Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Pre-op physical yesterday. EKG within normal parameters. Dr. Gidday walked me through the pre-op questions including one which wondered if I had dementia. When I asked her how I would know, she laughed, slapped my hand, “Everybody says something like that.”
As long as I was in the area, I went over to Health Images and picked up a cd of Kate’s left shoulder x-rays for her visit with the rheumatologist next month. Let no month pass without significant medical moments.
We’re all in a bit of buzz here with a winter storm predicted for tomorrow. It’s not much of a storm but it’s precipitation and we need it. It’s also the first winter storm prediction in November so far. A lot of folks with snow deprivation. Folks on pinecam.com talk about doing their snow dance.
I’ve seen two movies in the past couple of weeks, Dr. Strange and Arrival. I saw Dr. Strange in 3-D. Fantasy and science fiction still have my attention after all these years. Dr. Strange was fun, great CGI, a cast that includes Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Dr. Strange origin story.
Arrival was a stunner. I’m promoting WWHD. What would the heptapods do? Amy Adams gives a somber, slightly distracted by melancholy performance. She carries the film with her delicate humanity. The story telling is not linear, 
neither is the heptapod language. Time is more flexible than we think, malleable. No Randy Quaid flying his jet into the mothership, no Luke flying his fighter into the weak spot of the death star. In fact, no onscreen violence at all with the exception of an explosion, a brief one. Though you won’t understand unless you see it, Arrival is about the power of language.
Today is Kate’s needleworker group and it’s here at our house. Preparations have been underway. More to come this morning: ebelskivers, muffins, cheese, coffee, furniture moving, that sort of thing. My job? Keep the dogs from biting the guests. That means I’ll have them outside or up in the loft most of the day.
Ruth is filling out her application for the Denver School of the Arts. The application process includes an audition sometime in January. She’s going for fine arts. Ruth is a printmaker, a painter. She draws well, too. I really hope she gets in. She needs peers, other kids with her level of talent, intelligence and curiosity. Otherwise, she gets in trouble. Grandpop did, too.
Brother Mark wanted to know if there were images of my new knee. This is a generic image that shows the components of a common knee prosthesis. Total knee replacement is an increasingly good procedure and all of the anecdotal data I’ve come across has been positive. To be able to walk easily, get in and out of the car without pain, exercise, hike with Ruth and Gabe, sleep with less pain medication, and build up my endurance will be wonderful. December 1st.
Ruth wanted to see the Queen of Katwe, the story of a poor Uganda country girl who became a chess champion. So we did. It was a good movie, not great; but, its almost all black cast reminded me of Luke Cage, which also has an almost all black cast. I have been and am suspicious of the idea of appropriation* as bad, but these two media pieces have made rethink it.
Having said that I found myself intrigued with both Luke Cage and Queen of Katwe because they had almost all black casts. The voice of the characters, the setting, the narrative drive had an integrity, a cohesiveness different from a white dominated movie or television program. The vulnerabilities, tensions, outright conflicts reflect immersion in Uganda and Harlem. They help open up a world, a way of being, a certain thrownness, as Heidegger put it, that is well outside my white, male, middle class, small town Midwest USA experience.
However. The notion of silos, common in critique of bureaucracies, corporate or governmental or academic, seems to me to apply here, too. Silos are self contained domains, segments of a differentiated work place. The easiest place to see silos is in academe where biology and physics occupy different departments, often different buildings, and usually do not communicate. The internal culture of the military makes it secretive while congress wants transparency, the EPA is a separate agency of quasi-cabinet rank, so it is separate from the department of Agriculture where many matters of critical environmental concern receive attention. The critique is that while the silos differentiate and protect, the world is not so divided. Biology and physics operate within each organism. In the world as it is, Federal Superfund sites, under the administration of the EPA, interact directly with farms and municipalities. There was no bureaucratic barrier between the toxic waste pouring from the Gold King Mine and the waters of the Animas River.
