February 10th looking back

Friday, February 10th I had World Views class, but no voice. The sore throat had turned to laryngitis and was staying put. I taped the Algonquin map to the wall, and talked about some local Native American history and then students read their presentations on modern Algonquin figures, and it went well. I read from the Unquachoag Prayer at the end of class. Today was the deadline for the Global Warming article in New York Spirit, emailing back and forth with William Meyers, using tracking etc. I made alot of changes. I pretty much made the deadline. I got a msg from a scientist Donna Blackwell, Scripps Oceanic Society, saying that there does not seem to be an increase in hydrothermal venting. This is a huge relief--if true. I sent a reply asking about the hesitations in the gulf stream currents. Later I got directed to another expert for that one.


I went to Staples to pick up the web business cards for amazine1.blogspot.com and they were there, even though no one had called me. They had just arrived! They looked pretty good and I was excited. The library was closed so I went to the lab to work on the baseball site and this one, inserting some pictures. I am learning about ads for the baseball site, and about linking. I have rarely trolled the web, but now I do. It takes time but I learn about what other people are doing. I read part of an interesting novel Bear Tribe something futuristic, ties in with global warming.
I taught a long guitar lesson for LV at her house. Her father was eager to look at the Mets site but forgot the url. I taught LV at home and then fell asleep on the way to Marist. Fortunately I pulled over. I was so sleepy I had a good nap. In the dream I was swimming in a sea of music, a huge string orchestra. It was very relaxing. When I woke up I remember staring at the dashboard of the car, and still hearing the music, hearing all four voices distinctly. As I was waking up, I heard this string orchestra in my head, very slow peaceful Baroque music in ¾ time to heal me. It has been in my head ever since. I wrote it down in the car in my logbook.


Today was the deadline for the global warming article for NY Spirit, and I just made the deadline before class. Today we talked about the nature of Tao, one of my favorite subjects, but also the students read their papers on modern Algonquins, which went well and took up much of the class time.

Thursday, February 9th, 2006: I believe it was this night after class that I called DLP on the cell and he told me he might get to go to England this summer to study abroad at a very old school with lots of gargoyles. I was tempted to say, “Hogwarts?” People always used to kid him about his Harry Potter Lookalike problem. This Christmas I was buying him some Harry Potter Glasses at the Scholastic Bookstore at the publisher’s headquarters on Broadway, but turned around and put them back. I thought maybe it would not be so funny from his point of view.
One of the courses offered was Shakespeare. I said, “Do you know the Psalms?” He said, “Yes I read the Bible for literary inspiration.” I asked, “Do you have a King James edition there?” “Yes, right here.” And he opened it to Psalms. I said, “Now look at Psalm 46. Shakespeare was 46 in 1611, the year that they were finishing the King James Bible, the first English bible. The story was, everyone had high expectations of the Psalms as poetry, but the translators were having a hard time making it zingy, peppy, wowwy, cool. So they hired Shakespeare, who was known for his associations with that abomination known as theater, but who could write some smokin’ verse. So they asked him to beef up a few Psalms, and he did. But they told him not to tell anyone he had been involved, whatsoever, on penalty of death. Being an artist and proud of his work, and also knowing some of the codes Da Vinci used, he signed the 46th Psalm in code. The 46th word in from the beginning is Shake, the 46th word from the end is Spear.
So of course in a way he broke his oath. The Globe Theater mysteriously burned down within two years, and then Shakespeare himself died three or so years after that under mysterious circumstances. Of course, this is how they teach literature at Hogwarts.

Many excellent scholars have endorsed this theory, and in fact the Hebrew words are in a very different order in the Pentatuch.
DLP was skeptical and counted and found the word count off by one. I noted there is also another word inserted which has never been translated, which throws off the word count. It was, needless to say, an interesting discussion. We talked about where he could go on weekends, and I suggested Paris rather than Rome, much quicker trip. He thought of Ireland, maybe Berlin where everyone speaks English. It was a fun discussion in any case.

Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 I read all of Mirella's new book Lost Angels and created a blurb/endorsement for the back cover. (See separate entry, it is about autism) Its due out very soon. She will be selling some at Lee Carroll's next extravaganza. He is very supportive of autistic or "Indigo" people, as am I.

I had an autistic student at Marist recently and I didn't say anything, I just knew, rather high functioning and intellectually gifted 20 or 21 years old, and very clever. She would ask questions, one after another until I was blue in the face and the other students were getting very annoyed at her, so I had to say "see me after class." They were good questions; she caught places where I assumed common knowledge that for her did not exist. Afterwards one of the students was very angry. He stormed up to me, "Why do you spend so much time on her? Do you know what she is? She's a...." I cut him off, and said, "I know what she is and I know others like her, and sometimes they do very good work! But they do things in thier own way, as you see." He couldn't believe it.

The other day I saw her sitting in the student center with her "travel bear" in her lap, just staring off into space. I nodded to myself, and kept her secret. She has the green starry eyes associated with Williams' Syndrome. It is a rare syndrome that doesn't have that many obvious drawbacks and often brings with it a gift for music, but those with this syndrome have weak hearts, literally and figuratively. I must know a million people with this rare syndrome.

I went wandering around Woodstock today. Its not that large a town. Tourists come here and say, “Hmm…excuse me…is there another Woodstock?” Well in fact there’s Saugerties, Bethel, White Lake, and also there’s Phonecia and Shady, and all are part of the Woodstock archipelligo but no, this is all there is! It was a good day. I was driving and looked down at the floor and there was the tape of my WNYC interview with Leonard Lopate lying there. I hadn’t seen that in years. That live broadcast reached tens of thousands of people with the Native New Yorkers message, and sold a lot of copies. He was a tough interviewer, but we all rose to the occasion. I had been warned by another author that he can kind of sneak up on you with these hard questions, even personal questions, after all its New York, so I was prepared, and we did a little mental gymnastics, a little intellectual Sumo wrestling, but both shook hands at the end so to speak. I listened to the tape on and off as I drove during the day, and it was mostly history, and not as contentious as I remembered. But I had fond memories of the place. The studio is at Number One Center street, where the Boro President’s office is, and there was tons of security on the way in, since it was just after 9-11. I believe it was that day that I met Virginia Field, Boro President of Manhattan and gave her Native New Yorkers and a dream catcher made by a Munsee still living in the state. I offered it to all the people of New York in her care, and she accepted it gladly and said, “Thanks, we need all the help we can get!”
I went to the post office, and there was a note for a package. I picked it up and it was a package full of tapes from Oaness at Wolf Mountain Radio, tapes of our latest interview. However, it arrived with no postage and with no postage due or COD sticker on it. The new director there is very strict, and chewed out the employee who didn’t send it back or throw it away. In fact, the meter tags are often put on in haste and don’t stick too well. His wife Betty had mailed it, and I don’t think that the postal workers in Florida would have accepted it without postage, so I suspect the distain I received was orchestrated. The director sneered when she had to write out Yat Kitischee by hand in her documentation book, but hey its not an Algonquin word so what do I care?
I also received a letter from Sarah saying she wasn’t sure she was coming to the February 11 event. I got a poster from Mary Lou at Pine Hill for the upcoming event, the one James David Audlin was going to speak jointly at. I saw that she had only put my picture on the poster, not his, and I felt that wasn’t right, and I wondered if that’s one reason why he cancelled, and I wouldn’t blame him. I believe that event would have been the first for his new book. As it turns out he will have his book launching at Oblong on March 25th, which gets more traffic among book dealers, and we will try again for a co-signing later in March.
I sent Brian Wilkes (www.standingbearfoundation.org also can be reached brian@wilkesweb.net )a copy (finally) of Native American Stories of the Sacred, along with the gallery brochure from Ramapo College. Brian was extremely helpful in providing most of the Cherokee information in the book, which is all real cutting edge stuff, and authentic oral tradition. Thanks Brian!
I went to visit Shiv Mirabito at Dharmaware, but he was in India until April. Eric, a local legend in Woodstock and organizer of many great events greeted me. They said I could organize an event for NASS when Shiv gets back.
I went to Golden Notebook, a famed bookstore in Woodstock, and talked to the owner for a while. He too had never heard of Lovelocks’ new book, but knew of some other fairly new releases on the subject. He said that he had Stories of the Sacred in stock, but was not in a position to do a signing right now. He asked when Native New Yorkers was coming out again, and I was able to say within six months, soft cover revised, and that I was the distributor for the hard back as author. He had arranged a book signing and reading for me for Native New Yorkers when it came out, and made some important connections for me then. I believe it was through that event that the book ended up at the bedside of our remarkable congressman Maurice Hinchey (one of the most "green" reps in Congress). The owner said he would like to arrange a signing for the release of the new Native New Yorkers, and I agreed.
I was feeling sick, and was losing my voice. I went home and was so tired I fell asleep with the light on. I was supposed to appear in court about a traffic incident, and when I got there, the officers related to the incident had already left. The judge could see how sick I was and said he’d set up another date. That was really quite considerate. I went to a Chinese restaurant in Saugerties to have some spicy food to heal my throat (which helped). I didn’t get too close to anyone, but I wasn’t sneezing. I sat there thinking about this crazy global warming scare, wondering if it was really possible, no less irreversible. I overheard people saying that the casino really would come to Saugerties. I thought that was pretty strange, why here? I knew it would stir up anti-Indian feelings here in town, such a small town to host a casino. I had no regrets personally, as while I was writing Native American Stories of the Sacred I came upon material I’d never seen before that explained the mythical importance of gambling and also its dangers, and included both in the book. It establishes a way for informed readers to be for traditional native customs and against modern casinos at the same time. However not everyone wants to have that kind of discussion when they are fighting for their community’s integrity. But mostly I was thinking sober thoughts about Hansen, Lovelock, Lovejoy and others, about this doomsday scenario, so close that if they are right I will probably see the beginning of the end. I went outside into the parking lot to stand in the cold air and think about these heavy things, and I looked up and there was a huge ring around the moon, which was not quite full. The ring was gargantuan in size and very awe inspiring, it encompassed the full scope of my vision. Inside the ring it was clear and outside it was cloudy. It was stunning, like the mother ship in Star Man. I had only seen that once before in my life, with my ex wife Patty. It was the day we were talking about the future and possibly getting married. Then we saw that ring, and she said it meant good luck, a big yes from the universe, especially regarding rings, etc. So based on that I decided to marry her and we were happy together for ten years and yielded a beautiful son who is smarter than me and more diplomatic, and who likes the Mets and music. Out of that bond came Resonance Magazine and Resonance Publishing which is where I got the nickname REZMAN. See, you thought it had something to do with being Indian and working on reservations saving endangered languages. So to see it tonight at what my friend Madeliene L'Engle would call an "hour of darkness.." as I contemplated the fall of mankind, it seemed like an exceptionally positive sign.
Maybe those hippies in Woodstock who say the aliens will come to rescue 440,000 are right. Hey, you gotta believe!
I also got some paperwork in the mail today from the Pequot Museum, a fine group of people who use casino money in a very constructive way. I guess the timing was ironic.