Rant Du Jour

Southern Belle

As a boy I lived in a small north Louisiana village. There were only five stores, two service stations and one cafe.  A railroad track ran through town, and all of my life I lived with three freight trains shaking the earth as they blasted through town, including one at around midnight. I would sometimes get up enough courage to stand as close as I could to this huge metal creature crashing through the silent midnight.  My Southern Belle is a short recollection of how I felt.

Short story Callin' Mary

This is another story about living in the country. We had to find out what old man Bogan was doing singing and hollering at sundown every evening, calling out for his long dead wife Mary.

Mexican, chinese housekeepers, Invicitus

Mexican and Chinese Housekeepers, Invicitus

Lee and Grant and Command

Just read the quadrilogy by Mike and Jeff Shaara about the civil war, and had some ephiphanies about the responsibilities of command, and how it is the same for Generals and parents and bosses.  It generated a little poem, Love is all there is.

Give me the sea, poems, mouse god, etc.

In the original Rant I included this neat painting by James Christensen of an old man in a sailboat sitting high and dry on a rock beach overlooking the sea. Look online for fantasy pictures by Christensen and you will be delighted.  It generated this poem, Give Me The Sea.  It is followed by a piece called Dance Me To The End Of Love, inspired by a picture by Jack Vetterino, followed by several poems, MouseGod, Look in my eyes, Remembering a Dream, Had I been wise.

Recreating myself, hometown, music, art and dancing.

I have had to recreate myself at the age of 71. Here's a bit about my hometown, dancing, cajun dancing, wanting to be an artist.

Kindergarten, dead kids

Went to grandkids kindergarten graduation.  Who are these kids? What are they? Adults are dead and dying kids.  Listen to Christopher Robin.  Who am I?

Blooming of the oak trees in New Orleans, shrinks

Friends and Kin:

It’s Sunday,

April 2, 2006

, another day of pollen in

Baton Rouge

. I just don’t believe it has ever been this bad, but maybe it just never affected me this way before.

It was another near sleepless night for me. Perhaps it was the world making its

midnight

leap springing forward in time so that now it is seven rather than six and is still dark outside.  While spring is altogether delicious in

Baton Rouge

, it is accompanied by the dreaded pollen primarily from the blooming of the thousands of oak trees everywhere.  Yesterday the pollen from the tree hanging over my patio literally carpeted everything in the yellow stuff an inch deep on the tables, chairs, swing, hammock, plants and the cement floor.  I have an immense headache, am sneezing, my eyes are red, burning and watering and my head feels as if it is trying to give birth to something on the verge of bursting out through my face. After this will come the blooming of the Ligustrum, and the assorted other shrubs and trees here that give us our wonderful green that erupted just a couple of weeks ago.

Every spring I think of the following story that I wrote in a rant on March 31 either last year or the year before. This is an actual happening and I feel is worth repeating.

I had a maritime client working on a towboat in the

Mississippi River

as a deckhand who had fallen down the stair on a boat after slipping on oil that had been tracked from the engine room to the almost vertical metal stair. He had gone to a series of doctors for his head and back before seeing me, and one of them was a shrink from

New Orleans

who had seen him after being referred by Medicaid for a Social Security disability evaluation.  I paid this doctor a visit at his office first, as an initial consultation about my client.

His office was one of those ancient houses near

St. Charles Avenue

in uptown N.O., and was dank and dark, reminding me of those Gothic ghost stories. The gaunt woman with the severe glasses, stony down the nose stare greeted me with disdain from behind her cluttered desk and ushered me into his inner sanctum. We passed through two huge paneled doors, each of which had to be unlocked and relocked as we passed through and I sat in a chair well below his big desk, causing me to look up at him.

He was a frog of a man in his late forties, with a messy vest and dirty fingernails with bad teeth, little fishy eyes set in a cadaverous face laced with wrinkles. He told me he couldn't talk to me about my Cajun client, however, he would have to meet me off of his premises, for the rules forbade him revealing his diagnosis in cases in which he had been paid by Social Security. However, we could meet at another time at, say, the Pontchartrain Hotel Restaurant on

St. Charles Street

where I could spring for his lunch one day in the future. So we scheduled for me to take another long jaunt from

Baton Rouge

to

New Orleans

for this occasion. He seemed willing to bend the rules for lunch.

Though I wondered at his logic and situational ethics, I wanted, and needed, to know what this medical wonder had to offer, for my client was banged up pretty badly and being illiterate and socially challenged, he needed all the help he could get. Maritime cases are great cases to have, for they are easy to prove, handled in Federal Court where in those days (seventies) the judges were fairly friendly and hadn't come to realize they were anointed by Jehovah, and juries were generous in those days for the legal profession had not begun it's spectacular nose-dive into the cellar of public and self-esteem.  There was respect for attorneys in those days, and I was a happy and getting good results for my clients.

So I drove the seventy odd miles from

Baton Rouge

to

New Orleans

on this particular early spring morning, passing down the alley of live-oak branches overhanging St. Charles wide boulevard with its electric street cars clanging down the center of the boulevard (the New Orleans call it the "neutral ground.") Sometimes the wheels on the tips of the rods connecting the car to the electric wires strung over the tracks would hit something, causing an electrical snap and showers of sparks falling all around as the cars rumbled by, the windows open and the passengers rocking in the rhythm of the clatter of the swaying cars.  Sometimes the air would be perfumed, laden with the fragrance of jasmine and wisteria. And on this occasion, the tops of cars parked along the wide streets were carpeted in the yellow pollen falling from the huge oaks that lined the street.

I was on time if not a little early, as I parked in the hotel parking lot, which also had many live oaks all around. I ambled in, with my legal pad in my folder, ready for battle, action, or whatever presented itself.

I was directed to a table in a far back corner, sheltered on each side by huge split leaf philodendron. The man with the medical degree lifted his bleary eyes to me as I approached and he signed for me to sit, and I noted three empty martini glasses on the table. He was working on another clutched in his hang which I noticed bore the same long, dirty fingernails and several rings including pinky rings. He had started without me.

After an expensive meal, and quite a few martinis, I gave him a couple of hundred in cash and he slid an envelope to me including his report. I asked him what he thought of my client, and he said that my client had the intelligence of an animal. I glanced at the report and realized that it was of little help but it did show that my client couldn't get a job doing anything else because of his low IQ and education. The Cajuns from way down the bayou had little education and many in those days spoke very little English, and were reduced to the most manual of jobs and the chosen jobs, since they were born and raised in the marsh on the edge of the gulf, was on the water.  The medical care provider who was sitting before me pronounced my client as a lower specie or genus.

Then, his eyes got even more misty, and he leaned forward and said, conspiratorially, as a non-sequitor. "We are having a virtual epidemic of psychosis in

New Orleans

. We are sending dozens across the lake* every day."  (Pronouncing it Noo Or'lywns, as they say it in the uptown area) (In the working class section it is pronounced Noo awl'ins---not Nawlins like the outsiders think).

(*"Across the

Lake

," referred to Mandeville mental hospital across lake Pontchartrain.)

I replied, leaning forward to hear his whispered diagnosis of the

New Orleans

mental state, "That's very interesting. What do you think was the cause of that?"

He turned to look all around, even looking suspiciously at the overhanging tropical plants which were evidently listening intently to his pronouncements, then leaned back toward me, squinting behind his little reading glasses and said between tightly pursed lips "The head of Ochsner's Mental Clinic and I agree----it's the blooming of the oak trees."

I had to blink at that one. He smirked, and leaned back and took a deep drag from his cigarette he had been smoking in his long golden cigarette holder as he looked at me as if he was the wisest of the wise. The tried not to think about what had to be going on behind those protruding eyes of his. 

I paid the substantial bill, and walked out to my car, feeling a bit disoriented. Actually I felt unclean, as if I had something on me, or in me, like something I had stepped in that I couldn't get off the sole of my shoe. Maybe if I rode with my head out the window and let the air blow on me it would clear it away. Then I noticed my car had been covered with oak pollen while I had been gone. I absently ran my forefinger over the hood, leaving a streak in the yellow covering, and I don't remember now just what I thought then, but I do know that I shook my head in wonder at the plight of man.

This was in the early seventies, and the experience started me to thinking about psychs, and their products.  Plaintiff attorneys sent clients to them  as part of building cases, showing how not only that the client had been hurt physically, but maybe had been mentally injured. I thought there was something to them in those days, but I learned they didn't have a clue and were just garbage collectors. What the medicos couldn't handle were sent to them and they had created names for phenomena the patient was demonstrating, and these names were made up in meetings where they were named by majority vote rather than any real basis in fact. Then they created medicines to "fix" these conditions which they had created out of nothing. Since then we have Prozac, Ritalin, etc., all to "fix" conditions that really never existed before.

My doubt of these "doctors" grew to contempt over the years and soon I refused to send anyone to them for even a simple diagnosis, for they invariably gave the client an RX and evaluated my client right there after seeing them for a few minutes, sending them into a spin.

In court or deposition, I could ask one of these “healers” three questions that would create interesting answers. "What is the mind?"  They said they didn't know, and nobody could know. "The mind could not know itself."

"Have you ever cured anyone?"  "No, but one can change behavior by modalities such as drugs, shock, lobotomies, etc."

Finally, "Who or what is this thing that has this mind that you say you know nothing about?"

I had one shrink, Curtis Steele in

Baton Rouge

, to fumble about with the answer, as if he had never really thought about it, and finally he came out with "what you are asking about is the result of a coincidental collision of random particles in a chaotic universe."  In other words, we are just an accident that is continuing to happen, mud or meat or meat that accidentally became animated.  Therefore, they are justified in treating us like mud or meat.  I have consistently, during my decades as an attorney, denied their ability to testify as experts in the mind for they, across the board, know nothing about it yet are the legal arbiters and judicially bestowed keepers of the tech of the mind before courts. The pharmacological industry keeps them going, along with gifts to Senators and Representatives who pass legislation giving billions to them to continue raping the innocent and creating a social nose dive into what I consider Armageddon, or fascist oblivion run by big pharma and its masters.

I always look at what a person's product is. If he or she is a person who lays bricks, then how beautiful and sturdy is the brick wall or building. If he or she is a nurse, how well do they attend to their patients, not how much money do they make. I urge anyone to look at his or her product and if the product is just a paycheck I think they should rethink their lives.

So when I look at the product of psychiatrists and psychologists, whose tech is derived from observing people in mental institutions, and largely from institutions that existed in the turn of the century with Freud, Wundt, et al, who thought sex was all there was or men were animals with no souls and had to be caged or held down and suppressed as social mechanisms, then the entire basis of this "discipline" is false. They fail to recognize that someone is home, that we are spiritual beings and are basically good but just have lots loaded on us that we have done and that has been done to us that makes us do crazy and stupid things.

What makes me very upset is that many ministers, to be ordained, particularly Catholic priests, must undergo psychoanalysis and take and pass courses in psychology.  And if a person comes in with a problem they can't handle, then they must refer them to a psychiatrist for if something happens to the parishioner then they could be sued for failing to send them to a psych. This is totally insane. Our true spiritual healers are having to turn to the devil, if you believe there is a devil, and if there is one it is a psych, to get final OK to be a preacher or minister. This doesn't mean those who have spent time learning this stuff are bad, but I ask them just what do they know now that they didn't know before that they can really use in practical life before getting those degrees and spending all that time and money learning all that stuff. All they can do is go through a litany of memorized “conditions,” given names like paranoia, schizophrenia, shopping disorder, math learning disorder. They have no better tools, and are probably, if they can say it gave them a tool, struggling to work with it to make sense and finally resort to common sense in helping their parishioners.

And it is getting worse, for now, I would imagine half the people around me are on some kind of drug to help them get through the day and confront the news that collides with our universe from the media. I am paranoid, then, if I feel there is a conspiracy that is masterminding all of this. It is like creating a problem that totally distracts and then giving it an expensive solution that only you can provide. So lets terrorize the public with news that threatens the very underpinning of our lives and security, compound it with economic stress, environmental horror, create laws that protect us from those horrors while taking away freedoms that are our birthright, and on top of that provide a wonderful pill that will make us ignore it all. Result: mummies, robots, slaves.

Years ago I was asked to a luncheon for those who had written lots of letters to the editors, and was among a group of around seven plus David and Doug Manship who are the publishers of the Advocate in

Baton Rouge

. Their excuse for publishing such frightening news at all times was that the public needs to be “warned” of it being out there and it was a way to protect the public. Bullshit!  It sells papers and advances the agenda of those who the Manships answer to. But the Manships are like all other newspaper publishers, wanting to sell their product, and bad news sells.  And I would say that the Advocate gives proportionately more good news than most other dailies of that type---Gawd!  Just try to read the LA Times, or the NY Times and find one item of cheer!!

Recently I chanced upon a couple of joyous websites.  There is much much more good news in the world than there is bad, we just don’t get it. Good news doesn’t sell newspapers and doesn’t create the chaos and fear that then sells products made by those who benefit from generating the fear that lies at your inner core.  So take a look at www.goodtimes.com and www.odemagazine.com.  This is good stuff.  Look around in your own yard, your own neighborhood and city, and see if there is anything that is actually threatening that you can’t handle.  I guarantee there is not.  So where is the problem?  With the Manship meeting, since there was so much news about mugging at that time, I asked the group had anyone experienced or seen a bugging, and they all said they hadn’t, and wouldn’t go anywhere near the place where it was all taking place---all in one geographic area in Baton Rouge of the day, called Mall City—a drugged out crime ridden section of town.

“So accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with Mister In Between.”  That was a song popular in the forties and fifties by the Mills or Ames Brothers, I forget. 

When I look around for the terror that they say is all about, I see none. Here is a little poem by my friend Russell Salamon that runs through this.

How blue this blanket

Is.  How car that car.

          The leaves

                   Just

                      Leaves,

Not camps of foreign armies,

           Not death

           Nor

Freedom personified, just

           Leaves lying

           On the ground.

And then there is Dean Blehert, whose poems are semi-poems many times, but are never wasted. Once Dean sent out two and three pages weekly to his subscribers, free, of his poems, each page crowded with these little things, interspersed with drawings by his wife Pam.  I have a notebook filled with these, and I just randomly went through this morning and pulled out a few. There are literally thousands of these.  Some are longer. Dean can be serious, but why should he?  These are as serious as needed.

I’m here to see

The ocean---I ran all the way!

Did I miss anything?

We kissed long and hard

It is not easy to learn

A Foreign tongue.

The things you think are wrong with you

Are only wrong where they are not

You.

I could become a legend

In my own time

If I only had

The time.

Let’s just leave God out of this—

OK, God?

He put on his pants to look for

The bedroom cricket. It was

In his pants leg. They did

A song and dance routine.

I’m so alone, they said to each other.

We’ve drawn apart, so we can play catch.

Prove to me I’ve lived before,

Said a man who’d never lived at all.

They don’t make history

Like they used to.

I wanted to stop being a victim

But they wouldn’t let me.

I’m a safe poet in a storm.

Why does everybody always have to be right?

Can’t we take turns?

“I want you in me!”

Said the fat lady passionately

To the chocolate cheesecake.

I keep getting fatter

If beauty is skin deep

Mine becomes profound.

Things aren’t so bad…
that’s why sometimes I wish

I were a thing.

I’m very good in bed—

I just lie there with my eyes closed

And don’t do any harm

To a soul.

There comes a time in a man’s life

When he has to choose. I can’t decide

If this is that time or not.

I could incorporate.

Would you read a poem

By a corporation?

It’s a vicious falsehood that nothing stops you from doing what you want to do.  You are stymied by the most potent, irresistible, unreasoning force in the universe:  You.

Please, Lord, make me a great and famous poet or at least less fat.

You catch me staring hungrily at you---

I was just mentally stripping off your

Opinions, wondering if you’d be any good in poetry.

“…there was right on both sides.”

That’s the trouble with Ri8ght:

It stands on opposite sides

  And glares at itself.

My old age is well taken care of:

I’ve entrusted it to the

Unimaginably distant future.

I’m immortal, so far.

I could walk away from it all

And never come back, and I would, too

If I knew which way was not back.

A fool and his money are soon

Indistinguishable.

….and at the end of the sixth day God paused to read some overdue Environmental Impact Studies.

The chocolate chip ice cream

Emerged from the freezer, found a child and was fulfilled.

I went for a walk in

L.A.

Everyone I met was wearing a car.

We do not die because our hearts Attack us. We attack our hearts.

No matter how carefully I empty the Laundromat washer, I lose socks. The house takes a cut.

Daily the toll grows. How many now missing in inaction.

I could go on and on with his stuff. I have thousands of these, and I always feel a little hidden smile as I read each one. It is a joy, and he conceals a man of great depth in all of little bubbles of joy he cannot but share.  He and Russell wrote a poem when my son Jake died at the age of thirteen in 1994, and I will never forget that.

So it has come to the end of the offering for today.

I just came across a poem written about, or for, me by Kathleen Mayeaux, some twenty years ago.

Essence of Ashes

The fire in you flicked its coral tongue

Up and out, licking brightly

At everyone, transferring

Dancing holy spirit flames

To our ashen foreheads as we knelt

On a tilt-a-whirl altar,

Sharing a chalice that held

The power to replenish itself.

And the cup went around, moth to mouth.

Soon we were praying in onomatopoeia,

“Open sesame, the hidden portals of time.”

The ectoplasmic hands that moved us

Caressed the letters on the board

And Ouija confided through you,

“Go forth. Seek the master of minds

Over matters of madder hatters.

Partake lustily of this existence

Before another is offered

And you must confess you’ve never

Even tasted the first one yet.”

Your eyes leapt like live coals,
disintegrating cleanser commercials,

Those blasphemous barriers against

Entrance to phantasmland

(When you wish upon a streetlight,

make sure the vampire is still in sight).

And we called on the bemused muses

For the grace to incinerate

Cartoon characters whose words

In their still life balloons

Often make a mockery of the glorious

Transfiguration of our phoenix.

So, dear reader, that is the end of the Rant for April 2, 2006.  If anyone on this list wishes to be taken off, please tell me immediately. I tried to consolidate several lists and there are is still duplication and I am sorry if you get more than one of these. Sometimes your name is on several lists and I send it out on all lists. One day I will take the time to make one big list and not have any duplication.

LDSledge

Rantor