Negative Spaces
Getting personal with a great lake full of memories and ions | may3.2023
‘Lake Erie Reverie’ | CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO | TheStoryIsTheThing.Substack.com
By Douglas John Imbrogno | may 3, 2023 | thestoryisthething.substack.com
Lakes and oceans talk to us in a language we don’t understand with our cognition, but with our bodies. To be more specific, with our very cells. You might say that it is the soothing language of negative ions. These small molecules with a negative electrical charge are found in high concentrations alongside oceans and tide-roiled bodies like lakes. These microscopic ions can not only slip through skin cells, but we also drink them up with every breath we take:
The beach, in particular, can have as much as 2000 negative ions per cubic centimeter as opposed to a crowded city that may have less than 100. Studies have shown that negative ions possess not only an anti-microbial effect but also a mood-stabilizing one.
SOURCE: ionloop.com/blog/the-power-of-negative-ions-the-beach
So, in the video above I offer up a mood-stabilizing couple of minutes of ‘Lake Erie Negative Ion Therapy.’ Especially if your life circumstances put you at the lower end of the negative ionic scale in your existence, right now. Plus, you will see a Great Blue Heron in mid-flight. I, personally, can never get enough of Great Blue Herons.
‘Light Me Up.’ | Lake Erie lighthouse in Lorain, Ohio. | april2023 | thestoryisthething.substack.com photography
I spent last weekend in Lorain, Ohio, on a trip which included a visit to the last remaining Italian aunt on my father’s side. The family’s Old World/Old Guard is on its final legs, with all the Italian-born offspring moved on from this life, including my father. Now, a final elder link — my dear Lorain-born Aunt Teresa — is on her final spins upon this Earth.
Lorain holds a key place in my siblings’ heads and hearts. My family couldn’t afford vacations growing up, what with six kids, two parents, and one income. So, our family vacations manifested as twice-yearly trips from our home in Columbus, and later Cincinnati, up to Lorain, the town where my parents grew up, met, and married. Once at summertime, once at Christmastime, we would re-enter the clatter and cousin-filled cacophony of separate extended families — my mother’s Germanic-Scottish brew, and my father’s hot-blooded, bubbling Italian stew.
Many of the families of both clans — after the kids struck out into their own households and homes — were strung along or not too far from Lake Erie, upon whose waterfront the ethnically various town of Lorain stretches. Not for nothing does Lorain dub itself ‘The International City’ (though its ethnic mix is diminished in numbers, nowadays). Suffice it to say that my Italian grandparents, Eugene and Catherine Imbrogno (christened upon their late 19th century Calabrian births as Eugenio Imbrogno and Caterinal Napoli) celebrated their 50th anniversary at Lorain’s American Slovak club. And one Italian aunt and one Italian uncle each married Polish hotties, whom they met there growing up, while my mother’s father of Germanic immigrant heritage found a Scottish newcomer to America upon the streets of the town, who he’d later marry. Which all explains why I happen to be here.
‘Lake Study with Distant Heron.’ | Lake Erie jetty, Lorain, Ohio | april2023 | thestoryisthething.substack.com photography
So, in addition to its soothing negative ions, Lake Erie possesses an almost mythic hold upon my growing-up imagination and emotional database. That is why I begged off booking the Hyatt hotel near my aunt’s assisted living facility, where some of my siblings landed for this weekend’s visit. Via AirBnB, I found a cottage a hundred-yard stroll from the lakeshore. I could see the lake’s white-capped waves frothing out the window of my second-floor bedroom.
Soothing and inviting, too, was a dinner of homemade eggplant parmesan at my cousin’s lakefront home, preceded by glasses of red wine and tens of thousands of negative ions bathing us out on their backporch, as Lake Erie waved at us just fifty yards away, on to the far horizon.
‘Looking to Canada.’ | Lake Erie, Lorain, Ohio | april2023 | thestoryisthething.substack.com photography
FREE SUBSCRIBE
For updates on new essays, poems, diatribes, photo essays, experimental videos & sorta memoir excerpts, subscribe to this site’s free e-mail newsletter: TheStoryIsTheThing.substack.com
Mr. Brainwash & Friends at Auction
The Disposal Bulletin
by Douglas John Imbrogno
It is a poem
better than any I
might write.
At least, when stopped
at an interchange,
pulled off the highway
going from here
to there in my life,
as we do.
A yellow notice,
affixed to poles and signs.
Even to a metal berm.
Some ‘U.S. assets’
have been forfeited,
it proclaims.
‘All’ are certified.
All ‘high value,’ says
this ‘Disposal Bulletin.’
The asset list follows,
to be auctioned on this
very day at 1 p.m.:
‘Rolexes, Fine Jewelry,
Cartier, Patek Phillippe,
Picasso, Dali.
‘Mr. Brainwash, Pino,
Tarkay, Peter Max,
Andy Warhol …
Lamborghini, Silk
Tabriz.’ And that
is it. The whole list.
Whose 'it' could all this be?
Were these all one
owner’s life largesse?
And, pray tell, who
was Mr. Brainwash?
Did Andy Warhol know?
These questions
agitate my head, as my
light goes red to green.
I am on my way, again,
to where I wish to go.
The auction haunts
me as I drive, going
there to here. A photo of
this visage, studied later,
says at the poster bottom:
‘Signs will be picked up
after auction.’
All evidence of this
king's (or queen’s) ransom
of stuff, from a
Lamborghini (a cartel
kingpin, perhaps?) to a
Peter Max and Cartier
wiped from the
interstate interchange,
one day in April 2023.Wait a Minute
‘Waiting.’ | Greyhound Bus Station, Huntington WV | march2023 | thestoryisthething.substack.com photo
…………………….
‘I Am Waiting’ (excerpt)
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder …
RELATED
LINK: PARADIGM SHIFTING: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Life in the Trenches of Poetry
In this 1995 interview I did with poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, godfather to the BEAT movement, he forecasts and foretells "the revenge of the white man" taking place in contemporary politics, while reflecting on an epochal career as a poet, artist and essential figure in the rise and spread of the Beat movement.