Sunday, May 14, 2017

Connecticut Yankee on Mother's Day

Not all that long ago - during my own lifetime in fact - we didn't wash so much. Maybe that's why we were publicly so afraid of sex? Maybe we cuddled more?

Skin during the time of King Arthur was crusty like some homeless person maybe, with clothing rank. Not all that long ago, Mark Twain could be a bestseller, famous throughout the land, selling modest quantities of awkwardly printed books. And now we are all authors, with Harry Potter mocking the days of royalty. Google scale concentration of wealth on my joyful labor.

I transitioned the "dry look" generation, and finally did give in to Odorono, having tortured my College mates quite enough. I'm bored with the enacted orgasm anyhow, informed by film which is also past its prime. Cary Grant needed LSD to be himself for us. My compass is broken, I shall wander aimlessly. But I shall smell like nothing, and it will be my offering and suffering both.

Advisor to a young student from China, brought here by me as a matter of fact and failure, I must shy away against the pain of raw need. Why must he say out loud that he has no friends? Why can he not at least connect with the significant numbers of Chinese students at the University up the road? Why can't he be like American expats, and form himself aloof from us, making fun, finding a way to be almost at home away from home. Why can't he be more like I was?

He did graduate yesterday, and I am humbled. That he was so serious about learning our ways and yet was still rejected by his classmates who complained of his preparation with English, imagining some sort of payoff to the College to let him attend. I suppose that among his fellow Chinese he is also awkward, and therefore should be a mate to me. Inwardly, I am annoyed.

I could not quite swallow the irony that my colleague chose for me a Dr Seuss book to send me off. Touching really, to the point of tears, it was so appropriate. But Ted Geisel used Mom as the prototype for fascist dictators, and I grew up subversive therefore, as are my own kids. Simple words can be so empowering at each outset!

Could I somehow find a way through humor to let my colleague and former boss know how wrong it is to mother a team? To take their production narcissistically as her own. To find miraculously when someone outsmarts her that she'd already thought of that at the program's inception, and is now so glad that someone finally has midwife her own idea?

When I remarked a family discovery that my own Mom was destructively narcissistic, that she deployed her daughters against their father to their shame, that she couldn't separate her ego from her children and in her pride and gloating left me full of shame and wanting to hide, my colleague answered without hesitation that all Moms are narcissistic. Of course.

Perhaps a celebrity roast format, and I wish I had a million dollars to endow a chair in her name upon retirement already. My own Dad's voice R.I.P. still does echo within me conjectural statements of things I could say to most anybody if I were to want to hurt them beyond what knight's armor protects against.

Sometimes I do it entirely carelessly, a stray remark to son-in-law, which I know is me in destructive competition and I feel somehow as though I cannot help myself. I have so many important things to work out with him, he is that much more intelligent than I. So much more deserving of my daughter's love. No excuses padre, no excuses.

And how then can we ever come together if we only celebrate those versions of each other which we love through gritted teeth (my dentist is in process of cleaning out my pockets for my own good, against excruciating pain)? I say only good things and sometimes it exhausts me. Thank god for confidential friends who are enough alike that language is a barrier only on those rare occasions when precision is actually required. With those mates, you work it out together.

Well farewell sweet College. You have so much potential, though microcosm is so much more difficult to alter than the big picture. I did order special tams for our Fine Arts graduates, urging them to understand that "fine arts," the term, is as much a holdover from the days of knights and nobility as is the structure of the College itself, though we claim to be forward looking.

All are authors and artists now, and the work is collaborative, and it must change the world and not only delight, for we must transform again the way we did when writing did the trick last time. Was it the first time?

The word, the province of the elites for so long until Gutenberg and Buddhist sutras brought it to the common man. Our hyperindividuated selves, as in-formed as performance-art orgasm, still lust after fame and power. Trump is our King Arthur, foul though he breathes.

Happy I am to prefer the feel of scalding water on scaling flesh, Inwardly, I wear the face of a dog scratching toward his belly. Forgetting is sweet sorrow. Sleep eludes me. Mom will get a walker now, in honor of slipping away. She is happy all the time, and forgets what I am up to. Blessed relief. And free at last. A Farewell to Arms. I fly at half-mast, vast or half-vast are my pursuits, and the change is upon us. We shall pull ourselves from the icy grip of our technologies. We shall be post-human in better ways than can be articulated by design.

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