Peter Clothier's Blog, page 190

A Weird Week

This is a weird week, and it's not only the storms--four in a row, thus far--that keep slamming into the coastline from the west. Each brings, it seems, a heavier rainfall along with it. No, it's also the rhythm of the week which is all off. In the normal course of events we head up to Los Angeles from the beach on Sunday afternoon or Monday, and return to Laguna usually on Friday. Well, sometimes Thursday, if we're lucky. This week it was back to Los Angeles Sunday, then back again on T...

The Inside Edge

No. I'm not going to talk about Massachusetts. I'm going to talk about me. Well, I guess I usually do that anyway...
I was up shortly after 5AM, fed George, took him out for his morning walk. He was more than a little puzzled to be going out so early, but raised no particular objections. I made tea, poured two cups, and took one in to Ellie, to wake her. By 6AM, we were on the road, headed for the Faculty Club at UC Irvine, where I was scheduled to give the first in what is now...

Rain

There's a steady rain outside my window this Monday morning in Los Angeles. A weekend of bewildering contrasts, which seems only highlighted by the arrival of the series of storms we expect to last for this entire week.
The news from Haiti continues to be heart-breaking, and those few glimmers of hope, when one live person is found beneath the rubble feel like little tidbits offered by the media to relieve the flow of dreadful news in their reports. The suffering is unimaginable--not only ...

MRI

It did seem odd to me that the imaging technology company, to which Kaiser sent me for my MRI, was located in a Bank of America building in Beverly Hills. What, I wondered, is the nexus between big banking and big medicine that brings them together in the same (weirdly green-ish) glass and steel semi-high rise on Wilshire Boulevard? Does this have something to tell me about the state of our economy and the state of our health care system?
I left that one unresolved. In the reception...

Haiti

So much human suffering! And in a place where suffering was already common lot of the vast majority of people... The images are heart-rending.
Did we need another reminder of the spectacular destructive power of nature, and our puny defenses against her? I think not. And then again, perhaps we did, given the insults that we heap unstintingly upon her. The devastating event in Haiti reminds of this truth, and also, sadly, of the indifference of the wealthy and developed nations of this w...

A New Medical Adventure

(I feel badly having written the entry below, having now heard news of that earthquake in Haiti. My little headaches seem so trivial. And my fear of being trapped--see below--so, well, theoretical when compared with the dreadful reality in that poor, devastated contry.)
I'm taking my head to Beverly Hills this morning, to have it examined in an MRI. Why Beverly Hills? That's what I wondered. It seems that Kaiser outsources (one of those neologisms that I truly hate!) its MRI patients to t...

A Recluse

Who would have thought it?
We have this neighbor, a couple of blocks away. He's a big man, with long, unkempt hair, and he always seems a little unwashed. For years he has had this huge, two-door red clunker, I wouldn't know the make, but I'd guess from the early 1970s. It belches fumes; the pop-up lock on the driver's side has sprung loose, and its long cable is usually draped around the steering wheel while one of those club devices protects the car from theft--though it's hard to...

Hummers...

(... the nice kind!)
We watched a particularly lovely episode in the PBS "Nature" series last night, called Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air. I have always been enchanted by these truly magical little creatures, and I learned a whole lot more about them from the program. I did not know, for example, that they are found only on the continent of the Americas; that there are close to 350 distinct species; that, inches long themselves, they migrate literally thousands of miles each year; that...

Speaking of Poetry...

.... I'm going to cheat a bit today and offer you this Don Marquis poem by way of entertainment. The "i" in the first line is the narrator, Archy the Cockroach, who writes his poems by jumping from key to key on the typewriter. (This is before the computer, friends!) Obviously, he can't manage the shift key and the "i" together, to make the upper case letter. Oh, and the punctuation marks are a little beyond his reach. If you don't know about Archy and his friend, Mehitabel the Cat (who t...

Poetry...

I was thinking this morning, in connection with my preparations for the speaking engagements I have planned for early this year, about poetry, and about how the poet is the only "artist" for whom financial success represents not even the glimmer of a hope. Every other kind of writer can always hope--most of us vainly!--for a book that sells well in the bookshops. Performance artists of all kinds have to concern themselves with the costs of production and finding audiences. Visual artists p...