Effective immediately, and thanks to a recent free domain offer from the greatest ISP in the world, inyourhand.org is now metaphorager.net. (Well, and it’s also a cooler title.)
Too Mellow to Die
It worries me somewhat that my friends and colleagues are more concerned than I am that I experienced my fourth cardioversion Sunday.
“Experienced” is the wrong word. I experienced, and have a clear memory of, the 150 beats-per-minute irregular jangle in my chest, alternately exhilirating and tiring; the two ER trips, one for pink pills and one for (and this is why I love the emergency-responder sense of humor) “Edison Medicine;” the quiet peopling of “my” ER bay with what now seems in retrospect an awful lot of medical personnel; the partial deforestation of my chest so the defibrillator contact won’t arc; the smell of IV-administered sedatives in my nasal capillaries; the slow drop into warm unconsciousness from a ring of too-casual faces. I’ve seen it before, twice in succession five years ago and once three years after.
But of the cardioversion itself, the targeted electrocution which Ann tells me is always difficult to watch, I have absolutely no memory. And therefore, the seriousness of the situation — the potential for blood to clot in and shoot out of my atria toward my personal brain — somehow has never sunk in. Except for those around me.
All I seem to carry away with me (apart from the deep stretchy scorch in my chest, and a somewhat longer life) is a sense of the Universe’s fragile tensity — mine, yours and everyone else’s, all sideways in space and forward and backwards in Time; a sense that paints with echoing joy and terror everything it touches. (Synesthetics intentional.)
So maybe I shouldn’t be bothered by not being more bothered. Kissing the face of your sweetie can be intoxicating enough — how much more so to kiss the face of Reality, or of God?
Poetry of News
There is a certain poetry to newswriting that’s not readily apparent to its readers — and perhaps not even to its practitioners.
This derives in large part, I think, from the absurdity inherent in exchanging six to eight hours a day for six to eight hundred words a story which will be forgotten by next week.
It’s the game of Reality Creation, newsriting is. My job is to tell you what happened in a place you didn’t see. Though I labor to get it right (literally, with sweat and grunting and everything), my account is necessarily incomplete and should be taken with a grain of salt. (As should everyone else’s, of course: including yours.)
First Week In
Three things:
– My beats: fire, cops, breaking news, and meetings as needed.
– I work with some freakishly smart, amazingly creative people; two of whom I have now dueled with a lightsaber.
– The Game hasn’t changed much — get it fast, get it right, and get it (or a different part of it) first. Many of the players have also changed, but the ones who haven’t seem as happy to seem me as I am to see them.
Last week also found me chasing a fire, investigating a vehicle crash (no injuries, thank Gd), touring a local farm, and chatting with a now-retiring fire chief friend. It’s great to “be” a small-town newspaperman.
Again.
And so, to work.
It was four-and-a-half months since I was laid off from the sasonal office-manager position at a local nursery, and longer still since I worked in my official profession, when I picked up the phone to call Sonoma Valley’s newest newspaper. The conversation went something like this:
“Hi, I’ve been out of work for five years but I think I can help. Do you need any reporters?”
“Sure!”
Well, not exactly like that. But pretty close. Anyway, I started yesterday at the Sonoma Valley Sun, and will be covering fires, cops/courts, and breaking news. (In addition to whatever else is needful, like features and (I hope!) columns.) Also, I’ve reclaimed the byline “Neal Ross” (which I adopted for radio back in 1995 since nobody can seem to spell or pronounce “Attinson,” and kept for newspapering since that’s how all my contacts knew me. They still do).
There’s a saying that the One rewards men only for the merit of their wives. I don’t generally hold with Deuteronomic reward/punishment theology, but seeing the relief on Ann‘s face makes me agree with at least a small part of it … Blessed is the One who makes our wives happy.
As for me, I feel as though I’m walking in a dream. But I’d better wake up before the deadline. 😉
Thump, Flutter, Gak
I looked up from the computer, wondering about the “thump.” Then I saw the robin on the patio — fluttering wings outspread, struggling to get up.
Outside, through the gate, into the side-yard. “Are you okay?” I asked reflexively.
She wasn’t, at least at first. Her beak and eyes were wide open, and she was panting — or do robins always breathe that way? She seemed dazed but unhurt (no broken legs or anything), so I sat down next to her and babbled softly: “You poor thing. We’ll get you fixed up, give you some nice worm broth and pyracantha cobbler,” etc.
Natural Machines
A number of years ago, I got into a cocktail-party argument (or its boho-pomo equivalent, since we were in San Francisco in the 1980s) with someone who decried the “unnaturalness” of spaceflight. Her thesis, IIRC, was that humans were somehow apart from and opposed to Nature, as evidenced by the fact that “we make stuff instead of using what’s already there.” I asked, “What about beavewr dams and birds’ nests?” She got mad and found another people-knot. Would but that I could have steered her http://www.nextnature.net/-ward!