Daydreams and Time Jumping
Billy Traveled In Time
I wonder what the difference between a daydream and being unstuck in time would be - I guess they are not mutually exclusive from one point of view - sometimes in a daydream you can become unstuck in time, but you do not always daydream when you are unstuck in time? . . . Now that I have written that collection of sentences, I am not even sure what I am thinking and thats okay. I said I like to write. I never claimed to be super really good amazing awesome times at it. The point is to write, not write well - always anyway.
Scrubs is a constant presence in my life - starting really in my graduate studies - I
loved the show when it was on, but have found a great love for it while watching episode after episode on DVD's, then Netflix and now Hulu - the humor is my humor, a live action Simpsons with heart, comedy and rooted in some form of reality. I love to watch the story arcs play out instantly - and all the daydreams, sometimes fantastical but sometimes just an alternative route forward - I sometimes think about the possibilities in front of me and what would make me happy. Writing this blog as an outlet is a good start at that. J.D.'s daydreams are of course where I am going with this - I daydream sometimes, but do I tilt my head to the left when I daydream? Do I fully disappear or would I even notice? If I am unstuck in time, would it seem like just a single second and then I am back - to the outside world I never left, but to me a lifetime has passed? Similar to a favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Life where in the course of minutes Captain Picard lives 40 years of a scientists life in order that their civilization lives on in memory. Even though they all died from a drought. So it goes.
I became unstuck in my own way yesterday, for a moment the sunshine hit me as I was reaching for my car door and I was no longer in Portsmouth, Ohio - I was back in Fairfield, Ohio. I was 17 years old. I was in my parents driveway and I was getting into my car. My grandmas car. My first car. Like the strongest loves of our life, can we ever forget that first car?
. . . I can still smell the scent of the interior - the red carpet floors, the red upholstery of the bench seat - as I get in and sit down in the drivers seat, sinking into the red and grabbing the slightly greying red belt to buckle in, 12 years of grime built up on the safety material in the same spot where I grab it each and every time - my right leg rests against a cream colored plastic center console - it sits on the hump at my feet, tiny plastic nubs gripping the carpet to hold it in place around town. It sits there between my foot area and the passengers foot area - two cup holders and storage for whatever junk I put there - receipts and other paraphernalia. I have been and probably always will be a bit of a collector (some say hoarder - this is inaccurate). Little items always bring back the memories of moments in time - movie and concert tickets, trinkets and stickers - even the odd string or random accoutrement will find its way into a safe place for me to consider later. Im often reflective when I clean my desk drawers, and I am sentimental and attach feelings. I purge them on occasion, if they no longer bring back the memory associated with them - but here, this plastic console sits with a plastic Jesus sitting in the left cupholder, his right hand up in blessing - he's magnetic, but there is nothing to magnetize him too. Its a warm day, and the inside of the car is musty, that good grandparent musty smell - a mix of all the smells that mingled together since the car was built in 1985 - and now 1997 after being owned and operated by Ellen Marie Weislogel nee Kinch.
There is a dead bee in the back window sill and I don't remember ever actually getting rid of it - I may have used a vacuum on it eventually, but I left it there for a very long time. I never wanted to touch it or bother it - it was part of the car itself. It came with the car. The car was grandmas. At this point she was not dead yet. But she would die, in a hospital - DNR. So it goes. And then the car would be mine only. But for now, it was important that I stayed nearby, it was the one car she could still get in and out of. An important job. Holidays meant I got to play taxi.
The smell is entirely reminiscent of my grandmother, whose husband, my middle name namesake, passed when my mother was young - in 1965. He was 51 and according to grandmother who would also tell stories if I asked - sitting in the rocking chair in the back room he built onto the house they lived in, to accommodate their 5 children - the room that would become decorated for Aunt Josephine's when she moved in and thats how I remember it- she would share how he loved to slather his toast with butter in the morning. I never knew him. But I have bits and pieces about him. Heart attack. So it goes.
But here, in the my now unstuck experience, the car smell is powerful and I am happy and ... safe? It is the smell of safety! The safety I felt in that motorized box on four wheels, passed down from grandma. The Dodge Ares - a four door sedan - maroon Red. Maroon red interior. Pushbutton radio (eventually replaced with a high quality Blaupunkt cd player) - that car. The car that growing up I would ride in the back and fall asleep on road trips with grandma - to avoid getting carsick. Something that if you let me ride with you I probably will still do - the motion of a car is soothing enough at any hour of the day to roll me to sleep - if the sun is shining and I am warm, its game over. Sorry, I just wanted to warn you. So many experiences including the final trip I had in it. But in this moment its warm, my hands on the steering wheel, and I am heading to work at Jungle Jims. Gotta stock those bananas and core the pineapple.
Warmth was washing over me in waves - sunk into the cushion - my arm at rest on the middle armrest divider. Four cylinders. Automatic. I drove it until I wrecked it, the final ride (come to think about it I have wrecked every single car I have owned, though they were not all my fault . . . he says to nobody in particular but himself in defense.) I was heading home from my college girlfriends house (a 10 minute drive from my own childhood home) grandma had passed, at this point, it was 2000 and I was leaving during winter. It had just started snowing. That kind of snow that removes all sound from the world - there is nothing but the sight of floating, tumbling flakes as they glide to the earth. Soft snowflakes - no noise. No sound, just fluttering silently to the ground. I really didn't think much of it as I took the back way home, down a hill that passed my other grandparents house and took the curve I had taken plenty of times before, except this time the curve snapped back. In that moment when everything slows down and your body speeds up, somewhere in there I had to consider two choices - total engine destruction with a head on collision or a sideswipe opportunity that would leave the right side crippled, but drivable. I opted for the side, and we sold the car for 500 dollars. The back right door damaged in the perfect shape of a brick mailbox. Glass shattered. Pride injured. Otherwise okay.
It ran for many more years, because I saw it around town - I had tattooed its bumper with WMSR Redhawk Radio stickers - bright yellow and green, you couldn't miss 'em. It lived on.
Care and Meaning in the Moment
I'm not sure I truly appreciated the car then - as much as I do now - always a life lesson is the need to be better at appreciating what we have in the moment and to be in the moment and not let it go by too fast. Don't wait so long to acknowledge it, or make sure the moment knows it is a moment too. It's a lesson I still need to learn- we cannot just assume a moment knows its importance, but maybe we don't realize it either until after the fact. I guess I can define regret by a positive recognition of how important something was that was assumed to know.
Trains. Prisoners. Helmets for bodily refuse
There is a book on the Holocaust I always recommend. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Elements of the chapter brought this book slamming back into my memory, a book I read in my college capstone in 2002 - The Holocaust. I used the book as a high school teacher a year later as well - the chapter that I never forget the tittle of is Excremental Assault, which provided a look into the ways that Jewish prisoners were dehumanized based on the restriction of the most simple of bodily functions. You should read it.
"Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans"
The chapter puts me to thinking about a place I've never been - war. Battle. Americans captured. Loaded on trains - sent away. I don't know the feeling of bombing. of being bombed. I know people who have, but I haven't. I am happy for that. I don't want to know. But I can tell you about my Great Uncle James Francis McNary who did go to war. The Great War. World War I. He was a chaplain. A Catholic priest from Ohio.
I don't even hunt anymore - I grew up doing so - rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, quail, and deer. I can field dress, I can skin - but it's so violent. I've come to really dislike the violence associated with it, and guns too. I cant even think to find myself there anymore - i do love fresh deer meat stacked in the freezer, but I don't want to do it myself anymore. The violent act of sending a projectile passing through muscle and bone, interfering with the homeostasis of a functioning organic entity where all physiological processes are working. No thank you. I like the walking. Spending the day with family - dad, uncles, and grandpa - but it's just not my thing. Maybe if I wasn't the only one of my friends that grew up hunting it would be different -or if I wouldn't be able to picture the actual reality of the metal slamming into and wreaking havoc ... but just not my thing. Guns - I own some. They are somewhere else, and I really don't care for them. But back to my Monsignor.
Monsignore McNary
Chaplain McNary - I can share this much right now- he was awarded a letter of commendation for valor under fire. Performing Last Rites (yes, the very purpose for which creepy Jesus hung on my wall - he was holding the tools of Last Rites at bay in his wooden cross for just such an occasion as a near death experience) during the Great War. The War to End All Wars. World War I. No mans land. Bombardment. Performing his duty to God and country - his picture hangs in my office, and at home in my dining room. I have more than two, these came framed. I cannot imagine the fear mixed with determination - the persistence and presence of mind to do his job - the audacity to ignore ones own mortal danger for others. I've seen it in movies. He lived it in life. What did it feel like. I would love to have known him. I can visit his grave, maybe he will speak - so many questions - only he would be able to answer them.
Oral history is one of those pedagogical tools that can be at home at any level of social studies education - using storytelling and interviews to build the personal connection and see history as our own story - making history current again- finding that through line in the narrative that connects you. This makes war real to me, in many ways and reminds me of the personal impact that the violence of institutional entities have on families who provide their daughters and sons to their defense. Oral history lets family and close friends provide the stories- and students as the recorders and creators of new content that shows what they have learned. History in our own backyard sometimes. The personal is important - its the world the student inhabits.
Father James Francis McNary, Monsignor. The fiery Irish Catholic priest of Middletown, Ohio. Met the Pope. He was a letter writer too, something I have found myself doing more of lately - I do love the American postal service. I think he would be a blogger today - his letters, from what I have read, were descriptive and the events came alive through his words. He lived through the flood in Hamilton, 1913. "the screams and yells fell silent and the poor soul was lost to the currents" So it goes.
He still lives, of course, a second life through those who knew him - my third cousin Rosemary, my mother .. . and it recently dawned on me as well - about five years ago - that parts of my family are Irish. not kinda Irish or St. Patricks day Irish, but Irish. Thats a new avenue for this German America Cincy guy to explore.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. (60)
War is hopeless. Win or lose. It's hopeless. So is violence. There is no winner. Why did McNary do what he did? What was his purpose - his reasoning - to provide some reprieve from the unrelenting violence? Solace in the face of uncertain death. It was not for the commendation. He saw something else, but did he think there was no other choice but to act? If you think there is no choice and you act, are you acting because it is your choice, or you think there is no choice...and now I am stuck in a circle. Was he choosing action, or was it inevitable - to ensure the souls of his peers were ushered safely to the beyond? I think Vonnegut is digging for some kind of investigation of purpose, or the lack thereof in life, and war - the role of freewill maybe, if it actually does exist. However, this is bordering far to close to some type of literature analysis, which is not my bag.
It's odd, maybe, to read this chapter and then write mainly about my first car - but it is where I ended up. I don't pick the memory, or the experience, I just write it down. Called back to a safe cocoon of red cloth and vinyl dash - and the blessing of my own personal plastic Jesus as I drive under what I think is my own will, and make choices based on what I want - making meaning I think matters. Thats my bag.
I wonder what the difference between a daydream and being unstuck in time would be - I guess they are not mutually exclusive from one point of view - sometimes in a daydream you can become unstuck in time, but you do not always daydream when you are unstuck in time? . . . Now that I have written that collection of sentences, I am not even sure what I am thinking and thats okay. I said I like to write. I never claimed to be super really good amazing awesome times at it. The point is to write, not write well - always anyway.
Scrubs is a constant presence in my life - starting really in my graduate studies - Iloved the show when it was on, but have found a great love for it while watching episode after episode on DVD's, then Netflix and now Hulu - the humor is my humor, a live action Simpsons with heart, comedy and rooted in some form of reality. I love to watch the story arcs play out instantly - and all the daydreams, sometimes fantastical but sometimes just an alternative route forward - I sometimes think about the possibilities in front of me and what would make me happy. Writing this blog as an outlet is a good start at that. J.D.'s daydreams are of course where I am going with this - I daydream sometimes, but do I tilt my head to the left when I daydream? Do I fully disappear or would I even notice? If I am unstuck in time, would it seem like just a single second and then I am back - to the outside world I never left, but to me a lifetime has passed? Similar to a favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Life where in the course of minutes Captain Picard lives 40 years of a scientists life in order that their civilization lives on in memory. Even though they all died from a drought. So it goes.
. . . I can still smell the scent of the interior - the red carpet floors, the red upholstery of the bench seat - as I get in and sit down in the drivers seat, sinking into the red and grabbing the slightly greying red belt to buckle in, 12 years of grime built up on the safety material in the same spot where I grab it each and every time - my right leg rests against a cream colored plastic center console - it sits on the hump at my feet, tiny plastic nubs gripping the carpet to hold it in place around town. It sits there between my foot area and the passengers foot area - two cup holders and storage for whatever junk I put there - receipts and other paraphernalia. I have been and probably always will be a bit of a collector (some say hoarder - this is inaccurate). Little items always bring back the memories of moments in time - movie and concert tickets, trinkets and stickers - even the odd string or random accoutrement will find its way into a safe place for me to consider later. Im often reflective when I clean my desk drawers, and I am sentimental and attach feelings. I purge them on occasion, if they no longer bring back the memory associated with them - but here, this plastic console sits with a plastic Jesus sitting in the left cupholder, his right hand up in blessing - he's magnetic, but there is nothing to magnetize him too. Its a warm day, and the inside of the car is musty, that good grandparent musty smell - a mix of all the smells that mingled together since the car was built in 1985 - and now 1997 after being owned and operated by Ellen Marie Weislogel nee Kinch.
There is a dead bee in the back window sill and I don't remember ever actually getting rid of it - I may have used a vacuum on it eventually, but I left it there for a very long time. I never wanted to touch it or bother it - it was part of the car itself. It came with the car. The car was grandmas. At this point she was not dead yet. But she would die, in a hospital - DNR. So it goes. And then the car would be mine only. But for now, it was important that I stayed nearby, it was the one car she could still get in and out of. An important job. Holidays meant I got to play taxi.
The smell is entirely reminiscent of my grandmother, whose husband, my middle name namesake, passed when my mother was young - in 1965. He was 51 and according to grandmother who would also tell stories if I asked - sitting in the rocking chair in the back room he built onto the house they lived in, to accommodate their 5 children - the room that would become decorated for Aunt Josephine's when she moved in and thats how I remember it- she would share how he loved to slather his toast with butter in the morning. I never knew him. But I have bits and pieces about him. Heart attack. So it goes.
Warmth was washing over me in waves - sunk into the cushion - my arm at rest on the middle armrest divider. Four cylinders. Automatic. I drove it until I wrecked it, the final ride (come to think about it I have wrecked every single car I have owned, though they were not all my fault . . . he says to nobody in particular but himself in defense.) I was heading home from my college girlfriends house (a 10 minute drive from my own childhood home) grandma had passed, at this point, it was 2000 and I was leaving during winter. It had just started snowing. That kind of snow that removes all sound from the world - there is nothing but the sight of floating, tumbling flakes as they glide to the earth. Soft snowflakes - no noise. No sound, just fluttering silently to the ground. I really didn't think much of it as I took the back way home, down a hill that passed my other grandparents house and took the curve I had taken plenty of times before, except this time the curve snapped back. In that moment when everything slows down and your body speeds up, somewhere in there I had to consider two choices - total engine destruction with a head on collision or a sideswipe opportunity that would leave the right side crippled, but drivable. I opted for the side, and we sold the car for 500 dollars. The back right door damaged in the perfect shape of a brick mailbox. Glass shattered. Pride injured. Otherwise okay.
It ran for many more years, because I saw it around town - I had tattooed its bumper with WMSR Redhawk Radio stickers - bright yellow and green, you couldn't miss 'em. It lived on.
Care and Meaning in the Moment
I'm not sure I truly appreciated the car then - as much as I do now - always a life lesson is the need to be better at appreciating what we have in the moment and to be in the moment and not let it go by too fast. Don't wait so long to acknowledge it, or make sure the moment knows it is a moment too. It's a lesson I still need to learn- we cannot just assume a moment knows its importance, but maybe we don't realize it either until after the fact. I guess I can define regret by a positive recognition of how important something was that was assumed to know.
Trains. Prisoners. Helmets for bodily refuse
There is a book on the Holocaust I always recommend. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Elements of the chapter brought this book slamming back into my memory, a book I read in my college capstone in 2002 - The Holocaust. I used the book as a high school teacher a year later as well - the chapter that I never forget the tittle of is Excremental Assault, which provided a look into the ways that Jewish prisoners were dehumanized based on the restriction of the most simple of bodily functions. You should read it."Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans"
The chapter puts me to thinking about a place I've never been - war. Battle. Americans captured. Loaded on trains - sent away. I don't know the feeling of bombing. of being bombed. I know people who have, but I haven't. I am happy for that. I don't want to know. But I can tell you about my Great Uncle James Francis McNary who did go to war. The Great War. World War I. He was a chaplain. A Catholic priest from Ohio.
I don't even hunt anymore - I grew up doing so - rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, quail, and deer. I can field dress, I can skin - but it's so violent. I've come to really dislike the violence associated with it, and guns too. I cant even think to find myself there anymore - i do love fresh deer meat stacked in the freezer, but I don't want to do it myself anymore. The violent act of sending a projectile passing through muscle and bone, interfering with the homeostasis of a functioning organic entity where all physiological processes are working. No thank you. I like the walking. Spending the day with family - dad, uncles, and grandpa - but it's just not my thing. Maybe if I wasn't the only one of my friends that grew up hunting it would be different -or if I wouldn't be able to picture the actual reality of the metal slamming into and wreaking havoc ... but just not my thing. Guns - I own some. They are somewhere else, and I really don't care for them. But back to my Monsignor.
Monsignore McNary
Chaplain McNary - I can share this much right now- he was awarded a letter of commendation for valor under fire. Performing Last Rites (yes, the very purpose for which creepy Jesus hung on my wall - he was holding the tools of Last Rites at bay in his wooden cross for just such an occasion as a near death experience) during the Great War. The War to End All Wars. World War I. No mans land. Bombardment. Performing his duty to God and country - his picture hangs in my office, and at home in my dining room. I have more than two, these came framed. I cannot imagine the fear mixed with determination - the persistence and presence of mind to do his job - the audacity to ignore ones own mortal danger for others. I've seen it in movies. He lived it in life. What did it feel like. I would love to have known him. I can visit his grave, maybe he will speak - so many questions - only he would be able to answer them.Oral history is one of those pedagogical tools that can be at home at any level of social studies education - using storytelling and interviews to build the personal connection and see history as our own story - making history current again- finding that through line in the narrative that connects you. This makes war real to me, in many ways and reminds me of the personal impact that the violence of institutional entities have on families who provide their daughters and sons to their defense. Oral history lets family and close friends provide the stories- and students as the recorders and creators of new content that shows what they have learned. History in our own backyard sometimes. The personal is important - its the world the student inhabits.
Father James Francis McNary, Monsignor. The fiery Irish Catholic priest of Middletown, Ohio. Met the Pope. He was a letter writer too, something I have found myself doing more of lately - I do love the American postal service. I think he would be a blogger today - his letters, from what I have read, were descriptive and the events came alive through his words. He lived through the flood in Hamilton, 1913. "the screams and yells fell silent and the poor soul was lost to the currents" So it goes.
He still lives, of course, a second life through those who knew him - my third cousin Rosemary, my mother .. . and it recently dawned on me as well - about five years ago - that parts of my family are Irish. not kinda Irish or St. Patricks day Irish, but Irish. Thats a new avenue for this German America Cincy guy to explore.
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. (60)
War is hopeless. Win or lose. It's hopeless. So is violence. There is no winner. Why did McNary do what he did? What was his purpose - his reasoning - to provide some reprieve from the unrelenting violence? Solace in the face of uncertain death. It was not for the commendation. He saw something else, but did he think there was no other choice but to act? If you think there is no choice and you act, are you acting because it is your choice, or you think there is no choice...and now I am stuck in a circle. Was he choosing action, or was it inevitable - to ensure the souls of his peers were ushered safely to the beyond? I think Vonnegut is digging for some kind of investigation of purpose, or the lack thereof in life, and war - the role of freewill maybe, if it actually does exist. However, this is bordering far to close to some type of literature analysis, which is not my bag.
It's odd, maybe, to read this chapter and then write mainly about my first car - but it is where I ended up. I don't pick the memory, or the experience, I just write it down. Called back to a safe cocoon of red cloth and vinyl dash - and the blessing of my own personal plastic Jesus as I drive under what I think is my own will, and make choices based on what I want - making meaning I think matters. Thats my bag.
So is this.
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