Week in Seven Words #553

This covers the week of 8/23/20 - 8/29/20.

derange

The man moves like a jumping electric wire. He's tormented to the roots of himself. Staggering up and down the street, he raves about how the industry used to want differences but now wants sameness. Homogeneity in opinions, looks, and creative ideas. I don't know which industry he's talking about. His description fits more than one. In his creased suit, and with his briefcase swinging and shuddering, he belongs to no workplace now.

layers

I've walked down this street a bunch of times without knowing that its name alludes to three activists from the Civil Rights Movement who were killed while helping register black voters in the South.

resting

I stay in bed later than usual, grateful for several hours of uninterrupted sleep.

solidarity

An old man whispers to the young man working at the pharmacy, "You're at this job to land rich widows." When the young man splutters, the old one says, "No shame in that."

splashing

Sparrows in an ecstasy of puddles.

sprinkle

Rain nips at us at the end of our walk, a drizzle after all the breathless warnings about a major storm.

trapped

She chides me for eating too much chocolate. Then she offers me chocolate.

Week in Seven Words #551

This covers the week of 8/9/20 - 8/15/20.

beware

The moment has arrived: We're getting pizza from a restaurant. A milestone during a year like this. As we wait outside the pizza place for our order, we stare into a neighboring window display with a sign that advertises psychic readings. A woman comes up to us and warns us not to see the psychic. "They went to jail for stealing people's fortunes!" Her voice is harsh, her eyes hard and bright. I wonder if she's one of the psychic's victims. Or maybe the pandemic has pushed her into the borderlands between sanity and madness.

crowns

From our bench on a high point in the park, the view is only tree canopies, thick with summer growth. Layers of leaves, subtly shifting shades of green.

nescient

The less I'm exposed to the contents of their brains, the more faith I have in humanity. 

pouring

After a morning of heavy rain and thunder, the sun emerges like yolk from a cracked shell.

rassle

They snipe at each other, sometimes viciously, but I think it's a strange comfort to them, to get tangled up together in long text threads.

 

starkly

On one side of the street, there's a stretch of restaurants with lively outdoor seating, people crammed around tables on the sidewalk as pedestrians and dogs ease past them. On the other side of the street, there's a stretch of shuttered businesses and homeless people asleep under construction scaffolding.

streamlet

On its way to the lake, the stream tumbles over rocks. Dogs dip into the running water and shake the droplets away.

Week in Seven Words #510

This covers the week of 10/27/19 - 11/2/19.

departure
I hurry back to give her a second kiss.

depression
One statue with a ripped out torso embodies depression. Mind and body laid to waste.

feasting
At an Uzbek restaurant: salads in small, shallow dishes and a delicious stew that settles comfortably in my stomach for what seems like days.

mealtimes
A rich salmon salad in the morning. Pecan cookies in the afternoon. Some yogurt for dinner.

sculptures
On one outdoor terrace, a sculpted horse considers the ocean and the narrow streets of an old neighborhood. On the rooftop, a real bird with black and white feathers perches on a steampunk-like contraption. Nearby, a statue skulks, its face lost in the shadows of a hood.

staked
The cat peers out from among broad, dusty leaves.

waterfront
By the ocean: scooters, bikes, paper boats strung up in the air, a rippling flag on a rock among the waves.

Week in Seven Words #505

This covers the week of 9/22/19 - 9/28/19.

cramps
Curled up on the couch with intense cramping, waiting for the OTC painkiller to kick in. My feet swivel in time to the pulses of pain, and I try to let the murder mystery novel I'm reading distract me.

curiosity
She shows an interest in Revolutionary-era Boston, after I show her an image of Samuel Adams beer.

drub
In the back room of the board game cafe, the wall is scuffed and dented. A small sign hangs on it, asking customers not to kick it or bang on it with their fists.

hoard
I find a notebook for her, in light blue and decorated with hot air balloons, in which she'll probably want to write the poems and song lyrics she isn't yet ready to share with anyone.

tidying
I clean my shoes and donate some boots, towels, and pillow cases. Under the couch, I find dust clumps that look like small gray wigs.

unquiet
She's trying to find a chair, or configuration of chairs, that will suit her. She slides from one to the other. She chooses a middle seat, before scrambling back to settle against the wall. I don't think she'll find anything she likes, because the discomfort is embedded in her mind. She can't uproot it by means of rearranging chairs.

unthinking
She's frustrated that they don't consider a cold to be an illness. They take no care to cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze.

Week in Seven Words #367

bluff
R-rated rap lyrics muttered by a sensitive boy who wants to sound tougher.

cariogenic
The shop displays candies in cartoon colors and chocolates in silver foil. Popcorn erupts in a buttery river from bright red tubs.

normalcy
What people find acceptable can change quickly. Many seem unfazed by governing practices, speech, and behavior they would have condemned in the recent past. Others begin to criticize things that they've let slide before.

pinpoint
She doesn't know which soup to buy. She wanders up and down the aisle, her fingers tracing the cans and cartons. From the way her hands shake, her difficulty must run deeper than soup.

preschooler
In the elevator, he tells me that he knows double-digit numbers. He points to 10 and 11 and names them proudly. "But what happened to 13?" I ask. He pauses, staring at the unaccountable gap between 12 and 14. Then he laughs. "They DEMOLISHED it!" he shouts. "Hahahahaha!"

saporous
The sign advertises mulled wine and apple cider donuts. The words alone - and the colors and curves of the letters - flood my mouth with their flavors.

standards
His Facebook feed is full of people he dislikes. As long as they're angry, he's satisfied.

Week in Seven Words #350

account
Prayers, exuberant songs fill the synagogue. In the back, a woman who has a mental illness is bent over a book on her lap. Occasionally, she says something that sounds like, "But, but, but..."

emboldened
We brainstorm stories, and she becomes less timid with her ideas. She's worried that what she writes will somehow be wrong. The idea of mistakes not even mattering in a draft - that anything can go into a draft - is delightful to her.

grounds
We discuss repentance and how to keep it from becoming self-flagellation. Repentance is oriented to practical action - acknowledgement of the wrong done, and sincere efforts to make amends and to make changes to future behavior. Self-flagellation pushes people into purely emotional territory, where they give themselves up to their own sense of wrongness and get stuck in it.

recess
The front steps are the place to go for downtime. If there's a spare half-hour between meetings, and the sun is out, settle down. The narrow street before you becomes the world for a while. Read, close your eyes, maybe hope for an interruption from someone you like.

retrieval
For a moment, I think it's a real dog, dead or injured and floating in the river. But it's only a stuffed animal. Soon after, a boy comes running with his younger sister following. They find a short, spindly branch by the river bank to haul it in.

serenity
It's a peaceful evening, the clouds stitched to the sky in threads of peach and light blue. The wind carries sea salt on its breath. Leaves are murmuring overhead.

sloganeer
It's tacky to put the names of politicians on a kippah. But he likes to turn himself into a walking ad for his favorites.

Veterans Day Viewing: Debt of Honor

Title: Debt of Honor: Disabled Veterans in American History
Director: Ric Burns
Language: English
Rating: PG

I watched a free screening last night for a documentary that will be airing on PBS tonight, 11/10, at 9 p.m. eastern time. Debt of Honor looks at the way the U.S. has responded to returning wounded veterans from major wars across history.

With advances in medicine and technology, there are many more people who survive serious injuries in the line of duty, but they might return with missing limbs, paralysis or with visible scars. These permanent injuries are among the challenges to returning to civilian life.

The documentary also focuses on mental health, particularly post-traumatic stress, in returning veterans. As far as we can tell, mental trauma has always been a part of war, with different names for post-traumatic stress ("soldier's heart" after the Civil War, "shellshock" after WWI), and our understanding of it increased greatly after the Vietnam War. But there's still much that we don't understand and a stigma remains. Often, it's the psychological issues (including but not limited to PTSD) that keep returning troops from merging back into daily life successfully. It's also a matter of redefining or readjusting their identity after spending time in a combat zone or military setting. And if they're injured or mentally traumatized, they need to find a way to make sense of life.

General attitudes have also varied, from one war to another, towards returning veterans and how to respond to those injured; and the documentary makes the point that since Vietnam, the military and the mainstream population have gone separate ways. There's a disconnect between them. We don't have a draft. Civilians may not even really feel any direct effects of war, and may live in ignorance of complex battles fought in places they wouldn't be able to find on a map. So when soldiers return, it might as well be from an alien world. Meantime, there are high rates of suicide among veterans and soldiers in active duty.

The film is well worth watching, so if you have time tonight and have access to PBS please check it out (or get the DVD at some other point). After the screening last night, there was a discussion panel that covered several topics, including inadequate care for veterans. For instance, Guam has a super-high rate of U.S. military service, but it's terribly short on VA resources. (Here's a short video on that.)

Week in Seven Words #222 & 223

222

disconnect
A couple in the park: Man and woman strolling, he pontificates, gestures broadly, makes authoritative pronouncements about things he only half-knows at best, while the woman nods, murmurs, surreptitiously checks her phone.

faerie
The enchantment of pink blossoms floating around your head.

patchy
Blonde willows and raggedy weeds by the pond.

pistons
I understand the enjoyment people get from running, but not from jogging. Running can give you a feeling of freeness. Jogging has always struck me as mechanical, like you're a machine pumping up and down.

shocked
The park is artificial, so the lakes can be drained or filled at will. The fish might be stunned out of their habitual routes and find themselves on their sides, eyeing a terrible sun.

tableau
Facing north, heads uplifted, four turtles frozen on a sunny rock.

treble
And there he is again: The half-naked man, kneeling in the tunnel and playing the violin.

Three Stories from Stephen King's Just After Sunset

Collection: Just After Sunset
Author: Stephen King

When King finds the emotional center of a story, shows us the hearts of his characters, it makes all the difference. There are stories in this collection that have an interesting premise but don't develop. Sometimes there's too much straining for effect. But here are three stories I like because they're gripping and for the most part are told with heart. Each has its own unique atmosphere of horror.

Title: The Gingerbread Girl
Emily is running from the horrors in her life. She takes up running after her baby dies from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Separating from her husband, she moves to a family property in Florida where she'll need to use her running abilities, along with her ingenuity and will to survive, in order to escape from a psychotic neighbor. (There's a painfully suspenseful scene where the main character tries to break free from a chair she's tied to before the homicidal neighbor returns to torture her and finish her off.) At its heart the story is about someone striving for life. Emily fights to live and outpace the terrors the world holds for her.

Title: N.
Told in a collection of case notes, letters, and newspaper clippings, the story is a horrifying mystery centered on a psychiatrist and a patient, referred to as N. in the case notes, who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). N. has many of the usual compulsions of people with OCD, such as the need to count things a certain number of times, arrange things in certain ways and perform other rituals. But he tells his psychiatrist he's doing this for a very real reason: to prevent the reentry of a demonic entity into the world.

Given that people with OCD believe that their rituals and compulsions stave off disasters, the psychiatrist at first thinks that his patient is merely imagining this Lovecraftian entity. But when he visits the site that his patient tells him about, a remote field in rural Maine with a grouping of rocks where the creature might break through, he begins to have second thoughts. He develops his own compulsions. But is this terrifying creature of darkness real? Or has the psychiatrist merely taken on the symptoms of his patient, which does happen sometimes?

Title: Willa
The story sort of crumbles into bittersweet goo as it goes on, while still remaining sad and chilling. It starts with a group of passengers waiting in a remote Wyoming train station. The train is set to come at any moment, but David can't find his fiancée, Willa. The other passengers tell him not to go looking for her; many of them don't like her. David doesn't even realize how long she's been missing, and he remembers how she's sometimes chided him for not being able to see what's right in front of his eyes; like most people, his capacity for denial is strong. When he finds her, he discovers that some things, like their love for each other, haven't changed and that "perception and expectation together" really are powerful.

Week in Seven Words #183

bromidic
I sit through an episode of an awful TV show. It's only bearable when watched with people who can laugh with you at how bad it is. It hits me yet again that I've lost a lot of patience for TV; I know there are good shows out there, I just rarely turn on the TV and bother to look.

dreamt
Green eyes, bony limbs, the grace of a cat. She's a creature made for shadows.

harmonious
A spray of white roses against brownstone. A yellow window framing bookshelves and a burgundy couch.

preternatural
A cat, arching and yowling in the mouth of a dark alley at something it can see but we cannot.

procyonid
Raccoons paddle around in the shallows of the urban lake. They forage among the weeds and rocks. From the bridge, some people throw bread crusts and chips. A large, bold raccoon brushes aside these offerings and scampers closer, looking up, maybe waiting for something more substantial to fall from human hands. What would happen if he were to climb up on the bridge?

stifled
Maybe in holding my feelings back, I'm giving them too little opportunity to grow. Maybe they should learn, however painful it is for them, that I'm not who they'd like me to be and that they'll have to deal with that.

trammel
He mutters to himself and jingles the keys in his hands. He's given small but important tasks, so that he'll always feel a part of the community. But sometimes he goes to the end of the street and looks across it, not as if he's seeing only the buildings on the other side but what's beyond. He knows that he could have been more, were it not for the unsolvable problems of his brain.

Nonfiction Book of the Month: We've Got Issues

We've Got Issues by Judith Warner discusses different factors that account for the sorry state of mental health services for children and early intervention for learning disabilities in the U.S. There's much to debate in this book, but even if you disagree with some of the premises or feel that she needs to dig deeper into some of the issues, I think you'll find that her approach is refreshing, as she doesn't blindly demonize people, whether they be parents, psychiatrists, or teachers. She also points out flaws in much of how the media reports on children's mental health, including their misinterpretations of data and their use of children as mere symbols representing larger societal problems.

Worth Watching: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Title: Lars and the Real Girl
Director: Craig Gillespie
Language: English
Rating: PG-13

In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) buys a sex doll but doesn't use it for sex. The doll, named Bianca, is fully clothed and gets treated with care. Lars courts her chastely, takes her around town, and introduces her to people as if she's real; he even gives her an interesting back story. Instead of functioning as a sex toy, the doll becomes his way of working through a deep-seated inability to connect with real people.

From Wikipedia, Fair use, Link

I can hear some of you going, "Okkkaaaay..." and backing away slowly. So let me give you some background on Lars. His mother died giving birth to him. He grew up with a distant father and with an older brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), who left home as soon as he could. Now Gus is married to the warm and lovely Karin (Emily Mortimer), and the two are expecting a child. Lars lives near them physically, but keeps his distance emotionally. Though he can't articulate his fears, he is deeply afraid of people's unpredictability and mortality. He also doesn't respond well to physical touch.

How do people react to Lars and Bianca? After some initial hesitation, the townspeople play along with Lars's delusion and let him heal through it. Although Gus's first impulse is to have his younger brother committed to a mental hospital, he's dissuaded from this course of action by my favorite character in the movie, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), who combines cool understanding and warm compassion in her role as the town's medical doctor and psychologist.

Delusions can have their own logic and reveal something real and meaningful about the people experiencing them. And people reveal a lot about themselves in the way they respond to another person's psychological difficulties. Gus's initial desire to have his brother committed stems less from concern than from embarrassment and, more deeply, guilt and personal shame.

Is it realistic, the way the other people in the community come to support Lars and treat Bianca as a town mascot? Such widespread acceptance is rare, but not impossible. Read this article, which discusses the influence of social environment on people's ability to cope with mental illness. Ostracizing and isolating people with psychological problems makes them much worse off, but unfortunately that's what we usually do in our culture. The approach taken in Lars and the Real Girl might be more conducive to healing.

The movie is funny too. It shows the absurdity of the situation, but treats the characters with kindness. I also like how Lars uses a doll to work through his issues, instead of using a real life woman as a personal crutch or savior. He has a love interest in the movie - Margo (Kelli Garner), a colleague at work who seems to like him too, in a shy way. But on some level he realizes, even in the midst of his emotional disconnection, that he's not yet ready for a real relationship with her or with anyone except Bianca. And even Bianca starts to show signs of independence as the movie progresses, proving herself to be less pliant than she appears.

Human After All

I've published a short story at Front Porch Review called "Human After All." It opens like this:

After the fire ruined her face and body, Aisling didn’t want to live among people.

You can read the story here.

A Smoker's Guide to Health and Fitness

On the occasion of the 37th Annual Great American Smokeout, it's fitting that I reveal to you: A Smoker's Guide to Health and Fitness, an e-book I've co-authored with one of my brothers, who's a family medicine doctor.

In his practice he has a number of patients who smoke and many others who used to. The majority of them care about their health, even if they're not always doing what's best for them (including smoking, eating poorly, and not getting enough physical activity), so it occurred to him to write up the kinds of information he shares with them in an e-book that would address their total health and fitness, mental and physical, no matter what stage they're at (e.g. smoking and trying to quit, smoking and not attempting to quit, stopped smoking years ago but have concerns about elevated cancer risk). Earlier this year he asked me to help him with this.

The book is not yet available but we've set up a site for it which we hope will become a community for people interested in improving their health and promoting good health among others - without shaming smokers or focusing only on their cigarette use (as opposed to addressing all of their health needs):

SmokersFitness.com is the site.

Two additional reasons to go there:

1) We're now hosting a giveaway of the book that includes a gift card to a major online retailer you book-lovers out there might appreciate (so don't hesitate to sign up, and also to spread the word to smokers and ex-smokers in your life who would benefit from the book).

2) In the "Contact the Authors" section you'll get to see a photo of me. Camera shy as I am, I've never put a photo up on this blog, but there I'm unveiled in all my co-authorial glory...

Seriously, I'm happy to have helped my brother with this. He's a wonderful doctor, cares about his patients and goes beyond the textbook in thinking about their issues and helping them out; he doesn't see them as a walking checklist of symptoms, but as individuals, and in addition to treating their existing problems he places a great deal of emphasis on prevention and good health habits.

It's also been interesting co-authoring a book, fitting in what I'm writing to what the other person is writing and not being the only one who's got a say as to what goes in the book or is left out as the writing progresses; I've co-authored smaller academic pieces before but not something like this (the other large writing projects I have underway at the moment are just my own).