452. Photographic Collection: Celebration of Papu Ray's Memorial and the Minnich Family, 2009, 2008, 2003 (Literature Discussion Leaked In)

Photographic Collection from Ray's Memorial (Riverside and Mount Baldy, California, July 12, 2009, as well as Ray's 96th Birthday in Corona July 2008 and a happy summer back in 2003.

The Blurb that I Wrote in Picasaweb:
Ever since my grandfather Ray's passing, I felt like a strong current in my mind and life had stopped flowing, a string of attachment to this world had been cut. But it's funny; though Ray has metamorphosed into new life and planetary cycles, the past flows of this mental river of Ray never seemed erased--perhaps now even more vibrant than ever. [Paradoxically chopped up, severaged, and reconverging into a new order] I returned to Riverside shielded by video cameras, digital cameras, voice recorders... knowing that this familiar home is somewhat foreign, now that one major character in my life has been removed... or altered into another state. Through loss, or perhaps, strange transformations (for me), I feel I have gained new, stronger currents... more closeness to my family than I had ever detected in myself before. Anyhow, the least I can do is construct a collage of the memorial and highlighted past adventures, which reflects a heightened consciousness and appreciation of family, as well as acknowledgment of inevitable change.

I emailed several of my family members--I don't have everyone's email, but whatever emails I could scrounge for--and I sent a long email to my aunt Jeri Lyn in Sebastopol. She vamped up her website http://www.dillindesign.com, and I can't wait to tell Barry Spacks about her work!!! Jeri Lyn had this funny line concerning her life-long moodswings as well as her attempts to differentiate "nothingness" and "pointlessness." That's SOOO funny. SOOO Beckettsonian, and something I SOOO get. My Ph.D. question is "What's the point?" in the first place.

I'm glad I performed this task of photo compilations. I feel I have delved deeper into the psyche of my grandfather Ray, preparing me for writing an upcoming story, "The Mountain's Last Flower," concerning the story of a scientist with a troubled history with personal walls and universal walls of perception and action. And due to these internal walls and borders and failure to address them and break them down, he defied his own childlike commonsense and his adult antirationality took his own life. The main character is not a mirror of Papu Ray, but certain elements mimick his circumstances, especially in terms of retroactivity of perception of the condition of his son John--the retroactive diagnosis of Asburgers.

Well, shxtso! I'm ruining the story! I better write it SOONER than LATER! Okay, I'll shut up now. I invented the story on the fly in a car drive, and through my conversations with Barry Spacks, I discovered I was crafting a character that summed my fundamental troubled relationship with science and scientists, as well as my attempts to understand the inner world of Ray. It was all very subconscious creativity... now taken into full blown consciousness. I am actually kind of shocked at myself.

Barry Spacks mentioned two things to me and the class. He noted in one of my poems in which "my writing became smarter than my own self," which I agree. And we also talked about the IMPORTANCE OF READING versus THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE. I argued that if I spent most of my life reading litrary classics, then reading would become my experience, and then there is no possibility of injecting novel input to the field of literature. And if I lived a life strictly of experience (without being well-read), then I can be majorly detached from the gestalt of human history (except for the stories told by people in real life). My combination of life is (1) experience, mostly with mountain and ocean boys and chics (2) reading scientific literature, being taught scientific ideas (3) barfing everything out in literature-art mode (4) retroactively being informed that I sound like Samuel Beckett. I told Barry that we have to unplug ourselves from the Matrix to bring new ideas into the matrix. If we read strictly classic literature, the field would be self contained, and the likelihood of anything new coming out of younger generations is close to minimal--especially if experience constitutes of being locked up in a classroom for 20 years (so I raise my hand, claiming to be victim of that). And then I argued, another horrible part about modern experience is that most of it is INDIRECT, as opposed to DIRECT. If you ask someone, "how did you spend your day?" they discuss the news they watched and this movie star did that, and that pro athlete took this type of dope, but did not talk about their own personal lives or experiences, like I talked with my neighbor about the tides and had an adventure up in the mountain and worked all day trying to make a gadget to improve fuel efficiency for my car. I could not write a glorious piece on tennis (for another person baseball), because I feel insulted that this society has come to glorify the most absurd sport of swinging at a ball to hit over the net with a stick of high surface area. Professional tennis players get paid more than teachers, etcetera. Society has made absurdity a CONVENTION. Granted sports is all about exercise of primal aspects of our brain, like socially acceptable forms of competition beside bloody warfare, but to make it the centrality of entertainment?! Come flipping on! I would rather go in my backyard with my friends and figure out, and invent a new sport. That would be more self amusing. And to think the psychological damage tennis was for the entire family, and so many familes who's mommies and daddies who want their little kids to become the next Venus Williams or Roger Federer. Like flipping whatever. Okay, okay. I'll shut up. The point is, I would be mortified to write a more rudimentary memoir of my life simply because the first 19 years of it, I was trapped, drowning in a largely consumerist mentality, largely consumerist society, physically and mentally. By the time I entered CCS, I started carving out a universe of my own. I was 19 years old, and that's when I felt like I was born, when my "self" and my "surroundings" was born to its truer state of consciousness. Right now I'm in a fiction phase in which I construct alternative fictional realities based on oversimplification of components of the current universe I live in, and through this fictional universe--I seek to discover new and greater truths about the world we currently live in. Tadah!

451. Notes of Higher Consciousness (aka Beyond Diary Entry Details) on my Grandfather Ray's Memorial July 12, 2009

The Death of Anonymous Meaning ~ Prose Poem?

She struggled so much to acquire knowingness, familiarity, comfort, even passion for existence within a once perceived foreign terrain, even the land of her birth rite. As soon as she crafted a web of associations, some layered map of values, attachments, meanings, she was soon after strangled, stripped, raped, deprived of this self-carved universe, partially to its entirety. It was as if all the thick-skinned layers of her mind were burned and ripped off, so that her inner thoughts and guts leaked out and oozed into an uncontained puddle of permanent deformity, while existing in a simultaneous fleeting state of psychocardiac arrest. Her surroundings as a whole were some ever-shifting, hauntingly pathological makeupbreakuper that she could barely cope with. This acquisition and subsequent stranding, displacement, death of a now anonymous meaning, which somehow resulted in the LACK OF her own death, transformed all things known to once again foreign, alien, massive entanglements… return to void.

Yet somehow, amidst periods of desolate change, she craves so hard to grasp, keep, tend new bycatch of her near empty mesh, remain undesensitized to these anonymous shiftings of meanings, even diminish meaning to being much less anonymous. She still seeks trust even though it hardly exists. Otherwise, she will become like most of the rest: savage waifs subsisting on fragmented islets of values, so willing to latch on, sunbathe for a while, so eager to swim away, abandon to the next seemingly fresh spot.

Many people live their lives
Through other people’s lives
Because they have no lives
Themselves.
—Jules (short poem, quote)

Endlife Metamorphoses (poem)

It’s easy to love a human being
Especially when he loves you back.
It’s agonizing to love
A decaying water sack.
And it takes a major dose of dreaming
To love a bag of dust
Beside a pine tree
Up in a mountain.

Some metamorphoses of life
Are pathetically metaphorical,
Yet starkingly true.

Nevertheless downright
Mentally incomprehensible.

Death of Anonymous Meaning, Part 1

It was the Death
Of Anonymous Meaning.
Pain universal,
Yet exclusive to me.

T’whole world gone amuck
Throbbing, screaming.
Yet no man on the street
Felt of any other human’s
Mourning.
Yet no man on the street
Knew of any other human’s
Passing.

Hooked on my mourning.
Caught on his passing.
Mourning of all minds
But t’mind was just mine.
But t’mind was sole mine.
Why t’mind was just mine?

All known, foreign
Once again.
Catch-hold, renew
Once again?

Death of Anonymous Meaning, Part 2, Grandfather

Why any other
brown box?
Just not another
Brown box.

Why any other
Bag of dust?
Just not another
Bag of dust.

For, a few months ago—
A breathing water sack,
A caring human being
Even then, before that,
Was my grandfather….

Why any other
Hole in the ground?
Just not another
Hole in the ground.

Why any other
Pine tree around.
Just not another
Pine tree around.

For, those long years ago—
He jumped the sugar pine
And passed torch to his son
Who’s aged growth came aligned
To a new growing….

Why any other
Red cabin?
Just not another
Red cabin.

Why any other
Bald mountain?
Just not another
Bald mountain.

For, a long time ago—
Now near abandoned tomb,
Terrain burned to the brain,
A childhood’s tended home
Of fathers, mothers,
sons, daughters….

Death of Anonymous Meaning, Part 3, Random Boy

Why any other
Two-faced boy?
Just not another
Two-faced boy.

Why any other
Impulse ploy?
Just not another
Impulse ploy.

For, a few months ago—
He crept into void’s tart,
And anonymous meaning
Wrapped cozily barbs
‘Round a squeeze
To near strangle,
Mostly me.

Why any other
Humored house?
Just not another
Humored house.

Why any other
Mooned-oak rouse?
Just not another
Mooned-oak rouse.

For, a few months ago—
With foothold in mind’s heart,
With a flip of a switch
He swiped out his dagger, (ripped apart)
Slashed abandoned (stabbed)
Burning forests,
Mostly me.

442. "Mindful of the Mountain" Song/Poem [Fragment?] of My Grandfather Ray HUB BLOG FOR RAY-MARION

Mindful of the Mountain Song/Poem. The PDF can be found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfulofthemountain.pdf.

I've written a few poems that have immense personal meaning in concern of my grandfather. It mainly started with "Two Generations Removed from the Land," which I frantically wrote in the middle of September, essentially during a panic attack session in the car, when I found out the Ray had a horrible "transfer" session from a Physical Therapy Center to the nursing center where Marion used to be--then he exclaimed over the phone to me "These centers just want to milk your money! They don't care about you!" and then my panic attack ended because though Ray had a bad day--slump--he was rebounding rapidly. Two other heavy poems I wrote were after Ray's passing, in which one was "Stepped off the Planet," and the other one was "Mindful of the Mountain," in which I have a ditty above, but I made a much lengthier song back in October of 2009, and I haven't had a chance to revisit the audio.

"Two Generations Removed from the Land" can be found in Blog 296

and the book "CHESS: The Poetry of Human-Environmental Change."

"Stepped off the Planet" can be found in Blog 387.

And of course, "Mindful of the Mountain" can be found right on this Blog 442!

Descriptions of a turbulent time during the passing of Ray are found in Blogs 349 and 350, as well as the Question Reality GoogleGroup.

It seems that each poem that I wrote for Ray had become more and more simple... and somewhat more emotionally profound in messaging (at least to me, personally). I am sure I have other unfinished fragments and ideas of poems and stories layng around. The poems showed that I was greatly attached to my grandfathr, in the best ways that I knew now.

During 2004-2007, I had written a few poems about my grandmother Marion, but they were along the lines of "Artificial Life," (I tried writing this poem twice, but rendered unsuccessful, something that needs to be done) or my level of disgust on how modern medicine was extending life to a point of visceral absurdity. If you rewind the clock two hundred years to a few thousand, my grandmother would have been first in the line of saber tooth catnip, flat out. She could barely function on her own. I told Jules last night that I cried at age 15 when I discovered Marion had Alzheimer's and I wrote a long report in my English class about Alzheimer's Disease (which seemed to make sense), but after that, I was emotionally flat and even cynical, as the whole family, especially Ray, went for a very long ride of ten-year decay. Other than that, my father told me that Marion was very instinctively caring and nurturing--housewife type--and Ray was more of a dominant fatherfigure of the household, but those were the times, and my father treated me and my sister as two kids who deserved the best of the best, whether we were a female, male, or or "it," whether we had four, six, or the magic number of 5 fingers.

I also happened to write a little bit about Marion when I sketched out a short story called "The Immensely Minor Passing of Cat-Kat," which is found in Blog 334.

402. Poem "Tipped Over Winnetka"

My green car tipped over Wittetka
and I looked to the fire-coated mountains
of southern California
in comfort with Fiona Apple,
"If you don't have a song to sing,
you're okay,
you know how to get along humming..."
And instead I shattered tears,
face red.
The bell was rung.
There was no going back.
I realized I lost my grandfather.

387. Poem / Song Called "Stepped off the Planet" (For My Grandfather Ray)

I stepped off the planet
W' my lungs full of fluids
Of my very own ocean
My petri of potion.

I stepped off the planet
My bones brittle broken
Of my very own mountain
Quite rigid of tendons.

I stepped off the planet
My wiring still firing
But my form just gave in
Yet circuits worth keeping--

So I stepped off the planet
With one more thing
On my to-do list--

But what's the point?
What's the point?

Life ran out of time
T'make all rhythms rhyme.


So I made a trip to hxll
To-meet Mark Twain o'er beer
Conversing, waiting for my son,
And my granddaughter.

So I made a trip to hxll
To-meet Mark Twain o'er beer
Conversing, waiting for my son,
And my granddaughter.

So my wiring kept firing
My wiring keeps firing
However do I please
Whatever my musings

My wiring kept firing
My wiring still firing
Is the very only thing
That was worth any-ah dxmn.

[For my grandfather, Ray]

350. Sketch Notes from the Passing of My Grandfather, John Ray Minnich, Age 96. Part II

(I started writing this about an hour before my grandfather’s passing).

Today is a day of Loss. And through the medium of Loss, by pure accidental opportunity meeting a prepared mind, or perhaps two prepared minds meeting in somewhat random circumstance, I have gained a new Love.

As I am writing these here words, it is the last moments of my grandfather’s life. Ray is currently in an intensive-care resting home in Long Beach, California, near by Saint Mary’s Memorial Hospital. My father and sister are there right now. I would be there right now, but it would be impractical for my 5-6-hour round trip drive when I am awaiting for a 10am class tomorrow morning. I refuse to miss any of Dr. Sam Sweet’s lectures. I know Ray would be pissed off if I did, had he been healthy and well right now. My grandfather is currently drowning in his own fluids within his lungs. He engorged in his own blood and phlegm, invaded with a soup of bacteria. I suppose an ephemeral woohoo for the bacteria, but a horrid road for my grandfather. He has low blood pressure: 70/40 (though stabilized). His pulse has been 140 beats per minute since last Saturday, when they started giving him a horrendous cocktail of antibiotics. My heart goes up that high after a long jog or intense bout of tennis or badminton. My sister, Jenny, inquired me in a dire, sarcastic tone: “How would you like to chronically jog nonstop for a week?” Uhhh, no. Ray, 96 years old, perhaps had run his body into 5 or 6 bouts of 26-mile marathons, given the pumping of his heart. As of now, either he drowns in his own fluids or his heart fails from a heart attack. He is obviously struggling to breathe. Two minutes without oxygen, you’re gone. I bet the mass accumulation of specialized and generalist cells in his body are all flipping out and gasping for existence. Does the entire body shut down right away, or are there still small islands of life remaining in the body for a little while? Is there some electrical charge that blew in the brain?

Dxmmit. No Darwin Award here for being killed by a hummingbird flying into your eye or a giant saw whamming into your car window while driving on the freeway. The small things get my grandfather in the end. As if a shifting baseline of gradual decay has mounted to some form of brutal extreme event of tragic dysfunction of parts of a once synchronistic and strong whole. All I can see with the weakening form of my grandfather is a Star Trek Spaceship calling out Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, awaiting it’s inevitable collision with a planet or another ship. Or as one graduate student described the modern human-environmental condition for Planet Earth as the Titanic about to crash into a massive iceberg.

And such is the condition of my grandfather. There is no way out of death. There is no way to cheat or bypass death. There is no Plan B. But then, the Plan B of evolution is living family: my grandfather’s brothers and their families, my father, my sister, my mother (in-law), my two cousins… and their kids…. Wow, my grandfather is a “great grandfather”…. It may be the passing of my grandfather, but in the end, he fulfilled the duty and “fitness” of evolution such that he was able to pass on a rehash of his genes into the next generation, with some pretty impressive results—at the moment. I know I inherited quite a bit from him, whether genetic or environmental. A high energy budget, the value of brains—whether intelligence took form of gee-wiz fun facts or abstract problem-solving. A stubbornness and meticulousness. A sticking to fundamental principles and values… no matter what. But heck, this is an essay on its own, I will touch upon later.

Knowing Death is Knowing Life. Knowing Life is Knowing Death.
Being trained by evolutionary biologists and geologists, I suppose we have rather strange, bizarre, yet “ultimate” views of life and death. We go from individual births and deaths, to births and deaths of societies, all the way expanded to mass extinctions and adaptive radiations. Talk about scale. But again, this is another essay to talk about.

For example, how do people define the “cause of death” when it ultimately ends up being a conditional chain reaction of events in space and time?

All I can say, whatever is happening now, represents about .05% of my grandfather’s existence in his long life. My grandfather is in fetal condition during two times of his life: (1) now, age 96 (2) when he was born, 1912. That’s it. The rest of the time, he was an extremely intelligent, strong, independent-minded individual who understood the landscapes, contributed to the community, and raised a strong family.

It seems like the Last Bout of Medical Care ends up being some form of Mind-numbing Protocol of Medieval Brutality. My grandfather Ray deteriorated from the use of heavy antibiotics, not from the early stages of pneumonia. They should have just given him amoxicillin. Apparently my grandmother Marion went out in a more “painful way.” My mother claims that she was “awake” and “convulsing” the entire time. I had a flashback to my good friend Lauri’s partner Claudia (who used to work in a nursing facility), who mentioned that people don’t croak instantly, but ultimately takes days for the different organs and parts to shut down. And they’re just kinda laying there, convulsing as their form starts to shut down. My grandmother had been largely a vegetable the last year or so before her passing, so claiming that she was awake, measured by here “eyes wide open” doesn’t mean much to me. I remain quite skeptic of her “level of consciousness.” Even though Ray right now may have his eyes closed—though he opened them once yesterday to acknowledge my presence—I have a notion that Ray is much more conscious of what is going on now than what Marion went through. After seeing what I saw yesterday, I honestly think that Going Out by Car Crash seems more glamorously painless than this.

My mother also explained to me in my grandmother Kiki’s Last Bout of Medical Care, she essentially did not pass from cancer, but her form stopped functioning due to the pain induced from the forced-in feeding tube. Mama said (pardon my lack of consistency) that Kiki’s skin around her face looked like fried meat. Mama claimed that Kiki died a painful death, and that people attempted to “put make up” all over her face, but you could see the remaining facial expression telling another more gruesome story otherwise. But then again, how do we define happy or a sad facial expression. Being worn on a body that is no longer moving? Come on, Mama! That’s a value judgment. Kiki had no control of that facial expression. I’m sorry.

Hospitals are Mass Production Factories of Life and Death. Patients are part of the assembly line. Doctors and nurses don’t see you as a human. They don’t have the capacity to when they see a few hundred humans every single day. You’re a number. You’re a statistic. You’re a “next,” “next,” “next.” They mindlessly plunge oxygen tubes down your nose and shove feeding tubes in your stomach. I don’t know what My Fate shall be. It’s not a matter of “if” it’s more so “when and where and how.” The “how” part will most certainly not factor in the Mass Production Assembly Line of hospital treatment. But I have a long to-do list before that happens. The longer I live, the longer I see a value in keeping my genes in the gene pool. I might engage in an egg-donor situation. I can’t take care of kids. Dogs. Plants. Caterpillars. Nada. I can barely take care of myself. My very own mind!

It’s as if Ray’s form, skinny-stick form, a relict of my own anorexia, pale-white, as if he were some living ghost of a body of a Jew from the Holocaust. I suppose it’s a horrid analogy, for our family is not Jew-affiliated (though I have many Jewish friends), but my grandfather was a researcher for Shell Chemical during World War II, and I am sure he was indirectly involved in saving many people’s lives (at least from the Non-Nazi side).

I talked to my father on the phone today for quite a bit. I will have to call T-Mobile and ask them for a Grace Period this month due to the death of my grandfather. Besides my bxtching and griping about a challenging meeting with one of my advisors, which led to my elaborated encounters with two other very solid-minded professors… my father started making a long-to-do list in concern of “what shall happen.” He informed me that only the immediate family knows about what is going on, and apparently there was already a Game Plan in action in terms of “who will call who” as soon as the Event occurs. Uncle Dwight will inform his lineage of the family. My father will call Ray’s close friends: neighbor across the street and peanocle friends at the park. I suppose my father will also call Uncle Bob (retired Anthropologist in Norway) and Judy (in San Diego), and the other lines of the family, like Chuck’s side. Apparently two weeks ago Ray pointed out to my father (now Bub) the place where Marion was cremated, and that he should do the same with his form. I just found out today that my grandmother’s ashes were distributed into the ocean.

Wow, my grandmother is part of the chemical soup of the ocean. Maybe she’s incorporated proteins in some phytoplankton or zooplankton. Maybe some of her chemicals are now part of some shark or a Blue Whale. Marion’s diffuse components are circulating in this vast, global swimming pool. She liked the ocean much more than the mountains, though Ray and Bub would have preferred her placement under a pine tree at the Cabin of Manker Flats of Mount Baldy (same here), Ray did a private ceremony and released her ashes into the currents of the ocean breeze and water.

To resume my father’s to-do list, he made a decision to do a personal ceremony of placing my grandfather’s ashes underneath a sugar tree behind the Cabin. Uncle Ralph’s up there to, by a Ponderosa pine. I guess I’m going to have a lot of my family living up there, incorporated into Tree Biomass of the San Gabriel Mountains. Well, at least trees live for a long time. It’s a more concrete system than an ocean. Talk about some epic form of Ecological Reincarnation. Geodegradeable: it all recycles in the end. Who knows? Maybe some of my body used to be part of some T rex body a few million years ago. I suppose life recycles its chemistry parts through time. I think my dad and I want to be in part birds, but I know for sure we will both go to Visit Hxll and have an Epic Conversation with Mark Twain at a bar, over home-made beer.

I’m not even being religious. I’m being tangible about these thoughts. Kyle asked me if I were religious. I said no. Then I asked, “Are you?” Kyle said no. I said, “As a scientist, it’s best to say ‘I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.’ That’s what Dr. Schneider from Stanford got away with saying and it was well received by an entire room of journalists at an international science conference.

The other thing that my father will do is hold a Memorial service (hopefully after all this Holiday-ing) and that he will inform the newspaper of Ray’s passing. At first Bub was hesitant, and I said, “No, it’s not right. Ray contributed a lot to the community of Long Beach. You have an obligation to inform the newspaper of his passing.”

For a moment today, I thought about the Illusion of Fame, and if I ever had a conversation with Dr. Sam Sweet, I would tell him that if I croaked right now, I bet there are only about five humans on this planet who would ever bat an eye or even alter their step from their pre-existing pathway.

Sometimes I hate being a human. As if we were some form of accidental hyper-creative byproduct of evolution, and sometimes I think it does no good for anything for me to think about my thinking—though I have a notorious tendency to do so. It can be self-defeating sometimes.

Depending on how optimistic or pessimistic people are, I think humans will remember “the last good day” rather than the last bad. Last bad days are inevitable to happen, but you can frame your mind to hierarchize your memories and recall the disproportional number of good days.

So, in strange, twisted ways, a Day of Loss has led to a Day of Found… of Love. Yes, “love.” The word that I rarely use. I witnessed Ray Bradbury speak of how his relationships of love ultimately fostered and was the foundation of his writing. “The key to writing is love,” if only they could sell that as a bumper sticker, *sigh.*

Love takes various mysterious forms, sizes and shapes and colors and textures. The Hollywood standard definition of Love for a tall female in her twenties predictably takes the form of an even taller, young, athletic, handsome male. But Love is more so a state of Reality, a Beautiful Bower of the mind that can be constructed independent from True Reality. Love is an Adventure of Magnanimous Proportions that has no creative and intellectual and physical boundaries. And given this definition that is far beyond the housing of a physical body, I do indeed state amidst the Chaos of Loss, I have found Love.

You will never know when you will find Love, but you will know you will have found it within a few minutes, within an hour—within a lengthy two hour conversation—sealed by the warmth and firmness of a handshake that embodied Trust and Growth, but so firm that it could potentially symbolize a helping hand to (Academic) Survival in times of falling. I don’t mean to sound superstitious or endorse “smoking gun reasoning” or anything, but Claudia Carbonell, an instructor at Barbizon in Los Angeles, once told me that you can tell the condition of Love by the mere first shake of a hand. All I can say is that meeting Love and a Penetration and Syncing and Aligning of Cognitive Maps of souls yesterday—this finding of connection, communication, meaning, in all spectrums—made all the worth of the pain of meeting 200 people the last three months, in which only each person would give me a piece, a fragment of the larger puzzle of my mind.

A sour meeting with one professor led to the discovery of two different professors (my grandfather Ray wants me to resume my academic life!), to which one—seemed to be the beginning of an Academic Adventure I would have never dreamt of otherwise. A mind can be another world, an epic, beautiful journey—all contained within one brain?

It’s funny to think that sometimes asking REALLY STUPID QUESTIONS can actually get you somewhere. Like, why do humans artificially select the cute fuzz-balls to conserve rather than the slime molds? Why do I have fear of velociraptors? Like, why do I need to eat? Back in the days of physical manifestation of anorexia, this stupid question was no laughing matter. Somehow in this day of age, the really stupid questions seem to have become really profound.

296. Poem / Song for My Grandfather Ray: Two Generations Removed from the Land, and Extra Poem "Story to Tell"

My grandfather, John Ray Minnich, 96th birthday, in Corona, California.
Black and white photograph of the same.
Two Generations Removed from the Land. Shifting Baselines in my personal life. Page 1.
Two Generations Removed from the Land. Shifting Baselines in my personal life. Page 2.

PDF file of the poem is here...

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/twogenerationsremovedfromland.pdf.

Two or three nights ago, I was bawling and crying because three of my family members portrayed that my grandfather "lost a will for life" and was content with where and what he was, even though he was weak and had a urinary catheter in him. That night, the piano was my best friend. And so was my sister. I had come to realize that tragic and chaotic emotional conditions can render very beautiful music and very beautiful art. And it is completely chaotic and spontaneous. So, whenever I am in an unstable emotional condition, I should harness these emotions into productive pieces of art--created out of context.

I visited Ray yesterday and he told me this, with a twinkle in my eye: "You know what, Victoria? Let me tell you how bad it is in this resthome. They did the same with your grandma Marion. All they care is that they put the client in a position such that they can milk as much money off of you as possible until you croak. They don't care about your happiness. So, I gotta get the hxll out of here and back to Long Beach, with a live-in caretaker." This is condensed and paraphrased, but the apparent "loss of will to live" was replaced with enormous willpower. Ray was also disturbed that the caretakers let him sleep in till 4pm, and he had things to do and needed to be productive during the day. Otherwise, Ray was very happy to see me, and I was very happy to see him. I wrote out the final version of the poem in his room.

I had constructed the chorus of the poem "Two Generations Removed from the Land" back in Fall of 2006, during my Medieval Dark Periods. Thankfully the Dark Age only lasted one year, but ended up being two, from 2005-2007. I created a beautiful melody, but had absolutely no clue how to finish or elaborate the poem/song. Then, a few nights ago, when I was collapsing emotionally, the song came back full-fledged, and I realized that this song was about the slipping connection with the land, from my grandfather's deep-rootedness, to my father, and back to myself. It was a personal Shifting Baseline within three generations of the family. When I create a documentary about my grandfather, my father, and I, and the concept of shifting baselines with memory of the landscapes, this song will be within the movie, as well as this poem:

Story to Tell

If you-got, a story to tell

Say it once, and say it well

Then allow the "technology"

To go repeating. Repeating. Repeating.

If you got, a story to tell

Say it once, and say it swell.

Then the nuts-and-bolts of the system

Go on tweaking. And shifting. And tweaking.

Then the methods, of the madness

Add layering. Of order. To some degree.

To some degree.

I am happy that I included in the "Two Generations" poem about how I was born and raised in "Disney's Cloud" and I had to rationalize my ways "to come on down," which is ultimately a satire on a Disney/Pixar song played at the end of the Wall-e film. I do say Wall-e is a Pixar film, not a Disney film. The values and implications of the film are so tremendous, I ended up walking from the film, telling Tariel: "I think this means that Disney is going to bulldoze all its theme parks and turn it into artificial ecosystems of 'wild' lands."

Bonus Set of Family Images from Photobucket Compiled for my sister Jenny:

http://s202.photobucket.com/albums/aa109/stokastika/familycollectbubcentricforjenny121907/?start=all