Off to work
Kristin Kate's dad said last night that if you're an underpaid New York City schoolteacher and haven't been able to get all of your report cards done due to a variety of strange, unlikely troubles and bureaucratic incompetence of various stripes, then taking a day off from that school in order to catch up on your schoolteacher's duties in truth does not amount to taking time off. You actually are off to work, even when you're not going to your place of work. When I was in Oregon doing the MFA I would say things like "Time to make the poems" to whomever was sitting at the breakfast table or dinner table or post-prandial cocktail table. That really was work then: to go into my room with a candle lit and a blank page folded open and Yo La Tengo's "I Heard You Looking" was good, valuable, accredited time well spent. It still is, of course, but such time was more easily understood as "work" back then: now I have to remind myself that it's work and not play. But I, unsurprisingly, digress. Here was one of my places of work this lunchtime hour:
It's the weight room in the basement. It's in good shape now, mainly, considering the amount of stuff that had been there previously. When Jon's stuff came home from Colorado, Dad and I (mainly Dad) stacked it around the various equipment. For the last few weeks I've been working out with the other equipment. Now however his stuff's been sort of stair-stepped down - also my father's good work - so that much of it's now put away or hung up or at least removed from the canvas bags and duffels in which they came home.
The poetic resonance of having Jon's physical stuff around the bench press seems too obvious to even comment on, much less use in a poem, but there you go.
*
I had a bit of a, no, I had a huge Jon-related affliction at work yesterday. I didn't use my time in a valuable, beneficial way yesterday morning. Napped, lounged, read a bit. Didn't maintain my Good Ground discipline. Didn't even write a poem (for me, that's a big problem). As a result, my trip into the Big Top of Capitalism seemed even more meaningless than usual - yesterday's post was penned right before I had to leave. And it all dovetailed in the worst possible way with thinking about Jon, because that feeling of aimlessness seemed to produce a thought pattern that was cousin if not brother to the feeling that gripped Jon that Saturday morning.
There's a real paradox in here. Because I feel that if I had maintained my schedule - written my 2,000 words, written my poem, jotted off my emails, prepared applications, and generally just been the man of letters I succeed in being in my best moments and days, then I wouldn't have drifted into the pessimistic what-could-it-possibly-all-mean frame of mind that had me crying my way down the blustery 690 and had two separate people ask immediately on seeing me if I was alright and if I wanted to be somewhere else. All that could have been avoided, is Notion #1.
Notion #2 however is that failing to check off all of the checkboxes on yesterday morning's to-do list - or today's, or tomorrow's - effectively leads to an unexpected affinity with Jon. I realize that this is a scary thought. It's similar to if someone contracts, say, the Ebola virus, and dies, and one of the family members says "Hey. I miss my deceased Ebola-victim brother so much, I want to feel what he felt," and then goes and gets himself bitten by an Ebola-carrying rhesus on purpose. That's admittedly weird. Luckily, that's not what I'm advocating. (And here we can see the benefit of similes and metaphors - in hashing out how they sort of do but largely don't apply, we might begin to make sense.) So no. Instead Notion #2's about inserting these opportunities for you to stop and confront the new fact in your life. Not in a public, social, "Yes it sure is sad; yes I'm sorry too" sort of way. But in an off-the-rails, "My whole body is shaking as I cry and isn't that funny that I'm glad for it as it's happening" sort of way. It's similar to what I began to theorize some months ago, when I was debating coming home from Brooklyn or not. The eventual decision was that coming home would afford those opportunities more so than remaining in New York would. That being here would allow me to handle his rusty machete - where did he get that thing? - and try on one of his collared shirts (too big) and hold the urn in my hands late one night when everyone else had gone to sleep (far far heavier than you would think it would be, given its size). So Notion #2 - in short, "hurting" oneself by failing to observe traditional thought-patterns of fulfilling To-Do Lists and going to work in the traditional Seven Dwarfs sense - isn't really at all like giving yourself a fatal shot of the depression that seems to have beaten Jon. Instead, it's an inoculation. George Carlin has a bit in his "You Are All Diseased" concert series: it's involves how the habit of living in antiseptic air-filtered homes actually creates or exacerbates asthma in certain communities because people haven't had the same exposure to basic airborne germs and mites and dust. Since he's been a Irish Catholic youth with all manner of sicknesses and feeble periods and then eventually got into more vigorous rough-and-tumble periods and won himself some scars, Carlin's joke asserts that whereas we're diseased, he will never die. (I think also of Teddy Roosevelt and the gym his dad built for him.) That's sort of what's going on here. Exposing yourself to what might hurt you.
But then there's an immediate rejoinder to #2. It's a Cultural rejoinder, the old Bootstraps rejoinder and the need to Pull Them Up. Gad. Even as I write this I think of my own daily To-Do list, which has 2 out of 6 things on it crossed off. Notions #1 and #2 the poles I feel myself trapezeing between.
*
It's a larger, talkier way of saying that the chicken-scratched words I wrote on the upstate-bound Amtrak on December 18th - the word SOLIPSISM with bright-light lines surrounding it, and the word SOLIPSISM with a big Ghostbusters / public-service-announcement style "No" symbol through it - well, the tension between those two pictograms persists. Because I feel better having written this: me, I, myself, DJ Lobko. SOLIPSISM with the bright-light lines. But Jon's spirit's somewhat hard to feel in me at this moment - not generally; just at this moment - which makes me want to cross out and excise the SOLIPSISM. Self and Other, WML and JRL: it's hard to balance my thoughts and my heart between those two because I'm one of them.
*
Arthur's brother in Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind (see last post) was older. He was also more of a natural in school, was more socially adept, was physically bigger and stronger, teased Arthur harshly and for years, and generally shone so brightly that Arthur didn't begin to shine in his own right until he was into high school. It's obviously difficult to read this and compare. I did enjoy school more than Jon; it did come simpler to me. I did seem to have an easier time with friends, although I maintained an all-around reserve, a certain Lobkovian tendency to limit the radius of my circle of friends. I can't remember teasing Jon. I'm glad about that fact. I'm saddened by the implication that there were middle-child kinds of issues at work here. There's a lot I want to say but can't or shouldn't on this matter. But in the weight room I remembered reading that an athlete of good all around ability should be able to bench their body weight. I'm getting there. I also remembered that Jon was benching 3x what I'm able to bench. 3x. He outshone me. Once I spotted him when he was up there at the limit - 350 lbs or so - and I like to think that he took my expression, a sort of dazed, amazed smile as he pushed the weight up - as a recognition of what he could do that I couldn't.
It's the weight room in the basement. It's in good shape now, mainly, considering the amount of stuff that had been there previously. When Jon's stuff came home from Colorado, Dad and I (mainly Dad) stacked it around the various equipment. For the last few weeks I've been working out with the other equipment. Now however his stuff's been sort of stair-stepped down - also my father's good work - so that much of it's now put away or hung up or at least removed from the canvas bags and duffels in which they came home.
The poetic resonance of having Jon's physical stuff around the bench press seems too obvious to even comment on, much less use in a poem, but there you go.
*
I had a bit of a, no, I had a huge Jon-related affliction at work yesterday. I didn't use my time in a valuable, beneficial way yesterday morning. Napped, lounged, read a bit. Didn't maintain my Good Ground discipline. Didn't even write a poem (for me, that's a big problem). As a result, my trip into the Big Top of Capitalism seemed even more meaningless than usual - yesterday's post was penned right before I had to leave. And it all dovetailed in the worst possible way with thinking about Jon, because that feeling of aimlessness seemed to produce a thought pattern that was cousin if not brother to the feeling that gripped Jon that Saturday morning.
There's a real paradox in here. Because I feel that if I had maintained my schedule - written my 2,000 words, written my poem, jotted off my emails, prepared applications, and generally just been the man of letters I succeed in being in my best moments and days, then I wouldn't have drifted into the pessimistic what-could-it-possibly-all-mean frame of mind that had me crying my way down the blustery 690 and had two separate people ask immediately on seeing me if I was alright and if I wanted to be somewhere else. All that could have been avoided, is Notion #1.
Notion #2 however is that failing to check off all of the checkboxes on yesterday morning's to-do list - or today's, or tomorrow's - effectively leads to an unexpected affinity with Jon. I realize that this is a scary thought. It's similar to if someone contracts, say, the Ebola virus, and dies, and one of the family members says "Hey. I miss my deceased Ebola-victim brother so much, I want to feel what he felt," and then goes and gets himself bitten by an Ebola-carrying rhesus on purpose. That's admittedly weird. Luckily, that's not what I'm advocating. (And here we can see the benefit of similes and metaphors - in hashing out how they sort of do but largely don't apply, we might begin to make sense.) So no. Instead Notion #2's about inserting these opportunities for you to stop and confront the new fact in your life. Not in a public, social, "Yes it sure is sad; yes I'm sorry too" sort of way. But in an off-the-rails, "My whole body is shaking as I cry and isn't that funny that I'm glad for it as it's happening" sort of way. It's similar to what I began to theorize some months ago, when I was debating coming home from Brooklyn or not. The eventual decision was that coming home would afford those opportunities more so than remaining in New York would. That being here would allow me to handle his rusty machete - where did he get that thing? - and try on one of his collared shirts (too big) and hold the urn in my hands late one night when everyone else had gone to sleep (far far heavier than you would think it would be, given its size). So Notion #2 - in short, "hurting" oneself by failing to observe traditional thought-patterns of fulfilling To-Do Lists and going to work in the traditional Seven Dwarfs sense - isn't really at all like giving yourself a fatal shot of the depression that seems to have beaten Jon. Instead, it's an inoculation. George Carlin has a bit in his "You Are All Diseased" concert series: it's involves how the habit of living in antiseptic air-filtered homes actually creates or exacerbates asthma in certain communities because people haven't had the same exposure to basic airborne germs and mites and dust. Since he's been a Irish Catholic youth with all manner of sicknesses and feeble periods and then eventually got into more vigorous rough-and-tumble periods and won himself some scars, Carlin's joke asserts that whereas we're diseased, he will never die. (I think also of Teddy Roosevelt and the gym his dad built for him.) That's sort of what's going on here. Exposing yourself to what might hurt you.
But then there's an immediate rejoinder to #2. It's a Cultural rejoinder, the old Bootstraps rejoinder and the need to Pull Them Up. Gad. Even as I write this I think of my own daily To-Do list, which has 2 out of 6 things on it crossed off. Notions #1 and #2 the poles I feel myself trapezeing between.
*
It's a larger, talkier way of saying that the chicken-scratched words I wrote on the upstate-bound Amtrak on December 18th - the word SOLIPSISM with bright-light lines surrounding it, and the word SOLIPSISM with a big Ghostbusters / public-service-announcement style "No" symbol through it - well, the tension between those two pictograms persists. Because I feel better having written this: me, I, myself, DJ Lobko. SOLIPSISM with the bright-light lines. But Jon's spirit's somewhat hard to feel in me at this moment - not generally; just at this moment - which makes me want to cross out and excise the SOLIPSISM. Self and Other, WML and JRL: it's hard to balance my thoughts and my heart between those two because I'm one of them.
*
Arthur's brother in Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind (see last post) was older. He was also more of a natural in school, was more socially adept, was physically bigger and stronger, teased Arthur harshly and for years, and generally shone so brightly that Arthur didn't begin to shine in his own right until he was into high school. It's obviously difficult to read this and compare. I did enjoy school more than Jon; it did come simpler to me. I did seem to have an easier time with friends, although I maintained an all-around reserve, a certain Lobkovian tendency to limit the radius of my circle of friends. I can't remember teasing Jon. I'm glad about that fact. I'm saddened by the implication that there were middle-child kinds of issues at work here. There's a lot I want to say but can't or shouldn't on this matter. But in the weight room I remembered reading that an athlete of good all around ability should be able to bench their body weight. I'm getting there. I also remembered that Jon was benching 3x what I'm able to bench. 3x. He outshone me. Once I spotted him when he was up there at the limit - 350 lbs or so - and I like to think that he took my expression, a sort of dazed, amazed smile as he pushed the weight up - as a recognition of what he could do that I couldn't.
posted by Wil at
10:54 AM
1 Comments:
Good post. Your posts are getting more organized.
One thing I wanted to ask you is: in the newspaper article I read this past weekend, they said "talk to your kids about suicide" just as you would talk to them about drugs, smoking, and drinking.
From your point of view, what should a parent say? Certainly, there's the obvious - "don't do it/if you can't talk to us, talk to a teacher, counselor, etc/we're always here for you/ the usual parental stuff. But is there anything else you would suggest? I realize that if a child (presumably, teenager) feels so badly, a parents' words would probably ring hollow. I realize there's probably no magical words, but I would like your perspective on this.
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junebee, at 5:55 PM
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