A Month of Poems

Posted on April 3, 2018 by Jim

April is National Poetry Month. Thirty days for celebrating words, wordsmiths, and the poets who subvert the status quo.

Do you think Donald Trump reads poetry? Maybe he should put the Twitter down and pick up some Walt Whitman. Whitman wrote,

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Mark was a poet, an award-winning one. While he was out walking across America for something bigger than himself, he was writing poems, like this one: Continue reading →

Easter: Just Another Sad Holiday

Posted on April 1, 2018 by Jim

Today is Easter Sunday. Some of you got up and went to a sunrise service. I used to like these. Being outside, in nature, helped connect theology to Earth. Of course, many Christians don’t care about Earth because they’re fixated on heaven.

I’m not a practicing Christian these days, whatever that means. When I was 21, I was naïve. I didn’t know any better. Thirty-five years ago, I simply accepted the false notion that “Christians aren’t perfect,” to excuse the abhorrent behavior I found inside “the fold.”

When you embrace something new, there is always a honeymoon period. Having been raised Catholic, I was attracted to the enthusiasm for scripture I found in many other believers during my initial Protestant foray. I loved the freedom that came from reading the Bible for myself, not having it spoon-fed to me by a priest.

For the Catholics I knew, Jesus wasn’t seen as a revolutionary or renewing figure in their brand of religion. That’s not to say that Catholics don’t believe in Jesus, just that salvation is a different process than “simply believe and be saved,” as I came to understand Christianity back in 1980.

My born-againism “lit a fire” in me, enough so that I left school at UMaine and walked away from my second love (Mary was my first), baseball. But, it doesn’t take long for this initial zeal to cool, or get squashed. Or, in my case, moved to another location. In this instance, it was Crown Point, Indiana, and Hyles-Anderson College.

My experiences at Hyles-Anderson have been documented here and here, as well in one of my essays in the previous book I put out, The Perfect Number: Essays & Stories Vol. 1. Things in the Hoosier State didn’t turn out as expected. Continue reading →

Grief in the Light

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Jim

While it’s okay to talk about trivial matters—food, beer, and what restaurants we like; songs and bands; maybe why Tom Brady is better than Ben Roethlisberger—some argue, we mustn’t discuss the weightier issues confronting us—like death and the attendant fall-out from grief and loss.

There was a tacit understanding when I was coming up that certain topics were notably off-limits in mixed company—the old adage, always refrain from “politics and religion.”

Apparently that’s not the case any longer. Political thoughts are offered with little regard to how well-framed and supported they are by logic or fact. Then, there is no shortage of those ready to offer (inflict?) prayers on your behalf (even if they never seem to be “answered”). So, the old taboos no longer apply—unless it’s talking about death and the subsequent way it affects the lives of those left behind. At least that’s how it seems to me, more than a year out from the event that changed the lives of Mary and me.

A few weeks ago, I heard a track on Jeffrey Davison’s Saturday morning “Shrunken Planet” program on WFMU. It was by a band listed on the playlist as Bipolar Explorer. Something about the song, “Lost Life,” was evocative and then Davison mentioned how the album where he pulled the cut from, was a reflection on the death of their singer, Summer Serafin.

The band has the requisite page on Bandcamp and they’re on Wikipedia. I found additional information about them and Summer. She was a beautiful and talented actress who died all-too-young. Her band mate and love of her life, Michael, has soldiered on, making music that recognizes how grief and loss leaves those who loved the person who is gone, forever affected (and afflicted). It’s about death and what follows for those left behind, yet, I don’t find the music of Bipolar Explorer morbid, or in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I ordered “Sometimes in Dreams,” and it is a haunting and profound exploration of lost love in musical form.

Continue reading →

Letter From a Dad

Posted on March 16, 2018 by Jim

There is a website called Chicks on the Right, founded by two conservative women, Amy Jo Clark and Miriam Weaver. The site is similar to many that promote only one side of the spectrum, politically and ideologically. I don’t really care about that.

What I do care about is that earlier in the week, while doing a Google search about Mark and something I was thinking about, I came upon this post, first. The writer, someone writing under the pseudonym of “Miss CJ,” called my late son a “hippie moron.” Then, in trying to get back to the post, I discovered this one.

Can you imagine missing your son each and every day, and then reading someone saying she wasn’t even sorry about his death, even going as far as to gloat about it? This is the kind of hater BS that makes me angry and close to being crazy. You never stop loving your son and wanting to protect him, even after he’s been killed.

I thought I’d write today’s post in the form of letter to the two founders, appealing to their compassion and empathy, and perhaps, their “better angels.” But this is likely an exercise in futility, akin to reasoning with the unreasonable. Continue reading →

Thoughts from the Blizzard

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Jim

Is being rigid and dogmatic a hedge against uncertainty and chaos? I think for some.

Society is awash with those convinced that they’re right. Like the guy in Sabattus. Another document fetishist—Constitution or Bible, it’s always the same—these guys (most of them are guys, white ones, too) are certain that some ancient document holds the key forward—or rather, backward.

I spent a little time this morning attempting to earn a shekel or two. Most apparently were like me—“working” from home. Oh, there were the hearty few, like Miss Mary, who went off into the white falling from the sky to visit some customers. She’s a trooper that girl.

By 11:00, I decided to call it “a day,” and hopped on my stationary bike to listen to a podcast. Unfortunately, the one I picked was annoying and I decided to go to my default, which is music.

Another March Northeaster in Maine.

Life isn’t predictable, nor is it ordered by some higher power. But, if you must tell yourself it is, please leave me out of your conversation.

Continue reading →

The Myth of Control

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Jim

Apparently, there are prescribed ways to grieve. Not too public, because while we can share our thoughts about food, music, or the perfectly ordered life we all lead (sarcasm) on our blogs and via our social media feeds, I guess grief and loss are off limits.

That’s an interesting approach in terms of being transparent and “real.” Only sharing the good, but never touching on the tough times. Life’s a cakewalk when everything is going great. But if you write about your life, then why stop when things turn to shit? Something worth considering, I think.

A writer none other than iconic Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.” Didion’s book is masterful, bringing her unflagging skills as a journalist to what at times feels like her, “reporting out” on grief, while also passing through the experience, personally, after the sudden (and unexpected) death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003. Continue reading →

What Does It All Mean?

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Jim

Life now has a definitive before and after. What existed prior to tragedy is now gone—not in the sense that all of it’s disappeared entirely—but threads connecting me to that time have been forever altered.

If you are not familiar with passages through the dark, you probably won’t understand. That’s okay. All of us will at some point lose someone we love, though. All loss isn’t the same, either. Therese Rando posits that sudden, unanticipated death leaves those left behind traumatized due primarily from the psychological assault brought on by a death like Mark’s.

I continually run into people who don’t know my story. Why should they? It’s not like I’m hosting a reality TV program or anything. Of course, being the self-oriented people that we are, it’s easy to assume that everyone knows that my son was killed and expect them to acknowledge it. What’s interesting to me after slightly more than a year of acting out a common scene, is how people do react when they do find out. It runs the gamut from basically not acknowledging it (sort of like “oh,” and then moving on), offering some version of the platitude,” I’m sorry for your loss,” and then, there are those who engage with you in a human and empathetic fashion. This group is the smallest one. Continue reading →

At the Museum

Posted on March 3, 2018 by Jim

We live in a culture coarsening daily. Public discourse, from the very top, down, has been stripped of the most basic elements of etiquettes (look that work up, as in “etiquette and Emily Post” and see what comes up. At one time, to get ahead in the business world and even presidents actually cared about things like etiquette and how to act in a public setting.

A few weeks ago, Miss Mary and I visited the local art museum at the prestigious liberal arts college near our house. It had been years since we last took advantage of this cultural perk, one that’s free to visitors.

Today, we drove to Portland and spent more than two hours at the Portland Museum of Art. We even signed up for a membership. Again, we commented upon leaving that it had been “too long” since we last spent an afternoon surrounded by art. Continue reading →

Good Journalism

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Jim

Years ago (it was actually in 2003), I began blogging. I tried to consume the best bloggers in the blogosphere at the time. One of them was Andrew Sullivan.

His blog became a daily stop for me. There were few writers covering issues and writing about them with his clarity and erudition. He’s one of the few writers/journalists that I’ve found whose work regularly countered ideological defaults.

I recently signed up for a year-long subscription to New York magazine. Why? Because I’ve consistently been directed to stories on their website. Rather than be a “taker,” I figured a subscription was the least I can do to support what remains of viable journalism in America.

I wasn’t surprised that when my first issue arrived in my mailbox (replete with Clarence Thomas staring back at me from the cover) that there would be a Sullivan-written article on opioids.

New York Magazine cover (Feb. 19-March 4)

It’s the best writing on the topic I’ve read up to this point.

America’s in tailspin on multiple fronts. Simply talking about a crisis like the one afflicting the country won’t solve it, and like Sullivan points out, neither will trying to win it with a “declaration of war,” as has been tried with dismal results in the past.

Then there’s this:

One way of thinking of postindustrial America is to imagine it as a former rat park, slowly converting it into a rat cage. Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. That dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation.

That’s not going away, as technology—which has overshot its intended mark time and time again—with its incessant over-promising and under-delivering, has left America awash in people and lives destroyed by opioids.

Read Sullivan and weep.

The Jim Baumer Experience

"…learn, unlearn, relearn."-Toffler