All Over the Place: On the Eighth Day

By Michael H. Brownstein

The eighth day, well rested, the miracle of universe complete,

the dark dung of darkness and sad light cleansed and organized.

Forgive us our moment when all prayer becomes short stories,

shell shock inability to listen to vibrations of silence,

people wading into the brakes of words—

the sharp shark shard of vowels and their choking curves,

consonants threading into a grand forest choir

each stitch a slip in the wrong direction.

Forgive us our greed and simple idiocy, our lists,

our tears in flesh and psyche, our anger, our augers,

our metal plates, forgive us for taking the deeds

holding the great desk together, forgive us the robberies

of paper and light, of organization and disbelief,

forgive us for stealing purity in psalm and purity in image,

forgive us for every nine day week after week,

forgive us for forgetting where we are, where we come from,

where we belong, forgive us the miracle of rest.

Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Iceage (a novel): Chapter 5. Return

A work in progress.
Chapters will be posted
as they are written.

Vic opened a closet and pulled out a heavy coat and a pair of boots. “You’ll need these.”
    I stepped outside and found there was a world of difference between wearing that coat and my suit. The wind bit at my face and hands. I quickly jammed my hands into my coat pockets.
    Three huts down, Vic pushed me toward a door. Inside we were welcomed by nice, warm heat. We removed our coats and hung them by the door. Then we walked down the hall. He stopped at a door and knocked.

Roger’s Reality: The Camper Saga, Part 3

By Roger Owens

This is the bad part, with a very bright spot right in the middle of it. We’re in South Carolina, rolling down I-95 at a smart 63 miles per hour. That’s as fast as I can go without the transmission on my old Explorer shifting up and down, and it sucks gas bad enough without pushing it. Like I said, we’re not in a hurry. I reckon we’re getting about ten miles to the gallon, two hundred miles on a twenty-gallon tank. Just about right for breaks for old dogs, and old people as well.

From “The Scratching Post”:A memorable meal

By Ken Marks

[Originally posted on The Scratching Post, April 28, 2021. Republished here by permission of the author.]

I’m vaccinated, Linda is vaccinated, and it’s spring — time for a wildflower excursion. But maybe not. We’re in a drought; California is bleached out. So I turned to my main spring resource, the California Wildflower Tipline on Facebook. It features lovely splashes of color that excite wild cravings – “I want that picture, too!” I was cautiously hopeful, and there it was, a post showing carpets of wildflowers near the American River, on the outskirts of Sacramento. Wonderful, because I could also visit with my cousin Steve and his lovely wife, Gretchen. They live in Sacramento. I found a place to stay within 20 minutes of their house, and we were off.
    The drive from San Jose to Sacramento doesn’t get dicey until you’re ready to enter Sacramento. There you’ll find a maze of highway signs that has baffled Google Maps. The signs show Highway 50 branching east out of Interstate 80 as you approach Sacramento. Google Maps disagrees. They show Intrastate 80 as the eastern branch. Frantically, I looked for the invisible Intrastate 80 sign. Nearly an hour later, we arrived at our lodgings.
    Our “hotel” – a very generous a word – was “SureStay Plus Hotel by Best Western.” It consists of a lobby and adjoining restaurant in front of two rows of cell blocks ... er, rooms. The facade is dreary and unwelcoming. No shrubs or flowers separate the blacktop from the lobby. I wouldn’t call it ugly, just a couple of clicks above shabby. Inside, the receptionist sat behind a plate of clear plastic. She seemed safe from our exhalations. We got our room keys and a few vague words about its location. When we opened the door, Linda saw it was a hollow steel plate, which I found consoling. If an axe wielder were to strike our door, he’d be foiled long enough for help to arrive.

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.

Highways and Byways: The Autumn Crocus

By Maik Strosahl

While recovering from my surgery late last fall, we made a trip back to Indiana to take care of some business. We stayed at a very nice Bed and Breakfast in Anderson, near where we used to live and our favorite Mexican restaurant.
    The morning we were leaving, I found some purple flowers just blooming. After doing some research, we identified them as Autumn Crocuses.

Goines On: Shaving thoughts

Click image for more vignettes

For the several-hundredth time, while Goines was shaving, he thought of one of the three white ladies to whom he had been a colored maid, à la the 2011 film The Help. 2011 was the year two of the white ladies entered his life, after UNC’s Office of the President was shaken up by the retirement of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and his replacement took his place, bringing along from her previous gig the assistant who had done her bidding there and would continue to do it at UNC, while supervising Goines.

All Over the Place: A Festivity of Leadership Because Silence...

By Michael H. Brownstein

All right, leader of the sand. All right, he who eats his followers.

All right, Catherine of the wooden raft with wheels and, all right,

Cleo of the heavy carpet and its intrigue in court. Darkness is not

night falling over us, mid day clouds roiling in, electricity,

unease. All right, the misuse of power, blood lusts and scars,

the cutting away of limbs. All right everyone

who cannot contain the promise of their years, all right

all of you with no memory of money and all right

those of you who do. All right avengers of blood, soothsayers

basking in its texture, its taste, the way it feels between fingers,

phlegm and sticky. All right, you who are jealous of shadows,

you who have jealous breath. When the sky wakens to the color

of leaf, the ground littered with autumn, when the sky wakens

to the lines in clouds, the wind calm, the water calm,

when the sky wakens to a pause in the noise of the living, the predators

asleep, when the sky wakens and everything has ended,

a brake in men, a disturbance of depth and fiction, the collapse

of what is allowed (and what is not). All right, enough

has been said—and we continue—one bloody festival, then another,

a feast for the grand birds, another for the grand maggot.

Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Acting Citizen: Auditioning (Part 2)

By James Knudsen

Last month I auditioned for a local theatre and provided some insights into the woes of the actor hoping for a callback. In the process, I revisited a song in my book of sheet music, Why Can’t I Walk Away, and learned more about the musical for which the song was written. To refresh your memory, the musical is Maggie Flynn. Its creators, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss, based the story on the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863 and an orphanage that was burned to the ground during the unrest. The show’s development occurred in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

11 Years Ago Today: Spiritual jocularity

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    “Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
    “No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
    Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.

But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy¹ (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

11 Years Ago Today: Oh, where are you, Charlie Thomas?

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 21, 2010.]

Yesterday was one of those days when everything just felt wonderful and right and I was on a continual glorious ride of love and laughter and play. Everything clicking, to-do items getting checked off at a good clip. Not possible (I don’t think) to identify the reason or reasons for it. Just go with it and glory in it, enjoy.
    Much of the feeling remains, and I’ve laughed a lot today, too, despite having had to concentrate intensely much of the day on an editing task.
    But I do remember a few of yesterday’s highlights:

• About 8:30, my boss emailed the members of his department to please attend a brief meeting at 11:45. A few of us buzzed about a bit what might be up. I enjoyed asking two or three colleagues, “You’re near the center of the inner circle; what do you think’s going to be announced?” Of course, no one knew for sure. Meeting my boss himself in the stairwell, I asked him, “So, what are you going to announce at 11:45?” He smiled in his utterly boyish way. “Now, what could it be? Maybe someone in the department got arrested? Or won the Nobel prize? Or maybe...someones retiring?” He has worked hard and produced so much of late; we were all glad for him upon hearing the announcement.
• A little later my neighbor friend Bill telephoned with the news, “I got the job.” He’d not been regularly employed for many months. Bill and I go for walks and talks occasionally. He thinks that even though I’m not religious, I’m “spiritual.”
  

• My nephew whose three fine novels we tried to find a publisher for a few years ago emailed me that he was reworking his first one and would I like to help him prepare it for Amazon’s Kindle format? I replied, “I’d love to be involved with your publishing project, and I’m honored to be consulted.”
• When for exercise I was delivering to a friend an envelope from the mail room, I told her I recognized the name of the sender, an intern who’d worked in her office. “What a fine young man,” she said. “In his third year in law school, about to go intern for a judge.” I told her I’d actually been thinking about him, wondering whether he and another intern, with whom I had worked, were still....“Oh, yes,” my friend said, “wedding bells soon, I think.”
• After standing at my bus stop for 25 minutes after work and beginning to wonder whether I was going to have to telephone the commute van’s driver to please come pick me up (never been done before), an express bus that’s not supposed to service my stop (I’d not even attempted to flag it down) did stop for me. I told the driver, “I so appreciate your kind heart!”

So many nice things happened, I’m sorry that I waited too long to remember them all. But I do remember one more, the most jocular one of all.

Around two-thirty, I answered my phone and the voice sounded familiar, if perhaps a little older than the last time I’d heard it. “I just called the first person I was able to find at UNC.”
    Of course, my old IBM colleague Charlie would have lost my telephone number and would need to search a website or something to locate me. The wonder was that he could remember where I worked.
    “Charlie,” I said, “how wonderful to hear your voice!”
    “Charlie?” he said.
    “Yes, Charlie,” I said. “It’s you! And it’s so good of you to call. How long has it been? Two years, three? How are you?”
    “This isn’t Charlie,” he said.
    “Of course it is! You sound just like you!”
    “No, really.”
    “Are you sure?” I said. “The last time we talked, Charlie, you said you were getting Alzheimer’s. Are you finally to the point you don’t remember who you are?”
    “You don’t have to have Alzheimer’s,” he said. “But I’m not Charlie.”
    “Well,” I said, “okay. Then, who are you?”
    It was a complete stranger, calling from Pennsylvania. He said his name was Mert, which I guessed was short for Merton. He was trying to get in touch with an “old Army buddy,” who he thought might have gone on to be a professor of geology at the University of North Carolina.
    I took the particulars and promised to help find his old friend, if he could be found. I told him that Charlie, the last time I’d spoken with him, was herding Alpacas in a town in Ohio, next door to Pennsylvania. I told Mert that Charlie was about the same age as him and the friend he was trying to find – around seventy-five.
    “How old are you?” said Mert.
    I told him.
    “I didn’t think you were a young guy. Most young people, you ask them for help, they don’t want to spend more than a minute with you. Anytime I ask a young person for help, I get a geography lesson. None of them is willing to help you to the end result.”

Before nine o’clock this morning, I had a telephone call from Mert’s geologist. The secretary of the Carolina Geological Society, whom I’d emailed, had called him last night.
    It had been fifty years since the geologist and the man from Pennsylvania served together in the U.S. Army. The geologist thought he recognized Mert’s last name, but he thought his first name might be Mervin rather than Merton.
    On the van ride home yesterday, I enjoyed telling Donna and Ina about “Mert’s” call, and about my whackiness about Charlie Thomas’s Alzheimer’s. Today, I enjoyed telling them that I’ve already found Mert’s old friend.
    The van arrived at the Lowes Foods parking lot, where my wife and Siegfried waited for me, in our only car until we take delivery of our new Volvo. I said to today’s van driver, “Hope, thank you very much. You are the best driver in the fleet.”
    A few of the others looked at me. “I mean, besides Chris and Melanie, of course!”
    General laughter. “Hey, I’m ‘crazy.’ It’s fun.”
    Donna said, “We who have admitted we’re ‘crazy’ are on the road to recovery.”
    What a day! Another one.

Highways and Byways: The Wanderer

By Maik Strosahl

Last summer I read an article focused on what it called Earth’s second moon. As I read further resources, I learned it really is not a moon, but takes a weird path while orbiting both the Sun and the Earth.

10 Years Ago Today: It adds up

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 18, 2011.]

Yesterday afternoon I mentioned to a friend who lives down the street that on Saturday, while waiting on our daughter and son-in-law’s boat at the Coyote Point Marina (until it was time to go to San Francisco International Airport for our overnight flight home), we watched The Sum of All Fears. It was the first, and we hope it won’t be the last, Tom Clancy movie with Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan (and Bridget Moynahan as the supposedly future Mrs. Jack Ryan; she’s Police Commissioner Frank Reagan’s daughter Erin in Blue Bloods).
    I got excited when my friend said there was a sequel.
    “Have you seen it yet?” I asked eagerly. “What’s its title?”
    “Haven’t seen it, but it’s called ‘The Fear of All Sums.’ For people with a math phobia.”
    Zing! My witty friend had me again, for the what-teenth time I’m unable to say.

All Over the Place: Sometimes She Wakes to War

By Michael H. Brownstein

Sometimes she wakes to war

thinking flares of thunder, echoes of lightning,

a grand thunderstorm rattling her windows,

a hurricane, wind swept and damp with sand

violent like the breaking of oyster shells under foot,

an earthquake and the wrinkling of mortar,

collision of brick, the heavy breathing of a survivor.

Then she remembers who she is.

A Couple of Maroons: A River Runs Through

Detail from
second photo

By Craig McCollum & Maik Strosahl

While Craig is working on an upcoming post, I am trying to beat our deadline before leaving for a family vacation, so I grabbed a couple of Craig’s photos and ran with it. —Maik
    A River Runs Through It was the last film in a theater that I went to with my father. And we didn’t really have a history of going to movies. When we were kids, I remember going to see Bambi when it came around in the ’70s. Then there was a carload night in the early ’80s with a double feature that included an updated Lone Ranger. I had to sleep through the second feature because by then I had a paper route and would have to wake up early to do the deliveries. That was it. Until 1992’s A River Runs Through It.

439 Years Ago Today was NOT October 14

Pope Gregory XIII

It was October 4
(by the Julian Calendar)

By Moristotle

Tomorrow will be the 439th birthday of the Gregorian Calendar, which was adopted in October 1582, in order to correct a problem with the Julian Calendar’s calculation of the average year as having 365.25 days.The Wikipedia entry on the Julian Calendar explains the problem:

Highways and Byways: Meeting the Boss

By Maik Strosahl

Four stops. Just three deliveries and one pickup in Nebraska before heading for 34 hours with the family and starting it all over again on Monday. And it began as just another Saturday in the life of a Werner-dedicated driver working the Dollar General account, but somehow it became quite a memory.

From the Alwinac: Sounds of Bulgaria: The Music of Lazar Nikolov

[Click on image to
go directly to
the Alwinac’s home page]

[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]


It was a world beyond anything I had yet experienced or imagined. When I recall it, the sounds come back to me first. I hear the spontaneous burst of vibrant applause of the passengers around me, most of them returning to Bulgaria for the first time in many years, triggered by the bump of the wheels of that aging 747 touching down on the tarmac in Sofia thirty years ago. I hear the tra-ka-ta tra-ka-ta tra-ka-ta of the yellow trams rattling along the tracks, competing with birdsong in the center of Sofia as the day begins. I hear the rush of water as the fountains in front of the National Palace of Culture or the National Theatre or the National Bank begin to spray. And I hear people, people waiting in ill-defined lines to buy banitsa or pay bills, the phrase “tuk ne e Amerika” (here isn’t America) often catching my ear.

    There was music too. The resounding intonations of the priest and the harmonious hymns of the hidden balcony choir at the neighborhood church, the infinite repetitions of conscientious piano practicers wafting through open apartment windows, the pay-per-piece performances of street musicians ranging from fiddle players scraping folk tunes as their trained bears danced to classical musicians traversing concertos and chaconnes before heading to rehearsal at Bulgaria Hall. I never knew where or when I would run into a particular Bulgarian bagpipe player on the streets of Sofia, but he was out there most days throughout my 23 years there, improvising to the clanging accompaniment of his strategically-placed bell belt.
_______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2021 by Geoffrey Dean

All Over the Place: My Resting Place among the Branches

By Michael H. Brownstein

This is the way of the seed of the locust,

the grass frog, the tiny peeper.

I built this room from ripped cedar shakes and cardboard,

soft adhesives, silver spun nails, crucifix screws

Light enters the room through tears in the netting,

disfigured branches, salt and weed.

Goines On: Raging

Click image for more vignettes

Goines’ bedtime thoughts for two nights were topsy-turvy and frustrating, owing mainly to his inability to hold intermediary thoughts in short-term memory.

    “Frustrating” hardly captured it. During the second night (after the incident of the empty sheriff’s car with its engine running) he groggily thought he had pieced together the characteristics of the 2200 bumped cycle, but he wasn’t sure, because it apparently wasn’t 40 years long (like the 2100 bump). 

    The morning after that second night, now awake and able to jot done stuff, he went over (and over) his nighttime finding for the 2200 bumped cycle and found that it was 28 years long, which seemed odd, because that was the same number of years as the standard 28-year cycle. Goines slogged on to the end of the 2001–2400 calendar period, taking notes as he went.

Goines On: Goines off and on

Click image for more vignettes

Goines was walking very slowly this morning. He had been moving very slowly since getting out of bed. Partly, he thought, it was because he had dropped one of the Goineses’ Villeroy & Boch saucers onto the floor the previous afternoon, and he worried about his grip. The saucer had just slipped from his hands while he was trying to serve Mrs. Goines her tea. He hadn’t dropped a dish of glass or ceramic onto the floor – that he could recall – and he didn’t want to do it again, any more than he wanted to launch another coffee carafe to smithereens. He was moving very slowly.

Goines On: 2021 or 2001?

Click image for more vignettes

Goines thought he should first explain to the prospective 12-year-old programming whiz that his personal mnemonic

        “Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel

had been chosen for practical reasons, because it represented Goines’ present year, 2021. The kid might think it made more sense for a program to use the year 2001 – it seemed cleaner somehow... unless he or she chose to use 2021 as a way of attributing Goines – which Goines would have to agree would be nice.

Highways and Byways: Big Boy

My 50^th Post

By Maik Strosahl

When I first started the Highways and Byways column, I was a bit worried I would not be able to keep up with the weekly schedule. I did miss one week, but have had fun working with all of the Moristotelians. For my 50^th post, I am going to share something a bit different.
    I was relaxing with my wife one recent Monday afternoon, preparing to leave for another week behind the wheel of my truck, when she saw a notice that a special train was coming to Jefferson City. We checked the schedule and realized we could wait for the boys to get home from school and go down to where the the train would spend the night.

Reflections on a Hugging Sestina

Photo by @MichelleEvansArt

By André Duvall

[Note from Moristotle: When I asked André to please read and comment on a sestina I had written, his response was so thoughtful I asked him for permission to share his response publicly. The sestina appeared yesterday. I wrote it in September of last year, the same month André wrote his reflections, and I presented it to Dennis & Jan Huggins in October.]

I wanted to wait to comment on your sestina until after I had time to re-read it slowly and savor it. I do believe it “approaches perfection,” as you yourself felt. What a wonderful tribute to your friends – I feel the poem is successful on many levels:

Romance of the Huggins, in Sestina

Together
they worked,
raised family,
gardened,
walked,
befriended....

By Moristotle

In gratitude to my neighbors and friends Dennis Huggins and his wife, Jan (née Mayberry) Huggins, for a handsome house-number sign they had made for my wife and me, I composed this sestina in September last year and presented it to them in recitation and by framed printed copy. The Huggins kindly gave me permission to post the sestina here.

It was of course his fam’ly, Dennis’s,

that gave his wife her surname. And so, Jan,

for better (not worse), is ‘Huggins’ in life.

Together they raised family, kept house,

retired together to almost daily walks

with their Betty Lou, who joined them in their garden.

Their hands together worked: In the garden

digging, hoeing, raking, tilling, Dennis

maybe more the heavy stuff. On their walks,

either’s hand holds leash of Betty Lou. Jan’s

hands may be the ones do most inside the house,

as they did with children too – such is life.

All Over the Place: Trigonometry

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

Today my fourth-grade class and I studied the cosine of an angle. I had recently won a grant to purchase very expensive trigonometry books. Didn’t know what to do with them. Fourth-grade teacher. So, I decided, Why not? I decided to work on a formula near the tome’s beginnings – cos (a) = a/h. Much to my amazement, the class stuck to it and tried and tried and helped each other and really worked their way through the problems.

Iceage (a novel): Chapter 4. Russians’ Camp

A work in progress.
Chapters will be posted
as they are written.

While I was packing, Mary came into our quarters with Anna, who ran up and wrapped her arms around my leg. Coming nearer, Mary asked, “You going someplace?”
    I picked Anna up and gave her a kiss. “Go play now. Mama and daddy need to talk.” I placed her on the floor and she took off like a bullet to her room.
    Pushing two pairs of socks into the side pocket of my pack, I said, “I have to go to the Russians’ Camp. They killed one of our locals, and if I can’t work it out with them, there’ll be a war and we’ll be right in the middle of it.”

20 Octobers Ago: We Slept with Windows Open (a poem)

“Alive, Alive!”

By Moristotle

[Written that October in 2001, originally published on July 3, 2006, without an image, a few weeks after the birth of Moristotle the blog. Reading it always rekindles in me the wondrous hum of the night it describes.]

We slept with windows open all the night
The day I sold or gave my books away.