Revisited Currency

I've been so kinda sad and screwed up over the passing of my friend Glenn that I haven't been able to think in any organized manner over these last two weeks.

What is there to say about it? Glenn Sorvisto was like no other person that ever existed, but I guess that that's true for/about everybody (cf. that whole snowflake milieu), so I'll have to expound, and this is where it gets inarticulate and intangibly sorrowful. And there's advance dread about it, so I'll get to it after an interval during which I'll perform mundane tasks and tend to reponsibilities like getting dressed.

I think that there are too many stories to tell, each of which is too difficult to parlay, so what follows is what I have gleaned as the gist of my friend.

Glenn was disarming, in many senses and senselessnesses of that word. While striking in appearance (not only handsome, but also with a peerless sense of style that featured, among many other items, alligator shoes, an easter-grass bowler hat, and simultaneous boisterous plaids), his personality was truly artful. A dazzling array of people each knew and remember Glenn differently. 

To many, Glenn is remembered for a loose-limbed eschewal of decorum that seemed to verge on haplessness—embodying a defiant and devilishly funny maelstrom of caustic and extemporaneous alchemy. Like a song that swings with such ferocity that it threatens constantly to come apart, until it is made apparent that such swinging is actually fundamental to the song. None of it was orchestrated but for every separate and collective memory of it.

Dozens were the occasions on which I experienced genuine discomfort in Glenn's company, although hindsight reveals its majesty. I'd say so now if I could: 

"YES, Glenn! I am so grateful that you smoked a cigarette in the banquet hall during that wedding ceremony. And inside the DMV that one time." 

Or, "It was brave of you to walk into that liquor store, grab a 6-pack of beer, and walk past the cashier, saying, 'Mañana!' Repeatedly. Until the clerk was so overcome with laughter that he allowed you to leave without paying."

These are among the more minor incidents to which I bore involuntary witness in the company of Glenn Sorvisto.

But that's all shallow nonsense on so many levels, because Glenn the person was so loving and gentle and kind that it's extraordinary for us human people to have been blessed with his presence for as long as we were. In all of the apparent chaos that surrounded him, there was always immense comfort. Glenn subverted my understanding of decency, because he was nothing if not singularly decent. He was deceptively sensitive and keenly thoughtful, even (especially?) in moments of alleged ignorance. He was always himself. He gave himself over to being himself.

There are bazillions of stories, but I don't feel like telling them at the moment, and I know that my facts are only as factual as the distance that separates me from them. I think about his love, Jody, and their incredible 18-year romance. I think about all of the friends that we shared, and the different ways in which each and all of these people experience this loss.

And a world without Glenn Sorvisto appears all the more daunting. But then, I remember that, irrespective of how daunting is any future, it remains inexorably destined for the same pile of pasts and precedents that houses hobbled former futures.

Now I'm All Serious

Humans need to have some work done on their stupefying human brains.

Here in Brunswick, Maine, we are out of oil, with perhaps a thimbleful remaining.

Anyhow, I've just adjusted the thermostat upwards by 20% to 60°, so that my wife and children don’t feel like they’re hostages on an involuntary sojourn to a distinctly frostful hinterland. It’ll definitely drain what remains in our tank, which had been relatively plentiful prior to a polar yestereve. But, consequences be damned, say I, when it comes to my family knowing at least a semblance of comfort in their shared slumber. I’m staying awake in preparation of the emergency-refill call that I know that I’ll have to place sooner than later, even though I’ve no means of paying for a delivery (due to a succession of foibles that is keeping the money that I’ve earned at arm’s length). People say that compensation is forthcoming, and I hope that it is.

Granted, the party (where’s the party?) line is that a person should lie in the bed that they made, which is perfectly aligned with the puritanical and punitive notions that founded this intermittently great land. “Serve the heavens with your deprivation.”

This is all well and good, but why do we live in a country that appears to be allergic to alternatives, even as it is ruled by profiteering? It is actually, legitimately preposterous. To fill our oil tank would cost—and this is no joke—$974.00! Without the $50 in fees that we’d be obliged to pay. Per month, at this rate. How on earth can a person afford that in addition to everything else? There is assistance available, but Governor Paul LePage has decided to cut the amount by 70% so that he can provide tax cuts for wealthy people. He says that this spurs job creation, but it does no such thing. What is does do is let people be cold. We won’t freeze to death (I am, as I've stated before, famously exothermic), but there are heaps of impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. Many of them are ancient and proud, and what will become of them in all of this? What will happen? We’ll have a sudden onslaught of AARPsicles, that’s what.

Research into alternative heating has proven to be a fruitless enterprise; a summer visit from a Solar-Power consultant confirmed that a switch away from oil is, more or less, cost-prohibitive ($20,000) for people like us; we could finance it, and there are (rather piddly) tax credits, but they don’t outweigh a bleak employment and income scenario, and they won’t defray initial costs to any appreciable extent. So, in this very nasty meanwhile, we have to continue to “shell” out for heat, which mandates that we’ll accrue no savings.

And this is how the Great, Big “Them” works. I don’t think that it was ever really possible for me to appreciate before this cardboard-salad sector of my life, just what a joke the notion of class mobility is for most people. I would not be writing this post had I not been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis during my final semester of graduate school, only to be shunned on multiple occasions by Social Security and others like them when I sought assistance regarding my disabilities.

It happens to people all the time—gradually, momentum is lost, and you’re suddenly embalmed in the formaldehyde of class rigidity. It’s assumed that you have nothing to contribute, or that you’re cognitively incapable, or that you’re unable to manage adult life. The people that think thus, and strive to impress that upon you so that your limitations are bandied about constantly, don’t see the OTHER, more pernicious, set of limitations—borne of the fact that this culture is fueled by judgment and hierarchy, and that that's the default that every one of us is beholden to examining. 

With a chronic and (supposedly) terminal disease like MS, it’s so often the case that nobody believes in any chance of your improvement, but they’ll placate you when you talk about it by refraining from yawning when you speak. But then, when you are experiencing wellness, expectations of you are frightfully unrealistic, like your health is a bank account that you MUST empty whenever possible—usually by way of exposing yourself to the same stress-filled nonsense that begot this whole cycle in the first place.

And now, there are my wonderful, wonderful children and my stunningly excellent wife, who is my best-ever friend. They’re so, so important to me. And, truly, the love that we have for each other serves as a barometer for a life that is lived harmoniously with my self. That is precisely why all of this tedium has got to, and (I hereby declare) is going to, STOP.

Definition and Meaning (Not Even)

It's been a WEEK? Holy carp.

Something occurred, or must’ve done, to keep me away from this pleasant activity of posting daily. That’s fine; all that we are is irrefutably older. But the atoms and molecules that comprise us are ever assiduous in so doing, and they seem still to be keen on it, even if it is January, which it definitely is.

I’m pretty sure that I took my SATs on this day in 1991. (It’s astounding to me that that was twenty-one years ago. Babies that were conceived to a soundtrack of Michael Bolton, or Wilson Phillips, or Richard Marx, or the Pretty Woman soundtrack, can now legally purchase hooch. And, why not? They need it bad, I bet.) I remember those anniversaries and details like that to demarcate the passing of time, during both this onerous winter and this clustrophobic vastness of a life-and-living apparatus. I guess that you’d call something like that calendular—like the flower, maybe, but made of iceberg lettuce. Wait.

I’m putting myself to sleep with how excruciatingly boring I am. I’d like to say that it used to be different, but my thoughts are stale units of torpor, like rotten things float, by the time they surface, all gussied up with such idiocies as sentence structure.

Anyway, as pivotal experiences go, that SATurday morning was an especially vivid one, all cruxy and such. Such mundane situations as that frightfully cold and sunny, standing awkwardly in a high-school parking lot with a bunch of other middle-school students (I was 12 at the time), waiting to take our SATs and pretending that I hadn’t underdressed, commenced a change in the course of my life.

The SAT? It’s a test, alright. I forget its length, but I recall it as having been 4 hours in duration. Like nobody ever had a blanking bladder. At any rate, this was the work of a nameless Smartypants organization so as to kinda, you know, objectify the aptitudes of others. Because I had an extremely difficult time reading under fluorescent lights (and nobody but me knew this, because I had no wish to be humiliated), I filled in random dots on significant portions of my test. And this changed everything, because I did pretty well, and I received a scholarship for a college course. I didn’t use that for a couple of years, until just after I’d failed 9^th grade. I took the only course that was available—Feminine and Feminist Ethics—and it was stunning. Noy only did I love it, but I was given the first “decent” grade (out of charity?) that I’d received in several years. It made sense for me to do something different, so I did, and I stopped going to high school, which was the most.

All that bygone superfluity aside, we experienced yesterday the ballyhooed JANUARY THAW. (It’s happened both later than usual and rather precipitously, even thoough Brunswick has been about 7 degrees above “average” for months now, so it’s just like the more-merciful-but-nonetheless-cruel western Maryland that I know so well. But, what a glorious and disruptive havoc it was here! The puddles were positively enormous. The sun was bright.

It was interesting to see that, despite this anomaly, everybody wanted for it to be even warmer than it was, and at last, I realized: the thermal spectrum of what a person can withstand diminishes with age. I mean, I knew that, but what I hadn’t realized is that the threshold of temperature tolerance on both sides (hot and cold) recedes incrementally. Observing the ways in which I am less robust than before, I did some informal projections with whatever stunted and haphazard mathphysics awareness has voluntarily gone dormant inside of me, and the conclusion landed me—finally, flatly, and firmly—at one place on the thermometer:

Seventy (70) degrees. ROOM TEMPERATURE. Next thing they'll tell me is that the afterlife is climate-controlled.

Ewwwwwwwww.

THE END

Someone Says

I don't know the source of this truism.

(Gosh, well, that itself is a truism, innit.)

Neither do I know the source of the following truism (although I am quite sure that it's from a Goddard College student):

The perception of time within a finite experience is analogous to the lifespan of a toilet-tissue roll. It seems initially to be boundlessly present, and use (let's say a 1-foot segment) does little visibly to diminish its abundance perceptibly. But then, a threshold of sorts is crossed, and that same 1-foot segment means so much more to the girth of the roll, yet nothing can be done about it. The real-life applications of this axiom are both apt and irritating.