Eulogy

A familiar family: stalwart old guard revolutionaries. young tattood girls. beautiful gay men. Faces from before, but now with babies, doctorates, new tattoos, same smiles. Everyone seems timeless...Exactly how I last saw them, even if i hadn't met so many of them. We are in a secret courtyard behind the church, which i did not even know existed, a secret sanctuary. A massive oak hangs over. A crucifix of old branches rests peacefully behind climbing vines. Tables with orchids, lit by clinical lamps, strewn with potato chips and photos of the beloved. There is genial conversation, an epic soundtrack, and occasionally a sobbing embrace.

He ran away from North Carolina, away from his father, a commanding Methodist minister, he ran away to Berkeley, to spend 38 years in a radical free clinic--in the basement of a Methodist church.

We tell our tales. I tell mine. My speech. i agonized all day, for a few weeks, turning over and over...the profound role of my teachers at the free clinic. In the end it would always be deficient, so i stay dutifully within my five minute limit. I listen to the stories of others, deeply moved by the impact of one human on the lives of many. I am honored to be a part of something. JD, ever the wise motorcycle sage, speaks softly and eloquently of Scotto's impact on the myriad physicans, nurses, PAs hundreds of workers, who then go on to impact the souls of others. This then, the way things unfold.

my speech.
"The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset once cruelly noted, 'A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.' But the legacy of that revolution, of its teachers and institutions can generate a force that lasts 30, 40, 50 years, that ripples deep into the psyche of the next generation and rumbles across continents and seas.

I arrived to the Berkeley Free Clinic entirely by accident, an earnest do gooding 19 year old, full of angst, restless, and fierce in my own bumbling 19 year old way. I wanted very badly to make many wrongs in the world right. And so I arrived, and so I met Scottosaurus.

Scottosaurus was crotchety, perpetually wary, incorrigible. He endured my endless questions: why was his name Scottosaurus? Why did he have a torchlight strapped to his hat? Where were the condoms? How do I shut off the alarm? The toilet has exploded, what now? He always answered thoughtfully, often with a note about history of the Digger’s movement, or the last time the clinic flooded in the late 1980s. We spent many slow shifts discussing the merits of an assortment of science fiction literature, Kantian metaphysics or the changing nature of information and its relation to power. It was Scotto who introduced me to Pete’s coffee, which he typically brewed to the strength of gasoline. He often lumbered about, supremely disgruntled, but his mind was bright, sparkling and nimble. He could mobilize a dense architecture of rapid fire bullet point arguments, exquisitely interwoven clauses, exceptions, and footnotes drawn from endless vaults of profound clinic history and obscure facts about vacuum tubes.

Scotto made me believe in the revolution. The one that may begin in riots, but bleeds deeply into the daily work of life. His life is inseparably and intimately interwoven with this clinic. The impact of the Berkeley free clinic, of its people and vision, cannot be overstated. The people of this place have been teachers, models, inspiration, and comrades in the search for thoughtful impact towards a better world, they illustrate what the steady and rather piecemeal work of Revolution actually entails—long meetings, unclogging toilets, reaching beyond ideology and inflated rhetoric to listen—to listen to clients, to one’s own self, and one’s fellow workers.

Scott himself was a thoughtful connector, a hub in the clinic’s erratic, dynamic and fluxing existence. He observed events, people, and exchanges with the astuteness and analysis of science, and artfully sought to relate, connect, and synthesize a collective wisdom. He was also completely unafraid to tell you were dead wrong and piss you off royally. But he was ceaselessly passionate for the work and for the vision. He cared deeply and indubitably.

My heart is heavy for this loss, heavy that I had not spoken sooner, that I could not express directly these things to Scotto. That in my brief 3 years in the IRC, I had been profoundly moved and transformed. It is true, that many of us, 5, 15, 30 years later, are still full of questions, of angst, of fierce restlessness to make the many wrongs of the world right.

But in that brief time, I gained immensely, what I have learned here has launched me with boldness and knowledge to undertake the good fight—in the clinics of San Francisco and Tanzania, in the marble halls of policy and advocacy, to join others in upholding dignity of each human, and the collective spirit of justice in all action.

Antoine du Saint Exupery, the famed pilot and author of the fearless 'Little Prince' advises 'If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.'

Scotto’s legacy is a pillar of this clinic, and the clinic in turn launched a thousand lives—curing pimples on penises, or empowering each other to learn their own bodies, or by letting people stumble into the courage to make the world “a little less ridiculous,” by knowing there are others who will stand and work with them. Chirp!"

Why I love the British

Perhaps in my deepest, I am fundamentally a tropical girl--given to sentimentality, fussiness, shameless hedonism, clingy neediness and unbridled passions. I cry and laugh with utter transparency and express my love with food.

And perhaps forever on, I will be on all functioning accounts an American girl--fiercely ambitious, equally earnest, gruesomely optimistic, stimulation junkie, self absorbed, individualistic and given to expressing all affection couched in the language of legal consent.

But somewhere in between, i would like to think that weaving the distance in continents and oceans, is the cheerful work of the british, who were always so exquisitely polite when endeavoring to wipe out your civilization and grow tea plantations on top of it.

Their infamous stiff upper lip, lined always with a comical handlebar mustache, smelling vaguely of tobacco, bacon and bureaucracy, these men and women provide models of grace and sly dowdiness, be they faced with armies of disgruntled heathens, the demise of their empire, tropical weather ruining their tweed suit, or that final Tea Cup in the Sky--mortality.


Someday i will question what the English language has made of my brain, and write it out, in this language that has colonized me--and I who have colonized it.

Against perfectionism

“Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.”
Guy Kawasaki

Fortune Cookie says: "You will discover new frontiers"

I miss the taste of revolution in my mouth.

That old hooligan of a prophet Nietzsche warned: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Phblt. what would it find but more abyss? And there's the crux of the matter: heaving, devouring darkness peering intently at each other. This is what ambition amounts to, and the alchemy lies in making light.

The heat has been hammering at me. Nothing can be done. All of civilization, with its whirring air conditions and defiant stretches of parking lot, is nothing for our blazing father star. The sun is merciless. Philosophy, chemistry, nothing. Economics the rise of the information age, useless. Gay pride parades and the Geneva Convention, these things have melted. In visceral exhaustion nothing means anything.

Nothing, anything to be done, but alas, to google image search puppies.

Until then, the case for moderation: “Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.”

%#&%@&* HOME!!!!

This is the five day forecast for Lancaster, CA from Weatherunderground.com. I will arrive Monday and leave Friday.

Monday
103° F | 70° F
39° C | 21° C
Clear

Tuesday
108° F | 70° F
42° C | 21° C
Clear

Wednesday
108° F | 72° F
42° C | 22° C
Chance of T-storms
20% chance of precipitation

Thursday
106° F | 72° F
41° C | 22° C
Chance of T-storms
20% chance of precipitation


Friday
103° F | 70° F
39° C | 21° C
Chance of T-storms
20% chance of precipitation


YEAH!

i hate steam punk

just as much as i hate all the circus nonsense and Seed magazine. I hate it because i thought of it first, and i hate it even more because the last clause is entirely untrue and i only wish i had thought of it first. i may only have muttered it in repetition when someone else said it, but it was* before it showed up on the new york times trends page. Sure i read all of Blake, Lewis Carroll, Romantic mysticism and acquire much of my morality from South Asian culture that absorbed British 19th century prudery wholesale. But maybe i only talked alot about the Victorians more than actually converting my ipod into a brass steam engine. le sigh. When did stodgy ideas from dusty books become so much less sexy than design? Clearly, long ago, while i was not paying attention. i feel so disempowered.

Chronos and kairos

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist, fighting for peace by nonviolent methods, most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands. To commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." (Thomas Merton)

Merton was himself what most would describe as an activist in the antiwar movement of the 1960s . Yet in this passage he identifies both the daily lives of many activists, and the personal habits of almost all modern physicians, as a way of participating in violence against human values, rather than ways of promoting peace and health.

For many students the most important distinction offered that between chronological or 'clock' time, on the one, and contemplative time on the other. Relying solely on the first and devaluing the second pushes otherwise laudable impulses—for example, to serve others—into the realm of violence. The reading which seems to make the lasting impression describes the difference between two Greek words for time. While chronos refers to what can be measured by the clock or calendar, kairos refers instead to time that cannot be measured, time that is separated instead into periods of meaning. In reflection one temporarily steps outside of chronological time to see things from a different level and with a more broadly purposeful perspective (Bloomquist, 1997). In many ways the distinction between chronos and kairos parallels Covey's distinction between the urgent and the important. Helping students learn to value kairos in their lives, and to resist being swallowed by chronos, is a critical goal of spirituality teaching.

We describe a variety of exercises as aids in regular reflection. These include transcendental and other forms of meditation, yoga, relaxation response, contemplation, and journaling. Each is a means toward an inward focus, a way to find space within oneself despite a culture so much at odds with it. The intensity and sensory over-stimulation of contemporary life almost deny the reality of anything quieter. Again, however, the course does not encourage spirituality as escape from the world. On the contrary: an inner life is part of, and nourishes a full and balanced life…

The medical curriculum emphasizes scientific and technical skills, and stresses that, without continuing education, physicians become unable to care for their patients. Practice is needed for technical skills—even the best physicians soon become rusty if they do not do a procedure for a while. The humane skills that constitute virtuous behavior—such things as imparting hope, and showing compassion through intensive listening—likewise require practice. The physician's ability to promote healing depends on both sets of skills. Covey (1989) has shrewdly observed that ability and character tend to go together; allowing one's abilities to atrophy through inadequate practice commonly reflects a character flaw. And, as Richard Gula notes, 'We must practice virtuous activity so that the virtues become habits, or second nature to us. We become trustworthy by doing acts of trustworthiness; we become altruistic by doing acts of altruism.'

Judith Andre, Jake Foglio, Howard Brody, "Moral Growth, Spirituality, and Activism: the Humanities in Medical Education"