Rattled

My car engine sputters with a death rattle.

I might start and I might not.

It’s her new thing.

I kill car batteries, solenoids and computers with mere proximity.

This could be on me.

A chiropractor once told me not to wear a watch as it made my electrical current run backwards. If you, like me, think that nothing is impossible, you won’t roll your eyes at that prognosis though of course I did.

A recent cardiology visit revealed a thunderous heart murmur. A cord in my heart had broken and one of my valve’s barn doors was flung open floundering in the rushing rapids of blood surging mistakenly backwards into my lungs.

My blown electrical circuits somehow don’t surprise me. It seems preordained.

Still, I refuse to grasp the implications. Don’t mess with me. I trust nothing.

My first instinct is RUN.

Not long after my Dad died two years ago the grandfather clock on the wall by my folk’s bedroom stopped.

 My mother dryly took it as an unallowable omen.

She reminded me of the old rhyme, “My Grandfather’s Clock” which someone put melody to and I know Johnny Cash sang years later.

Ninety years without slumbering tick tock tick tock

His life seconds numbering tick tock tick tock

But it stopped short never to go again when the old man died.

Wisely I had told her nothing of my hereditary plight. Bullet dodged.

I collect vintage clocks. There are never too many clocks thinks the woman who always runs behind.

My office clock stopped the week I saw the cardiologist.

Batteries couldn’t revive it.

Rattled, I wouldn’t wait for an estate sale or antique mall.

I ran to the nearest store and bought a random cheap thing from China to keep the beat going.

Tick tock tick tock.

I am not my clock.

Not the right vintage for death.

RUN from the thought.

The car radio played metal and blue grass new grass stringed whiplash music on the car ride toward stiff gurneys in freezing rooms.

They’d  check me out.

Down the throat.

Up the veins and arteries.

I’m hard wired to noisy machines.

Hear the whoosh of heart murmur, and screaming beeps.

Cold jelly probes by personality free techs are checked by overworked indifferent doctors.

I’m coming out of anesthesia number one waiting for the next one in another prep room.

This is nerve wracking.

Just put me out.

What’s taking so long!

The rattled cardiologist sticks his head in the door.

“It’s too chaotic, it’s too chaotic, you’ll have to wait. I can’t do it. The schedule is too full.

He looks Wiley Coyote insane. Smoke blowing out his ears.

The rattled patient screams back like a mental patient.

“No I can’t. I’m hungry, I’m freezing. I can’t stay here anymore. I have to go.”

He pauses, shocked.

“O.K. Get her in there now!”

The nurse sprints into action. Hurl tubes and medical crap onto my thin paper gown and well worn blanket.

It’s like an episode of E.R. and I say whoa if you don’t really have time I don’t want him doing this. It feels hysterical.

I’m told; we do this all the time. Don’t worry.

She grabs the IV pole.

The gurney rattles racing down the corridor.

The IV pole leans into the doorway on two wheels.

Feels like heavy metal medical rock and roll.

 I surrender.

Let’s dance.

They wheeled me into the chaos.

Aside~ I visited my mother where my lovely VW Beetle awaits me. The battery was dead. The clock in my bedroom had stopped. The wall clock outside my bedroom stopped the first morning I awoke.

Open heart surgery was imminent. I had to find the right surgeon. I was told I had no more than a few months to get it done before my heart was permanently damaged.

This is noted at the risk of you not believing me. This sounds to you like a gross exaggeration. Too much equals unbelievable and boring.

Unbelievable and also boring it is.  But true.

American culture, Healing, Hilary Lindsay yoga, medical, new age enlightenment, poetry, social commentary, Uncategorized, yoga wisdom

No Bagels for Nazis.

 

April 2023

I’ve been recovering from hip surgery.

On the couch.

Watching television.

The news.

 Nazis.

 Supreme Court Corruption.

Gay bashing.

Woke the stupidest word of the year thanks to a minority of overdosed Liberals preaching misplaced moral authority and devious Conservatives turning that word against them with a battle cry.

Here in Nashville majority Republican dictators who hold all legal authority desecrate Nashville’s legislature that allows no weapons in that stronghold but recommends them in the hands of anyone anywhere else in their self serving jurisdiction. 

A once iconic town is sold off to the highest bidders. Take our land, our peace, our public services, our roads and do what you want. Just give the power brokers a check.

Nashville’s not the only one.

 The private religious middle school a mile from my house was the latest mass murder scene that caught a nation’s eye.

Private schools were a way to sequester your child from the poor and the wrong race. They are the shame of an otherwise kindhearted city that puts no investment in the public’s education. Educating what might be viewed as the lesser class can only lead to problems down the road. Better to have a city of half wits and ambitionless drifters. They can be managed.

I used to write about these things. Unleash my grief and fury.

But now, ho hum.  Human rights are only for those who wield weapons against humanity. People vote for 2^nd amendment homicidal maniacs and then weep over dead children. They say women’s rights are human rights and support forced birth and female enslavement.

Pro life means pro birth without regard for the life part. Pro life means the right to kill your fellow man with an assault weapon.

You don’t want your loved ones murdered, do not vote Republican but you have to vote Republican because the Democrats might give some money to poor people or let immigrants in or allow you to manage your own body or let children read uncensored books or see non conformists minding their own business in public.

When your kids are murdered remember you made your choice.

You don’t like Jews so avoid all things Jewish. Good luck with that. No bagel for you. No movies, television and no comedy for you but that’s O.K. You don’t understand comedy anyway. That requires some depth. Good comedy is too smart for you.

You don’t like Blacks so avoid music and sports just to start. I mean, that’s where you might unwittingly embrace that which you otherwise don’t understand or respect. Well, for you there is golf. Trumps’ game and his buddies, the Saudis.

The guys who sent planes into the Twin Towers.

Healing isn’t possible despite the ice, the drugs, the P.T.

I can’t even watch television without being alarmed by the mass of illness awaiting me because only people over 60 apparently watch TV. I have many ways to die and even Comedy Central doesn’t want me to get ahead of myself. Take this pill despite it killing you in more ways than your certain life threatening illness will, just more slowly.

So here I am on the precipice. No details necessary for you. You have your own cliff to navigate.

CBS Sunday morning is a respite. Some news but mostly human interest stories, mostly positive.

But today I’m told the planet is becoming an unlivable inferno.

Our garbage is piled miles high in New Jersey.

Another story of a beloved celebrity dealing with cancer.

Shark behavior is changing. They are not alone.

I shrivel in stark fear knowing that’s not helpful.  An expanded life force is a path to wholeness.

Before it’s time, my hip not yet happy, I’m in my garden, pulling weeds, talking to my trees cleaning up the ravages of the past winter that murdered the landscape in a freak freeze.

You change what you can, make joy where it’s possible, and you may not be able to change a mind or a world but I remind myself that there’s satisfaction in attempting self determination.

That might mean changing a Nazi heart by extending a bagel.

Tyree Nichols Has Risen

Three days to die, to lay in wait

till his specter appeared in the harsh glare of the nation’s spotlight for the entire world to witness.

Tortured by the murderous blows of five “peace” officers  

Against this one slight and gentle soul

Whose crime, mistrust,

formed by scores of injustice,

told him to run.

The police assassins ravaged and raged while those hired to serve and protect stood by

as he cried out for a mother who wasn’t there.

Who will condone this, copy this, crow about it and

where will my sons be when they come again?

Crap shoot is our condition,

luck good or bad.

Chance translates to anxiety.

Anxiety silently kills

as sorrow becomes our national pastime.

Gun Violence Comes From Guns

Gun manufacturers are being questioned about the billions of dollars and intention of selling assault weapons to the public.

Their defense is it’s not their fault if the wrong person buys the guns. The guns are benign.

The people taking advantage of that argument are people who support wrong people because that populace will keep them in power and money.

The gun manufacturers say murderers are the problem and the problems are local, not their business.

I think you have to have murderous tendencies to want an assault weapon but let’s say that’s not true.

You have to embrace violence to want those weapons.

You have to be a person prepared to exert the kind of destruction those weapons can wield.

By definition, if you want to own a weapon of mass destruction, you are willing to generate mass destruction.

You might not think it’s your design to render flesh and bone to pulp but you are ready to do that if pressed.

You want to be ready to do that.

You are the person who breathes life into that not benign weapon of destruction.

You are who it was made for.

Citizens with less violent inclinations but infected with the modern American paranoia of wanting a weapon to protect from the murderous lunatics put more money in the pockets of the gun manufacturers and politicians who support them.

The gun manufacturers have made them for you and you have made them billionaires.

This is the new balance.

Bitchin Yoga Weighs In as Democracy Falls

Bitchin yoga weighs in on the glorious and shocking as a matter of course.

Why be silent in these darkest days when silence is surrender.

Silence is defeat.

Surrender is not so much my circumstance as resigned.

And resigned is not so much the truth as hopeless.

When Bitchin yoga is hopeless more than angry,

When depression smolders under the scorched earth it’s a warning sign.

In case you needed more.

I have no signal for those who can’t receive what they don’t recognize, what’s never been their vocabulary.

The perpetrators of these end days might shift focus if they looked outside the familiar, the messages of the complicit. Some might call it facts. I would call it facts.

But it’s not comfortable to hear opposing views. It’s uncomfortable to admit wrongdoing. Then it’s nice to believe in “alternate facts” which the Trump administration invented and you deemed acceptable.

Better to stay with the people who assure you of your rightness.

Better to stay self righteous.

Better to create a supreme being complicit in your unruliness.

 Then you don’t have to do any work to find your wayward way.

The supreme leader does it for you.

Some call it God to mask the word Trump.

Some call it Trump outright.

Either way, they don’t care, nor does he, about you or your families.

They care for their self interest which they’ve convinced you are yours though you bear zero resemblance to them or their riches.

You will believe that a treasure chest of guns is the right of every man and that those guns are for glory.

You will look at carnage and corruption in equanimity saying it’s not your fault.

You will vote against your own self interest because someone whispers socialism in your ear and even as those Republicans evoke a fake bogeyman they move toward complete anarchy and fascism.

I can’t fathom you being that dim-witted.

You who will not read this anyway would have no expectations of my opinions.

But once again and for posterity my opinion is duly noted.

The Inmates Run this Institution

Mentally deficient politicians dictate the laws of this country.

Mental illness is the murder problem, say the mentally deranged who decide these things.

Three years difference in age will fix the problem of gun fueled rage is the only dared position of the opposition who know nothing can be done anyway. Few are brave enough to demand all assault weapons illegal.

Assault weapons can stay because the minority unhinged who vote or the morally bankrupt money worshipers who provide the guns will keep corrupt legislators in power.

Any person with the urge to buy an assault weapon is clearly mentally unhealthy.

In a country that doesn’t take care of its poor, homeless, elderly, one feels that job security is the thin veil between victim hood and self determination.

Rather than fix the country for all of us they will cling to their jobs. Though they could band together for justice they don’t trust each other enough to make a move. They work for themselves and no one else. They live in social isolation.

We are scared and broken and self serving. Scared and broken, self serving should replace liberty and justice for all.

Job security determines the votes in Congress; power determines the ruling from Justice.

Humanity rots under the fallen moldy canopy of a once bright American sky.

Mental illness is not a singular problem but the general condition of a people with no hope, no power and no pride.

Lady Liberty’s statement of independence no longer describes independence from oppression but anarchy.

Huddled masses of bloody children yearning to be free.

Freedom is for the killers and opportunists.

The rest are managed. Mange our bodies, our education, our marriage, our vote.

The United States is now the shit hole country that Trump declared the less advantaged.

The would-be autocrat and his coven of craven cowards have advanced the darkness within us all.

Sorrow and hate rise quickly to surface at the least provocation.

Mental sickness is our status.

Close the Sky.

Roblindsaypictures

It stays with me day and night, this plea for help from Ukrainian president Voldoymyr Zelensky.

Close the sky.

It says everything in three words. Protect us. Save us. Defend us.

The endless vastness of the sky that was the only space we saw, that free air, germless air, a refuge from claustrophobia, was a savior through years of sheltering in place against Covid 19.

The sky was heaven for a lost congregation and a cathedral of prayer.

Now it is too big, too formless, too ethereal a canopy for the civilization below.

Death can reign from the sky.

Close is a familiar word to the world now.

Close the schools. Close the office. Close the mask over your nose.

Close the sky is disturbingly beautiful to me. This plea born of terror, of agony and despair should not be beautiful but in its simplicity and strangeness I find it so.

If it was not beautiful would it not be so powerful?

The sky cannot be closed. It is a place without borders. This is what makes it so magnificent and fearsome.

And impossible.

Ukraine

There’s a distance of ten thousand miles between my sweet steaming coffee and the fuming television screen this morning. Russian artillery fire smolders as an endless stream of raging grey tanks move toward Kyiv. My coffee tastes like ash.

How weird a world where one sits in the privilege of home and comfort watching another existence violently crumple. It’s like watching a murder while eating pastries. It feels a bit sociopathic though to turn away is its own lack.

Endless stories of crying children and frightened mothers, of bravery and treachery blaze across the airways as the onslaught escalates, as journalists relate pleas for help, as the Western world contemplates and discusses measures to halt the destruction in slow motion as if a country isn’t being eaten alive while they prevaricate.

Watching Ukrainian President Zelensky I’m reminded of Patrick, one of the beloved characters in the series Schitt’s Creek because they look alike and because the characters of both are simply beautiful.

Admitting this impression feels guilty. I have the luxury to think these shallow thoughts though I will defend to the death the usefulness of lowbrow television as a way to know the mind of the culturally  average, which to be redundant, is most of us who engage in a world beyond our villages or want to.

These images of Putin’s war are not unlike a T.V. series as we become no less horrified or heartbroken but maybe a bit numb by the regularly scheduled sameness of it all.

How fucked up is that?

Everything on this planet is interrelated. When the web pulls anywhere it affects us. When a soul suffers we suffer with it. When pain is inflicted in another we wince.

Why do men provoke war? What women say in real time to each other is that they are morons. Is it a woman’s job to stay their hands? Could they when the ire is raised in self righteous lies they tell themselves?

There’s no need to lash out as I want to and no easy answer when dealing with detente and madness. The black and white that defines absolute always becomes grey when it sits in the atmosphere but it doesn’t feel that way today.

Man Advances While Nature Plots

Vertigo plagues me. Motionlessness, I feel the planet hurl through space.

I considered the story line of Corona 19 as a malevolent, intelligent intentional predator oozing through a dying earth’s portal. I imagined animals exhausted by human destruction agreeing to host the virus on a symbiotic sentient mission to scour humankind with a fearsome plague.

In a fit of communal self loathing my fury at the state of our complicity grimly assures me we had it coming.

Killer viruses color the paper masked days.

I looked up data on the intelligence of viruses.  They possess a vague consciousness. They are parasites that mutate via hosts. Their mission is life everlasting.

Predators are a foundation of the animal kingdom. It’s nothing new that one survives by the demise of another.

It’s about dinner or dominion.

But humans are different. Our predatory patterns are not of a natural world but more complex.

Our idea of dinner can involve a world of hurt before we inflict the final blow to be packaged in plastic.

Our need for dominance involves excess.

The earth’s disease didn’t start by blood but desire.

Desire at its root is the same for all mankind. It’s the inhale. The inhale says yes. I want life.

To hold the inhale or to grasp it before the exhalation’s absolute emptiness disrupts the circuits. It is a sign of dis-ease. You can feel it in hyperventilation, indigestion, pelvic disorders, and jaw pain. This lack of ease is the first imbalance.

The virus comes for and by the inhale.

Such dark poetry but delicacy is for easier times.

Two steps forward and one step back is our nature and an antidote to the barrenness of a linear life.

The curve can endure more force than a straight line. Still, under force it can curve too much. The integrity of the whole breaks down.

The forces of ignorance or incompetence or incapacity are reeling us in.

Though in so many ways life is made easier than ever we’ve staggered backwards more than a step this time.

That is the vertigo. That is the wobble.

Imbalance begets disease.

The selfishly toxic politicians and talking heads, the abused environment, and the under-served ignorant public are the malady.

Disease is not the end but the beginning of our pandemic.

Salvation is not simplistic in a complex and confused society that fights it.

Thin Blue Veil

Star Trek Captain of the Enterprise, William Shatner exited Jeff Besos’ Blue Origin rocket at the age of 90 overwhelmed by the revelation that the minuscule five foot wide thin blue veil surrounding earth is all that separates us from destruction.

Distance and space shed light on this slight protection as well as the perspective of a combined humanity who will live or die together.

The illumination defies the fact that we see ourselves as unrelated tribes speaking unrelated languages, living individual lives.

It defies our aversion to amend bad habits despite worry for the planet.

All that separates us summons the greeting Namaste.  The light in you recognizes the light in me. The suggestion is I see you and I see you are like me though we mostly don’t see or believe that.

The words thin blue veil stay with me.  In this post quarantine Pandemic infused 2.0 life I see that veil hanging like a pall between what was and what will be. The atmosphere feels toxic and beyond repair. The dream of the greatest nation a spec in the bygone distance.

The prevailing text of modern yoga states at the outset that the goal of yoga is to lift the veil of ignorance about our true nature. At this moment of cynical denial of undeniable truths, the veil prevails as evidenced by the current social civil war.  I once thought yoga could save the world but it seems only to have become another distraction.

This veil is a fog of confusion. Should this veil dissipate might we come to recognize the true nature of ourselves in concert with our environment? Would the release of one veil not protect the one surrounding the planet? Would the emptiness of the word us become instead a construct of social reform?

The veil between courtesy and contempt is a porous shroud blowing in the breeze of moodiness.

The veil between health and sickness is a moment that changes everything.

The veil between friend and foe is fickle and self serving.

The veil between comfortable and destitute is always uncertain.

The veil between fact and opinion is a wall.

The veil between Liberal and Conservative an electric fence.

The veil between the boomers and whatever letter this generation is, is language.

The veil between relevant and discarded makes no sense.

The veil between male and female is full of holes.

The nature to watch for disaster is hardwired. To look at life with optimism takes work and practice. The right environment makes it easier but that environment is not prevailing. Everything is in question now.

What will we give up for the love of the earth and her creatures?

What can we buy that has no plastic?

What can we eat that hasn’t harmed a person or animal?

How should we build our home to not over extend?

Buy our clothes?

Invest our money?

How will we make the least impact on the fragile blue veil?

What can we pretend is not our problem?