Quoth the Raven, "Gigolo!"

This snippet of mimicry was written in response to a waking inspiration to relate all things natural and mundane to the course and status of my life.  It started as an internal chuckle, and took off from there.  It has also been posted at http://dellasumbrella.newsvine.com/, my blog site dedicated to posts and articles about ovarian cancer.

Quoth the Raven, “Gigolo!”                                       By Wendy Wallin

On a morning gray and teary, as I wondered, blank and bleary,

What the raven, winging past my open window, saw below,

His resounding voice kept tapping out a clicking chant, wings flapping,

That seemed to be recapping not the "Nevermore!" portrayed by Poe--

Oft repeated by the rhythmic, rhyming Edgar Allen Poe

In his redundant tale of woe.

It was clear, while I was listening as the morning dew lay glistening

On the oak leaves, reminiscing on a verdant long ago,

That the word the bird was uttering 'neath the rain clouds barely sputtering,

Was a taunt--what he was muttering was an insult, "Gigolo".

What's a girl to think, on waking, to be called a gigolo--

The male equivalent of "Ho'"?

Whereas Poe thought he was tapping into some mysterious yapping

That might illustrate the texture of a truth no one could know,

What I heard was not a language spouting existential anguish,

But some baggage this strange corvid had decided to bestow,

So carelessly and randomly determined to bestow,

On the nearest sleeping so and so.

Fully wakened now I ponder, as I hear the taunt from yonder,

The unfortunate reminder of a lifetime spent in tow.

In recriminating tones, the fleeing raven made no bones

About eliciting my moans of scant success I have to show--

After years of pledging action to create enough to show--

When he scolded, "Gigolo!"

Ravens, thought to be quite smart, have also crafted quite an art

Of fooling people into noting all they opted to forego,

As if in scrutiny lay atonement for a lifetime of postponement,

When it's stone-cold dumb to rue what started years and years ago--

What could only be remediated many moons ago,

As one’s dull routine eclipsed one’s glow.

Is it theory of mind that makes the raven so unkind

And so disinclined to clarify the seeds he wants to sow?

Does he know that ambiguity results in ingenuity,

Suggesting incongruity to a mind that wants to know--

That has frittered away a lifetime endeavoring to know--

 How to catch but not to throw?

To Poe, the raven spoke of loss in terms that made him feel quite cross,

Engendering rage, exhaustion and the urge to holler "Whoa!"

But to me the bird implied my androgynistic side,

Allowing me to slide into a more agentic flow,

By hinting that I chose my life of regulated flow,

As he gently chided, "Gigolo".

Matters of the Heart or The Heart of the Matter?

Many years ago, my father wrote that it's a little-known but indisputable fact that EARTH is a cyclical permutation of HEART.  Little known, yes: when I Googled "earth is a cyclical permutation of heart", there were no hits. When I left out the word "cyclical" the search yielded about two hits.  One was from the website of a Christian college, in a piece about the mystery of motherhood, the other a poem written just last year.  The poem , "Permutations of the Earth", is a pleasing plethora of permutations tumbling from the words "Earth" and "Terra", a babble evoking flora and fauna and erratic motion, a stream of consciousness pooling at "The Earth, a hearth: Heat at her heart....", a wordfest fading in  flecks of foam at its eddying end. The poem resides at www.poempigeon.com/poem.php?uid=5311.

In my description of the poem, I resorted to alliteration, because as simple as permutations appear, they are not.  Take the game Boggle, for example.  How many words can you make out of three random letters?  Sounds easy.  Looked easy, watching my brother play with other family members.  Once I sat down to play, I realized how it got its name.

Where am I going with this?  I've been doing crossword puzzles lately, initially to pass the time while recovering from hip replacement surgery.  But it's become somewhat addictive, this word play thing, and I'm beginning to understand my mother's preoccupation with games such as crossword puzzles, anagrams, anacrostics, and Scrabble.  But then she was much better at those games than I ever was.

I've never seemed to have the patience for crossword puzzles, and it didn't take more than fifteen minutes or so of playing Scrabble with my mother and brother for me to get discouraged, start drawing blanks (and I don't mean blank Scrabble tiles) and ask to be excused.  Or more accurately, I'd grumble something about needing to run to the store for another six-pack of beer.

That was in the far distant past, of course.  I haven't played Scrabble with my family or made a beer run for well over 30 years.  And I think my brain stamina has improved over those 30+ years of not making beer runs.  I suppose I can partly credit the ongoing practice of listening to clients, registering what they say, and formulating responses for my improved attention, and Ritalin, I won't deny, has significantly improved my ability to digest and retain information from what I read as well as what I hear.  But certainly the lack of mental acuity that accompanied excess alcohol consumption was a problem during some of those Scrabble games.  So I've been pleasantly surprised by my new ability to sit in one place long enough to at least get to a stuck point on crossword puzzles.  Better yet, I've finished a few at one sitting.  Never mind that I end up feeling sore in the butt and like I've wasted the better part of a morning.

My recent affinity for crossword puzzles didn't really start with my hip surgery.  Some time before that, while looking through old letters my parents had written to me, I came across two anacrostics my mother had created.  They were long, each spread out on two sheets of paper taped together, from which I had made copies sometime after my mother died.  I cleverly stored the originals in some place which no longer seems such a clever place, since I can't recall where it might be.  One of the copies I found stored with letters was cut off so the first letter of a whole list of words, along with parts of the clues, was missing.  Not that it mattered much, because I had to cheat a lot -- internet, books, Thesaurus, etc. -- to complete the two puzzles.  But complete them I did, and while doing them, cheating or not, I felt like I was finally giving my mother her due.  Because when she first showed them to me more than three decades ago, I didn't have enough faith in my abilities (and also didn't have the benefit of the internet) to ensure I might actually be able to solve them.  "You're amazing, Mom!" was the best I could do at the time.  I couldn't fathom her facility with the written word, her ability to form complex words from scrambled letters, her knowledge of Latin, Sanskrit, and all manner of literature, the innate poetry of her being.

Here's a sample clue (all of which were hand-written in her very own pica-sized, upper-case print) for one of the words or phrases the letters of which would be inserted into the anacrostic quotation:

"Anc. Greek spring festival at Delphi, honoring Apollo"

And another:

"'The trumpet of a prophecy, O wind,____'(8 wds)"

There were, of course, some easier ones, synonyms, which were nevertheless not always easy for me, such as  "Spread out, dispersed" and "Unduly demonstrative".  But between my figuring a few out on my own and looking up many more, I was able to fill in the quotes.  And then, because they were quotes my mother had chosen, I wanted to honor her by going to the internet to find out who she might have wanted to honor.  It was quite satisfying, making this connection with my mother, so many years after her death, by solving (or at least filling in after Google, Thesaurus, and my mother's old books of poetry had solved) her puzzles.

And now a new thrill, having just looked up "anacrostic" (because I wasn't sure what the puzzles my mother had created were even called), to learn that the first letter of the answer to each clue, when read down the page, is supposed to identify the quote and its author.  I hadn't known that.  I ran to my desk and pulled my mother's completed puzzles out of my "in box", where I store things I might want to refer to on occasion.  Sure enough, the puzzle which doesn't have the first letters cut off by the copier reads, down the page, "George Eliot, Middlemarch."  Holy alphabet soup, she did it all!

It's a little harder to read the anagram on the copy which has all the first letters cut off, although I did try to write them in at the edge.  What I come up with is OM_SHHUXLEYONA_IECEOFCHALK.  Evidently the first clue was cut off as well.  The answer is, it seems, "Thomas H. Huxley, On a Piece of Chalk".

 I don't know how long my new fascination with word puzzles will last, but maybe next time I visit my brother I'll be willing to try my mind at boggle again.  In the meantime, that anagram my father wrote?  An indisputable step up from the pedestrian pet dust I'm scattering here.

This is my mother and brother's birthday, so happy birthday to both.

Empty Corral

My friend Kelly said we have empty corral syndrome.  It’s true; we have had horses in our lives for at least a generation.  Marc and I counted the years and found we’ve had one or two horses for almost three decades, and most of that time with the horse(s) living at home.  Rose was like our last horse child to leave.

No wonder we keep looking up at the corral to see what she's doing.

I bought Megan in 1987, and have not been without horses since.  Add to that time the two years my African stallion, Haro, lived in my back yard, the years I lived at home with my sister’s horse, Goldie, and the three years I had my first horse, Whiskey, that comes to about a couple of years short of half my life that I’ve had a horse to care for.  Marc, as it turns out, has spent half his life nurturing horses as well.

No wonder we keep feeling like a part of us is missing.

A few years after I sold my first horse (or rather, regretfully, traded her for a Mexican saddle), I had recurring dreams that I was back at our first house in the San Fernando Valley, and Whiskey was there and I had forgotten to feed her all those years.  That dream repeated itself periodically until mid-adulthood, when I bought Megan.  In recent years I have have frequent dreams about Dante—riding him, trying to get him to comply, grooming him, responding to his requests that I scratch his sweet spots, watching him and his mare (Megan, Jessie, Rose, in that order) charge up and down the hills, out the gate into the street, through a neighboring ranch, while Marc and I trudge along deer trails, try to outsmart them, head them off and bring them back to the corral....

Or me catching Dante at the top, climbing up onto his back, and letting him find his way back down, helter-skelter, with me just hanging on and enjoying the ride....Or me riding Dante to a training facility and walking him around the arena, glowing with satisfaction when he moves easily into a trot, then canter, then changes leads, then stops on a dime and backs up with a light squeeze of legs and a hint of tension on the reins.   

For the most part, those events were only in my dreams.

Rose loved to roll, jump up, buck, and gallop off, especially when she was outside the confines of the corral.  But from time to time for the last year or so, she appeared to be narcoleptic, and we never knew for sure if she had just rolled or fallen down.  Sometimes she'd be standing, nodding off to sleep, and her forelegs would start to buckle, as Dante’s had done when he was younger. Usually she’d snap awake, head up and ears erect, then start nodding again.  Occasionally she ended up on her knees and lurched heavily as she righted herself.  A few times, she lay down and got herself in an awkward position with her head downhill or her legs under the fence rail, and needed some help getting turned around so she could get back up.  But otherwise she seemed healthy—a vital horse in her late 20s who loved to kick up her heels and tear up the hills when she got the chance.

A couple of days ago, seemingly out of the blue, Rose was having a problem getting up after lying down, and we kept finding her on the ground.  Earlier, Marc had seen her get up from rolling, give a little kick and run around the corral, as if excited about some unexpected sound or scent; then she was down again.  We got her up and took her for a walk; she seemed fine, and appeared to enjoy the outing.  When I went up to give her an afternoon treat of specially formulated feed for older horses, along with carrots and apples--a wedge of which contained her daily arthritis medicine--she was lying near the gate with her head pointing downhill, trembling. After we helped her up using the lead rope she continued trembling, then had a bloody stool, then began sweating as we walked her down the hill to wait for the vet.  Her ears were limp and splayed out; she heaved a sigh and let out a grunt from time to time; she walked slowly, catching herself a couple of times when she started to keel over.  Her eyes looked veiled, vacant; she was clearly in pain.  We covered her with a horse blanket and let her stand or walk, as she wished.  She finally stopped shivering but was soaking wet; she stopped wanting to walk.  By the time the vet got here, her gaze was calm and she seemed resigned.  He took her temperature, which was flaming, and measured her heart rate, which was soaring.  She was beyond help, he said, probably septic; he thought it best to euthanize her.

   

I don’t know what dreams I’ll have about Rose.  We had only had her about five years, and at first she was just a companion horse for Dante (as well as a good ride and a docile and beautiful presence).  But in the four months since we lost Dante, we’ve appreciated her even more for her steadfast reliability, her serene personality, and her stoic patience which probably gave her strength through her ordeal at the end.

Marc and I are both grieving.  It was sad losing Dante, but in some ways a relief because he had so many leg problems and was in pain most of the time. With Rose, we were finally having fun with her without the distraction of Dante’s needs, giving her more attention, taking her for walks around the property like a dog on a leash.  She was also the best horse in terms of disposition and training I’ve ever had the pleasure and honor to own. It’s also probably the end of our horse era.  

And in the Year of the Horse, no less.

Weather or Not

     I seem to be spending a sizeable chunk of my internet time checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Service website for the 10-day forecast for our area.  Although my usual interest is to see if there is any rain in the near-distant future, I started relying on the forecast to see if we would have a freeze.  I had planted many summer-friendly plants in pots, and since we've had an unusually warm autumn, with leaves still clinging to thirsty blue oaks and goldfinches forgetting to fly south, many of the flowers were still blooming at Thanksgiving.  I wanted to cover those plants that might be shocked by an overnight freeze or two.  It turned out to be several overnight freezes (like a week or so) and several more near-freezes, along with mild-to-warm days, continued dry weather (only bordering, according to the terminally optimistic newscasts, on drought, although we've broken records for dry year and warm days), and an unprecedented number of in-a-row spare-the-air days.  Folks are upset, it seems, that they can't have their Yule logs this season.  I haven't heard many complaining that the native plants and trees can't have their seasonal drink of water, although there was (thank you) an opinion piece in the Napa Valley Register about the effects of drought (and consequent dry creeks and sandbars) on the Coho salmon that usually are able to find their way upstream to deposit their eggs.

      Each day, when I visit the NOAA site, I spend a little more time watching the animated satellite images from 4 kilometers above the Western U.S.  I have stared--no, glared--at that high pressure area that has parked itself stubbornly and ineluctably over the state of California.  For a time, through most of November, the high actually took on the shape of California, with its edges squared off at the northernmost border, draping in a virtual straight line down the Pacific coast, with somewhat feathered edges on the other side of the state along the Sierra Nevada range.  Occasionally it lifted its Eisenglass skirt to allow some cloud cover and precipitation in Southern California, then defensively dropped it back down to prevent any penetration by wayward weather.

      Clouds, clouds everywhere, and not a drop to drip on us.  There have been ravishing storms and raging floods elsewhere, alternating with drought and wildfires.  A Wikipedia summary of the year: "The 2013 extreme weather events included several all-time temperature records in Northern and Southern Hemisphere. The February extent of snow cover in Eurasia and North America was above average, while the extent of Arctic ice in the same month was 4,5% below the 1981–2010 average.^[1] The Northern Hemisphere weather extremes have been linked to the melting of Arctic sea ice, which alters atmospheric circulation in a way that leads to more snow and ice.<sup>[2] "  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_extreme_weather_events

 Now, that's Wikipedia, not me, claiming that the weather patterns have something to do with melting of Arctic sea ice, which in turn, we could assume, might have something to do with global climate change.  I'm not ready to assert that our (not quite) drought and warm fall/winter weather is caused by climate change, because I hate it that every time there's a snowstorm somewhere in the world the "deniers" sneer and chuckle with disdain, pointing to the snowstorm as proof that there is no such thing as global warming. 

     I'll limit my commentary for today to the reality we are facing here and now.  Our well continues to threaten desiccation; we are scrounging the last bits of manganese- and calcium-thickened dregs and I'm committed to no more than three or four showers a week.  The plants I've been protecting from the freezes are at risk of dying of thirst, because I dare not use the well water on them and our water collection tanks would now be empty had we not had water delivered a couple of times. 

      I would merely like to point out, for those willing to see, that we need to think seriously about water conservation.  A near-full reservoir is not a guarantee of continuing availability of water.  The fact that vineyards can now have water delivered to meet their growing needs in a dry year doesn't mean there isn't a growing problem with groundwater levels.  I've been trying to conserve water for about 50 years now, having spent my early years in desert environments and a couple of years as an adult living just south of the Sahara.  I'm still waiting for complacent, conventional wisdom to notice the dry grasses and burning bushes.

     In the meantime, I'll keep staring at that animated satellite image over and over again.  I doubt my visual meditations will melt that intransigent high pressure area, but I'm mesmerized by the clouds that swirl around it trying to get in.</sup>

Dante Allegro

Haltered, he turned with difficulty in response to light tugs on the lead rope.  He had wedged himself in the stall sideways, trying--as he had become accustomed to do--to pin Rosie in the back near the manger.  Dante was a horse with attachment issues, and Rosie his current object of attachment.  He fairly panicked when she was out of his sight, and he could rest assured that wouldn't happen if he blocked her exit from the stall.

But this time, he was blocking his own exit.  His legs--the fronts rigid from ringbone and the hinds limp from stretched ligaments--were failing him.  Standing was painful, and he shifted from one hind leg to the other, allowing his now torqued front feet to absorb most of his weight.  Walking had become slow and awkward since his last shoeing a week earlier, and turning was now an ordeal.  You could almost see his walnut-sized brain using every available synapse to plan which feet he should move where, and in what order.  By the time he was facing me, he seemed too tired to take the first steps forward.  Or in too much pain.

The vet was waiting at the bottom of the hill, near the house.  We had only to get him down the incline, which he hadn't tried since walking down to see the farrier the week before.  His ligaments had been weakening for over two years now, and we had kept him going on a cox-2 inhibitor and stable rest for the greater part of those two years.  He had been happy, as had Rose, the old mare we got to replace the other old mare we had gotten to keep him company a few years after he had lost his first old mare, Megan.  He didn't lose his mares easily.  He cried for weeks when Megan died.  When I say cried, I mean whinnied in his childlike, high-pitched way, day after day, for hours at a time.  And then he whinnied back at the echo of his whinny from across the canyon.  When he finally gave up whinnying, he seemed more than resigned; he seemed depressed.  I spent a lot of time with him back then, sitting on his back and reading a book as he wandered around the property eating grass, taking him for walks and letting him follow me back when I returned to the house, going on short trail rides until he had one of his crazy spells, then either letting him go to run back on his own, or facing the challenge of riding a four-legged pogo stick along the narrow trails to the house.

Dante and Megan

Grazing at the pond

His ringbone started causing problems for him around the time we bought Jessie--a thin but well-trained old mare--to be his stablemate and my stable steed.  It turned out she had some eating problems as well as Pigeon Fever, and after six months we had to have her put down because of severe, painful colic and twisted intestines, probably caused by hard, calcified formations in the intestines called mesoliths.  Dante was once again in emotional agony, and called out for her for days.  By a stroke of good connections, we were able to replace her with another old mare--this time a stocky, healthy quarter horse--owned by the farrier who shoed the horses owned by the man who had buried both Jessie and Megan.  Dante had only about a week to grieve.  When I rode Rose up the driveway bareback, with only a halter and braided cotton rope to guide her, Dante whinnied an elated greeting and was happily partnered for his remaining five years.  But during that time, perhaps from excitedly running up and down the pasture hill after hale and hardy Rosie, the ligaments in his hind legs started loosening up until his fetlocks sank almost to the ground as he walked, then as he stood.  But still, he was happy to be with Rose, and seemed content to be our aging colt, our over-sized puppy, our oppositional, distracted, unpredictable, developmentally challenged, yet endearing horse.

It was twenty-one years to the day since we had bought him, then a spunky 2 1/2 year old gelding.  He never lost his spirit or his personality.

On the way down the driveway from the stable to the waiting vet, he moved carefully, stopping every second step or so.  I had insisted on bringing Rose down with him, because he was becoming nervous as soon as we had them both haltered up and the vet had come up to administer Rose's yearly shots.  He wouldn't take his eyes off her, and as Marc urged him to descend, he nervously glanced back to make sure Rose was with him.  She was only behind him by a neck, and their bodies were almost touching.  Still, he stopped and waited until he could see her.  Then, as I held her back slightly to let him negotiate the final decline and turn, he whinnied, turned his head, and waited.  I pulled her ahead a little, and he picked up his pace slightly, not quite andante, to follow.

As soon as he was sedated, his head drooping almost to the ground yet managing to keep his balance, I walked Rose slowly away to take her back up the hill.  He seemed not to notice, yet Marc says he could tell he was trying to follow her with his eyes, turning his head slightly in her direction.  Dante worried about losing her.  He had no way of knowing he was losing himself.

It was only later in the evening that Rose whinnied--once, then again--to see if he would answer.  She had heard Marc walking on the gravel, and thought perhaps Dante had returned from wherever he had gone.  Unlike Dante, Rose has probably seen it all.  Horses who don't come back, her own foals disappearing, perhaps even sniffing the reality of death.  She didn't seem to sniff or cry for Dante, and called for him only once more, during the night.  He had gone nowhere; was lying on the gravel below her, outside her line of sight, waiting for a truck to pick him up and take him away.

Rose seems to have learned to accept whatever fate the humans dealt her.  Dante always had something else in mind--he was a horse of his own making, self-willed and full of folly.  We did our best to make him ours, and he did his best to set his own terms.

"Come on Dante," we'd cajole.

"Commandante," was what he heard.

Dante and Rose

Deer in the Pool Light

In his Opinion extracting the teeth of the Civil Rights Act, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that times have changed since the Act was passed in 1964.  "That was then and this is now," he all but said.

Marc and I went to the local dump yesterday, to deposit the pool cover that was saturated with the smell of carrion.  An unsuspecting fawn had no doubt stepped en pointe onto the edge of the blue bubble plastic, gingerly, but not gingerly enough to pull back when the cover gave way, yet delicately enough that we failed to hear the splash and thrash which usually brings us dashing out of bed to the rescue.  Although the past two days had been hot, we had left the pool covered, allowing it warm up a bit after the surprise of a rare, early summer storm that drizzled and chilled us for a good three to four days.  I was filling my watering can at the rain harvesting tanks in order to soak some plants before the scorch of an anticipated, week-long heat wave, when I noticed two of our calico cats sitting at the edge of the pool, looking at the blue plastic as if ready to pounce on a trapped, errant lizard.  Then I noticed the bulge under the cover, the odor from which I was unable to detect until I lifted up the edge and saw a deer's hind leg.

I called for Marc, and began reeling back the cover.  The fawn, from one of two families that have been hanging around our house, still had its spots.  Its mouth was open as if screaming for help.  If we had heard it, we would have helped.  Instead, we lifted it out of the water onto a rubber pond liner, and put it in the skip loader on the tractor.  Marc took it to the back and dragged it up the hill a bit, so it could at least nourish some of the other wildlife.

The night before, I had dipped in the shallow end of the pool, pulling the cover back only far enough to permit me to do a few leg kicks from the edge.  I looked down the length of the pool, contemplated opening it up to swim, and settled for pool aerobics instead.  I saw no bulge; either the deer wasn't there, or it hadn't yet risen to the surface.  I looked up stages of carcass decomposition on the internet, and concluded it had been in the pool more than a day.

Later, when we unreeled the plastic to cover the pool for the night, we realized it smelled strongly of dead deer in the second stage of decomposition.  We folded it, removed it, and Marc later dragged it down the driveway to the gate.  In the morning, we loaded it into the bed of the truck and drove the three miles or so to the dump.  I went along to look for materials to use in my current project: deer proofing discrete areas of our yard, so we don't have to fence in the whole yard and deprive the deer of access to water in our pool and small pond.  I suppose it would make sense to just build a fence and let the deer find the stock pond a quarter mile away.

I hadn't been to the dump in years. Marc and I had acquiesced--an outgrowth of a couple of surgeries to deal with my creeping arthritis--to a certain division of labor in our household which freed me from some of the heavier chores, such as hefting loads of scrap wood, metal and broken patio umbrellas out of the back of the pickup truck onto the junk heap at the dump, or engaging in political debates with Bill, the aging conservative dump manager.  I had remembered Bill as a stocky, grizzled redneck type with ruddy cheeks, gruff manner and a sun-bleached glaze of right-wing judgment in his blue eyes.  Marc's reports of his incendiary tirades, trading anti-liberal invective for pots of Texas chenille cactus hacked from our oversized plants, had discouraged me from helping Marc discard our unwanted junk, even after my hip had fully healed and I was better able than ever to balance, lift and heft.  When I returned with Marc, Bill had traded grizzled for wizened, redneck for mountain man, and ruddy cheeks for a steel gray, straggly, foot-long beard that tapered off into two points.

He no longer looked judgmental, but had replaced the look with caustic taunts.  He started with a double-edged compliment when I introduced myself.

"You're way prettier than Marc said you were," he said jovially through the passenger-side window.

"Oh well, at least he's honest," I said, surprising myself with my own double-edged retort.  I didn't know exactly what I meant by the remark or where I might go with it, but Bill found a direction.

"No, he can't be honest," he said.  "He's an Obama supporter."

I muttered something like, "Honesty goes with that territory," as I got out of the truck.  Bill started pacing a bit to rev up for the mini-rant that was to come.

"He's spending your tax dollars visiting some black house.  Some 300 year old place or something like that."  I assumed he was referring to the slave-trade house in Senegal which Obama had recently visited.

"That's a part of history," I suggested.

"Oh, yeah.  Those people's history."  He was self-righteously agitated, and seemed fully satisfied dividing history into "us" and "them."  I let it drop.

Marc has been letting it drop since the interaction with Bill right around the time Marc's father died.  Bill and a visitor to the dump were tossing verbal darts at Marc about Obama, making no effort to buffer the pointed racial barbs.  They were two angry old men attacking a liberal for his support of a black president.  Marc said as much, and it seemed Bill had calmed down a bit after that.  We spent the rest of our visit talking about the possible uses for some wrought iron fencing Marc and I were hauling back to the truck from a perilous hill of discarded metal.  As we got into the truck, we overheard Bill telling his friend that the sun was actually cooling, and it was known that at some point in the distant future the whole universe was going to explode anyway (...so we don't have to worry about global warming, now, do we?).  We got back home before our thermometer had reached 110 degrees, the second day of an upward trend that would last at least four more days.

This is now.  Let's deal with it productively, using current information, enlightened awareness, and all the adaptive skills we can muster.  And let's listen for the sound of frantic thrashing in the middle of the night, and be attentive to the silent cries of those drowning, and watch for signs of disintegration, and attend to the problem in time.

Insight Cliff

I said to myself (and to my husband, Marc) Tuesday night as the returns came in and Barak Obama was declared winner of a second term as POTUS, that we should be nice to the losers.  I don't know, though; it's not easy to be nice when being nice gets lost in the morass of delusion, fabrication and self-deception that characterizes this new breed of Republicans, the FrankenGOPs.  Stitched together out of whole cloth, they are walking blind, their clenched hands waving before them as if by some miracle their hands, or the money they are clutching, will prevent them from stepping over the edge.  Only opening their eyes will prevent that.  They seem unable to do that; their eyes have been closed for so long, and after awhile even eyes will atrophy and seal up if left unused. 

Here are a few articles illustrating the lengths to which the Frankengops have gone in order to maintain their delusion of grandeur, sense of entitlement and illusion of self-righteousness.

Sabrina Siddiqui, in the Huffington Post, summarizes their stabs at denial after being blindsided by Obama's re-election.  (Of course they were "blindsided" only because they couldn't see to begin with.)  Their narrative explaining Mitt Romney's quite predictable loss (predictable, that is, if one paid any attention to his inability to clearly represent himself as standing for one issue or another or to the unpopularity of the issues he did sporadically support, not to mention the polls) covers a lot of ground:  the media highlighted his gaffes and downplayed Obama's; hurricane Isaac  disrupted their convention; Romney was too nice; Chris Christie was too nice to Obama during Hurricane Sandy's aftermath; Obama won by "suppressing the vote" (by running ads about Romney and Bain Capital); Romney wasn't conservative enough; the electorate is uninformed; and the fact checkers were biased.  Siddiqui effectively fact-checks these flaccid attempts by Republicans to avoid facing the truth at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/09/conservatives-mitt-romney-presidential-election_n_2099504.html.

In spite of statewide Republican efforts to make voting more difficult in those areas likely to support Obama, people waited doggedly in long lines for long hours to cast their votes.  It was when there were reports of huge turnouts in northeastern Ohio, northern Virginia, central Florida, Miami-Dade--Obama strongholds--that the Romney folks got their first glimpse of reality, according to Jan Crawford of CBS news.  The article, at  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57547239/adviser-romney-shellshocked-by-loss, describes the election night onion of denial being peeled away, leaving Romney and Ryan in shock, and their wives in tears.

Their are, contrary to all-too-common Frankengop opinion, some logical explanations for their electoral losses.  Condoleeza Rice, who may be seeing the light, has suggested the Republicans' mixed messages in regard to immigrants and women may have been part of their undoing.  Frank Rich, in New York News and Features, pinpoints a penchant for duplicity and fantasy-based insularity as the Frankengop's achilles heel.

At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that believes low tax rates drive economic growth, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Laden’s death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense. It’s the GOP that demands the rewriting of history (and history textbooks), still denying that Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” transformed the party of Lincoln into a haven for racists. 

 His article, "Fantasyland", can be found at http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gop-denial-2012-11/. 

Matt Taibi, in his blog at the RollingStone, attributes Romney's loss to the Republicans' inability to spread their message, 

because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they're surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else...is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can't win votes when you're calling people lazy, stoned moochers.

Taibi's article, "Hey, Rush Limbaugh: 'Starting an abortion industry' won't win you female voters", is at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/hey-rush-limbaugh-starting-an-abortion-industry-wont-win-you-female-voters-20121108. 

While some Republicans are calling for introspection, reflection and recalibration (see Daily News at  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/gop-urged-inclusive-temper-social-views-article-1.1198516), others continue to stumble across a perilous terrain of self-deception, unable to distinguish between their magical thinking and evidence-based reality.

I may be wrong about the insight cliff.  It's quite possible Frankengop has long since stepped over the edge.  Next stop (and it's a short walk), oblivion.