Tag: Despair

How are you feeling about the trial’s revelations?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know the one I’m talking about. Even before getting to the others just ahead.

Let’s just say I’ve been watching this building up, step by step, for decades. The corruption by big money and trickery, the erosion of the middle class, the polarization, the sleaze, the breakdown of the checks and balances or a loyal opposition.

Working in the newsroom, I was bound to give both sides their voice, though one was doing everything it could to discredit us and those distortions went unchallenged. There was more, of course, going on in the dark, things we sensed but couldn’t prove outright.

Let’s just say I was outraged but had to keep it bottled up. But then, after retiring, I let it out by indulging in a stream of poetry I usually steered clear of – the polemic rant akin to Dr. Bronner’s Moral ABC or Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America collection or Phil Ochs’ protest folksongs.

The result is Trumpet of the Coming Storm.

While the pieces that spewed forth in my collection may look like history from the Reagan years through the Bushes, they do reflect the origins of what’s coming to a head today. Even the poems that can be considered sophomoric seem prescient.

There are good reasons I subtitled it Blasts of Alarm and Rage, 1976-2008.

Do take a look.

It’s available in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.

Oh, grunt

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve said it before and I know I’m not the only one.

Changing our clocks back an hour is the real beginning of winter. Everyone will be out of sorts for the next week and have no idea why. It really takes us that long, internally, to readjust.

Even those of us who are officially “retired.”

Now for our storm door out front

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Are you ever caught up when you own an old house? Or is it like a personal sailboat, where you pour copious amount of money into a hole in the ground or the water?

The latest item to join our home maintenance to-do list is the front storm door, which detached from the frame a few weeks ago. It was too heavy and awkward to go back in, and apparently some shifting had warped the angles. It hadn’t been closing completely, and the last time I tried, bingo! We were in trouble.

It wound up, as I said, coming off altogether.

Oops!

We do want to get that fixed before winter hits, though. The front door itself is rather leaky.

Yet part of me is thinking maybe that can wait till I’m dead.

Damn, I do miss being able to call maintenance back when I was living on Yuppieville on the Hill. Back before I so deliriously remarried.

Red squirrel jitters

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Squirrels were a pestilence back in Dover, raiding our garden and devouring the crown molding in our barn, in addition to some damage to the house itself.

While deer are a problem here, we haven’t had squirrels.

But the other day, I looked up from my keyboard and saw a small red squirrel scampering across our brush pile.

A few minutes later, my wife, working in another room, called out to say she’d seen a squirrel.

“A red one?”

Yep.

They’re worse than the grays we had, in the opinion of many.

So far, at least, it hasn’t been back.

Cross our fingers. We really no longer see them as cute.

Our old garden has been obliterated

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

People used to walk down our street in Dover just to admire our garden. They told us how much pleasure and peace it gave them. It also attracted a range of wildlife, including hummingbirds, butterflies, or the occasional turkey or fox.

Throughout the year, the garden also led to many photos you can still find here at the Red Barn.

It was, by many standards, funky. The weeds were never completely controlled, but it was prolific and made good use of what we sometimes called the Swamp, after its mucky clay soil in late spring and early summer. Our pet rabbits delighted in much of what we picked there, too.

The new owners, alas, have bulldozed all that. The strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants as well as the raised beds and shrubbery screens – gone. Twenty-years of reclaiming the once tired soil and then dining well as a result – gone. Naturally, we’re lamenting, knowing how much more they must be spending on groceries that won’t be as fresh or tasty.

We have to recognize, of course, that we’ve left all that behind and no longer have a say in the matter.

But we still feel sad or even a tad angry. Ahhh!

We’re stuck in fog, fog, fog

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While I had heard that these stretches of a surrounding blur of dense gray could linger weeks here, I assumed folks were talking about March or maybe late November, not the height of glorious summer.

And then a friend told me of one summer in Lubec, a few miles over the water to our south, where it hit every day, often without any splash of sunshine.

It does dampen the emotional wellbeing of many.

As much of the nation – and world – suffers under recording-breaking heat, we’re having many days when the day’s high has barely reached much above 60, as in Fahrenheit. Only a few readings have even broken as far as the lower 80s. I’ve worn my beloved Hawaiian shirts only three times, and my shorts are still in the bottom drawer of the dresser. If you’re wondering, unlikely as that is, I’m not one of those guys who goes bare-knees in January, believe me.

Much of this has been accompanied by weeks of fog – morning and late afternoon through the night, especially – but sometimes without break during the day as well.

I’ve stopped reminding people that Seattle experiences something like this six-months straight every year or that San Francisco is accustomed to watching the ground-hugging clouds return every afternoon.

We do live on an island, so the temperatures just seven miles away on the mainland traditionally run ten degrees warmer, but those are still much more reasonable than the hellfire raging elsewhere.

None of the wider extremes should come as a surprise. True prophets had forecast them a half century ago, and we are running on those projections, contrary to the decades of denials and resistance of capitalist naysayers and their puppet politicians. Remember, too, it was “climactic instability” rather than mere “global warming.”

So, on a more mundane level, on those partly-cloudy to partly-sunny days in the forecast, we jump onto running the laundry early and then getting it promptly out on the line to breathe, and I attack the lawn with the mower as soon as the grass dries sufficiently. Not that I’m the only one, not by a longshot.

When I did live in the Pacific Northwest, I was in the interior desert with dreams of escaping somehow to a writing life somewhere along the coast, maybe in a cabin in British Columbia or Alaska.

Something like this, perchance.