With her back to her daughter, Theodora Triggs shoots heroin. She insists that she loves Tamika and says she knows other children of addicts who are worse off, but admits, “When I’m using, I’m chasing my drug. I’m not paying attention to her.”
Theodora Triggs caresses daughter Tamika as the child falls asleep. When her mother vanishes for hours or days in search of drugs, Tamika fears she will never come back.
Johnny brushes Tamika’s teeth with a toothbrush she is sharing this day with Theodora, who is HIV-positive. After noticing that her own gums were bleeding, Theodora asked him to clean Tamika’s teeth first.
In foreground, Kevin watches as his father, Calvin Holloman, a speed addict and alcoholic, tosses back a beer. Kevin calls the addicts who frequent the small apartment “the bad people.”
Son Kevin digs through garbage in a dumpster, hoping to find clothes for his 10-year-old sister; he finds a pair of shoes, but they are too small.
Ashley Bryan, 10, stares into space as her father, Calvin Holloman, lies on a mattress in the living room of their apartment. Unlike her brother, Kevin, Ashley is well-behaved, quiet–and depressed. She speaks sadly of lagging far behind others her age in academic skills: “What’s 3 times 3? I don’t know.” She and her brother missed four months of the last school year after their father withdrew them from classes.
Before going to sleep, Ashley Bryan says her usual prayer: “Just once, give me something good. Please, make life get better.” Neglect is the norm for Ashley and her brother, who go weeks without a bath, and are often hungry.
From the page: “AURORA ALERT! A coronal mass ejection (CME) is racing toward Earth and it could spark a severe geomagnetic storm when it arrives–perhaps tonight (Sept. 14th and 15th). People everywhere should be alert for auroras.”
Please note the use of the word ‘everywhere’ there. This suggests to me it could be quite a show. I am going to be heading up into the mountains on my bike (armed only with my trusty camera and a General Electrics Minigun to ward off the herds of enraged zibu) anyway as the skies over Scotland seem clear. Best viewing generally suggested to be around local midnight.
Various useful links to sensors, live satellite feeds etc here
aurora.group.stumbleupon.com/sites/
And as per usual there isn’t an ongoing and heated debate going on in the discussion forum – aurora.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/ so make sure to watch that not going on as it happens!
So far nothing much showing up in York, UK.
Hmm perhaps just watch a movie instead then.
A November Night
There! See the line of lights,
A Chain of stars down either side of the street —
Why can’t you life the chain and give it to me,
A Necklace for my throat? I’d twist it round and round
And you could play with it. You smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose eyes the fairies live . . . And see,
The people on the street look up at us
All envious. We are a king and a queen,
Our royal carriage is a motor bus,
We watch our subjects with a haughty joy . . .
How still you are! Have you been hard at work
And are you tired to-night? It is so long
Since I have seen you — four whole days, I think.
My heart is crowded full of foolish thoughts
Like early flowers in an April meadow,
And I must give them to you, all of them,
Before they fade. The people I have met,
The play I saw, the trivial shifting things
That loom too big or shrink too little, shadows
That hurry, gesturing along a wall,
Haunting or gay — and yet they all grow real
And take their proper size here in my heart
When you have seen them . . . There’s the Plaza now,
A lake of light! To-night it almost seems
That all the lights are gathered in your eyes,
Drawn somehow toward you. See the open park
Lying below us with a million lamps
Scattered in wise disorder like the stars.
We look down on them as God must look down
On constellations floating under Him
Tangled in clouds . . . Come, then, and let us walk
Sine we have reached the park. It is our garden,
All black and blossomless this winter night,
But we bring April with us, you and I;
We set the whole world on the trail of spring.
I think that every path we ever took
Has marked our footprints in mysterious fire,
Delicate gold that only fairies see.
When they wake up at dawn in hollow tree-trunks
And come out on the drowsy park, they look
Along the empty paths and say, “Oh, here
They went, and here, and here, and here! Come, see,
Here is their bench, take hands and let us dance
About it in a windy ring and make
A circle round it only they can cross
When they come back again!” . . . Look at the lake —
Do you remember how we watched the swans
That night in late October while they slept?
Swans must have stately dreams, I think. But now
The lake bears only thin reflected lights
That shake a little. how I long to take
One from the cold black water — new-made gold
To give you in your hand! And see, and see
There is a star, deep in the lake, a star!
Oh, dimmer than a pearl — if you stoop down
Your hand could almost reach it up to me . . .
There was a new frail yellow moon to-night —
I wish you could have had it for a cup
With stars like dew to fill it to the brim . . .
How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we woudl lose our way along the paths
~ Made new by walls of moving mist receding
~ The more we follow . . . What a silver night!
~ That was our bench the time you said to me
~ The long new poem — but how different now,
~ How eerie with the curtain of the fog
~ Making it so strange to all the friendly trees!
~ There is no wind, and yet great curving scrolls
~ Carve themselves, ever changing in the mist
~ Walk on a little, let me stand here watching
~ To see you, too, grown strange to me and far . . .
~ I used to wonder how the park would be
~ If one night we could have it all alone —
~ No lovers with close arm-encircles waists
~ To whisper and break in upon our dreams
~ And now we have it! Every wish comes true!
~ We are alone now in a fleecy world;
~ Even the stars have gone. We two alone!
sara teasdale . 1917
“Here, in Havel’s earliest essay to be translated into English, you can already find the four main themes that have animated his adult nonfiction writing ever since. One is the responsibility to make the world a better place. Another is that the slightest bit of personal dishonesty warps the soul. (“The minute we begin turning a blind eye to what we don’t like in each other’s writing, the minute we begin to back away from our own inner norms, to accommodate ourselves to each other, cut deals with each other over poetics, we will in fact set ourselves against each other…until one day we will disappear in a general fog of mutual admiration.”)
A third theme is that ideology-driven governance is practically doomed to fail. (“It prevents whoever has it in his power to solve the problem of the Prague façades from understanding that he bears responsibility for something and that he can’t lie his way out of that responsibility.”) Finally, there is his belief in the revolutionary potency of individuals speaking freely and “living in truth.””
