August’s poem

Samuel crawled into bed with Karin & me this morning. “I’m sick,” he told us.

He is, a little.

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Some child has squirreled away the thermos from which I drink my morning coffee.

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This month’s poem, by the Pet Shop Boys, is “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk”:

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What a performance tonight

Should I react or turn off the light?

Looks like you’re picking a fight

in a blurring of wrong and right

But how your mood changes

You’re a devil, now an angel

Suddenly subtle and solemn and silent as a monk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

It’s better than nothing, I suppose

some doors have opened, others closed

but I couldn’t see you exposed

to the horrors behind some of those

Somebody said: Listen

don’t you know what you’re missing?

You should be kissing him

instead of dissing him like a punk

But you only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

All of my friends keep asking me

Why, oh, why

do you not say goodbye?

If you don’t even try

you’ll be sunk

’cause you only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

What’s the meaning

when you speak with so much feeling?

Is it over when you’re sober?

Is it junk?

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This song is for Hermione and Ron.

Diagnoses

So, the clinic called today. The tests confirm that I have SEVERE sleep apnea. The clerk who relayed the news didn’t know how to pronounce “apnea” – hup-NEE-uh, she said – but I asked her to spell it, and A-P-N-E-A, indeed, is what I have. I was told to buy a CPAP machine at my pharmacy. Would I like to schedule a “titration” at the sleep clinic? Yes, please, I said, but what was I supposed to do first? Buy the CPAP machine, or have the “titration”? After more phone calls it was determined that I’d do nothing further before going in for the “titration” on January 20. (Really, the slowness of this process is baffling.) I’m still not sure I understand what to do; I plan to investigate further.

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Our coffee pot broke a week ago. Karin & I have been keeping awake with sodapop and storebought iced mocha. But by this morning, those supplies had run out; moreover, after two days of relative calm, Samuel decided to shriek and shriek. By the time I’d prepared his bottle and gotten him suckling, I could hardly stay awake. I dozed off watching a TV show about heinous Australian crimes. Samuel slept in my lap. I dreamed I was visiting certain professors in Ithaca – ones under whom I didn’t prosper. My dreams were vivid; my wakefulness, hazy; but, all the while, I was aware of Samuel’s breathing.

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Yesterday, I was more alert (I had two glasses of iced mocha), and I read a terrific essay by Nathan J. Robinson analyzing the memoirs of various staffers of Barack Obama’s White House. Robinson isn’t a columnist I ordinarily seek out. On several occasions, though, I’ve admired his work without realizing he was the author of something I’d admired previously (one piece I’ve highlighted in this blog is his assessment of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial credentials). Now I’m attending more closely to how Robinson connects his political dots.

Interestingly, his condemnations of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren (whom he used to esteem more highly) seem to hinge on similarities that he perceives between those candidates and Obama. Robinson really doesn’t like Obama’s political style, and I increasingly agree with him. (I put more stock in reasonableness than Robinson does – I’ve written a dissertation about that governmental virtue – but I also lament the manner in which Obama employed reasonableness as an ideal.)

The best thing about Robinson’s analysis of those fanboys’ memoirs is that it conveys what’s dangerous about the allure of a leader who styles himself as elite. Such a person will likely be a technocrat who considers himself above his electorate and his party, or else a panderer to financial elites who play him for a sucker (or both).

Read the article about Obama and his fanboys.

Weep.

Ask how we can do better.

November fragments

So many November birthdays:

Five days ago, Scarlett Johansson turned thirty, and so did my brother, David. …

Yesterday at 6:00am Edoarda called Stephen to wish him a happy birthday. …

A few minutes later, Edoarda’s parents called from Nicaragua. “Muchas gracias, muchas gracias,” Stephen kept on saying.

Oh yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Our house is vermin-free. For longer than a week, the traps have remained unoccupied.

People have been asking about my new job at the high school.

How long have you been doing it?

About a month and a half, but it seems like forever.

What’s the craaaazzzziest thing you’ve seen?

Nothing too crazy. I saw a kid get arrested. The school’s cop pulled him into a room and yelled at him for a long time. Then they went into the principal’s office. When they came out, the cop said something else to the kid, and the kid tried to run, and the cop pancaked him and put cuffs on him. The cop was built like an NFL lineman. The kid was scrawny.

A couple of nights ago, I saw the cop on TV, telling how he cultivates relationships with the kids.

How well do YOU get along with the kids?

A few times each week, I buy donuts from them, which they’re grateful for. Otherwise, I barely talk to them. I hardly even notice when they make out with one another in the halls. I work more closely with the teachers, ordering supplies and making photocopies. I could tell you a lot about the copy machines. Whenever there’s a paper jam, a teacher emails me and I scurry off to see if the copier is broken enough for me to fill out a repair request form. Our building is big; some of the copiers are, like, two blocks away from one another. There are teachers who’ve been around for forty years who don’t know where the backup copiers are.

I could go on and on about the copiers.

Do you enjoy this job?

Very much. The teachers have vivid personalities: every day is like watching a sitcom. Also, I get free coffee, courtesy of the Social Studies dept chair.

Romaniacs, pt. 533: The coffee drinker

Rainy weather, and so I’ve decided to read A Wrinkle in Time. “It was a dark and stormy night.”

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Last night, after I wrote those lines, I promptly fell asleep. I’ve been falling asleep very early. The previous night, at around 9:30, I was on the living room floor playing with the cat, and I fell asleep.

At least I knew which day it was.

Cristian: “How nice to see you, John-Paul. Are we supposed to go out for coffee today?”

JP: “No, Cristian.”

Cristian: “When did we recently go out for coffee? Was it last week?”

JP: “It was yesterday, Cristian.”

Edoarda, Stephen’s gf, remarks that during her four years at Bethel she has watched Cristian become more presidential, i.e. more gray. I point out that this is due to his age, not to his lifestyle.

Even so.

Cristian pushes himself through life by drinking loads of coffee; maybe that’s why his emails tend to arrive at 3:00 in the morning. I couldn’t live that way. After my third or fourth cup I’d be a jittery wreck. On the other hand, I fall asleep whenever I try to grade papers.

As we share a French press, Cristian tells me of the habits of a certain well-loved metaphysician who didn’t have a lot of grading to do. “He used to read detective novels all morning, and then he would cheerfully write for a couple of hours; then his workday was over.” A hint of bitterness. “With such a routine, who wouldn’t be creative!”

Indeed. And with such a routine, the guy’s prose had better be damned good. None of this unnecessary formalism in his popular writings; no tiresome avuncularity. He owes it to those of us who have trouble staying awake, who are too tired to read what we truly enjoy.