On the Streets of Dar es Salaam

Here’s a poem I wrote 2 years ago while visiting my sister in Africa…

 

On the streets of Dar es Salaam:

Owner-less vendors sell dignity and bananas-

Flashlights and globalization-

Speak in tongues, but still spit American slogans.

Potholed pavement, lucky to be paved.

Missionaries searching for the unsaved.

Sad, saggy, somber eyes

Asking why I’m in their country,

Because they were already colonized-

Children cry more from mzungu than hunger-

They know hunger-

Tired, work-worn hands never waver,

Except when escaping wasteland shackles.

I keep my digital camera close to my hip…

Not for fear of it being stolen,

but rather because I don’t have the courage

To take snap-shot  memories of others’ troubles.

Of happy-less smiles.

Hand-me-down tourist clothing.

Shanty town homes.

Tired, broken bones.

Click-click-click shoot the heartless drones.

Real life is not a spectacle to be mocked,

To be hung on my bedroom walls-

-I have walls to hang it on-

Poverty is NOT art.

The heat covers the streets,

The way I’m looked at makes it difficult to eat,

My humility and retreat to discover my own greed-

For the souls on the streets of Dar es Salaam my heart bleeds.

On campus, at 8am, for the last time

Today i finished my last class of my undergraduate education at CSU, and walking through the campus at 8am I was filled with emotions. 3 girlfriends, visits to the hospital, many, many friends, 2 jobs, 5 years, and who knows how much personal growth, have all seemingly flashed through my life, leaving bits and pieces of themselves with me and I’m thankful for the sadness and the joy. I have conquered it all, which seemed sooo impossible at the time. I have endured the pain and relished in the joy, absorbing it all through open eyes and never ending smiles. I don’t know if it’s the sleep deprivation and overload of caffieine, but it’s very surreal to me, the fact that a certain portion of my life that I have known for so long is over. I can effectively close that book and move on to the next. As I said in I think to much, “I think I’m living my autobiography, and this is just a chapter.” What now? Where do I go from here?

In all honesty, it doesn’t matter. Life has this funny way of working itself out when you allow it. I’m in no hurry, and why should I be? If I’m not happy, with whatever I end up doing, it’s up to me to change it, to make myself happy. And so far, I’m succeeding. All the people who question what I do, or what I did, don’t understand that aspect of personal responsibility that I take for my own life, and that they should take for theirs. If you aren’t happy, change whatever is troubling you. Don’t run. Don’t close your eyes. Don’t avoid, or cover, or ignore the problem. Problems are only challenges waiting to make us better people, so beat it (beat it, just beat it). It feels sooo good to defeat something that stands in your way. It allows for you to laugh at, love and live your life.

I glanced back at the campus as I walked away, and it became a memory like all of those that it reminded me of. It became one more obstacle that I defeated.

And all of this at 8am. Usually i’m not even awake yet!

Smile, it feels good!

Btho

Midnight Train

There’s a train that rolls through downtown Fort Collins around midnight nearly every night, and tonight, I stopped hating that train. It was a very strange experience. I was deep in meditation; my window half cracked and the cool late spring air was keeping my breathing easy; a cone of sandalwood incense burned next to my bed; nothingness floated through my mind; until that train came.

My first reaction was to get upset, like I do everytime I hear the train drawing me away from my serenity, but then I realized something: I can’t stop it.

What am I gonna do? I can get mad. I can get riled and lose my meditation and restart my mindful breathing once it passes, but then the train will win. And it will happen tomorrow too. And the next day, and the next… And thats when  I noticed that its the same way with everything that stresses us out. If school bothers you today, whats gonna stop it tomorrow? We all have these daily “trains” that happen everyday. They keep us from enjoying the small things, like my meditation, and trap us in this circle of stress, and anger, and dullness. But the train will eventually pass, whether I am upset or not, and life wll go on. I might as well save myself the headache.

As i was thinking all of this, I calmed down. I noticed that my breathing was still at the same rate as it was before. I was still in the half-lotus. My posture was still exactly the same. I beat the train. And as the train rumbled off into the distance, to awaken others, i felt as though I had conquered a huge obstacle (even though this was just a train).

I hope that tomorrow brings more trains, more challenges, more things to accomplish. I know it will. It will never stop. That midnight train will be there for a long time to come, attempting to disrupt my meditation, and I look forward to it.

Smile, it feels good.

btho

The physiology of anger

Anger has been a common theme in my blog since the beginning, and i am continually learning about what makes us angry and what triggers people to act in an angry way.

I took a physiology of psychology course last semester and was completely drawn in by the functioning of the brain. Its amazing. I learned where my stroke was,The temporal lobe, and that it controls primarily speech functioning, memory,and some visual processes. The part that struck me as interesting though had nothing to do with my speech, memory or my vision. It had to do with the interrupted pathway from my lower brain regions to my upper brain regions. Basic instincts like fear, hunger, and anger (to name just a few) were now disjoint with my frontal lobe- the part of the brain that puts reason behind those feelings.

The other interesting thing that i have learned over the past year about anger is that it happens, physiologically, before you have a chance to put a reason behind it. There is a 10-15 second window from the time you get physiologically upset to the time you can reason about it. Well, that connection wasn’t in tact for me. I would get angry and not now why. I would get sad and not have any reason for being sad. It was intense and I often had no idea how to control this. That’s when I stumbled across Thich Nhat Hanh’s book entitled Anger.

He described this ten second process as the inevitableness of becoming angry, but he put the importance on what we do after those ten seconds. This made me think of  when my mom would say “count to ten before you get mad” and actually retought me how to control whatever emotion I was feeling at the time. I slowly restructured those important areas in my brain in the left temporal lobe, and likewise, the areas on both sides that controlled the delicate interworkings from the amygdala to the pre-frontal cortex. But I highly doubt (looking back of course) that I would have recovered from my stroke so well and understood myself without the ability to stop and realize that something is screwing up inside my brain. I wasn’t an angry person, but i acted in an angry way.

The brain is amazing. The way it can restructure itself, the way that neurons from one part of the brain will switch functioning when one part of the brain is injured, its maleability, its quest to grow and function the best it can, and its complexity. Anyways, the reason I wrote this post was so that you all could understand your anger, and love it. For ten seconds you can embrace the anger, after the ten seconds you can understand what’s happening, and you can abolish your anger. You choose to become angry! Afterall, its just a ten second process. Try counting to ten (thanks mom).

After that, smile, it feels good!

Btho

Recently

A quick update:

I often find myself smiling for no reason at all. I should be bogged down. I should be stressed. I should be freaking out about graduation, about a job, about health insurance, about the uneasyness that goes along with growing up; but i can’t. I get stressed for an hour tops, then I have this revelation, every time, about what I do now, post-stroke, is extra. Its a bonus. And that feeling is extremely liberating. Life isn’t worth all of the chaos that we add to it. Stress doesn’t extrinsically happen. It happens within ourselves and is controllable. So I don’t stress, or worry, or hate. Those are things I can control. Sure things happen, but the only thing that I can do is control my reaction.

School is going painfully slow. i have heard stories of people who have less than a semester left to graduate when they drop out, and i now understand them. I’m not saying i’m going to, but i feel their pain.  When in all honesty i should  be enjoying these last 4 weeks. It can be a little overwhelming at times, but as i said before, its all extra from here on out, so I’m going to try to enjoy it. Even the last few weeks of school.

My stroke has had obvious profound effects on how I view the world, but I am still forced to deal with the physical effects as well. Everytime that i am walking somewhere, I am motivated. every page of notes that I write, I am motivated. every sentece that I have difficulty speaking, I am motivated. i am flattered when someone has no idea that I am any different; when they are shocked when they hear that I had a stroke, but these things are so obvious to me, that they have become a large part of who i am and what defines me. Not to mention what motivates me… i still hold on to the attitude that I am never going to be done going through the recovery process, that there will always be something to work on. In fact, when i stopped using my ankle brace I took a friends advice and hung it next to the door in my bedroom. Next to it is a notecard with “you are not done” written on it. I have come an incredibly long way, but I still have an incredibly long way to go, and I am actually excited for it all.

As for my dating life, I have tried to date few women recently and in all seriousness, they confuse me more than anything. I’m not saying that i’m giving up on dating, but I’m giving up on trying to date. i’m just gonna let it all happen, thats how it always works out best anyways. It serves me right for even attempting to understand women. haha.

Anyways, there’s a little update.

Smile, it feels good!!!

btho

Snow

Here is the newest section of my book. It takes place about a year ago, about 5 or 6 months after my stroke. Enjoy!

 

 

The snow falls and covers all of the pain and all of the hate and my mind is blanketed with wet, fresh serenity. The icicles just dangle there and wait for the spring sun to let them dissipate.The tiny frozen angels dance poetically from the sky, and upon completion of their journey they melt instantly. Some are salvaged and lay in fields or rooftops or my jacket, but this is only temporary salvation. The spring will soon come and what is a season of birth for some is a season of death for others, the snow will soon melt and give fresh run-off to sustain all the life around. The interconnectedness of life is beautiful, and for this reason (and the close call I had a few months ago) I am not afraid anymore. The one fear that is still even conceivable to me is the fear of not living. Not enjoying these tiny milliseconds of life that happen every day. A smile, a shared laugh, an instant of truly loving someone, whatever that tiny moment is, it is beautiful. With all of this recent pain-the memories of Lindsay, the evil words said, the realization that my body doesn’t remember how to function, my grandmother’s death- comes the realization of all that is beauthiful-the positive memories, the love from everyone around me, understanding myself, and what I’ve come to realize is a full circle. Even though I lost my grandmother, a piece of her lives on, and solace and peace are still obtainable. Does a person pass if part of them is always with you? This is the best piece of evidence of the afterlife to me. It isn’t a fable, or a story, it’s the simple fact that the idea and thought of someone never disappear even after one has passed. And life continues to be beautiful.

With the loss of the left side of my brain I have realized what the meaning of beautiful is. I no longer analyze things. My brain is a soft piece of receptive tissue and I am able to soak in everything around me without worrying about time or problems. They no longer matter. I am also able to find, to see, all of the… dare i say religion?… pragmatic dogma in everything that is around me, all of the sentient beings, all of the immovable matter, all of the waste, all of the essences, all of life itself.

Do you like microwbrews?

Fine, I’ll work on sundays.

That was my response to the law, or repeal of the law, that said that liquor stores could now be open on sundays. Big deal right? Well, if you have read my blog for a while then you know that I have been concerned about grocery/ convenient stores eventually being able to carry full-strength beer as opposed to the “3.2″ beer they are currently allowed to carry. I have so many problems with this issue that I don’t know where to start.

1. Part of the original agreement of liquor stores staying open on sundays was that this would not happen, grocery stores would just swallow the cost of losing money on 3.2% abv beer. If it wasn’t part of the original agreement, I doubt it would’ve ever happened, we’d still have our sundays off like everyone else. Plus, if this new law goes through, what’s going to stop them from doing it with wine? Liquor? Where does the protection of liquor stores come in? Everyone is arguing over the protection of grocery stores, that they shouldn’t lose money off of 3.2% abv beer, but why should liquor stores lose money? Is it just a question of who has more influence over our state senate/house? It seems that way.

2. 3.2% shouldn’t even exist. Grocery stores, with any sort of logical insight, would have stopped carrying 3.2% beer when the repeal first went through and they wouldn’t be losing any money whatsoever. That’s what we do if the product doesn’t sell, you move it off the shelves as quickly as possible, you don’t complain to the government about it. If it doesn’t sell, don’t carry it.

3. In Colorado the system for buying beer has already been set up. Why do you think that Colorado has soo many wonderful microwbrews? Because there is a market here. They’re sold at independently owned liquor stores and people have the wonderful option to buy whatever kind of beer they can dream of. Options are endless, and I will argue that options are the key to a successful economy, otherwise we start to resemble soviet grocery stores with grey boxes lining the shelves. Many, many breweries have already stated that if this law passes, they will be closing their doors. (Crabtree, Lefthand, Fort Collins Brewery, etc.) If they do so, what will the effect on Colorado’s economy be?

    a. Tourism will decline. People from all over the United states come to Colorado for its wonderful festivals, local breweries, and things that are related to beer. The GABF (Great American Beer Festival) draws thousands of tourists every year and is seen as one of the best beer festivals worldwide. What constitutes the GABF? LOCAL MICROWBREWERIES. If half of the participating microwbreweries are from Colorado, and this law passes, you can expect half of those Colorado micros to close their doors. Thus, if enough microwbreweries close their doors, the GABF closes its doors (or moves), and Colorado misses out on millions of dollars in revenue. (This is just speculation, I have no idea how many breweries wiill or will not close their doors).

    b. Lost jobs. Now correct me if I am wrong, but now is a time in our economy that jobs should be protected and created, not lost. This will have a much more profound effect than most realize; Liquor stores will shut down across the state, and employees at those stores range from 3-30 (I’ m guessing 30, I have no idea how many employees Wilbur’s or DaveCo employs). Also, liquor representatives will greatly deminish. Elite Brands is a small, but very reputable liquor distributor. They distribute mostly high-end beers, as well as wine and some liquor. Are grocery stores going to carry the Lost Abbey beers? Chimay? Port Brewing? I doubt it. So this will also effect the economies of outisde states as well. That ranges from California to Maine to Belgium. Less production means less jobs. (Shout out to Tia, Elite Brands rep).

   c. I have been doing  some serious thinking about the positive effect that this law will have. It will increase production for Kroger, and Wall-mart, and Safeway. It will be convenient. But what else will it do? The convenience arguement isn’t a sustainable argument, I have yet to find a grocery store in Colorado that doesn’t have a liquor store within 200 feet. i feel like  the United States as a whole should appreciate the 20 second walk it takes to get to the liquor store. We should encourage convenience without dismantling every sort of physical exercise. I will spare you my argument against places like Wall-mart, because that is not the focal point of why i am writing this. This economic section of this post is to ask this: What growth will this create? The answer: none. It will only transfer the growth away from the creation of jobs (small businesses, microwbreweries, liquor reps) to corporations where an increase in employment is, at best, minimal. Keep in mind i’m not an economist. But I do care about the economy.

4. The price of hard liquor and wine will surely rise. Now that profits from beer have been diminished, it is essential that we (the liquor store) make up that money somewhere. The mark-up on beer, wine, and spirits are some of the lowest mark-ups in retail. Plus, you have to figure in: employee costs, insurance, cost-of-stock, electricity, theft, broken bottles, etc. Needless to say, the retail side of the liquor business skims its slim profits off the top, and hopes for big days to bring big profits. First off, we make most of our money on the cheap domestic beers. Those are also t he beers with the lowest margins of profit, but we rely on buying in bulk and selling mass quantities. So if 30% of our sales in in domestic beers (again i’m speculating), and we lost that 30% to grocery stores (they will be able to buy in larger bulk than us, thus driving their possible margins lower than ours, thus customers buying their domestic beers from grocers to save 50 cents), we would have to make that money up somewhere. If this law goes through, I imagine that liquor stores heavily raise their margins on liquor and wine in order to make up for it. We have to eat too.

I have more to say, but I already feel bad about leaving such a long post. Plus, I am more interested in the comments I get. I want to see what you all think about this so please, leave a response.

Regardless, I’ll smile cuz it feels good
Btho

I wanna thank you

I wanna thank you-

regardless of if you hear it,

Cuz i was teetering on the slick ledge of life-

Looking over the edge; not afraid.

So this is an ode to those who made sure i didn’t lose my balance.

Cuz i went a little crazy back in the days of recovery,

Luckily i had more than one angel lookin over me,

Cuz i met god, when i asked for heaven she said i was lost,

If i dont know that i’m already there i’m really lost.

Hell, she said, is only in your mind.

And i’ve been there too.

He’s not that introspective.

So this is to those who kept my sanity in a jar,

Let me cool down, then opened it up and showed me who i really was.

To those who understand, comprehend and mend.

This is an ode to patience.

An ode to salience.

An ode to late nights, remembering and forgetting all at once,

An ode to self preservation,

Self appreciation.

An ode to those who had my back, who still do,

An ode to those who saved my life from thousands of miles away,

Those who still save my life, every single day.

I wanna thank you, regardless of if you hear it.

a dream i had

I quickly glance down to my cards, pocket aces, and that old familiar feeling comes back. I expect to have a headache soon, expect to lose my vision, expect to lose my hearing and end up in the bathroom, throwing up, stumbling around, dancing and flirting with losing my mind. I expect all of those things even though they are not going to happen, even though I am safe. I can’t put the feeling to rest though, and I strain for some kind of relief.

“Raise” he mutters from across the table. His hand shaking ever so slightly and his eyebrows raising almost covert to my scanning eyes.

Here’s my catharsis.

“Call.” I set the required amount in the pot with my right hand, unsteady for different reasons than his.

The flop comes. Ace, Queen, two.

“Check” I do my best ‘lets get this over with’ impression and he bites.

“Six-fifty”

I size him up for a minute. Do I raise now and give my hand away with a check-raise, or do i draw him in with a call? The others at the table stop their conversations and notice the intensity on my face.

“Call”

The next card is a King, I pray to God, Allah, Moses, Whatever that he has Ace-King. No more acting cute.

“I bet the pot. Seventeen.”

He looks me over for a second, his eyes glazed over from the whiskey. The stare he gives me tells me to back down, to fold. The slight shakiness of his hand tells me that he has something good. He makes a quick, almost unnoticeable glance down to the board. I peer at him from under my hat with uneasyness. He looks right at the ace and the king on the board.

“Call”

Something tells me that was his best acting. He has Ace-King. The next card comes.

It’s a King, giving me a bigger full house than his presumable Kings full of Aces. My heart takes off, and I can barely hear the rest of the table speak over the rhythmic thumping.

“Check”

I’m going to let him do all of the work.

“I’m all in” He emphatically states.

“Call” My voice shakes noticeably.

He flips over pocket King’s.

“Nice hand.” My cards go into the muck. I grab a Black and Mild out of my jacket pocket, take one last drink of my whiskey, and leave the friendly game of poker. It’s only fitting. It really hasn’t been my year. 

Walking in the chilled December air i know that’s not true. It has been more so my year than anyone else’s, and with each jab i take I learn a lttle bit more about myself, about my resilience, about my tendencies, about how I’m going to come back for more. I keep walking, although I have no idea where my destination is, and I let out a smile.

I shouldn’t even be walking yet.

Another excerpt from my book

This takes place in the hospital just after having surgery and finding out about the stroke. Hopefully, I get the message across that I wasn’t all there yet. Also, I hope to get the point across that love is exactly what i needed at the time.

 

My eyes blink, snapping pictures of those around me. There’s a doctor, I think, at the foot of my bed. Snap. Lindsay is curled up right next to me, gently touching my leg. Snap. My mother has that worried mother look in her eyes and it makes me remember just how strong she is. Snap. My dad is hunched over the foot of my bed near the doctors, a determined expression radiates from his eyes. The doctor speaks:

“Brett. You had a stroke after we performed surgery to remove your aneurysm.”

I digest the words, dissecting them and interpreting them at once is too difficult.

He’s talking to me. Something went wrong. Stroke, what is the word stroke? When was there a performance? I don’t remember that. I know I had surgery. And the last part of the sentence boggles my mind. They removed part of my brain, my aneurysm. Part of me is missing. An instant sadness wells up from inside, permeating itself throughout my body. I look back at the doctor.

“I… I don’t… get.”

That’s not at all what I was trying to say.

Lindsay leans over closer towards me, rubbing life back into my cold body. She whispers the sentence back into my ear with 500x the amount of love that the doctor had. Each word is treated carefully, leaving her lips with passion and sincerity and the words flow gracefully and elegantly into my ear and make sense. I had a stroke. The word ‘stroke’ makes sense now. The folder for the word ‘stroke’ is tucked away, deep inside my brain, under blood and inflamed tissue, and dying neurons and cells. The word stroke comes back to me. My psychology classes come back to me and I can remember videos of the disabled elderly with speech problems and motor problems and memory problems. That’s me. I understand. But it’s a cold understanding. It’s the kind of understanding that sends shivers down your spine and creates a giant lump in the pit of your stomach. The kind of understanding you go through when a relative dies. The kind of understanding that is necessary for growth. The kind of understanding that you are simultaneously hurt by and proud to have conquered.

Lindsay leans over again and whispers something else in my ear:

“You…” She’s understanding too. “You lost motor function” She takes another second. “You lost function to the right side of your body Brett. But it’s going to be Ok. You have lots of love and positive energy and family and friends and the most amazing doctors and…”

She gets up and leaves the room. This is really hard on her. The doctors continue on with their words that I just can’t understand. They aren’t spoken with enough love.