as i set out for my walk last saturday morning i noticed that a very deep very precise hole had been cut into the grassy patch next to the garage... by my return, a substantial post had been inserted in said hole... come monday morning, during our faculty inservice, we were told that these signs - requested by the village of mundelein in support of local ordinances - now gave us the right to have errant dogwalkers and other significant interlopers removed from school property... fined... incarcerated... executed... i have no strong objection to these consequences... being a cat guy, i'm indifferent... but i'm wondering if we might not create a more rigorous strain of signage around the property to join what we already have... such as that above and these perennial favorites:

my ambiguous soul is especially fond of double arrows and would like to see them used more widely...

if only we had some signs that really mattered...

as mentioned yesterday, i passed a good chunk of today sitting in a classroom down at depaul u. ... being inspired - as if i needed that inspiration - by dr. david joliffe to "teach" the things they carried... of course i will use it... of course we wil read it in aplit... but today's session offered some useful lessons (i've finally got a hold of zeugma and polysyndeton), and it provoked... a feeling...

as we reviewed some websites with information about how the draft operated back then, i felt a feeling... a sadness... an anger... a confusion... that i hadn't felt in a long time... for a moment i was eighteen or nineteen again... staring down the barrel of some impending "reality" my blind young self hadn't counted on... the fact of the draft... the war... the man-made world. for a moment i felt 1968... 1969... 1970... and it was not a good feeling...

o'brien's wrenching "On the Rainy River" defines the features of the crisis better than anyone i've read... mine was not so clear, and chronic... not acute... quieter and more easily set aside... but from it i learned a kind of doubleness that has served me well all these years... i'm obscure, i know.

what did i take from the broken days of 1968... 1969.... 1970....? my journal of the time - suitably naive and mendacious, fit to its audience, a teacher - carries few traces... i didn't know who i was... only thought i knew who i was expected to be... i saw the signs but couldn't read them... and was afraid... so...

so... i think i'll think more about that time... and me in it... try to peel back some of my self-told tales... in a while.. but now i'm tired... though the clocks are falling back tonight... and there's stuff to do tomorrow... the walk...

The present age . . . prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Ludwig Feuerbach

 

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