other

So we all sit down one day and Oh hey, one of us got this crazy idea: lets make a model of the universe! And for now we’ll keep it simple, stick with just our galaxy and the Horsehead Nebula. Good? Good.

Here’s how it goes down. We make little models of the planets, all to scale, perfect scale, and we lay them out on a round table. How big were the planets? We used perfect scale…the sun, you can hardly see it, but we managed, made it happen. The sun is 0.015mm. Tiny bright yellow speck in the middle of the table. The planets? It was tough, but we made it happen, nicely painted and all. It was kinda tough to see ’em on the table, and what we presume to be far-larger-than-scale solar winds (it’s warm outside, so the ‘close the window’ idea got veto’ed quicker than a tea party filibusterer pork barrel bill*) kept blowing our planets all askew. So we glued them down and made labels. Easy.

And the horsehead nebula?

The horsehead nebula, in our model universe scaled to fit the solar system–home–on the top of a table, is properly located halfway between the earth and the moon. Nothing some good amateur rocketry couldn’t handle. Oh yeah! Almost forgot to mention, the model of the old horsehead, that was the hardest part. Little bit bigger than twice the size of Seattle.

*I proudly know next to nothing about politics.

stories

A lotta years ago I began to wonder if I would find myself in Alaska someday, and now some day is today and hey oh, look, I live in Alaska. Four or five years ago I began to wonder if I’d find myself teaching in a village in Alaska, and in April I signed a contract and on Saturday the wheels of paperwork began to turn..my initial teacher certificate should be here in a few weeks, the certificate that will make good my contract to go teach in an Alaskan village. It’s happening!

Day by day was the tale of the past six weeks. This “Summer Field Experience” bit of the certification program was the most intense thing I’ve done in my life. It was like the most difficult finals week I had during college, cloned and stacked five times over. Worth it? Like gold, baby, worth its weight in gold.

Learning? Well yes of course, all the things we were there to learn we did learn in spades: classroom management, disciplinary literacy (beating kids with books? why yes…in a way..sorta..but not), assessment, standards, GLE’s, strands, philosophy, lesson planning, behavior management, and oh so much more. And then some extra things too. One big extra thing, really. This: no matter how good I am at not judging, I still do. That one I learned the hard way, and I can only hope and pray that from learning it the hard way I’ll do better next time. Yeah, there’s a story behind it, even written up as my last Summer Field Experience journal entry. I wouldn’t feel ok posting it here, at least not for a while.

And now what? Four weeks of reading, organizing, planning, goofing off, and tutoring–the time will sail by–and ka-pow I get on a jet plane for the north. First to Unalakleet for some training, then a plane to Nome, then a helicopter to home sweet home, Diomede.

Day by day, one day at a time, that’s been the tale alright. But when I hit the brakes and look around I’m struck breathless by where I am and the trade I am privileged, honored and humbled to be a part of. It’s surreal, unreal and beautiful.

The best part? In five or so weeks, subtract the unreal part.

:D

other, stories

Below this and the picture are some select parts of a post by Tom Engelhardt about memorial day. Scroll down and look at the list of towns. Those are the hometowns of the soldiers who’ve died this May while on duty in Afghanistan. There are twenty two towns, each recently struck by war’s curse: the death of a loved one. Year by year the wounds heal, but the scars are forever.

It’s Memorial Day and there’s a scarred town on my heart: Bellevue, Washington.

Thank you so much, Joe. We miss you  :’-(

_________________________________________________________________________________

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.

[…]

Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall.  Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict.  There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.

Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.”  There will be little controversy.  They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.

[…]

Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.”  Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country.  They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.

Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t.  So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.

Spencerport, New York

Wichita, Kansas

Warren, Arkansas

West Chester, Ohio

Alameda, California

Charlotte, North Carolina

Stow, Ohio

Clarksville, Tennessee

Chico, California

Jeffersonville, Kentucky

Yuma, Arizona

Normangee, Texas

Round Rock, Texas

Rolla, Missouri

Lucerne Valley, California

Las Cruses, New Mexico

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Overland Park, Kansas

Wheaton, Illinois

Lawton, Oklahoma

Prince George, Virginia

Terre Haute, Indiana.

As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.

stories

The pickup was big. Big tires, big man. HID accessory light-rack on top of the cab. Dualies? Check. Aftermarket exhaust? Check. I rolled up to the red light and scoped out this big truck opposite me. The man inside has a cell phone stuck to his ear. Of course. I shake my head, he’s just like the rest of them.

The light turns green, I go on my way and he goes on his way, and as we cross in our near and opposite paths I almost didn’t notice the tears in his eyes.

funny, other

Kids sent to the office: more than I remember (4? 5? something like that)

Kids who threw me completely off by standing up and announcing a decision to voluntarily go to the office: 2

Best thing I had to say: “LUCAS! Put your tooth BACK in your pocket!”

other

Quote of the week:

“A girl’s gotta have standards, even with chicken wire, a girl’s gotta have standards.”

stories

Best Faulkner I’ve read yet. But I’m new at this Faulkner thing. Did I mention I’m on a high falooting literature kick? So anyways I’m new at this Faulkner thing, and everybody tells me that I won’t really get it before two or three re-reads, and for every great huge brilliantly crafted idea and relationship I saw, I could feel two or three sail by me entirely uncaught. So then likely I liked this one most because I caught a bit more. And now throw all that out the window, here’s the moral of the story for now: this book was GOOD.

Excerpts:

——

“Then let him go!” the boy cried. “Let him go!”
His cousin laughed shortly. Then he stopped laughing. “His cage ain’t McCaslins,” he said. “He was a wild man. When he was born, all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources. He was the direct son not of only a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed, the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father,” he added quickly. “He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage had already been done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him. Not betrayed by the black blood and not wilfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat. His cage ain’t us,” McCaslin said. “Did you ever know anybody yet, even your father and Uncle Buddy, that ever told him to do or not do anything that he ever paid any attention to?”

——

“Why not?” McCaslin said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they–” the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “–they don’t want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”

——

Until three years ago there had been two of them, the other a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sense even more incredibly lost than Sam Fathers. He called himself Jobaker, as if it were one word. Nobody knew his history at all. He was a hermit, living in a foul little shack at the forks of the creek five miles from the plantation and about that far from any other habitation. He was a market hunter and fisherman and he consorted with nobody, black or white; no negro would even cross his path and no man dared approach his hut except Sam. And perhaps once a month the boy would find them in Sam’s shop–two old men squatting on their heels on the dirt floor, talking in a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue which as time went on and the boy squatted there too listening, he began to learn. Then Jobaker died. That is, nobody had seen him in some time. Then one morning Sam was missing, nobody, not even the boy, knew when nor where, until that night when some negroes hunting in the creek bottom saw the sudden burst of flame and approached. It was Jobaker’s hut, but before they got anywhere near it, someone shot at them from the shadows beyond it. It was Sam who fired, but nobody ever found Jobaker’s grave.

——

stories

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years. Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carrion. Out there under the blue lamplight the trolleytracks run on to darkness, curved like cockheels in the pinchbeck dust. The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of yours shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock.

Hey Suttree, they called.

Goddamn, said J-Bone, surging from the bowels of the couch. He threw an arm around Suttree’s shoulders. Here’s my old buddy, he said. Where’s the whiskey? Give him a drink of that old crazy shit.
How you doing, Jim?
I’m doing all around, where you been? Where’s the whiskey? Here ye go. Get ye a drink, Bud.
What is it?
Early Times. Best little old drink in the world. Get ye a drink, Sut.
Suttree held it to the light. Small twigs, debris, matter, coiled in the oily liquid. He shook it. Smoke rose from the yellow floor of the bottle.
Shit almighty, he said.
Best little old drink in the world, sang out J-Bone. Have a drink, Bud.
He unthreaded the cap, sniffed, shivered, drank.
J-Bone hugged the drinking figure. Watch old Suttree take a drink, he called out.
Suttree’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was holding the bottle out to whoever would take it. Goddamn. What is that shit?
Early Times, called J-Bone. Best little old drink they is. Drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin.
Or any morning.
Whoo lord, give it here. Hello Early, come to your old daddy.

Yeah, right? Lyrical isn’t close to being the right word. How do you do that?

There’s an odd, not too interesting and short story of Suttree and me. I bought the book nearly two years ago, read all up to the last 80 pages, then shelved it, for a reason I didn’t understand, not worth a rat turd; really, I had no idea why. Bad book? Oh no, amazing book. It is a bit slow to read, absolutely, but that’s because it’s not hardly even a ‘book.’ The words of the first page tie together and together stop and kick and knock around and in one page there’s some myth and some lost and some found and it is the slowest reading page I’ve read. It feels like he’s more a painter than a writer, pencil his brush. And so now I crack the cover and remember how brilliantly this man uses words.

Edit:
I posted this halfway through the book, then finished it. Whewee. Not sure I like the last quarter. It’s weird, it’s definitely kinda weird; I could only reccomend this book if you’re real good and ready for a weird few final chapters.

stories

–that’s his name. Well, it’s not his name actually. But, as a substitute teacher, I have to use good memory hooks; I find out this student is from Louisiana, the name stuck fast. Also, a relevant fact for later: I have this thing I do sometimes: I bring in half a dozen doughnuts and I tell my students they win a doughnut by putting me on my heels–do something to impress me. Mind you,if you’re going to ask students for excellence, you do not use supermarket doughnuts, no that would be idiotic; thankfully there’s a little doughnut shop in town that is as wildly amazing as it is pricey.

I subbed yesterday for a photo/computers teacher. When I saw “photo/computer” in the job description, what happened wasn’t so much that I ignored the computer half, more that I never even got that far. Photo. Photo. Wait…I can spend time in a classroom doing stuff with…photography? Really?

I stopped, did a quick pinch-test, nope, not dreaming, this is real. Great!

The lesson plan took all of 5 minutes to cobble together: can’t go wrong with good photojournalism. Aaron Huey.

Louisiana picked a war photo (this one: aaronhuey.com/afghanistan), and he did not address even one of the three assigned questions. In this failure, he wrote this, perfectly succeeding:

I don’t know what to think I saw this man walking not knowing if he had a bomb on his chest or if he was on our side we kept on driving he stared at us until we disappeared I still think about that man he stared at us with a grin on his face as if he was saying “we got you we got you once you think your ok we got you.”

“Um, so, I didn’t know how to answer any of the assignment questions, so I just sorta put myself in his shoes and wrote something” Louisiana told me, handing in what he’d done, what he’d done instead of completing the assignment. Louisiana was smirking, because he wanted a doughnut.

He got one.

stories

Sometimes a few facts tell a story better than telling the story:

-I spent some time with my family in Seattle over the holidays, and as I was leaving a dear brother of mine gifted me a nice Churchill size cigar
-Cigars go bad after a few days of not being kept in a humidor, especially in dry weather
-We’re in the middle of a dry cold spell here (something like 10 or 20 below at the moment)
-I don’t have a humidor
-There sits on my back porch the stubly remains of an enjoyed cigar
-My nose is still regaining feeling. C’mon little nose, just a bit more, you can do it! Get that feeling back already!
-I am currently wearing a hoodie, synthetic down jacket, my Great Uncle Nick’s wool hunting jacket, a stocking cap, neck gator, wool gloves, long johns, heavy carhartt pants, and two pairs of socks
-I’m still shivering a little bit, even though I came back inside half an hour ago
-I smell like smoke
-I like a good cigar

other

It’s 4:19am Christmas day and I am framing photos I took in frames my apprentice little sister and I made and things could not be happier; this could be a really neat on-the-side job.

ideas

Is it any wonder that the human condition can be summed up so short and clear by saying we all just badly need a hug sometimes. ?

photography

Great, long and beautiful drive, even better: shared with mom.

Just in case it may not show through well in the one photo with the thumbs up, the thumbs up is actually for 4wd, not the icy road. Um.. on second thought it is for the icy road too. So it should’ve been a double thumbs up. my bad.

Also, review of the 1990 Jeep Cherokee Sport: really, really really cool and fun. Mileage, not terrible but not too hot either.