A bag of mixed nuts

      Somewhere in here I should post about my teaching this week. The confidence I gain when planning activities is usually enough to sustain me through actually doing the activities. Usually. I'm much better at creating activities than seeing them through, though.
      I wasn't surprised when my plans for Tuesday were met with confusion and silence. At least I managed to do more whole-class activity and discussion; until now, it's been small groups. Talking in a large group always scared me as a freshman (okay, only the first semester), and I don't want to shut down conversation. However, it's getting harder for me to monitor several small groups at once; I must be losing my touch.
      Doc Henry taught us a lot in journalism class in high school...some of it was perhaps not quite ethical. Gather information however you can. It was in this way that I decided to learn to read upside down, to eavesdrop even better than what Mom taught me in all the endless doctors' offices, to put people at ease by allowing facial expressions to show through, even when those expressions were all an act. Whatever it takes.
      But I seem to be losing some of those "skills." It's probably for the best; I can't be a badger for life. It's probably better for the students--I think I seem less crazy when I'm not standing in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and a smirk on my face. Now I stand off to the side, head tilted puppy-like, and zero-in on one thing at a time.
      It could be that I'm just distracted as of late, by the mass of Burke. It's hard to think about hearing six things at once when Papa KB is echoing. I think I'm channeling a dead rhetorician.
      The cold weather reminds me of football season. This always makes me melancholy, puts me in the mood for Romanticism. Yes. You read that right. That sort of self-centered, makes-no-sense-to-anyone-else stylized and strategic response (damn you KB!) is appropriate for football season. When I think of all my dead bandmates.
      Dead or destroyed, what's the difference? I'm told a large chunk of the military-type went to Iraq. And came back someone else. Destroyed by Iraq, destroyed by Ashland--prisons of our own making. Etc. A bad Creed song goes here. Some are at the county jail. Poo Tee Wheet.
      I'd try to count, but the end number's possible height is too scary. It makes more sense to watch the Classmates.com page change as people die, or enlist, or try to find each other in some weird quarter life desperation.
      Oh, there are births and joys and marriages. I'm sure. But those don't go with football season. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" does, and when I saw it written in front of Heavilon, I almost burst into tears for no good reason, except that it felt like fall and the best minds of my generation weren't being destroyed, but were destroying themselves.
      Act vs. Agent, Kenny says. The agent/act ratio is very important when we want social change. The right person with the right ability. What should I do about the Scene-Act ratio, Kenny? It's football season, and I keep remembering things I was sure I'd forgotten when I moved to Boston. Like how the Midwest makes me want to run to a new Scene. The Act required of the Scene is a change of Scenery.
      In Boston I never wanted to run. Boston is safe, even as the crowds swarm and people breathe down each other's shirts and the students party forever and ever.
      I'm distracted. And it's not just because my muscles seem to have minds of their own. It's the feel that something is missing--or too present. Absence and presence are the same, right Derrida? Can one be distracted by the fact that one is distracted?
      What goes with what? KB asks. Football and fall and cold air and missing best friends and losing hope and the need to run. They signify each other, so in the fall wind I can't help but feel distracted by things that aren't there now.
      In Boston, the fall was different. It was a New England fall, short and wet and windy, dark by 5 pm. The lack of twilight saved me.
      How do we fix things that are too pious? Papa KB says "perspective by incongruity." That damn confusing preposition in the middle. In Japanese, there are fewer prepositions, and the connections between modifiers and what they modify make more sense to me. I break the piety by symbolically mixing things that don't go together. I symbolically change the equation in hopes that as a symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, the associations break accordingly.
      Football should be replaced in spring. Not symbolic death of the season, but life. And the missing best friends, I remind myself, happened in winter, too.
      Your connections are faulty. The binaries at the center don't refer to anything but other words. the centre falls apart; it cannot hold. Can a bad poem be a good symbolic action? Let's find out.

A symbolic of motives
"I love you"
when you are like this, I mean.
When the fall wind is in your hair
and there's nothing to worry about except
plumes and spats and the orange electrical tape
holding my hand together, I love it.
"Oh hold my hand
together" for at least the next nine minutes
and when it starts to bleed, just as they bleed
that we are bleeding together, letting out
the bad spirits making us sick of this town.
"Let's leave together"
To Florida or Hell, or your basement,
it doesn't really matter here at week nine
with Jeff's lips split six ways and my legs
betraying me to the camera.
"I'm never coming home"
Did you even hear me say it over
the victory songs that engulfed us so totally?
It's nice within the music, safe and warm
where we're all shouting together.