As a chatty, sensitive, and often anxious child, I was drawn to ways of imposing order on the chaos of life. I see now that chaos itself can be orderly, beautiful, and worthy of embrace. As a beautiful Zen Buddhist saying goes, “The bad news is: you’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: is there is no ground.” Still, as an ongoing student of human psychology, I think the human brain, and mine as one of those, craves patterns, habits, and manageable groups. It imparts a comforting affinity on the horror of infinity. When my mind can grasp the endlessness of time and space by making salutary the irresistible pull of ruminating about the past and obsessing about what’s to come, it helps me focus on what is, here and now. After President Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, it makes the terrifying void of national politics less panic-inducing by learning to effect change in the immediate world, Howard County, Maryland, around me.
Related: A limerick about a close friend of mind, Becca Niburg.
My youngest mind, like that of many grade-school-age children, was drawn to routines. I wrote schedules of my time in notebooks and didn’t appreciate it when externalities interfered with them. This, of course, wasn’t particularly tenable when I didn’t have the ability to control most of my life, as that was, thankfully, run by the amazing caregivers, teachers, family members and friends I had. I loved making outlines, ones that organized my thoughts to be put into writing, an early interest of mine. When I learned to diagram sentences at Glenelg Country School in Glenelg, Maryland, I fell in love with the predictability of language. And though I dreaded the weekly requirement to have our parents sign our “Assignment Sheets,” on the back side of which our teachers wrote our grades and comments on our performance in school during the previous seven days, I loved getting to write our homework tasks on the front side.
As a young adult who was coming to terms with my gender/sexual identities, I learned some not so healthy ways to cope with my emotional struggles. This learning periodically sidetracked the sanguine solace that apprising myself of information about and then learning to use planning structures provided. When the unhealthy coping mechanisms weren’t in the way, I bought office supplies and home goods to arrange my living space by category, type, and kind. As the photo in the image above shows, this isn’t going so well lately! But I think that’s fun, funny, and often, thereby, fabulous now, happily. During my college years, I also taught myself about the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress book organizing system. I cataloged the clips and full episodes of TV shows I recorded on VHS tapes as a way to engage with the small-screen stylings I collected over the years.
Three of my English professors, a class of people who’ve saved my life one scholastic course at a time, in the English Department at the University of Maryland simultaneously introduced me to the mothers of all higher-order verbal and logical frameworks, Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetorical theory. The five disciplines of rhetoric are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, as it was based on the need to impart orator skill to citizens. Arrangement is an unsung classic, in my view, of the thinking of early-and-mid Western thinking by philosophers and practitioners on this subject.
I still love all those topics. The Athenian model of rhetoric, which led to the Roman and European ones, was based on the need for Greek citizens to be actively involved in democratic politics. So, it’s no wonder local politics has proven singularly fascinating, soothing, and healing, even, in my life. Community organizing is, above all, about how to align people, ideas, money, actions, and words to create results in our lives. And, lest ye worry, I still buy office supplies–a folder, sheet protectors, labels, etc.–now and again.
Also: A poem about Guy Guzzone, State Senator for Maryland’s Legislative District 12.
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.