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August 30, 2005

And a Fine 'Fuck You' to Ann Coulter!

Praying works!

yes, she's a cuntI prayed for Tucson in my day, because I was told to by a billboard. Prayed that Tucson—or at least the rest of Arizona—would trade in the stick for a carrot (carrots, at the minimum, are more soft-tissue-friendly!) and stop turning the entire state into one giant prison for all sinners criminals great and small.

Well, I haven't gotten that wish yet, but small steps, right? What I have gotten is this:

From the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson:

Finally, we've decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.

Now, it turns out that she's being replaced by one of the martinets fuckheads Murdoch's chattel “journalists” of FOXNews, Tony Snow, but...small steps, right?


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August 28, 2005

Triptych Diptych

Yesterday was not an easy day. Productive, a bit, and destructive, more than a bit. It more or less ended with me grabbing my helmet and getting the hell out of the house Dodge for a while.

There is a certain flying feeling when you're on a motorbike. That goes double and wonky when it's a Vespa. You're seated more or less upright. Both feel planted on a supporting, flat surface, knees protected and handlebars sufficiently flat to remove themselves from view.

Add to that a very long and curving and unbroken road through Golden Gate Park, late enough in the day where mottled sunlight interrupts the pavement and blurs the curblines and it's nearly cinematic in its removement. Only the loud clacking and choking sputter of a two-stroke engine keeps you grounded—and not even then. Inurement turns the sputter and clack into a sort of rattle and hum that soothes.

Before I made my way through Golden Gate Park towards Ocean Beach, I stopped in the Castro. Stopped at the drug store there for tools of an armature I needed around myself for this solo flight: a notebook, three packs of index cards and a good pen.

I arrived at Ocean Beach as the sun was low in the sky, a headlight unable to keep pace with the Earth's escape into night.

I'd also ended up on Twin Peaks, briefly, after deciding against stopping at the too-convivial Canvas Gallery or the too-elidable cafes of the Castro and Duboce Triangle.

Thoughts that go to ink and paper are different to those which fly through fingertips into the light. I can go to explanations both physiological and logistical, but fuck that noise, as we used to say: it is what it is, and off we go.

2005.08.27 — Ocean Beach

The Sea is for the Nothing Special.

Too much of too few things: mundane. Too many creatures of too many varieties: bewildering.

Too much water and too much—far too much—air.

Sand is nothing except where the endless ends, the perimeter around the too-much.

The gulls scavenge and shit, filthy creatures who get away with their excesses and excuses because there's so much to scavenge and so many places to shit.

And a too-willing Sea, green and complicitous, ready to swallow the evidence and chalk it up to Nature.

When the Sea offers, It's just who I am!, remember that the tiger does not hate the gazelle and the fly can do nothing but accept the spider as a fact of life and a feature of Nature, as we might a hurricane or an earthquake.

Sand does not attempt to hinder the gait, it just wasn't designed for it or for anything.

Or perhaps the sand is too forbearing, too accommodating, too open, too bending and too giving to be forgiving.

[I would miss San Francisco if I were not still in it.]

It's too easy to slip into Forever near the Sea, and too often too painful to slip back out of it and be reminded that Forever lasts longer than you will.

If I stayed?

Would the Sea keep me in Forever?

Or would it take me away and swallow all evidence of me when I could no longer stand as a rampart, no longer balance on inert-but-strange sands and even stranger waters?

Obsidian Depths and silicated Oblivion are Forevers as well, from a certain perspective.

[Old Albert—he and I would have been fast friends, Forever friends.]

The Sea is cold—apologies to D.H.—no matter the heat of the life within it. No one can dismiss the chill.

The chill of the Nothing Special.

•••

2005.08.27 — Twin Peaks (later)

Filmic sky, both pastel and metallic. Odd.

I am Adam Hoskins in Chapter Two, but in my world, it's far too cold and no one's gawking.


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August 25, 2005

Me, Me, Me, Meme

From Addaboy, who tagged me for this. Now, granted, I was randomly chosen for this—and by someone other than addaboy!—but I'll try not to take it personally. After all, he didn't. Ha.

Oh good, and it's a simple one. Ten songs you're currently 'digging'. Hmmm. As if my ignominy wasn't going tits-out already.


Tagging:

Sam
Tony
Skittles
Adam
Walt

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August 24, 2005

The Lovely Fear

I finished reading the third book, “The Devil Wears Prada : A Novel” (Lauren Weisberger) in less than a week and began to read the fourth on the way home from work yesterday. “The Lovely Bones: A Novel” (Alice Sebold). I asked Sam to pick up a copy for me because it was the inspiration for a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter. A lovely song I can't seem to stop listening to, even now.

The book has been sitting there awaiting my attentions for weeks now, and at this point, I can't honestly say it wasn't some passive-aggressive thing that kept me from picking up this book.

It's about a young girl who is murdered at the age of fourteen. It's written in the first person singular, postmortem. In the first few pages, she talks of “my murderer” and begins to map out the terrain of “my heaven”.

After the surprise to myself that there was hesitation in my even approaching this book, yet another surprise hit me when I finally got started. This book is not maudlin at all. At all!

There's a certain blunt candor to Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) that I think every fourteen-year-old has inside his or her head. For an intelligent young person, that goes geometrically worse (trust me, I know).

Most of all, I am only eighteen pages into it, and already Susie is a fully reified person.

I used to wonder about my grandmother “Ma” and my great-grandmother “Nanny” looking down from “their heaven”, when I was a very young boy—no more than seven or eight—and wondering how they could be where everything was supposed to be perfect but still looking “down” at us missing them, at my mother's illimitable grief, and feeling perfectly happy? Did they just not care about us anymore? Was god hiding them from seeing our visceral pain, our unwelcome vicissitude?

It was the first of many things that became simpler, more understandable, more abidable, more “perfect”, in walking away from the martinet lockstep of christian polytheism.

Or maybe we all do get to choose our own Heavens. And for me, like for Tony Kushner's characters and for Herb Caen, Heaven is a City much like San Francisco.

I've dallied too long. The book and whatever it may bring, await.

•••


There's neighbors, thieves and long lost lovers
Villains, poets, kings and mothers
Up here we forgive each other

In my heaven

For every soul that's down there waiting
Holding on, still hesitating
We say a prayer of.....levitating.

In my heaven

You can look back on your life and lot
It can't matter what you're not.
By the time you're here, we're all we've got.

In my heaven.

— Mary Chapin Carpenter, My Heaven

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August 23, 2005

Pro-Life Pat Robertson

Nods to him for the pointer on this one.

Seems the Pro-Life Pat Robertson is calling for the assassination of another human being.

Think the “@%#$@#$% liberal media” is at it again, making trouble for a humble man of god? Think again. The New York Times starts off its article with this line:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has suggested that American agents assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”

“Suggests!” you say! Clearly it's a witch-hunt! Well, it might be, if the Times hadn't quoted Robertson directly, just three paragraphs later:

“We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator,” he [Pat Robertson] continued. “It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

So where's the moral outrage from those self-appointed absolutists? Catholic brown-nosers? Little Calvinists in Papist clothing?

Maybe the Catholics are too busy dissecting the threat of—wait for it—hand-holding during Mass!—to be bothered with calling out murder-threats made by one of their god-ridden own.

But, I suppose, there's too much political loss associated with in-fighting to be bothered with things like a call for murder.

Speak up, folks. Tell us how Pro-Life you are, and what you're going to do, quite publically, to defend that stance.

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August 22, 2005

The Sherbs

I ask you, of big biceps and big brains and of here and here. The Sherbs. Love? Hate? Ennui?

“The Skill” (The Sherbs)

“Defying Gravity” (The Sherbs)


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August 18, 2005

Koan #003

Challenge: Where is my splendor?

Response: Are you tired?

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Books & Trains

I have read two books in the last 48 hours.

I never thought I'd say that again in my life.

The last time I'd done something like this was on a vacation Allen and I took in 1994. We went to St. Thomas. Allen had won the trip playing a phone-in version of the Scrabble TV Gameshow. Ironically, it was on the Family Channel. Yes, folks, Pat Robertson had sent a gay couple to St. Thomas for a week, all expenses (including airfare) paid! We had taken three suitcases: one for him, one for me, one for books. I read eight books in 'six days seven nights'.

The reason for the reads? The taking of a train! (A lot of alliteration for a literary allurement, no?)

Now that Frank is no longer making the daily trip to the Mothership (sound the chime of gratuitous rhyme!) I am taking CalTrain baby-bullet trains to the South Bay. It saves on gas, it saves on the expense of gas ($92.50/month for the train vs approximately $70/week), and I get a couple of hours each day of me-time. I've spent the last two commutes reading.

First was Necklace of Kisses, as I mentioned in the last entry, and then was “Ethan Frome (Enriched Classics)” (Edith Wharton). Technically, I had to read the last 10 pages of it when I got home, but Sam insisted. You see, he'd had to read it for a class last semester, and we had the movie adaptation of it from Netflix. I had wanted a “date night” with Sam, and he set it all up: he cooked, bought me flowers and chose a bottle of wine that he knew I liked.

So we watched the movie together, cuddled up on the sofa under a too-heavy comforter.

The movie was well-acted, but the adaptation was one of the worst I've seen (that said, Demi changing the end of The Scarlet Letter to a happy one is, by far, the worst).

Ethan Frome is a painfully well-written novella. Knowing up front that things don't end well doesn't stop you from wishing with every paragraph that it will be other than you already know it to be, and the more pages you read, the less chance that the fewer remaining pages will produce an unexpected happiness. That makes for an intimate dread! It's been a long time since I have been affected so deeply, personally by a book.

Well, except for the day before, with the Weetzie Bat book. But even that was an abstract idealistic, ethereal reaction rather than unavoidably having to endure the cold, wet, loneliness of Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver.

It feels like I'm finding that bit of daylight back into the world I want to be in. Not a nose buried in books, but rather a life lived with memories and sensations and imaginings that are motile, accessible, vibrant. An arable life, I've called it in the past.

I know from Sam and from Mikey and from my own distant-past experience that reading compulsorily does not bring with it the same joy as reading by choice, but I do now have the luxury again of having the space and time to read and to get back into my own headspace.

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August 16, 2005

Necklace of Kisses

I once met Francesca Lia Block at a reading in Berkeley. It was two summers ago. She was there to read selections from her book, “Guarding the Moon: A Mother's First Year” (Francesca Lia Block). There is a luminous quality to the woman, something not contained in her thin body or ample breasts or raven hair or in the eyes that bejeweled her angular face. The small beige top she wore belied the numinous gift for words she didn't seem so much to possess as to become.

I thanked her for Weetzie Bat and for all the rest of Weetzie's stories. When she fielded questions from the group, I asked her how she managed to make the writing feel punctuated and staccato while also sounding like the most satisfying run-on sentence you ever heard. She laughed and cocked her head to the side. She seemed to enjoy my own phrasing and told me she'd written the book in her head while walking back and forth from classes to her home. She suggested the cadence perhaps came from the walking.

I was introduced to the entire Weetzie Bat set of books by a stripper in Chicago. He was a lean and gorgeous and little man, blond and beautiful, older than I was by a few years. He was given to wearing primary-colored t-shirts that were old and shrunken a bit, showing off more upper arm than otherwise. He was easy to talk to, very easy to listen to—except when he'd raise an arm up and I'd catch a maddening glimpse of hard and smooth torso as a result of the too-short shirt (to this day, a sliver of torso will drive me to distraction).

I wasn't merely introduced to the books by him. The next time I'd seen him—perhaps a month later—he handed me a small brown paper bag from a bookshop on Broadway St in Boystown: the first two of the Weetzie Bat books! “A gift,” he said, “Someone bought me a set, so I'm just doing the same.” “But!” he added, “Save them. Don't read them right away.”

“Well, when can I?” I asked, not sure what the hell he was saying.

“Save them for when you need them. You only get to read them for the first time once, so make them count.”

My year-long stint in Chicagoland back in 1992-3 was not a pleasant one, for the most part. I didn't fit in Naperville, or Chicago, or any of the flatlands of the Midwest, so I had no sense of home, no sense of my own center. San Francisco had already been the object of my affection and half-way through my year-long sentence stint in Chicago, after six months of sowing wild oats (and other seed!) I had consummated things with San Francisco and began the machinations to shack up with her. But in those moments of loneliness and emotional aphasia I turned to the two very slim volumes of technically young-adult fiction and dug in. Eighty-some pages and less than an hour later, the first book had its narcotic effect: yes, every Dirk deserves his Duck, houses can be pink and made of gingerbread, and My Secret Agent Lover Man waits for me!

I was transformed.

The world can be candy-colored and made of spun sugar and gumdrops and faux fur. Orange tennis shoes go with anything and pink is perfect!

So goes it with what must be the seventh or eighth Weetzie Bat book, called
“Necklace of Kisses” (Francesca Lia Block). From the book:

Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you on this earth. Sometimes you catch them. They can be the hands of the people you love. They can be your pets—pups with funny names, cats with ferocious old souls. The thing that keeps you here can be your art. It can be things you have collected and invested with a certain sense of meaning. A flowered, buckled treasure chest of secrets. Shoes that make you taller and, therefore, closer to the heavens. A suit that belonged to your fairy godmother. A dress that makes you feel a little like the Goddess herself.

I say, Believe in magic and it will believe in you. Believe in yourself, and the world of the possible is yours.

It never occurred to me until this new book that Weetzie is about my age. She's turned forty and is missing so much in her life. Her Secret Agent Lover Man is just Max now and Witch Baby (Niña Bruja!) goes by Lily and attends Cal. With a supposed midlife course correction, all is not a fancy and a folly:

Sometimes you keep falling; you don't catch anything.

Weetzie captures so much from those around her, perhaps only because she empties herself with every new acquisition and thus makes room. She shares that sense of abundance that I also possess: give of your gifts and abilities because there will always be a restorative. Give of yourself because others give you so much already. Never mind that they are able, in part, to give to you because of what you've given to them over the years:

Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you here. Sometimes you catch them. Sometimes you don't.

Sometimes they catch you.

As you all who read me here know or have figured out, life has been fraught with cost for me—and for LOML—in various and sundry-and-not-sunny ways, for a time. These have been perilous times for my sense of abundance; no restorative had made itself known.

Until this weekend, on a trip downtown to Stacys' Bookstore in an attempt to retrieve a long-forgotten gift certificate when I was surprised by signed first-editions of Necklace of Kisses on the New Fiction table.

I read it cover-to-cover in my 90 minutes of Caltrain travel today. I'm feeling restored!

And loquacious. (though he may say 'prolix'. :)

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Pictures of We


Ours1Ours2
Ours3Ours4

Even though I love these pictures, personally I think we're better in 3-D.


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August 14, 2005

Our Place in the World

I had mentioned a while back, to Sam, that we had no real privacy from the world. Some of that, of course, is lacking because of this very blog, but I like to think that privacy involves choice. One chooses what is private and what may be shared.

I remember telling Sam that I wish we had a place that was our own. I was speaking mostly metaphorically, but when you live in San Francisco, nothing is strictly metaphor. Thoughts made manifest and all that hokey subjective reality stuff here at the end of the Rainbow.

So yesterday, Sam took me to a place he'd wanted to take me for a while (no, besides the DV antics) yesterday afternoon. He made me recline the car seat and cover my eyes as he drove. I had some sense of where we might be headed, not because I thought about it, but because nothing is straight and flat (thank the goddess) in San Francisco. Up and down, turn, veer, lean left or right, that sort of thing.

It was a foggy and cold afternoon here, but San Francisco gave us interlucent glimpses periodically, and between him and me right there in the newly-christened “Our Place” was a certain lambent quality that left us feeling anything but cold or socked in.

These are the times and this is the kind of life I need, the kind I strive to lead.

...and no, I'm not saying where this place is. That's nun ya bizzzzness.

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August 13, 2005

Seeing Yourself As Others Do

In the third Harry Potter movie, Hermione utters, “Is that really what the back of my head looks like?”

Turns out, time travel isn't the only way to catch yourself in action from a third-person perspective! All you need is a $500 DV cam, a dirty, dirty boyfriend and a reminder from said boyfriend that you do, in fact, deserve to be called Piggy.

It's pretty damned hot to watch, even as it also serves as serious incentive to get to the gym a whole lot more often. -wink-

And for my dear, dear friends in Eastern Washington State, I assure you at least I was open to the possibility of procreation, as was LOML, but I'm not sure our parts were. Funny, it doesn't look disordered. God [of Biscuits] bless!

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August 11, 2005

I Miss San Francisco

No, not I'm Miss San Francisco. I miss San Francisco. I spend all day every weekday down in Cupertino at the Mothership and I don't get to spend much daytime in the City.

I'm at Sweet Inspirations in the Castro waiting for Sam. The sun is low, casting long shadows and blinding half the people walking this side of Market Street, but it's still kind of warm, the shop has its front doors open, and all manor of variety of people walk by, from older men in daisy-dukes to crazy Portuguese men wearing Superman muscle-tees, from FTM transsexuals to straight girls with their clutchy, overly-demonstrative boyfriends.

I miss this...

I love my job; I love the people I work with. I love it all, except that Cupertino—and most of the South Bay for that matter—feels largely soulless. No afflatus.

I wish Apple were in San Francisco. But then, as Marie always said, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets filled faster.”

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Limbeck

The near-empty bottle of Miller High Life catches the thumps of bass guitar, vibrates in my hand. I hold it by the neck; I always hold my beer bottles by the neck. The music is dangerously loud, but my ears are blocked, a curious benefit of lingering sinus issues. The lighting is drastic, insufficient, universal to band bars.

This could be fifteen years ago. This could be Pittsburgh; in my hand could be an Iron City Beer. But it isn't fifteen years ago and this is San Francisco. And that's not The Toll playing on stage, it's Limbeck.

The past is just the past and I'm damn glad to be here and be now. The boys of Limbeck are gifted. Watching the thing that the four—and sometimes five—of them become when they play their songs is watching a true human miracle. Music—and not didactic pontificating—is the language of miracles and no god is needed.

To me, that transformation is the proof of a band. Not whether I like their music or not, not whether they play well or not, but that presence on stage that is so much more than the sum of the players.

I happen to love Limbeck's music, and especially their words. It's a privilege to witness the joy that each and all of them radiate when they're up there. Liking what they do instead of just doing whatever the fuck they like.

Last night was a very good night for me, the first one in a very long time. It was a good night for LOML as well. In a sense, Limbeck continues this “old home week” I've been experiencing (but have yet to write about): on my very first trip to Tucson, during my very first in-person time with Sam ever, we went to Starr Skates in downtown Tucson to see Limbeck. They played in a 600 sq ft space; we stood ten feet away from them—and we were near the back! Sam inched closer and I stood back watching him melt into the performance. The set of his shoulders almost imperceptibly shifted; he cocked his head forward and down a bit, exuding intent to become part of it all.

In him, I saw myself. Or at least saw a deep-down commonality between us. Something without words, something demonstrable only because you've demonstrated the same thing before. Something knowable only because you already know it.

To talk with the Limbeck boys is to talk with friendly, happy people. Genuine, decent guys whose immense, accessible talents have not produced immense, inaccessible egos.

Go see them if you get the chance. And pray to whomever that you do get the chance. And if that doesn't work, create the chance yourself. In any case, go buy their albums. They deserve to be heard and you deserve to get to know Limbeck's music.

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August 09, 2005

Babycakes

Long friendships have their privileges, and I am one privileged human being.

One of the privileges of a long and close friendship is that in so many situations, words are not required. I'm willing to go so far as to say that words are clunky and awkward enough that they would interfere in such sublime moments.

Such is the case with one of my dearest friends, Judy. I started calling her “Babycakes” a long time ago, after I first read

“Tales of the City (Tales of the City Series, V. 1)” (Armistead Maupin)

At first she thought it was a sexist and belittling nickname, but I told her to read the book and she'd discover what I meant by it. She did. And she got it. Now she calls me Babycakes, too. I don't remember the last time I called her by her given name. And that seems to make us both smile.

I got to see Judy last night, along with her husband (and my friend) Matt and their son, Sean. It's difficult to hide anything from someone like Judy—because of our long friendship of course, but more because of who she is—and why would I want to? That's the finest of privileges that comes with our kind of friendship. It's not intrusive, it's more like a mirror—or a bright light from a unique angle. I won't say it isn't tiring, but it's a good kind of tired. Being honest with yourself is sometimes an effort.

But I wouldn't trade a thing about us, except that she lives too far away. Last night I told her as I hugged her goodbye that I loved her and I missed her. She said the same things back. And the words seemed beside the point: the hug was already speaking all that needed said.

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August 07, 2005

Be The Dog

I grew up in a house, in a family, in a Home where there were very few boundaries place on generosity, on kindness, on decency. This applied not only to those who lived in the house, but to anyone each of us might encounter: if there was something you could offer, something you could do for another that didn't jeopardize your own safety, health or well-being, then why shouldn't you offer something? As the Catholics were fond of saying, real giving is giving of your substance and not just your abundance, so giving of your own material or emotional abundance should be a no-brainer, right?

My once-a-month therapy (think of it as verbal blogging at this point) with Ronald regularly swings around to what he calls my “general sense of abundance about the world.” He coined the phrase “sense of abundance” quite some time ago, and the more I hear it, the more I use it. The more I use it, the mo' better it seems to fit my world view.

This whole no-boundaries thing, however, puts a great deal of faith in—and a great deal of responsibility on—the recipients of generosity, of good will. Faith on my part that their acceptance of generosity is according to need and comes with great hesitation and appreciation, not because I expect to be appreciated (because then it's just a barter), but because it's how I would be as the receiver of gifts. Knowing I was receiving something without deservedness would make me appreciate it all the more, take only what was absolutely needed, and plan to return the favor to that person or to someone just as a means of perpetuating an environment of good will. In short, having not deserved yet nonetheless received a gift, I would make the effort to be deserving of it as soon as I could.

Now, lately, I've come to realize in a real and very concrete way that not everyone shares that mentality. For some, there's a strong sense of entitlement: take the Christians these days, for example, who expect that their religion takes a place of honor and undeniability in the public forum. Sometimes others just haven't had a similarly idyllic environment in which to learn such stuff, who think that generosity is some zero-sum game where if someone else gets something, that's less stuff available for you.

The latter notion is, admittedly, completely alien to me in the milieu of good will. Time, I can see..spending time with one person does take away from the available time to spend with another. Sex, I can see as well, because mood and urge are spent in the act.

As for love? Well, Muriel Grable, the mother of George Grable, who was Allen's partner before I was Allen's partner, called me often after Allen's death—and often while he was still alive—and would assure me that “one love doesn't take from another”. She meant, of course, that just because Allen could find love with me after George died, that it didn't mean that Allen loved George any less. And on top of that, she loved Allen as her own son, and his happiness in life was more important than honoring some outmoded notion of respect of the dead.

But then again, she was speaking historically, serially. I'm certain she would not have been so abiding and generous had Allen taken up with me while George was still alive and Allen was still in that relationship.

Other things, like security and stability and a sense of Home, to me as an adult, are singletons; exclusivity is required for some things, sometimes by definition.

So...for some, it's entitlement. For others, it's a different emotional model when growing up. For others, perhaps a general immaturity is the basis. Something like, “hey, it's free! why not take it!” or “it's not stealing if you don't get caught” and thought ends just so, just there.

Whatever the case—or combination of cases—I am reminded of a story about, strangely, dog-training. A woman owned a dog who would bark every time the mailman came up to the house to drop off the mail. Every time the dog would bark, the woman would yell and punish the dog for doing so. She could not figure out why her 'teaching' was not effective, why the training never took. Then someone suggested something to her: be the dog. Meaning, see the situation from the dog's point of view: he barks and barks and then the mailman goes away. That's it! None of her yelling or training even figured in the face of the effectiveness—as the dog saw it—of the dog's barking.

So perhaps instead of wondering why there's little opportunity for me to be generous because those upon whom I would bestow feel entitled or feel needy and/or are simply immature and so just just expect from me, perhaps I should be the dog.

Perhaps I should look at the world from someone else's perspective and tone down my solipsistic tendencies just a bit. Maybe that's how one develops appropriate boundaries later in life without losing one's own sense of goodness and abundance in humanity. Maybe local limits don't have to imply universal qualities. Maybe I should take my own advice and tune my self-fulfillment to something a lot less indirect.

Maybe I should just acknowledge that right now, I don't actually possess at the moment the abundance that I'm used to sharing.

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August 05, 2005

The “Sins” of the Fathers

Soul
Soul
Soul
Soul
How much did ya
How much did ya
How much did ya get?

— “How Much Did You Get for Your Soul?” by The Pretenders

It seems that the Canadian Roman Catholic Church has put a price tag on the soul of a newborn. Or maybe that's too harsh and I should just say they're using the infant's immortal soul as a cudgel to get same-sex parents of said child to lie to the Church and to God in order to preserve the Church's very very earthly need to consolidate its own power.

It seems that Cardinal Marc Ouellet is willing to risk the soul of a newborn just to remain unequivocal about how reprehensible the Church believes same-sex unions to be.

Which just adds to the notion that the Catholics are militant about the Sanctity of Life and Soul only until the human is born. Then the Social Engineering kicks in where they care more about the home life than the life of a child out here in the world.

Cardinal Ouellet? With all due respect, go fuck yourself. I'm sure you can find a loophole in your chastity vows.

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August 04, 2005

A Man of Dolor

It is not very often I am sad. I have been throughout my life aggrieved or angered, disappointed or doubtful, benighted of candor or besotted with anguish. But outright sad? A rarity.

So here I sit, writing for me—and, after a fashion, for you as well—without direction or condition, cause or target, sink or wick. I don't really know what to do with this interval. Be thankful that I don't so often have a melancholy about me? Be forensic and think my big brain into solving a whodunnit? (first I'd have to manufacture a culprit)

Am I run aground? Empty? Have my palliative skills gone on the blink? Have I forgotten to apply them to myself often enough? Have I depleted my reserves?

In writing, I think. In thinking, in sadness, I look for answers. A significant step away from my usual search for better questions and the natural fluidity of mind which comes from it.

Perhaps I'm trying to answer a thing that isn't a question.

Perhaps, as dreaming is a means of clearing the cobwebs of the mind, sadness is a means of scrubbing the patina off of the spirit and the heart.

Perhaps there's no motion because there's no traction and el Mundo triste's coefficient of static friction isn't up to snuff (and perhaps physics isn't the language for this).

This mood had an onset, I tell myself, and therefore will have an ending. So I should hold close my coin-purse of Summer Accelerators and wait for the right time to spend my wealth.

But Spannungsbogen is sometimes on too high a shelf, and patience is a thing espoused usually by those endowed with world and time enough. I should know.

I should remember.

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August 01, 2005

My Summer Accelerators

The changes in seasons in San Francisco are there just like anywhere else, if you know where to look for them.

Green means Winter. Not just any green, but a crazy, almost kelly green—definitely a green that Magritte would have used, did use—that tints all the hills here. Winters mean rains; rains mean that the rocky surfaces can support plant life, weeds whose only purpose is to seed and make more weeds; and that kind of life means green. New green.

It's a green that takes some preparing for. Winter is spent mostly under gray skies, not the right kind of light at all to show off Madre Tierra's pretty green dress. That's for Spring.

Spring is sunny, muddy, giddy. Spring here is like spring in any moderate climes, the start of something new, the start itself as old as time on earth. Trees come alive, the ground comes alive. Buds come—on trees (and on each other! ha!). How many angels can dance on the head of a peninsula? All of them!

Spring brings pink and white flowers of plum and cherry which, in turn bring “snow” to Edgewood Avenue, literally the edge of the Wood.

But mostly, Spring, late spring, brings purple back to the Jacaranda trees! I look forward to it every year. It's more of a calendar than iCal or any stack of paper or cardboard will ever be. It's what informs my Sense of Where and Sense of When.

And every year, when the blooms fail and fall, the deep green of the tree itself seems scar tissue, what's left after the tree has fought its good fight and given us its best.

Jacaranda Purple is the color of Spring to me, the color of the end of Spring, really, because Summer arrives on the calendar when June is already heavy, and San Francisco labors under its weight, hot and humid and torpid until the clock strikes July.

July brings fog; July brings crisp temperatures and atmospheric clarity. July is Summer everywhere else, but Mark Twain's Winter in San Francisco. Calendar Summer is cool and windy and remember your jackets, please!

Sutro TowerSummer fog is dense, possessing taxis, having fingers that crawl and hoist it over Twin Peaks: my Fog Monster! She shows up every afternoon, her own street beat.

When the fog swells, becomes solid and simple and massive, fingers retracted, it's a force of nature again, and rises up and up. When the top of the fog touches the bottom of the horizontal beams of Sutro Tower, the tower itself appears to be a galleon on a sea of sky: the Flying Dutchman.

When time and meteorology conspire to put me in the right place at the right time, meaning when the fog layer has risen to Just-So and I am home Just-Then, and the ship Just-Appears, I am filled with joy. I can't explain it. The swiss army knife of intellect tries all its gadgets and gewgaws to solve for it, but there's no solving for joy. Maybe that's the best definition of it, after all. It's a gift, it's good timing. It's right-timing.

By mid-September, already Autumn, it's hot again in San Francisco. Summer Solstice may arrive two-thirds of the way through June, but San Francisco takes her own good time getting there: a full season, almost.

Autumn is hot again, and sometimes humid. The heat doesn't last more than a month, and so it's savored. Street Fairs abound—boys with their clothes off!—a last hurrah or two before the gray comes, the gray that must be endured before the green comes. San Francisco's collective terrible Tuesday every day of the week.

Thanksgiving is forced, or at least past-minded. The end of November offers no collective experience to be thankful for, so instead I look back at a year and compose myself and my patience for the next to come. What a difference from ten years ago when la Luna was my only friend and more than a month was more than was understandable, abidable.

These days, life is arable. Difficult at times, difficult at most times, sometimes. But survivable, thriveable, livable.

More than livable; I'm here and it's today. San Francisco is a land of abundance, verdance for the soul and palate and mind and body.

A Flying Dutchman Day can propel me for a week. The Jacaranda blossoms are all but gone and that gives pause, until I see that the gi-normous magnolia blossoms are back again, off-white and glowing.

So what will be next? I can't wait.


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