Grace Slick - Chronic Alcoholism Kills - People Love Rock Bands

 Yep, that's me, up in the middle of the night. Only thing to do is to pad barefoot to the baffroom and listen to one Rick Fisher from Tulsa OK.

Topic perfect for me. Pelvic Floor Dysfunction. Susan Wilcox, the phyiscal therapist.

Cmon, Susan, Get to the point. 

Leaky bladder. She never discussed how to fix it, so I looked it up myself and sent myself an email.

Kegel exercises.

...

Below is a note from Rem, the Roslyn Postman. 

BTW, I can barely see as I am not wearing my reading glasses. 

Not required for employees, so long as they're vaccinated. We never enforced the mask requirement for customers.                                

     It's safe to travel now, so long as you're vaccinated. All the same, I wouldn't travel internationally--that would probably make me nervous too. I will be travelling (domestically) by plane in September.

     Finished the Richard Himmel novel and started a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" novel, "Starship Titanic," by Terry Jones. 

    Why would I want to read that? Jones was a member of Monty Python. So far it's not as ribald as I expected, and with some decent situation humor. Unbeknownst to the people on the ship the construction amounted to an insurance scam and the ship is slowly falling apart.--Rem

     Ruth comments that she is surprised she has never read the book. They should  have prescribed it at Goddard College. 

...

Why did I look up Grace Slick? She is still alive - at 81 - but has had TERRIBLE problems with addictions. 

She has all white hair. 

Read about her on Wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Slick

Hope the above link works.

...

Was looking up my famous poem PEOPLE LOVE ROCK BANDS. Wrote this when I went to see Jack Cassady of HOT TUNA at the Keswick.

Entered that poem into several contests. The winner is US, both you and I. Though locating the poem would take several days.

https://ruthzdeming.blogspot.com/search?q=people+love+rock+bands

Here's a terrific blog o mine. 

Click here. 

...

Why did I get out of bed?

Bad dreams.

Watched on PBS something very moving about native Americans. The man suffered from substance abuse for many years. Was clean for about 18, since he's a role model for his son.

;;;;

Oh! Now I remember last night, she said, like a woman who drank 18 bottles of vodka last night.

Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed a Pulitzer Winner and did a very fine job. The girl's dad was incarcerated for years for two rapes. When she and dad finally met, he said, I treated them as if they were objects and not people. I had no empathy for them.

The morrow I will come back after 'naming names.'

Walter Straus - b. 1918 - dunno if he's dead or alive - did not like my poetry.

"Now here's a good poem," he said, and referred me to EVELYN.

Ah, now I remember. It's Evelyn Hope. 

Summary

The speaker of the poem is an older man sitting with the corpse of Evelyn Hope, a 16-year-old girl who has recently died. He is "thrice her age" (line 21). Even though she "had scarcely heard [his] name" (line 9), he longed for her. She was too young to have yet loved, so he never made any direct proposal and wonders whether it is now too late.

He spends much of his address praising her purity and reflecting on how their relationship as "fellow mortals" (line 24) might have made them partners under other circumstances. He assures himself that their union is not forever prohibited and believes God has merely delayed it until they meet again and he can have her.

When they rejoin, he will tell her of the many phases of life he has passed since this moment, but will also assure her that she has always been missing from his happiness. He promises to her corpse that he will always love her. He then places a leaf into her "sweet cold hand" as a secret that she will see when she reawakens with God and which will communicate to her his promise.

Analysis

Despite the profuseness of the speaker's passion in this poem, he is easily categorized as disgustingly creepy. One gets the sense that Browning, in this poem published in 1855, wanted to explore the type of unfettered control fantasy that characterizes the Duke in "My Last Duchess," but without the sophistication in language, the charm, or the dramatic irony that pulls us into the earlier poem. Though a dramatic monologue, this poem lacks dramatic stakes - one gets the sense that the speaker is not worried about being interrupted during his long wail to the corpse, which could suggest he is a powerful man, and so he is able to expound on his feelings.

The most immediate grotesqueness of the situation is its physical circumstances. The speaker has obviously lusted after this girl from afar, without having ever made an effort to introduce himself. He acknowledges that she is too young to have yet loved, but this did not deter him from having developed an attraction deep enough that he believes they are fated to meet again in the afterlife. Again, the fact that she might have "scarcely heard his name," and yet he is given the opportunity to sit for an hour with her corpse suggests that he might be a man of renown who had picked out this young girl as a future conquest.

What is perhaps creepiest about the poem, however, is his insistence on expressing his feelings in such a pronounced pure form. He does not acknowledge the inappropriateness of such an attraction, but instead assumes that her nature of "spirit, fire and dew" (line 20) has made her an appropriate match for him. When he places the leaf in her hand at the poem's end, he means it to be a symbol of something pure and perfect, entirely unaware that he is crossing lines of propriety. The dramatic irony here does not draw us in as the duke's charismatic use of language does in "My Last Duchess", but instead horrifies us more, since this speaker is doubly unaware of how grossly inappropriate his actions and long-gestating affections are.

In the end, the poem is mostly concerned with the psychology of self-delusion. As noted above, the speaker is unaware of the extent of his delusion, so that the further he goes in assuming that he and the girl are fated to be reunited, the more we see his lack of connection with reality. His insistence on understanding their relationship (or lack thereof) in terms of godliness and purity only shields what we can assume is a much baser sexual lust. Of course, he'll never realize this but instead will spend the rest of his life considering himself a martyr for having lost this young girl, which makes the point that despite its title, this poem is not about Evelyn Hope at all but instead about a powerful man's level of delusions and grotesque perversions.

...

Night-night, Little Ruthie.

"Fra Lippo Lippi" Summary and AnalysisPrevious Section

Changing the Window to a Door - Concentration Camp Liberation, 67 yrs this month - Prose Poem: Death Watch for Uncle Marvin

I've lived on Cowbell Road since 1990. That's 22 years. My sister Donna suggested I put in a door in my kitchen so I can eat outside on my deck. Well, now that I'm $50 richer from winning third prize in the short story contest, I decided to spring for a new door.

It would never have happened if carpenter Dave Small hadn't been working a couple doors down. He gave me a good price and began work two days ago.

Dave and Chevy w/over 200,000 miles. He's a very active man. He sings in an Abington chorus. His wife is a police dispatcher. They have 5 kids and 8 grands.

Dave said he recognized me from Hope Community Church in Willow Grove. My friend Alex Zachariah took me to hear holocaust survivor Marianne Fischer tell her amazing story of surviving after the Nazis rounded up the Hungarians (like me!)

Can't quite remember, but she did have a baby in the camps, who died, and she later married the father. She converted from Judaism to Christianity b/c her piano or violin teacher helped her through the ordeal.

First order of biz was transplanting the bleeding hearts that stood in the way of the new steps Dave would build me.

Dave moved them for me. I also took a sprig and planted it in the front yard of the Abington Demings.

You can see the window on the right. He's constructing big posts. That's an azalea in front.

Dave arrived around 8 am and stayed until my naptime 5:45 pm.

I was busy working on my Guest Column for the Intell so I only saw the last 15 minutes of the Rockford Files. I had actually napped earlier w/Scott. We were watching one of the Holocaust programs in memory of the 6 million Jews and others who were methodically exterminated - like insects - by the Germans.

The show we watched was about a married couple who survived Auschwitz. Prisoners actually had sex in the camps. And this fellow Jack and his beautiful wife are still having sex today.

What about that nut from Norway who killed 71 Muslims? That man is not mentally ill. Neither was Hitler. I don't know how you'd describe them. I suppose "human annihilists" might be a good word.

The reason I chose this below prose-poem is b/c my "Gramma Green" lost many of her family members in the Holocaust. My other grandmother, Lily, never discussed it.

Gramma Green would position herself in front of the TV on Silsby Road in Cleveland Heights and scream out in horror at all the terrible things going on in the world.

She was the mother of three fine children:

Photo of Left to Right, Uncle Marvin, Dad, Aunt Hy. All dead.

Note to dad: Hi Dad. Doing great, thanks. You'd love my new windows. Miss you soooo much. You'd be 91, brave man that you were. Love, Ruthie

THE DEATH WATCH FOR UNCLE MARVIN

Hi Kevin (said my email),

Just came home from a poetry reading at Barnes and Noble Jenkintown.

I read my 3-page poem “People Follow Rock Bands” to thunderous applause. People came out of the aisles to hear me, every goddam aisle was emptied out. They left behind their half-read books, they were trying to get them read before closing time so they wouldn’t have to buy them, but they knew they’d end up buying them b/c they’re booklovers, all of them.

And when I finished my poem the cashiers too came over to me and even the assistant manager who was drinking chai in the indoor cafe. They all just sort of rushed in and lifted me onto their shoulders and carried me around the store three times, just before they dropped me off in the parking lot at my snowy car.

I flipped on the wipers and brushed the snowdust from the back windows for my drive home in the snowfall, up The Fairway and down Washington Lane.

When I came to where it deadends at Terwood Road I paused for a moment at the pass, only for a second, and watched the lovely pasture glowing with snow and night sky, before I made my crucial left turn, and the horses had all been led to the barn for the night.

And then I came home and the phone rang.

Kevin, it always rings the moment I get in the door. It was my mother. Her voice was normal.

“He died?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What time?”

“Eight-ten.”

“Oh, eight-ten on St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Yes, I think my father died on St. Patrick's Day, too.”

“He did,” I said. “I remember you told me.”

And I thought of our family and the significance of the dates of things. I for example was born on Christmas and christened on Valentine’s Day.

“We were all holding a death watch,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a death watch,” she said.

“Let’s just say that I was holding a death watch.”

Pause.

“He went real fast,” I said.

“Yes. They were giving him morphine.”

The life supports had been stopped. And he was deep in there, deep inside, curled up like an embryo. We come in that way and go out that way.

He wanted an orthodox burial. He and my father both....just loved the Jews like crazy.

“Three hours,” I said. “He was gone in 3 hours. I was thinking about him all day, on the off.”

“I was eating Tastycakes,” mom said.

I concentrated intently on being with him when I was driving to my poetry group at 7:15. He would die an hour later when Barbara Wagner was reading her poems. She was the featured speaker.

My mind kept wandering while she read. She was good, but my mind kept going over to the side and I was reviewing my life. Thinking mostly about a poem I was working on about throwing away an old mattress. It was a long involved poem of 8 pages.

And I was reviewing it the moment his invisible presence departed and went out into the ether, that good man.

Mom's Birthday 91 - Reuniting with my back surgeon, the great Guy Lee, MD

At 1:30, Mom called. She loved the card I painted for her.

 I wanted her to get it precisely on August 8, her b'day, so I went to a reliable PO (at the Bryn Athyn PO, the one closest to my house, it took a month for a simple post card to reach someone).

This time, I drove from my credit union in Horsham to the PO. Sam had given me directions. It was a nice new post office and Rick told me it should get there the next day.

Only $1. 12.

I erred in telling Mom I was about to leave to see my back surgeon b/c now she's gonna ask me how my back is.

I HATE talking about health problems..... except to YOU, mon cherie!

As Mom cleans out her house before the transmigration into the Big Sky, she likes me to go through her letters and then throw em out.

I painted the back of the card yellow, the way I was taught in acrylics class taught by a young man Chris, who kindly called me Ms. Matisse, cuz I like patterns.

I cut out shapes, as you can see, from a nature mag I found at Scott's, then glued em on with Elmer's Glue via Q-tip. I wear blue latex-free gloves that Rich Fleisher got me at Sam's Club. 

On the bottom, I pasted on the Marine Corps logo, wishing Mom a happy 29th - she would never tell me her age when I asked her - plus the closing lines from my late Uncle Marvin, dad's older brother, and a closing line "With love" from my dad.

Actually dad's 'with love' was cut from a letter to his future mother/law, who he referred to as Mrs. Begis. I don't believe he ever called her by name during the 36-yr marriage of my parents.

Dad served in WW2 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was a staff sergeant and a paymaster cuz he was a fast typist.

He told me he'd read 16 books a week there. 

Dad was the most disciplined person I've ever met. A great role model.

Dad died young - 59 - lung cancer that meta'd to his brain. When I was approaching my 59th b'day, I kept wondering if I'd make it. I'm 67.5 today and doing just fine. Thanks for inquiring.

Dad's death kit:



Two years ago this month, I had back surgery with the great Guy Lee, MD, of Abington hospital.

I'd been having some problems recently and wanted to see what he thot:

As I wrote out the symptoms, I remember doing the same thing for him yrs ago and that he liked reading my hieroglyphics.



Natch, I had NONE of the symptoms when Scott n I walked into his office.

He told me I may have arthritis OR that there's anudder sciatic nerve on the other side of my left leg.

The body is endlessly complicated.

Here's my main man, Guy Lee, MD.

Guy and his buddies have a rock band. In surgery, he plays Metallica. I told him a couple of new bands that I've been listening to on YouTube.

He wrote em down: Morrissey, who he's heard of, and National. 

Guy and his buddies went to see ..... who is this?

I'll tell you at the bottom of this note.

DO-GOODERS FOR MANKIND: Guy Lee and a bunch of orthopedic docs fly to Honduras once a year, in January or February, to perform surgery.

They land in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. The airport is filled with militia men. The country is one of the drug capitals of Central America. 

Lee said it has the highest murder rate in the world.

Doesn't bother this deeply religious man, who says the people are wonderful there. His son, a senior at LaSalle High School, who speaks Spanish well, may accompany him. He's thinking of going into medicine.

My sister Donna and I will meet at mom's at 5 pm.

Talked to Donna last nite and told her what I was making for the b'day dinner.

It's my "Live Forever" salad... steamed green beans, asparagus, chunks of Cabot cheese (made by small farms in VT), fresh kale, sunflower seeds, chopped onion, green & red peppers, peanuts, and a dressing from mayo, moutarde, olive oil, and fresh garlic.

"You have energy at this hour?" Donna asked. 

"Yes," I said. "I just got up from my nap."


Can this be  Ozzy Osbourne napping?