He Not Busy Being Born

Chihuly

2014-08-01T01:57:27Z

Tacoma?

2014-07-30T18:35:42Z

Where the heck am I?

Tacoma, Washington. We are here for a wedding.

View of old downtown Tacoma from our hotel window.

Statue of indigenous person.

A river runs through it. Once highly contaminated, now not so much. Lots of water in Washington.

Train...about a half mile long. Wonder what is in those container cars?

Last Class Ever

2013-03-15T18:29:46Z

Well, yesterday, Thursday, March 14, 2013, I taught my last class ever at UCSB. Could well be my last class period. Been teaching writing since 1973. Can't imagine not doing it. But having used up my call back time, I am officially done. Oh, wait. I still have the last batch of papers to grade. And then I am done.

Below find pics of my last class ever. A good group, very quiet, though willing and very good natured:
Bye Guys!

Broken Hearted Melodies: Liner Notes

2013-03-08T20:22:40Z

Broken Hearted Melodies by The Tingles

Though the title might not suggest it, I had wanted to end "The Tingles," as we had begun it (Lighthouse of Love), on a slightly more upbeat note. Now looking back, I can't say where exactly I located that note, the more upbeat one. But I think it's in the last line of the refrain, "You can lean on me if I can lean you." True, it's hardly The Youngbloods calling on us all to smile on each other, but at least there's a hint of an exchange of human warmth, though perhaps significantly qualified by that "if." You can lean on me IF I can lean on you. I could have written: You can lean on me AND I can lean on you. But I didn't because "and" seems to presume to much, and honestly, you can lean on me only if I am allowed to do the same.

So that's the upbeat note as best I can locate it.

As for the rest of the refrain, I must insist on the pessimism:

"Nothing now anyone can do
Just have to buckle down and try to see it through."

Sometimes that's just how things are. It--whatever it might be (someone dying; dreams gone up in flames; words spoken that can't be taken back; really bad mistakes made)--simply cannot be undone or fixed up or glossed over. All that you can do--if that--is try to get though it with whatever dignity you can muster.

The last stanza is perhaps a bit too existential (in the existentialism sense). But I just can't get Sartre and Heidegger out of my head...with their idea of our having been flung into a world we did not make.

Somebody's Body: Liner Notes

2013-02-24T00:41:41Z

Somebody's Body by The Tingles

Death again. This time about dying anonymously, as it were. A body pops up in the lake with no I.D. or identifying marks and then gets buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. That's a downer. But maybe too--given how noisy the song is--it's about making a joyful noise, in spite of everything: as in the line:

Somebody's body
Rise on angel's wings
Somebody's body
Sing, Sing, Sing

Maybe, in relation to the whole, we all die anonymously. Sure, we all have a smaller social circle. But just beyond that the circle spreads out to those other people we may even share a few moments but pass by generally in our daily rounds. I noticed, one day, at this place where I worked out, that an older guy, who was usually there all the time, had not been there for some time. So I asked another guy if he knew anything about that guy. "That guy," because I couldn't remember that guy's name. I indicated where that guy usually sat and said that I thought he was from Wisconsin and had worked for Sears. And the guy says, "Oh that guy. He died I think."

So I worked for a while on a song called "That Guy. You know, that guy." But I never finished it.

Heaven Bound: Liner Notes

2013-02-23T20:02:27Z

Heaven Bound by The Tingles

This is Brother Dan's song from top to bottom. He plays all the guitars and percussion and sings it. I do a little back up. He also wrote it, some time ago, back in the 80's, when he and his wife, Kim, had a punk band. I don't know what they were calling themselves at the time. Goodbye Blue Monday? Mr. Pleasant? I don't know, as I said, but I always liked the song from the first I heard it. And it mixes well with the overall malaise of the CD. It's about a suicide, I think.

3 AM: Liner Notes

2013-02-23T18:56:58Z

3 AM by The Tingles

If "Around Once" was lugubrious, this one is at least maudlin.

It's about insomnia, about suddenly being wide awake at 3 AM and not being able to get back to sleep again, knowing that you have a long hard day ahead, and will need every bit of energy you have to get through it, yet here you are at 3 AM wide awake with the minutes slipping by. No rest for the wicked, eh?

I hate it. I have been insomniac for years. At one point, years ago, I used as my soporific cheap wine and was for some time in effect a situational alcoholic. But that proved counter-productive, and anyway, I discovered prescription meds. Before I couldn't get to sleep at all. With the meds, I got off to sleep OK but started waking up at aberrant hours, like 3 AM. Now apparently, as a senior citizen, according to what I have read, I am likely to have only "fragmented" sleep the rest of my days.

I don't know why exactly but the song makes me think of a bit from Freud's essay on Narcissism:

We should then say: the sick man withdraws his libidinal cathexes back upon his own soul, and sends them out again when he recovers. 'Concentrated is his soul', says Wilhelm Busch of the poet suffering from toothache, 'in his molar's narrow hole.'

I was aware of something like this, I think. The first two parts of this song are very much concentrated in my molar's narrow hole. I tried to break out of the narrow hole in the last part by suggesting there are other people--poets, lovers, soldiers--doing other things at 3 AM. But true to form, I return in the last line to narcissistic grandiosity claiming that, as I lie there, I hear the world turning round.

Around Once: Liner Notes

2013-02-15T19:36:18Z

Around Once by The Tingles

This is one lugubrious sucker.

Everybody dies. We all get to go around just once. What's the big deal? I don't know. But I think it is.

As I wrote I thought it was in the genre of the stages of life poem. But the song didn't turn out like that. The first stanza is sort of about what life looks like when you start out. Much potential seems to lie ahead. Things look different in the middle stage; mostly regrets at things not done and sadness at how quickly time has passed. And the last stanza is about how things look right at the end: pretty bleak.

Unrelieved lugubriousness.

The emotional key to the song for me is the line, "And you ain't got time to unpack your trunk." The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut tries to differentiate the classical theory (Freud) of man [sic] as suffering from guilt from what he calls "tragic" man [sic]. The former he says:

...cannot illuminate the sense of fractured, enfeebled, discontinuous human existence; it cannot explain the essence of the schizophrenic's fragmentation, the struggle of the patient who suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder to reassemble himself, the despair--the guiltless despair, I stress--of those who in late middle age discover that the basic patterns of their self as laid down in their nuclear ambitions and ideals have not been realized.

That's a long way of saying: and you ain't got time to unpack your trunk.

And So It Is: Liner Notes

2011-07-26T17:17:12Z

And So It Is by The Tingles "And So It Is" represents a continuation of, or elaboration upon, the dying in the old person's home theme announced first in "5150" as it concerns the "the old man."

More details:

They put him in this big old place where every door is locked
They don't want no one getting out they might go for a walk
He's feeling sad and lonely now so far away from home
Not a single person there that he's ever known.

All of this is pretty much true or as it occurred. But the refrain is mostly made up:

They take him to the window to get a little light
Blind as a bat he don't know if it's day or night
But his face like a flower it turns to the sun
And so it is and so it is
Until his day is done.

The last part--until his day is done--is of course a metaphor with the word "day" standing in for the concept "life." But the other part seems to make an empirical or matter-of-fact claim: that he was "taken to the window" and that he was "blind as a bat." Maybe he was taken to the window to get a little light. I don't know, but I doubt it. He had a walker. I know for certain though that he was not blind as a bat. Though he was pretty blind, having suffered over a number of years ocular decay, resulting from something called macular degeneration. I am not sure what this is medically speaking. I only know its effects that one loses vision starting in the center of the eye. So right in the middle of what one should be seeing becomes a black hole which gradually expands taking up all vision except usually on the very periphery. One is left with enough peripheral vision to get about. So he was not blind as a bat.

I think his peripheral vision responsible for suggesting the line I like best in this song: his face like flower it turns to the sun... He walked, during our visit, into a large room, with light streaming at one end, and he cocked his head in a birdlike way, first to this side and then to that, trying to make out where was. He was using, I know, his peripheral vision, but to do that, he had to cock his head left and right as does a bird. Somehow his making that movement touched me. I couldn't figure out how to get a bird into the song, so I changed his face to a flower.

This I think fitting since as we age the more we regress back along the food chain, so that in end, some exist only in a "vegetative state."

5150: Liner Notes

2011-07-25T17:39:35Z

5150 by The Tingles
Once again: based on a true story, or, perhaps...and I believe...multiple true stories that are bound further to multiply by the day as more and more baby boomers, themselves getting along in years, are forced to deal with their own dying and sometimes demented parents.

That's what--in three parts--5150 is a tale of.

Part one: making the call.

5150 is CA Police Code for "a danger to himself (herself) and others." So you dial 911 and say, "I have a 5150." And depending on the details you give, the authorities will come and pick up the elderly.

Call 911, get the medic and his van
They come and took away the old man
He was threatening to burn down the house
Figured it was time to get him out

The burn down the house part isn't exactly true, but close enough. And it's no fun at all when things get to this point, and you have to make that call. And the elder doesn't go peacefully, but screaming at the top of his lungs and resisting for dear life.

So they come and they took him away
Locked him up for 14 days
Trying to figure out where he might go
Fact was don't nobody know...

Which is pretty much what happened. Being a veteran in this case, he was locked up, in a "pod," they called it, at the VA Hospital for evaluation, for a legal period of 14 days.

Part 3:

They took him off to an old person's home
He was sad and so all alone
I cry like a baby, that's what he said
Couple days later I heard he was dead...

Also pretty much occurred as told. The old person's home was very sanitary. You could smell that. But he was sad, and said so. In fact he said, "I am in hell." And then a few days after I saw him in that home, he was dead.

Or as I previously wrote:

He left the room without making a sound
Nobody noticed till the orderly made his rounds..

So that's the story of 5150. In three parts.

He Is Not: Liner Notes

2011-07-23T18:56:48Z

<a href="http://thetingles.bandcamp.com/track/he-is-not">He Is Not by The Tingles</a>
"He is Not" is at the heart of my order of things.

That's about "the old man" who died in 2006 though it's not about him in any particular sort of way, excepting perhaps the line:

He left the room without making a sound
Nobody noticed till the orderly made his rounds...

That is true and particular to the old man (though I am sure also to many others who die in those "homes"). For the rest it's much more generic.

Somehow he just slipped out of time
Leaving only his remains behind
An odd assortment of odds and ends
Fingernails, toes, teeth and skin....

Those are pretty generally the remains of anybody. So the emphasis ends up being much more on the "not" and not on the "He."

You can't say that he moved on
Cause there's no place for him to be gone
He didn't fly high. He didn't sink low
No, he didn't have nowhere to go...

When one is no longer, one is NOT, and that's that.

Oh time is a mighty tide
It carries us far it carries us wide
It is the beating heart of the stars...
If you can still see'em you still are.

We should occasionally remember that.

BUT HE'S NOT.
OH HE'S NOT
AIN'T NO X GONNA MARK THE SPOT WHERE HE'S NOT.

That last bit--ain't no x--may, with its postmodern under erasure feel, be overly clever. But I still like it.

Out of the Blue: Liner Notes

2011-07-22T18:53:05Z

Out of the Blue by The Tingles

Once, years ago, I read that, when one gets old, one gets to having lots of memories. Those old guys sitting on the benches in front of the courthouse weren't doing nothing. They were remembering. I remember thinking when I read that back then that, well, maybe old age would have some benefits. One would remember, in any case. I was still thinking like that when I wrote "Out of the Blue" five or six years ago. Then, five or six years ago, the memories weren't coming back. Things have changed since then; they have started popping up all the time, and I wish they wouldn't. I think more like William Blake now, "Drive your plow through the bones of the dead." And I have the refrain of a song yet and perhaps never to be written: And now I am wondering/ Better to Remember? Better to Forget?

So I don't know now that I could write "Out of the Blue." But I still like it. I think it is neurologically accurate too. Brain science says that when the brain is idle or more exactly in neutral, when one is "wool gathering," that's when the brain gets involved in making up the self (making connections, telling stories). So the self arises when the mind is not occupied with an immediate task.

Theses lines are intended to evoke a dreamy state:

When the rain obscures the horizon
And the wheels hiss on the road
And the darkness is descending
And you've got miles and miles left to go...

Or:

When the wind is just a whisper
And something in the shadows stirs
And you forget what you are doing
And your mind becomes a blur...

Those are times, brain science says, when the brain is relatively disengaged that memories might pop up.

And the third stanza is about memory and aging:

Now that autumn is upon you
And you're raking up the leaves
The spell of smoke is in the air
And it's finally time to grieve...

That's a bit too discursive, and really I underestimated when I wrote the song the degree of grief involved in remembering.

Better to remember? Better to forget?

You tell me.

Country Song: Liner Notes

2011-07-21T18:20:17Z

Country Song by The Tingles

According to Willie Nelson, "Three Chords and the Truth--That's What a Country Song Is." Well, it that's true, this song is half way to being a country song, since it has those three chords, and only three. The "truth" part is a harder call, though this song is based, as was "The Curse," on a true story or rather on multiple true stories, since I am sure this story is told in one way or another many times a day, around Nashville and probably in rural China too. But then we hedged our bets a little. The refrain runs:

Heading down that long road
All I got is gone
Feels like I am stuck inside
A real BAD country song....

So if we ain't got the truth...or hit it somehow...it could still be a country song, though a REAL BAD one, making allowances though for that particular inflection in the sixties when BADD meant GOOD.

So perhaps the truth is ambiguous. And while it might not be the truth exactly, I do pride myself on having imparted at least a little social realism and immediate relevance with:

We'd lived too long on credit
Up to our necks in debt
When everything had been sold
There wasn't nothing left...

A reference again to hard times. At one point I worked a yard sale into the song, but the rhyme didn't work out.

And finally I can't think of being stuck inside something without thinking of Dylan's "Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

The Curse: Liner Notes

2011-07-10T18:51:05Z

<a href="http://thetingles.bandcamp.com/track/the-curse">The Curse by The Tingles</a>

The curse is based on a true story.

Way back when I was a kid in shorts, at a time when only kids wore shorts and, as a kid, you looked forward to the day you got long pants, in Ora, South Carolina (circa 1950), my uncle, a teenager, who lived across the field from us would call out, "Come here, Nicky. I got something to show you," and I would round the corner and there he would be chopping the head off a chicken. I don't know how many times he pulled that one or how many times I fell for it, but the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" has for me a specific graphic meaning having seen, as I have, that chicken running around the yard with its head still over there on the tree stump and there was something just awful about that.

But one time, he calls out and I round the corner and there's no chicken. Instead, a snake is hanging down the side of the chicken coop and uncle is laughing up a storm, like it's a real thigh slapper or something, seeing the fix this egg thieving snake has got itself into. For it had crawled into the coop, and swallowed a wooden egg, which, as I understand, was used to induce the hens to "brood," and having swallowed that egg could not get back out the same knot hole it came in through. So "The Curse" is a true story up to this point, for, while, in the song, I let him wither on the vine as it were, in fact uncle picked up an ax and cut the snake in half and squeezed the wooden egg right out of the tail section, plop! onto the ground.

So what's this little story? What is it about? Well, not much of anything except that it happened. The snake of course is a mighty symbolic creature, what with Adam and Eve and all, and the idea that the snake was cursed (by not being able to go in reverse; and us too cursed by our irreversibility (can't go out the way we come in)) has theological implications. But lest the meanings get too thick, I tried to thin it all out with: "Never bite off more than you can chew/And never swallow anything that's bigger than you."

Speaking of snakes that got stuck, my wife spoke with a woman in Columbia, SC, who was going into the bathroom to take care of nature's needs, when a huge gopher jumped out of her toilet followed in hot pursuit by a large snake. She rushed out of the bathroom to call the animal protection people, as the snake rushed the gopher, and when they got back in the bathroom, no gopher was present. Rather the tale of the snake was sticking up out of the toilet. Guess what? It got stuck trying to go out the way that it come in.

I claim in the song that "ain't no snake ever born could go in reverse." I am not sure that is biologically true. Some claim that sea snakes can go in reverse. Maybe. But somehow "ain't no land snake ever born could go in reverse" lacks the impact I desired.

Lighthouse of Love: Liner Notes

2011-07-09T17:38:35Z

Lighthouse of Love by The Tingles

While not exactly joyous, the CD I made in 2008, Sea of Love, was at least about love which is generally viewed as a positive thing. Most of the other songs I had written in the four years before that and in the three years since have been depressing. So when I set about writing a few new songs for "The Tingles," I felt a vague urge to give a nod backwards, as it were, to the more positive love stuff before plunging, in the cuts to follow, straight into the darkness. Still the song takes a while to get to the light starting, as it does, with a plunge into darkness:

When all of a sudden the bottom it falls out
And all of your certainty turns into doubt
And all your expectations turn out to be a hoax
And all of the promises are just dirty jokes

Looming back there in my mind not too far of course when I wrote these lines was the sudden economic collapse the dust of which still settles around us, as we appear even to be sinking deeper.

The lyrics then plunge on into the darker, if not slightly more metaphysical, waters with:

When there ain't no signal coming down from above
When all is lost in the raging flood.

Katrina too was not that far back in my mind, what with the "raging flood." But finally a turn if not to optimism at least to the possibility of something other than utter darkness:

Keep a weather out eye
For the lighthouse of love...

There's a good deal of watery nautical stuff in this; "weather eye"? --You ask.

I don't know where that came from except perhaps all those Captain Hornblower books I read in junior high. But it was very important back in the day of the clipper ship to--no matter what else one might be doing or even however important that might be--nonetheless, keep a weather eye out because the weather at sea and the failure to attend to it can be a life and death matter. So the song does end with a glimmer, like the lighthouse itself, of--if not hope--at least the possibility of it.