Bring on the waterworks.

First.
I've been trying to post in this blog more often than once-a-month, but that didn't happen in September. My biggest excuse is that it was college basketball season, and I didn't want to post any basketball stuff--it gets me into trouble. A smaller excuse is that I have nothing to tell; there are no new stories, there are no new poems.

Which make it sound as if September has been another boring month. Not at all. Between lining up for tickets to games; looking for scalpers for tickets and looking like scalpers to get rid of tickets; cheering my throat sore and screaming at referees; and sneaking out of work to watch the games, well, it's been National Basketball Month. And that's never boring (for me, at least). But, I could be getting sick of it. Note, could be. Check back November. N. B. A. Okay, enough.

Second.
I think the older a woman gets, the less prone she is to tears. That's a new theory of mine. Wait, maybe I should qualify: The older I get, the less prone I am to tears. It kinda makes sense, since you start to realize they accomplish nothing, and worse, you look like shit afterwards. (No offense to the woman who knows how to use tears to get the advantage. Different strokes for different folks and all that. And let me just add, You go girl!)

A couple of weeks ago, I met up with some friends at D.'s house. I had just come from a basketball game then, I think, and people were asking me if I'd watched it. Of course, I say. We won, right? L. asked. Uh huh. Did you cry, too? Because M. cried, he reported. Why would I cry? I said, There's one more game to go. So, if we win the next game, would you? he persisted. I wouldn't cry if we lost, why would I cry because we won? I was perplexed. L. just nodded his head, considering-like.

But it got me thinking. What would bring me to tears nowadays. Well, there are the movies and the books, but the kinds are getting farther and farther apart.

(Aside.
I remember once in college I watched Saving Private Ryan and I was crying at almost every frame. And it pissed me off because I could imagine Spielberg directing it just so: "Ooooh, let's shoot this scene from behind. Once they hand her the letter, she reaches for it, hands trembling. She reads it then falls to her knees. No need for dialogue. I can almost see it people! Bring on the waterworks!" Boy, that really pissed me off, I stopped watching movies for a couple of years after that. If it weren't for his brilliant Catch Me If You Can, I'd never watch him again.)

Anyway, it made think. What makes me cry nowadays? I thought about it, and I thought about it and I thought, What a fucking waste of time. So I grabbed the book I was reading then, Dava Sobel's Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, and went back to it.

Nothing to make you cry in that title, right? Wrong. Oh boy. Here's the formula: Take one history of science book, where the protagonist is an ex-carpenter who is self-educated, and pit him against the whole Royal Astronomy Society (or whatever) of the whole of Britain. Mention that the search for the answer to this "Greatest Scientific Problem" led to the discovery of other things--the refinement of the gravitational relationship between planet and satellite, the discovery of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, the calculation of the speed of light, and peripherally, how sauerkraut defeated scurvy--to taste. Add a loyal son who fought for his father's invention, and a rival/evil-astronomer named Nevil. Plus millions and millions in prize money. Et Voila! I've got tears running down my cheeks.

Not just that: Ask me to tell you about it, then watch my eyes. I swear they'd be bright, like a grandmother's recalling her youth. Oh boy.

It isn't even brilliant writing (Sorry, Ms. Sobel). I mean it's not lyric, it's not poignant. (It put me off too, that Diane Ackerman had good things to say about it, and to see later on that she's Ms. Sobel's "good friend". Ugh.) It's matter of fact and basic, just like a science text should read. But we're talking about the invention of the chronometer here. (Chronometer. Isn't the name enough to give you goosebumps?) And I like how she starts it, her own curiosity over those "invisible lines", and how she ends it, at the prime meridian, seeing another fascinated girl, at literal zero hour. It's beautiful.

Ask me, I'll lend it to you.

Third.
My new favorite poem.

Addressed to Himself
Cirilo F. Bautista


How hard I have made life for you, Cirilo
Who wrestle with words to free my mind;
Your various battles, you do not know,

Pose at me the same buckle, the same wind
That eagle in anger hotly ride on.
Yet like buckles you never break, though blind

At times you pine and pine for beauty gone--
Ah, never take the same courage, mon ami,
Wisdom and the past are never one.

But learn to distrust language that we
In constant dreams deem the only fact
Kill it in seduction or heraldry

So eagle-like you may invent your act;
Then think you walk in a world of thrall
Where Beauty walks too but does not look back,

Crossing the foggy fjords of the skull.


Fourth.
A poem to make me cry? Nope. They make me envious and they make me swear. They make me want to write, or want to stop writing. But they don't make me cry. It's science more than anything, that wrenches the tearducts open. Conduct an experiment if you want proof.

Fifth.
That's it. Just wanted a nice finished number to end this with. Bow.