Upcoming

So I've got a gig coming up. Here's the facebook events page, right here. I'm gonna be doing a lil' reading, don't have a show as yet but I do have a name. Rolling Stone, Vogue it's called. With a name like that you don't even have to have a show but hopefully should do by then. Time will tell. It inevitably does. See ya there.


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The Unwelcome Blues

There once was a lil' blue welcome mat
Who fell in love with the drop of a hat
Everyday hearing it's soft brown lil' felt pat
She didn't know why she loved it but she loved it and that's that
Blossoming, Blossoming underfoot

But one day there came one day
That that soft brown lil' felt pat went away 
What once was brown had now turned grey
The welcome mat feelin' like a heroine in a tragic play 
Dismay, dismay underboot

So Mr Caraway's welcomes became unwell
Though she read BLESS YOU her lil' heart was goin' through hell
Cos' o' how much she missed her lil' beau, or her lil' belle
Entering the house was different, why Mr Caraway couldn't tell
But felt it in his soul and on the soles o' his feet

I can't help falling in love with you

I've always loved this song, I can't help it probably. It's a song about inevitability. There's a difference between inevitability and inevetibalities. There's something reassuring about inevitability, it means you don't have to struggle so much. It just flows. There's something crushing about inevitabilities, it means you will have to struggle more. You get stuck in your tracks. Damn. We are born in to inevitability, inevitabilities are thrust upon us. Inevitability has grace, inevitabilities, if you're lucky, willl give you grace.  
  Inevitability is things like the sun coming out tomorrow (or not), the river flowing surely to the sea, just those things that happen or not. This song is about the inevitability of love. Some may find the inevitabilty of love to be a romantic notion. It's not really. Everybody loves somebody (or something) sometime and romance has fuck all to do with it. It's just part of life. As long as life exists love will exist in 1 or 2 or whatever ways of its various forms.
  As long as life exists death will exist in 1 or 2 or whatever ways of its various forms. In Slaughterhouse 5 after somebody or something dies the author writes so it goes. In this song when someone falls in love the singer sings darling so it goes.
  Some things are meant to be. Or not to be. Also, some things were meant to be.Or not to be. There's solace in that.

" 'Even now,' she thought, 'almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.' "

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Astronaut Model

“What problems are young people having today?” I was asked at a harmless social get-together at the home of the dean of admissions.

  The problem for young people today is the Harvard Medical School admissions committee. People this bright and accomplished shouldn’t have to be begging for a job in medicine. It shouldn’t be so hard. There should be more clearly defined, simple paths for people to be of use. That so many young people want to be doctors speaks well for the families producing intact applicant and for medicine for attracting them, but I can’t help feeling that there should be a broader array of choices. People that intelligent who have worked that hard should be able to be doctors if they want to. What exactly is the point of producing an abundance of amazingly capable people if we don’t have things for them to do? Two hundred years ago being able to read and write a little, being healthy and having a work ethic, meant you could do well at just about anything.

  It shouldn’t be so hard for people to figure out what to do with their lives.

  “What the hell are we going to do with Timmy?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think we could get him into med school?”

  Every Nobel laureate was once a goofy sixteen- or twenty-two-year-old whose family worried about what the hell or she was going to end up doing.

  I have had heartbreakingly accomplished patients kill themselves or become heroin addicts. It’s not enough to play an instrument perfectly or to get a full scholarship.

  As soon as a new hurdle is set on the path to getting into medical school (organic chemistry, higher and higher GPAs, higher and higher board scores, extracurriculars, community service, moving personal stories, et cetera), the ability to clear the hurdle spreads through the applicant pool like the ability to resist penicillin spreads through a petri dish. Everybody is throwing a lot of pasta up against the wall hoping that it will stick. Any essay that works will be reworked and reworked and reworked some more.

  Some applicants were accused of trophy collecting. It wasn’t enough to be a concert pianist, work in a first-rate research lab, or save a small South American village. It had to come from the heart.

  After watching so many candidates I liked go up in flames I suggested to the dean that each committee member be allowed to advance one applicant a year to the final pool without the usual debate. He thought it was a good idea and would bring it up to the committee.

  Is a doctor really that special a thing to be, or are we making too big a deal of this? It’s like we’re all scrambling to get to a place a little higher up on some slippery pyramid because we don’t know how high the water will be when the tide comes back in.

Mark Vonnegut M.D.

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

Starry Eyes, Silent Night

 Carol woke relatively early. It was nighttime but she had fallen asleep in the afternoon. The pain in her stomach was hiding for the time being. She thanked the Lord for it. God bless him she said with something like a sparkle in her once starrier eyes which had been diluted somewhat over the times.
  Venus had her little paw on little Buddha's big belly. Her own little belly was bigger than usual, filled with little kittens. Buddha was wearing red fairylights which glowed red over Venus. Buddha was a present from her brother's son, Stanley, an 8 year old boy. His name in English is Sid Arthur but in Indya they call him Buddha he told her when he gave it to her. Smart kid she said to her brother. We think he may be autistic her brother told her. It sometimes works out that way. I hope I don't become one of those crazy cat ladies she said. It sometimes works out that way, she was yet to find any other homes for any of the kittens. What comes first, the cats or the craziness? She'd read somewhere about fleas making people go insane. She didn't need that.
  Nobody was coming over this year. She'd have had a man over, but Mo was dead this year. He knew he would die young and he did die quite young. Mad bastards can often die quite young, just a couple of years or so older than the good. A few months before he died Carol whacked a frying pan over his head in front of her daughter, Joanne, a 12 year old girl. Afterwards, he stood there with a knife held to his heart pleading with one of them to plunge it for about fifteen minutes or so before going to the off licence for another can. Joanne just sat there quietly.
  Joanne had bought her mother a soft toy for Christmas this year. It was a cuddly donkey. The year before she had gotten her a cuddly lamb. The room had plenty of little animals in it now with more to come. Carol had taken to sleeping on the sofa with the animals. Her bed was full of fleas and they weren't very pleasant sleeping companions, all over her all the time, driving her crazy.
  Venus went into labour. OK said Carol. She got off of the sofa. The floor was filthy and her feet were bare. What I like about you is that you don't mind getting your feet dirty a nice ex boyfriend once told her. Venus had now birthed the kittens. Carol picked up the runt of the litter. Her first thought was to name her after someone else but looking at her she named her Carol after herself. A robin dropped by on the windowsill for a moment too brief to really be noticed, quickly flying away before the stray cats scratched at the door, delinquents all 3 of them catcalling female felines and half howling at the moon in a way seeming to be threatening to scratch that silly smile off of its stupid crescent face.
  Merry Christmas Carol said to Carol. I don't care for it too much she added. She then put Carol back with Venus beside little fairylit Buddha's big belly and turned off the lamp on the side table and turned the gas heater on. In the relative darkness of the relative earliness the heater glowed over the room and the kittens became more red.

The Master

You don't make up for your sins in Church, you make up for them in the streets, the rest is bullshit and you know it.

i. The Master

The Master is a shyster. In  some respects he has to be, at least it is what is expected of him. You see, he is the figurehead of some kind of faith but his faithfuls have no time for faith. Because of this he shrouds the faith with a scientific rhetoric much like Freud did with psychology. Therefore, his faith becomes something closer to an outright pack of lies. That is what his faithfuls want and though there may be no actual difference hither to thither between faith and a pack of lies there is a profound shift in intent and a large disparity between what either is worth. The master is being paid to tell a pack of lies, not develop any kind of faith. Nobody actually believes in him, nobody actually likes him. It is safe to say that he doesn't have a friend in the world.
 The master is essentially a phoney medium. It is not the psychic who forges a link to the realm of the dead, if there is such a place, but the client who does so- they just need a shyster with vim and vigour enough to seem half way convinced. Someone that they can kid themselves that they can be certain about. Uncertainty is a large responsibility.
  Now, there is an inherent paradox crucial to belief, that it is a belief, you do not know. Belief regardless of belief, in other words. Faith is a technical term, not a divine one. Fundamentalism is the coward's way out. Yet that is what the master's faithfuls want. It is what he serves them in big steaming piles of appropriations of absolute certainties. He has been plied with money and it has rendered him worthless for he is untrue. Whether or not he believes what he is saying is probably as irrelevant as whether Jesus Christ believed what he was saying. What matters is whether his words have any worth. The master's words have none, and there's a lot of them.

ii. Freddie Quell

Freddie is a lost boy. He starts The Master on a desert island. He builds a naked woman out of sand. At first it is a half joke but later we see him lying earnestly with his sand woman. There's a phrase about building your house on sand or something, a lack of foundation, he is building his relation to humanity on it. It is safe to say that he doesn't have a friend in the world.
  Freddie's major talent is brewing moonshine. He can make it out of near enough anything (I wish i could do that). It is intrinsic. It is also potent. There is an old man who looks like his father, so he tells him, who poisons himself on it badly. It is partly the moonshine which sets up his friendship with the master. The master is a big fan of it, it is something to actually get intoxicated on afterall. The master finds Fredddie in general to be a hoot and a good laugh.
  The master in turn embarks on putting Freddie through his program, or process, or whatever it is he calls it. Freddie likes it, he has to answer a lot of questions about himself, it is likely a long time since anyone has taken an interest. Afterall, he's a lost boy. The programming has something to do with reawakening, so called. Freddie is not susceptible to the delusion, he doesn't really want it. He doesn't want anything from the master. Because of this some minutely wonderful happens through it.
  The master is holding a symposium to coincide with the publication of his latest tome and during it he tell his faithfuls something quite true (quite true to be understood in its full contradictory/ non contraictory nature). He tells  his faithfuls that the secret is laughter. This may not be a certainty but at least it is meant and in that sense it is quite true. It's a revelation. He even takes some steaming absolutisms out of his book. His faith is becoming less bullheadedly false and more like a faith. His faithfuls do not like this but he is not pandering to them in this instance and finally he says something of some worth. And who is it that he finds a hoot and a good laugh? It is Freddie Quell. Freddie helps the master find some worth in himself and the master is the first person to recognise a worth in Freddie. I took that photograph he earnestly tells a woman, pointing to a photograph of the master adorning a pamphlet later on in The Master.
  The most touching scene in The Master is when Freddie returns from spending a few days in the slammer. The master has a mid afternoon half drunk on, sitting on a porch, he is unenthused, whoops, nearly! he says to a little girl after she falls of her scooter just for something to do. Then Freddie returns. He is happy to see him. If he were a little doggy you would be able to see his little tail wagging. Freddie is not expecting this, he has been silly and expects some sort of rebuke. He does not expect anybody ever to be happy to see him in general. The master likewise does not expect anybody ever to be happy to see him but Freddie is happy to see him also. It is a revelation. They have a jovial tussle.

iii.  Cor'

There is a strange quality to The Master though it is not a strange film. It is quite commonplace really. Except this, it is a bit pointless. At first this may be a little disconcerting. However, a sphere does not have a point. Nor does an apple but it does have a core. So does The Master. At it's core is something like love. I would call this something like redemption. Now redemption goes both ways, someone has to slightly mend themself/ be more like themself and someone else has to slightly mend themself/ be more themself to recognise this.
  Through Freddie the master has someone who recognises a worth in him and so can recognise it back, reflected. Through the master Freddie has someone who recognises that he has a worth in him for the first time in his life and so he can see it back, reflected. They both flourish in this sort of mirror. And though their association ends severed there is an ethereal permanence left by the impact it has. And though they may go back to their old way they will go back differently, redeemed in some aspects.
  It is this core of redemption which is what I believe to be The Master's worth. Redemption is, afterall, worth something like believing in. What will survive of us is love. No?

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poems for children

a poem about limes read in the bath

if you'd like a copy send your address to samkastin@gmail.com

poster by Ben Kastin