Tiny black flyer,
we'll call him 'Gnat',
leaves the leaves
his decaying heaven beside the stream
to hang with me.
to hang in the air
right between my eyes
Only distinguishable from the
dangling shadowy spiders and small
deep black spots in my eyeballs
by the independent motion.
(You have independent motion,
you may go...)
Maybe it's the glasses;
I don't need them to walk, but, you know,
The glorious beauty of the entire world is never enough.
One must check their phone occasionally.
So, walking and shooing, shoeing and swatting
Until annoyance mothers intention;
Stop, observe, and smash.
The tiny corpse in the palm confirms the kill.
until
10s of yards later, there is another.
Right between the eyes.
We go through a similar tragic drama.
10s of yards down the path,
there's another.
At this point I think what if it's the same
Gnat reborn, again and again, saying
"what was that all about?"
Maybe it's an old friend
who took a bad turn on the wheel of karma
what is the important message they are spending lifetimes trying to get across to me?
well, maybe there is no message. maybe it's just
the pure animal attraction.
Relationships remain a mystery to me.
Month: August 2025
Helen says, “bye!”
Today was the anniversary of the death of my mother, Helen Ida (Smith) Chern. So, I have been a motherless child for 17 years. That is every bit as long as I was a child living (for the most part) with a mother. It is starting to sink in.
She really was a wonderful, magical person when she wasn’t under the shadow of her depression, illnesses, chronic fatigue, suicidal episodes, and a certain stubborn dramatic holding on to that state of mind once it had set in. I think that some of that was a desperate mechanism to get the rest of us to back off and leave her alone for a moment. Intellect really can be as much of a curse as a blessing. I guess we were a couple of the last of our kind, since I failed to pass along any genes. (as far as I know. as of yet. as they say.)
Then of course there was the decades long darkening shadows bringing on the decline of that intellect, ending finally in full-blown dementia. Though, once she had finally let go of all effort, she seemed as happy as I had ever seen her.
One of the last times I saw her in the hospital, I asked her if she knew who I was. Apparently you’re not supposed to ask that, but it didn’t seem to phase her. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. She might have been dodging the specifics. But, she replied, “Yes. You’re the love of my life.”
Now I can look back to my early childhood and see the vivacious, beautiful young version of her, prancing about the house singing during the chores when she wasn’t hating and being oppressed by them. “Today is Monday! Today is Monday…”
My Fabulous Academic Career part I a
from the overly forthcoming “Memoirs of an Escapist”
Nursery School: a drop-out from day one
I suppose it is not too surprising that I have a memory of, or a memory of a story about, my first day in “Nursery School.” Most of my early memories were burnt in by fear, shame and moments of blooming self-awareness. This experience of being suddenly forced at once into the midst of the hoi polloi and under the thumb of The System had elements of all of the above. In some strange way, the memories exist as simultaneously polar self-images: a very childish feeling of being overwhelmed and unprepared to cope, yet at the same time a sense of having moved into my adult self as I set myself apart from the children and in opposition to the Institution. The more adult self memory is navigating situations on its own. The infantile memory is having to interact with, and being viewed by, the adults.
I was somehow entering the class as the semester was already in progress. The teacher kindly offered me an out from a full-blown socialization melt-down by saying that since I was “The New Boy” I could just sit on the sidelines and observe. I readily accepted the title, and hoped to maintain the position of “New Boy” for the rest of my life. I set about my duties of non-participation with undetectable gusto, and continued to do so for days to come.
However there all too soon came the dreaded day when it became clear to the teacher that I was not about to become more comfortable, or be moved to leave my chair by the sight of all the “fun” the other children were having.
“But… I’m the NEW BOY!”, I protested.
“You can’t be The New Boy forever,” I was informed, to my everlasting dismay.
After this, all my memories become more dark and cloudy. I do remember one of the allegedly Fun Activities that we were expected to take part in, for it was emblematic to me of how the leaders were as dumb as their followers. The teacher had everyone get in a circle and prance around “like horses.” The teacher, who was probably actually a nice young Socialist girl and unfairly villainized in my memory, didn’t just let the children be horses after their own fashions but had to demonstrate how it should be done. She trotted along putting her head down and then throwing it back. “Like this!” I found this to be about the stupidest thing I had witnessed to date in my long somewhere around four years of life.
The final act of this dramatic episode was perhaps overlooked by most and forgotten by all but myself. To me it represented my first public protest; an evolutionary moment when had awareness of the situation and defined my relation to it, decidedly a source of pride to this day. The parents, staff and Administration all gathered on the last day of the ‘school’ year for a graduation ceremony. The little kiddies all marched up one by one to accept scrolls of paper while everyone cooed over how cute it was. I did not want to attain cuteness in such a cheap manner. I knew that we had not done anything for which we should be proud, we had not actually learned anything, and they were in fact really just laughing at and humiliating us with this condescension. I refused to go up and get my diploma. This pretty much set up the pattern for the rest of my life.