Neil Young - Walk With Me

It's bwoken (insert sad face)

Dropped my camera yesterday morning as I was preparing
to leave for the weekend. The good news: I can still take pics.
Bad news: can't view them or do anything with the touch screen.
That's ok. It will all work out. I am going to get a new one.
I have consulted Ian, who is one of the best photographers
I know. He just got a new, affordable amazing camera, so I am
going to see what he says (what say thee, Ian?).

Spent Friday night in the ER with Marie. She fell at the nursing
home. Her foot just gave out on her (bones are shot in one of her
feet and it just crumples with no notice). So grateful she did not
break a bone. Bruised face, stitches in the corner of her mouth,
bruised palm. She is an amazing 92 yr old. Still drives. Still lives
in her own home. Cognitively losing ground but still aware of most
things going on. I don't know if Gene will ever get to leave long-term
care, and I fear both of them are giving up. This is hard to watch
and hard to live and hard to not feel sorry for me as the watcher,
the one who can do nothing but wait for phone calls re: falls, meds,
wills. The one who needs to just do what needs to be done (as I do)
and try not to think too much about how difficult it is to watch the
end near. Both could live several more years, but both are getting
tired. I just gotta get some rest and do what I can do to be as
positive as I can be and as helpful and as present. Mostly, as present.

Glorious 4th birthday celebration yesterday with my precocious and
amazing and oh so dear to me grandson. He was really busy so GiGi
took the back seat, but that's ok. He knows I was there. He won't forget.
Or maybe he will, and that will be ok, too. He enjoyed me yesterday.
That's what matters today.

I don't remember being 4. I am not sure why I think of this question
so often: what is your earliest memory, but I do.
And I don't know what it is or why it even matters
but it seems it does for some reason and I can't
let go the wondering.

You know you live in rural western KY when fireworks are still going
off on the 10th (started going off in late June). Redneck haven or heaven,
I suppose. I would go off on a tangent about how someone can afford
these large, expensive fireworks displays but can't afford to pay child support
nor pay the bills but I'll try to refrain.

On Call

My least favorite night of any week. I pray for it to be a quiet night.
Already been on the road all day. Was my day to check on everyone
in the crisis unit in Hopkinsville. So, I was thinking as I was driving
home of all of the things I needed to do but didn't feel compelled
to do, but I have managed to accomplish the following things since
arriving home at 6: took Molly to the cemetery for a walk, washed a
load of clothes, started the spaghetti sauce, loaded the dishwasher
and started it, washed what would not fit in the dishwasher, moved
around the living room furniture, put clothes in dryer and started
another load, went through the mail, read an article in a magazine,
read a few poems, gave Molly her meds, food and water, pulled
some weeds, took out some recycling. Now to go cook the spaghetti
and start reading something. Reading The Dubliners but not in the mood
tonight for another story in there, so I think I shall start reading
another Denis Johnson novel--Angels. Here's a Johnson poem I like:

The White Fires of Venus
by Denis Johnson


We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can't tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
"Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethoscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don't know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged."

They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don't know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.