I've loved Colfax for a long time; it's always been a central compass through my life, a main thoroughfare, and also a cobbled-together melting pot of street culture. So I like to keep an eye out for particular examples of Colfax style.
This week, the hubby spotted the fellow on a scooter with full Harley leathers. We spotted a gentleman in his late 50's in the top-down bright blue convertible shouting "Jesus F-ing **#!% %)#&) %)(#%)#(%#)) )((#*#*#%&%" as he took a turn, the gentleman serenading the world with his version of "under my umbrella" (nicely on-key if a little loud) from the bus stop, and the unholy union of a hippie and Dean Martin striding along in tight bell-bottoms, a fitted bright blue lounge jacket with the sleeves pushed up, ponytail, mutton chops, beaded necklaces and a houndstooth-checked Trilby. Since he's a hybrid we've decided he's a "hypie" because it sounds better than "hipbrid."
Friday, July 17, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wildlife in the City
Every now and then it gets a little tiring that the neighbor's backyard barbeque at midnight on a weekday is twenty feet from my bedroom window. On days where the people make me crazy, the wildlife in the area helps to keep me on an even keel.
This morning was the regular bus routine, but stopping to smile at a baby chickadee - fully fledged, but still about an ounce lighter than all the massive three-ounce adults - doing its best to carry away a cookie from the bus stop. Nervous, tentative hops toward it in case the giants sitting on the bench were to attack, then a comical effort with neck craned backward to wobble away with a piece of cookie as big as the bird. Bird got the cookie, bench cheers!
In the park, we have obvious geese, goslings of all sizes, herons, loons, rabbits (though fewer now than before the plague purge a year ago), larks and ducks. The larks are to be found in many traffic crossings near water, since it seems like a good place for insects to congregate in the heat, swooping in daredevil arcs through the traffic pattern and coming up with bugs in reward of their aerial antics. The ones in traffic in slower areas swoop almost lazily. Aurora larks are slow enough to follow easily in their flight paths. Larks at Colfax and Colorado zip through traffic at high speed. The ones living under the gazebo in city park are far too fast to capture with my amateur camera. They flit in under the gazebo at such speeds that I wonder if they don't sometimes bounce off the back wall.
Red tailed hawks and owls have taken pigeons from our roof (and welcome to them, we have spares). Of course there are crows, ravens, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers (one determined to get into the side of my house or the side of my lamppost), starlings. We have none of the swift little lizards that pop up in dryer and lower locales, but there are foxes in the park, and our neighbor has spotted one on the roof of our garage. We have raccoons, one of which took up residence under our back porch at one point, one of which startled me with a head the size of a football peeping up out of a storm drain. The raccoons are surely pilfering the trash. I'm amazed the foxes find enough to live on here downtown, and amazed at how well they normally hide. Laying out on the back deck one night netted sightings of at least three different types of bats, one of whom found its way under my old refrigerator in the kitchen as well.
The insect life is diverse enough to offer entertainment as well, from the lovely fat monarch caterpillar I found munching the onion stalks (leading to a butterfly with the worst breath in the world) to weird spiky ladybug larvae, darting dragonflies unable to handle a curve so they carve insanely angular paths over the back yard in Summer, and one dragonfly as fat and long as my index finger, bright green with an eight-inch transparent wingspan and looking like something out of the Cambrian, sitting on the sidewalk one day on my way to work. I was tempted to take it along if it were dead but know they can sit quietly waiting for prey, so figured I didn't need to lose a finger to the dinosaur bug by taking that chance. One of the prettiest pictures from my yard was a white spider as fat as the full moon weaving a web laced with raindrops in the middle of a thicket of tall grass, the brightest thing in a blue-grey day of rain. The neighbors, truly thoughtful as they more usually are, have taken to mowing this patch of grass for us, so I'm thinking of putting up a fence in defense of moonlight and ladybugs.
This morning was the regular bus routine, but stopping to smile at a baby chickadee - fully fledged, but still about an ounce lighter than all the massive three-ounce adults - doing its best to carry away a cookie from the bus stop. Nervous, tentative hops toward it in case the giants sitting on the bench were to attack, then a comical effort with neck craned backward to wobble away with a piece of cookie as big as the bird. Bird got the cookie, bench cheers!
In the park, we have obvious geese, goslings of all sizes, herons, loons, rabbits (though fewer now than before the plague purge a year ago), larks and ducks. The larks are to be found in many traffic crossings near water, since it seems like a good place for insects to congregate in the heat, swooping in daredevil arcs through the traffic pattern and coming up with bugs in reward of their aerial antics. The ones in traffic in slower areas swoop almost lazily. Aurora larks are slow enough to follow easily in their flight paths. Larks at Colfax and Colorado zip through traffic at high speed. The ones living under the gazebo in city park are far too fast to capture with my amateur camera. They flit in under the gazebo at such speeds that I wonder if they don't sometimes bounce off the back wall.
Red tailed hawks and owls have taken pigeons from our roof (and welcome to them, we have spares). Of course there are crows, ravens, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers (one determined to get into the side of my house or the side of my lamppost), starlings. We have none of the swift little lizards that pop up in dryer and lower locales, but there are foxes in the park, and our neighbor has spotted one on the roof of our garage. We have raccoons, one of which took up residence under our back porch at one point, one of which startled me with a head the size of a football peeping up out of a storm drain. The raccoons are surely pilfering the trash. I'm amazed the foxes find enough to live on here downtown, and amazed at how well they normally hide. Laying out on the back deck one night netted sightings of at least three different types of bats, one of whom found its way under my old refrigerator in the kitchen as well.
The insect life is diverse enough to offer entertainment as well, from the lovely fat monarch caterpillar I found munching the onion stalks (leading to a butterfly with the worst breath in the world) to weird spiky ladybug larvae, darting dragonflies unable to handle a curve so they carve insanely angular paths over the back yard in Summer, and one dragonfly as fat and long as my index finger, bright green with an eight-inch transparent wingspan and looking like something out of the Cambrian, sitting on the sidewalk one day on my way to work. I was tempted to take it along if it were dead but know they can sit quietly waiting for prey, so figured I didn't need to lose a finger to the dinosaur bug by taking that chance. One of the prettiest pictures from my yard was a white spider as fat as the full moon weaving a web laced with raindrops in the middle of a thicket of tall grass, the brightest thing in a blue-grey day of rain. The neighbors, truly thoughtful as they more usually are, have taken to mowing this patch of grass for us, so I'm thinking of putting up a fence in defense of moonlight and ladybugs.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Springtime in the Rockies
My neighbor is out mowing his lawn. He happens to be a big smexy Gothic Bouncer, tats and muscles and all, so you would think this would be a sexy thing.
However, aside from his growing bald spot being visible from above, he's hunched over a tiny hand-pushed mower in a navy wifebeater, with tiny thin-rimmed silver glasses and the last three quarters of an inch of a cigarette (one filter, two millimeters remaining of tobacco) clenched grimly between his cynical lips. He reminds me that it is not possible for a Goth to mow a lawn without coming out looking like a cross between Hunter Thompson and Spider Jerusalem.
A little further down the way is Colfax, already beginning to yield spring bounty. This is the same street where I've seen three multi-hundred pound sisters in tank tops and short shorts pile out of a pickup truck carrying a tuba (the sisters, not the truck), an elegant African-American lady with red lips, heels and nails in a cheetah-print cat suit pushing a pram with a baby in a matching cheetah outfit, and of course the tutu skater stopping traffic with his glissando gliding across the street.
So this year I have an eye out as usual for the carnival, and have seen the occasional blue mohawk or ladybug-spotted business suit. Best one this month was a fellow who looked remarkably like Hugh Jackman putting along on a bright orange scooter, and the red-and-white striped tights, polka-dot top, close-cropped yellow hair and long Grover-blue scarf of the lady who looked after him and fanned herself dramatically, eyebrows raised high as she slinkily lurched down the street with the careful heel to toe gait of a heron.
I love this season.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Editing Memory
The New York Times reports today that scientists have made a breakthrough in editing memory, helping people to forget traumatic incidents, bad habits and more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html?_r=1&em
Release a drug to block several molecules, wipe out an engram.
I'm sure there will be a number of posts by people concerned about use of any such drug. And ethics will be a big concern, because my first thought about this is that really, there isn't anything I think I need to forget. But I have a laundry-list of things I'd like everyone else to forget.
That day in seventh grade, when I abruptly got my first period, while wearing white pants. That can go. I have a list of about forty-three people we (my flying monkey squad and I) need to visit to wipe that one out.
The entire two-day relationship with that guy who insisted we were "soul-mates" once the person I thought was a friend dumped him on me - literally. If we wipe that one out of the minds of the not-friend (different from an um-friend), all spectators, and the gentleman in question, he will be free to find his real soul-mate, in Australia, Tibet or Zimbabwe, having completely forgotten that abruptly forged supposed link and with no hypocrisy whatsoever in his new starry-eyed glomping.
The time the guy left me at a party and I coped by getting drunk, then climbing into the closet so no one would know I was drunk. I still don't know how they thought to look in the closet when they noticed I was gone, but really, the whole thing could go. Twenty people on the brain drug hit list and whammo, my universal lifetime reputation vastly improved.
The time the guy made fondue for our romantic date and it made me really sick and he left me to be cared for by my friend his roommate. The roommate gets a pass for being a true friend.
Now, a lot of these things were twenty years ago now, and the vast majority of the witnesses have already forgotten me entirely, wouldn't recognize me now at all, or have moved into a witness protection program and are living in Antarctica dressed as penguins. But any time I think of running for political office, publishing anything with my real name, or being otherwise visible on the collective social radar, I think back and wonder how many people remember far too much about the person I once was to see clearly the person I now am. And somehow, someone showing up with a laundry list of pernicious details and dumb moves while dressed as a penguin seems more likely to damage my current reputation than even a more sensibly dressed witness might do.
I picture being on "This is Your Life" with a conga line of failed romantic endeavors and every one with its own series of embarrassments. Now, there is always a chance that people simply won't care. It's not as if I've ever hired a nanny under the table or accidentally listed $45,000 in charitable deductions on my tax returns. And, in fact, the majority of my friends who are about a decade younger than I visibly flinch at the very possibility of any personal revelation from younger and more foolish days, as if their own mother were about to tell them about some drunken hippie escapade. With tongue. So I do have a cadre of protectors who would willingly picket the "This is Your Life" set with large sheets to ensure no one saw anything, largely to save their own senses of shock, horror and dismay at old people being juvenile delinquents. But so far, no sheet to drape over the lingering mental images of other old people who were young when I was young and whether more or less foolish than I, at least more sensible about giving out public ammunition.
So the flying monkeys and I are waiting until this thing is widely available, and will be wiping out selective references to "vomit," "soul mates" and "seventh grade." We think this will really be a general public service with widespread benefits, although we have a personal interest in the matter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/health/research/06brain.html?_r=1&em
Release a drug to block several molecules, wipe out an engram.
I'm sure there will be a number of posts by people concerned about use of any such drug. And ethics will be a big concern, because my first thought about this is that really, there isn't anything I think I need to forget. But I have a laundry-list of things I'd like everyone else to forget.
That day in seventh grade, when I abruptly got my first period, while wearing white pants. That can go. I have a list of about forty-three people we (my flying monkey squad and I) need to visit to wipe that one out.
The entire two-day relationship with that guy who insisted we were "soul-mates" once the person I thought was a friend dumped him on me - literally. If we wipe that one out of the minds of the not-friend (different from an um-friend), all spectators, and the gentleman in question, he will be free to find his real soul-mate, in Australia, Tibet or Zimbabwe, having completely forgotten that abruptly forged supposed link and with no hypocrisy whatsoever in his new starry-eyed glomping.
The time the guy left me at a party and I coped by getting drunk, then climbing into the closet so no one would know I was drunk. I still don't know how they thought to look in the closet when they noticed I was gone, but really, the whole thing could go. Twenty people on the brain drug hit list and whammo, my universal lifetime reputation vastly improved.
The time the guy made fondue for our romantic date and it made me really sick and he left me to be cared for by my friend his roommate. The roommate gets a pass for being a true friend.
Now, a lot of these things were twenty years ago now, and the vast majority of the witnesses have already forgotten me entirely, wouldn't recognize me now at all, or have moved into a witness protection program and are living in Antarctica dressed as penguins. But any time I think of running for political office, publishing anything with my real name, or being otherwise visible on the collective social radar, I think back and wonder how many people remember far too much about the person I once was to see clearly the person I now am. And somehow, someone showing up with a laundry list of pernicious details and dumb moves while dressed as a penguin seems more likely to damage my current reputation than even a more sensibly dressed witness might do.
I picture being on "This is Your Life" with a conga line of failed romantic endeavors and every one with its own series of embarrassments. Now, there is always a chance that people simply won't care. It's not as if I've ever hired a nanny under the table or accidentally listed $45,000 in charitable deductions on my tax returns. And, in fact, the majority of my friends who are about a decade younger than I visibly flinch at the very possibility of any personal revelation from younger and more foolish days, as if their own mother were about to tell them about some drunken hippie escapade. With tongue. So I do have a cadre of protectors who would willingly picket the "This is Your Life" set with large sheets to ensure no one saw anything, largely to save their own senses of shock, horror and dismay at old people being juvenile delinquents. But so far, no sheet to drape over the lingering mental images of other old people who were young when I was young and whether more or less foolish than I, at least more sensible about giving out public ammunition.
So the flying monkeys and I are waiting until this thing is widely available, and will be wiping out selective references to "vomit," "soul mates" and "seventh grade." We think this will really be a general public service with widespread benefits, although we have a personal interest in the matter.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Urgent Need to Distract
Once more, the banner is raised on the mailing list. The ever so useful community mailing list I'm on for anime convention management, that is. And the banner in question is that cheerful challenge to post the silliest thread possible.
This time around, at least my friend Erica started the nonsense, instead of me. Often these threads seem to spawn out of my oddball signature lines, which I change whenever the mood for a side comment strikes me. In those cases, they may last for just a few thoroughly off-topic responses. But when any of a certain select few repeat offenders such as Erica purposely starts a thread that's silly, the thread takes on a life of its own and can go like wildfire, the result of the good nature and rampant creativity of the list members. One thread even spawned its own web site (with the help of a friendly web developer) for our imaginings regarding development of the most epic fail convention ever. This time around, Erica decided to go for a more laid-back approach to the silliness, and suggested "MehCon," with the memorable motto "The Premiere Whatever" suggested by artist and friend Mari Kurisato. It's not designed to be an epic fail con, because we can't be bothered to put that much work into failing. We plan to have some kind of costume contest, if the person running it remembers to bring the boxes of stuff from her garage, and if someone passes out so we can dress them up, but otherwise we might just draw on them because we forgot to order any registration materials. I'm thinking Naruto headbands. Someone might do an AMV contest but we're not sure because we have all these discs, and they only brought a VCR. I'm in charge of guests if any show up. I think I have some power bars I can feed them.
We like to occasionally flesh out one of these manically devolved conventions. I envision these as an "action figure" set of self-destruction conventions. EpicfailCon, WhateverCon. The SevereDramaandPoliticsCon would definitely need its own action toy in the line. Possibly one for DeludaCon, all smiles while it's bleeding to death. Wait! You can buy badges for 80% off today only! What do you mean the hotel canceled our contract? Um... ok, we can do it in the parking lot then....
The convention mailing list in general has a lovely high tone, a dedicated community happy to help even people asking the same question that was already asked thirty times, and a lot of really useful information on everything from licensing and permissions to hotel contracts and tax concerns (and that's just this week). It's a public list and even those who do not manage cons sometimes join just to see what the heck we talk about. I do generally try to give useful input to these conversations, and have occasionally sent a baby con manager a six-page answer to a single-line question. I value the serious information on the list greatly, and value the massive combined experience, talent and savvy of the convention members, and I must note there are many, many times when I restrain the urge to post a silly aside for fear that I'll drag the whole list off the rails again.
But at least once a quarter there *ought* to be silliness, and at least once a year it ought to be a seriously dedicated level of silliness, and I am pleased as punch to contribute. I'm not sure whether it's influenced by Spring Fever, and I can't say this is even a tendency to want to draw attention to myself. It's a sheerly irrational determination to enjoy those opportunities for whimsical nonsense. Because really, when all the contracts are signed and the guests are scheduled and the banners are hung, we're running anime cons.
And that is a truly silly thing. We can get as serious as we want about vendor verbiage, but there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit even as we strike sub-paragraph three. And the fact that there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit is an excellent example of the reason anime cons ought to exist in the first place.
I believe the impulse to silliness is one of the highest impulses in human nature. Like the nurturing impulse it is a deep-seated lure to share the most harmless and pleasant method of communicating with and sharing with other beings. The urge to giggle together is a delightful and very healthy way of connecting with all of humanity (and sometimes, dogs, dolphins, horses and birds too).
This belief shows in the way I program for conventions, with panels on the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or Japanese translation leavened by sessions like the Anime Olympics (racing wind-up hopping hedgehogs the participants are only allowed to touch with flyswatters). Seriousness is a valuable and important and, well, serious, contributor to all of our sociocultural achievements. And learning is ingrained, expanded upon, and seen more completely when looked at through the looking glass of humor. We learn what we do and we do what we love. The two should be well entangled.
This time around, at least my friend Erica started the nonsense, instead of me. Often these threads seem to spawn out of my oddball signature lines, which I change whenever the mood for a side comment strikes me. In those cases, they may last for just a few thoroughly off-topic responses. But when any of a certain select few repeat offenders such as Erica purposely starts a thread that's silly, the thread takes on a life of its own and can go like wildfire, the result of the good nature and rampant creativity of the list members. One thread even spawned its own web site (with the help of a friendly web developer) for our imaginings regarding development of the most epic fail convention ever. This time around, Erica decided to go for a more laid-back approach to the silliness, and suggested "MehCon," with the memorable motto "The Premiere Whatever" suggested by artist and friend Mari Kurisato. It's not designed to be an epic fail con, because we can't be bothered to put that much work into failing. We plan to have some kind of costume contest, if the person running it remembers to bring the boxes of stuff from her garage, and if someone passes out so we can dress them up, but otherwise we might just draw on them because we forgot to order any registration materials. I'm thinking Naruto headbands. Someone might do an AMV contest but we're not sure because we have all these discs, and they only brought a VCR. I'm in charge of guests if any show up. I think I have some power bars I can feed them.
We like to occasionally flesh out one of these manically devolved conventions. I envision these as an "action figure" set of self-destruction conventions. EpicfailCon, WhateverCon. The SevereDramaandPoliticsCon would definitely need its own action toy in the line. Possibly one for DeludaCon, all smiles while it's bleeding to death. Wait! You can buy badges for 80% off today only! What do you mean the hotel canceled our contract? Um... ok, we can do it in the parking lot then....
The convention mailing list in general has a lovely high tone, a dedicated community happy to help even people asking the same question that was already asked thirty times, and a lot of really useful information on everything from licensing and permissions to hotel contracts and tax concerns (and that's just this week). It's a public list and even those who do not manage cons sometimes join just to see what the heck we talk about. I do generally try to give useful input to these conversations, and have occasionally sent a baby con manager a six-page answer to a single-line question. I value the serious information on the list greatly, and value the massive combined experience, talent and savvy of the convention members, and I must note there are many, many times when I restrain the urge to post a silly aside for fear that I'll drag the whole list off the rails again.
But at least once a quarter there *ought* to be silliness, and at least once a year it ought to be a seriously dedicated level of silliness, and I am pleased as punch to contribute. I'm not sure whether it's influenced by Spring Fever, and I can't say this is even a tendency to want to draw attention to myself. It's a sheerly irrational determination to enjoy those opportunities for whimsical nonsense. Because really, when all the contracts are signed and the guests are scheduled and the banners are hung, we're running anime cons.
And that is a truly silly thing. We can get as serious as we want about vendor verbiage, but there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit even as we strike sub-paragraph three. And the fact that there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit is an excellent example of the reason anime cons ought to exist in the first place.
I believe the impulse to silliness is one of the highest impulses in human nature. Like the nurturing impulse it is a deep-seated lure to share the most harmless and pleasant method of communicating with and sharing with other beings. The urge to giggle together is a delightful and very healthy way of connecting with all of humanity (and sometimes, dogs, dolphins, horses and birds too).
This belief shows in the way I program for conventions, with panels on the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or Japanese translation leavened by sessions like the Anime Olympics (racing wind-up hopping hedgehogs the participants are only allowed to touch with flyswatters). Seriousness is a valuable and important and, well, serious, contributor to all of our sociocultural achievements. And learning is ingrained, expanded upon, and seen more completely when looked at through the looking glass of humor. We learn what we do and we do what we love. The two should be well entangled.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Ies with Ease
It's obvious that the Queen's English, Cockney, Canadian English, U.S. English, and Australian English are fantastically diverse languages (let's not even start on Indian English today morning).
But every now and then a new facet of the differences strikes me. Reading one small word in this article on an airport outbreak of war between two rival motorcycle gangles in Australia triggered that familiar "wait a minute..." feeling about our mutual (?) language.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090323/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_biker_brawl
Now, it seems there are already a lot of basic items in Australia that end in an "ee" sound, however spelled, whether it's a wallaby, a joey, or a budgie. In some cases though, those are shortenings of longer words (budgerigar) to a comfortable form. And comfortable forms have those ee's on the end more frequently than in U.S. English forms. Here in the U.S. an ie ending seems to have a connotation of something small, cute, childlike, harmless. Little Ann is Annie, little Rebecca is Becky, babies are ee's, and budgies are ee's, and hard core Star Trek fans struggle to be known as Trekkers instead of Trekkies in a desperate bid to be taken seriously, and so far we trend pretty well along the same lines. "ee" is a little more feminized in the U.S. as well, with women more likely than men to be willing to ee-ify any term they are currently using, whether it's sweetie for sweetheart, teenyweeny cutiewootie, or Dougie for Doug, as I heard a lady call to her friend last weekend.
But calling biker gangs "bikies" abruptly raises a flag that we are no longer on home turf. Either Australian English has divorced itself from the baby connotation of the "ee" sound, or in a country with poisonous radar-using furbearing egg-laying platypuses, stretches of hundreds of miles of nothing between dusty outposts, and giant toads that ooze toxins, methamphetamine-dealing biker gangs merely qualify as "cute." Oddly, the wide-spread use of "ee" forms which would be a feminine tendency in the U.S. becomes a back-to-front way of reinforcing the impression of all the testosterone inherent in Australia.
But every now and then a new facet of the differences strikes me. Reading one small word in this article on an airport outbreak of war between two rival motorcycle gangles in Australia triggered that familiar "wait a minute..." feeling about our mutual (?) language.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090323/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_biker_brawl
Now, it seems there are already a lot of basic items in Australia that end in an "ee" sound, however spelled, whether it's a wallaby, a joey, or a budgie. In some cases though, those are shortenings of longer words (budgerigar) to a comfortable form. And comfortable forms have those ee's on the end more frequently than in U.S. English forms. Here in the U.S. an ie ending seems to have a connotation of something small, cute, childlike, harmless. Little Ann is Annie, little Rebecca is Becky, babies are ee's, and budgies are ee's, and hard core Star Trek fans struggle to be known as Trekkers instead of Trekkies in a desperate bid to be taken seriously, and so far we trend pretty well along the same lines. "ee" is a little more feminized in the U.S. as well, with women more likely than men to be willing to ee-ify any term they are currently using, whether it's sweetie for sweetheart, teenyweeny cutiewootie, or Dougie for Doug, as I heard a lady call to her friend last weekend.
But calling biker gangs "bikies" abruptly raises a flag that we are no longer on home turf. Either Australian English has divorced itself from the baby connotation of the "ee" sound, or in a country with poisonous radar-using furbearing egg-laying platypuses, stretches of hundreds of miles of nothing between dusty outposts, and giant toads that ooze toxins, methamphetamine-dealing biker gangs merely qualify as "cute." Oddly, the wide-spread use of "ee" forms which would be a feminine tendency in the U.S. becomes a back-to-front way of reinforcing the impression of all the testosterone inherent in Australia.
It goes in cycles
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/wl_uk_afp/britainusliteraturesuicide
Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.
For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.
Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.
Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.
Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.
For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.
Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.
Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.
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