Haiku Friday

By Mary Lowry

It’s Friday, so take some creative time for yourself and write a haiku.

The Rules: Haiku consist of three lines.
The first line has 5 syllables.
The second line has 7 syllables.
The third line has 5 syllables.

Haiku often contain references to nature, and the third line may hold a surprise, an unexpected twist.

Schaefer’s Ambulance
takes you where you need to go
for the smallest fee

Now it’s your turn, readers. Go to the jump and give up your best haiku in the “Comments” section.

Read More

Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs—Your New Favorite Band

By Keesha Davis

You may not have heard of Star Anna yet, but you will.  And if you have and have been fortunate enough to see them live, you know how damn lucky you are.  Star is well-known around the Seattle area as a talented vocalist with a heavy duty soul.   Star and her music (pretty much one in the same) are powerfully raw, lovely and tender, shy and ready to put it all out there in all the right ways.  I was lucky enough to see Star Anna and her band the Laughing Dogs play at the Historic Columbia City Theater in Seattle on July 23, 2010.  For those of you who don’t know about the theater, apparently Jimi Hendrix played there before anyone had heard of him.  The distinct possibility of being able to draw a parallel between Hendrix’s and Star Anna’s humble Washington beginnings to eventual well-loved rock legends sometime in the near future had gotten me all giddy for the show.   I don’t exaggerate (well, sometimes I do, but not right now) when I say that the entire night I had the strong feeling that I was watching my favorite local band at the beginning of a new road…on the verge of making it big.   I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more right now.  I’m not the only one.  A quick look at their website will show you that the legendary Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) and Duff McKagan (Guns ‘n’ Roses) are right there with me.   In fact, September will find the band in Stone Gossard’s (Pearl Jam) Studio Litho to record their third album, featuring McCready.  Plenty more about their upcoming record in part two of this series.  Needless to say, you’ll want to buy it as soon as it comes out.  Here is a video taken by Layne Freedle (Outlaw Digital Media) of one of the new songs, For When I Go, that will be on that record.

Read More

Nurse Jackie: on Sinners who are also Saints

By Mary Lowry

Edie Falco, best known for her role as Carmela Soprano, stars in the Showtime television series Nurse Jackie.

In the pilot (which aired on June 8, 2009 and was Showtimes most successful premiere ever), Nurse Jackie, a no-nonsense nurse working at All Saints hospital in NYC, demonstrates her ability to show both a hard edge and a bottomless well of compassion. And she doesn’t hesitate to work as a sower of dark justice and good, taking risks to create small renegade reparations in an unjust world. She doesn’t hesitate to falsify a dead patient’s driver’s license to make him a registered organ donor, or steal a violent perpetrator’s wallet and give the cash to a recently widowed pregnant woman. A student nurse wonders aloud if Nurse Jackie might indeed be a saint. But if Jackie is a saint, she is one from the order of St. Augustine who lives by the mantra: “Dear God, make me good, but not just yet.”

Read More

Orthodontia

By Reba Saxon

Teeth with Braces

I am convinced that had I not had the meddlesome and sausage-like fingers of one Dr. Blackwood in my mouth at the age of 13, my face would work better today, including lusher lips. Judging from my sons’ faces, lips like Angelina Jolie.

At my age, lip lushness is an issue. Why is it that lips get narrower and narrower with age? Why can’t they be like ears and noses that continue to grow throughout our lives? I’ve even heard that those appendages continue for a while after death, although I can’t imagine who is circulating that rumor, nor how they would be checking its veracity.

When I was 12, my mother was told that I had an overbite that rivaled a rabbit, but looking at my front teeth now I can’t imagine it. Who told her? Our dentist, who lived in our neighborhood and ran off and left his wife and children for his hygienist. His name was Dr. Swindle, if you can believe that. Who would truck with someone who was named Swindle? His wife should have seen it coming. Probably made part of the $2000 proposition, the cost of braces, at that time. $2000 in the 60s!! And you can be sure that it was intimated that the parent must not really love their child if they weren’t willing to spend it.

Upon stern recommendation that I obviously had too many teeth for my mouth, four permanent teeth, the 4th away from center on top and bottom in both directions, were pulled and the rest yanked back using an ever-tightening wire attached to each tooth by running it through a track that protruded from bands attached with cement around each tooth. Hurt? Lord, yes! But not enough. We had to increase the speed with which we pulled those teeth from their rightful places by using rubber bands for constantly increasing pressure. Tiny rubber bands that would not even encircle your pinkie, were attached to a tooth’s track assembly on the sides of your upper teeth, and then anchored to a similar assembly on the bottom teeth an inch or two further back in your mouth. The resulting tension was STILL NOT ENOUGH!! I also had a “mouth-bow”. This was an apparatus (I use this term with the full knowledge that it is only the first of two apparati I have had inserted into my body, the second being a gynecologist’s speculum, duration about 2 minutes) (Don’t try this at home.) that I used nightly. All night. Every night. My braces had small metal tubes on the offending upper side teeth. This bow-shaped apparatus fit into those metal tubes inside my mouth, had a parallel bow outside my mouth attached to an wide elastic strap with Velcro closures running around the back of my head. It was padded, thank you! Don’t want to create pain! The pressure this monstrosity created was like having a fish hook with tension on it attached to a finger or toe nail 24/7.

After all this are my teeth straight? Yes they are, but my tongue has never fit in my mouth. When I close my teeth, my tongue is further back in my throat than feels normal. If my tongue is relaxed, it is between my upper and lower teeth. I’ve gotten used to it, of course, but it just goes to show, don’t fool with Mother Nature. Was it a good thing? Probably not. Now that I see how my own children’s teeth turned out, and how what was mildly out of alignment went into place as the jaws grew to accommodate them.

There are jokes made about the Brits’ awful teeth, and how they are not nearly as interested in perfection as Americans. They believe it gives a face character to have some flaws. Americans believe in magazine perfection, and that it is not just attainable for each of us, but imperative. I believe that somewhere in between lies the answer—isn’t that always where the answer lies?

Read More

Mesmerized by the Right

By Glenn W. Smith

When our sideshow news cablists, the White House, the NAACP and others began their carnival barking outside Andrew Breitbart’s tent once again – this time echoing Brietbart’s slander of Shirley Sherrod – the predictable puerility followed. The White House apologized and blamed the media culture, Fox News denied its role, pundits claimed the high ground and called for Sherrod’s reinstatement. The NAACP’s quick admission – “we were snookered” – was the only adult behavior around.

It’s a rare day that Sarah Palin, the Klondike Queen of Kooks, doesn’t get a front-page turn on Huffington Post. Left, Right, Middle or Ozone, commentators of all stripes are mesmerized by the Right. No matter how nutty, nasty or distant from reality, the extremists talk and the whole political sphere gets all rubbernecked.

I’ve fought white conservatives’ annual voter suppression and intimidation campaigns for decades in the South. It was and is hard to get attention on the issue. But let a couple of black guys dressed up as New Black Panthers hang around an African-American polling place in Philadelphia, and FoxNews has America thinking the Liberty Bell down the street has finally fallen apart.

When CBS News’ Bob Schieffer somehow avoided the Right’s hypnotists on this unscandal and failed to make it a subject on “Face the Nation,” Fox’s Megan Kelly was so shocked she attacked Schieffer on the air. That’s how accustomed the Right is to having its daily way with the minds of America’s newsies and pundit class.

Read More

Meditative Acts

By Catherine Avril Morris

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy…but the meditatin’ ain’t. At least, not for me.

Wait, let’s back up a minute. (See? Lack of focus. That’s part of my problem.)

Barton Springs is beautiful anytime, but my favorite times to visit are during the free hours — and not just because I’m cheap. At nine o’clock in the evening, after a sweltering, sluggish day, there’s just nothing like a visit to the Springs. The air near the water is cooler than the air farther up on dry land. The water itself is a sweet, cold revelation. And it’s dark enough out to imagine that it’s, say, a hundred years ago — back before A/C, when Austinites probably came to the Springs of a summer’s eve because it was the only way to cool down. I mean the only way — there weren’t any Polvo’s margaritas or noon shows at the Alamo Drafthouse back then.

The Springs are also gorgeous at around six-forty-five in the morning, when the sun is coming up and it’s just you and a handful of other lap-swimmers doing the eighth-mile length of the pool as many times as you can take it. That first plunge into the water takes your breath away, but since it isn’t too hot out yet, the shock isn’t as bad as it is in the afternoon. Your body adjusts. You surge forward, and then it’s just arm over arm, breath after breath, water in your ears, lungs tight but strong as you watch the fish twit back and forth in the reeds beneath you.

Before I moved back to Austin, during my four-year sojourn in San Francisco, I was a kickboxer. Like a lot of people in that city, I headed west when a love affair went really, really bad. I needed kickboxing: needed to pound it out on a heavy bag or my sparring partner, to use not just my fists but my knees, shins, elbows, heels, and also my speed and my instincts — my tools for avoiding injury. I’m untouchable. I’ll mess you up, but you can’t get me, never, ever again. You can see why martial arts might appeal to the brokenhearted.

It also appealed to me because it was the only time of day when I was thinking of just one thing: how to make my muscles keep going; how to get through the ninety-minute class without passing out or dying. I wasn’t fit, back then. I hadn’t known until then that exercise could quiet an overcrowded, constantly chattering mind. My obsessive, pessimistic, second-guessing thoughts just evaporated when I was kickboxing, vaporized by power, sweat and exertion.

By the time I moved back to Austin, I didn’t need such an aggressive workout anymore. My broken heart had healed. I got into more meditative forms of exercise: swimming, biking, running. You know, triathlons.

Meditative. It means “involving or absorbed in meditation or considered thought,” and it is one of my favorite qualities of some of my most favorite activities — running, playing music, writing. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about flow, the state of engaged focus and absorption in a meaningful task that leads to, or perhaps is equivalent to, optimal experience. This touches on what I’m describing: When I’m doing something I find meaningful and interesting, something that requires my focus and shuts out the jibber-jabber of my slightly neurotic brain, I’m in the flow, a meditative state that is either happiness or something even a little bit better.

So if I can achieve meditative states, why, oh why, can’t I meditate?

Here’s an example of what happens when I try. At Barton Springs this morning, after swimming a half-mile, I get out of the water feeling pretty darn good. Muscles tight, skin chilled but warming up under the morning sun. I walk over to my towel, keeping my stomach sucked in, though there aren’t too many people around yet; probably no one’s looking. Hey, maybe I’ll take advantage of the early hour, sit and close my eyes for a few minutes, and just focus on my breathing. That’s what meditation is, right? In its simplest form? That’s what many people and Web sites and texts have told me.

So I sit, cross my legs, get comfortable. Close my eyes. Breathe, in, out, in, out. I’m conscious of the sounds of splashing water, birds calling to each other, insects doing their thing. I try to do what I’ve heard I’m supposed to do, and let those sounds enter and exit. Don’t attach to them. Don’t attach to my thoughts. If they surface, I can just let them go, like catch-and-release fishing.

Remember that time when a fish bit the crap out of my ankle when I was standing in the deep end? That thing left a fish-mouth-shaped scab on my leg! I swore there were piranhas in Barton Springs!

Oh, crap, I’m thinking. Let it go. Back to focusing on my breathing. In. Out.

And then…suddenly, the sounds of splashing and insects and bird calls and people’s voices came together in a swelling orchestra, and she let the sounds enter her, and she was One with the sounds: One with Barton Springs —

Argh, thinking again. This always happens — whenever I try to meditate and stop thinking, I start narrating my meditation! Okay, I’m focusing, I’m focused —

Maybe I should write an essay about this. Narrating your mediation. That’s kind of funny, right? Maybe that happens to a lot of people when they try to meditate —

I stop, and give up for the day. It was a good try — four-and-a-half whole minutes. I’ve read research studies that show just 10 minutes of quiet time at the beginning of each school day helps students perform better academically. Maybe 270 seconds of quiet time will help me meet the rest of my day with greater comprehension, compassion and equanimity.

Or maybe, if meditation forever eludes me, meditative acts can serve as a close cousin. I think, with a brain as garrulous as mine, they’ll have to do.

—

The Barton Springs free hours are between 5 and 8 a.m. every morning, and between 9 p.m. and closing time at 10 every night. You can also go at other times of day for just $3 (adult entry fee). Visit the Barton Springs Web site or call the hotline at 512-867-3080 for more information.

Read More

On Media: Of Molehills and Mountains

By Glenn W. Smith

The graph below charts the relative intensity of media scare stories on everything from the Millennium Bug to violent video games to the swine flue to killer wasps. Wonder why we’re anxious? Here’s part of the reason. The graph is from informationisbeautiful.net. The vertical bars show the number of scare stories per plague.

Read More

Panic Politics

By Glenn W. Smith

If ever a town earned the right to perpetual panic, New Orleans is it. The people of New Orleans face the economic and environmental consequences of the BP oil spill before they’ve fully recovered from Katrina. I’ve been spending a good amount of time in New Orleans lately, and panic is the last thing on the minds of New Orleanians.

On Frenchmen Street, a two-block circus of music and bars not far from the Quarter, a young street poet bangs away at his spontaneous verse on an old Royal typewriter and recites them for tips. He came to New Orleans from D.C. to work as an ambulance driver. A city hiring freeze left him a lot of time to write. But he’s not panicked. He was, I promise, happy, if in a bluesy kind of way.

I don’t meet many happy people in politics these days. I’m not sure I meet any. In the political arena, panic is everywhere. On the Right, there’s panic about zombie communism. Maybe we should shorten the name of this ultimate straw-bogeyman to zommunism. Anyway, On the Left, there’s panic about undead fascism. Those not panicked about being sold out are panicked about being accused of being sellouts.

One of Austin’s greater slacker rituals used to be the annual North Austin/South Austin tug-o-war called the “Tug of Honor.” A big rope was strung across the Colorado River, and hundreds of beer-drinking partisans lined up on their side of the river, grabbed the rope and tugged. At some point, one side or the other tumbled into the river. Now, we are much too panicked for that sort of revelry. But there’s another point here.

If you’ve ever been on the losing side in a tug-o-war, you know that moment of panic when your team is overpowered, its mutual footing lost. There’s a kind of oh-my-god panic. Somehow, in our current political circumstance, all sides seem to be having such a moment at the same time. The laws of physics hint that that shouldn’t be possible.

Read More

Compassion in Coppell

By Scott Braddock

This post originally appeared here.  My thanks to Glenn W. Smith for allowing me to re-post it here on Dog Canyon.

With a heavy heart, I took to the airwaves Friday night after what had been a tragic 48 hours or so in North Texas.  Coppell Mayor Jayne Peters (pictured) had gunned down her daughter, Corinne, and then took her own life.

Radio broadcasts and blogs had been filled with comments from people with no sympathy for what family and friends of the mayor and her daughter are now going through:

“She’s a murderer.”

“She’s a coward.”

“I’m glad she’s dead.  One less crazy woman.”

“Why lower the flag for a woman who killed her kid?  She’s honored while the average joe who puts on his work boots every day and makes it happen on a daily basis gets nothing?”

An honest debate over why the flag had been lowered at Coppell city hall was healthy and justified.  There was no honor in what had happened.  Only sadness.

Read More

Bill’s Teeth: a short story

By Dorothy Harrigan

             His wife’s God-given name had been Rosamund Virginia Winters. She was called Rosie for short. The first time Bill had seen Rosie Winters and heard her name spoken was a moment he never forgot. The sound of her name had struck a chord within his heart, summoning romance and whimsy for the very first time. He had thought it the most interesting name in the world, evocative and strange. His mind constantly searched for an image to match it. Rosie treated him kindly and thought him smarter than he thought himself. She had been his partner for fifty-four years until she died one Wednesday afternoon, while he stood in an unusually long line at the post office.

            As he sat now, at seventy-six years old, he thought of Rosie. They had retired to Ruidoso, New Mexico, where the clear mountain air restored their lungs and lives. His long legs stretched out before him and rested on the cozy green ottoman she had purchased just for him. His heels touched and his feet splayed out in opposite directions, affording him just enough space in between to see the flickering of his TV. His feet looked rotten. They were unkempt, which is something that Rosie would have never let happen. She had always made sure he was lovingly groomed for public display, but after her death, he let himself go.

             Bill’s usual afternoon had been interrupted again by a sharp, cold pain in the back of his mouth. He had been watching Working Girl with Melanie Griffith and was already up to his favorite scene. He owned this movie, but today it was on television. He watched the broadcast version with commercial breaks every fifteen minutes while the worn VHS sat right beneath his feet, in a hefty drawer built into the side of his recliner.

Read More