breathing reX

Posted on April 20, 2002 by joe

Woke up feeling pretty good, thought the bactrim the doc gave me yesterday was kinda miraculous.  When I went to work it all came back, so I stayed for an hour gurgling and coughing incessantly, then came home.  Ate.  Slept, a little.  Spent hours reading the archives of reX.’s raMbles…, and now I am here.

I love reX.

The chest cold, now anchored firmly in place, is beginning to take the defensive and no longer commandeers every breath I take.  As its tribute, it now demands only two or three minutes of uncontrollable coughing out of every hour, instead of the 20-minute episodes it demanded yesterday.  My head, however, is behaving somewhat like a baggie full of jello with great globs flopping either this way or that, depending, I surmise, on nothing less fickle than my position relative to the direction of the earths rotation.  In one instant my sinuses feel like cathedrals and my hearing is so acute that I can follow a conversation in the street a block away.  The next instant I am deaf, and The Blob has grown to fill all the cathedral space, and is threatening to invade the town.

I told them not to expect me at work tomorrow.  I can say, like president, Jr.?except I have justification?that this will be a long term proposition.  I may try to return Sunday; that would make for only four missed work-days.  Or I may set my sights on Tuesday (I have Mondays off) and make it an even week.

And allow me to suggest that you visit Front page to the life of the boi on the cam’,CAPTION,’www.rexsworld.com’, LEFT);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>reX’s site.  The cam on the life of the boi’,CAPTION,’www.rexsworld.com’, LEFT);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>webcam is interesting, but he writes with absolute sincerity and brutal honesty.  Much of what I discovered in his archives touches on familiar names, themes and images from the year and a half during which I was obsessed with him daily, even hourly.  But even for the uninitiated, reX tells life of the boi on the cam’,CAPTION,’www.rexsworld.com’, LEFT);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>a story, in days, of joy and tragedy and love and heartbreak and hope.  Above all else reX is delicately sensitive, and exquisitely humanitarian.  I don’t know what he gets from putting up on the web his cam images, his voice and his words, but he cannot possibly have any idea how much he gives to us by doing it.  Personally, I am moved to tears, as well as inspired by great gusts of hope, over and over again by his faithful sharing of his life.  I love reX dearly?and we have yet to speak.

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phantom updates

Posted on April 19, 2002 by joe

I’m tweaking my template (even still), and blogger apparently pings weblogs.com for each tweak even though there is no new post.  Sorry if you have come here seeking newness and been disappointed. 

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letter to Israel

Posted on April 18, 2002 by joe

Excerpt from the Independent News:

I emphasise that I and the vast majority of Palestinians support Israel’s right to exist in safe, secure borders. This must be alongside a sovereign Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital. You have a choice to make. Either security and security, or military occupation.

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Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime

Posted on April 18, 2002 by joe

Independent News

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bronchitis

Posted on April 18, 2002 by joe

Been coughing and wheezing for five days.  Deep down in my lungs I can hear the fizzing-gurgling of stuff that shouldn’t be there.  It seldom emerges, even after an hour of deliberate effort to tear it loose and spew it out.  Because of the concurrent head cold which I am also enjoying, each rib-cracking cough of my chest cold makes my head feel like the homerun ball at the end of a slugger’s bat.  I am up to about 50 grand slams today; there must have been thousands yesterday.  I start the day with a swig of cough syrup and 7 ibuprofen.  Please write and tell me how foolish I am, how I should not even be allowed to have medicine if I am not going to follow the rules and make nice, how I deserve to be sick, to suffer and to die because I do what I feel like doing instead of feeling like I am told to feel, how commie, liberal, terrorist, pinkoe fags like me…  Well, you get the picture.  And really, don’t get your panties all in a bunch; I have an appointment with the doctor in an hour.  Maybe he’ll give me some psych meds, too.

I thought that I was all better when I got up today.  Tuesday night, my coughing and wheezing woke me from a sound sleep several times. ; Not so last night.  I woke with nary a gurgle.  Considered calling the doc’s office and cancelling?too late for that, I decided.  Then I began rehearsing how I would explain my lack of distress during the appointment which I so urgently requested yesterday.  But soon the hack woke up too, and I was barking all over the house, and collapsing into a kind of combat crouch which I have developed for these episodes of sustained, explosive coughing.  So, we’re off to see the wizard…

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cry

Posted on April 18, 2002 by joe

And this (from days ago?I have to stop reading sites in reverse!) is so very sad.  You made me cry.  Again.

There are many trite things available to say; none of them help.  Cry.  Break stuff.  Make the neighbors wonder if you’re not unstable.  Then laugh at the neighbors, and go buy better stuff. 

Oh, and get drunk.  (Was that trite?  I’m sorry if it seems so, but I really mean it.).  Margarita’s or Martini’s, vodka Martini’s.  Mmmm, I’d forgotten why I like tragedy so much.

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brief kisses

Posted on April 18, 2002 by joe

These are the musings of a poetic heart breathing gently like a warm breeze on a balmy sun-filled afternoon.  He makes me sigh; such a sparkling gift, so perfectly bestowed, and brief. 

Ahhh, the lips.  You can keep them, more truly than you can keep any pop lyric which will never be yours alone.  You’ve kissed others, and so has he.  But those were all different, completely different.  Those others can’t, and none in the future ever will, bring two together in one small moment, within one small space, sharing a single halting breath in any way even close to the way that you and he did it.  A kiss is an intersection of emotion and moment and neither will ever be the same again, not for you or for him.  Each kiss is as much yours now as it was in the instant you drew back from it. 

…big strokes, thick scribble, bright colors only.  Warm as your lips are.

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the trial of henry

Posted on April 17, 2002 by joe

Pinochet judge asks to question Kissinger, an article from The Guardian today, says in part, “The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning by Baltasar Garzon over his alleged involvement in a plot by former South American military dictatorships to persecute and eliminate their opponents in the 1970s and 1980s.”

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens.
\(click the pic to go to trialofhenrykissinger.org\)’,CAPTION,’good.book’, STICKY);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>

A long life is not always such a good thing.  Too bad we have to wait until men like Kissinger become frail before we dare speak the truth about their crimes in our midst.  The question I am really wanting answered is this: Will American government officials?both former and current?ever subject themselves to the same international criminal code that they seek so broadly to impose on officials of other governments?  I think not; one of the perquisites of power is the ability to imperiously disregard the rantings of those who know the truth.

I know it is unbecoming of me, but I hope Henry lives many years more, the longer for me to relish his decline. 

Finally, not to worship Hitchens too much, but here is Israel Shahak, 1933-2001‘,CAPTION,’thenation.com’);” onmouseout=”return nd();”>an article he wrote nine months ago in which he touches on the arrogant, self-serving attitude that Palestinians can have rights only if they deserve them.  Talk about crime in our midst…

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test02

Posted on April 15, 2002 by joe

Guardian Unlimited

Paula Radcliffe wins London Marathon – and collects ?185,000.

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test01

Posted on April 15, 2002 by joe

Guardian Unlimited

Ariel Sharon warns troops may storm Yasser Arafat’s ruined HQ to capture terrorists wanted by Israel.

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sad eyes

Posted on April 14, 2002 by joe
I hate when you tell the truth, because I hate to see you sad.

my supervisor at work.
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eve of destruction?

Posted on April 13, 2002 by joe

I am Shirley-McLain-ian, to a degree.  I believe that I chose this life before I was born, and this spot on the planet to live it, and the people who were my family.  All these things I whine about, …they’ve been happening forever, and probably will happen forever, and will happen whether I am here to gasp at the horror or not.

When one experiences an overwhelming trauma, I think a person tends to believe something like, “This horribleness is only happening here?it can’t be like this everywhere.”.  Of course it is not horrible everywhere, but once a victim focuses solely on their own trauma, it is only a short step to seeing it as the only trauma. 

The eastern world it is explodin’,

violence flarin’, bullets loadin’.

You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’.

You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun your totin’.

And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’.

From the way I have lived my life you’d think that pain and suffering were my invention, that my surveillance of it is novel and unique, and that no one has ever noticed injustice before me.  I have to keep reminding myself: It is not all about me.  It never has been.

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scream silently

Posted on April 12, 2002 by joe

So what is the other response?  Tell me please.  Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals.  But what’s the other response?  …the one that does not dwell so tenaciously on tragedy?

(Let’s see if i can do this without ‘dwelling tenaciously on the tragedy.’). 

Focusing away from the point-at, gasping, horror may not be the same thing as denying it is there, but it feels that way to me.  Pretending everything is OK is charged for me, supercharged emotionally.  As you may know, when I was two years old, I experienced a horror that has not yet ended.  But that event in itself is not the point.  The thing that makes it difficult for me not to scream (figuratively), even when screaming has been done to an annoying excess (like I have done in this blog), is that the two year old’s screams were deliberately ignored.  The choice was made to ignore what happened, to pretend everything was OK, because in 1961 nobody wanted to put my father’s brother in a mental institution, which would have been the course at the time, and nobody knew how to handle the rape of a child; nobody even wanted to admit that it had happened. 

So it didn’t.  My screams all drowned in the sea of denial around me.  And my reality rejected my experience.  My going-on-three-year-old life in Northboro, Massachusetts became stunningly and tragically unreal when parents, family, extended family, and even family friends, all rejected my experience as if my story were the problem, instead of the horror it was reporting.

So, the image of skipping merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals, captures in some way the absurdity of my experiences?perhaps the absurdity of everyone’s experiences. 

And screaming, …well, I don’t know when to stop because I have been taught to believe that I make no sound at all. 

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state-conducted terrorism

Posted on April 12, 2002 by joe
[T]he accounts of the massive destruction of civilian homes, and of the firing on civilians [in the refugee camp of Jenin], could be confirmed as they also occurred in the town of Jenin, suggesting a widespread and systematic pattern of human rights abuses that is only now beginning to emerge.

I don’t know where to start, this article tells of so many crimes and inhumanities.  Like rocketing and bulldozing homes while civilians still occupy them.  Like using prisoners as human shields.  Like extrajudicial executions and disposal of bodies in unmarked mass graves. 

Are the Israeli’s allowed to do this because of the Holocaust?  We need to get over our gentile guilt.  I have only skimmed the surface of that genocide’s horror, like lightly touching the numbers etched in glass, and even that was overwhelming.  But nothing justifies repeating that behavior.  Nothing.  I acknowledge the base urge of the Israeli people to return horrors and inhumanities for the horrors and inhumanities which have been inflicted on them.  But civilization, by definition, means that such atrocities are stopped, not perpetuated.  Sharon, in everything he has done his whole career, has sought to perpetuate the insanity of hatred.  Israel, stop him.

Where are the tears?  Where have our hearts and souls gone? 

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and murder them for sport

Posted on April 10, 2002 by joe
It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

“Come on, dogs,” the voice booms in Arabic. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis?  Come!  Come!”

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: “Son of a bitch!”  “Son of a whore!”  “Your mother’s cunt!”

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children’s slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered?death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo?but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

A Gaza Diary
by Chris Hedges
From the October 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
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