Crazy Stable

Having finally figured out how to use the "referrer tracker" in my server's blog-hosting toolkit, I am baffled to observe numerous hits straight from various megasites peddling Internet drugs--the kind where "one of our physicians" is happy to dispense that inconvenient formality, an actual prescription,  after you fill out a brief questionnaire (usually, it seems, about your urgent need for such potentially mortifying pharmaceutical purchases as Viagra). Trying to channel the mind-numbing literalness of a search engine, I have combed these sites for clues as to why an online meds-seeker would click through to here...the ramblings of a manic-depressive renovator in Brooklyn...and I'm stumped.  Perhaps it is some cosmic joke perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry that indirectly pays so many of our bills through my medical writing. Perhaps "Flatbush" is street slang for "Xenical." If you have cybertrotted over here right after trolling for drugs (FDA-approved ones, of course), would you be kind enough to enlighten me as to why and how you got here? I promise not to tell your date about the Acyclovir purchase, and I hope you have enjoyed your momentary look around this unlikely destination.

(Hey, wait a sec'! Did you catch the words "manic-depressive" up there? Did Googlebot? Are people flogging their search engines 'cause they're "crazy," and want to get "stable"? Mabel, is that you??? )

Image, above, from this priceless collection of vintage pharmaceutical ads

I don't think of myself as a poetry person--don't read a lot of it, don't follow new poets (or "slams," God help us), and I certainly don't understand it (although I recall there is "iambic pentameter"). But I'm surprised by how much poetry jangles around in my mental pockets, and certain circumstances always turn up the same penny. For instance, on this spiritual First Day of Summer, as the roses go wild in the garden ("Maiden's Blush" is out!) and we scramble for window screens and electric fans amid the piles of un-put-away winter woolies and blankets, here comes cranky old Yeats, mumbling in the midday sun amid my ferns and peonies:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 

And a small cabin build there,  of clay and wattles made, 

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

This little fragment, from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," thrills me at some level deep beyond words, every single time I read it; it contains the distilled essence of everything salvific about summer in the CrazyStable, about summer itself, about life itself. But why? No one can accuse me of being overly literal-minded.  There is nothing Celtic about our landscape; no one will mistake our looming barn of a house for a "small cabin," nor its cedar shakes for "clay and wattles"; and I've never gotten nine bean-rows into my tiny vegetable plot (at the moment, in fact, it lies fallow). And of course a hive is out of the question for liability purposes, much as I'd love to have one (although we do have a constant squadron of carpenter bees droning and zooming around the soffits and fascia boards of the house and garage, where they drill precisely machined holes and do God knows what inside them).   Nor do I live alone in my bee-loud glade (although at any given time, Spouse and Child are more likely to be found in the kitchen or in front of the telly than out in the glade with me).

So why this thrilling activation among my synapses, every year, of this verse? I have a weird notion that particular bits of poetry may act as a sort of antigen for a particular soul, identifying and locking onto a wordless but highly specific joy or pain, memory or hope--and triggering a powerful release of grace.  (Thus the poems we love become grafts or chimeras, part themselves and part us.)  I have another weird notion that every great poem creates a wordless essence--an experiential "soul" that, even if words were obliterated in the cortex of the reader or hearer, would remain there in sensory exactitude. 

This also means that if we bomb the inside of the garage to kill the carpenter bees, the poem still counts. 

Excuse me, but I have to go plant some beans now. (And to all who have lost a loved one in the service of our country, my prayers today...)

The sacred tradition of Cat-Blogging Friday has been neglected here, so today we present the Bermuda Bed Triangle.  All 3 guys are sharing a rare moment of mutual nonaggression. They are also emitting highly significant amounts of CSF (Cat Sleep Factor), a potent sedative that has been known to cross the human blood-brain barrier from a distance of several feet. Epidermal contact with even 1 cat in deep REM sleep produces sedation comparable to that of low-dose benzodiazepenes; use of up to 2 cats is associated with transient coma-like states in susceptible human subjects. The use of 3 cats in a triangulated dispersal configuration around a human has never been recorded in the literature, but dose-response curve extrapolations raise serious safety concerns regarding lasting brain-wave alterations.  For this reason, our team proposes a preliminary dose-findng investigation of triple-cat high-dose CSF insomnia management using a rodent model.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it's the excessive anticipation of X-Men III around here, but I've been wishing for a device like Cerebro, Dr. Xavier's telepathic mutant-identification machine, that would put me in contact with all the most kindred souls in the Blogosphere. Because even a brilliant engine like Technorati can't tell me if there's somebody out there weaving magic from one of my tertiary obsessions (the Holy Shroud? the Brontes? tidal coves?) unless I think to go look for them first.
Well, at least one sometimes stumbles on them. Here are a few new additions to the elite CrazyStable blogpond at left. I keep my blog-rolling, and blog reading, pretty limited, because I am prone to OCLD (obsessive-compulsive linkage disorder), a neurosis in which the sufferer’s butt melds into the computer chair from excessive explorations of other people’s blogrolls. But I love these too much not to share. In no particular order:

The Inn at the End of the World: Not only has bagpiper/cultural commentator John Cahill also named his blog after a fragment of Chesterton (hey, great idea!), but he shares a brace of the Stablemistress’ curious passions, including paleo-Catholicism (with a nice shot of social justice to balance the lovely liturgical wonkiness), Anglo-Celtic curiosities, and conservatism, all served up with a twist of dry wit. John, where have you been all my life?

Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina: I avoid food blogs, afraid I’ll wander forever in a happy stupor and never emerge except to stumble, glassy-eyed, to the kitchen clutching a freshly printed-out recipe. (In one toe-dipping exercise, I quickly wound up chuckling through a home-cooking site somewhere in India, loaded with mouth-watering recipes and charming anecdotes. We ate well, but I got little work done that day.) As I discovered during a brief foray into infertility blogs (don’t ask), some topics seem to fuel outrageously good “amateur”-writers-you-never-heard-of, and food/cooking/baking is among them. One of the sweetest (pardon the pun) of the foodbloggers is Bakerina, a young lady in Astoria who has flirted with the culinary profession and shares her joy (and jam, and bread, and cake, and frustrations) with the rest of us. How can you resist someone who calls her day-job “LutherCorp”? (Another dazzling food writer/cook is my cousin Derek, but he is too busy becoming a brilliant architect to post to his blog Ex Culina more than once a semester or so.)

A Brooklyn Life: A group blog, apparently, by clever young things living the life Spouse and I would aspire to if we were Brooklyn newlyweds instead of mid-life muddlers. This bunch make the cast of “Friends” look like the cast of “Cocoon.” It’s fun to fantasize about leaving the Child with a kindly wet nurse in the countryside and then checking out their tips on bands in Billyburg and Red Hook, cool places to eat, and wacky stuff happening around town. And even if you’re not into lofts, alt-rock and graphic novels (more Spouse’s fantasy world than mine), you've gotta love writing like this dismissal of “The DaVinci Code”:
“Rather than paying your hard-earned cash to watch Gump and Opie get all Sister Wendy on the bible…”
(Instead, they suggest an “interactive café” involving “two lovely professors, one panda and a live audience of the hopeful and depressed.” Whee!)

Sci Tri: Quiet, illuminating notes and reflections by a fellow science writer, Robin Lloyd, who was gracious enough to link to CrazyStable. She’s written on the scientific exploration of human happiness, a topic deeply relevant to me, the heterozygous lab-rat offspring of the world’s greatest optimist and the world’s darkest pessimist (see below, “Taking Sides”). I’ve been fascinated that, amid all the clinical trials of antidepressants, some docs study what makes people resistant to depression. Life in the CrazyStable has produced a keen interest in the mechanisms of human resilience, much as a sinking ship sharpens one’s curiosity about the seaworthiness of lifeboats. I plan to explore several of her links on the topic.

But right now I have to go make dinner. I don’t need to check Epicurious for a recipe, now…do I? 

No gardening or paint-stripping got done today...I was learning to make hardcover books and boxes at the Center for Book Arts. My book-in-a-magnificently-coordinated-box came out pretty terrific under the patient tutelage of artist/instructor Ben Rinehart...but making boxes is not for the faint-hearted. (By "boxes," I mean "perfectly joined and ravishingly covered-in-fancy-paper boxes with little flossy ribbons to tie them shut.") The little suckers consist of countless parts that have to be hand-trimmed with the precision of coronary surgery, or nothing sets right. Creating and assembling these components involves gigantic heavy board-whacking gizmos with razor-sharp edges, lots of glue, and lots of pretty materials that will be pretty much ruined if touched by glue (or carelessly board-whacked). As you're assembling one, you start thinking, "So this is why gift stores import these from China"...where piteously underpaid workers doubtless churn out dozens or hundreds of them an hour, with none of the artisanal and archival boxy goodness (and glue sniglets) of mine. At one point, struggling to cut a 5/8" sliver of bookbinding board with a ping-pong-table-sized guillotine and my sticky trembling fingers, I had an anti-epiphany (that is, a totally baffling revelation devoid of insight or inspiration): Given my incredible lack of ability to perform even the simplest measurements accurately, and my craven anxiety around big, sharp tools, why have I been drawn over the years to attempt mastery of things requiring...extremely precise measurements and big, sharp tools?

There was the woodworking course at Yestermorrow School, which was to equip me to create simple but elegant shelves and cabinets throughout the CrazyStable. (The legacy of this now-defunct dream: a dusty table saw, and a petite recessed-panel-door cabinet that I must have made under hypnosis.) Measuring and cutting wood is Difficult and Scary; they give silly, false names to boards (such as "two by four," which is lumberyard lingo for "some other amount of inches"), and then expect you to feed them through Snarling Blades of Death, and if you make just a teeny little error, you cannot stretch wood at all.

Then there's my dream of sewing--the skill (mastered by my mother but not passed on to me) that will produce a tide of beautiful window treatments, pillows, table linens and even covers to hide the total destruction of the kitchen chair caning by the cats. Sewing machines, unfortunately, operate by plunging a sharp needle up and down rapidly, a hair's-breadth from your fingertips, and fabric slides all over the place when you try to cut it. (The sewing will still happen, I swear; bolts of optimistically purchased fabric patiently await an encounter with my Elna sewing machine, causing BestFriend to quip, "Able was I ere I saw Elna.")

At least I can take comfort in baking. Dammit, not only can I measure flour and sugar with my eyes closed (well, almost), but I am fearless to the point of recklessness with a whirring mixer. Of course, if you screw up a cake, there is one redemptive option left that doesn't work for a botched cabinet, Roman shade, or handmade box:

You can just about damn near cover the thing in whipped cream.