Gut feelings (a sort of postscript)

 

And as a sort of postscript to my non-review of the Dylan biopic, yes, I've been struggling, and no, no one is listening, just like those whisperers in Dylan's song drowned out by a chorus of howls. On New Years Eve, I will be having the most festive CT scan of my life, and a few days after that I have to have a sort of bullseye painted on my belly so they can tell where my colon leaves off and the rest of me begins. (Actually, it's in case they have to remove the whole thing.) They will draw my blood and analyze it, and they will listen to my heart with its odd skipping rhythm. Then on Ukrainian Christmas, I will go under the knife, or whatever it is they use these days.

I had to tell myself today, really just tell myself, look, you're not gonna die. This won't kill you, it will merely test you. Maybe more severely than I have ever been tested, in spite of near-fatal alcoholism and one mental breakdown after another over a lifetime. I actually got into such a deep slump spiritually that I was sure no one would care or even notice that I had died, that I had no legacy, that all I had done for my loved ones was for naught and they would just carry on as if I had never existed.

I couldn't go on that way, so as usual I needed some Dylan to boost me up, or at least get me walking again, in some direction. Any direction. Not sure what happened, but I have gained purchase a bit, and no longer am quite so sure I'll die on the table and that will be that, the end of everything.

It's weird how cliched things actually do happen, such as your life passing before your eyes, and all sorts of odd memories are popping up and replaying themselves, not all of them very good or bad, just neutral things. But the playlist of Dylan songs I am quite literally compiling for my memorial service (if I even have one) is not so neutral. I have taken this dress rehearsal for my own death as an alarming sign, and this has caused me to plunge around mentally like a deer in a forest fire, not knowing which way to run.

There is always something apocalyptic about Bob's most comforting songs. "Death is Not the End" is a nice little spiritual, with a women's chorus singing "Lawd, Lawd", but one verse proclaims:
"When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men

Just remember that death is not the end." 

Or should I listen to "My Own Version of You"? 
"All through the summers, into January

I've been visiting morgues and monasteries

Looking for the necessary body parts

Limbs and livers and brains and hearts."

Good old Bob! Aren't you pleased with the way he has mellowed? But perhaps this song is appropriate for someone whose literal guts are about to be compromised. Is that why I feel so violated? Or whatever this is. It's a good thing no one reads this, or so I tell myself, because it's about the least-festive thing you can read at this time of year. 

But it's been a weird Christmas, a weird end-of-year, and I keep trying to focus on walking the dock at Burnaby Lake, blackbirds eating out of my hand, wild geese exploding in formation right over my head at Blakeburn Lagoon, all the simple, blazingly lifeward things that feed me and keep me whole, if that's the right word. I won't be whole after this, in fact I will be literally gutted, but will it matter, is it like having your tonsils out, I wonder? Can I do without that part of me? I guess we'll see, but until then, keeping the lights turned on in my mind is the biggest task I have ever had to face.

My Own Version of You

All through the summers into January

I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I want to bring someone to life - is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

It must be the winter of my discontent
I wish you’d taken me with you wherever you went
They talk all night - they talk all day
Not for a second do I believe what they say

I want to bring someone to life - someone I’ve never seen
You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean

I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando
Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it up right and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create

I get blood from a cactus - gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die

I’ll bring someone to life - someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind
I say to the willow tree - don’t weep for me
I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be

I get into trouble and I hit the wall
No place to turn - no place at all
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do

I’ll bring someone to life - in more ways than one
Don’t matter how long it takes - it’ll be done when it’s done

I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace - like St. John the Apostle
Play every number that I can play
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day

After midnight if you still want to meet
I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street
Two doors down, not that far to walk
I’ll hear your footsteps - you won’t have to knock

I’ll bring someone to life - balance the scales
I’m not gonna get involved in any insignificant details

You can bring it to St. Peter - you can bring it to Jerome
You can move it on over - bring it all the way home
Bring it to the corner where the children play
You can bring it to me on a silver tray

I’ll bring someone to life - spare no expense
Do it with decency and common sense

Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be
You won’t get away with fooling me
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessings of your smile

I want to bring someone to life - use all my powers
Do it in the dark in the wee small hours

I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there - its carved into your face
Should I break it all down - should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel - can you tell me please

Stand over there by the Cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long ago before the First Crusade
Way back before England or America were made

Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell
Mister Freud with his dreams and Mister Marx with his axe
See the rawhide lash rip the skin off their backs

You got the right spirit - you can feel it you can hear it
You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night you can feel it in the morn
Creeps into your body the day you are born

One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Show me your ribs - I’ll stick in the knife
I’m gonna jump start my creation to life

I want to bring someone to life - turn back the years
Do it with laughter - do it with tears  

        

Why the Boy Scouts went bankrupt

Boy Scouts of America files for bankruptcy

CNN February 18/20

12,000 Boy Scouts were abused over decades

The Boy Scouts of America has filed for bankruptcy, according to a court document filed in Delaware bankruptcy court early Tuesday.

The youth organization, which celebrated its 110th anniversary February 8, listed liabilities of between $100 million and $500 million and estimated assets of $1 billion to $10 billion.

The bankruptcy filing comes at a time when the organization faces hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits, thousands of alleged abuse victims and dwindling membership numbers. As a result of the filing, all civil litigation against the organization is suspended.

Paul Mones, a Los Angeles-based attorney representing "hundreds of sexual abuse victims in individual lawsuits," called the organization's bankruptcy filing a "tragedy."

"These young boys took an oath. They pledged to be obedient, pledged to support the Scouts and pledged to be honorable. Many of them are extremely angry that that's not what happened to them and the Boy Scouts of America did not step up in the way they should have," Mones said.

The Boy Scouts of America was fielding several hundred sexual abuse lawsuits

The Boy Scouts of America faced hundreds of lawsuits from alleged sexual abuse victims across the country -- all of which are now suspended because of the bankruptcy filing.

Several of the lawsuits allege repeated fondling, exposure to pornography, and forced anal or oral sex. In response, the Boy Scouts of America said at the time that they "care deeply about all victims of child abuse and sincerely apologize to anyone who was harmed during their time in Scouting." They added that they were "outraged that there have been times when individuals took advantage of our program to abuse innocent children."

"We believe victims, we support them, we pay for counseling by a provider of their choice and we encourage them to come forward. It is the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) policy that all incidents of suspected abuse are reported to law enforcement," the organization said.

Last April, exposed court testimony showed the organization believed more than 7,800 of its former leaders were involved in sexually abusing more than 12,000 children over the course of 72 years.

Mones, who was part of a legal team that won a $18.5 million verdict against Boy Scouts of America for former Scout and sexual abuse victim Kerry Lewis in 2010, said Monday that instead of potentially having their day in court, alleged victims who had pending lawsuits will now need to file claims in bankruptcy court.

Michael Pfau, a Seattle-based attorney whose firm represents 300 alleged victims across the country, said the bankruptcy claims process will be decidedly different for those suffering due to the Boy Scouts of America's alleged inaction.

"They won't have to give depositions involving their life history. Their lives won't be scrutinized, but they lose their right to a jury trial. For a lot of abuse survivors, telling their story in a court of law and forcing the organizations to defend their actions can be cathartic. That won't happen with a bankruptcy," Pfau said.

Mones said in the aftermath of the Lewis case, his law office received hundreds of phone calls from adult males claiming to have been Boy Scouts of America sexual abuse victims, but many states had statutes of limitation that narrowed their legal options at the time. It wasn't until years later, when some state legislators enacted new laws that enabled victims to file lawsuits without limits on when the alleged abuse took place, that a barrage of complaints against the youth organization were filed.

Pfau estimates the number of claimants will eclipse those of the Catholic church.

"The Catholic bankruptcies are limited in geographic scope. Here there will be claimants from all 50 states and the American territories," Pfau said. "We can talk about files and numbers, but in reality if you step back and realize the scope of the human carnage, it's stunning."

BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. I used to wonder about entrenched and socially-revered institutions like the Boy Scouts, its unshakeable foundation now completely demolished simply by the emergence of the truth. The dehumanizing phenomenon of systemic abuse is finally, painfully breaking through, often  explosively, and seemingly everywhere. Survivors were isolated, felt they were the only one, dared not speak because they were silenced, and died inside while others went about their way. This is what I call the "oh, surely not/he would never" view, the view of everyday normalcy while hell rages in silence on the other side.  I hate to think how prevalent all this is among people who have been too ashamed, frightened or dead by suicide to come forward. Perhaps the fact that men are now beginning to speak means they will be more readily believed, treated with more respect, and  won't be so barraged with "but why didn't you report it?" silencing tools, which is what women who have been raped almost universally face.

I remember back in the '90s - and everyone seems to have forgotten all about this, though it nearly destroyed my life - the "False Memory Syndrome Foundation", made up of parents and other authority figures who constantly downplayed the prevalence of child sexual abuse. They actually claimed, and the culture desperately wanted to believe it, that incest and sexual abuse was a fairly rare phenomenon, that there was a sort of "abuse bandwagon", and that therapists "implanted" these terrible notions that people claimed they had endured.   

The worst of it was the systematic and ruthless denial that it ever happened, and what we now call "gaslighting" - making the accuser seem "crazy" and delusional. They were usually successful because their victims' lives would be in ruins, and the perpetrators were mostly extremely comfortable, high-status people. They even mentioned it in one of their floods of magazine articles, saying, "We were proud to be such a fine-looking bunch of folks" who "would never" perpetrate such horrors. Survivors were accused of being zombified by abuse propaganda, becoming these harrowing spectres walking around like Stepford wives and bearing poisonous lies, even being coerced into "recanting" and taking it all back. Sometimes, the only way to get your family back was to sacrifice the truth. It was a choice between decapitation and tearing your heart out.

So as bad as I feel about all this, at least this horror is now out of the closet for good - or I hope so. But I believed that it had already happened in the early '90s, though it was all ruthlessly reburied and forgotten about. "False Memory Syndrome" (which doesn't exist, though I believe it forced its way through relentless lobbying into the DSM) was on the cover of EVERY magazine, including Time, Life and Newsweek, but if I bring it up now I get a baffled, "what are you talking about?" look. It's as if it didn't happen at all. Amazing what we do with trauma (i. e. completely forget it ever existed) when we don't want to face it. It doesn't even matter if we have experienced it first-hand or not. It's a cultural numbness which is blessed indeed for those wanting an "out". And amazing, too, how the profound isolation and being treated as crazy and delusional, which so often leads to demolished lives and suicide, seems to last forever.

I found a creepy video which I can't even post here, meant to be an illustration of one of the main tenets of scouting: OBEDIENCE. Now I see that concept as totally poisonous, not just coercive but monstrous. Taking little boys out into the woods and sexually violating them requires automatic submission to authority, a form of grooming and conditioning which paramiltary groups like scouting excel at. Good boys submit, and they don't tell tales, because Scoutmaster John WOULD NEVER do such a thing - and how can you even think of it? Why would such a possibility even come into your mind? What is wrong with you?  

Think how shockingly long it took for the truth to come out - and will it recede back into the shadows again, as it has done so many times before?

Bentley smells a rat!

This didn't need to happen, oh no, not on an Easter Sunday morning when all you hope for is a cheery visit from a fluffy little bunny handing out candy eggs.

What I got was a rat.

I have never SEEN a rat before. I have had nothing to DO with a rat, ever. But there it was, hunched on top of my bird feeder, its snakelike tail drooping down, looking more dead than alive except for its skritchy little whiskers and trembling little nose.

I didn't want to think about an entire colony of rats living in the tool shed. So I told myself, over and over and over again, that there HAD to be just this one rat, this lethargic-looking thing that we could easily poison or snare in a trap, or, at very least, scare away.

Bentley was coping admirably. Though he was obviously traumatized, he dealt with the enormous stress in his usual courageous manner, by flopping over on his side and yawning. Bentley laughs at death.

The thought of an infestation in my house or even in my tool shed makes me want to move out. This was a HORRIBLE  creature, but it got worse, because later in the day while we were having a lovely, jolly barbecue in the back yard, this happened:

This. . . this THING came skulking beside the back fence and began skittering along at a dreadful pace.  My God - it was either the same rat, meaning that the rat would keep returning indefinitely, or. . .

It was a different rat.

"Maybe it's pregnant," my daughter-in-law said to me. OMG. Can't be happening. The grandgirls were screeching and whooping and wanting to adopt it, insisting it was "cute".

This is the same creature who brought Europe to its knees during the medieval plagues. NOT cute.

As a family, we will survive. We've surmounted many a disaster up to now. That absolutely does NOT mean we'll surmount this one. In fact, by the law of averages, our survival is about to collapse like a house of cards.

Oh God, I cannot look at this gif much longer or I will become ill. And yet, I cannot let it go. The hellish sight of  vile scampering vermin will be with me forever.

So who's flying the plane?

'We're all going down. Say your prayers': Berserk JetBlue captain has to be restrained by PASSENGERS after being ejected from cockpit in mid-flight and running up and down screaming

Unruly pilot identified as Clayton Osbon, 49, who has been a JetBlue captain for 12 years

Captain screamed 'Iraq, al-Qaeda, terrorism, we're all going down' after coming out of the toilet telling passengers 'say your prayers, say your prayers'

Passengers looked on in horror as the married captain tried to break into the cockpit after being locked out

Flight attendant urged passengers to restrain the increasingly erratic captain

Four passengers, including a retired NYPD sergeant, jumped the man

Former prison guard David Gonzalez, 50, put the captain in a choke hold until he passed out

The flight was packed with people heading to the 2012 International Security Conference in Las Vegas

Flight 191 from JFK to Las Vegas was forced to make an emergency landing in Amarillo

JetBlue said the captain had a 'medical situation' and was taken to an Amarillo hospital

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121240/JetBlue-captain-ejected-cockpit-mid-flight-running-aisles-screaming.html#ixzz1qMna1v3P


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The girl with the flaxen hair

I have to admit off the top that this photo is way out of date. That little girl, one Erica Morgan, is now turning five, a momentous age that represents a developmental leap, and

a new readiness to read and write and sit still long enough to attend classes.

Plus she still breaks the cute-o-meter every time.

Erica Morgan is a princess from tip to toe, from her tossing curls to her crystal-blue eyes,with the longest eyelashes anyone has ever seen. They're like fans, for God's sake. When she flutters her eyelids, there's a breeze.

All my four grandkids are wondrous to me, representing the upspringing of new life in the midst of a very dry wasteland. My disillusion with the writing business (NOT with writing itself, which was still compelling) had parched my insides into those flakes you see in the desert, you know, in National Geographic or someplace.

Erica made her debut at such a time, and I will never forget rounding the corner in the hospital room and seeing her for the first time: she looked like a tiny, pink, compact, living rosebud, and she had that ineffable sweet baked-biscuit smell of the newly-arrived.

It's a fascinating thing watching any baby become themselves, evolve into

who they are going to be. I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of those myths we all ascribe to, like "you remember everything that ever happened to you" and "we only use 2% of our brains") that our personalities are basically set by age two. Yikes. Parents who've made any mistakes at all must shudder at such a statement.

But such is the fluidity and surprise of human nature that even the worst two years can cause the plant to grow around the obstacle. Cedars abound here, and many of them grow too near power lines. Often they have to be trimmed in a weird-looking circle. I saw one recently that had put out a lot of new branches, but they all came straight up within a couple of inches of the power line. The tree "knew".

So what does this have to do with Princess Erica? Even the best life in the world is burdened. If nothing else, it's burdened by turning on the TV (guaranteed to depress anyone) and finding out about oil spills and plane crashes and little children dismembered by fiends. Who can fail to feel something, not hopeful, but horrific?

We need to say to our kids and grandkids, it's all right, there are terrible things out there in the world, but here, in your own home, it's not like that. The odd emotional explosion clears quickly for the most part, and it's back to the twinkly, shrieky fun of two little blondies tearing around the living room.

I love them beyond endurance, sometimes, and I do worry about the sort of earth they will inherit. Is violence escalating, or is it just reported more accurately (the old saw that journalists fall back on)? What about the stress of a madly-accelerating world, with gadgets replacing real human contact and people swelling in gross obesity due to grabbing the easy drug of junk food?

It wasn't supposed to be that way. I remember back in the '60s, there

were all sorts of reports of Xanadu, the World of the Future, of a lean, fit population (all that low-fat cooking, remember?) only having to work three days a week, spending the rest of the time in creative and recreational pursuits.

(Oh, and remember those dumb-ass domed cities, like something out of the Jetsons?)

It isn't going to be that way for Erica, my little blondie. I hope she will manage. Acceleration tends to lead to more acceleration, unless stopped by a crash. Like the frog slowly stewed in increasingly-heated water, we just don't notice it, until we see the alarming increase of depression and addiction and autism and. . . fat.

It's doubtful Erica, in her sparkly little tutu and candystriped tights, will be anything other than sylphlike. I want a happy life for her, want it more than I want to live. I have the tremendous opportunity to love her without reservation, without the burdens of parenthood. I can be the fun nanny who chases them around the room, plays Barbies and PlayDoh and paper giraffes.

Sometimes I ask myself: What good will it do? Won't they forget? Is any of this banked in the psyche? How much do we remember?

No matter. Maybe it's for me, as much as them, and I will remember, remember every single sweet blessed day that I get to love them.