Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

What Must Be Returned

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So yesterday I went to a reading by my friend Joseph Gallo, who read his fine poems and played his contemplative cedar flute for us. It was a beautiful day in Santa Barbara, in which the spring sunlight was lying passive as a cat. Joseph’s material and presentation were compassionate and generous. So I declare it was an excellent reason to emerge from my lair.


I enjoyed all of Joseph’s poems and some really jumped out at me. So much so that I had to fumble in my pockets for a pen and paper and scribble a note.


One poem that struck me is called Summer Sends You Sun, and you can read it on his blog.


…I will never see

the tender suffering at your window for I will have returned

my eyes to the stars. I shall instead lay my light upon the hand
of your youthful skin as the night visits in its way.


Thanks, Joseph! 

A Call to Celebrate Sanity

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Robert Bly is one of my favorite poets. He has shared the top of my list since probably 1985. I love his poems. I love his delivery. I cherish his sanity. It is so with all of those who inform our lives.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence?

Watch and listen to this.

 

What is it about the ones whose lives are meaningful to us? What do they have that we need, and need to emulate? I propose that we are seeking clarity, a sense of our place and time, perhaps a tesseract to who we’ll be and to those who’ve raised us up.

I’ve always loved the first sentence in the anonymous book, The Way of a Pilgrim. “I am by the grace of God a Christian man, by my acts a great sinner.” That’s clarity.

My grandfather used to tell me, “stay in the boat,” and that was clarity.

John F. Kennedy said,

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The passage of a half century has turned that inside out. It’s not that the government is afraid to let us see the truth. It’s that the people are afraid to face it. We are a nation afraid of each other, not to even mention everybody else. We are afraid of the religions of our neighbors. And fear is not the opposite of courage. Indifference is the opposite of courage. Fear is the opposite of clarity, of truth, of sanity.

I am a Christian, not afraid of Muslims, or Jews, Buddhists, or Hindi. I love them and wish them peace. I’m not even afraid of the Westboro Baptist Church, though it makes me sick and I promise you it is no real church at all. I know this by a simple shibboleth: there is nothing in what they do or say that points toward Christ.

This week we have, many of us, been fixated on the personal implosion of a man who has lost his mind. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of this group of audacious lunatics, whose greatest and most ardently held tenet of faith is that they’ve figured out who and what God hates. Those people are insane. They have forgotten the face of love.

There are two things I know about God. First, that there is a God and I’m not Him. Second, that God is love.

With that I invite you, gentle reader, to join me in a search for simple clarity, whatever it looks like to you. Let’s choose one word, then another, and put them in their order. Let’s remember the faces of our loved ones, thankful that someone held our hand when we cried, hopeful for someone to do it again when we die. Because another favorite poet, William Stafford, had this moment of clarity:

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know —
it’s too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.

Repent and Be

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If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

– Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913-1960)

We don’t get to see Camus quoted very often, do we? And did you know he had a Nobel Prize? I’d forgotten.  Pretty good for a guy who died at the age of 47.

It is a hard thing, not to be like a dog, always on the wrong side of the door. Or always at the end of a leash which ends no closer than Oh that’s not close enough to the best place on the planet to pee.

I joke, but I’m guilty of forgetting that peace lives in acceptance, and surrender to a Power Greater than myself. That’s how to see “the implacable grandeur of this life.”

The Charlie Syndrome

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I guess we can agree that there’s very little that’s funny about Charlie Sheen’s epic meltdown. And I’ll stipulate that really his sad, accelerating spiral into oblivion is out of place on a blog about writing and its peripheral concerns.

Entertainment is just entertainment, but it’s part of our culture. So maybe one short post isn’t out of line. 

I can only say that I have enjoyed the show, watch it every week, but Sheen is just one of several people who make the funny work on that thing. The laughter has always come when Charlie (Harper) is on set with Alan, Jake, Evelyn and Berta. Berta has never gotten enough screen time, for me. I don’t think the show comes back without him, but that doesn’t make him more than one member of the cast.

Sheen thinks he’s the whole deal, and that’s wrong. He’s an actor, and that’s nice for him. It’s an interesting and sometimes valuable profession. But so is a baker, a teacher, or a cop. My Dad was a lineman for the power company. He gave us lights and cold food, and the TV we watch assclowns like Charlie Sheen on. But Sheen gets 2 million for a week’s work. It’s a stupid way to run a railroad, if you ask me.

And it’s my humble, layman’s opinion that we’re seeing a rampant snafu of brain chemistry at work. Sex and drugs and psychosis. I mean, we all know crazy when we see it, unless we are crazy. It’s an insight generally endemic to the human herd.

So watching a career disintegrate is no fun, but here’s some Charlie Sheen funniness that he couldn’t possibly have done better without Jimmy Kimmel’s help. 

Fixed It

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I think I finally fixed my computer. As you may recall from previous posts, my desktop PC started crashing a little over a month ago.  I started getting the Blue Screen of Death, or Doom, and it took several days to reach a probable diagnosis: the graphics processor on the motherboard was overheating and going out.

There are only 2 ways to fix this, that I know of; either replace the motherboard or install a new graphics card to replace the one that lives on the motherboard. The latter is far less work and money, so there you go. It took about 10 days of research to decide which one to buy. And it took Amazon 2 weeks to get it here.

I’m not normally a patient person when it comes to not being able to use my stuff, or waiting to get stuff once I absolutely decide it’s needful. So brownie points to me for that. The desktop has been on sick leave, and I’ve been using my laptop. There was a benefit there, in that it motivated me to learn why the laptop was getting so slow, and get it running better.

The new GPU finally arrived yesterday around lunchtime, and I called my brother Joe. He has installed things like this before, so he was able to walk me through it. We got it finished today. It wasn’t exactly easy, but Joe helped me out by phone. Thanks Joe!

Want to see some photos of the inside of the PC, before and after the repair? Of course, here you go.

So it’s all installed, seems to be working OK. I’m glad to have my PC back online. I’m also pleased that I’ve finally conquered my fear – or mild and highly defensible anxiety – of messing around inside the computer case, except to clean it.

Helping: How It’s Done

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Yesterday a friend told me about a program that was recently proposed to help the homeless in Santa Barbara. Instead of giving money to the homeless, one gives it to an organization designed to distribute cash to those in need.

I said I wondered whether someone might catch on to this, and decide to come and take all the money by force.

My friend said that the plan had failed anyway; nobody wants to do that. Apparently if one has a dollar to spare, it takes some direct confrontation to him or her to part with it. I’m not surprised, much less self-righteous, since I think that’s true of me. But this is how a society takes its needy and disenfranchised, and turns them into beggars.

Ironically, the City of Santa Barbara recently considered a $50,000 proposal to rotate sidewalk benches on State Street, to make it slightly less comfortable for “panhandlers” to speak to passersby while seated on thereon. The benches would be perpendicular to the sidewalk, so that people would have to turn their heads to look at pedestrians while speaking to them. The benches are set in the concrete, hence the cost. I thought this was pretty stupid, especially considering how much food could be provided for $50,000.

Here’s an article that explains the issue better than I have.

And here’s one that describes recent City Hall debate over providing a warm shelter. Some of the argument against helping is just mind-boggling. In essence, if the City helps the destitute and lost who are here now, more will come.

A man in India has a beautiful approach to the conundrum. His name is Narayanan Krishnan and you can click here to watch a short CNN video about him on youtube.

Reynolds Price

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On Poets & Writers:

Fiction writer Reynolds Price, who died last Thursday at the age of seventy-seven, is the subject of a new documentary, Pass It On, which takes a look at the impact the late author had on his students at Duke University, where he taught writing and the poetry of Milton for more than fifty years.

I enjoyed this little 4 minute intro to the documentary:

http://www.pw.org/content/reynolds_price