Spring: The Lyrical Season
Or, Why April Is In Fact The Cruelest Month

Spring is for the young, a lyric to be sung,
As backward my heart's heavy burden is flung
Into reflection of the past
And the fact of my own life's end
Soon to come.

Spring is when everything is new and alive and blooming, when grass and flowers and bugs and bees are all abuzz with procreation, regeneration, birth, renewal. Winter begins its thaw, and as we continue along the timeline of our life and look headlong into a shortening future, April's lush fecundity can seem a mockery to a person who is older and has seen a few springs come and go.

This mind set, this feeling, when you notice your own life's arc hitting its midpoint, you know that these displays of nature's sexual recreation are limited to you, - sure they will continue on after you have gone, but when you see them you are hit with a mixed feeling of joy and wonder and inspiration that there is possibility in life for shedding old skin and becoming new again and yet also the cold understanding that your own life inches toward its own winter.

As you hear the lyrical song of nature's rebirth, you cannot hear the music as you once did as a child, with the pure joy of 100% involvement of the song as you sang along with your heart in; you also hear amid the notes of joy and life slight strains of ending, decay, a betrayal of life's one time promise.

All this is pure Wordsworth's Ode. A line:

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

and

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Islip Stat State Hospital, NY - Marion Byrne

The above picture is the hospital where my grandmother Maron Byrne died. I never met her, never heard a word about her from my father (his mother), didn't know when or how she died. She was born in Killybegs, Ireland, county Donnegal. Left Ireland when she was a teenager for New York, roughly turn of the century.

Looking at her death certificate, it appears she died of "acute myocardial infarction" which is another way of saying heart attack. Appears she also had "rheumatic heart disease,"a condition caused by a weakening of the heart due to rheumatric fever.

But the question is, why did she die in a mental hospital? It says on the death certificate that she had another condtion called "involutional depressive reaction" which as far as I can gather is a form of depression.

The story is that my grandmother was a mean person - tough, hard, heartless. When her daughter Eileen (my aunt) got married to my uncle Bobby Devito, they say Marion said she vowed never to speak to her daughter for marrying an Italian, and so it went, for years on end, Marion living in a house across the street from Eileen, never saying a word for 20 years up unto her death. The art of holding a grudge, a Grdduge Artist.

My aunt Joyce, who is by all measures a sunny and genial person and has a pretty optimisitc outlook on life, once told me that Marion was the darkest, most bitter person she'd ever met. This was my father's mother.

The story I heard last summer, whlile visting the little sheep shack where her homestead once stood in Killybegs, Ireland, was that her entire family of ten lived in that small house all together. One year tuberculosis became general over the region and people were dying by the scores. Their fmmaily was safe until the day they decided, being good Catholics, to take a visiting priest who had TB into their house, who eventually infected them all, killing off the entire family except Marion and her sister. A family of ten reduced to two in two year's time. It was after that when Marion was given a ticket to America, to leave the green land of much suffering.

After living in Brooklyn, meeting and marrying Albion Nolan (my grandfather, whom I never met, whose parents were from Ireland), they moved to Patchogue, NY, where I used to visit as a young lad. From the little snippets of the past my Dad has told me, his father Albion was a classic Irish drunk. He only remembers his father when he would see him pased out drunk on a sidewalk in town, looking down, ashamed at the shell of a man.

Good Fortune

This is a particularly good fortune cookie:

"Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence."

Fresh New Fecundity: As If Spring Had Sprung

Sure, it's still winter, but this heat wave has everyone thinking Spring has indeed sprung upon us. I went for a great run today (18 miles, 2880 ft gain) through Castle Rock State Park and one thing I couldn't help but notice was all the new overgrowth on the trails, fallen trees and branchs, and hella freakin' bugs! I must've eaten at least 20 bugs of various sizes and species - not intentionally, of course, but as I run through the trails I have to breath and this is when the little bug bastards just fly right in. I don't take it personally, for they know now what they do, but it's annoying. A few got into my eyes and ears. It's part of trail running, so I ain't exacly complaining.

All the plants, the river banks, all of nature, including the bugs think Spring has sprung. Imagine the life of such a bug: live a few weeks, and in that time, fornicate your ass off all day long, HURRY!, and make as much offspring as you can, 'cause you gonna die real soon. Got it? What a life! Millions of little insectoid Hugh Heffners pimpin' around making babies galore. Then, you die.

As a man gets older, and he's single, like me, he starts to wonder if that is too his purpose in this life, on this earth. This cycle of nature as it births and dies, births and dies, over and over again, some long extension of growth and degenration, each little bug a part of it, each little man himself a part of it. Surely, the soilitary man asks, there must be more to it than planting my seed so that other may live and I may die. Surely there is some larger thing of which I am a part and permits me to continue on when my earthly vessle, my skin-encapsulated ego runs its course and comes to the end of the line. Surely God doth not mock me!

Little Bug, O' Microcosm of my manly life cycle,
Why you fly in my mouth?
Why you bone all day long?
Flyin from bug ho to bug ho,
Makin' sure your species lives another round.


Ah, the weak, flimsy verses of an amateur. Put the pen down lad, give up the werds, and get busy making babies! You want a purpose? Make another human being.

Rabbie Burns said it better, when he asked his mouse:

To a Mouse

WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

Like a Trained Circus Monkey: The Art of Everyday Grovelling

The process of interviewing for jobs should be pretty easy, but for some reason, it makes me feel dirty, soiled, as if I am selling out, putting on a phony face, not being true to myself - lying, in other words.

My Mamma always told me not to lie, and I usually don't, but in an interview (or a date), you have to lie, you have to give the best face you got, clean yourself up, put on a perma smile and start your song and dance.

It's something we all have to do, but I suppose what bugs me is the artificality of it all. True, we have to be "artificial" every day of our life, when we go to work, to the store, we supress a thousand impulses insdie us that would allow our animal natures to exhibit themselves: farting loudly, not shooting the person who just cut us off on the freeway, dealing with an obnoxious idiotic coworker who is full of himself, picking your nose with relish and abandon, grabbing a pretty woman's booty, and so on. These are things you just can't do.

But the job interview is more than artifical - it's down right theatrical, a real drama, a stage where you are brought into the arena to be looked at, inspected, judged. You enter this field of judgement with the deck stacked against you, you need them, and they have what you want and all it takes is one person to not like the way your mouth moves to the side when you talk, to be displeased with the size and shape of your eyebrows, or just doesn't like the tone of you voice, and you are gone, finished, not to be called back again. And you are out on the street, forced to start the process all over again.

I guess what really bugs me is the imbalanced power relationship you enter into when you walk in to the interviewing room: you are inferior, in need, and they can decide to give it to you or not - a job, a means of survival, security. What's perhaps the worst is the level of person who usually interviews you - the recruiter or HR person - is usually on par with a Swiftian Yahoo, some boneheaded yokel who has the power to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down, and you have no choice but to force the smile, the laugh, and fake interest, agree with what they say, and grovel.