Justice

Posted on May 17, 2013 by stephenarcher
small http://indipaydayloans.com

To start, read this story and click on every link:
Wel­come back.

I took this pic­ture months ago while walk­ing around Guatemala City. I did not know what it meant. Exactly three days ago, I looked up “Jus­tice for Geno­cide” on Google and that was the day that Gen­eral Montt was sen­tenced to 80 years in prison for geno­cide and crimes against human­ity – that last one always strikes me deeply – con­victed of being inhu­man, the first time a for­mer head of state had been sen­tenced in his own coun­try for such crimes. Good for you Guatemala. Thank you. The ero­sion of trust for the pow­er­ful is in full swing here in the United States. Barak Obama is pre­sid­ing over three dis­as­ters – dead Amer­i­cans in Libya, appar­ently left to die with­out backup, that’s bad. The IRS has appar­ently been exert­ing itself to overly inves­ti­gate con­ser­v­a­tive non-profits dur­ing an elec­tion year – that stinks. Worst of all, the Asso­ci­ated Press has had their phone tapped for months and then their records con­fis­cated in the inter­est of the pub­lic “inter­est”. I am not inter­ested in that. I want an overly free press. Way overly free. With­out that we are in dan­ger of tyranny. I am a social lib­eral (fis­cally I am prob­a­bly a Lib­er­tar­ian). I am will­ing to wait for all the evi­dence to come out, and I don’t believe all the evi­dence will come out, before I make a judge­ment, but I am hard pressed to believe that any rea­son to tar­get polit­i­cal groups unfairly by the IRS or that the Jus­tice Depart­ment would ever have good rea­son to tap every phone at the AP, is jus­ti­fi­able. Can’t swal­low that.

This Guatemalan dic­ta­tor killed thou­sands. We have much to be grate­ful for here in the United States, even now, but the rela­tion­ships between us and “them” is grow­ing nar­rower. It is grow­ing scarier.

I am think­ing about jus­tice and crimes. I am think­ing about my side of the street. I am think­ing about own­ing what I do to hurt other peo­ple and what I have to make right. I am also think­ing about where that ends and where I stand up for the fact that I am a good man even though I make mis­takes. This is some­thing I don’t think coun­tries do. Can they take this step? Can any­one tell me of a time when that has hap­pened? For my pur­poses in my own life, it doesn’t mat­ter except that I won’t look to nations to learn moral­ity. Pol­i­tics is a dif­fer­ent sub­set of human endeavor. Ethics, ideals, morals, integri­ties – these are things that well up in me, in you, in the indi­vid­ual, but don’t seem to be a part of gov­ern­ments or pol­i­tics. That is why it is crit­i­cal that gov­ern­ment exists to sup­port the indi­vid­ual, both for free­dom and respon­si­bil­ity (they are as tied to one another as the A and B sides of a record). When we rely on gov­ern­ments to define ethics, moral­ity etc, we rely on an entity that will wire­tap the press, allow the IRS to tar­get unsa­vory sorts, etc. I need to max­i­mal free­dom so that I show up for my side of the street, clean it up and be a bet­ter man today than I was yesterday.

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Crack

Posted on May 10, 2013 by stephenarcher

I joined a writ­ing group for a while. I should be in sev­eral of these. I like to write and I am not ter­ri­ble at it. I like words and I know what lots of them mean and I can some­times string them along so that they even­tu­ally believe my lies. The writ­ing group fiz­zled, even though the tit­u­lar (weird, awe­some word) head, Will Akin assured us we could con­tinue on even if all we ever sub­mit­ted was a “damn haiku” once a month. I didn’t even get that done and I fell out of the group. I won­der if it per­sists and I still think I should be a part of it. This has noth­ing to do with this photo I took out at Smith Rock.

I am not really a sports pho­tog­ra­pher, but I could be I think. I took lots of sports pho­tos for the 1983 Car­roll High School Anchor year­book. I would spend hours in the dark­room of the jour­nal­ism class­room. Mrs. Wal­raven, an odd woman with a hawk shaped face, gave me a key to the class­room where the dark­room was and I was often there past mid­night. She trusted me. She trusted no one, except her stu­dents. Those of us who could hang in there with her bizarre para­noias long enough to learn how to write a news story or take a jour­nal­ism pho­to­graph or draw a semi-ironic car­toon etc, those of us who did those things, she loved. She was teach­ing us jour­nal­ism. I learned how to edit (the lack of evi­dence in this blog notwith­stand­ing) a story. The facts in order of impor­tance, sup­ported by salient quotes. Cover the five “W’s” and that ‘s it. It is harder than you think. Try it. I loved it. I could remove the silly feel­ings from the thing and just crank away on the “facts” as I now know they should be called.

So I spent many days of hours in that dark­room. I kissed a year­book edi­tor in there once. Mostly though I worked very hard at learn­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and how to print pho­tos in baths of devel­oper and fixer and washes. It is incred­i­bly com­plex. I won’t list all the steps here in the inter­est of the pre­vi­ously men­tioned edit­ing. You can just trust me. Or this exam­ple: It’s like play­ing the gui­tar. What a ridicu­lous instru­ment! It’s hard. Trust me, again. I can’t imag­ine who thought of it, some demented genius.

We like doing hard things. Must feel good. It does feel good. Some­times I make my life hard. That is dif­fer­ent. It does not feel good, but it is all still me. The impor­tant thing is that I hold with all of me, on to me, no mat­ter how hard I have made it. That is the hard­est thing I have ever done, every day.

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Light on Thorns

Posted on May 2, 2013 by stephenarcher

I haven’t been writ­ing. I haven’t been check­ing in with myself. I haven’t been drink­ing in the life my body is mov­ing through.
I have been rais­ing my son. I have been lov­ing my wife. I have been doing my best at work.
I haven’t been car­ry­ing my cam­era. I haven’t been screech­ing to a stop when the wind blows plas­tic through barbed wire in a beau­ti­ful way. I haven’t been stop­ping.
I have been sleeping…more. I have been stop­ping ear­lier, some­times. I have been bet­ter to my col­leagues at work. I have started run­ning, a lit­tle.
I haven’t been holed up in my pri­vacy. I haven’t talked with some friends. I rarely cook din­ner.
I am talk­ing with some (other) friends. I am writ­ing now.
I am grate­ful
for the light on thorns
for the curve of the park in front of our house
for the word arc.

I am not done.

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This Climb Does Not End

Posted on March 31, 2013 by stephenarcher

If I had a Sun­day morn­ing off while I was a surgery res­i­dent, it felt like Christ­mas and my birth­day every time. They did not come often. I worked over 100 hours/week and was on call either every third or every other night. The year I stopped being a res­i­dent, laws were passed lim­it­ing res­i­dent work hours and that is a good thing. I do how­ever, have whin­ing rights so that when a younger sur­geon com­plains, I can tell them I walked to the hos­pi­tal and back uphill both ways and with­out shoes, etc.

Any­way, Sun­day morn­ings. In my mem­ory, the day started with dif­fused light through kitchen cur­tains, hot cof­fee in the press and an end­less day ahead of us. The smell of the cof­fee, of course, bet­ter than the cof­fee can ever be and then the smell of the grinds going down the sink when the press is spent. Really, this post is about that. My mem­ory of those spent cof­fee grounds just before they swill down the sink — not burned but cooked, for sure and done. The acid in them is revealed and they have given up all their fla­vor. Today, I smelled that again. I hardly drank any of the cup I poured. I mostly just lin­gered in the aroma of the cup and the spent shells of the beans that fired.

On those rare Sun­days off I would almost never be off at the same time as my wife who was also a res­i­dent, but in pedi­atrics. Her sched­ule was usu­ally every fourth night which was in oppo­si­tion to my usual every third night. If we landed on a Sun­day morn­ing together, it was truly spe­cial. I am a per­son who likes my alone time but when the day together with my part­ner hap­pens only once a quar­ter, I am in for that. It was usu­ally about sleep­ing as long as humanly pos­si­ble because one of us had been up the night before or both had. In any case, sleep, top priority.

We would live the two hours of morn­ing before noon as if they were an eter­nity. Eggs and b. and the cof­fee and an Eng­lish muf­fin. I would like to say we hiked across the plains or climbed a new route, but mostly the morn­ing lin­gered in to the after­noon and two young, exhausted doc­tors made their way even­tu­ally to the store for din­ner and a video (!) or we hung out a book­store or we tried to find the energy to talk about the future…we weren’t good enough at that and even­tu­ally the present tense of fatigue and my own lack of wake­ful­ness led to the end of our mar­riage. Many res­i­dents crashed on the rocks of res­i­dency. It really felt like a climb that sim­ply could not and would not end. I was in it for seven years. I worked unques­tion­ingly for any length of time that any per­son on the lad­der above me said to work and some­times there were four or five peo­ple above me on that ladder.

The end result of that work is that I know when a per­son is “sick” as in really ill. I know when I need to get my ass out of bed and go to the hos­pi­tal and when I can wait a few hours and store up rest. I can’ know that unless I have been through the fire of hav­ing seen it all, easy and hard, for seven years.

So this morn­ing the cof­fee roasted and as I poured the spent grinds, I smelled the past, was grate­ful for my young self that learned those hard lessons; and I won­dered about what other route I might have taken up this climb, my life.

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24 Minutes Plus Six For Commercials

Posted on March 27, 2013 by stephenarcher

I don’t won­der so much now how I grew up think­ing that life was going to be for me as it was for Steve McGar­ret (played by Jack Lord, actu­ally born John Joseph Patrick Ryan – that’s three cool names) on Hawaii Five-O. Obvi­ously, and I hate I have to say this, the orig­i­nal H5-0, not the cur­rent, ridicu­lous remake. I don’t won­der so much now why I didn’t grow up in the Brady house, although I wanted to then and I mean the actual house. I didn’t care so much for the “fam­ily”; I was actu­ally look­ing at the design of the house and the designs that Mike Brady (played by Robert Reed, actu­ally born John Robert Rietz – good idea to change the name, Bob) came up with as the cool but kind of annoy­ingly non-confrontational dad on the BB. (I have researched it and Robert Reed was actu­ally a Shake­spearean trained actor who got mad at the slap­stick schtick, so to speak. Look here http://​boing​bo​ing​.net/​2​0​0​7​/​1​2​/​3​0​/​m​i​k​e​-​b​r​a​d​y​s​-​a​n​g​r​y​-​s​h​.​h​tml. I don’t won­der because I now know the producers/writers/designers were cre­at­ing some­thing for me to dream about, some­thing with­out the grind­ing wheels of war from the for­ties, with­out the mess, some­thing bet­ter and brighter, pos­si­bly pas­tel even. I get that now and it is ok with me. I was too young to fight it as a teen in the six­ties and sev­en­ties (since I wasn’t a teen, I was only six when the decade turned). I sim­ply grew up with it. My anger turned on at the appro­pri­ate hor­mon­ally dri­ven age, which cor­re­sponded with the eight­ies – another story.

Any­way, I liked the design from the time I was a kid. I liked the low flat roofs. I like ranch houses. I like the dream of “mid­cen­tury mod­ern”, the fifties and six­ties archi­tec­ture. I should dif­fer­en­ti­ate here in that I don’t like the blinded, soggy think­ing of what is por­trayed as Amer­i­can mid­dle class from this time. I like the archi­tec­ture and design. Some­how I would like to be from the Beat Gen­er­a­tion (see Jack Ker­ouac, actu­ally born Jack Ker­ouac – see, bet­ter already, more hon­est for sure!) in my think­ing but non-ironically live in a beau­ti­ful sprawl­ing ranch style house with a pool. And, to my credit, this is kind of who I am!!

I am not say­ing I want to move to Palm Springs, where we just went for a very hip, modern-type week­end and where this photo was taken in the emp­tied office of a park­ing garage – how hip is that? But to live some­where warm and in a house with clean lines, and be friend with earnest, hon­est, real peo­ple liv­ing impor­tant lives and not sim­ply lost in the sim­ple rec­tan­gu­lar shapes of the time in my mem­ory when things worked out ok in 24 min­utes, plus 6 for commercials.

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PS: I do real­ize this light is not actu­ally a mid­cen­tury mod­ern piece, but the photo, for me, evokes that time some­how. The stair­well is from the six­ties prob­a­bly or sev­en­ties and the whole scene, lit­er­ally in a park­ing garage office, was too good. If you are a die hard purist, I beg your forgiveness.

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Child of the Sun

Posted on March 19, 2013 by stephenarcher

I have four words for my son
for his learn­ing. These are spring­boards.
They (you know, “them”) will teach him how to read and add/subtract
in those rooms.
After that (before that really, as in right now), this, these:

Pas­sion
Curios­ity
Dar­ing
Love

If he has a ques­tion he will read and learn. If he needs to count, he will add and sub­tract or he will do dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions if his pas­sion leads him there, if his desire to be a lov­ing man, and curi­ous, leads him there. He will take risks if I don’t snuff his dar­ing. He will be led around his by life, (un)leashed to his passion…

if we (me and Rose, and you, his vil­lage – we need you, you know!) have any­thing to say about it.

Right?

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Untitled 88

Posted on March 5, 2013 by stephenarcher

Just the photo. After my last post, I think it best to leave the words out…I say this even though I know that it will be hard for you not to go back and read it. It’s bad. Just own­ing that. But you could stay here, on this post, with this odd, inter­est­ing image and make up a lit­tle story about it. It was image 13 on a 12 frame roll. It should be square but the film was done, and so it cropped itself.

Ok, see you when you get back.

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Pyramidamid

Posted on March 4, 2013 by stephenarcher

I would love to say that you start with a blank. But it’s me.
I start with a blank.
Then I have eggs and toast and cof­fee on the road and
then I end up some­where with my cube shaped cam­era
that I hold like my lovers breasts…i love it, seri­ously, because it con­nects me to a past you don’t care about and future which lit­er­ally does not exist, but i hold it like a cubi­cal warm crois­sant on a Sun­day morn­ing, every time, like that. I can’t explain it, but I describe it hop­ing you get how pow­er­ful the mechan­i­cal thing is to me.

Then I make a pic­ture. I don’t take a pic­ture. I am mak­ing some­thing not tak­ing some­thing – sounds like steal­ing. I am col­lab­o­rat­ing with a par­tic­u­lar moment. You are invited, after, but still that orig­i­nal moment is there, some­what frozen, although I hope you write a poem about it and…thaw it.

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Blue Window

Posted on February 17, 2013 by stephenarcher

This blue win­dow
opens, flut­ters an invite:
Wind wan­ders through here

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Confident Girl

Posted on February 14, 2013 by stephenarcher

I came across this lit­tle girl who was kid­ding around with a tuk tuk driver(note the lit­tle red tuk tuk in the cor­ner) who was parked. She stuck her tongue out and he called her
“muy fea” – very ugly. She gave him the look I pho­tographed here, fear­less, funny.

At some point in my life I came to believe that I had low or no self esteem. Maybe it was the pat­tern of deci­sions that neglected to include what was bet­ter for me. An exam­ple, you ask? Dat­ing toxic women with­out even know­ing they were toxic; refus­ing to stand up to abu­sive peo­ple in my work life and the extra fun corol­lary (that always fol­lows refus­ing to stand up to bul­lies) of becom­ing a bully in my work life.

This last one is what is on my mind, the bul­ly­ing thing. On my recent trip to Guatemala as part of sur­gi­cal mis­sion team, I had the oppor­tu­nity to work with peo­ple who have known me, but not worked with me in some time. In that time I have done some work. Mul­ti­ple peo­ple said to me things like, ‘wow, you are nice now,’ ‘you are not the guy I thought you were’ etc. These com­pli­ments stung a lit­tle, because I know I had been a hard guy to be with in the oper­at­ing room, the halls of the hos­pi­tal, the ER. I still can be, but it is less, truly. It is less because I like myself bet­ter, accept that I deserve to be here sim­ply because I am here – more on that in a sec.

At some point a child gets beat down enough or their neu­ro­trans­mit­ters fail or they swal­low some lie about their fun­da­men­tal bad­ness and they get the idea that they are worth­less. I did that. I made it a belief. In terms of behav­ior, beliefs drive the bus. Beliefs gen­er­ate my feel­ings (you didn’t know you made up all your feel­ings?) and my thoughts and my actions fol­low. We can argue this if you want, just write to me or post a com­ment. For now pre­tend I am right. The lit­tle me gained a belief that he was worth­less, lead­ing to feel­ings of pain/shame/anger lead­ing to actions to avoid these feel­ings (med­ica­tion) and/or to pass them on (bul­ly­ing). It was not until fairly recently that I decided to chal­lenge the belief. I chal­lenged the belief because it was caus­ing a lot of dam­age. Also, I wanted to start liv­ing within my val­ues and the con­stant atten­tion on myself that deny­ing my self worth requires, forced me to live out­side of my val­ues. I am a per­son who does not want to cen­ter every wak­ing minute on me. I value self­less­ness, in other words. The effort to hold on to the shame and the false belief that I am worth­less was becom­ing an ego trip of mon­u­men­tal pro­por­tions and also was way past being bor­ing for me and every­one else. How then to accept my self worth?

I accepted yours. I asked myself if I believed that you deserve to have my basic respect sim­ply because you exist, because you are a part of human­ity. Answer: yes. If that is true then how to I go about exclud­ing myself (for lack of wor­thi­nesss) from the group called human­ity? How do I say I don’t deserve to belong to that group espe­cially when say­ing that forces to me to spend every wak­ing sec­ond prov­ing how unique my shame is – so unique I don’t even deserve the basic human respect every per­son believes for only draw­ing breath? That is a lot of energy, a lot of ego. It started to look ridiculous.

I am here and because of that I have my atten­tion and respect. I don’t have to prop my esteem up on the wreck­age I cre­ate in an effort to level every­one to my noth­ing. I am respon­si­ble for my own pro­tec­tion and love, first. It is not on you. Some­how learn­ing this has allowed me to be a bet­ter, not per­fect, guy at work. I can deal with my ongo­ing feel­ings more eas­ily because the fun­da­men­tal belief is changed. In fact if I start to feel the shame I have to talk myself in to it because the shame is incon­gru­ent with my belief about my worth. I still do feel it, but it is now more like a mem­ory than reality.

I liked this lit­tle girl because she didn’t flinch. She didn’t believe him. She laughed and went on with her snack. I real­ize I am totally mak­ing up the story of this lit­tle girl, but oh well. She helped me feel the love that the peo­ple who work with me were show­ing. I had enough of me in the game to let it sink in and know I deserved it.

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