NOTES FROM THE CAFE FIASCO
Marshall T. Spriggs
Volume 26, Number 0, Winter Solstice 2019
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Annual Report – V26.0
I usually start these annual reports with a comment about the sun rising. However, these days I hardly ever see the sun rise. One of the great benefits of this time of life is that most days I get to get out of bed in the morning when I want to and, having never been an early riser, I take full benefit of this situation whenever I can. Ah, retirement!
Despite this, I can tell that it’s usually very dark in the mornings this time of year (the cat gets me up for a few minutes between 4:30 and 6am). And I can personally attest to the fact that the sun does set early because the Solstice is upon us. The circle of the Wyrd has brought us again to the bottom of the cycle. Time to wrap up the year so that we can look at what the Fates may bring us in the future.
Health
Reviewing the year, the most prominent focus in the house have been around health - more me than Denise and Harry the Cat, but none of us have gone untouched by this topic this year.
The good news of the year for me happened in January in that, after eight years, my radiation oncologist finally decided to kick me out and told me that there is a very minimal chance of my cancer coming back and that I didn’t have to see him anymore. Dr. Zeitman is a very careful man and wouldn’t use the C word (“cure”), but he did say that after three years of no prostatic activity I really don’t have to worry anymore. I don’t have to live with this everyday though, as with all cancer patients, it has left its mark and you never fully can forget it.
In other disease news, last year I reported that I had developed Graves Disease (a hyper-thyroid condition) that had gone into remission at the end of last year with the application of drugs. Well, this spring it came back again and, with it, having to start on the drugs again. The drugs seem to be doing their job yet again, but I will have to stay on them for at least another couple of years before we get another shot at putting everything back into balance without them.
Despite the progress in both these areas, I spent a lot of the year with a baseline sense of weariness that I couldn’t quite shake. At first I attributed this to the Graves, then to my allergies, and finally we found the culprit at the end of the year. After a number of years of being pre-diabetic, I had become officially “diabetic” (and had been for a year). Though I knew that this might be coming some day (my Dad was a diabetic and the disease runs in the family), it was somewhat of a shock to see that it had finally caught up with me. I’m now trying to figure out what this now means in terms of diet and exercise and the prospects of moving the blood glucose back to acceptable levels. This is reminiscent of what I did after the cancer diagnosis, but it is 13 years later and I don’t seem to be as flexible about doing it this time around.
Denise is in a continual balancing act to keep her migraines in check and during the late summer she fell off the balance with a round of nasty headaches. This was followed with a couple of weeks of nose bleeds (something else that she is also prone to). So, she wasn’t feeling too chipper during the summer either.
Not wanting to feel left out, Harry the cat decided during this part of the summer that he had to start throwing up with disgusting regularity. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell us what was wrong. But we finally traced this behavior to the fact that he had developed an allergy to some of his food. He still throws up occasionally, but it now seems to have more to do with hairballs than anything else.
I don’t know if this counts as health, but it was also during this period that the little yellow light on the dash of our 10 year old Nissan Versa started flashing. The problem? The car’s transmission was about to leave us. It had been a very good car for us, but it didn’t make sense to spend $4000 to repair a car that’s total worth was much less than that. So, we sent Versa Stella off to a charity and bought a “new” 3 year old Honda HRV. At the very least we needed reliable transportation to get back and forth to doctors’ appointments. The whole summer made me think a lot about entropy but by the fall things had substantially calmed down.
Work
After 3 years of being a teaching assistant in the Sustainability Program at Harvard Extension, my faculty and I decided that it was time for me to hit the road for further adventures outside of the “World’s Greatest University” (just ask us). This afforded me the opportunity to return to my working class roots yet again (a recurring bad habit).
I knew that my old friend Dean Athanas was running an “environmental” car service (all hybrid fleet) on the Cape, so I pinged him. Yes, he was looking for someone who lived in Boston specifically to deal with those people stumbling off of Logan red eye flights at 5am. This would involve me getting up at 3am once or twice a week to be sure that I was there should they come in early. So, of course, I said, “yes.”
So, I became a limo driver for the Green Shuttle of Cape Cod for nine months from the early spring through the summer and into the fall. As always, dealing with the general public is, how do we say it now, a “challenge” but, for the most part, I enjoyed it while driving 22,000 miles. I had some interesting conversations with passengers and got to know lots that I never imagined about Cape Cod (like many towns don’t have street lights - a revelation if you are driving around the winding roads of the Cape at 2am).
With the coming of winter, I’ve retired from this as well (getting to be a serial retiree until I get it right I guess) and now the cat and I hang around read, scribble, nap, and watch “Forged in Fire” on the History Channel together. I expect that this will continue at least until next spring depending on the situation (see Health section above).
Denise remains the Costume Crafts Artisan at the Huntington Theater Company, she still teaches at night in the Boston University Theater Department, and she does workshops in her studio and at places like the Eliot School in Jamaica Plain. The HTC is in the process of raising the money that it needs to renovate the 1920’s era theater that it received from real estate developers as a result of a complex deal cooked up after the theater’s divorce from BU a few years ago. Supposedly, this renovation happens in “a couple of years” once they raise the money to do it.
D was honored this spring as the Huntington staff that was the most awesome in 2019 winning the “Cohen Award.” This is bestowed at the HTC’s main fundraising gala in May and allowed us to rub elbows with many patrons of the arts that we wouldn’t normally be having a beer with. Interesting crowd. Almost all of them don’t live in Roslindale.
Marshall Arts
Sensei Don Laliberty is still indulgent enough to allow me to hack away in his Iaido sword class. Since I’ve been there so long,
I can no longer consider myself a beginner (especially seeing that I can now execute the difficult maneuver of returning the sword to the scabbard with decent regularity) and so I can now look forward to making increasingly minor modifications in my technique for the rest of my life. The key to mastery of the sword is repetition.
And embedding the firing of the nerves that control the movements of the body into the muscles is the key since the brain guiding the hand is too slow to make you an effective swordsman. How do you do this? You do the same motions over and over and over until you no longer have to think about them and then you make small improvements to make the motions better and more efficient. Attempting to control a couple of feet of rapidly moving steel can be very interesting, especially when there are a number of people around you attempting to do the same thing with various levels of success.
Is all this repetition boring? Not really. There are multiple ways that you can screw up every motion (I’ve done most if not all of them) and this keeps things engaging and the feedback on how you are doing is immediate. As with all martial arts, it all comes down to hacking the nervous system - something that I’ve been engaged in for over 50 years now - and something that continues to be fascinating to me. On the less lethal level, I haven’t been producing any visual art this year. I hope to rectify this in the coming new year. Much the same process, but a little less dangerous.
Environment
As we all know, climate change is going to be coming by 2050, er… 2030, er… okay, it’s here now. The polar ice cap is melting in the Arctic, as is the permafrost in Siberia. Boston is now experiencing flooding downtown during “northeasters” and tornados are happening in odd places like Louisiana and Cape Cod (and not the shark kind). The Greenland ice sheet is melting at a rate 17 times faster than what would be considered normal.
Over the long-term, the prospect of climate change is now no longer long-term. It’s now here. And 11,000 climate scientists wrote a letter a month ago saying just this. New Orleans is temporarily back, but will not stay that way as the ocean level continues to rise, no matter what the Army Corps of Engineers might build. Miami, which is zero feet above sea level, is going to eventually be lost to us and already experiences flooding during “king tides.” The Mississippi floods the food belt in the center of the country driving even more small farms out of business. And, of course, fire season in California is now all year long. We’re at crunch time, kids. And it’s not decades away. Ask anyone from California.
Thankfully, at least the kids have gotten the message and while the media focuses on the top of the policy food chain that has been locked up by the fossil fuel industry for years, the fact is that there is a lot going on at the lower levels to address the problem that doesn’t get covered. States, municipalities, non-profits, and even the energy economy as a whole is responding to the threat. The only questions are is this enough and how much time do we have before major league hell breaks loose. Doesn’t look to me like we have enough of either to keep us away from some significant damage. How bad is it going to be, hard to say. But it won’t be pretty for some people. Check your flood maps.
Zen
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been spending more and more time on my Zen Buddhism studies. I now have a formal student relationship with Roshi Melissa Myosen Blacker, an awesome Zen teacher in Worcester and I’ve been going on longer meditation retreats.
Meditation for hours a day when you have the squirrelly mind that I have is not easy, so I very much appreciate Roshi Blacker’s assistance in separating myself from the internal hamster wheel. Sitting meditation everyday (or at least attempting to sit every day) has had a number of positive results in my life. I tend to be less angry and dogmatic about my opinions. I also tend to be less trapped in my own thoughts and emotions. A number of emotional blocks have started to disappear or are easier to get around. I tend to be more compassionate toward my fellow humans. Good stuff. I hope that this will continue.
Politics
So, what can you say after enduring the political wrecking ball that is Donald J. Trump for three years? He’s the perfect negative example of what you would not want your children to become. And he’s also very powerful and therefore very dangerous. But we all know this, even a fairly large segment of the American population that supports him knows this.
I do have to say that I find it is hard to believe that half the American public has not woken up to the fact that they elected an authoritarian, and malignantly narcissistic, real estate developer from Queens to be President of the United States. How did anyone expect him not to be corrupt? How do you hand over the keys to the nuclear arsenal to a guy like this?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s sold the country out to other monied interests and, in fact, is really only interested in his own ego as represented by what he owns. He’s been taking the entire country to the cleaners for three years and somehow half the country still thinks that he’s going to lead us back to those good old Republican values of small government and fiscal responsibility.
That’s just stupid.
Hey, kids, the 50’s are not coming back and the United States, though still immensely powerful really is on the decline. The Donald isn’t helping. And the current administration is also in alliance with the totally self-serving Republicans who are only accelerating this process. You know: Greed is good. Putting kids in cages is going to make you safe. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. We all know the tune. Those old fashioned Republican values? Limited government? Balanced budgets? Deader than a doornail whether Donny is President or not. The train is headed to a Fact Free Future. The only question is whether we’re smart enough to get off. I find it, how do you say, disappointing that full one third of America isn’t.
Things in General
Despite some of the bad news that has happened this year, things are actually pretty okay here at 35 Amherst Street. I can’t say that it’s been an easy year, but we seem to have weathered things pretty well so far. I’m teetering on the edge of official old age here (at least me, not D) and, somehow, we are all still alive and I still don’t have to get up at a particular time most mornings. When I was younger I never thought that I would see this or get this old.
If I’ve learned anything over all these years, it’s that life can be surprising. One thing that’s been both surprising and constant has been the love and support that I’ve received from people like you and folks in general. This has kept me alive and from going completely over the edge more than once and I again thank you for it. I have come to rely on this support, just like I rely on the sun eventually coming up as I eventually crawl out of bed. It may be the nadir of the year, but at some point the wheel turns and the light returns.
Please receive profound well wishes from we here at 35 Amherst St - Denise, Harry, and me. Have a great Solstice and on into the Winter.
The light returns!
Much love,
MTS