Behavior Modification 007

I can't remember exactly where I am, in the weblog, in life.  The problem occurred a week ago Tuesday, 13 days ago, more or less.  Mary was going out to eat lunch with a friend at Cracker Barrel who had stopped by to pick her up.  When the friend pulled up to pick her up, I was in the garage, about to go down the driveway to get the empty recycling bins and our garbage can.  I raised the garage door to go out to talk with our friend.  Apparently she was brushing something off the seat of her Cadillac and didn't see me at her window.

I was just starting down the driveway when Mary materialized on the other side of the car.  I mentioned that our friend apparently hadn't seen me and thus continued down the driveway, wishing her a good lunch.  I was about halfway down the driveway when I felt the metal bumper touch my side.  The next thing I knew I was face down on the cement staring at the pool of blood I was lying in.  Either the ladies saw me and were trying to do me in, or they didn't see me and the rear motion detector wasn't working either.  Since they stopped the car and didn't continue running over me, I assume the later.  In any case it was and still is a painful experience.

With the help of a man who was going by, they got me up and took me to the emergency room where I spent the rest of the afternoon, being X-rayed and MRIed and attended to by a group of kind Valkyries, who at least were not carrying me off anywhere, yet.  The doctor was kind, said there were no broken bones, though there may be a fracture or two, nose and arm.  Later tests revealed that there is a fracture of some sort in the left arm.  I am always pleased when they discover such things as it tends to justify the pain somewhat.   

I keep wondering where they thought I might have gone, until they hit me, and found out, but I try not to think about that too much. 

Actually, as I think back about that momentary contact with the moving vehicle, I decided that is what being touched by an angel must really feel like.  The power was immense; apparently I flew for a bit and then landed on the concrete.  And with that said, I shall close this notice down, try to find the right picture, and then go to bed. 

The image was sideways, but it is now turned and I think, centered, and thus provides some sense of the way I looked a week or so ago.  Ouch!  Now I also have some idea of why the Turkey Vulures have been congregating around and over our house.

May you never be hit by a car or touched by an angel on a mission. 

Behavior Modification 003

Having trouble with the Squarespace App; when I close it to go off to have another life elsewhere, the only way I can reopen the document is by rebooting the iPad, which always taxes my memory.  Ah well, technology!  And to think that I gave up my typewriter for a laptop.  I had an Olympia typewriter; my parents had bought it for me when I started college.  Somehow they neglected to include a spellcheck.  I typed my Master's paper on the Tempest on it, and the draft of my doctoral dissertation on 16th, 17th, 18th century formal verse satire: Joseph Hall, John Marston, John Donne (the John Donne also wrote 5 formal verse satires) , and Alexander Pope.  The subject was Images of Evil; it was a critical work.  Everyone before me had done the scholarly research, thank Goodness!  Thus, I got to write a critical analysis and talk about the poems' meanings, something I really delight in doing, yet.

The only bad aspect of the task was the volume.  One of my two best friends in graduate school, Bill Elkins who attended both UK and EKU, go figure, and who died on the operating table at age 62, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hopkins' 7 "Terrible Sonnets. Thus  he had to study and understand, essentially, seven 14 line poems.  His paper was about a hundred pages.  I, however, with great youthful enthusiasm, chose 4 poets from two different ages, each with a number of much longer poems.  Hall and Marston each had a book of this kind of poem; fortunately, Donne wrote only 5 of them, and Pope rewrote only 2 of them, but then wrote an original poem in the genre which is a literary masterpiece, The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.  My last chapter was an extensive, absolutely brilliant literary analysis of that poem, fun to think about, fun to write, though it took me three more summers to finish my dissertation, primarily because of my struggle with Hall and Marston.  And I haven't really thought about the beast since.  I should do something about that, maybe.

In any case, What interested me in this somewhat minor verse form was the way the satirists conceived of and imaged evil, especially since Pope took 2 of Donne's satires and rewrote them, so to speak, in the 18th century style and idiom, that is, heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter).  "I am his highness dog at Kew;/Pray tell me Sir, Whose dog are you?"  "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be and all was light." "Oh hadst Thou, cruel, been content to seize/hairs less in sight or any hairs but these!"  Pope's The Rape of the Locke is one of the most delightful poems in the English language.  

I should close the document and save this writing, just in case.  Odd, I had another topic in mind when I started this paper earlier in the morning, Turkey Vultures in the Subdivision, as well as Pet Peeves, but "at my back I hear time's winged chariot drawing near."  Now that I think about it the chariot and the vultures go together, gulp.

"The grave's a fine and private place, 

But none, I think, do there embrace." 

Andrew Marvell, maybe.  One l or two I can't remember.  Iambic tetrameter.  I should quit before something dire happens.  Good morning.