New Year's Resolutions, the DOABLE kind

Big Frank has in the past always made some New Year's resolutions. Usually they have centered on the usual list: weight, exercise, increase this, decrease that, add this, eliminate that . . . you know the usual kind. So THIS YEAR Big Frank was thinking - why not think off the list, as it were. Nothing to do with elimination - no emetics, thank you. And no painful additions of the kind that even though it hurts to do it (you know like eating brussel sprouts, or running 10 miles every morning before 6:00 am) it in some is believed to be good for you. No, nothing of the sort this year. This year it's all about making me happy by doing more of those things that I already enjoy. Typically New Year's resolutions involve an attempt to not do something. Not this list - it's all about doing. So Big Frank suggests that as an approach to making resolutions this year - do more of what already makes you happy. What are Big Frank's? I suppose that anything over 7 would be approaching a top ten thing, and that is too derivative so only seven (for now):

1. Spend more time with more people (Big Frank likes people)
2. Spend more time outdoors in the fresh air (starting tonight with night snowshoe trek)
3. Say what you think (Big Frank likes speaking his mind and he thinks a lots so this is good)
4. Be happy (Abe Lincoln says that all you have to do is decide to be this and it happens - we shall see!)
5. Travel more (OK, Big Frank already travels a huge amount, but he likes it so . . . MORE)
6. Write more (Poetry, interviews, and blog ---- you all have been forewarned)
7. Sleep more/Dream more/ (Who doesn't like sleeping and dreaming?)

Now this will be a New Year to look forward to; feel free to share your resolutions with Big Frank.

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL OF YOU OUT THERE IN BLOGGERLAND

Some Good Questions!

Big Frank got these from a good book full of questions (The Book of Questions). Here are some of his favorites:

1. If you could have free unlimited service for five years from an extremely good cook, chauffeur, housekeeper, masseuse, or personal secretary, which would you choose?
2. Would you be willing to give up sex for one year if you knew it would give you a much deeper sense of peace than you have now?
3. Would you like your spouse (partner) to be both smarter and more attractive than you?
4. Do you prefer being around men or women? Do you closest friends tend to be men or women
5. What would constitute a perfect evening for you?
6. How many times during the day do you look at yourself in the mirror?
7. If you wanted to look very sexy, how would you dress?
8. Which would you choose if it had to be one or the other: one intimate soulmate and no other close friends, or no such soulmate and many friends and acquantences?
9. If 100 people were chosen at random, how many do you think you'd find leading a more satisfying life than yours?
10. Were you able to wake up tomorrow in the body of someone else, would you do so? Whom would you pick?

Feel free to send Big Frank your answers.

On the trail

Big Frank took Gina out snowshoeing today. It was her first time, but she managed the trail like a pro; while her dad was the one who fell. Great day for mushing through the woods - in the mid 20s with a bright sun overhead. Big Frank is now waiting for that moon to wax into its fullness so he can head out on the trail in the moonlight - maybe a good way to bring in the new year, away from the crowds and noise.

Astrological Dilemma

Astrological Dilemma (The Virgin to the Bull)
---- Big Frank Dickinson

Summer stretches perpetually between us;
You on the horns of your dilemma
And me hovering on wings of adaptability;
An angel of persistence aching to receive

Your warm venereal breath lisping
Insistently of lingering silk.
Me - ruled by Mercury; oh so mutable;
You by Venus and the breeze of love.

Some say that it is Ceres, the goddess of growth
That truly rules us both, but in that case
Why such a long cold winter?
How long can the sun withhold its rays?

Bring the half-cup of your flowering horns
To this angel on the lam, wings still spread.
Be my yin, the fecund earth beneath me,
And I will be your coming summer sleep.

Midholiday musings

Big Frank has seen Christmas come . . . and go. It's funny how this holiday is supposed to one of peace, love, and giving; yet for so many it brings stress, nostalgia, and disappointment. Big Frank thinks that this is a remnant of one's youth, when the holiday truly was a magical time - a time when all routines were broken in a refreshingly bright way, when wishes and hopes rose, and family traditions brought everyone together. As we age the routines vary, wishes and hopes get tempered and family traditions change. Instead of carrying one's own hopes and wishes, the holiday becomes the challenge of fulfilling the wishes and hopes of those loved ones that depend on you. It is funny how those desires of others replace your own and in some way one's own limitations in the difference you can make in others' lives gets accented more and more. This coupled with the knowledge that there really is nothing magical about this time brings a certain melancholy to the season. Of course, especially for those who are not religious, the above mentioned combination can result - in sum - in a holiday that in some ways is a combination of loss plus glaring limitation. For way too many it becomes a time, a season to weather with as much good cheer as one can muster. Big Frank thinks that there is a way around this. Click here for the solution.

Merry Christmas

Big Frank had the pleasure of spending Christmas with family and a good friend. It is a time of the year, whatever your religous views, that centers on goodwill, good thoughts, and connections. Big Frank was lucky to have his mother and her husband with him along with his daughter, and his good friend, Magne.

However, given this emphasis that this blog has on poetry, it seems appropriate to put in some lines of poetry that fit the season. These are not necessary Ho Ho Ho lines, or amazing grace has lit upon us, or green spangles and jingly bells etc.; no, they are lines that carry good solid messages that are worth thinking about and that could apply anytime, but given that this time of the year we want to think that we have substantial thoughts - well, these are substantial - so think about them.

"Love in full life and length, not love ideal,
No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name,
But something better still, so very real . . ." Lord Byron

"If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream,
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time." Rainer Maria Rilke

"I miss it so much
No button to touch
No dial to turn
No key to hold" Royksopp

"If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen." Jane Hirshfield

.

"Life on earth is quite a bargain.

Dreams, for one, don't charge admission.

Illusions are costly only when lost.

.

The body has its own installment plan.

And as an extra, added feature,

you spin on the plantets' carousel for free,

and with it you hitch a ride on the intergallactic blizzard,

with times so dizzying

that nothing here on earth can even tremble." Wislawa Szymborska

Remember: What it is!

Home

Tucked Into the Warmth
---- Big Frank Dickinson

Tucked into the warmth, full without ambition,
Like a bowl of popcorn without butter,
A mission-less angel, missile in silo,
Or dart nestled in its bulls-eye home.

Having arrived - no matter the time,
No matter the place, the silence
Is as quietly deceiving as
Crickets crying next next next.

From "H" to "M"

Agent Hope---- Big Frank Dickinson

". . . Falling through your whole life, you are breaking apart . . .
But in the round shape of the wheel is the idea which is the bone upon which the flesh of the wheel is fixed . . ." Russell Edson

Agent Hope was assigned to him after desire awakened, and disappointment appeared in the mirror. Agent H, let's call him, wore seersucker suits with a panama hat, and carried himself with a swagger. In one hand was an unlit cigar and while it never did get lit, still he appeared ready to smoke it when it did. He followed his charge only intermittently, having a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time and then, often reappear after some horrible setback when he would whisper in the fallen's ear, an ear that until then only heard loss, how that fall could be turned. Agent H would give him this kind of stuff: "Look at the H in hope: its upward reaching sidebars need to be restrained, lowered and centered - and when it is you can make a poem out of it." Agent H was full of those kinds of convoluted kernels. Still, odd as it may seem, they took root. The man began to be guided in his desires less by hope and more by poetry. Sometimes he rhymed, often not; more often he found his syncopated, quick-footed dance and its reverberation with all that surrounded him satisfying and pleasurable, even if he could never really say why.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Do Wacka Do
---- Big Frank Dickinson

"Yeah, I see you’re goin’ down the street in your big Cadillac,
You got girls in the front, you got girls in the back,
Yeah, way in back, you got money in a sack,
Both hands on the wheel and your shoulders rared back
root-doot-doot-doot-doot, do-wah," Roger Miller

Smoothness and a chipper disposition rode on his shoulders. Of course, the weather also helped - those sunny days, that warm breeze, and the regularity of it all. "All luck", some said; and he, "So what, I'll take it, who wouldn't?" Days stood up for him, at attention and served him well in the form of a clean conscience, limited imagination, and an unflinching ability to sit in the middle of where he actually was. This ploppiness, as he called it, always revealed through some amount of patience, learned at a cost of potentially lost opportunites, initially unnoticed lurking possibilities. It was with these weeds, as he called them, that he made his life: toast without butter, moles with hairs emerging, lazy eyes, and dripping facucets. Nobody saw these things - what they saw was the glint in his eye, the bounce in his step, and the way his eyes embraced them "A clean windshield, and shiny shoes": that had been his mantra - not so much something that he sought but outward signs of preparedness and attention to detail, which he did not so much pay attention to as keep in mind as a linguistic touchstone to being on track. In actuality he rarely washed his car, but that didn't stop it from running - that is, until those trucks plowed into him.

Is this a dream?

What Kind of Dream Is This?
---- Big Frank Dickinson

He was very big on bifurcation and certainly nobody could dispute the truth of life = dreams + waking life. Yet, he always reminded himself that most of everything was all in the second category: all our plans, our self-esteem, our relationships, our ideas of self-improvement, our regrets, our love interests, our . . . (there are lots more). Dreams it seemed to him were a form of life that was not taken very seriously. Maybe, he thought, that was because dreams were viewed as completely outside of our control - kind of like the weather, unlike our personalities, which we tended to feel were of our making; but, were we not just kidding ourselves (about how much control we really had (in waking life).

So he took control of his dreams (it's a long story how - not for now). They became predictable, because he, like most people, liked a set scene, with a reliable cast of characters, and the dreams were limited by his conscious imagination, which - let's face it - is no way near as wild as what comes up from your wacky whatever. His dreamland was like the life that the proverbial people who abandon their current setup, family and friends and move to a distant city, only to recreate the exact thing that they ran away from. Eventually, of course, he could not tell the difference between his waking life and his dreams. One was only a slight variation on the other - bigger house in one, smaller mate in the other, three kids in one, only two in the other, red toaster vs black, ski holidays vs diving, and so on.

In time when he went to sleep he packed a lunch, and called his wife in the middle of the night to see if she wanted to have breakfast when they woke.

I am not my personality - yeah, right.

I Am Not My Personality
---- Big Frank Dickinson

He kept saying that he was not his personality. He was not sure exactly what he was; sometimes he thought that he was nothing and that certainly was not his personality. You know, the Buddist thing about the self being the absence of everything. But his friends made fun of that, and anyway, who can have an image of nothing? Well, you can imagine an empty room, but it's still a room. Then there is empty space - like those big gaps in the universe, but that was still surrounded by stuff. Then he thought nothing was all about what isn't - so he went with that. About the best image he could come up with was everything that he was not: without desire, consistent, eternal, infinite, everwhere, all knowing, completely self-sufficient in everyway, and absolutely knowling of itself. But this drove him nuts, because that meant that he was what he wasn't and how could that be? What kind of world is that he found himself in where in actuality he was everything that in his mind he thought he wasn't. This was too neat - so he concluded that he was probably some of the things that he thought he wasn't: he chose - eternal, and infinite (they seem to go together), but rejected the others. This made sense and gave him hope; if he was eternal then in time he would probably figure the rest out. His real self thought this was a riot!

Prose Poem - "Synchronicity"

Synchronicity
---- Big Frank Dickinson

6:02 am, he wakes, when in a small city 200 miles to the south a young woman is also awaking and reaching for the alarm, as across the globe in Osaka a sushi chef reaches for his knife and is cutting a thin slice of yellow fin tuna, as that tuna's mother slices a parrot fish in half swallowing one half while the other drifts slowly to the bottom, as on the surface directly above in a sailboat's galley the ground's of the captain's coffee sink to the bottom of his cup, which has a yellow tuna and the words "TUNA MAN" written in exactly the same script as the accountant's business card, who at this very moment in Samarkand is setting his alarm and going to sleep with thoughts of the number 602 in his head, exactly the amount of money that a woman in the Couer d Lane casino is seeing pour out of a slot machine, which was made by a company called Tuna Alarm at the bottom of a hill in the industrial half of Kandarsam, Ohio, address 602 Osaka Street, on which there is also a post office, which has a PO Box number 602, in which is a letter addressed from Global Reach and addressed to Lane Chef with an appeal to save wild parrots, one of which at this very moment in Brazil is sitting on a branch across from another parrot who at this moment is waking up for exactly the 602nd time in its life, and immediatly falling down as the axes of the coffee plantation's expansion slice through the surface of the tree, the wood of which will make the next bed that he orders online for his guest room in a couple of years, days - 602.

Then 206 days later while in Ohio he meets a woman, an accountant, whose father comes from Samarkand, and sells Yellow Tuna to Japanese sushi chefs. He is alarmed that she is unhappy with her recent Brazilian bed she won in a casino, and she at his reluctance to contribute to the wild parrot fund. They then look at each other and say, in unison: "What are the odds"? They know they were meant for each other - it was meant to be.

Prose Poem

Big Frank has been reading more prose poems. Here's a good one from Peter Johnson. Read it the first time, and then ask yourself: "How does that make me feel?" Then read it again and ask yourself: "Why?"

A Ritual as Old as Time Itself
by Peter Johnson

There's a man flying his wife. He's been at it for the last year of their marriage. With one end of the string around her heart, the other around his fist, he scurries up and down the shoreline.
A year ago, his wife yelped at the first tug, but now she seems content, as if she'll never come down.
And the man? He's so happy he wants to fly her all the time. But just as he considers this, the sand beneath his feet gives way. He's unable to run, and his wife begins a slow descent.
"No," he yells, "it's not fair. It's only been one year, you flew me for two."
"Now, now," she says, making a perfect landing. "You'll get used to being in the air again, and, unlike you, I promise to be very gentle on that first tug."

Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter in Spokane

Big Frank spent the afternoon (along with 100 others) with two terrific writers, both national book award winner, who are native to Spokane. They were giving a reading at Aunties, Spokane's locally owned bookstore. The room was full, standing room only, and both gave funny and heart-warming readings, with plenty of local references to keep the crowd from Spokane happy. When Sherman noticed some young folks from a town where he used to live he struck up a conversation with them, and finding out who they were - he told one of them that he had made out this the guy's aunt! Walter read an extended demographic piece on Spokane which helped him explain to himself, and the audience why it was that he still lived in Spokane, even after all his success as a writer. Walter only read one piece, Alexie, read about 6 of his poems - all much appreciated. The best line, which Big Frank can only remember in paraphrase was from Sherman's poem entitled "Late Night Phone Call From a Former Girlfriend", which ended with this couplet:

"What we really most want for ever more
Is to be wanted by those we wanted before."

Here's another poem of Alexie's recently published in Valparaiso Poetry Review:

HOMILY
by Sheman Alexie
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Desire is the inconvenience of its object.
Lourdes isn’t Lourdes if you live in Lourdes.”
—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

How often have I walked through my front door
And forgotten to exult? Why won’t I roar
For all of the objects that I adore?
When did I stop praising the books I hoard
And the bookcases, lovingly restored?
Why do I ignore the baskets and gourds?
O, Lord, let my love for things be reborn.

Let me sanctify my shirts and coats, adorned
With feather, paint, and bead. Let me sing for
The star quilts piled on the beds and floors.
I own so much yet want for so much more.
Why do I treat my possessions with scorn?
From this day forward, let us be forewarned:
Lourdes isn’t Lourdes if you live in Lourdes.

Love by Milosz

Big Frank has been reading poetry lately by Czeslaw Milosz, the nobel prize winning poet. Milosz wrote in Polish, but often translated or worked with the poets who translated his poems into English - the translations are very good. Here is a poem he wrote on love. It's a different view, and one puts the accent on understanding oneself by stepping out of the mind-lock so many fall into whereby they only see themselves from their own perspective - a tough nut to crack, but one that allows one, as Milosz understands, to truly love.

Love
by Czeslaw Milosz

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

It's COLD outside

Big Frank is cold. OK, winter is coming, and when it's winter and you live in Washington state, you will experience cold. Still, even knowing that it was coming; Big Frank is cold. He was thinking this morning about one of those questions that people ask, you know, when you are asked to choose between two equally disagreeable outcomes, like would you rather lose your right hand or your left one, or would you rather be left alone in the desert or in the jungle? Well, one more of these asks, would you rather be really really cold, or really really hot? Right now, Big Frank would rather be really really hot. However, it's cold Big Frank is experiencing and writing about so how about some tips on how to best handle the cold?

Tips On How To Best Handle The Cold
A. Ideal but probably not realistic:
1. Eat as much as you can, grow (or buy) a thick winter coat, reduce your body temperature and find a hole in the ground where you can hibernate,
2. Go to Singapore
3. Sit in your bathtub full of hot water with a stocking cap on.

B. OK, getting real now
1. Behavioral things to do
a. Eat high energy food; it increases your heat production
b. Exercise; it also increases your heat production
c. Shiver - this can increase heat in your muscles up to five times (but can cool your core from loss of blood) - not a good thing long term!
d. Wear multiple layers of clothing - the trapped air in between acts as insulation.
e. Wear a hat (over 50% of heat loss occurs through you head!)
f. Mittens will keep your hands warmer than gloves
g. Light a candle (they produce a lot of heat)
h. Cook! This warms the house - and you get to eat those calories
i. Take a hot shower or bath and then put lotion on your skin; it acts as insulation
j. Use a humidifier - it can increase the apparent temperature in your home by 15%
k. Find a friend (a close one!) to snuggle with; any warm blooded creature is a furnace unto itself

Finally, Big Frank welcome more tips from all of you readers out there. Let's beat this cold. One last thing - Big Frank is not sure what the effect of poetry is on the cold; he's still ruminating on that one.