Life is crazy...

My son admitted to me this weekend he has a drinking problem, and has in the past been a stoner. Oy veh!

Of course, admitting is the first step, and we organized some evaluation and counselling to see the next step.

He also had enough problems this weekend to be ready to try an alternative school scenario. Well, maybe. Might be a breakthrough.

Wrote this poem this morning. I hand out with a small group of people who pass out a word for the day to write about. The word today was apocryphal.


Sing o Muse,
of the wrath of Katrina,
and the damage she wrought
both wide and far,
and the legends she spun,
the memes apocryphal,
of racism and toxicity
and death and deep waters.
And yet when dawn
shows her fingertips of rose,
will we not find
that though the myth
was worse than the reality,
the reality is bad enough
for legends of its own.

Don't know why Homer popped into my head. I am feeling sad. Two people I talked to yesterday didn't know who Jonathan Swift was. These were educated people, and although Swift isn't the number one person in English lit, people should associate that name with Gulliver's Travels at least...

Today I feel trapped in one of Elliot's poems...

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And there I am...longing for a life of quiet and scholarship and no more high drama, and the only teenage angst would be memories of my own not easy transition into adulthood...ah well...life is what it is. Who knows where it will be by this time next year?