The Dreamsicle Ruminations

I loved Creamsicles, not to be confused with Dreamsicles. Personally, I can swing either way. One has ice creme and the other has ice milk over a orange sherbert shell. I was reading a health magazine and pointing out to a friend that "You know, no matter what you do you are gonna die."

His response was" You have the power to determine if you die sooner or later." And barring mad men and accidents that is true.

For the record, I am not advocating eating crap foods all day and all night. Veggies are essential. Water. Cut back on the sugar in all form. Be thoughtful in meat consumption.

You can plan for tasty and health. You can have Creamsicles without the yutz. This is Erika from a Little Insanity.





But really, we are gonna die. Before I go I will have another Creamsicle or a slice of Cherry pie.

I'm not proud but I'm ain't stupid either. The point of life is to live it.

How did I come to such a decision?

I met a woman who knew she was going to die. I spent some time with her teaching her to use the Internet. Often when I visited she would have a container of Ambrosia near her bed.

One day I read the ingredients, it was filled with sugar, artificial sweeteners, gunk and imitation marshmallows.

In my head I'm thinking "This mess will kill her."

In actuality, it was one of the few foods that she could eat without bring it back up. The woman did die but not from the pseudo Ambrosia.

Still, I'd be willing to list it as a minor contributing factor.

On a hot day with the sun beating down and life if good I see nothing wrong with my tongue and lips wrapped around the popsicle of my choice. Now some days that will be a 100% fruit ice bar. Or it could be shaved ice with some flavor on it.

One day I hope I could be that person that can take eat an olive and be completely satisfied. Behold, it would be enough and I would be in a state of grace.

Except that I am not that person and will never be that person. Ice on the tongue. The smile of lemon blossoms in the air. The patterns of clouds in the sky. Sucking on some sherbert.

Maybe it is how and what we decide to consume. I will give it more thought.

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Poetry In Plain Sight - Carl Stillwell

It has been too long since I've written a proper poem. I'm hanging out with the poets to find my voice that was shelved for a reason I can't remember. It might have been a job or a man.

I can't remember. Once of the things that I like about spoken poetry and poets is that there is a lot of risk taking. Can you say the words? Will they understand. Will the spirit of the poem come through.

This first poem is in memory of David Stillwell entitled REM Revelation.



Sometime you just have to let things happen. This is CaLokie with Don Kingfisher Campbell riding shotgun on Glory Golden Oldie.



This is my day 19 and 20 videos for National Videoblogging Posting Month.

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Poetry In Plain Sight - Pete Justus

There is such a richness in Pete Justus poems. He gives you visuals and language. You have to be present and just listen.



This is Pete Justus reading his poem, Section 60.

For more information about Pete check out his Facebook page

This is my Day 5 video for National Videoblogging Posting Month.

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Margaret Fabrizio and Turning 80

This is video by artist/vlogger Margaret Fabrizio. I guess the main take away from the video that I got was to go ahead and live your life to the best of your abilities.



I'm trying to strip away the filters that bind me to in-action. I need reminders like this to keep on moving forward.

Margaret has her website where you can view more videos, check out her art work, quilts, her collages absolutely rock; I love collage art so I am extremely biased but this is good stuff.

She has music for listening or downloading.

Margaret is starting to making me feel like a first class lazy bone couch potato. Definately give the site and her YouTube channel a visit.

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Silver Tongue on the Finally Friday Freakout

People underestimate the meaning of family and community. We are separated by body but we have connections to dozens of people, real and imaginary that we don't know.

When we hear of their passing we take a moment to say "Damn, really? I liked that person." Not that is not a bad thing to say.

It is far better to say that than "They can't dig deep enough to bury that SOB!"

Rue McClanahan lived to be 76 years old. Had a job on one of the best sitcoms on television as the sassy Blanche on Golden Girls. Reminded all of us that there is a chapter two, three and seven if you are willing to turn the page.

K.T. Oslen is another good old girl who sings the way that Blanche would appreciate. I think Rue would like it too. Yes, there are those among us who have fell for Silver Tongue and Gold Plated Lies but we scraped the dust off and kept on moving to better days.



We don't expect to go down this way but we will. With certain types of celebrities we know and don't know the real person.

Those of us who grew up with Gary Coleman knew he was a child actor. We knew that he got shanked in life by the financial mismanagement of people that should have known better or made an effort to do better.

To be honest, we culturally laughed at him. Sometimes we were confused at his attempt to earn a living. Some of us understood that he was doing the best he could under impossible circumstances. I think maybe his adult life was spent trying to find a place where he belonged.

But I don't know that. It is the Spackle I mental apply when don't know the totality of this man's life. I hope his last days were peaceful and happy.

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This To Shall Pass on the Finally Friday Freakout

I can count the number of times I have recommended a marching band rendition of a song. This would be a first. But any music video that has a token homage to Swamp Thing is jake with me. And yeah, give the fellas .99 cents cuz this does have medicinal qualities.

I just got finished reading Taddy's post about someone who was mistaken in their belief they had no value. Then he linked to a damn fine post by Jennifer Michale Hecht about two other folks taking the deep six plunge and she is imploring people not to leave ahead of their time.

I want to put in my two cents but I can't sing. You wouldn't want me too either. I leave this to OK Go and the Notre Dame Marching Band.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Poets, hell no - defy tradition.

Writers - are you kidding me? You don't even have to write; transcribing the idiocy and wackiness of these times will keep you in gravy for years to come. You do have to remember to come up for air. Exercise. Talking to real people who are not afraid of human to human speech is good. Veggies, eat more veggies.

Creators - see above.

Those that have people that love them beyond measure and/or those same people are under 21 years of age. Not an option for you and you know it.

And no, you can't take them with you.

People who think that there is no one that loves them or could love them. I would say that you haven't met the person yet. Hang on, hear me out. You might never meet that person until you love the one within yourself.

If you loved yourself, you wouldn't want you to come to any harm. See how this works? Yes, the pain can be great but love is greater than pain. If you can love enough until you find someone one that can help you deal with the pain that is all that anybody can ask of you.

Hang on until you find the help that you need.

Depression is a powerful hateful monster. You might not be able to do this yourself. Counseling, watching the entire series of Babylon5 or a road trip far, far away from home could give you the space to find and embrace your spirit.

Let me be blunt; this is not the time to go. The ding-a-lings and non-thinkers are gaining traction because those with half a lick of brain are getting disappointed and downhearted.

If you can read a book, paper or electronic, you can't go. Seriously. We need all the cognitively functioning people we can get.

This is the front seat of the roller coaster of life. Yell, laugh or move forward peeping out from time to time behind your hands. Hold on to the bar babe, this too shall pass.

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The Confederate Flag – The Push Me Pull You of Culture and Race

Tenured Radical had a post on the 2009 conservative march in Washington. If you follow the link you will see two men holding a flag. I also encourage you to read her full post. When I see the fabric that is called the “Confederate flag” I have very specific emotions. They are visceral. I feel fear inducing recollections based in historical facts and events. No, this is not about bashing white people.

First A Bit of Historical Context

One of the learning skills impressed upon me as a teen was to know what a word or concept really means. For the benefit of our overseas readers, I want to give a brief summary about what has become to be known as the Confederate flag. This is photo is the first actual Confederate Flag, 1861 from the Smithsonian Institute.

 

This is not the flag that gets people blood red upset. In fact, most Americans would probably confuse it with an early version of a American or Union flag. It is most certainly not a Union flag. When I look at it I have no immediate attachment, fear or hatred of it. It is a historically valuable object created at the time of the separation of the southern states during the Civil War. The history of that war is painful but it is a part of my collective American history and it is exactly where it belongs, protected in a museum. 

Rebel Flag

 

This is a Rebel flag. It is not a true Confederate flag; it is a latter day variation of the third Confederate flag from 1865.

During World War 2 some of the southern solders brought along the Rebel flag to show pride in their country and to represent their state. Other states and countries were doing the same thing. After World War 2 southern college students began bringing the flag to football games. The Rebel flag became a southern cultural icon, so I have been told. One that African-Americans at the time were nervous about but that is a story for another time.

David Sarratt writes about the historical Rebel flag’s resurgence:

White Southerners believed that their exclusive culture was being threatened, and the flag became a symbol against civil rights. The segregationist Dixiecrat party of 1948, who ran Strom Thurmond for president, took on the Confederate flag as its symbol. Anti-Civil Rights sentiment ran strong in the South, which was once again feeling imposed upon by a distant federal government. The conflict was on again.

The Rebel flag was embraced by the Klu Klux Klan and every anti-civil rights and hate group from here to Georgia and all points beyond. It was used to support intimidation, threatens fire bombing and murder. The victims were not just African-Americans but Jews, women and European-Americans.  It was used as a rally banner to defend southern land from any group that tried to challenge the Jim Crow laws and system of segregated government.

The rest of the country was in no way exempt from this type of behavior by the way. In some respects, they did dirt worse than the South.

The points that the Segregationists wanted understood was that they resented outsiders coming into the South to dictate change. They felt that they had a regional system that worked for them. Southerners felt race relations and integration was a state’s rights issue, not a federal concern. Segregationists felt they were defending their American rights of self-governance and expression.  They felt that the federal government was overreaching it jurisdiction.

Is any of this sounding familiar? In a 2009 sort of way?

Support for The Confederate/Rebel Flag

• Confederate Digest response to Is the Conservative Flag Racist? Mr. Conn’s answer is no.
• Parents who want to defend their children’s right to wear the Confederate flag on their clothing. They want to defend and protect their cultural heritage.
• Greg Zotta’s perspective on the right to display the Confederate flag.

Other Points of View about the Contemporary Usage of the Rebel/Confederate Flag

• Rev. Ryusho has the same questions I have, why bring that flag to DC?
• Tension between NAACP and South Carolina Conservative Action Council on Confederate flag. You should view the video or read the text of the news story.
• Fox The Poet uses the Rebel flag as a jumping off point for one of his poems.

Historic Culture Clash

I have tried and continue to try to understand the conservative point of view to the various issues of the day. There are legitimate concerns about the budget, corporate financial malfeasance, health care and repairing and developing new infrastructures.

That damn flag make it almost impossible to have those conversations. You see, that Rebel flag is a part of my history too. A part of my heritage.  The blood soaked one. The one stained in humiliations and screaming voices too numerous to count.  I can’t speak for Native Americans, Latinos/a or Asian-Americans, but I bet some of them ain’t feeling the warm fuzzes for the Rebel flag either.

When I see the Rebel flag at a conservative march on Washington or at healthcare protests that tells me I am not invited. In fact, it might be detrimental to my health and longevity to attend. I have history to back me up on this particular theory of mine. I have no desire to test it out in real life. It is scary enough reading blog posts and comments that damn me to hell for breathing.

I am not advocating suppressing any groups history or culture. I’m all about the solutions. Got any?

Resources:

For more information about the History of the Confederate flag visit the American Studies Department of the University of Virginia historical overview.

The Smithsonian Museum has an online collection of military resources, images and objects called The Price of Freedom: Americans at War.

Gena Haskett is a Contributing Editor at BlogHer where this post originally appeared.

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Anne Sexton – Her Whispers of Inspiration

There was an urgency of somebody or something trying to get my attention. I kept hearing Van Morrison’s Inarticulate Speech of the Heart in my head. Well that and various other song lyrics about pain, love and the search of redemptive peace. Finally, I heard Anne Sexton’s name. I had not thought of her for years. I loved her poetry when I was a teen. I remembered how Anne used words that were her tethers to her world.  A world where madness dominated her life and yet she created solid, beautifully crafted poems.

Who Was This Woman?

Anne had been a fashion model. She was a wife and mother. And a poet. This woman advanced what could be thought of as topics for poems. Topics that were profoundly personal. Her work moved the reader, not stylized structures or academic approval; although she had that too. 

For every box they searched to constrict her value she found a way to express herself. Her poetry were confessional in the sense that she didn’t necessarily clean it up for public consumption. She was not vulgar. There was craftsmanship in her work. Anne wrote her poems as she experienced her life. Engaging and painful.

Trying to explaining her importance is complicated. Anne Sexton had a mental illness. There is no dispute about that fact. The illness has been described as manic-depression in some of the biographical summaries I’ve read. There may have been early family based abuse. I’d guess that there is a possibility that she might have also experienced undiagnosed post-partum depression.

Anne had a great deal of needs that couldn’t possibly be filled or properly treated at the time. Yet, in the middle of all her chaos, Anne created a fine body of work.

Musician Crystal Cheatham has also heard the whispers from Anne:

Most of all I think I understand how much she truly needed her husband and later told him she had exchanged that neediness for what she thought it was in the first place, love. You see what I’ve discovered is that Anne’s writing is not brilliant because she was crazy. It was brilliant because she was honest.

Another thing to consider is the environment of the late 1950s-1960s with specific defined roles for men and women. When she was was not writing, teaching, performing she was creating the source material for her work. Anne burned through friends, love affairs and hospitalizations.  It was not an easy life.

At the Eleventh Stack. Don writes about what Anne faced as a poet and a woman:

I can’t begin to imagine the courage it took for this lone woman to stand up and confront her madness in a public way at a time when most did not want to hear.  The cusp of change was rapidly approaching and perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of Sexton’s life was to bring these issues, with the help of psychoanalysis, into the public forum to be engaged, debated, and addressed.

Anne Sexton committed suicide in 1974. Suicide has many surviving victims trying to make sense of what seems to be a senseless act. At Louisey's blog Letting Go, Recovery in the Sunset, she remembers the anniversary of her own mother’s death. She posted a copy of Anne’s poem, Why Death? maybe as a way of saying she will never understand but Anne did and this is how it was articulated.

Why Is Anne Sexton Important?

I have always remembered the feeling of being stunned reading her poem “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife.” It wasn’t just the topic but the honesty of admitting that the character in the poem knew she was a transitory value. It was painfully lyrical.  It was honest and made me a part of an unspoken understandable depth of loneliness.

At The Unfolding Moment MoonRabbit gives us a glimpse into her creative process in creating art. The example she displays incorporates poems into the the mixed media pieces:

…Other poems have been burning in my consciousness. I search my journals for lines that connect…With colored pencils in various shades of brown and olive, I begin to add text to the diptych. Text becomes texture as I use the words to fill in a space here, to visually extend a line there. If Mary Oliver’s key ideas are the centerpiece of this work, then Adrienne Rich provides the anchor—I carve a slice from her lines and lay it repeatedly across the shape that encloses “breath,” so that breath/spirit and words/communion are intertwined and interdependent.

So Anne and other poets can help mixed media artists find new mediums to incorporate into their work? Yes, I guess they can.

SummerPoet speaks to separations and beginning again with Anne also slipping into her thoughts:

I wondered about Anne Sexton today and Woolf and Plath. The strong women, well not so strong. The beautiful women who wrote, who were brave and in the end stumbled. They felt they weren't loved enough, weren't understood and they couldn't take one more bit of bad news. The sky opened, it start to rain and for woolf, she just let herself go in the river after sitting down to write her husband a note that she didn't wish to be his burden. His heartache maybe but not a burden. I understand that. 67 days later I get it.

For More Information About Anne Sexton and Her Work

This is one time I’d like to suggest you go low tech and visit a public library to get one of her books. If you can download an e-book version that will work as well.

Having said that, for a quick biographic sketch you can’t do wrong visiting Anne Sexton's page at The Poetry Foundation. There you will find not only biographical information but links to some of her poems and a listing of her work.

You should also check out the Modern American Poetry site with a section that contains Anne’s biography, cultural influences and essays about her career.

Do you have a favorite poem of Anne’s or a memory she invoked?

Gena Haskett is a Contributing Editor at BlogHer where this post originally appeared.

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In Memory of Miss Koko Taylor on the Finally Friday Freakout

Koko Taylor sang about life, stories and adventure though the Blues. She carried forward a long tradition of telling the tales via music. Her life as a Blues musician had to be exciting, tragic and an on-going lesson in humans and humanity. Musically, she came up on the rough side of the historical fence of the 50s, 60s and 1970’s.

The passing of Koko Taylor was spoken with a whisper compared to David Carradine um, unintentional departure. No disrespect intended. Mr. Carradine was a spirited individual who had a life filled with stories, adventure and lawd knows he was one of a kind. I don’t think you could do a movie about his actual life on the other side of the cameras. Not sure this is how he planned to go out but there you go. There is life and there is the alternative. You are working on one and the other sneaks up on you.

I first heard Koko Taylor over the radio. I was reading one of my computer magazines. This song came on the radio and forced me to put it down. The name of the tune is Insane Asylum.

“When your love has cease to be, there is no other place for me, if you don’t hold me in your arms, I’m rather be here from now on.” It was like being hit from all sides and nobody else was in the room.  As soon as I could I bought her CD of her greatest hits. Pure gold each and every tune.

I’m not well versed in the history of the Blues. I have songs I like, mainly the story songs. I’m still looking for the one that goes, “my new silk pajamas are crumpled on the floor, there’s crumbs in the bed and what is wrong with you? What I want to know is, is something going on?”

I digress. It isn’t just about the song, or the delivery of the song. It is the connection with other people. Koko explains about her inspirations, like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, her process of writing and what it can do for an audience.

Tis a time for weeping but that is only a part of the Blues. You can weep and jump for joy at the same time. So lift up your glass of Cherry Coke and groove for the next nine minutes or so to a bit of Let the Good Times Roll + I’m A Woman.

Koko, blessings on your new tour and I hope you meet up with old friends and family.

Everybody else, rock on.

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