Friday poetry challenge: No exit from Escher's stairs

This morning I turned a page in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker and saw myself--my job, my office, my life, plus a handy reply for the colleague who keeps begging me to please please please change my mind about retiring in December. 

It was already a better-than-average issue, featuring Simon Rich's delightful retelling of "The Pied Piper," Amanda Petrusich's gripping exploration of the power of grief, and Julian Lucas's long profile of Colson Whitehead, which made me even more eager to take delivery of his new novel. There's even a short story by Ben Lerner that didn't instantly repulse me--a real accomplishment.

But then in the middle of the not-horrible Lerner story I ran into Chris Gural's cartoon titled "M.C. Escher's Lab Rats" (view it here). Made my day, my week, maybe my year.

I suspect that I'm not the only academic who feels like one of those rats scrambling through an impossible Escher staircase that lures us toward some longed-for apotheosis only to flip us on our heads at the base of yet another set of steps. There's no way out, no way up, no way around, just an endless climb that can't be distinguished from descent, while everyone acts as if the futility is perfectly normal.

Well I need to get out of this rat race. I'm only staying on until December because of health insurance, and then I'm outta here. People keep asking why I want to retire or begging me to stay, which is flattering except I just can't. I could blame the wonky knee that makes standing in front of a class painful and, sometimes, dangerous, or I could blame ever-shifting college policies, enrollment issues, and rampant AI infestation, or I could mention a desire to spend more time with my grandkids while they still like me, but really it comes down to this: I'm tired of living as one of Escher's lab rats, especially when the maze has no end so there's no opportunity to find the cheese.

I don't know what happens when you combine doggerel with ekphrasis, but maybe it's time we found out:

Step up, step down,
go this way round
and through that door
that's on the floor--
up to the attic.
No one is static
but always moves
up well-worn grooves
in stairs that climb
to nowhere. I'm
a rat that wants
to leave the haunts
of Escher's stairs.
But exit--where?

It's not pretty, but if's Friday so it's time to sling some rhymes. Who's next?

Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Trying not to take this weather personally

Why do I struggle to sleep during a power outage? The house is quiet, eerily quiet, with a thick curtain of darkness blocking out the world, but my mind stays alert, aware that something is wrong: 

What time is it now? The juice is supposed to return around midnight. Sure feels like midnight, but how would I know? 

Thirsty. Where's that flashlight? Oops, can't run the water with the pump dead, and can't open the fridge lest the outage last longer than expected. Wait, here's a can of ginger ale on the counter. Would warm ginger ale help me sleep? What if it makes me want to pee? Can't flush the toilets with no power to the well pump. 

Why can't I sleep?

Next day I kept asking people at church what they thought of the storm and they all said "What storm?" Apparently it was highly localized, bringing sudden hail, rain, wind, and thunder to our small corner of the county while skirting the rest. By next morning crews had removed fallen trees and limbs from several areas of our road, but I saw little sign of damage elsewhere.

The storm lasted ten minutes at most but left us in the dark for six hours, much of which I spent wondering why I couldn't sleep. And then the power came on and we suddenly became aware of just how many little lights surround us every day, how many common noises provide the soundtrack of our lives. The clock came on, the fan started moving air around, and I soon settled into blissful sleep.  

Friday poetry challenge: Glassy-eyed wonder

When I chose the window seat, I did not expect it to become the Falling Window Seat, offering a front-row view of a smashing performance that caused diners to leap from their seats in astonishment or maybe terror. I'm pleased to report that no one was injured in the making of this spectacle, but the glass shattered spectacularly and the show, alas, could not go on.

I'd driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy at The James, and we'd arrived early enough to grab lunch at the hospital cafe. The Juneteenth holiday had thinned out the usual crowd, so we scored a table next to a window. But what was happening just outside our window? Thick coils of rope swaying like pendulums in the breeze, scattered tools and unrecognizable equipment, and one worker, a man in hard hat and yellow vest, leaned back and looked up over our heads as he held a rope taut, trying to steady something outside our angle of vision. Moderately interesting, we thought, but not much of a show.

And then BOOM!--Something big smashed down on the terrace. 

Inside the cafe, diners jumped from their seats and ran, some leaping away from the windows and some rushing toward them to get a better view. Suddenly the cafe was crowded with onlookers chattering in many languages, wondering whether they ought to call a doctor or flee for their lives.  

Meanwhile, the terrace outside was thronged with workers looking up at the building, looking down at the shards of shattered glass, looking inquisitively at the equipment they'd been using to try to raise a massive pane of glass into place. One man talked into a radio while others began to remove the suction cups from the glass lifter. A worker stood with hands on his hips, looking up and shaking his head. Anyone who had been standing nearby when the glass fell would have been studded with shrapnel.

Indoors, onlookers scanned the shards for blood, expressed relief at its absence. Outdoors, workers in sturdy boots walked around oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

It could have been a disaster--it certainly sounded like one. But instead it was a bit of terror and shock intruding into our lunch hour before we walked back into our ordinary lives, relieved that today we would not be a part of a story on the evening news. Another day, another near-death experience. Ho-hum.

But the beat goes on:

Bless this mess, this glass that passed

so close--but missed! I must insist:

let's raise a glass and wrest a gloss

from this distress. (The shards got tossed.)

Now who wants to try turning an unexpected interruption into a smash hit?

Bumper sticker befuddlement

I'm getting too old for this, I tell myself, though it's hard to define what this refers to. I'm definitely getting too old to decipher bumper stickers on passing cars, but if I'm so close that I can easily read the words but still can't fathom what they're trying to say, that's a different kind of problem. 

I understand what it means when a pickup truck the size of Nebraska has its backside plastered with the American flag with assault rifles replacing the stripes, and I know what it means when a vanity license plate spelling BEHEMOTH is attached to an SUV so bit it makes me wonder why no auto-makers have manufactured a car by that name. These signs communicate very clearly: I'm a big tough dude who may well be armed--stay out of my way. I am happy to oblige, and kudos for spelling behemoth correctly, but do you know how to pronounce it? 

But then I stand staring at a tiny colorful car sporting a pink bumper sticker that says I got a lobotomy at Claire's, which I kind of understand because the relentless pink glitteriness of Claire's boutiques could make anyone over the age of 12 feel lobotomized, but apparently there's a whole pop-culture thing about getting a lobotomy at Claire's, an online rabbit hole I don't intend to descend.

I'm definitely getting too old for some of the pop-culture references I encounter while out in public, but often I can't even tell if a bit of text is gesturing toward pop culture or simply being silly. We need more zombie baseball: pop culture reference or random words on a bumper sticker? If someone will explain to me what zombie baseball is, I can make an informed decision about whether we need more of it.

I need less confusion in my life and fewer opportunities for annoyance over inept advertising, an epidemic I can't seem to avoid. My ears hurt every time I hear a local radio ad telling me that electronic bikes has raised the bar, but at least the problem is easy to identify: somebody  (copywriter, editor, ad manager, business owner, whatever) can't grasp the concept of subject/verb agreement. I get that, though I worry about how all those people could hear they has without grimacing. 

What I don't get is how a whole host of people could have approved a radio ad for a local flooring company that keeps telling me We want you to be where your feet are. Grammatically correct, yes, but what does it mean? I generally am where my feet are because it was my feet that got me there, and if there's a way for me to be where my feet aren't--short of amputation--I'd like to hear about it. 

Or maybe they want me to lie on the ground hugging my feet? Assuming the fetal position is unlikely to put me in the proper frame of mind to buy flooring--or anything else. I'd like to let my feet take me to whoever wrote that ad and ask a simple question: What were you thinking?

But then maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's just noise intended to get attention or gesture toward some outside reference without making meaning at all. And that, I think, is what I'm getting too old for: maneuvering through a world where the gap between word and meaning sometimes seems unbridgeable.

Antidotes for summer panic

Of course it's ridiculous to suffer a midsummer panic attack when summer hasn't, technically, even started yet, but the academic calendar skews everything so that June is my only real month off all year, though it's not entirely off because I have to attend webinars (yuck) and preside at meetings to plan events funded by the grant I'm administering, a task that will double in size in July, when I will also have to plan orientation for incoming faculty (and yes, I'm glad we have a few new hires this fall, since last year I planned the entire all-day event for exactly one new faculty member) while also preparing syllabi for two or, possibly, three classes, one of which I'm completely rejiggering, and the word possibly back there is another reason I'm a little stressed out since, for reasons I can't disclose, I won't know for another couple of weeks whether I'll teach that third (very important) class and I refuse to start working on fall syllabi until I know exactly what I'm teaching, so July will be crammed full and then we'll plunge into the deep end--August, when everything starts up again.

No wonder I'm panicking! Here we are in the middle of June and what have I accomplished? I've written an essay that felt like excellent therapy but will probably never be published, and I've chaired a couple of meetings, and I've worked on publicity about the grant, and I've driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and to Belpre for blood tests and a transfusion, and yes, I'm troubled that he needed two blood transfusions in one week and feels really awful after the most recent round of chemo, so I walk around with a solid little lump of concern sitting on top of my brain every single minute of the day, which makes it hard to think about more important things--but is there really anything more important right now than my son's health?

I've been seeking distractions so I won't think so much about what I can't control, but then I played this online game so much that it hurt my wrist and shoulder so I had to delete it from my phone, and then I started reading too much, taking up Middlemarch again, not only because I felt I needed to do it justice after ragging on it last week but also to try to resolve a question that was puzzling me: did I miss an important element of Casaubon's character? The question arose when a friend referred to Casaubon as a conchologist and I thought wait a minute, I don't remember that, so I had to go and read the whole stinking novel (which is really delightful and funnier than I'd remembered but not, I insist, the greatest of all time) and there it is, in chapter 30, when Casaubon is recovering from his illness and Mr. Brooke advises him to eschew scholarship and take up a more relaxing pursuit, a passage well worth reading simply for the contrasting voices:

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study; conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphry Clinker'; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have so little humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."

"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."

You must unbend, I tell myself, echoing Mr. Brooke, but I certainly don't intend to take up the "light study" of conchology. Maybe I just need to read less.

And so I did. At the suggestion of another friend, I read Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that neatly rebuts Mr. Brooke's claim that "We have so little humor now." You want humor? Read Less!  Middlemarch is funny (sometimes) but it takes a week to read, provided that you're not devoting any time to, for instance, having a job, but a quick reader can breeze through Less in a lazy June afternoon. I don't know how to describe the plot without evoking Homer and James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and, especially, Dante, which would make the book sound stuffy and scholarly, two things it most decidedly isn't, even though the main character, Arthur Less, finds himself in a dark wood on the eve of midlife and proceeds through various circles of travel hell. It's just a very funny account of a man running away from one problem and straight into a series of new ones while being stripped of everything that makes his life meaningful. Okay, that doesn't sound funny either, but trust me: it is a total hoot, with some marvelous moments of insight as well as a neat twist at the end. Just what I needed right now.

And so was this: "The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech," an online rant by Brian Phillips, who provides his list as a sort of addendum to the Pope's encyclical regarding technology. I suspect that every reader will find something familiar among Phillips's 40 problems, like the one concerning online tracking of packages:

Welcome to Schrodinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it's being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. 

Or this one concerning the difficulty of finding helpful information in an emergency: 

I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can't do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorrento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least i never had to talk to Grok.

Phillips ends his amusing rant with a mini-sermon aimed at tech billionaires, reminding them that "There are things in the world that are more important than money"--which, come to think of it, is an important principle underlying the plot of both Middlemarch and Less. All funny, and all effective at distracting from a midsummer panic attack in the middle of June.

But eek--where is the summer going?

Friday poetry challenge: It takes a village (idiot)

So I'm driving home from Aldi where I've witnessed three random acts of kindness in a single shopping trip and I'm filled with a warm sense of appreciation for the community of Aldi shoppers, and I'm on a stretch of twisty country road that runs past a property formerly owned by a con man who tried to bilk our community out of piles of money through a complex scheme thwarted by a few random locals with the courage to open their mouths--so yes, I'm feeling good about the power of ordinary people to keep their community safe and happy, when suddenly there's this kid riding a scooter in the road right in front of my car.

I'm not talking about a Vespa; I'm talking about a glorified skateboard with handlebars, a flimsy thing that this kid, who looks to be about 12 years old, is zipping and weaving and swerving around on right in the middle of my lane with no helmet or knee pads or any other kind of protection. I come around a curve and there he is, but he must have heard me coming because he quickly swerves into the other lane to get out of my way. Right: he's riding a foot-powered vehicle that clearly isn't roadworthy straight into oncoming traffic--if there's anything coming around the next curve, he's toast. Why not steer his scooter to a safer place, like, for instance, off the road?

I barely have time to think all this before I'm past him and rounding the next curve and relieved to see that no cars are coming, and I look in the rear-view mirror to see that Scooter Boy has swerved back into my lane, which is the right lane for motorized vehicles but not for helmetless boys on scooters. Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson, I tell myself, and suddenly I hear my dad yelling at a bike-rider who crossed (in a crosswalk! in a school zone!) in front of his car: It'd serve you right if someone ran you over! 

And I don't want to be the cranky old person who yells at random strangers, but I also don't want to be the benevolent old person who drives blithely around a blind curve and flattens a kid on a scooter. I can see why that stretch of road would be appealing to a scooter-rider, with all the curves and hills offering opportunities for daredevil jumps and spins, but that one-mile stretch of road serves as a shortcut between the interstate and a busy highway. It gets traffic! Someone could get killed! Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson! But there's nowhere to pull over and even if I did, what would I say to the kid--and why would he listen to me?

So I drive on home, hoping that the kid has a mom or aunt or nosy neighbor nearby who will witness his shenanigans and give him a good talking-to. It takes a village to raise a child, but unless he's auditioning for the role of Village Idiot, he needs to get his scooter off the road. 

I'm tempted to leave him a note in the style of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just To Say

I have driven
my car
past your
scooter

which you
were probably
proud to be
riding so well

Forgive me
for not stopping
(you stopped
my heart cold)

Try yelling that message! Or better yet, trying putting some unsolicited advice into verse form for the benefit of various Village Idiots.