Invasion

Well, they’ve done it again. Now the iguanas are moving from the mangroves to the newspapers. The New Day (El Nuevo Día), our local newspaper, reports that scientists are unsure about the effect of the swarming population of iguanas. Do they harm fauna / flora or are they just a nuisance, visually speaking? (The author of the article describes them iguanas as feas—ugly. Well, has anyone ever asked them what they think of us?)

The real question, he goes on to say, is what they eat. The answer, most people say, is that they are herbivores. Great—let them eat grass.

But wait—they have been seen to eat eggs. 

Presumably scrambled, though not cooked.

So now the question vexing scientific minds is how often? So guess what they did!

Trapped 'em and cut into their stomach!

Guys!

Look, what did the iguana ever do to you? 

I think of the story I read, once, of two African safari expeditions encountering each other. They’re both observing the giraffes, but in rather different ways. The Americans are getting as close as they dare, and snapping away with cameras. The British expedition is drinking tea and observing them from a distance. The British leader of the expedition can contain himself no longer.

“It’s so bloody disrespectful to the animals!”  

Good point.

Well, the news is that with one exception the gastrointestinal content of eviscerated iguanas contain only plant matter.

The exception?

Lapas.

Hunh?

OK, another word I don’t know. Turns out that lapas are limpets.

Hunh again….

And limpets, it turns out, are mollusks which stick tenaciously to ships. 

Oh!

Well, there is something fishy (hope you didn’t notice that) here. Are there limpets in Puerto Rico? Or is this one more case of a Spanish word that means various things, depending on region? (One local hotel is named La Concha—the conch. But Venezuelans, when they spot it, go into gales of laughter, and the men take salacious pictures of themselves in front of the sign. In Caracas, the conch is the nether region of ladies….)

Wasn’t I speaking of iguanas?

Right. Well, I looked it up—the iguanas, I mean. And it turns out I had it all wrong! I had written that there are two species of iguanas, the greater and the lesser. Now I find that there are many more species of iguanas, including our very own Mona Island Iguana, which inhabits, very properly, Mona Island, midway between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up….

Wow! An iguana wearing camouflage! Often called the rhinoceros iguana, because of the bump on its nose. Here, you see it better.

Well, this iguana bears the name Cyclura cornuta stejnegeri.

Stejnegeri?

Well, one of the nice things about NOT using the computer to cruise Internet porn sites is that you have time to look things up. So who was Stejneger?

A Norwegian! Born in Bergen, emigrated to the states, worked in New York, and came to Puerto Rico. Discovered the Cyclura cornuta and stuck it in his book, the classic Herpetology of Porto Rico.

Yup, that’s Porto Rico. The gringos changed our name when they invaded us.

So of course I had to read about Stejneger. But really, what stuck with me most was not the biography but the image. Here he is….

Looking at it, one imagines him dressed just as above on the searingly hot island of Mona. And would he be trapping the Cyclura cornuta? And cutting into their stomachs?

No way!

It’s so bloody disrespectful….

Music Torture

Anybody remember Noriega?

Dictator of Panama, taken out by the US army on 3 January 1990. After being blasted for three days by hard core, heavy metal music—including, of all things Van Halen’s song Panama.

Which is what happened to me this weekend. Only in this case it wasn’t an army.

It was a pizzeria.

And a very good one, as I cordially told the owner on Friday night.

OK, I’ll tell the story straight. Puerto Rico has a number of good restaurants, and wants to crack into the food tourism industry. Yes, it exists. People apparently travel just to eat. Well, why shouldn’t they?

And many of the restaurants are on my street: Calle Fortaleza. And so the idea of a festival sprung up. Called neither very originally or accurately the SoFo Fest—Fortaleza runs east  / west, so it should be WeFo—it was a success.

And I liked it…

…in the beginning.

People sat outside talking, laughing, eating good food. Music, too. Guys with guitars, people singing trios from the fifties, an occasional bomba y plena. Nice!

But year after year, the music got louder. 

And this year it was insufferable. 

On Friday, I could bear it no longer. I went into the pizzeria, asked to speak to the owner, gave him my hand, introduced myself. I told him where I lived. I told him I had eaten his pizza, and that it was excellent. Then I told him the music was too loud.

He turned it down after the song had stopped.

Great!

The next night, the music was just as loud. 

I was furious. And became more so when I went—again—to talk to the owner. 

I saw a cop, dressed all in black, listening to the music.

“¿No tenemos un código de orden público?”

Yes, I was screaming. You had to, to be heard.

I addressed him as caballero, a term of respect in Puerto Rico. I begged him to come into my apartment, to hear for himself how loud it was.

He placed his hand on my chest.

I was stunned, but had the sense to walk away.

Hardly police brutality. Black guys in Washington DC get it a lot worse. It wasn’t a nightstick rammed up my ass.

It was also the first time I’ve been touched by a cop.

“I AM LEAVING THIS PLACE—I CANNOT LIVE HERE!”

That’s what I yelled at Raf.

Whose nerves were also on edge. Se we had a fight. And I woke on Sunday not sure whether I was going to book a one-way ticket to Chicago.

I took a walk instead. And I’ve taken a walk today. 

Years ago, when I worked on a psychiatry unit on the night shift, we had a patient that everybody dreaded—very big, very violent, very unpredictable. There were three of us working: two older women, and I. Guess who got to deal with him?

Nothing happened—not even a hand on a chest. But I went home shaking with fear, tossed in bed for several hours, got up and…

…took a walk.

(I may be revealing some coping strategies in this post.)

It helped somewhat, but my hands were still shaky, for the rest of the day.

I tell you this because today, I can barely type.

And I tell you this whole story because I’m tired of being the outsider, being the different one, being always in the wrong place. You know, I’m a white guy, but I swear I would change race and sex, were it possible to do so. That’s how apparently ardent I am to be different.

And I thought I had come to terms with it. Yeah, it gives me insights that the crowd, the sheeple (as the British call it) don’t have. But I’m about to type—if I can—the two words I despise the most in the world:

Why me?

If you’ve come this far—and you’re crazy if you have—you deserve something sweet. So here it is, an absolutely gorgeous song by Vaughan Williams, sung by David Daniels, the foremost counter tenor of our time….

This from your friends at Wikipedia:

The United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights have banned the use of loud music in interrogations, but it is still being widely used. The term torture is sometimes used to describe the practice. While it is acknowledged by US interrogation experts that it causes discomfort, it has also been characterized by them as causing no "long term effects."[1]

Yeah?

What about divorce?

Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees
 
Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves, when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.

Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by.
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

30,000 Lives

That’s how many people—more or less—die from gunshot wounds every year.

OK, be fair. A surprising number—over fifty percent—are suicides. Some are mishaps / accidents. Maybe forty-five percent are homicides.

Does it matter? Only ten thousand people murdered; hey—that’s nothing! 

Yeah? Every September 11^th, we all gather and recite three thousand names. Yet ten times as many people die every year from guns! And does it make a difference whether it’s you or someone else who pulls the trigger?

It’s a life lost.

I know a bit about that. I’ve had a brother scream at me, so concerned was he about my own planned death. And in my last trip to Chicago, I entered the seedy hotel where I bunked over, in my journeys from Wisconsin to Puerto Rico.

And discovered the manager, shaking, and calling 911.

The housekeeper had discovered the body.

She came out, a moment later, to smoke a cigarette and watch them collect the body. The paramedics came out, got the gurney from the back of the ambulance, entered the hotel. Sixty seconds later, they came out.

Everything—head included—covered by a sheet.

They returned with the gurney to the hotel. And came back with two suitcases, uncovered.

Took less than five minutes.

“He killed himself,” said the housekeeper. “So young, just 33 years old….”

One down—29, 999 to go?

“It’s surprisingly hard to kill yourself,” I wrote elsewhere. And I thought at the time of the decade I spent as a psychiatric nurse. Borderlines would come whimpering to show us the scratches they had carved on their wrist.

“Oh, let me get you some hydrogen peroxide to wash that off,” I’d say. “And would you like a Band-Aid?”

It’s anatomically almost impossible to slit your wrists deeply enough to hit the artery….

Tylenol? Curiously, for most people, nothing happens for the first 24 hours after ingestion.

“Just take a seat, Hon, I gotta see to this ingrown toenail….” a friend in the ER used to say, when the lost girls with their teddy bears arrived, empty Tylenol bottle in hand.

But a gun?

That’s serious. 

OK—sharp turn here. In a recent development, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who had been treating James Holmes warned the university that he posed a risk.

Did she warn the city?

And the university did nothing, since Holmes dropped out. 

Did he stop being a risk?

And does Colorado have a mental health background check?

It’s madness beyond words. 

Here’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m gonna start a petition on Signon.org . I’m gonna ask for thirty thousand signatures. Then, I’m gonna sit in the coffee shop that has now become my office and read them. I’ll film it, and put it on YouTube.

Any idea how long it’ll take?

Why Bother?

I don’t get it.

Well, nothing new there. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. But this has bothered me for most of my life. Why are people into sports?

What’s the point?

OK, Mr. Fernández came home, switched on the telly—for unknown reasons he’s feeling particularly British these days—and there they were. Gymnasts! And none of them lacking in muscular development….

Right, put down the Sudoku. Watched intently. The Chinese, predictably, were amazing. (Did they invent the sport? Feels like it….). A Japanese kid sailed smashingly onto his knees, walked to the sidelines, then started to hop. Interesting how strongly culture reigns behavior.

Amazing what they could do—hop, flip, twist, suspend, rotate, swivel. And clearly, they didn’t take this all up twenty minutes ago. Add all of the hours of all of the athletes spent in practice and you’d have years, if not decades.

What for?

Disclosure time—I spent years of my own life as a sort of athlete. I was a cellist. And I’ll freely admit, it didn’t do anybody much good either.

And it was a musical analogy that I thought of, yesterday. Seeing all of these amazing gymnastics was exactly like hearing a master pianist—Serkin, for example—play…

…scales.

Well, apparently people want to see it. The crowd was going wild. OK, not soccer-fan wild—there were no riots or fistfights. There also weren’t any empty seats. We’re in the grips of Olympic mania.

Now here more than Puerto Rico. After the opening ceremony, all three papers had headlines screaming about orgullo boricua and pro patria.

What for?

For carrying a flag into a stadium? For being—in the eyes of the Olympic Committee—an entity to ourselves? Sure, we were in the club with the big guys—Russia, China, the US. But also the little guys—the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Mauritania….

So why is it, I wondered, that people spend inordinate amounts of time training their bodies, just to do silly things on bar or ropes? They could put easily the same amount of effort and discipline, and do ballet.

And that made me think of the question Alfredo, Raf’s first lover, posed me.

“What’s the one moment in ballet that has most impressed you?”

Finally a question I can answer!

Concerto Barocco, second movement.

He knew immediately.

“The lift,” he said.

I was eighteen, alone in Boston, friendless. And yes, practicing and struggling. I went to see the Boston Ballet in an old movie theater in the city’s red light district. The first movement—lovely. The second movement?

I swear, the moment the male dancer lifted that ballerina—the crowd gasped. The theater breathed.

Something got changed in all of us.

Call me elitist. Say I’m a snob. There’s a difference between a C Sharp minor scale and a late Beethoven Sonata. There’s a difference between art and gymnastics.

Before I die

Well, she’s a talented lady, our Candy Chang.

Inventive too. Also fecund. Go onto her web page, and you’ll see (http://www.candychang.com).

And she fills me with envy! Why can’t I think of stuff like that? She’s out there in the community doing these goofy projects, but they’re wonderful. She’s stenciling “this would be a nice place for a tree” on barren sidewalks—tremendous idea, one we could use in Puerto Rico, which has major tree phobia.

Or what about putting the little red and white adhesive name tags—the kind that say “Hello! My name is _______”—on abandoned buildings? Only hers say “I wish this was a __________.”

But my favorite?

Before I die.

Here’s a building I’ve actually seen.

Unless I’m wrong, it’s Fredericksburg, St. Croix. But following Candy’s lead in New Orleans (where the project started), it became this.

 

What’s the big idea?

Well, Candy suffered a personal loss—know that one!—and decided that most people don’t think about the important stuff. What, she wondered, do I want to do or see before I die? And why did it take a major loss to force her to the question?

Shouldn’t we all be thinking that?

So she created a stencil—wow, that girl is a dab hand (hi, Franny!)—with the E-xacto knife! 

As you can see, it took off.

And it comes in Spanish, too!

It’s totally neat. 

So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna send this to my friend Sonia (Nick has an abandoned house in Old San Juan) with the message…

…Let’s do it!

Oh, and my three wishes?

1.     finally see Harry.

2.     watch Helen Mirren in the role of Franny in the film version of Life, Death and Iguanas.

3.     attend the trial in the Hague of George W. Bush for crimes against humanity!

Sidewalk Psychiatry

Well, of course somebody would think of it.

 

Ever wanted to step on your psychiatrist?

At least it's free….

http://candychang.com/sidewalk-psychiatry/

In Angustii

Well, Jack was bugging me, so I had to do it.

I had written about that sociopathic piece of music, the Grosse Fuge. And thrown in “And this, from a student of Haydn?”

That wasn’t right.

And Jack didn’t approve. So I struggled with him for a while. I mean, hey—how many people read this blog? How big is Haydn’s reputation, next to mine? And if we were gonna worry about anybody, shouldn’t it be Beethoven?

Not right.

Damn it. Look, Jack—and by the way, aren’t you dead?—it’s not that big a deal. And Haydn himself was famously a nice guy. Gracious. Good. One of his contemporaries called him the embodiment of Enlightenment's ideal of the honest man. (OK—give in to temptation, haul out the French. L’homme honnête! Now that’s class….) So he probably wouldn’t mind.

Marc.

Shit, am I ever gonna be free of you! I’m 56 years old, and you’re still able to say my name—Marc, and note the lack of exclamation mark! You had the quietest voice and, somehow, when you spoke, the heavens moved. Dammit—go putter in the garage. Build something. Stop bugging me—I haven’t defamed Franz Joseph Haydn.

Guess the response!

So I dug it out, the Lord Nelson Mass. Oh, hell, we’ll do the Latin (also classy): Missa in Angustii. Haven’t heard it in years, though I once played it for Raf, and argued it was a more sincere, more—well—honest work than Mozart’s Great Mass. Why not hear it again?

It’s amazing.

Also proof that the old can pull a surprise or two. It’s certainly traditional in content—the text follows the traditional Latin Mass. But wow—what the guy does, from the very first notes!

It’s pure terror.

OK, I enjoyed it enormously. Perfect music for a morning trot. Came home and looked it up. And discovered that, as usual, I’m not particularly original.

Everybody else thinks so too.

Well, that damn father of mine wouldn’t let me rest. He put me to read the whole article: here’s the skinny. The mass was written in that period when Napoleon was very near to conquering Europe. Austria was on edge, nerves were frayed. Haydn composed the work not knowing—no one did—that Napoleon had been defeated, and called it Missa in Angustii. A mass for troubled times, is sometimes the translation. But why not do the simpler thing?

A Mass in Anguished Times.

And was that enough for the old man?

NO! Then I had to download The Creation from Amazon—and pay 18 bucks as well—AND I had to read the biography of Haydn in Wikipedia.

OK—and are you listening, Jack?—here it is. Father is a barrel maker—or something, can’t remember. Mother was a servant. Musical family. Haydn at age six is sent to a relative to live and to develop himself as a musician. This the relative enables him to do, though he also doesn’t feed the child very well. Haydn serves as a choirboy until his voice changes. Actually, after. The empress complained that he sounded like a cow.

Thirty years in the employ of the Esterhazy family. Isolation for much of that time. And yes, he wore livery and did chores. Also composed like a fiend.

Had a completely unhappy marriage, which of course at the time he could not dissolve. So both he and his wife took lovers.

Several trips to London. Return  to Vienna. Teaches Beethoven, who predictably (and metaphorically) bit the hand that was trying to feed him. Composes the Creation over three years at the very end of the 18^th century.

Well, I listened to the first and part of the second sections.

And—you can guess this, right?—it’s friggin’ A.

And here again, he starts out with an amazing section of the chaos—the void before God filled the world. Full of dissonance, completely surprising.

Well the old man was right, as old men often are. The old Haydn reveals himself as something completely new. And my dead Jack is true to life—a fair guy who wants his kids to do the right thing.

Now will you go away?

Heat

It’s a day of fierce, unrelenting heat.

Also a holiday—Constitution Day, according to some. 

Mr. Fernández has a different word for it….

Well, for those who believe in it, it’s something to celebrate. And for me?

Sitting in a café, using the Internet, and consuming the air conditioning.

Also doing Stumbleupon, which shows promise to be a major waster of time. Remember Freerice? Used to do that for hours.

OK, so what have I stumbled upon? Well, here’s Alesund, Norway!

Well, that’s something to see. And what about this?

 Nice, but would you want to walk past it? Something sinister, here. OK, so let’s do this…

Hardly an improvement…

This?

Gentle Reader, we have arrived at page four! This old writer who today had nothing to say bids you farewell.

An ode to joy

Readers, forgive me. I had a tantrum in yesterday's post. Hope this makes up for it! (Crank up the volume!)

Well, we know there are evil winds—Joan Didion wrote her famous essay about the Santa Ana winds almost half a century ago. The Santa Ana starts on the leeward side of a mountain, she writes, and warms up and becomes drier as it moves down the mountain. By the time it hits Los Angeles, it is intensely hot, intensely dry and…

…intensely strong. Hurricane force, at times.

California burning? It’s almost always because of the Santa Ana winds.

But other things happen as well. Crime spikes, tempers fray, kids become unmanageable in the classroom.

Oh, and blood doesn’t clot as easily.

That’s when Didion inserts her famous phrase: “to surrender to the Santa Ana winds is to accept a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

(Or words to that effect—the damn Internet connection is still goofing off….)

Well, maybe that’s what’s needed—to accept a mechanistic view of human behavior.

It wasn’t, somehow, an easy weekend. I didn’t watch TV footage of the Aurora shooting—I’m smarter than that. But I read the accounts nearly compulsively (sometimes the same article, ostensibly to see if it had been updated). I thought about it. I wrote a post that was almost as incendiary as the Santa Ana winds.

Then I remembered—we’re being zapped by increased solar activity. Duluth reported blazing northern lights last week.

And I also remembered—the Santa Ana winds increase the ratio of positive to negative ions in the air.

Meaning a change in the electromagnetic field that constantly surrounds us.

It’s a subject that draws a lot of bunkum, and I almost hate to go there. Ghost hunters wander through houses at midnight, looking for dips in the electromagnetic fields. The UFO believers do similar things. 

But there is some scientific evidence. Solar flares occur normally three times a year. Investigators in Russia determined that suicides rise predictably in one extreme Northern Russian city with each period of flaring.

Aurora—which is seventeen miles from Columbine High School—is also a mile above sea level. Would they be more prone to the effect of changes in the electromagnetic system?

The advantage of thinking mechanistically is that it takes you away from things like “willpower” and “self-discipline.” Your drinking is out of control because of a change in genetic structure, for example, or proteins in the brain.

Might be true.

The disadvantage?

It leads straight to the Twinkie Defense. 'All that sugar made me kill Harvey Milk.'  

And my good friend Susan, I suspect, wouldn’t have it. “No woman suffering from the ravages of PMS has ever committed the massacres that men have.” 

Good point.

Whatever it was, it was intense. My mood was labile. Little things irritated me. And then, Pat sent me a link to the Beethoven clip above.

And I found myself flooded with tears in a coffee house in San Juan.

It’s something so moronic that I rarely admit to it, but here goes. I love orchestral performances because it’s one of the few occasions I can think of where one hundred people gather to do something beautiful.

And I loved this clip for the humor, the playfulness of it all. The musicians coming out of the bank (the Ode to Joy was a gift organized by a Catalonian bank to celebrate their 130^th anniversary). The people looking on, gathering, singing, filming, tapping their feet. The kids imitating the conductor.

The assassin in Aurora did more damage than the 12 / 71 he killed or maimed. But it’s also true that one person playing a musical instrument can…

…change the world?

No.

Yes.    

Should Men Be Allowed?

I know, I know….

That’s a provocative question. Also ironic, for two obvious reasons: I’m a man, my spouse is a man. Hardly the likely person to be asking the question.

Well, I did, right there in my black armchair, as I was cheating at electronic Sudoku. Yes, you can cheat—my version of iPad Sudoku allows you three wrong answers and will still declare you a winner. So, hey, why not? And I give you this tip—added value, as we used to say in Wal-Mart!—to help you along. Your guess should always be for the little box that helps you the LEAST! If putting the 8 in the lower-right hand box would give the next three answers—don’t. Put it in the lower left box—which gets you nothing. Most of the time you’ll be right. If you’re wrong, well, you have two more guesses AND those three other answers.

See?

By cheating, I manage to play expert Sudoku (I say this with pride) and win most of the time.

Today…I lost. 

OK, it doesn’t make me a bad person, as Jeanne used to say. And then I wondered—maybe it does. Not losing, but cheating. Jack wouldn’t have approved.

It was that old rigid morality I wrote about in Iguanas. That fire and brimstone, sulfurous hellfire, miserable sinner stuff. Didn’t believe in it, but he was still shot full of it….

I wondered about it because I was pondering an email Cousin Ruthie sent me—and when she writes, you read! (She correctly diagnosed Santorum—“a lizard!”—and is bang-on about Romney—“a snake in the grass!”) She had read a post about Lexapro 20mg po qd. And then remembered her nursing days. (She held out three years, I managed a decade….)

Well, both of us remember some of the same stuff—the endless notes we had to do to cover our asses, writing out medication charts at 3AM, those funny Latin abbreviations: qd, qid, tid, PO, SQ. She also remembers the guy who tried to grab her boobs every time she walked in the room….

She asks—anyone try that on me?

Errr…no.

And she mentions Clarence Thomas, and how her parents were shocked when she assured them that of course he had come on to Anita Hill, and then told them about her nursing days.

Well, her father and mine were cousins. But they both had that morality thing. And then I remembered the female colleague of Jack’s who approached my mother on the day of Jack's memorial service.

“I want you to know, John Newhouse was the only male reporter that EVERY woman felt comfortable with alone in the news room at night….”

Franny was shocked.

I’m shocked. 

And Clarence Thomas? Well, I believe Anita for one reason.

I don’t believe any woman could invent the story of a pubic hair on a Coke can.

Frankly, the whole thing is drenched with testosterone. And only an androgen-flooded mind could conceive of it.

So that got me thinking about the four guns James Holmes purchased to kill the 12 / injure the 71 in Aurora, Colorado yesterday.*

They were purchased legally, and the vendors correctly performed the necessary background check!

Well, GREAT!

How relieved the families of the 12 / 71 victims must feel! What solace to know that your loved one had been slaughtered / maimed with legal weapons! One imagines them at the graveyard, peering down six feet at the coffin. Mother bursts into sobs, Father holds her, and whispers, “But at least the guns were legal!”

She fishes for the handkerchief, dries her eyes, squares her shoulders, and looks brightly into the future!

And here’s where I asked the question—should men be allowed? 

Nor was it the case that I asked the question because James Holmes is a man. (Although name me, Dear Readers, one massacre committed by a woman….)

Yeah, he’s a guy. He’s also emerging—I write this in case you’ve just come out of 24-hour seclusion—as one of the most dangerous of the schizophrenics.

Bright, tightly wound, wildly violent. 

OK—circle around. Is the US the only place that produces this type of schizophrenic?

Don’t think so.

We may be, however, the one place in the world that reveres guns to such an extent that we allow them on our streets.

That delicate last sentence may be a disservice to the 12 / 71 of Aurora. 

How’s this?

A man’s gun is his dick. And nothing, nothing, NOTHING will take that away from him!

Breathe, Marc….

_____________________
*These numbers correspond to the original figures and may have been updated since.