053109

In fact my new watering hole is right around the corner on 1st Ave. It's young, classy, and hip. The name, get this, is the best part: Sin Bin. My mother laughed hysterically when I told her and said, "Around the corner from your own sin bin!"

I took a few quizzes this week on Facebook. One was "what kind of ethicity

should you be dating?" The answer was African/black. I can't argue. Another was "what is the color of your soul?" I must say this is spot on:

"Red is the colour of fire and blood, and so is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love. Deep inside your soul lie all of these things. You are always the one who keeps everyone else awake at a sleepover, bursting with energy. You're also never the one who's afraid of a fight, as you are strong minded and strong willed. All reds will one day make something wonderful of their lives. Having said all that, you are also a romantic at heart, and quite scary in bed! No one should stand in the way of a 'red', especially weaker coloured souls."

_____

I was unclear in the last installment about the price of the New York Times

on Kindle: everyday is $14 per month! A paper subscription to only weekends costs more than that, significantly.

_____

As of last Friday I am officially bugging out about the state of my home. The hardest part is that I cannot do any unpacking. It's quite dangerous and the MS causes me to get stressed out immediately; stress is MS's bread and butter. So I must rely on others, especially family. Now that I'm back east I have family all over. How a man in my totally disabled position managed to last as long as I did out west, where I had no one, is a testament to how gravely I wanted to prove my ex-wife wrong (I _could_ make it on my own); it nearly killed me but I think I did prove at least that much. The move reminds me of a very important fact: the mental and emotional obstacles of MS are more pressing than the physical.

Folks generally, if they know anything about it at all, think MS is entirely physical. It is critical for all of us afflicted with this terrible disease (which in stark terms boils down to ongoing degenerative brain damage) that there be knowledge in the main that MS necessarily involves severe psychological dysfunction. It's the worst sort of double whammy: one watches as one's ability to function physically in the world steadily disintegrates at the same time as one's ability to cope mentally dissolves into thin air. Moving is second only to losing a close family member in terms of the stress it puts you through. I will survive this somehow (family) and the next time I move it will be to the location of my final stand on this earth: a home I own.

*Poem*

Heart of Us Prays for Us

I discovered the center of the universe.

It's about a block from my apartment,

smack dab in the middle of 2nd Avenue.

I knew it only when I walked through it.

I've searched the world over

and here it's been the whole time.

What a shocker.

On the streets where I first roamed,

surrounded by skyscrapers,

hoping not to be found.

I suspect it moves, from avenue to avenue,

street to street, block to block,

always in motion like the fish

in the wine-dark sea, anonymous, countless,

drunk with being known by no one.

This center point of my return

is the point around which we all pivot,

is truly deathless, is all our days

unfurled before us in a glance.

In fact when I discovered the center

I realized it's inside me,

inside each of us, necessarily.

Where else could it be?

My universe emanates from within me,

stretching out, avenue to avenue,

street to street, out past the rivers

and the oceans, up into the heavens,

beyond the home of the gods

into what cannot ever be known.

But the heart of it all can be found

on any given day hovering somewhere above

2nd Avenue praying for us all.

*Quotations*

The writer's task is to evoke the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women.

--John Cheever

I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

--Walt Whitman (the first great American poet)

I believe that stress is a factor in any bad health.

--Christopher Shays 

Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older.

--Hans Selye 

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath.

--Natalie Goldberg

There are thousands of causes for stress and one antidote to stress is self-expression.

--Garson Kanin

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares.  They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Sometimes it seems your ever-increasing list of things to do can leave you feeling totally undone.

--Susan Mitchell and Catherine Christie

Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is--and that is the point I want to stress--that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word.

--Karel Capek (inventor of the word "robot")

*Nepal*

I lived in Nepal for a few months when I was about 18. From the moment I landed in Kathmandu to the time I left a few months later my wig was completely flipped; the experience changed me forever. I have so many stories from my time there it would be impossible to relate them all; I will choose a few for now:

I was in Nepal on a program through which I learned the language, customs, and history of the country; I also got to stay with a Nepali family for a month and a half. I was, as I continued to be through young adulthood, completely opposed to spending time with other white people; this attitude ruffled feathers among other program attendees. This attitude also made me, as it did in China, excel at the language, which is quite simple. In no time I could speak with fluency. My host family was of the Chetri, or second, class; they were poor but by no means destitute. Instead of spending time at program headquarters (with a bunch of white folks), I spent all my time at home, soaking in the way of life, figuring out how things worked with no running water and no stove and no bathroom, and, best of all, playing with the neighbor children.

I had so much fun playing with the kids I really wanted to do nothing else. In Nepal of coruse they don't have toys (except if you count sticks, pebbles, and the like. What we did every afternoon after school let out was stand in a circle dancing and singing songs. I learned a lot of the Nepali I know from the children. The thing that struck me most was this: the songs we sang were by no means what we westerners think of as kids' songs; they were the same songs they heard their parents singing, about love affairs, dead wives, loyalty, etc. We would be singing, dancing, and laughing while young children sang about girls they were engaged to, or girls they married who then died, or ill-fated river trips. I was amazed at how much I understood, at how accepting of me the children were, and at how precocious their songs were. Eventually I realized they didn't actually understand the songs; they knew how to make the right sounds.

I was the best student of Nepali in my program; unlike the others, I could actually carry on a conversation in Nepali. I will not forget my teacher (we were divided into small groups and each group had their own teacher). She was a brahmin woman (the first class, the priest/monk class) and, being upper class, she was plump and well educated; her name was Sabitri. I had loads of fun going to Sabitri's house (the nicest house I ever saw in Nepal, still a mud shack by our standards), learning to communicate more clearly, learning more about the lives of these people who were so very "other," and playing language jokes. Once I was at another friend's for dinner (eaten, as always, from simple metal trays lying on the floor, sitting on small wooden footstools, with the men eating before the women) and I got to tell a joke, one I'd been saving up (I found in Nepal as in China that the quickest way to hearts was with intelligent plays on language).

I don't remember anything about the joke except the punch line: a wife cries out, "It's dinner time; where is my husband?" That line brought howling laughter from my friends; they laughed because it was funny and because no one present had ever met a white person who could speak their language so well. They also laughed because though Nepali/Hindi culture is patriarchal, it is only so outwardly. Behind closed doors, as always, the women called all the shots. The mother of my host family, for example, once needed to see a doctor because of a nail through her foot. The doctor was all the way on the other side of town (I paid for it of course, though I could hardly afford it better than they could; doctors in Nepal are cheap but I'm quite certain this was mother's first trip to see one). The whole way there mother was sure to walk several feet behind me. Back at home though, with the door closed, the picture changed dramatically:

I was staying in a home which housed a wife, her unwed sister, grandmothers from both sides, and three daughters (Laxmi, Parvati, and Sarswati, the three concubines of the gods). It was very clear, once that front door closed, father and I were to do whatever the women asked of us. Father was happy to have another man in the house; though he was kind and accommodating, his attitude was very much "it's us against them," as if the women were from another planet and the best we could hope for was to be tolerated. Most amazing to me about the memory is this: as different as life is in Nepal, the relations between men and women are the same the world over. My father capitulates to the woman of the house; so does my brother; so did I when I was married. The major difference is that in the west it is socially acceptable for the woman to leave whenever she's good and ready, whenever she's gotten what she wants. Sounds harsh but I know firsthand how true this sentiment is.

Peace, love, and ATOM jazz