life is sweet

when the air is crisp and leaves turn gold
and you’ve got the legs and luxury of going outdoors
to enjoy it
you think for a moment that life is sweet

when you’ve got your cake and cream soda and your choices
of comings, goings and in-betweens too
and you know you can complain out loud
then life seems sweet

when favor is your friend and your friends and family
like to do you favors
and the only ones to hate you really just hate people like you
you ought to know that life is sweet

when you have stress but you’ve never really been stressed
and you look in the paper and see some who have
and think: that will never be me
you say out loud ‘life is sweet’

but when you feel the heartbreak of the tens
of thousands who don’t have the loves or a life
resembling yours
you truly know that life is sweet

White Noise

I wrote the following poem when I was immersed in the machine, without focus for my creativity, without any goals for my life. These days I feel as if an entirely different white noise is sparking inside my head; it is a thousand-plus different ideas that are screaming to be put to pen: to poem, to story, to essay, to book. Whereas before it felt as all confusion, now it seems more as a fire, pulsing and spitting bits of passion. It's torturous to try to separate one thought from the next, one idea from another, but I need to try to get it down on paper, bit by bit, before I wake up one day like the old artist in O Henry's "The Last Leaf" with only an empty canvas to represent his life's work.


The space beyond my eyeballs
is fraught with random noise.

My daily trip to work,
plodding jobs,
endless encounters,
and discussions.
The end is not in reach.

The bang that began it all,
left an explosion of matter and light.
Is the Universe expanding,
or is it all just in my head?

The noise that clouds my sight,
the buzz that fills my ears.
Is there any reason to it all,
the white noise that is my life?

Ignorance is Bliss

The little town of Apexlehem has been in the news quite a bit lately, for a fire at a used chemicals transfer site, as I noted in an earlier blog. Turns out the fire probably could have been a lot worse than it was -- environmental quality experts haven’t found much contamination in the air or water -- and eventually, those folks living right next door will see their housing values climb back up again. But what has been absolutely killing me is reading the daily newspaper interviews with town officials, who have been falling over themselves dissembling that they had no knowledge, no way of knowing, no possible inclination that EQ Industrial Services had harmful chemicals within spitting distance of the residences of the good people of Apex.

As a former reporter whose coverage area consisted primarily of that town, I found their comments quite distasteful. It is possible, technically, that most of them didn’t know what was there, as EQ took over the site three years ago from a different company, EnviroChem Environmental Services, which had been conducting the same type of work since 1987. But what kind of defense is it really, to say that the people elected and appointed to be in charge of the safety of the townspeople were ignorant of what was going on just under their noses? Several also claimed ignorance of EQ’s failed inspections of just six months before.

What they certainly did know was that the area sandwiched between all those new single family homes on Ten-Ten Road, the old downtown district and U.S. 1 is and has been designated for industrial use for many years. The old Pine State milk building is there; as were several other defunct plants and warehouses. That is, until the town’s thinkers got newer, light industrial and strictly commercial companies to move in, turning what was once a kind of a miniature rust belt into a modern business district. All very commendable and very good for the heart of the town. Change is slow, you know, so, since these town leaders clearly have been doing a good job in making lemonade out of this lemonlike district, one can hardly blame them for some of the leftovers still souring parts of the town.

But one can easily blame them for being ignorant of what is doing the souring. Personally, I doubt that town officials really didn’t know what was going on at EQ. I imagine their claims of ignorance were possibly technically true: they might not have known the exact types of chemicals on the site, while still knowing what type of business it was. But it’s possible that the mayor and town board members weren’t fully aware of what was stored on site -- town council meetings tend to deal with zoning issues, and less often with business proposals. Quite possibly, the previous company was there when they all arrived, and as such, the new company, performing the same type of work, might not need to present itself to the town at all, other than for certain permits.

So, while officials might really not have known what was going on under their noses, certainly somebody did. Which is why I have an especially hard time accepting that the town manager’s office was unaware of the situation. It just seems too farfetched.

But a really good mayor, a really quality town council, and of course, any town manager worth his salt (Bill Sutton anyone?) would have known what EQ was doing, which brings me around to my central point: either they were lying about the situation, or truly ignorant. Which one is better?

And so, as all this coverage continues, and the Apex mayor gets compared to Rudy Giuliani in the press for his presence, and the town leaders hold hearings on the issue, and everyone claims they want what’s best for the town so they’ll try to stop EQ from rebuilding, which all sounds fine and dandy. But the reporter in me is thinking of two things.

One is that I am pretty sure that there used to be a business in town that acted as a temporary storage facility for low-level radioactive waste (from hospitals and labs, etc.) before it being shipped off to some dump somewhere. Perhaps my memory serves me wrong on this issue, but certainly there are other businesses inside the town limits (with residential areas within a mile’s radius) which have hazardous materials stored on site. It’s nobody’s fault -- it’s just the town was way back never expected to grow up all around these places. So why can’t anyone admit it to their constituents? Is it truly better to have people think that city life is perfectly safe even if it’s a pipe dream? Is the image of Apex more important than the reality of Apex?

And the other is that all that time we wrote about Carolina Power and Light (now Progress Energy)’s planned expansion of their high-level radioactive waste storage on the site of the nuclear power plant in the rural New Hill area south of town, town leaders (excepting former town board member Doug Meckes) gave the issue the official brush-off. So what if the storage facility was not designed to hold that much waste? So what if shipping the waste to Wake County from nuke plants in Wilmington and South Carolina increased the dangers of a train accident or sabotage resulting in a radiation leak or fire? So what if CP&L wanted to use an existing facility built decades before instead of possibly a safer, but far more expensive storage process? So what if the energy company officials refused to consider the potential danger of a terrorist attack (in 1999) in order to release the radiation into the area? So what?

The town officials seemed to regard the entire issue as an episode of “not my business,” even though the business is truly in the town’s back yard. Should, God forbid, anything bad ever occur at that nuke plant, any environmental and economic impact would affect the nearby towns of Apex and Holly Springs the greatest.

For the record, our newspaper never took the stance that the nuclear waste expansion was a bad idea, but we agreed with the NC WARN protesters that there should have been a full public accounting and review of the plans by qualified non-company experts. This was an accounting we never got, and we certainly never got any help in the asking from the officials in the town of Apex.

So, while I find it entirely possible, and even plausible, that the duly elected and salaried leaders of the pleasant town of Apex, North Carolina didn’t know what was going on under their noses, and therefore can’t possibly be held accountable for a chemical storage facility with a shaky record going up in smoke and sending 17,000 residents fleeing for their lives, maybe, just maybe, that level of ignorance is simply business as usual.

Promise for a Cure

A home away from house
in some forgotten ‘cale.

A journey to a place
beyond sight of heart and mind.

A vision of tomorrows
more interesting than today’s.

A place inside of time
where spirits roam unchecked.

A halt to endless questions.
A finish to the fear.

An arrival to the certitude
of a life worth living.

You shall get there.

Brother can you spare a second?

I don't intend to use this blog often to rant, but I figure it's okay to do so every once in a while. I've been dealing for some time with living on the edge of being broke. Sometimes I use the term "poor," but broke is more apt. We're not poor; Beth and I "own" our own home, which really means that it belongs to the bank and we're renting-to-own. But after making the monthly house payment and forking over sums for the various utilities, groceries, and credit card bills, we have nothing left. And I'm not speaking figuratively here. So when it comes to seeing the enormous costs that come with the war in Iraq, (not to mention Afghanistan -- anyone remember that war?) and threats that we may need to use military force in Iran and North Korea, I really start to lose it.

That's because these days, I think of money in terms of $10 bills. My current temp job pays about $10 an hour, and so, when I take my lunch break, I sit back and think: "After taxes, Dave, you've just pulled down a cool $25." I'm not kidding, I do that. But then, if I take the luxury of buying a newspaper to read over lunch, I invariably see some figure on the current costs of running a federal government. Or worse, grandiose initiatives are referred to without mentioning the enormous price tag that accompanies it. So it doesn't take long for me to get to thinking what I could do with even a tiniest bit of that money.

According to nationalpriorities.org, based on congressional appropriations, the current cost of war in Iraq alone is about $333 billion. That's a lot of money. According to the Web site, if we funneled a mere $24 billion of that into fighting world hunger, we could cut the number of starving families this year, by half. In fact, at that rate, we could feed half the world's hungry for more than 13 years. A mere $10 billion per year would stop the spread of AIDS, according to retiring UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Or for a paltry $3 billion a year, we could vaccinate most of the three million kids who die every year of preventable diseases. Of course, that many surviving children would create other problems, but even if we did all three for the next 5 years, we'd still have $148 billion left over to address that.

Actually, this is how I used to think, back when I just had one of the lowest paid white collar jobs in the workforce. Nowadays, I only think about how I could spend even the smallest amounts of that money myself. It's hard to keep up with the counter on the page, but it appears that we are spending about $9 billion a day in Iraq. That's about $38 million an hour, $683 thousand a minute, and $10,000 per second. That's right, I said $10,000 per second.

Now, I know that pretty much everyone visiting my blog could find an economical use for 10 Gs, but since we're pared down to the bone, I could really use it. I figure that if I had a single second's worth of what we're paying for the war in Iraq, I could live on it, tightly, for about 8 months (untaxed). On two seconds' worth, we'd get by for a year, and I could probably afford to renew my weekend newspaper subscription, and visit either the dentist or the doctor for a checkup. On three seconds -- whoo-whee, we'd be in the lap of luxury. A minute's worth, spent and invested wisely, could last the two of us the rest of our lives.

Gotta go -- time to check my Powerball ticket.

I’ll take (pictures of) Manhattan

I went to NYC for the turn of 2000-01 with two friends, and that was the year that the city was snowed in. My friend, Eric, was on the very last flight in -- the rest were cancelled -- which was fortunate, that he made it, I mean, because I hadn't bothered to copy down any of the hotel information, or his cell phone number.

I had actually for years planned on going for the '99-00 turn of the millennia, but I panicked that year figuring it was too large of a celebration not to get hit by terrorists. I always think about stuff like that, which is one reason I was miffed when after 9/11/01 people kept claiming that "nobody could have imagined the terrorists could strike in the U.S." Actually, what really bothered me were people working insipid jobs, like some Hollywood gossip columnist, saying things like "It just doesn’t seem right to report on who is dating who right now." As if somehow, in the other 51 weeks of the year, every year, writing a gossip column is a serious business necessary for the survival of humanity.

But I digress. Here we were, trapped in Manhattan in the dead of winter, and the snow would not stop falling. Transit was shut down, as were city services, like garbage trucks, and there was a blanket of white over the whole town. It was an excellent first trip to "The City" for me. I took a boatload of photos, but most of it is still unprinted. I'll get around to building that darkroom, someday, when we have the money. But I have a shot or three that I scanned some time ago, so I figured I'd post them here. When I get around to scanning some of my other better pix, I'll toss them up on the blog as well. If Eric ever emails me any of his good shots, like the one of the working women hanging out at the bar, I'll post them as well. If you haven't met Eric yet, he's the one leaning up against the wall in the 72nd street subway stop.

the floodgates of the heavens were opened

The heavy rain last night made me think of these photos I took at Kerr Lake.

What Goes Up...

The town I used to work in blew up yesterday. Well, the whole town didn’t blow up, just a hazardous materials facility in the middle of it, which sent a plume of toxic fume into the air and some 17,000 people had to be evacuated. You probably saw it on the news -- it happened in Apex, North Carolina, a once small town turned suburb of Raleigh.

The mayor was on TV, calling it the worst disaster in the town’s history, which is a pretty serious comment, considering the entire downtown burned to the ground in 1912. I recall an old man talking about how they thought they might be able to save his father’s general store, “but when that black powder caught,” it was all over.

A single burning building might not seem comparable to losing an entire downtown, but then again, this building supposedly stored toxic and dangerous chemicals that don’t react too well when exposed to the human lungs. Apparently, the release of such chemicals into the immediate environment could also be a serious concern -- what goes up must come down -- and the rain that followed on Friday will run whatever was released right back into the water table.

You know how they always tell you not to pour your used grease, motor oil, or other substances down the drain? Well that stuff eventually works its way back to the reservoir where people and fish and birds and deer get their drinking water from, or it seeps down into area wells. The release of hazardous chemicals works the same way. It gets into the air, attaching itself to dust particles and whatnot, then falls or is rained down onto the ground, settling on fences and cars and houses, and trees and people, and every where else. The rain helps keep it out of the air and out of your lungs, of course, which is very good, but it’ll probably concentrate any contamination to certain places, which could be bad as well.

It all really depends on what was being stored (the paper said industrial wastes including paints, solvents, pesticides and weed killer) at the facility and of that, what was turned into smoke. One of the biggest hazards of smoking cigarettes is not the tobacco itself -- I mean to say, tobacco is bad for you, but that’s not all that’s bad for you -- but the combustion of materials within the cigarette that the human lung was never designed to accommodate. Cigs are chock full of preservatives like formaldehyde, and agents to boost “flavor” like cyanide and the stuff they use to make battery acid. Those, and the bleached white paper that burns while you smoke it can be downright caustic.

So, any building fire can have the same immediate effect. The chemical reaction caused by the intense heat and fire releases bits of all sorts of toxic fumes into the air even in a normal building fire -- but when you add mass quantities of, say, pesticides into the mix, it could be extra dangerous. They’re not saying yet, but according to the news, nobody seemed to have been seriously hurt yet.

So anyways, the whole time I’m watching this on the news, you know what I’m thinking? That I wish I could be there. I was a reporter, you see, for the Apex Herald newspaper, a weekly covering the town and a little of the surrounding county, from 1995-1999. Leaving that job for a better one is what got me to buying a house in Louisburg. The better job didn’t work out, and eventually, after dabbling in some corporate work here and there, it got me to where I am now -- unemployed.

So I’m watching the coverage on TV, all the while my mind is racing to think of what I’d be doing if I were there. The interviews I’d conduct, the people I’d consult, the residents I’d speak to, the photos I’d take, the questions I’d ask the mayor during the press conference he gave. And then the information I’d get from the town manager, his assistant, or perhaps the planning director, that the mayor doesn’t have a clue about.

Something I’ve noticed about the daily papers -- is they always want to speak to the mayors of the towns affected during any big issue. Town blows up? Call the mayor. New business opening up? Call the mayor. When I was a reporter I never went to the mayor for information. Even a guy like Keith Weatherly who has been mayor in Apex for nigh on 10 years, and commissioner before that, and who must know a heck of a lot about his town -- it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind to go to him for anything other than a feel good comment. I mean, when you really want to learn about something, why go to a politician for information? I’ve never understood it.

It’s exciting to be a reporter, especially during times of conflict, or disaster. It’s what you live for. Plus, if you do any even decent coverage at all during such times, you’re a shoo-in for some kind of press award. It’s no secret that the trials and triumphs of the human spirit are what bring one the little recognition that you can get as a weekly newspaper journalist. But more than that, just being in the thick of it -- the tension, the apprehension, the dangers, the excitement of it, really, is like juice to the blood of the journalist. We live for those things.

So for a few moments, I get to run the investigation, beat the street with my feet, bump elbows with the daily and national press, muscling room for a better photo, call all my contacts, stand at ground zero of the blast, seeing, smelling, feeling the story seep into my bones, then spend all night and several weekend days pounding all that raw data out into a story, two stories, three, four, editing them, calling for confirmation, reviewing the pictures, choosing the ones for the most impact and poignancy, perhaps throwing them together for a picture page, perhaps spreading them all over the front page, and then watching it go to press, taking a half-day breather, and then starting all over again next week.

For a few moments, in my mind, I felt the journalist again. Then I switched off the TV.

On Monday I go back to work at a temp job.

More Bondage Found On the Web

I'm very fond of found poems, which are essentially things people or companies have written which, looked at in a different light than intended, appear poetic, humorous, ironic, or the like. Found poems are gotten easily online, where one can browse through hundreds of pages at any sitting, and also because lists of things appear frequently online. Sometimes one only needs to print the list as is, without any modification whatsoever. Sometimes, it helps to remove the title, or introduction, or just print the relevant portion that turns it poetic. And sometimes it's worth monkeying with just a tad for effect.

Following are three examples of some found poems I have collected/made. Can you guess what they came from?

Physical Sensation During Injection

1. Cold, wet tingling in arm
2. Bitter, dry, metallic taste
3. Very hot feeling
4. Sensation of urination
5. Nausea


Page 1

One dead.
Terror threat level:
Explosion imminent.
Today's teens
expand and modernize
sickness.
Poverty and terrorism are twin evils.
Crackdown kills 5 marines.
We know the pain of terrorism
sided with the drug industry.
Intentional under-reporting or a cover-up
green light revenge.
The working poor
pressured to have sex.
Bush administration
deadly virus:
Diarrhea, stomach pain and vomiting.
Chimps, gorillas and other monkeys
at a crossroads.
A stable and secure society
knowingly sold contaminated products;
wait for destruction.
This is a time to celebrate, this is not a time to boycott.
No comment.


More Bondage Found On the Web

Compaction
Injection
Compression
Transfer
Extrusion
Blow
Rotational
Expandable bead
Foam
Vacuum plug assist
Pressure plug assist

Plastic mold
Continuous Molding
Lost wax
Slush or slurry
Die

Deformation (forming and shearing):
Forming
Hammer
Drop
Upset

High-energy-rate
Cored
Rolling
Shape
Ring
Transverse
Stretching (expanding)
Drawing (shrinking)

Stamping
Sizing
Bulging
Necking
Nosing
Extrusion
Spinning
Bending
Miscellaneous other

Explosive
Electroforming
Staking
Seaming
Flanging
Straightening
Shearing
Slitting
Blanking
Piercing or punching
Follow-up

Trimming
Shaving
Notching
Perforating
Nibling
Dinking
Lancing
Cutoff

Pulverizing
Crushing
Jaw crusher
Gyratory crusher
Rollers
Grinding
Ball mill

Face
Chemical
Turning
Boring
Knurling
Cutoff

Drilling
Reaming
Countersinking
Tapping
Broaching

Shaping
Horizontal
Vertical
Special purpose

Open-side
Pit-type
Grinding
Abrasive jet machining
Honing
Lapping
Spindle finishing
Vibratory finishing

Abrasive belt
Polishing
Buffing
Tumbling
Grit- or shot-blasting

Hobbing (hubbing)
Ultrasonic
Electrical discharge
Joining
Pulsed
Short circuit
Spray transfer
Submerged
Stud
Impregnated

Resistance
Spot
Projection
Seam
Flash butt
Upset butt

Percussion
Solid state
Explosive
Diffusion
Hot press
Vacuum
Friction
Inertia
Forge
Cold
Roll

Pencil
Induction
Flow
Torch
Dip
Soldering
Iron
Hot plate

Adhesive bonding
Epoxy
Modified epoxy
Miscellaneous other powders, liquids, solids, and tapes

Metal fasteners
Screws
Nuts and bolts
Rivets
Pins
Retaining rings

Stitching
Stapling
Shrink fitting
Quick-release

Empathy, offline

I’m not fond of reading poetry online,
it hurts my eyes from the staring.
(docs will tell you to look away for 5 minutes
every 15, but who can do that when you work
all day at that machine, staring for hours straight
even though you rarely pay attention).
And the doing of it lacks the empathy I feel when
immersed in a book of poetry, or even a scrap
of paper torn from a journal.
I feel little connection with the author (or the subject,
or the predicate, or the vowels, or anything)
because of the nature of the net;
the poem is not in my hands, I carry it not in my head,
walking with me where I walk, breathing into me as I inhale
and carrying with it the forum of my mind upon exhalation.
Instead, I see it only as pixels reproduced on my screen,
while the reality of the poem is stored away in some far off,
air conditioned-cold, subterranean server room,
an entire author’s works crammed into an area
smaller than my fingernail (one electronic hiccup
and everything that ever was Sandburg is gone,
sloughed off into cyberspace).
A poem in my inbox is better, because I feel as if it has Arrived,
as if via special delivery (my own personal copy
of The Fog, or Dickenson’s No. 6) as the author
must feel when that poem is first Published.
But I still feel a need to print it out, and take it to the couch
for comfortable perusing.
No, I really need book in hand, and my sandwich in the other,
while sitting at the lunch counter, or on stone steps,
or with my back against a library wall (places where one
can appreciate the world’s workings and mechanisms)
to properly inhale the endeavors of one mad mind or another
(if poets were sane, they would not write)
before adding to the exhalation my own demented musing.