Time to Go - A Rap by DJ TazzieDog

No power. Does it matter? Fuck, yeah, the trickle down gloom permeates your existence, their insistence that power is theirs alone dooms your water boy, say girl, stature, capturing the best years of your life, strife with condescension lapping up their pasteurized rapture, their ascension to capture the brass ring. Well, it’s time for inclusion, break into the boardroom. No keys? Fuck the “please” the “Yes sir”

Oh the pratter, the power broker chatter that dispenses what does and what doesn’t matter, shallow souls 

dilettante toads croaking out loads of ribbeting snippets of self-serving prose. It’s time to go. It’s way past time to go.

Thank You Note To Hillary Clinton

Dear Hillary- i miss you already. I didn't realize what a steady presence you were in my life until you disappeared. I was excited to know you were out taking a hike with your dogs recently, the first spotting since our ugly election and thought how refreshing it must have been to have that hike reported as just a hike, rather than a final walk before your brain tumor takes you out, or hmm, those hiking shoes are hiding a severe pronation problem due to debilitating scoliosis, or you were secretly meeting in the woods with a Goldman Sachs official to pick up a cache of money stashed away in the hollow of a dead tree. It was just a walk and I wish I were the woman who, by good fortune, came across your path. I would have said "thank you" for these years of dedication and hard work for the causes you believe in. Most people don't take the time to get personally involved in the causes that stir their hearts. You are one of the rare ones who has dedicated your life to working for the "others"; the working class, women, children, families, those who have no voice. You have been their champion and are certainly mine. I'm sure you are worried about the direction our country is about to take, as i and the majority of our citizens who voted for you are. So, please, even though it is understandable if you wanted to leave the country and tell the media and the politicians and the pundits and the entire republican party to "fuck off" , please don't. We still need you. We are scared and angry and need your steadiness and experience to guide us through this shitfest we are about to enter. Perhaps being outside of the political circle will allow you to have greater clout, free from the unbridled scrutiny into every aspect of your life. I don't know where the vitriol toward you comes from but you must have been hitting buttons and sending off red flags, making those who should be uneasy, uneasy. Something about your strength and female moxie, no doubt. The non-scandals you were put through and the unfounded nonsense that was used as a distraction to keep the country focused on trivia rather than substance, were weathered by you in a dignified and grittingly graceful way. Now, we are in quite a pickel and must reap what we sowed. I, for one, want you to know that I had nothing to do with this travesty of an election other than defending you, arguing for you and voting for you. And while i did get a bit caught up in the first woman president narrative i supported you because of your values, leadership, experience, talent and intelligence. The woman thing was just a bonus. I feel a tremendous sense of loss that you won't be our 45th president and instead we will be stuck in a reality nightmare with a two-bit charlatan and his entourage of characters right out of Mad Magazine. We really don't deserve you but we need you. Please don't be a stranger, be our firebrand.
With all the admiration i can muster through the tears, i am respectfully yours, Laurel.  p.s.  In order to cope with the election results and to help quell the anger by morphing it into activism i have started a group at my workplace called, Coffee with Hillary. I work at the University of California, San Diego and know many co-workers and students who are experiencing depressed states of mind similar to mine. So, the idea is to meet every two months to have a political therapy session, share ideas on how to combat the nasty things coming down the pike and activate. I use your name as our inspiration. I hope the concept will catch on at other campuses and that it's OK with you.

Marjorie, Summer of '16

The will to live is gripping
White knuckled so,
Round after round after round
Another blow
Why me, why has this happened?
Yet on she goes,
I.V. drip of confusion
Nothing she chose
Save, for the intervention
Too scared to close
Her life, her breath, her everything
So on it grows
The will, the life-gripping will,
Only she knows.

Drumpf Unhinged - A Rap by DJ TazzieDog

Drumpf morphed into Trump
A sump pump of toxic waste
Saving face, cloaking disgrace
Hate dumped into the space
Of the white, angry males
Who hail hearty from the lies
Of this cynical swine
His ballyhooed brand of
Business acumen
Just a flim flam scam
Devised to master them
With his cheshire grin
And simplistic spin
He riles the unrulies
Unhinged fools he's foolin'
With his "Make America Great"
Hate mottoed on caps
The saps bow down to his
Fuckface antics, the fanatics
Hear his vitriol call of
"Build the wall, Build the wall"
Bait and switch for the dispossessed
The underbellied festering
Mess of bigotry who follow his plea

All the while his tongue 'n cheek
Lays claim to headlines
Which is all he seeks
Parsimonious pageantry a new low
In this election a go-go
Freak show

Honoring Rachel Carson - A Rap by DJ TazzieDog

She set the scene for a silent spring
No singing, no trilling
No tweeting nor milling
About the bath
No splash nor preening
The "Fable for Tomorrow"
Cut all dreams from dreaming
Her perspicuous bite
Of prose mightily right
Frightened the toxin purveyors
Intent on disarming the bitch
Whose science turned snitch
And narc'd on the bastards
Disaster ensued for the Dupont brood
As their pesticides rained from the skies
Imbued with a blanket of lies
Complaints would arise from a public
Apprised of the demise of their
American pastoral
And she was on it, was Rachel C
Before Congress she whipped the ass of DDT
Like white on rice
She sacrificed a quiet life
Free from the strife of hard hitting
All hands on deck dickheads
Researching the fuck
Through their eco-sucking muck
Dichloro, Diphenyl, Trichloroethane
An evil axis defiling the terrain
With a greed filled game
She was hip to the sleaze
Breezed through chats with JFK
Pointing out the science and the facts
The need to act without delay
She laid it on the line
Did Rachel C.
And the EPA is her legacy.

The Lord's Prayer-Enhanced Interpretation Version

Our father, notice the small "f" which is grammatically correct, due to the possessive pronoun "our" preceeding it, which art in heaven, "who" might work better than "which" since we are talking about a person, or rather, a deity, but still a being of sorts rather than a thing. Although, truthfully, this is not a real father, at least not mine. My father's name was Robert, Bob for short. He was an atheist who called himself agnostic because the alternative seemed so...Hallowed be thy name, not Bob, my father, but the deity father with the small "f". Sacrosanct and all that. By using "thy" it sounds as if I might be addressing the deity father, although that remains inconstant.
     Thy kingdom come
     Thy will be done
     In earth,as it is in heaven
Unless we are voyaging to the center of the earth, Jules Verne style, into the very core of magmosity, the preposition should be "on". Although "in heaven" seems OK since heaven is more a conceptual place that floats about behind pearly gates or some such fantasy. Give us this day, our daily bread...Well, there is an implied "you" in that command, seems as though the speaker to deity relationship is getting a bit muddled, or maybe the speaker feels the power of the earthling.
     Forgive us our debts, yet another demand which could be read a couple of ways:  please forgive us for taking on debt, or forgive us for the things we owe, symbolically speaking, or "hey you, eliminate our debts now", and lead us not into temptation, well, why would an upstanding deity do that, purposefully lead us astray? Keeping that same trajectory, he would also and deliver us from evil, although generally a delivery is to something rather than away from something. Why not deliver us to goodness?
     For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory...would a deity, an all-knowing small "f" father fall for such fawning?
     Forever? The question mark here is mine alone.

Cross At Your Own Risk - A Rap by DJ TazzieDog

Think your path has consequence?
Well, there is none
To one whose quick glance
Sees only a chance to
Step on the gas.
Impatient to gun it
From stop sign, to run it
Their radar will plummet
To flatline you on it

Be careful curbside
Those text talk eyes
Lured by off road chatter
A gad about mad hatter
Wouldn't notice your splatter
You simply don't matter
Don't you get that?
Your shiny shoes
Your bags from Whole Foods
Tattered in a nano-second
Less than...
'Cause you're a pedestrian
The crosswalk is no friend.

Mad Donald

I was hoping to avoid the mention of Donald Trump in this, the 2016, election cycle. Like many other potential voters, I didn't take him seriously, in no small part due to his head-to-toe overall offensiveness. But, more notably, he just seemed like a joke; a publicity hound trying to bolster his lagging brand plastered on many-a-bogus businesses, with the ultimate PR stunt of throwing his hat, in this case a red baseball style one, into the proverbial presidential ring.With the media obliging by giving him all the free publicity a candidate could possibly want, his bantam cock antics went unchallenged.

There has been a rich history of joke candidates for various offices, including the highest, in this country. One of the most consistent of these characters is our beloved and iconic Mickey Mouse, who first popped up in the New York mayoral race of 1932, still a wee fellow of just four years. Mickey received just one vote in that race, tying with the infamous Al Capone. In 1960 in a Georgia congressional race a gorilla named Willie B. received 390 votes, outplaying Mickey, although the versatile mouse still had a presence. In fact, so prolific was Mickey's presence in Georgia politics that its legislature found it necessary in 1987 to pass a law that stated, "voters in Georgia would no longer be allowed to vote for Mickey Mouse in state election."

Mad Magazine, the satirical mainstay for all things tongue and cheek APB'd the voting public to consider Alfred E. Neuman, its fictitious freckle-faced and cheshire-grinning mascot cover boy, as a write-in candidate for every U.S. Presidential election from 1960 to 1980. Using slogans like, "You could do worse--and you already have," and "There are bigger idiots running for office," the magazine was quick to point out who the real clowns were. Hint: Not Alfred E. Neuman.

And yes, there appears to be a bigger idiot running now and the joke is running thin. To take "The Donald" as a serious opponent to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders makes me want to choke midway through a hard swallow. The only difference between Donald Trump and Mickey Mouse running for office, other than the obvious that one is a contemptible abomination of a human and the other is a classy cartoon mouse and one appears to represent his party and the other a write-in, is that one was a presumed joke and the other an obvious joke. Now, the joke may be on us.

On Being A Pedestrian

Drab, dreary, drudging, dull, all words that point to a pedestrian existence. Of course, there is another meaning for "pedestrian", one more commonly used, which is a "walker", someone who puts one foot in front of the other to deftly navigate around cars, bikes, trash cans and other assorted obstacles that might impact the propulsion from point A to point B.

What I believe has happened, in my experience as a pedestrian, walking from home to shuttle and back home again, on a daily basis, is the two meanings have co-joined and become a vision of a drab, dreary, drudgingly dull loser who walks. These people are just one rung higher than "homeless" and are irritating to drivers who have much more important things to do than wait for the drudging dullard to walk across the crosswalk, even though the light is green. For God's sake, what is this stupid pedestrian thinking? Trudging across the road, taking her good sweet time, schlepping shopping bags. How very pedestrian of that pedestrian.

The lack of respect by drivers to walkers, coupled with the cellphone distraction factor drivers seem to be attentive to makes it a land mine path of side-stepping and second guessing for all astute pedestrians and a possible trip to the morgue for those walkers unaware they are hot-footing it through a war zone. So, here are a few tips on how to successfully ped through the urban jungle without being flattened by a Hummer.

1. If walking with shopping bags, make sure they are emblazoned with the Whole Foods logo; this makes it look like you have money and could afford a car, thus gaining a possible place on the driver's radar.
2. If the pedestrian's light is green and a driver is stopped ready to turn right on his/her red light, assume the driver doesn't see you or your Whole Foods bags and go behind said driver's car or possible pancake experience may ensue.
3. Never, ever cross the street without first getting eye contact from any stopped drivers. If said car is tinted and you can't see the driver's eyes, go behind said car or possible pancake situation may arise.
4. If driver's eyes are looking down assume driver is texting and go behind that car and that lame driver in order to avoid, you guessed it, pancake.
5. Any truck, especially if jacked up, go behind. You can automatically assume truck drivers do not see you because you are a pedestrian and a low-life like you is invisible and said driver is so jacked up on testosterone that his eyes are either crossed or focused on Tinder for a quick score.
6. Any car stopped in a crosswalk you can assume that the asshole driver would love to take you out, so go around.
7. Assume any driver stopped and waiting for you to get your ass across the crosswalk is either, 1. using that opportunity to text so not paying attention or, 2. Hating your guts for being so slow and keeping him/her from making it to happy hour prices at the local craft brewery down the street. So, hurry along and look paranoid as though you could be flattened any second, because you could.
8. Any time you are waiting at a light and it turns green, do not cross until you are certain all cars have come to their typical screeching halt, look all around and make a dash for it to the nearest sidewalk.

If you follow these few simple rules of the pavement you will enjoy your experience as a drudging, trudging pedestrian much more and will live to walk another day. After all, it's fun to walk.

Marjorie's Trip To The Rehab - The Final Chapter

At the rehab there is a constant white noise of aimless calls of “Help”, not really desperate as much as confused. Many of the patients have no idea who they are, where they are and the question that keeps popping up in my mind, the existential one that lingers each time I exit the rehab doors is, why they are.  Initially, my mom, an extremely  gregarious person, took a stab at being the rehab’s social gadabout, waving to the blank faces that stared at her as I pushed her in a wheelchair along the bustling corridors of care, greeting the empty stares with “hello, how are you today”, like a queen in her carriage greeting the adoring  crowds. On the day of New Year’s Eve I made arrangements to have my guitar teacher, Sandy DeVito, of whom she was a big fan, stop by her room to play her an hour or so of guitar tunes she was particularly fond of.  Every month on a Sunday evening the Sandy DeVito Trio played at a local Mexican restaurant and mom was a devoted follower, so his appearance in her room with guitar in hand was a treat. As he serenaded her, wringing out of his baby Taylor some of her favorite tunes, we noticed a visitor in a wheelchair hanging out in the threshold of mom’s room. As the music continued playing our uninvited but not unwanted guest wheeled herself toward Sandy, face blank but intent.

“Come in,” my mom said after the fact. “You are welcome to listen to the music.” No response. The woman wheeled herself slowly by Sandy all the way to the window sill, where there were three potted poinsettias sitting on a ledge still showing their finery post Christmas. She proceeded to feel the moisture level of the soil in each pot. Then, just as randomly as she arrived, she left slowly exiting my mom’s room, her soiled fingers perhaps a reminder of what once was, the residue of a happier time. Sandy broke up that sobering moment by reeling off one of mom’s favorite tunes, “If I Love You”, a Rogers and Hammerstein classic from the musical Carousel, which she and my dad saw in New York live with original cast when they were first married. While she has always semi-swooned upon hearing this sentimental favorite, I have noticed as of late that she questions the "If" part of the song, the subjunctive leaving too little clarity on the subject of love.

 After a few weeks negotiating the rehab routine mom started wheeling herself in the wide and onerous wheelchair down the hall to the Physical Therapy room, limiting her greetings to only the few that could respond, working her charms on all of the attendants instead as she cheerily breezed by them in her new found independence. Her upper femur had knitted nicely to the point where she could now put 50% of her weight on the left leg as she exercised daily on an institutional walker under the tutelage of the various members of the physical therapy staff. The candy-apple red walker, the one at home that she didn’t use which got her into this speck of trouble in the first place, was replaced by an unattractive one with wheels on the front and tennis ball covers on the back legs in order to keep the contraption well under foot. A runaway walker would not do for an old gal with an upper femur still healing and a set of staples running down her left flank from hip to knee.  She was trained to walk in a very prescribed way: walker slides ahead, left foot moves forward, upper body holds 50% of left foot’s weight as right foot slips ahead and takes full weight as it meets its mate. At first this new walking gait was too much strain on her upper body and the length of her walks were very limited, interrupted by constant breaks in the wheelchair that was dragged behind her by the PT. The man with the crooked hip, whose existence seemed to consist of walking around the circular corridor for several hours each day, would lap her several times around the perimeter of the corridor and upon seeing him she would lift herself out of the wheelchair and get back into her new walking pattern, determined to be amazing at the task at hand. The man with the crooked hip never noticed. The daily outings with the PT crew exhausted her as they peppered into her workouts thera-band upper body work and stationary cycling in addition to daily walking excursions that expanded ever further down the corridor. By the time she was escorted back to her room she was spent and barely able to stay awake for her lunch, although she will never fess up to being tired, no doubt a sign of inferior physical stamina. And so it went, the daily routine of PT treatment punctuated by long shuffling strolls down the corridor twice a day, a bath every other day, a visit from Millie, the stalwart dog every morning in which institutional breakfast bacon bits were saved for her as a treat, crossword puzzles when I came to visit, heavy gummy bear consumption (her favorite candy) throughout her tenure, Australian Open Tennis on the tube, which frequently went on the blink before a match was completed, a daily 4 p.m. phone call from a 97-year old gent she called a phone friend, and the constant comings and goings of the ever bustling and cheerful staff. This went on for a few weeks until she was given the green light to put full weight on the left leg, just about six weeks after the mishap in the closet.

The adventure at the rehab is now in its waning few days and although mom is excited at the prospect of returning home in a week’s time, the exuberance partners with a bit of trepidation. She wonders if things will be as they were before or will she be more needy and feel less confident, more vulnerable. All questions that anyone might have following a serious physical trauma but when that anyone is someone who is 95 (she also anointed her 95^th year at the rehab) it becomes weightier.  This also means that my days visiting the rehab will be coming to a close. But, one thing is certain. The adventure continues.

           

My Man Henry David - A rap by DJ TazzieDog

He wandered the highways, the biways, the skyways

Divining the essence of mindful existence

Existential persistence

Transcending our resistance, his insistence

To trample a path

To look, to see, to live

Deliberately

Had him hoeing and hewing, 

towing, imbuing

A parcel by the pond

With all manner of beans and such

Provisions he’d need to live in the rough

His DIY cabin enough

For experimentation

In a waystation

Of transcendental fabrication

Much made of his solitary stays

At Walden

By Concordian folk

Galled by the notion

That his devotion

To promotion of a simple life

Something more than

Their daily strife

Was evidence of a lazy soul

Useless ruminations

Taking its toll

On their young Thoreau

But his time spent with

Muskrat and mink

To feel awake with a clear head

To think  

Not of their rebuff

Rather that in Wildness is

The preservation of the world.

Well, that was enough.

Marjorie's Trip To The Rehab - Part Deux

     It was 7:30 a.m. when I received a call from Sandy, said caregiver. I steadied myself to hear some challenging news, as was usually the case when she called. She did not disappoint. From that point forward to today has been a whirlwind of activity which included: a quiet ride in the ambulance to the local hospital (mom didn’t want the neighbors to know), a nine-minute surgery to cinch the two bones back to function as one by an orthopedist who bragged about his record for this type of surgery being seven minutes (I assured him pre-surgery that we weren’t necessarily eager for a record-setting procedure), a three day recovery stay at the hospital where mom appeared to be in an altered state of sudden on-set dementia and finally the move to a local rehab facility to get her back to her semi-independent, non-dementia status via physical therapy, rest and recuperation. All the while, woven into this whirling dervish time bubble was a fast trip to Los Angeles to take my daughter and her boyfriend out to dinner for her birthday, bring her home for Christmas( just two days away), entertain the in-laws for Christmas Eve dinner (I slammed out lasagna in record time but not nearly as fast as the surgeon repaired my mom’s hip), construction of the beloved Christmas side dish of Mushrooms Berkeley for the following day’s festivities at my sister’s compound and, of course, hours at the rehab trying to reconstruct a sense of Christmas for mom, the only person in the family who even cares a hoot about this ridiculously overblown family holiday. My sister (the older one who luckily lives in the area or I would be in this alone) and I were emotional wrecks throughout this holiday season. My little sister, up in the Bay Area, was also a wreck, sobbing on the phone and torn between immediately hopping on a plane to visit mom and staying to have Christmas with her family which included her freshman son home for the holidays. We encouraged her to stay with the family. Our brother, outposted in the mountains outside Reno in his enormous log cabin, wasn't able to travel until after the Christmas holiday rush. So my older sister and I ran shotgun for one another.

     What initially looked like a monumental hill that had to be climbed ended up being a long and winding path of switchbacks. You climb, then pause and catch your breath, then tackle the next part of the climb. Little by little you trudge ahead. Mom recovered from her altered state (caused by an overly zealous pain medication regimen) and returned to the planet with her usual wits about her, the Christmas goings on came and went, the in-laws left, the daughter escaped for an East Coast vacation, and the frequent trips to the rehab continued, each visit seeming less odious than the one before. The facility itself is part of an elder/senior community, the type that has full-service and one-stop shopping. The rehab facility is for the residents who either temporarily or permanently need health care and monitored medical and living assistance but also open to outsiders who need care as they rehabilitate body parts, many of which seem to be hip-oriented, or shall we say, upper femur.

       She was put into a room with another elderly female roommate who suffered from dementia but in a quiet and passive way. As I sat by mom’s bed, holding her hand and talking about how soon she would be home  and reassuring her that I had refilled her numerous hummingbird feeders with the properly prepared sugar water, her roommate’s husband came to visit with their dog, Zack the schnauzer, in tow. A curtain of privacy separated us but I heard him chatting with the wife who day-by-day was getting further and further removed from him. He told her how beautiful she was, how this was the best part of his day, seeing her, his beautiful girl that he loved so much.  He filled her in on his and Zack’s daily tasks and adventures and she responded the only way she could, detached and other worldly. I was grateful that mom was not fully cognizant of the tragedy ensuing behind the curtain. We needed to get her a private room and fast. The care facility is a well-oiled machine that runs 24/7 dispensing pills, meals, fresh sheets, baths, daily care to broken bodies and runaway minds. An army of attendants are needed round the clock and it looked as though that army was primarily made up of those of Filipino descent. Caring, patient, sweet, encouraging…the adjectives attributable to the caregiving crew is limitless. But, no matter the quality of care, there was no getting away from the tragedy of a warehoused elderly population waiting to die. Determined that was not to be our mother’s fate, that she would walk out of this place and get back home to feed her own birds, my older sister managed to wrangle a private room the very next day, Christmas Eve, and we wheeled mom down the hall, past a gauntlet of wheelchairs holding slumped souls, past the nurse’s station, overrun by a number of dementia patients looking as though they worked there but just hanging out to be somewhere, down to room 145. I brought along two poinsettias, a Christmas cactus and a tiny flocked pine that followed mom from facility to facility during this Christmas season adventure with a broken upper femur. The room was bright and large and extremely livable with a nice window looking out into a courtyard filled with hummingbird feeders and empty visitation benches. The attendants knew just how to transfer mom from wheelchair to bed without too much of a ruckus being made as her bum leg, the left one, moved gingerly and carefully with her wincing kept to a minimum. This was to be her home, her life for the next who knows how many weeks and she seemed both resigned to this fate and up to the challenge of bucking what the statistics say about a 94-year old woman with a broken upper-femur. I mentioned to her that this challenge was similar to those training to make the Olympic team, a thought she cogitated over with more than a quizzical look, although I quite like the comparison and have grown more and more to believe in it. Of course, the venue is hard to look at without a sense of horror and its comparison to Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon for the upcoming Track and Field Olympic Tryouts is certainly a stretch, but gritty determination is gritty determination. My mother has amongst her most admirable traits, grit.               TO BE CONTINUED...