Trump Unfriendings and The Search for an Onscreen Utopia

John was tall but straight-limbed thin and his baggy Catholic school uniform – blue slacks, white shirt, tie – hid no Darwinian strategy in or appetite for the survival of the fittest. The mob surrounding John moved according to an ancient choreography, as does a murmuration of starlings, but ugly. The other boys had never been trained in fighting, either. They were small-town, bottom-of-the-barrel, poor students in a school with no music, no art, no gym, no air conditioning. Just elaborately costumed nuns wielding long rulers on fifty-five baby boomers per room. But the attackers' genes skilled them in skinning a fellow human. Smaller boys skipped up ahead to cut off John's escape – just as wolves corner deer. Others, lackadaisical, languidly brought up the rear. With the same movements, they could have been the tail end of a church procession or a walk to the corner for cigarettes. A more definable scrum of first-stringers ringed John tightly. He'd never escape, even if he tried, but he wasn't even trying. The alpha delivered direct blows. Over and over. Short, sharp punches, shot out erratically, timed by sadism's metronome. Blows to John's arm, his temple, his neck, his cheek. Beta males, not allowed the privilege of striking blows, squealed the worst words at John. Spat on him. With their thumbs and forefingers, pecked at the edges of his clothing. Distracting John, confusing him. Bash: another punch landed.

John, feebly, weirdly, laughed. John was miming, "Please like me. Please allow me to be just one of the guys."

The playground was a square of macadam surrounded by a chain link fence. Through the fence we could see the gardens, clotheslines, and swing sets of our neighbors. Over the school roof rose the church spire.

I just attempted to google John. I want to know that he recovered and prospered and triumphed over what these monsters did to him. I couldn't find him. His name really was "John" and his last name was almost as common.

God, people suck.

But there is a world where people are noble, attractive, rational, and kind. An onscreen world. To reach it, all I had to do was walk home from school and switch on our family's one black-and-white TV. Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Victor Fleming, Sam Goldwyn and other filmmakers concocted wit, repartee, romance and adventure.

We all have to come to terms with the dark side in human nature. Me? I have felt best alone. I'm just not equipped. I don't have the moves, the appetites, or the instincts to be a wolf in a pack. And so I watch a lot of movies. And I struggle with loneliness.

***

And along came the internet. Alleluia. I need never be lonely again.

I thought that the internet would mean, to human relations, what the industrial revolution meant to labor. I thought that much suffering had been caused by misunderstandings. The internet's means of interaction, typed words on a screen, eliminated that problem. How could we misunderstand each other if our words were right there? Struggle for resources caused problems between people: "Get off my lawn." But there were no material resources on the internet. Anyone could type in whatever anyone wanted. Finally, we were all equal. Differences in physical appearance aroused hatred and discrimination. Ugly women, black people, white people, people wearing expensive clothing or rags: all these tension-causing differences disappeared. Finally, we connected soul to soul.

I was so naïve.

***

Over twenty years ago I was part of a pioneering internet discussion group. Finally I could write and actually be read. Finally my ugliness and poverty didn't matter. I could connect with nerds like myself living hundreds or thousands of miles away. Charlie in LA loved films and literature as much as I. We went on for weeks about Brief Encounter.

Humans find the snake under the apple tree no matter what Eden they inhabit.

One day, Larry called Anne fat. Anne asked her allies to denounce Larry. Within a day, there were thousands of posts attacking Larry. This was a virtual feeding frenzy, a lynch mob, a show trial. Bystanders drafted alliances as ironclad as those dominoes that fell into the shape of the First World War – "You are with the Hapsburgs and I am with the Romanovs so I must burn your fields!" Posts meant to be about movies or politics or opera contained hidden references only combatants could decipher that settled this or that score.

I wanted to talk about opera. I wanted to talk about film. I wanted to talk about the history of the Albigensian Crusade. That users hijacked these conversations to settle scores was an abomination to me. A frequently repeated truism never made more sense: great conversations focus on ideas. Average conversations focus on events. Small conversations focus on people.

There were other problems in paradise. I realized that the internet, with its distance communication, was inviting me to commit a great sin: to dehumanize others.

I recognized that I had to practice discipline: I had to constantly remind myself that there was a human at the receiving end of my words. I made it my practice to call people by name, to look at their headshot. To consider how the person would feel if I said this or that to them in person.

The internet grabbed my hand and lured me into the cave of narcissism. I had to stop my ears with wax and smack the siren's hand away. I committed to focusing on other people's posts, not just my own.

I looked at photographs of other people's kids. I care less about few things than photographs of other people's kids. I don't have kids and feel some sadness about that (and some relief). It's not easy for me to look at other people's kids, especially the adult children of people I went to high school with. Not having had kids, I experience passing time differently. I feel that *I* am the adult, in the prime of life. Other people's kids tell me I am not, that I am on my way out, and I have let life pass me by.

Looking at photos of other people's kids is painful but I do it because I want to give back. I do it not because these kids are important to me; they are not. The person posting the photo is important to me. I do it for that person.

But the internet seemed to tear us further away from each other, in inscrutable ways we could not anticipate, name, or penetrate. The intimacy we experienced when typing into and reading content from those little boxes rarely extended beyond those little boxes.

I know Belle better than I know most of my relatives. Belle's posts are short-story length; she has produced them without pause for over a decade. Her output rivals Charles Dickens. Her topic: her own life. She gave us virtual walking tours of her childhood home. We learned that she was not pretty, overweight, and nerdy. She married an abusive drunk. Divorced him. Yearned for a child. Later in life – and nothing is as rewarding to the reader as late-arriving joy – Belle, through the internet, found Mr. Right, a man as nerdy as she. Marriage. Pregnancy. We clapped our hands! Miscarriage. A devastating medical diagnosis. Abandonment. Belle alone again. We wept.

The strange thing is, after years of reading and responding, with all of my heart, to Belle, I met her. And she treated me as if I were a stranger. Further, when I took a break from our shared internet environment, she and I had no contact at all. No phone calls. Nothing. But when I showed up again on Belle's internet stage, her presence was a like firehose: "Here I am! Receive me!" She, again, responded to my posts, as if we were best friends forever. She, weirdly, would type things like, "I wish I could see you." Thing is, she had seen me. And when we were in the same room, she was distant.

That's not intimacy. I'm not really sure what it is. I don't think we have yet developed the word for that internet-dependent phenomenon.

I couldn't take the politics in this internet environment. I feared that something unhealthy and invasive was distorting my spirit. I left. Wary, I didn't join any other internet groups till Facebook, a few years ago.

***

Being a writer is like being the girl with big boobs. Men want access to the boobs. Many don't care about the woman behind the boobs.

Sometimes people read something I have written and they feel that my words express what they themselves feel but cannot articulate. They confuse that sense of appreciating a piece of writing with love. They send me a message saying that they love me, but if they had more self-awareness what they would say is, "I love what you wrote."

I do receive "I love what you wrote" notes from sophisticated readers. These folks address me as "Dr. Goska" and voice their recognition that we don't know each other and never will. They request no further contact.

The people who say, "I love you" in response to my writing make unspoken demands on me. They want me to continue to voice their unarticulated thoughts. If they read, and liked, something by me that reflects a conservative point of view, they want me to continue to voice, exclusively, a conservative point of view. If I say something that they interpret as liberal, they feel betrayed and they send me hate mail, excoriating me as a "crazy" "bitch." Always those words, spelled out or insinuated. I am a woman. I speak. I said something they don't like. I am crazy. I am a bitch. This has happened to me more times than I can count.

No matter how many times a woman is used for her boobs, she gets hurt. No matter how many times a reader says he or she "loves" me because they appreciated something I wrote, and then turns on me because I am not what they wanted me to be – their puppet and mouthpiece – it reaffirms for me my long held conclusion that people suck, and that I don't have the skills to triumph at that game, and that that which is good in people is as hard to access as any pearl of great price.

***

Which brings me to Dusty, Kristie, Lott, Don, Marty, Zale, Bill and Edna – some of the dozens of Facebook friends who unfriended me because I said critical things about Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Kristie is an upper middle class professional. Like me, she tended to post early in the morning, so I always saw her posts first. I valued her posts because in them I encountered white supremacy such as I had never seen in real life – in fact I didn't know it existed to that degree in real life. Kristie's friends, upper middle class professionals like herself, posted images of black people as monkeys; they threw around the n-word as if it were the canned olives in their iceberg lettuce. My anthropological curiosity inspired me to read all of Kristie's posts.

I made my first anti-Trump comments over a year ago. After I did so, Kristie, without informing me, unfriended me. Given the abundance, the shock value, and the early hour of her posts, I noticed the unfriending immediately. My reaction: "Well, I have one Facebook friend who gives every sign of being a white supremacist and she supports Donald Trump so much that she feels compelled to unfriend someone she never talks to and who never talks to her. Duly noted."

Zale's departure was harder to take. The long, slow bleed of former Trump critics crossing over to supporting Trump has been unnerving. Even Senator Ted Cruz took this walk of shame. During the Republican primaries, when they were rivals, Trump insinuated that Cruz's father played a role in the JFK assassination. Trump called Cruz's wife ugly and called Cruz "lying Ted." In a breathtaking move, Cruz stood up to Trump at the July, 2016 Republican National Convention. And then, in September, Cruz caved and endorsed Trump.

Watching former Trump critics succumb to Trump reminded me of a superbly orchestrated scene from the 1956, Cold-War era science fiction classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Those who have surrendered to the selfhood-erasing space pods try to convince two holdouts to give up their individuality and join the collective.

Facebook friend Zale had been right there with me on the frontlines, trying to convince Republican primary voters that Trump was, as Zale passionately argued, the menace the Founding Fathers envisioned as the potential destroyer of the Republic. In more recent days, Zale has been zealously pronouncing his own vote for Trump and the unspeakable possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Zale, without telling me, unfriended me. 

I had done a significant favor for Bill. I advanced his career and put money in his pocket. After I made clear that I would never vote Trump, Bill unfriended me.

Dusty and I had exchanged thousands of public and private messages. There was laughing, crying, hugging, spatting, over everything from Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to comparisons of Chet Baker and Miles Davis. I am phone-phobic but when Dusty dialed my little-used number, I picked up, and did my best to entertain.

I feel I know Dusty's father, who, like my dad, had spent time in a Catholic institution as a boy. I knew of his war-bride mother, and his brother who, like my brothers, had died young and tragically. I did not read these posts because Dusty's family members were important to me; they are not. I read them because Dusty was important to me.

One night I logged on and found several lengthy posts by Dusty raging against me for my anti-Trump stance. He kept saying things like "You are supposed to be an 'intelligent' woman" With "intelligent" in scare quotes. He called me a liar. When I tried to reply, I found that he had not only unfriended me, he had blocked me.

Lott, Edna, Marty and Don had used the "l" word with me. I saved those posts: "I love you Danusha." Lott called me his mentor – I had helped with his writing. My anti-Trump stance earned this from Lott immediately before he unfriended and blocked me: "You eat shit as if it were chocolate pudding."

Marty's photos of elegant dinners and travel by private boat informed me that the internet had allowed me contact with someone with whom I would never, otherwise, rub elbows. My writings critical of Islam pleased Marty. He cozied up to me. "May I call you Dannie?" I have a foreign name; I let people call me whatever approximation of it that is the least intimidating to them. Marty told me I was "smart and on the ball … just too funny." He said – I've still got the post – "I love you." After his Trump-related unfriending, I saw Marty say to Melinda, one who, like him, is anti-Hillary, "May I call you Melly?"

Edna sent me multiple private messages telling me to leave Facebook altogether, pray for guidance, and stop "bashing Trump." If I did not, she promised me a lifetime of loneliness.

They had all praised my verbal skills when I was expressing thoughts that reflected their own. When I said something that they disagreed with – that I would not vote for Trump – my verbal skills became the very thing they hated most about me.

***

You are alone in a room behind the keyboard. You are anonymous behind a pseudonym. You will never encounter those at whom your words are directed. You conclude that you have entered a world beyond morality, because it is beyond any consequence you will ever feel.

So you bully a teenager till she kills herself. Or you immerse yourself in porn. Or you post death threats.

The nuns used to tell us that we should leave room for the Holy Spirit between ourselves and our partners when we danced. I'm never alone in a room.

I want to use old-fashioned words to talk about Dusty and Marty, Edna, Don and Lott. Words that carried great weight a century ago, before rapid transportation could remove you from the consequences of your actions. This is what you are: insincere, inconstant, disloyal, fickle, traitors. These are the kind of expired crimes our ancestors fought duels over.

You said you "loved" me. You lied. You have no idea who I am. You think a writer is a Trump. Someone who calculates how to flatter the gullible and market to fear. In fact a writer is someone so hungry for truth she will risk everything to get at it, and to express it. That, you could not love. That you labeled "crazy" and "bitch."

Oh, and Edna. The older, Midwestern woman who had previously seemed so maternal. You condemned me to a lifetime of loneliness for speaking my mind about Trump. Edna, I'm not lonely because Trump supporters like you are no longer in my life. I'm lonely because so many people are like you. I'm lonely for a different kind of person – someone who values truth.

***

Billy Wilder's Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon, and The Fortune Cookie let light into my rough childhood. Wilder's Polish-Jewish mother, stepfather and grandmother were all murdered during the Holocaust. Wilder penned the script for the frothy 1941 romantic comedy Ball of Fire the same year that Nazi Hans Frank said, "I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear."

Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, struggled with depression. Watch his films often enough and you can't help but notice how many characters attempt suicide.

The movies that gave me hope also taught me, even if only through osmosis, that life, as Louis Adamic said, is a process of "licking honey off a thorn."

Honey: I have two Facebook friends, Sandy and Susan, with whom I agree on nothing. I am a devout Catholic; Sandy mocks my faith. Susan – I forget the word for her religion but it involves nature and folklore. We fight like cats and dogs. They have never unfriended me.

I had hoped that words, visible onscreen, would eliminate misunderstanding; that the screen itself would break down barriers. I just took a break from writing this essay and saw a Facebook message. Lyle had posted something on my wall and I had not yet responded. He was convinced that his post angered me. I have yet to read it. I had said nothing and that nothing was misunderstood.

I scroll past posts alleging that anyone who votes for Hillary Clinton – as I plan to do – is an anti-American slug.

I could unfriend. I could unfollow. I could erase people I once accepted as friends. I don't. My reasons for not doing so are rooted in my Christianity and the Middle Ages.

Benedictine monks and nuns vow to stability. In addition to being cloistered in Spartan conditions, they inhabit the same space with the same humans for their entire careers. How else to learn the Christian skills of forgiveness, patience, and real love, except from each other's foibles and failings? Not by erasing. Not by running. But by being next to someone who pisses the hell out of you.

If the Trump supporters posting misogynist hate-Hillary memes and inflammatory conspiracy theories have a moment of awareness, I want to be there when it happens.

As I hope they will be there for me.

You can read this essay at the ScreamOnline here: http://thescreamonline.com/trump-on-facebook/

Or at Okla Eliot's As It Ought to Be blog here: https://asitoughttobe.com/2016/10/27/trump-unfriending-by-danusha-v-goska/

"Muhammad Was a Feminist": Huffington Post

Child bride in Yemen 

When Muhammad was over fifty years old, he married Aisha, his favorite wife, who was six years old.

Muhammad is the "perfect human worthy of emulation." For that reason, there is no age of consent in Muslim countries.

You can easily find videos on youtube of imams arguing that even a female infant can be married to an adult male, because of Muhammad's example.

These adult men achieve sexual satisfaction from infants by "thighing," placing their member between the infant's thighs.

The marriage of underage girls to adult men has ruined generations of women. The cost to society is comparable to the cost of slavery.

Muhammad instituted the practice of requiring four adult male Muslim witnesses to prove rape.

No such witnesses? The woman is guilty of adultery. She is jailed, stoned, or killed in an honor killing.

Women contain the sin of allurement. If a man rapes a woman, the woman is to blame for alluring the man. This is the "logic" behind honor killing.

Most of the women in Pakistani prisons are imprisoned because they were raped.

Muhammad personally recommended the stoning of an allegedly adulterous woman.

Women are unclean when menstruating and cannot pray. Because, over the course of their lifetime, women pray less than men, women are less virtuous.

Muhammad said that women are "deficient in intelligence." He said that most of the sufferers in hell are women.

Muhammad said that one man can marry four women; women are allowed only one spouse. Men can divorce their spouse merely by saying "I divorce you three times." They can even text that message.

View a map of high sex ratio nations. In Muslim nations, women die younger than men, contrary to patterns in Judeo-Christian countries.

Before Muhammad, women in Arabia could own and operate their own businesses and hire and fire employees: witness Khadija.

After Muhammed, life became miserable for women in Muslim lands. Witnesses Aisha's statement that the believing women are the women who suffered the most. See Sahih al-Bukhari 5825

Muhammad advised Muslim men to beat their wives.

In diyya, the Muslim blood money system, a lower cost is paid for a female death than for a male death.

In some Muslim legal systems, women are not allowed to testify in court at all. In others, two women can testify if their testimony agrees with a man's testimony.

In Islamic inheritance, daughters inherit half of what men inherit. They customarily hand their inheritance over to their brothers.

A woman's children belong to their father, not her. A woman's breast milk belongs to the father of her children.

Muhammad encouraged rape of female captives, even if the captives' husbands were alive and present to witness the rape.

In short, this article is false propaganda and it should be withdrawn.

^^^

I just attempted to post the above comments under a BS Huffington Post article naming Muhammad as a feminist.

You can find the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/muhammad-was-a-feminist_b_12638112.html

Maybe you'd like to add your thoughts.

Skylands Photos by a Camera-Phobe from Not the Best Autumn

Photo by Carolyn Messina, a much better photographer than I, taken the same day.
You can see how much better the exact same scene looks when it is photographed
by someone who knows what she is doing. 

Another shot by Carolyn Messina. See caption to above photo. 

I'm learning disabled. I was never diagnosed; rather nuns told me I was possessed, and secular teachers told me I am retarded. I am dyslexic, have trouble with left and right and sequential order. Human brains split and lump. That is, the brain does two things: it creates categories of related things, and it divides things up into discrete units. My brain is good at lumping, not so good at splitting. I can see all the letters in the word; I just have trouble figuring out which letter comes first, which second, and so on.

Also I'm cheap and poor and a luddite. So I shy away from anything technology-related. I don't own a TV. And I'm very intimidated by cameras.

2016 was the hottest year in history. Except for the days getting shorter, when it comes to weather, September was just another summer month. October has also been hot. I'm sure bed-and-breakfast proprietors in Vermont gazed at the sugar maples and wondered if they'd ever light up. This autumn has been worrying for those of us who are concerned about climate change.

And northern New Jersey is under near drought conditions. In hot, dry years, leaves tend to just go brown and drop, rather than sing and dance their way to the grave.

But the other day I went to Garret Mountain and it was as if all the trees had gotten together over night and agreed to put on a show. And I wished I had a camera.

Then it rained, and we had a wind storm. I wondered if there were any leaves left. No pun intended.

I went to Skylands yesterday, camera in tow.

I don't really know how to operate this camera. It has some buttons and I press them randomly and sometimes I like what happens and sometimes I don't.

Skylands is north of here and many trees were leafless. Those leaves that did remain were largely subdued brown. I reminded myself that Andrew Wyeth can take just some grey, some black, and some brown and create a memorable image.

So here are some inept photos of Skylands on a fall day in not the best foliage year.

Believe it or not, as unremarkable as these photos are, many of them capture exactly what I was trying to capture: sun on leaves, clouds in sky.

The last two photos are by Carolyn Messina, a much better photographer than I. You can see how much better the same scene looks when it is captured by a proficient photographer. 

Pawn Sacrifice 2014 Brilliant Performances; Troubling Account of Bobby Fischer

For much of its runtime, watching "Pawn Sacrifice" is a grueling experience. Young Bobby Fischer is growing up fearing being spied on by government agents. His mother, Regina, (Robin Weigart) is a communist living in Cold War era Brooklyn. Bobby escapes from what looks like a loveless childhood and a chaotic home life by focusing on chess.

Regina takes Bobby to Carmine Nigro (Conrad Pia) a teacher who greets Bobby by telling him that chess is a religion that takes anyone regardless of nation or creed. One hopes that this kindly man will serve as a ray of light in Bobby's life, but Bobby behaves as if he is autistic. He makes little eye contact and focuses only on the board, shutting out his opponent and his mother and sister who must stand and watch as he spends hours on his first chess match with a near master. Once young Bobby loses to Nigro, he refuses to shake hands, cries silently, and icily demands another game.

The real Bobby Fischer was noticeably tall and slim with very striking facial features: piercing eyes, prominent nose, large, curved lips and a sprinkling of facial moles. Tobey Maguire is short and slight, with refined features, darker hair and no moles. Fischer was from Brooklyn and he lacked a formal education. He dropped out of high school. He talked like an uneducated Brooklynite who happens to be a headline-making genius; he had a lot of attitude. Maguire is from California and he never really captures Fischer's unique voice or inflection.

The film picks up with the arrival of three characters played by brilliant actors: Michael Stahlbarg as Paul Marshall, a sort of fixer / hand-holder, Peter Sarsgaard as Father William Lombardy, a chess master, and Liev Schreiber as Boris Spassky. These three actors are superb, and each has a moment on screen that absolutely took my breath away.

Marshall is a long suffering lawyer who prods Fischer to go to Iceland to take on Boris Spassky and become the new world champion. Lombardy is the closest thing Fischer has to a friend. He serves as Fischer's second.

Bobby tears apart hotel rooms seeking hidden microphones; perhaps the Russians, the CIA, or the conspiratorial Jews are spying on him. Bobby runs from journalists' cameras and the fans who want to grab and kiss him. Bobby cracks when he hears spectators cough or when he can smell their breath. He demands more money, special chairs, different rooms, quieter cameras. Though Jewish, he listens to tapes that convince him that Jews are evil people taking over the world.

All this is really hard to watch. It's especially hard to watch for anyone who remembers the Fischer-Spassky match. Bobby Fischer was an incredibly gifted man. He was world famous. After his match, he could have made millions and enjoyed a cushioned retirement. Instead he trusted the wrong people, became a raving lunatic Jewish anti-Semite and a member of a cult he would later denounce, denounced America, cheered 9-11, spat on documents, broke laws, became an exile, and, after refusing necessary medical treatment, died entirely too young and unnecessarily. His ironic, poignant last words, they say, were, "Nothing is as healing as human touch."

You can't watch this movie and not wish that somebody had done something to help this man. You can't not wonder, what was wrong with him? Was it the bad relationship with his mother? His lack of a father? His illegitimacy? Was he schizophrenic or autistic? Or is that he was treated like a star and did not receive, from others, the kind of feedback that forms character? A combination of all of these factors? Because Bobby Fischer is a commodity, even in death, we will never know.

In the film, Paul Marshall, the more practical and earthbound of Bobby's advisors, suggests taking him to a psychiatrist. Father Lombardy responds that chess is a rabbit hole. He mentions the hundreds of millions of moves that chess masters must take into consideration. He says that taking Bobby to a psychiatrist would be like pouring concrete down a holy well. The implication is that Bobby's chess genius is inextricably tied to his mental illness.

Lombardy cites Paul Morphy, a chess genius who could not succeed at conventional life. But look at Boris Spassky. He is still alive and no one suggests that he is mentally ill. Maybe a mentally healthy Bobby would have been an even better chess player.

Liev Schreiber, in the commentary, says that chess masters must constantly predict their opponent's attacks, and that doing so contributes to paranoia. Perhaps so.

Although I found the film hard to watch, the performances by the leads were so profoundly rewarding that they lifted me up in awe and made me cry. I don't know how Liev Schreiber did it, but he perfectly channeled a Soviet man from the 70s. I know because I was there in the 70s. Michael Stahlberg utterly inhabits his part, a chain smoking, sweaty palmed, tireless enabler who takes every abuse from Bobby and never stops trying to push him forward. Peter Sarsgaard is just simply superb, in every scene, from praying the rosary on his knees to the moment when dawn breaks on his face as Bobby starts winning. Tobey Maguire has a moment that is so powerful it gave me chills. He is beating Spassky. He is in his element. It is his bliss. See the movie for that moment, one I watched over and over again.

Owl Pellet or Hawk Pellet from Garret Mountain

Source
Hawk owl ejecting a pellet 

I had been birdwatching for decades before I saw my first pellet. I was hiking at Skylands with Mark S, a hunter who had once downed a deer with the first arrow he shot that morning. He looked down at Mount Defiance and said, "That's a pellet."

Now I see pellets at Skylands all the time.

Sometimes all it takes to see something in nature is to have someone point it out to you.

Birds need to be light, so that they can fly. Given their bodies' emphasis on lightness, they don't have many of the bodily organs that heavier animals have. Birds don't have teeth. They can't chew what they eat. Owls don't have crops, a bodily organ used to store food for later digestion.

Some birds, like ostriches, deal with the absence of teeth by eating pebbles so that they can abrade food in the digestive tract. Parrots eat clay so that they clay can absorb poisons from seeds. Lammergeiers or bearded vultures eat animal bones. Their digestive acid is very strong.

From Wikipedia:

"The acid concentration of the bearded vulture stomach has been estimated to be of pH about 1 and large bones will be digested in about 24 hours, aided by slow mixing/churning of the stomach content. The high fat content of bone marrow makes the net energy value of bone almost as good as that of muscle, even if bone is less completely digested. A skeleton left on a mountain will dehydrate and become protected from bacterial degradation and the bearded vulture can return to consume the remainder of a carcass even months after the soft parts have been consumed by other animals, larvae and bacteria."

Discoverwildlife.com says "An extra-long intestinal tract helps the lammergeiers digest bone, as does their gastric acid, which has a pH of about 0.7, close to pure hydrochloric acid."

I usually dissect pellets in situ. I just take a stick and poke at them on the ground until I see the bones inside. The last pellet I picked apart had some pretty big bones in it. One was the size of a human knuckle bone.

I usually don't bring pellets home.

I brought a pellet home from Garret Mountain yesterday. Boy, did it smell bad. I put it in the freezer over night hoping that that would diminish the smell. No such luck.

I googled "pellet" and "smell" and I found many claims. Some insist pellets don't smell at all. Some say they smell like rotting fruit. Some insist that they don't smell like poop. 

This one smelled like manure. I washed my hands several times after handling it. Good thing because pellets can contain viable rodent pathogens.

This pellet appears to be nothing but gray fur, with one little bitty bone, seen in the photo, above. Probably this bird, a hawk or an owl, had eaten a grey squirrel, or maybe a rat.

October 12, 2016

I didn't get up till 7:30 on Wednesday, October 12, 2016. I am chemically addicted to election 2016's constantly breaking news. I stay up late sharing outrage at the Defeating Trumpismo Facebook Group I started.

I did my daily exercises, showered, and graded some student papers. Student papers make me worry about the future of America. My students could leap over the Eiffel Tower if I asked them to. I worry because expectations are so low, and Politically Correct indoctrination, in lieu of education, is so great.

I don't like seeing students cry. I don't like receiving emails from my boss telling me that my requirement that students attend class has traumatized a student.

Administrators are fearful of confrontation, political show trials, and personal injury attorneys. What happens once coddled students collide with the wider world? What happens to the wider world?

I think about the expectations nuns placed on us baby boomers back in St Francis School. Fifty-three kids in a class. No air conditioning no sports or musical equipment. Just one nun, a blackboard, and various implements of torture. We met their demands. There was no other option.

After grading papers, I took on the torturous discipline of sending out queries on my manuscript, God through Binoculars.

This past summer, God through Binoculars was under consideration at four top publishers. Editors called it "captivating," "fascinating," and "spiritually profound."

I put on plays when I was in kindergarten. I performed my works in front of other students in second grade. I've received thousands of rejections on works I'll never publish. In decades of writing, I had never been this close to real publication.

"We liked it but the marketing committee … Not what we usually publish … outside of genre boundaries … hard to market." I have been unable to pray since. 

So, on Wednesday, October 12, after grading papers, I sent out queries for God through Binoculars. Around one pm I realized I just couldn't take any more.

I become alert to my approaching birthday whenever the hair on my arms registers the first crisp breeze, when I note the first lone leaf strip from green to scarlet.  

Birthdays and holidays are hard for people who are alone. I am not alone by choice – in a sense. I never was offered a menu; I never selected to inhabit the planet where no one would like me. But I have made little choices.

There was once a Jewish lawyer. I dumped him. He had a bumper sticker that said, "I break for unicorns," and he was plumpish in a way that suggested a complete lack of movement other than between a desk and a refrigerator. I've never been thin, but I've always moved – my calves are like railroad ties and I do have biceps.

I love having control over what gets played on the car radio, what I eat for dinner, and how long I soak in the tub. Other times being alone almost kills me and I wonder why I am here, and why I don't just leave. 

I had a good birthday once. It was so long ago and so far away it feels like another world.

No. Not "it feels like." It *was* another world.

I was living in the Himalayas. Machapuchare, the most beautiful mountain on earth, so sacred it is never to be summited, was so close, and the air was so pristine, I felt could throw a rock and hit it. I was sleeping on a red clay floor and teaching English to Gurungs, future Gurkha soldiers. No radio, no telephone, no electricity, no running water.

I received a message from a runner: report to such and such a town. I didn't want to go. I'd have to descend a couple of thousand feet (and then ascend on the way back) and walk through a freezing cold, very rapid river with a rock-covered bottom that would punish my bare feet as I traversed the stone's slick surfaces. The current would batter and tug at my mighty calves and I'd have to struggle with all my might against teetering into the rushing, freezing water shooting down from Machapuchare.

I had to go. DH, my boss, had summoned me.

DH was a dictator. Demanded strict obedience. Ironic. In the US he had been a rich hippie. In Nepal, an absolute monarchy, he adhered to Asian totalitarian models of authority.

I arrived. Our rendezvous point was a ramshackle tea shop of nailed together wooden planks plunked on river gravel. Inside the shop, I could not escape the roar of the rushing water just outside the door. I associate that roar with low altitudes in Nepal. It used to lull me to sleep when I was passing through valley towns; the softening and then disappearing rush was one way to calculate altitude as I climbed up and away from river valleys.

The tea shop owner gestured for me to ascend a banged-together ladder to a loft above the smoky shop. I did. Someone grabbed me from behind and covered my eyes. "Happy birthday to you," a gathered group of Peace Corps Volunteers sang. I looked through my tears across the dark room, lit only by lanterns built out of inkwells, and saw DH, my boss. God, I loved that man. And I thought he loved me. Gestures like this inspired me: an old fashioned, all-American birthday cake, slick with icing and illuminated by candles. How in Shiva's name they got that cake over the trail and across the river, I will never know.

We were cross legged on the floor; the floor was the ceiling of the tea shop below us, which we could see through knotholes in the wood. Little dishes of stewed goat meat sat in front of us. Marie could eat goat meat with such gusto. Marie was what, five foot ten? Long hair heavy as a mattress. Sharp tongue. Blue teeth – her mother had taken tetracycline when pregnant with Marie. She was smoking, as ever. Marie is now gone. Cancer. Marie was watching me like a hawk. She watched everything like a hawk. Maybe now she is one.

"I asked myself, do you love him and does he hate you?" she, direct, blunt, and wasting no time said to me when we were alone together. "Or do you hate him and does he love you? Or do you both love each other or hate each other? I was watching you two that night. The toasts, going back and forth." Marie, I don't know how to answer your question, even now.

DH was eating goat and drinking raksi. He was devout. He never ate meat or drank moonshine. I teased him. "DH, are you abandoning your dharma?"

"It's you," he said to me. "You make me drink. You make me eat meat."

Me? What was it about me, anyway? I still don't know.

DH raised his glass. "As everyone can see, Danusha is posted on a very high hill. I didn't want to come here. It's such a tough uphill. But something drew me here. Danusha's spirit. A toast, to Danusha's spirit."

Later, when I returned, alone, to the Gurung village, I struggled to remain in touch with reality. But another runner arrived with another missive from DH. This time it was a hand-written poem, not on conventional paper, but on lokta, handmade, artisanal, Nepali paper, bumpy with fibers from the laurel bush, soft as a baby's skin. I still have that poem. If I had any self-respect, I would have used it as toilet paper years ago.

Just googled DH. He appears, finally, to be happily married. He came back to the US and wrote his dissertation, as he put it, on how "Rich white people screw over poor brown people in public schools." Aha. And he's never taught in a US public school. Aaaaaha. He is employed doing good deeds and enlightening the world. Not at all ironic. Feh.

He now looks like one of those apple dolls. Oh, the shame, of crying so many tears over a man who'd end up looking like an apple doll. Not even a male apple doll. A female apple doll. I wonder if his spouse has two X chromosomes.

Another birthday. The black telephone ringing outside my room – was it three in the morning? Daddy entering around six. "You don't have a brother Phil anymore." Daddy leaving the room. I remember consciously going numb, because I knew it was more than I could take.

Once day broke, crossing the street to Alice's house. She wasn't there. She'd tell me later that when she heard the news she left town because she knew I'd turn to her and she knew she couldn't handle my pain. The moral of this fable is not complicated. You have friends until things go south.

Alice is now a nun. I recognize her in the group photo of grey-haired nuns – the only kind there are these days – by her posture. She always stood like just like that, the turn of her neck, the position of her hands, the angle of her elbow. Her distinct posture wrings love from my heart; my love races across the miles, the years, and the disguise of her in her billowy, larger, looser, body. Oh, Al. All these photos on your convent's web page of you spreading Christian love and mercy. Why wasn't I included?

One more birthday. 2014. I am visiting my sister in the third facility I will visit her in in 2014. She has a moment when she realizes that it is my birthday. She says, "Happy Birthday. Too bad your brother is dead."

I gasp. After the lifetime we have shared, her weird, random cruelty still takes me by surprise. I look at her. Her face is composed and cold. She is now staring at the TV. Was it her brain tumor, or she herself, demonstrating that she could still knock me on my ass?

I am alone. I have failed at so many things it would be easiest to list the things at which I have not failed: cooking and cleaning. Why not just leave? Because, so far, on the days that I think about it the most, something happens that brings me up short.

Laundromats are prime locations for suicidal thoughts. "Laundromat suicide" would be a terrific band name, or the title of a modern ballad.

You do something intensely personal in laundromats. You wash your intimate clothing. You do it publicly, in machines that invariably smell like cigarette smoke. You don't smoke. If all of this is not depressing, what is?

A few days before my birthday, I was in a laundromat. I was inside my own fortress, resistant to siege. My awareness of external stimuli was like a bug's awareness. You note the folded up newspaper heading for your compound eyes, but little else. All your human stuff is deep, deep, deep inside, and focused on the exit.

There was a man in the laundromat. He is tall and big, probably strong like bull. He dresses like an extra in a Soviet Stakhanovite propaganda flic, like he should be chanting the Volga boatman song.

Back in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy hit this neighborhood, two weeks without electricity forced us all together. I had said, back then, to this very man, "Are you Russian? Polish?" I had noted his accent. Also I noted that he lives in a majority-minority, high crime city. Usually if you are not black or Hispanic here, you are Slavic. The other white meat. The poor one.

He had responded with rage. "You tink I accent? You accent. I American."

There he was, in the laundromat, as I contemplated my birthday and my aloneness and failure. And he was fumbling. Badly. He couldn't get the washing machine to work.

Sigh.

I walked over to him. Shook the damn machine loose from its moorings. Took his money. Put it in the machine. Got it to work. Went back to my own clothes and my own thoughts.

Scary Slavic Man smiled at me with shy and boyish glee. "Tank you! Tank you lady! You know how to do!"

Another moment that brought me up short, on that very day. I was walking, and thinking about leaving, and I looked up and saw a face I have not seen since St Francis School. And the poetic thing, the rhyming thing, the thing that makes you think about patterns, that makes you think that maybe there is some underlying meaning: I immediately knew who it was. There are some disguises, some lines, some changes in hair color, but those are minor. This is a face I last saw sitting two rows over.

"Chris?" I said her name. She said mine. We approached across the distance, made contact, chatted as if no time had intervened, none. And after some amazement, we promised to connect via Facebook, and went on our way.

So … I'm not totally invisible.

Something bad, and medical, happened a few weeks back, on September 21^st. So-called "doctors" made a so-called "mistake." Just mentioning it, just mentioning it right now, my entire body became hot and tears filled my eyes and my shoulders turned to lead. Pain radiated down my arms. My body is saying to the writer inside me, "Please don't type those words. I can't take it anymore. Not after these four years of cancer and cancer and chronic illness and broken bones and scary lumps and death and funerals and Ted and failure please just shut up. Eat some more chocolate, destroy yourself, but don't put into words any more all this bad stuff that just keeps happening."

And since it happened, or since the surgery this summer, or since all the rejections, or even my sister's death, not a single person has hugged me.

I have no money so my only choice for salvaging what the "mistake" left of my body is to be treated by the same "doctors" who hurt me. It's like going to your rapist for therapy. I had to phone the quote doctors unquote and I thought eff it, it's my birthday. So I didn't.

I got into the car and drove north.

Color is arriving in the trees a month late, after the hottest summer in history. The Wanaque Reservoir looks like a moonscape. A lone heron patrols the shore. I pray for it. The state says we are officially in drought "watch" conditions. Pumpkins are small this year.

I saw activity on what used to be Mount Saint Francis, a convent. The Catholic Church had to sell it. I saw sticks topped with fluorescent orange flags poking out of the vast lawn and a "construction entrance" sign. I imagine the new buyers will turn those magnificent grounds into a strip mall. Breaks my heart.

The proud eagles guarding Skylands' entrance greeted me with their usual regal reserve. The annual garden is winding down for the year, but still productive of colorful petals.

I occupied a bench and took out my Victorian Fairy Tarot Deck. The other day on Facebook my cousin Phil belittled me because I read tarot cards. Phil posts memes saying that anyone who hasn't accepted Jesus is going to hell. He is also pro Trump. In response to his criticism, I told him that he does not demonstrate Christian qualities of kindness. I should not have spoken. But I did. Famous last words. He's probably unfriended me by now.

Were it not for my tarot deck and the ravens, I would have spoken to no one on my birthday.

I asked about Antoinette. I drew the three of coins, the "genius" card. Well, she was, and she was proud of it, too.

I asked about God through Binoculars and drew the queen of coins. Okay.

I asked if the deck wanted to convey any special birthday message. I drew the page of wands, what I call the "hippie" card. The deck was mistaking me for a younger version of myself. Joan Bunning, my favorite tarot interpreter, says that the message of this card is "Be creative. Be enthusiastic. Be confident. Be courageous." I'll get right on that. And I'll get smashed in the face. Pass.

I asked about Ted; I drew The Star, a card of hope. I hope he croaks. I hope I never forget what a bastard he is. I hope I win the lottery so I can afford a boy toy.

I said, I have been so alone in my life. Have I had any companion, even a spiritual one, a guide, a ghost, a guardian angel?

I drew the nine of coins. She is one of two distinctly solitary women in tarot. The other, the queen of swords, is known as the widow. I have never been married so I cannot be she. The nine of coins is elegant; she makes her own way in the world, keeps her own counsel, and is accompanied only by the ornament on her wrist: a falcon.

I liked it that I have some ephemeral guide who is herself an independent woman who likes birds.

I walk the same route every time: the annual garden, the perennial garden, the rhododendron garden, the wetlands garden – not so wet now. The pond, the hill, Mount Defiance, the orchard, the lilacs, the sundial, the azaleas, the magnolias, the manor house, the weeping cherry, and then back. Following the same route every time, I don't have to think, "Where is my body going?" I can follow my mind.

When I am at Skylands, the story I tell myself is a World War II story. It involves huge ethical questions as played out in England and Germany in the occupation and the post-occupation eras.

On Mount Defiance, I heard a raven. "Croak, croak, croak."

I responded. My raven is pretty good. "Croak, croak, croak."

The raven responded. "Croak, croak, croak." Maybe a little closer.

This went on for a while. I think even the raven got bored.

I thought about children in Syria. They were born. They were beautiful and worthy. They heard an explosion. Their former home pulverized to toxic dust; they breathed it in as they died, under rubble. They never got to fall in love, bake cookies, take a hot bath, watch birds. God creates people who live stunted lives and die alone. Why?

I cut some Sulphur shelf bracket fungus off of an oak tree. It really does taste just like chicken.

During the drive home NPR broadcast an interview with Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places. Dickey said that there are predictable archetypes in American ghost stories: tragic slaves, tragic Indians, and tragic spinsters. Women who never marry make scary evil ghosts.

As I drove, I debated with myself. "Buy take-out food? Go head. Give yourself a treat."

I go through this every year. I am poor and I am cheap. I can't bring myself to spend any money.

No take-out food.

I went to bed realizing the day had not been horrendous, because I'm resigned to it. I didn't expect. No one is going to realize it's my birthday and do something special. I am not that person; I was not issued that life.