Reflection in March.

Craig is having surgery this week to remove a syst from his spine, I think. The doctors dig it out from the root. Saturday, on the phone, this is what Rich told me. He told me, too, that he is getting disability, finally, from the Navy. It turns out his shitty hearing is not from the rigs he's been working on in the shop for the last 30 years--it's from the giant boat engines he serviced while in service. He's been deaf for a lot longer than I've thought, and now I wonder how many conversations I've had with him from the backseat of the car that have been one-sided. He told me that the first purchase with his deaf money is chrome rims for his new Chrysler 300. They're in the mail. On Sunday, my uncle Al died, and it's the second brother my dad has lost in a year. Saturday, on the phone, Rich said he was off dialysis, he was close to going. He's essentially starving to death, Rich said, and I remember that this is how Duane died when they found him, lost in the warehouse. When they found him, he was emaciated, he had starved. And I don't know what to do with this information, because it still doesn't seem real to me, that my uncles died because they starved, because they didn't get the food they needed to make their bodies move, breathe, live; these men of my childhood, of my father's whole life, who I mostly know through the giant plates of turkey and half-plates of mashed potatoes and over-buttered buns we've pulled from the same family-meal-buffet lines. And it feels unsympathetic to dig for meaning in this, to unearth a symbol or lesson or reflection in it all, but this image is so horrifying for me, I just close my eyes and see cheekbones, and I don't know what else to do with it.

Three months later.

Hello, old friend.

I have eight minutes until the bell rings, to update you on where I've been for three months. That's not enough time, but here are two anecdotes that will explain, if you read carefully. Of course you don't read carefully. You're a blog.

1) Yesterday, when I was grading papers with my thin, red Papermate correction marker, I noticed that I'd gotten sloppy and sleepy: my hand stopped doing what I wanted, and as I wrote comments I kept missing the paper and accidentally writing on my own fingers and hand. By the time I was done grading, the little red-pen dashes looked like self-inflicted bleeding cuts. In fact, I convinced myself that they were cuts enough that when I looked down I felt little slices of pain, just a little warm and fresh, not yet ready to heal.

2) I hate my graduate research right now. It's a load, and I keep having the instinct to tell my Composition students that they're my little mousy subjects, that I'm photocopying their papers in secret and their conversations in public, that I'm writing journals about them when they don't know what I'm doing up there at my desk. I imagine myself in a lab coat at the photocopier, that the green light from the machine is really some radioactive light, and I carry their papers around like Erlenmeyer flasks. They are white mice. I wonder how attached mice-testing scientists get to their mice before they inject cancer or whatever underneath their fur. I mean, I'm just observing their behavior, so I'm not that equivalent. But at the same time, I want to give them new names. I mean, I have Test Subject #1, but I feel like they should have mouse names like "whitey" or "bitey" or "Circle-face" for the one that won't stop running in circles and hitting his mouse muzzle on the side of the maze.