Smith-Rowe had a goal and an assist. And Bukayo Saka had a goal and an assist. But it is Pierre-Emrick Aubameyang that Uncle Albert knows.*
And he did get the other goal.
09.26.21
________________
* See here, “Arsenal 2, Tottenham 2, Kristen Lavransdatter 3.” And here, “The fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Part II).”
On another death.
The paper said, “family and close friends,” so I didn’t go.
We were friends, but how close? Besides, I didn’t want to go.
Still, I wasn’t surprised when Axel
called to ask where I was. He meant why I wasn’t. I said I didn’t know. And he
didn’t press, I am guessing because he knows I don’t explain “why” very well.
Maybe he regretted asking as soon as he had. Or maybe he wasn’t asking at all;
he was just calling.
This is the Axel I have been knowing, as
folks say where I used to live, since Alva McAllen died seven years ago. I met
him at her wake, but he didn’t do her funeral. Now Anders had died, Anders
Avril, the only French Lutheran in the Valley, according to Axel. And he did do
his funeral. And where was I?
But he didn’t push it.
Which was kind of him though I was ready. I was pretty sure
he would call. And I was pretty sure he’d ask where I was (meaning, why wasn’t
I there?). And I had rehearsed my replies. There was a shorter one: Anders was
more Axel’s friend than mine, and I figured if I qualified as “close” someone
would tell me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel I could “just show up.”
And there was a
longer one.
 |
| “It's not going in that's the problem; it's not coming out.”* |
09.20.21
_______________
* Aristippos on brothels (among other things). Aristippos of Cyrene, and his faithful Synopean companion Diogenes, appear in several posts.
The graphic is from Wise Wisecracks, in preparation for online publication by Rantrage Press. Watch this spot!
 |
|
“ceiling fan” – cellphone drawing by m ball |
“You know,” Roz said, “you are supposed to be
taking all of your pills all the time?” We were in bed. She lies on the right
if you are looking at us from the foot of the bed. She was on her side, checking her alarm. I lie on the other side. I was looking at the ceiling except my eyes were closed.
“I do know,” I said. “Only if I don’t
take some of them it’s easier to remember to do that.”
09.20.21
Anger management
“I read what you wrote,” Roz said.
“You’re doing
more of that lately,” I said. “Why?”
“I almost always
read what you write. I just don’t often say anything about it.”
“Oh,” I said. My
left ear was buzzing again. “But you have something to say this time.”
“Yes.”
I waited. The
buzzing stopped and started again: it’s like a cricket that can’t stop
screaming. It doesn’t go buzz-buzz-buzz; it goes zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
on the D above the D above high-C – on our piano, which is out of tune. I
waited.
“You sounded
angry,” Roz said.
“Oh.” Then: I was afraid of that.”
Now Roz waited.
“I was angry, but
I didn’t want to sound angry.”
“Why?”
“Maybe only to
you,” I said hopefully. “I sounded angry maybe only to you – you know me so well.”
“But why were
you?”
“Angry?”
“Yes!” Now she
was trying not to sound angry. And she was succeeding. She wasn’t succeeding in
not sounding impatient, however.
“When people are
illogical, it upsets me,” I said. “Smart people. But if they have an opinion
about something and they’ve decided they’re right, which they pretty much
always do, they just bang ahead and argue it any which way. They don’t think that
d doesn’t follow k.”
“Or that you can’t
draw a straight line from one place to another because there are hills in
between.”
“And ditches.
More ditches than hills. They think they’re leading blind men and there are no
ditches.”
“Yes,” Roz said
because she knows about Jesus the same as I do. What he said about the blind
leading the blind, only this case the lead-ers weren’t blind, they just didn’t
believe in ditches. But ditches there were, every ten yards or so.
 |
| Flat-screen, cellphone drawing by m ball |
“Are you watching that?” Roz said because I was sitting in
front of the flat-screen, and there were pictures skating across it but there
was no sound coming from it.
The screen was in front of me. Roz was standing to the right of it but closer to me. The farther-away pictures were
of golfers. The sound was off because the golfers were accompanied by commentators.
I like to listen to the swish and click of the clubs hitting the balls, but you can’t do that without
voices telling you about what the clubs and balls are thinking, as if they
could. More illogic.
“I was,” I said, “but
I don’t have to.” And I turned it off. “Why?” I said.
“I wanted to ask
you about your medication,” she said. I waited. “Are you taking
it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Some of it,” I
said. I looked at the TV as if the golfers might have come back on of their own accord. They had not.
“Most of it,” I said. “Most of the time.”
09.18.21
This morning I picked up my cellphone to read “the news,” which I did until I came on a story that began, “You can draw a straight line from [one very complicated historical event of about twenty-five years ago] to [another very complicated historical event of about twenty-five days ago].” And I stopped. “You can draw a straight line,” I said in my mind, “from Archangel to Cape Horn, but it would never get there.” I said, “You can’t trust a story that begins that way. It isn’t only going to be too simple, it’s not going to be true. Especially, it’s not going to be true to life. It’ll only prove a point that won’t be true either.”
Then, I declared that I wasn’t going to read “the news” for the rest of the week. It’s not a declaration I’m likely to keep to. And I’ll be sorry when I don’t.
Selah.
09.14.21
_______________
* I don’t usually write my post in a minute-and-a-half like I’ve written this one. It usually takes me a minute-and-a-half per word. So, take that into account, gentle reader.
Excursus
In which the blogger, like the narrator in a Henry Fielding novel, steps aside from the action to tell the reader what he thinks might be going on. Not ought to be! The blogger doesn’t have Fielding’s temperament, or his assurance. Thus, a parable, not an essay on form.
It is as if ...
It landed there when there was nothing but pasture and a few sheep. Later, grass would grow up around it. At some point, the field would flood, and the plane would sink. Someone would take the wings and dig up the half-buried wheels to take them, too, and it would sink farther into the ground. And more grass would grow up around it. Still, there it was, not far into the field at the end of the street, the half-buried fuselage, a two-seater where the pilot sat in the back and the passenger sat in the front. And you could still sit in it on the iron skeletons of the seats.
 |
| When the lion lies down with the lamb. |
The pilot had
started off not expecting anything to go wrong, though not expecting anything
to go right either — just going, in ever-widening circles, figuring the center
would hold, or if it didn’t, another center would take hold.
Then, there was weather or a mechanical
problem, or the plane ran out of gas — depending on who spoke the parable — and
the pilot was forced to land. [This is the way of parables, as opposed to
allegories, especially painted allegories. There are details in them, the
parables, that do not matter. So, the same parable can be told in different
ways at different times to different audiences, as Jesus does. And the teller
doesn’t need to be always busy making everything fit. Because
everything doesn’t fit. Jesus knows this if anyone does. Scientists are like
allegorists. They have the allegorist’s imagination. As do apocalypticists. All
three are interested both in how everything must fit (dammit!) and in
doom.]
The pilot bumped the plane down in a field
of nothing but grass and a few sheep. He climbs out of the cockpit and limps
away from the plane that has limped to a halt in a sheep pasture, dazed. The
plane is dazed, and the pilot is dazed. Or, he thinks he should be, so he limps
away.
He sits down under a tree, and he wonders where the nearest roadway might
be—in which direction the road might be? And where might the road take him?
A sheep comes up and asks if there is
any way the pilot can move his plane. Under it is just the grass, the sheep
finds, it has a taste for. The pilot shakes his mazy head. “No speaka d’
Ovino,” he bleated. He shook his head again, swung his feet under him, climbed
to them, and limed away. He still isn't hurt, but he limps for sympathy, even
if only sympathy from an uncomprehending sheep.
It’s as if that. What you just heard.
09.13.21
Metafriction
starring Willa Something-or-other
This Willa teaches what used to be called “English” at the local high school that used to be called T. J. Jackson. Now it’s called “Language Arts,” what Willa teaches; and the high school is called [Madrid]. She’s a friend of Roz, and of Uncle Albert; at least, they are all in a book group together.
She said she read the blog, and she asked me if I was writing metafiction. Her voice sounded like reheated coffee.
I didn’t say, “What’s that?” I said, “Not that I know of.”
But she said, “Do you know what that is?” So I had to say that I didn’t.
“No,” I said.
I asked Roz. She said, “How do I know if you know what it is?” Then: “But Willa wrote a play about it. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” I said.
“We went to it!”
“Oh.”
“At the high school She wrote it, she directed it, she had a part in it. She played William Gass.” I didn’t ask who William Gass was because it looked like Roz was going to say something else. She did: “Wait a minute!” she said.
She went away for a while, maybe a few minutes, maybe ten; and she came back with this.
09.05.21
Later, in bed - and later still.
continued from last time
“The letters.” She rolled onto her side and was looking at me.
“ ... ,” I said. Or, I didn't say because I was trying not to.
Without her glasses she herself looks unfocused. Without them, too, her eyes have to defend themselves. She looked fierce.
“That Albert was referring to,” she said.
“Oh. Yes. Yes, of course,” I said.
“My only concern,” Dr. Feight was saying, who normally says next to nothing but seemed to be feeling chatty, “is how much they may take out of you.” Now he was talking about the letters.
“Well, I can’t think much. I don’t really work at them.” I stopped.
“They just come to you?”
“Yes. It’s more that I transcribe them than write them.”
“But you are writing them, just you’re not writing in your own voice?”
“No.”
“You are writing with your own pen?!”
“Yes,” I said, “of course.”
I didn’t say, “different pens” (plural) and that was because they all had different pens, different colors. And different hand-writings, of course.
09.01.21
_________________
“If you’re new to the blog, you can catch up with Roz’s story here. And you can catch up to Dr. Feight’s story here, whether you’re new or not.”
