Apres Second Degree Black Belt Test

Okay, I took the test, performed to the satisfaction of my superiors, got the second degree black belt. Same for my pal Jamie Blake, and so the next morning we had to get on a train and head home from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Kalamazoo. We met the most interesting people along the way.

First of all, we have to mention V. We met V. At the hotel before we left. She is the new wife of one of the Lincoln dojo members, a bride imported from Kazakhstan. She is a slender white-blond person, half the age of her new American husband, sweet-seeming, smiley and vivacious, dressed in hip hugger jeans. I asked her what food she missed most from Kazakhstan and without hesitation she said horse meat. She said she was craving horse meat desperately. "Why don’t you eat this here?" She said it was the best meat in the world and so good for you, so little fat. She asked me if I thought she could get horse meat in Chicago; I suggested perhaps in Montreal.

We got to Chicago several hours late, thus missing our connection to the Twilight Limited, so a bunch of us got put on a shuttle bus to all points Michigan. There we met Rachael, a slender girl dressed in simple dress to her calves and white Amish hat. We thought she was maybe fourteen but she turned out to be twenty one—perhaps avoiding wickedness kept her youthful. Her father is a cattle rancher in Iowa; her father had grown up in Goshen, Indiana, but had left because of the temptations there. On the subject of horses, she said "I can’t imagine life without horses." Jamie asked if she ate them, and she assured us that she could not imagine such a thing. We asked her about Amish dating (often a Sunday evening activity, after 9 p.m., a walk or a horseback ride, and the girl might provide a snack for the boy). We asked her about rebellious teenaged boys who drink and do drugs and drive cars, and she lamented that sometimes such boys don’t mend their ways and are lost. We grilled Rachael about the Amish life until she fell away, exhausted. She looked so sweet while she slept, that it made me momentarily rethink my disdain for the practice of clinging to innocense into adulthood. Later, I thought better of any re-thinking.

Also on the bus to Michigan was A, a native Russian Jew with luxuriously thick long hair, who had lived most of her life outside Detroit. She told us about some traditional Jewish dating practices, such as using a matchmaker. She was visiting her parents before moving to Colorado with her boyfriend, where she would be studying physical therapy, to specialize in pediatric therapy. Then we found out she was in Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War, in Haifa during the bombing. A bus station got blown up a few hours after she was there. Also, in 1996 and 1997 she had been in a musical, Joseph, with Donny Osmond, who was very nice she said, quieter than you might expect.

Earlier, on the train we met a great big tall man with a medical boot strapped securely onto his foot. He had thick features a bone disease that had the word "shark" in it and the word "murine." He said the bones in his foot were gradually turning to a consistency of playdough, but the disease was not expected to spread. He said the disease affected one in a quarter million people, which made me think I may never meet anyone with that disease again. The eventual amputation didn’t scare him so much, he said, because he’d probably walk better with a prosthesis. He let me use his cell phone, and he provided us with an atlas when he overheard us being confused about the location of certain cities in relation to Louisville, Kentucky.

The Amtrak train had one of those viewing cars, so I went up and sat there for a while, watched the scenery as though it was a movie: so many garages and gardens and farm fields and tire repair shops and junkyards. Telephone poles with old fashioned blue insulators on them. Cows and horses. A handsome freckled Danish boy sat in the next seat, reading a book in Danish. He told me he’d been living in Thailand with his (American) girlfriend, not in Bangkok but in a small town. He said that he had lived in Singapore for a while, and that chewing gum was illegal there. You can’t sell gum, and if you spit gum out on the ground, it’s a five hundred dollar fine. He also said that if you are found with drugs at the airport, they arrest you and then hang you within twenty-four hours. (Boy, there's a country that doesn’t mess around.) I asked him how were the second hand shops in Singapore? and he said there was only one he knew of, and it wasn’t very good and they had no furniture. "People like new things there," he said.

The man who drove the bus to to Michigan was named Gene, and I always think it’s funny to say "Hi Gene" because it’s like "hygiene", and so Jamie and I greeted him that way in unison. Jamie said she felt she needed some sort of culture, so I asked Gene if, on the way out of Chicago town, he couldn’t drive us past the big Claes Oldenburg baseball bat (Batcolumn, 1977) and he did. The baseball bat is 101 feet high and made of metal, and so everybody got out of the van and looked at it, and about half the people, including the Vietnamese man who didn’t speak any English, took photos of it in the fading light. That Vietnamese man hot-boxed cigarettes at every opportunity, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs. Jamie and I briefly considered smoking a cigarette to celebrate passing our test, but then we thought better of it. We got into Kalamazoo after midnight. We had Gene drop us off at Brewsters, a bar on Portage Road.

Bad ear.

Okay, so for two months I've heard the ocean in my head. For two months I have heard a nonexistent truck dieseling in our driveway, but there were no other signs of the infection. (The funny thing was that one night, when the sound was particularly loud, I went outside and found that there really was a semi truck dieseling in my neighbor's driveway.) Now, as I'm about to go off to take my kobudo test in Lincoln Nebraska, I decide to go to the doctor (my p.a. actually), and she finds the infection, gives me antibiotics plus assigns me two inhalers that I have to use in a complicated way. I have to lie on my back, squirt them up my nose, and just as the junk is dripping down one side of my throat, I have to turn and lie on my ear so that the junk will go to my ear... Okay, so now I don't hear a truck dieseling in my driveway; I hear nothing. My ears are totally plugged. That nice solid infection has liquified and filled my head... Hopefully it will clear by test time... yes, one can hope. Okay, now I lie down for three hours sleep before awakening and hitting the road.

Death to Power Point Presentations

My darling Christopher came home all mad last night at midnight, because at work they had a "town meeting" at which the corporate management types went on and on, late into the night, about subjects such as efficiency. It didn't help that when he finally got home, his wife was still out cavorting with her dojo pals, Jamie & Mike, and that Chris had forgotten his house key, and didn't know where the hidden key was (how could he not know?), and had to work his arm up through the cat door on the back porch. Anyway, he was very cranky because of the two hour power point presentation that was like all power point presentations, inefficient and stupid and filled with jargon. People giving power point presentations always put up their bullet points, which take about ten seconds to digest, and then they proceed to read all those bullet points loud, verbatim, kind of in slow motion, so that you want to kill them. I went to a meeting of the Kalamazoo Watershed something or other and listened to an hour-long presentation done like this and we even got copies of the powerpoint pages to follow along on our laps; I'm surprised that nobody stood up and screamed from boredom. The woman, a Bush-appointed EPA official, was eight and a half months pregnant, and I hate to think of that poor baby in her womb listening to presentation after presentation, day after day, girding his or her fetal loins in preparation to enter such a boring world. After that awful school shooting in Virginia, there's talk of allowing more concealed weapons, but at any given power point presentation, this might put even a pregnant lady in grave danger.

Poetry & Infidelity

I had no idea what these poets were up to. I'd long resisted the lure of poetry; to a Michigan girl white space looks a lot like wasted space. David Dodd Lee said a poem comes from an urge; so recently when I had an urge, I gave in and wrote a poem, "Planting Season for the Alcoholics." And then I found I couldn't keep my hands off this poem. This poem was a body, and I messed with it every day, fondled it, tweaked it affectionately, in a way I generally do not permit myself to tweak and fondle the people around me. With most people I try (sort of) to keep my hands to myself, but with these poems, wow! Each one a little extra-marital affair! Then I wrote a sexier poem, "My Sniper," and that one I am still thinking about rather often, and I do something akin to caressing it several times a day. It's not like I molest or abuse these little poetry bodies; once I've created them, they become forces in their own right, and there's no way I could force an unwelcome or inappropriate revision upon any of them. The poems are monsters, pets, companions, fashioned the way Gilgamesh fashioned from clay his warrior pal Enkido. I would never abuse the poems though occasionally I make a change that I will have to unmake the next day, and I do wonder if this ever causes my darlings to spend an uneasy night.

Please Pull Garlic Mustard Now

It is time for you to all go out and pull garlic mustard before it flowers and goes to seed. (Those of you who know me must have expected this blog.) In case you don't know, garlic mustard is an invasive weed that spreads very quickly; it is growing all around you, pushing out your favorite native plants, and so if there is a woodlot or woodland you love, please go out now and pull garlic mustard before it spreads out of control Here is one website describing the problem and showing a lot of photos of the weed: http://www.invasive.org/browse/subject.cfm?sub=3005 If you search the web for "garlic mustard invasive" you will get all the info you need. Yes, you can spray the garlic mustard with Round-up (or any generic brand of glyphosate), but avoid using that near any water as it hurts frogs.

It's not easy being a crusader against the stinking weed garlic mustard. All we crusaders know it is a losing battle, but we fight to preserve what we can, we fight to buy a few more years of enjoying our trillium, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit. The latest indignity in this battle is the preponderance of people who now seem aware that the stinking weed garlic mustard is theoretically edible. This means that when I am out in the woods, filling bushel baskets with the noxious weed, someone will inevitably come up to me and say, "You can eat that, you know."

That comment is just as rude as my coming into your cockroach infested city apartment and saying, "You can eat those roaches, you know." When carpenter ants destroy the walls of your home, it would be rude to say, "I can get you some recipes for those ants." If black mold eats your uncle's head, I promise not to speak glowingly about edible fungus. If the dingos were in the process of devouring your baby, I would never say, "You can bread and fry dingos, you know."

This year, I'm going to nip this sort of thing in the bud. If you see fit to bother me during my hours of work pulling garlic mustard with the comment, "You can eat that, you know," I'm not going to respond verbally. Without a word, I'm just going to kick you in the shin.

So get out there and start pulling.