when is a cold the flu?

you have a cold - it's the kind where you're achy in your shoulders, your ears are ringing, you're coughing up small balls of phlegm from a very sore throat and though your nose isn't stuffed up,  every breath you take is too cold on your sore throat. and it does no favors for your general mood. and by you, i naturally mean me. on top of it, there's another mass shooting at a school, and another bunch of horribleness flares up on facebook among the gun-toting set. i hate being confronted with the wilful ignorance of people i grew up with. the world is becoming so polarized, i honestly fear for all of us. and there's no sense engaging with the deplorables, no amount of logic or reason will seep through their thick, redneck, racist skulls. they sent out their useless, ineffectual, insincere thoughts and prayers and next week, there will probably be another shooting and nothing will be done about it. especially if the perpetrator is white. hands will be wrung and more white supremacist mental cases will buy assault weapons. and that orange jackass in the white house will pose for photos with his grimace and a thumbs up and then rush off to his tee time. and if your head is all stuffed up and your ears are ringing, you might feel rather hopeless about it all.

and it will be compounded by other things which facebook brings to you...like awful, sad stories of a horribly sick little girl who is also being slathered with hopes and prayers - everyone apparently conveniently forgetting that a god that would turn a fever into pneumonia and cardiac arrest in a little girl, doesn't seem all that merciful or inclined to perform miracles. but on that front, you can kind of forgive the thoughts and prayers, because they probably at least bring comfort to those involved. you just mostly wish that facebook didn't involve you in these things.

and you wish this stupid cold or flu or whatever it is would run its course and loosen its grip. hmm...maybe a few thoughts and prayers sent my way would help...

* * *

knausgaard's journey to understand russia.

beautiful.

makes me want to dig out my turgenev.

* * *

and it turns out john b. maclemore of s*town fame made some music.

it involves ambient and field recordings mixed with tor lundvall's work.

* * *

do you know jonathan pie?

you should.

* * *

the food you take you with you when you immigrate.

* * *

i like these short, short stories.

* * *

need more podcasts?
there are some new ones on this list.

it's been three years

dear dad,

it's been three years now since you left us, which both seems like an eternity and just yesterday. as you know, i mostly talk to you in my head when i'm out in my garden, but i've been a bit absent lately as november is the darkest, most dreary month in denmark. it won't be that long before we go back towards the light and i'll be back to my usual conversations with you as i dig and plant beans and weed the asparagus.

i think you would be sad about mom's decline, but probably not very surprised. over the past year, she's lost her driver's license because she became a danger to herself and others on the roads. she had likely been that for years, with her distracted driving habits, donut in one hand and rooting around in her purse for lipstick or her glasses with the other, but in january things got serious. it took three cops to pull her over, despite driving on the shoulder at a crawl, and she was wearing slippers and no jacket and the windows were rolled down on a bitterly cold january day. some kind soul from platte gave her a ride home that evening, but everyone knew it was time for her to stop driving. the state agreed and took her license.

not driving meant her days in the house were numbered, as she couldn't get anywhere to get groceries or socks or menard's mugs or whatever else she felt obsessed to buy. but her cooking abilities had declined so dramatically after your death, that she wasn't cooking for herself much anyway and her diet was terrible. she'd always had a cavalier attitude to questionable canned foods, and her alzheimer's did not improve that. she wasn't taking very good care of her diabetes and her poor diet didn't help that.

so we found a place for her at tlc. they are kind to her and feed her three solid meals a day. they remind her to take her pills at the appointed times and she's in good physical health. helmet-clad, she rode her bike all summer, going out to the house when she wished. but then people began to call and report that she was in the middle of the road, not off to the side and they were worried about her safety. they reported it to the police and not that long ago, some busybody from the city office had the city's lawyer send a letter, asking for her bike to be taken away. the cow person in question enlisted a relative's help in obtaining moneek's address, but did that relative give her a heads up? no, she did not. that didn't feel too great.

as mom's confusion grows, she gets weird ideas in her head - it's her brain trying to make up for the gaps, to fill them in with something, anything. and it doesn't always make sense. recently, that resulted in her deciding to walk out to the house in the middle of the night - seeking home on some basic level. the police brought her back to tlc and safety, since it was a cold night and she was walking, no longer allowed to ride her bike. and then this week, the state paid a visit, given a heads up to a potential problem with mom by, probably, that cow in the city office. happily, they found only the truth at tlc - happy, content, well cared for residents.

and i'd love to be able to talk to you about it. i'd like to know what you would think. i think you would be disappointed. the supposed christians of that small town, indulging their righteousness, rather than kindness and compassion. all their kind words and admiration of you do not extend to mom, especially not as she loses herself. it makes me sad about platte and think that once she's gone, i may actually never go back there. as i feel now, i certainly feel no desire to do so. i think if i did, i would probably march into the city office and give that busybody a piece of my mind.

but if i look deep inside myself, i have also had trouble finding compassion for mom. she so willfully, studiously avoided being self-examined all these years, tho' she didn't avoid being selfish. it's been hard to watch and hard to summon compassion. but when i think of all she's lost since she lost you three years ago...her driver's license and thus her freedom, her home (it's still there, but she doesn't live in it), her horses, her mind, her memories, her friends (it's hard to be friends with someone with alzheimer's), her phone (she never knows where it is)...i do feel sorry for her. and i think it would make you sad too.

we miss you and we also miss her, even tho' she's still here in body. but i'll tell you more when i'm back in the garden.

* * *

and for something completely different:

these pictures are very striking.

musings from somewhere over the atlantic

iceland air FI657, somewhere over the atlantic

i don’t think there’s any way to emotionally prepare for this. clearing out our childhood home. the photos, the show clothes, the memories. the realizing that there’s not much there that i wish to have or keep. the clinging. the letting go. whether to reveal to mom what we’re doing. how she will react. whether she will understand. whether i have compassion and sympathy for her. so many questions, many more than answers. and a limbo space, where i don’t know what to feel. anticipation, dread, relief, nostalgia, resentment, disappointment, sadness? all of those at once?

she’s not going to get any better. she has checked out and she’s no longer the mother i knew. if i ever knew her. can we know our mothers? can we escape them? embrace them? become them? what if we become them? shit, what if we become them?

her utter lack of ever being wrong. her hiding of her actions. her lack of attention span. her distractions. what if i’m already her? how to escape?

i look at my hands and see hers. but also mine. we are always a combination of our parents and our experiences. but who does that mean that i am? i look at my handwriting and see dad’s.

dad was smart, sarcastic, a bit too mean at times, he drank a bit too much, loved his garden, was writer and cared deeply about his town. he was funny and competitive and political and i miss him.

mom is distracted, determined, funny, loves to sing, doesn’t listen very well, was never rattled if 8 extra people showed up to thanksgiving. but i suspect mom never reached her potential. was it laziness? or did she just not know what it might be? she loved horses and instilled that love in me. she got a motorcycle license at 60 and a permit to carry at 70+. i miss that brave woman.

they both loved reading. however, i don’t have a sense of what they got out of it. i love reading too, but i don’t recall them ever recommending i read a certain book. i just read what was around the house and anything else i was interested in….from stephen king to tolstoy.

i want a tattoo of dad’s signature on the inside of my wrist. and i want to get it on this trip. i have a sudden certainty of that. on my right hand. the hand with which i write.

in which i say fuck. a lot. and it's totally necessary

ok, US airlines can fuckity fuck fuck off for not letting young people who are 15 fly somewhere alone, not even for outrageous unaccompanied minor fees, if they have to change planes. how infantile are american young people? and how worrying is that for the future of the whole fucking world?

and you, allegiant airlines, with your incredibly bad reputation, but direct flights from one obscure airport to another (i'm looking at you FSD), blocking access to your website from outside the US. fuck you and your americentric ways.

and donald trump, you disgusting, vile, cheeto toned troglodyte. fuck off. you and all your deplorable, uneducated, toothless mouth-breathing followers. most of whom live in my hometown. fuck. the. hell. off.

and teachers who have their heads so far up their asses, they can't see daylight. and who threaten my child with scissors. and who try to blow sunshine up my ass and do fuck-all to actually help the young people who are in your class. and who have the limited world view of a troglodyte. fuck you. and the periodic table you rode in on. i bet you don't even speak a second language. other than fargoese, which, while incomprehensible, isn't actually another language.

rant over...but i'm not sorry for the swearing.

aggressive christianity

being in the states for a few weeks, i was struck by the visible increase in christian fundamentalism all around in the upper midwest. there have always been a few anti-choice signs here and there, and my hometown of 1300 has 12 churches, but there are more and more aggressive bible verses lining the highways and byways and christianity just seems to be much more in your face.

but i found this nail-studded cross west of the town where i grew up most disturbing. apparently, with 12 churches in a town of 1300, the youth groups have banded together into one and they erected this cross on the edge of a cornfield west of town. the large, rusty nails represent the sins of the young people in town.

and it strikes me as extremely violent and aggressive. and i wonder how a bunch of kids in small town south dakota can possibly have so many sins. what on earth are they? sex? drinking? playing hooky from school, the odd joint? hello, these are normal teenage issues - not giant nails on a cross. and to display them in such a harsh way, what good can that possibly do?

i'm more than a little worried about the aggressive tone christianity has taken on in the US in the years of my chosen exile. it seems to me not all that different from the sort of fundamentalist leaning of which all of islam is accused because a few choose to be extreme. when extremism comes to a small town in south dakota, what do we have left?

for more on this, read what frank bruni says about michele bachman and her ilk of the religious right here.

olives may contain pits

when i realized this afternoon that there was a delay in the broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the london olympics, it royally pissed me off. it strikes me as yet another symptom of a society far too focused on the wrong things. a late afternoon live broadcast didn't fit with the needs of the network to capture those advertising dollars, so they delayed it by several hours and completely destroyed the continuity by breaking for ads every 5 minutes. and the play-by-play by the anchors - simplistic, insufficiently-researched and well, moronic. and of course, the first 5 minutes had to be spent speculating as to possible terrorism. shameful.

what has happened to this country?  signs in the grocery store, warning that olives have pits. do people really not know this? are we so far from where our food comes from? i do realize that it's also lawsuit avoidance, but shouldn't we also be worried that it's come to that?

i've been here a week and a half and i'm dumbfounded. i can't stand to watch a news broadcast - they're over-dramatic and under-informed and carry little or no news. the speculations as to the motives of the madman killer in colorado have oddly become "the truth" about him, tho' he hasn't said a word. ordinary people quote glen beck and bill o'reilly and fox "news" as if they tell the truth about everything from school testing to gun control and health care. there's no critical thinking in evidence, apparently no one reasons for themselves (at least not out loud) and worst of all, there's no outrage over this.

where is the outrage?

well, i'm outraged, but at least i get to leave again. and leave again i will. tho' i will express my outrage with my vote in november. it's the least i can do.