Writers
Archive for May, 2013
Hi Max!
0Hello All,
As you can tell from facebook posts by my beloved Dominique Jones and Katie Larntz Johnson, today marks the 23rd anniversary of the passing of our first born son, Thomas Charles Maxfield Larntz.
Max was dealt a pretty tough hand at birth, coming into the world with only half a heart, suffering from Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoplastic_left_heart_syndrome) but he was a fighter even at that young age and he actually outgrew the stent in his heart, which was the first part of a three part process, essentially giving him a turtle heart. I used to say that “my son may not ever be Jim Thorpe, All-American, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be Albert Einstein.”
Alas, it was not to be. Max was too healthy and outgrew the stent a month sooner than his second operation. The stent was leaking blood into his heart until his heart could no longer pump, and he left us. 23 years ago, this operation was experimental and only had a 10 to 30 per cent success rate and that has grown to a 70 per cent success rate today. I can only hope the docs at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia learned something from our loss and I pray that 70 per cent someday grows to 100.
After Max passed we took his ashes up to Sandia Crest, along with hundreds of flower tops that we tossed in the air. The mountain winds took his ashes and the flower tops and spread them across the mountain top (and many of them are still flowering today).
Today, Dominique, Katie, the twins, and I went up to visit Max..
Here are some pictures that we took. I hope you enjoy them, and thanks for listening.
Be Well,
Your Pal,
Chuck
That third picture is a ribbon we tied around the branch 23 years ago. It is now part of the tree, just like Max…
Savage the Comic, Issue #1: Goodbyes (almost…)
112 years
Hello friends,
Well, this marks a momentous occasion. The cover, inside cover, back cover, and inside back cover to Savage Investigations the Comic, Issue #1: “Goodbyes” is ready for print. Dominique Jones and I, well, her mainly, finished it tonight. And here they are, coming soon to a comic shop (assuming you live in Albuquerque) near you–at least as soon as we figure out how we’re gonna get it printed. Here they are. Lemme know what you think, please. Written by me and Nathan Hendricksen did the artwork.
Cover Issue1: Goodbyes
- Inside Cover: Goodbyes
- Back Inside Cover: Goodbyes
- Back Cover: Goodbyes
Poem: The Sunburn Purchase of 1970
0May 19, 2013 * Dominique Larntz
Dedicated to the Rights of Nature Movement
Nature purchased me early.
At 3 months old, the sun
scorched my skin
across the side of a mountain
one afternoon
like it thought I might be
an agent of photosynthesis.
I am owned by nature
and fail to fathom the delusion
that man owns land.
Like a long-running movie
with dramatic courtroom scenes
where everyone’s malnourished,
I’ve stepped out to get some air
and seen the scenes are two dimensional,
and the script’s someone’s trip to make money.
When I was young, the fingers of reality
found me for that mountain moment but now
I am old and nature finds me everywhere.
I refuse conversations about who-owns-what
and I silently grow thyme on my back porch
as the plants call forth their right to flourish.
I hear it like the thrum of my heartbeat,
a song so much fuller than the noise of commerce—
the verdant cadence of reality
trickling through fantasy as the ice melts
around schemes of domination and colonization—
old ragged frozen prehistoric fish rhymes.
Instead the letters of real things start to appear.
Lexicons that interweave breath making and breath taking,
water ways and solar rays, until I can walk up that mountain
at a time near my last breath making friends
with the sun, with technology, with my fellow man,
with the landscape, with the whole of the day.
We don’t own land like
I don’t perform photosynthesis—
which the planet needs to make air—
the air I depend on for every breath of life;
breath I gulp as the plants move me.