I find strength in women a powerful turn on in general. I freely admit that. And Sarah is a woman of rare strength.

I try at times to capture that strength and it's transforming affect on me in words. It is like attempting to cage a fleeting, golden moment. Pompous I may be, but then I am not afraid to call myself a poet. Anonymous vitriol is a kind of poetry in itself, of course. It is of that vile stain on the fabric of suchness, that blackness, that creeping field of null and swarming shadows against which we measure our own light.

Anonymous vitriol, you are doing your part in the push and pull of Eternal Delight.
Maybe, in the future, however, you could do it someplace else.

Four Happy Bears, circa 1980something.

So, where were we?

Ah yes, I'm a doodler, it seems, as well as a scribbler.

A real renaissance man.

Be warned, now that I've got access to a scanner and Bloggerbot , you will be seeing more of this. . . stuff.

Assuming, of course, that you are in possession of vision of one sort or another; and that you (whoever you are) return to this blog in future. Assuming, again, that I have a future and am not struck dead before I update this space again.

As a friend of mine once infamously malapropised, "Anything is possible in this infamous universe." (Hi Wendy, wherever you are.)

This statement has been proved endlessly, for instance, by The Bush Junta.

Or, on a more positive note, the simple existence of Redwood trees.

After the carnage described below we are retreating to the solace of the coast just in time. Slipping away in honor of our imminent anniversary (15 years! Where did they go? Somewhere south of Mexico.) , we are exploiting the approaching Holiday Weekend and retreating to The Redwoods and Deetjen's between the mountain and the sea and only 1 between.

Won't be back 'till next week.

Ah.

"I come from a time where the burning of trees was a crime,

I lived by a sea where to be was a thing of true

joy

My people were fair and had sky in their hair

But now they're content to wear stars on their brows."

- Marc Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex, track 12: Frowning Atahualpa, from the album of the same 47 words quoted above, 1967 (same as me!) -

Now Marc I am sad to say that I am happy you went away.

Don't come back, don't return to see

How far we've fallen, neither starry browed or even content, we
are no longer your people, we
are killers of trees

for profit.

And loss is all we know.

Of Innocence.

Of Joy.

Of Home.

Of Hope. . .

Almost.

Though the stars have fallen from our heads to the ground
their light dazzled our eyes on the way down.

Some of us (the round bellied Mothers of Earth and wild children of sky, the tales who walk like men,

the friend of children, the strange ones with light in their eyes) can see the value of a tree is found not in coin but friendship.

Dusky bark that was once transformed by light
heaped now in chunks hewn from life
upon the dusty ground, you hurt my sight.


"To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way."

-William Blake, snipped from his (in)famous August 1799 correspondence to the Revd Dr Trusler-

This post dedicated to the Pine tree next door, felled today. You improved not only our view but our spirits.

"I do think that women could make politics irrelevant. By a kind of spontaneous cooperative action, the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people's ideas of state structure and vital social structure that seems to them like total anarchy. And what it really is, is very subtle forms of inter-relation which do not follow sort of hierachical patterns which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity. And I think it's women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation."

- Germaine Greer, circa 1970, as snipped by Sinead O' Connor for the opening track of her 1994 recording, Universal Mother (currently enjoying heavy rotation in my CD player, see below left) -

I had not heard of Germain Greer before I began researching the quote above. I am not surprised to learn, considering the source of my introduction to Ms. Greer was Sinead O' Connor, that she (Germaine Greer) is a controversial figure.

Controversy tends toward quotability, it seems. Germaine Greer again, from Said What this time:

• "Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them. "
• "Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother."
• "Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?"
• "The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough. "

So, where's the controversy?

The Reasons Why

by

Richard Cody

for

Sarah Cody

No. 5


I love you because,

as that old man

in the parking lot once said,

"The sun sure does shine brighter

when you're walkin' by."

How lucky am I

to know that still brighter glow

when you stop walkin'
and take me in to share your bed.

Bush declares Democratic Party a terrorist organization!

Nukes Boston's FleetCenter, the site of this years National Democratic Convention, in a defensive first strike.

Claims weapons of mass destruction, spirited out of Baghdad by anti-American Liberals prior to The President's liberation of Iraq, being harbored by The Democrats on convention site.

"It was us or them," said The President, falling even as he spoke from the seat of his black mountain bike into a rock filled ditch.

The President's security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, reached for comment regarding the nuclear strike against the Boston sports and entertainment stadium, said only:

"They're gonna' have to refund my Prince tickets now, right?" 

Green Party vice presidential running mate, Peter Camejo, said something about an avocado but nobody heard what it was.

 

"I was lost when I found you. Or did you find me?"
 
Ginny sighed.
 
"I was lost myself, Rebecca. We found each other."
 
"It seems so unlikely, doesn't it?" Rebecca's face shone a moment in the rays of the westering sun.
 
Ginny leaned slightly and kissed Rebecca's lips.
 
Above them an angel whispered, "I love you" in a voice, Ginny later recalled, "Like  a million golden bells chiming in a mansion big as the sky." 
 
 

"(You can't always get what you want)
(You can't always get what you want)
(You can't always get what you want)
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find
You get what you need" C2 - all new low carb Coke!

Ah, FucK that Shit!

More Toast!

(thanks to Keno's Rolling Stones Lyrics Page for the Rolling Stones Lyrics and, of course, The Coca-Cola Company for the inspiration)

This post brought to you by the del tag

The flag on the pole:
red, white and blue. It's shadow,
without nation, black.

Wild in the Streets

There are animals moving through the streets tonight.
I can see them from here -

muscles rippling beneath dark fur,
feral eyes glinting, snouts moist and twitching
under yellow sodium light.

I hear the sound of hooves
against the asphalt, clicking.
I glimpse a lupine tongue
rolling over pointed teeth, licking.

Wolves in the street!
I lose count at ten.
This must be
a dream menagerie -
passing below my window now,
bears larger than men.

Past sleeping cars wide eyed deer
pause then cautiously proceed. Tonight
the line between hunter and hunted
is erased by some unknown need.

What drives them on I cannot say.
But on they come, on and away!

Wild boar snorting, rats by the hundreds scurrying.
Mountain lions, serpents and horses,
all of them hurrying.

There is a rhythm in that motion, a pulse
that matches my own.
Deep within my blood I feel it quicken and begin.

Now I am moving down the stairs,
the doorknob turns in my hand,
cool air rushes in.

An old one, previously unpublished so far as I know.