I've been off the net for awhile because of a serious illness in the
family.  I'm going to work on putting thoughts together about the
confliction of being a doctor and a son during such time.  In the meantime I'll
post a review of our show that was published in the paper today.

"One House, Two Views" photography by Bob and Deb DeWeese, is at the
other end of the spectrum.  It showcases the measured elegance of
Bob's black and white gelatin silver prints, but as the title suggests
more than one view is represented here.
Deb DeWeese obviously sees her world in color.  She is showing
several manipulated Polaroid SX-70 color prints of such vividness they
would glow in the dark. She also meticulously hand colors her husband's
black and white work by use of a toothpick.  Bob DeWeese, on the
other hand manipulates his black and white landscapes in the dark room
and in so doing serves up a million subtle gradations of gray, living
happily within texture and sinuous line.
 DeWeese is better known for his ballerinas who shine in high
contrast on velvety blackness.  Several are included in the
show.  The digital print "Arms and Legs" is an exquisite exercise
in figural composition and a show stopper if there ever was one.

Really, no shit, I didn't write this.  But I damn sure intend to buy the reviewer a drink if I get the chance.

I Pledge Allegiance . . .

The Indiana
legislature recently passed a bill which was signed into law by Governor
Daniels which requires a moment of silence in the morning in public schools where
people can silently pray, reflect on the upcoming day, daydream, etc.

It also requires the pledge of allegiance to be recited,
although students may opt out of it if they choose.

Both of my daughters are boat rockers, smart, head-strong (hard-headed),
not easily fooled or intimidated and not afraid to defend themselves.

Jessie, my youngest, a junior in high school has refused to
participate in the pledge.  I support her
on this matter.  First and foremost, it’s
lame.  I said the pledge of allegiance as
a child, but was never asked to after third grade at most.  If we had been instructed to do this in high
school the teacher would have been laughed out of the room.  But times have changed and Indiana has gone so far red it’s surely in
the infrared spectrum now.

All has gone fairly well, though there has been taunting by
some self-appointed patriot police: “Oh, so you’re not an American.  You’re not supporting the troops.”   Etc.

Today Jessie responded with this: “The last time I had to
say the pledge of allegiance I was in like second grade, I was learning my ABC’s.  Does that make you feel good to be doing
something that you stopped doing after you learned your ABC’s?”  “Whatever” was all the patriot policeman
(Hitler Youth? Darn it, I swore I wasn’t going to use that term) could come
back with.

But yesterday a teacher told Jessie that she didn’t have to
say the pledge but that she had to stand. 
That was not the way I understood the law.  So I re-read it, contacted the Indiana Civil Liberties Union
and Deb has even contacted the Governors office to see if this is indeed
possible.  My understanding is that
students could opt out.  The governor’s
office is going to call back (probably) because that was their interpretation
too.  The ICLU has responded that she is NOT required to stand by this law.  Bless them.  I'm glad I'm a member.

I want Jessie to be able to live with her conscience, but to
also be within the law.

This pledge thing will backfire.  Eventually all high school students will come
to realize it’s pretty lame to do the same thing that they stopped doing in
kindergarten, and more students will opt out. 
It will be embarrassing when they give the pledge and no one bothers.

Life would be easier for Jessie if she just did like
everyone else and robotically said the pledge. 
But like I told her, a conscience is an expensive thing to have.  You always have to pay.  And like Ralph Waldo Emerson said:   “Beware
when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.”    Thinkers are scary.  They make people (especially homeroom
teachers?) uncomfortable.  People that
just get in line and do what they’re told aren’t so frightening.

One might ask why a father that served more than his fair
share of time in the military, takes his hat off and places his hand over his
heart and sings along with goose bumps on his back when the National Anthem is
played doesn’t encourage his daughter to say the pledge?  Mainly because it’s lame and meaningless.  It doesn’t support the troops.  It doesn’t better America.  It doesn’t ease the suffering of one
soul.  It doesn’t cause one student to
become a better person.  It’s lame.   But it’s another American “quick fix”.  We’re in the toilet as far as ethics in this
country.  But let’s not look deeply into
the core and cause of that problem.  Let’s
just say the pledge and that will ease our conscience.

That's Jessie, below.

Vanessa11 asked for a link to the photos in the show.  Here's one to some of the photographs:  http://www.deweesearts.com/show.htm
Thanks for all of the good wishes.

One House, Two Views

Deb and I are having work in a show here in Columbus.  It opens
this Friday.  We're pretty excited.  Our photography is quite
different.  She is primarily into landscapes and alternative
media, like hand-painted black and whites and hand manipulated SX-70
photographs.  I'm more of a people photographer, often
nudes.  There won't be any nudes other than that on the card for
this show.  This is, after all, Columbus Indiana.
I came up with the title while mowing grass.  My best ideas come
while mowing, taking a shower or sitting on the crapper. 
Fortunately, I have a lot of grass to mow, I take long showers . . .
and, well you get the idea . . . I have a lot of time to think.
I will post pictures of the opening.

Late this afternoon I woke on a lounge chair beneath trees
beyond our front yard, a book on my belly, and an empty glass beside the chair.  I stared at the ash leaves overhead, silhouetted
by a blue sky as I tried to wake up and was overcome with a desire to walk.  So I took off through the woods and over a
recently shorn soybean field to a drainage area between two fields that I’d
recently cleared and tilled and planted with native prairie grass.  The grass, or something green, was pushing
through the ground.  It's amazing how long you can stare at a square meter of earth trying to identify the green pushing through.  The creek beyond the
drainage area was silent.  As I walked
home I noticed the low sun lighting up tree trunks deep in the woods that I
would have never imagined being lit from that angle, and my mind wondered, and
nothing in particular came to mind except the visuals of the walk.

Today's been a weird, but overall pretty good day.
I've contacted the local university about teaching anatomy there and they are interested.
I've contacted Princeton University about pursuing a PhD in philosophy
there and they have at least responded to my e mail (not just the
auto-respond type stuff, but a hand -typed, somewhat serious response.)
Though they seem less than optimistic, given my science background.  (Brown just flat out said
they don't have what I'm looking for).
And today a bulldozer came to our property and began to bulldoze trees
to improve the drainage between our house and the (admittedly sucking)
vineyard that I've worked so hard on..  And I walked that newly turned soil in my flip flops,
rich Indiana top soil that had not been turned in hundreds of years, soil that will
soon be seeded in native Indiana prairie grass, and I realized that that
was the highlight, the best  moment of my day.

I’ve been resisting writing about Hurricane Katrina.  Partly because I wanted to see and digest the
extent of what happened and partly because having survived a category 4
hurricane, I’m not emotionally uninvolved. 
Tonight at supper we talked about Katrina and the human, national and
political implications and my youngest, less than one year old when Hugo hit Charleston, wanted to know
what went on that night and so I told her and it helped solidify my thoughts.

First and foremost my thoughts, prayers and money go out to
the people affected by the hurricane.  A
category 4 hurricane is a terrifying and humbling experience.  One of my most vivid memories is how my
prayers changed as the Hugo progressed from “please let our house be O.K.” to “please
let me be alive in the morning” (Deb and the girls had gone to Virginia so I knew
they were safe).  Not all had those
prayers answered during Hugo and even more fell on deaf ears during Katrina.

Beyond the human tragedy I have a few thoughts in no
particular order.

It is folly to build a city below sea level.  Any habitat below sea level should be a
submarine and nothing else.

If a coastal city is built below sea level the defenses
against the sea had better be built to withstand the worst storm imaginable.  Since nature can always come up with a storm
worse than we can imagine, it’s best to revert to the paragraph above.

We need to take global warming seriously or otherwise storms
such as these will become increasingly frequent.

Our wetlands are a great and much needed defense against
these forces of nature.  We have to not
only stop destroying them, we have to restore them, not just on the coasts but
right here in Indiana.

Spending billions of federal dollars to fix a problem after
cutting millions of dollars (to divert to Iraq)
from the budget to improve the levies around New Orleans is bad fiscal policy.

The world doesn’t really care too much about the US.  While the US
is quick to respond when any other country has a natural disaster, including Iran, the rest of the world pretty much assumes
that the US
can do it on its own.  And we can.  But fuck you very much for not offering help.

“Oh Baby I Just Don’t Know”

That’s the last line from an Allman Brothers song, “One Way
Out”.   It strikes a chord with me because
I’ve been there.  In my more untamed,
pre-married days, something similar happened. (Though I actually snuck out the
front door.)  It’s a situation that is as
uncomfortable as a bad fitting g-string, or so I’m told.  Despite all rumors, I’ve never owned one.

But those nights end when the sun comes up.  Those are the easy days.

What never ends when the sun comes up is what we’ll do with
the rest of our life.  And oh baby, I
just don’t know.

"They know that if we do not confront these evil men
abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and
streets, and they know that the safety and security of every
American is at stake in this war,"
George Bush, referring to our soldiers in Iraq, said this today as
justification for the war.  There's a couple of (well actually
more)  problems.
First and foremost, we have faced them in our own cities and
streets.  And George Bush was in charge of security of the country
at that time and he failed miserably.
Secondly, the first time I heard "we have to fight them there so we
won't have to fight them here" was as a very young man and the words
were spoken about Vietnam.
George W lived (and partied) through Vietnam.  He apparently didn't learn any lessons or even remember much.

Good reflexes, sore fingers, spilled blueberries and other
seemingly unrelated things:

I think I’ve got pretty good reflexes.  If you drop a two thousand dollar camera lens
and can snatch it before it hits the floor; that’s a good thing.  If your instinct and reflexes cause you to do
the same thing with a razor sharp kitchen knife with a 10 inch blade, that’s
generally not a good thing.  That
happened to me last week.

I think blood hit the floor before the knife did. I know
foul language spewed from my mouth before the knife hit the floor.  Two fingers had deep cuts, one which sliced
through an artery and was shooting a pretty good stream of blood through the
air.  The damn knife even hit my big
toe.  Fortunately my hand altered the
trajectory and it was a glancing blow to the toe that didn’t cause too much bleeding.  I’m just glad I was wearing pants.

Deb heard me cursing and yelled to ask if I was O.K. No!  She came to the kitchen and saw the blood and
went into hyper-drive.  I wrapped a dish
towel around the fingers, held tight pressure and off we went to the E.R.  There was a three hour wait at the ER but
they took me right away, not because I was a former member of the medical staff
but because I was dripping blood onto their floor despite the pressure.

Old friends and colleagues that saw me in the ER stopped to
inquire as to why I was there and chat awhile. 
That and the pain killers I got before I went home were the only good
parts of the night.  The ER doc and I
talked and caught up on old times as he sewed the 9 stitches.  The severed artery in my middle finger gave a
last blast as he was about to put the last stitch in and he remarked that he’d
better put a deep one in.  He said they
needed to come out in 10 days and I told him I’d take them out myself.  He gave me the obligatory “I can’t recommend
that.”

The cuts are healing nicely and except for some anesthesia
in a small part of one finger, because I undoubtedly cut a nerve as well, I
don’t think there’ll be any lingering effects.

Today Deb asked “Why’d you try and catch the knife?  When you spill blueberries on the floor you
don’t try to catch them.”  That’s true,
but I knock the blueberry container out of the fridge all of the time when I’m
getting stuff out and it invariably loses its top and blueberries fly
everywhere, so I’ve learned how to react to that, (don’t take a step until you
see that there are no blueberries where you’re about to put your foot).  This was my first experience with a falling
knife.  But it made quite an impression
(in my mind as well as two of my fingers) and I guarantee the next time it
happens the reflex reaction will be to get all body parts out of the way and
just watch the knife bounce on the floor.

But that’s in the past now. 
The fingers are doing well and I’m ready to cook again.