You scored as Dragon. You are the Dragon. You store a lot of knowledge about everything. You are generally one who is good with personal growth and can regenerate yourself after a bad experience.
Dragon | | 100% | Wolf | | 92% | Eagle | | 92% | Deer | | 92% | Crow | | 92% | Bear | | 92% | Stag | | 75% | Fox | | 67% | Salmon | | 67% | Horse | | 67% | Ram | | 67% | Dog | | 58% | Snake | | 58% | Bull | | 33% |
Which animal totem best suits you?
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Technorati Tags: quizfarm
Today is Transfer Student Orientation for Sam.
For the last hour-plus, I've been sitting in a too-warm room with too-burnt-orange carpeting in a low-ceilinged meeting room called the Rosa Parks Room. Earlier, Sam noted that we were sitting in the back.
I'd had to sit through a too-perky presentation with too-square cartoons cribbed and scanned and placed on an outdated PowerPoint presentation done up in canary yellow seriffed text on a light blue field.
Straight people, I swear, sometimes.
I'm here while Sam is at the student sessions two floors up in Jack Adams Hall. The man doing the preso is the director of the Career Center, and he's giving a big verbal chuck-on-the-chin to all the “other parents” in the room, encouraging their children to stay vigilant and take the initiative in learning how to be presentable.
Parents laughing at the silliness of haircuts, tattoos and piercings. I'd have to admit that there's no love lost between me and tattooing, but I'm more neutral than anything else. Piercings? Well, some people do look like they've fallen face-first into a tackle box, but a piercing isn't the end of the world.
I guess it's one of the things in not being a parent that makes me less affronted by body manipulation, or less adversarial to the “new generation” at all.
Though, come to think of it, I guess I can see why certain crazies come around here and call me categorically “old”. They've moved through their lives along a certain path that prevents them from being agonistic to “today's youth”: they draw a line at an arbitrary age difference and stand apart. They are old, themselves, no matter what the calendar says.
I'm not saying that chronological age doesn't figure; I'm just saying that culture plays a bigger part in affinity.
Besides, these parents are OLD!
Technorati Tags: Daddy, Education
It's oddly comforting to know that even a Pope gets treated, in death, no differently than anyone else. First they make you a Saint (or a Devil) and take away your humanity. Nuance goes to black or to white. And then they pile portent and pith on what you've spoken, or they resuscitate what's settled in order to change the nature of the Truth that was Your Life.
When Allen died—it will have been ten years ago next Wednesday—he was canonized by friends and family. It pissed me off that all those subtleties, the thousand things he thought about, the million little nuances that annoyed and delighted me, were all gone with the absolute stamp of a monoclonal remembrance.
And so the Roman Catholic Church herself turns what I'm sure at one point was a somewhat nuanced and quite human creature and manufactures a new Saint. And on a more personal note, Cardinal Poopyhead Schönhorn reverses a clear statement by Pope John Paul II and attempts to refute clarify it in more triumphal formalist fideist politically-expedient hardline terms. Yes, folks, John Paul II, the Pope of the Papists Worldwide, was not hardline enough for today's Romans—and he just died a few months ago!
Evolution is what is at stake. Again. Good, strong Science is at stake. Again. God blessed Kansas with Holy Ignorance and the Church wants a piece of that Blessing for Herself. By drawing such a fine point on the entire matter, Schönhorn undoes what JP2 ostensibly infallibly set out to do—while preserving the ex cathedra infallability of the Office Itself. Pope Panzer must be proud, the Pernicious turned Perspicacious on his watch.
That's a lot of alliteration by a bald Barbose blogging by blathering balefully!
No matter. If I sound bitter, it is perhaps that I have been arguing the wrong side of science, assigning the absolutist moniker to the wrong team: look at the Catholics, the Conservative Christians! They are the real relativists, redefining Science Itself to mean what they want, stealing fact and shwagging it up as ideology, and taking ideology and peddling it as Truth. Except when it doesn't suit. Then they change the nature of Truth itself and call it Absolute while absolving themselves of their own arrogance—all in the name of Jesus.
Life is funny; there oughta be a two-drink minimum.
You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life.
Technorati Tags
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JohnPaul2
Pope
RomanCatholic
Sometimes you have to improvise, that much we all know. But sometimes, sometimes you choose to do it. Sometimes you improvise because you can, because you enjoy exercising your intellect or other talents. Sometimes you do it to entertain others. And sometimes you improvise out of love for another. You find ways to spin bad things into not-so-bad, or distract with the good things to give some breathing space to the bad things.
This past weekend was up at the River, with Fred, Donovan, Derek and Marcello. It was all for Marci's birthday, and you know what? I got more out of it than I ever expected. And I expected a lot.
Things have been rough eventful lately, and even up at the River all was not a good time for me, even in the midst of a 3-day-long Good Time Had By All. But my friends were there. Whatever conscious efforts they made on my behalf I'll never know. I just know that I was surrounded by amazing people who wouldn't let me fall too far those couple of times when I felt like I was falling off of the face of the earth.
God is a red balloon at a picnic.
But mostly it was a great time. I know Marci had a great time and that was the single most important thing. Never underestimate the inadvertent payoff of making someone else feel good while having no expectation of payoff.
At every moment when I had a chance, the question would cross my altered or unaltered mind: how did I get so lucky to have these people in my life?
I need to know; but I suspect I'll never know. I guess I'll have to improvise.
Today in a review at the Macworld website of online photo printing, the software that I wrote (see the Ofoto Express link on the left side of this page) for Kodak EasyShare Gallery (née Ofoto) got a nod. It's an article mainly on print quality of these services but there's a very nice mention of the software:
To make uploading easier, Kodak, Mpix, PhotoWorks, Shutterfly, and Snapfish offer either stand-alone applications or browser plug-ins. Kodak, PhotoWorks, and Snapfish take the lead here; their well-designed upload tools let you simply drag and drop files from the Finder (see “Painless Uploads”).
I'm a star! Well, sort of. Well, ok, I'm a geeky star. But at least it's not about porn this time.
Update: the Macworld site just posted another article about photos, and the Ofoto Express software is given another, even better nod:
Several photo-sharing sites, however, offer terrific value and unlimited photo storage. Two of the best choices for Mac users (because they integrate easily with iPhoto) are Smugmug ($30 per year) and the Kodak EasyShare Gallery (free with at least one annual purchase of prints or other products).
They lick me, they really lick me!—wait, that was the porn.
The best things in this world—or at least the most robust and resilient—seem to be those which arise or emerge, forming a new meta-space. Like the power of 10,000 voices all singing the same song. Like 10,000 people having a moment of silence, for that matter. Something arises from below, something new is born. And no single person or thing directed the creation of that something-new.
I remember when the Twin Towers were hit. I was sitting in my living room in San Francisco all day long after it happened. I was home in time to see the second plane hit in real-time. I watched and waited, as did we all. Even though it was in this country, it was still very far away. Even though it was in this country, it was more importantly awful that human beings—and not just American human beings—were hurt and killed.
I was a spectator, tuned into any one of a handful of cable news channels, at the whip-end of the reports. Nearly four years later, technology has made the event of the London Bombings much more of a human event, much less of an over-there event. Click on that link and you'll see what I mean.
Over Here is, of course, over here. But Over There is also over here when people all contribute. It's one world; we're all human beings; we all care in our own ways whether expressed or not.
That page at technorati.com is largely an emergent phenomenon. Technorati gave it presentability and a place to be, but it's an organic thing, growing into what it will not because technorati drives it, but instead from a bubbling up of individual contributions into something heartbreakingly sad, lovely in its humanity.
And humanity's loveliness and tenderness needs all the visibility it can get in horrific times like these.
Technorati Tags: london bombings
What a ride.
Ups, downs, sideways glances. Askew, askance. Week ends. Weekends. Lows, HIGHS.
Break down, make up. Subordinate, coordinate. Equal sequel.
Obfuscatory stream of consciousness, like dipping into a raging river of thought with thanks to the rhino for the imagery.
Trying by doing; succeeding by failing to get in your own best way.
Sleep in order to be more awake. Stay awake so you don't miss the good stuff.
A bunch of queens with easy-to-assemble tents, double-height, queen-sized air-mattresses (and other hyphenated-references as well!), 90 seconds away from a Safeway, all fighting to be next up on the portable speakers with their own iPods (it does an Apple body good), drinking cold beers and laughing our asses off.
In the middle (well, Northern Middle) of California, on a campsite that costs $222 per night, in a “resort” at the west end of the small town of Guerneville.
And here I sit in Coffee Bazaar (or, this weekend, Bizarre) with my little dream-catcher, sitting next to Marci at 7:30 in the morning drinking a latte made with rice milk.
You can take the boy out of the City—and now, apparently, he can bring the City with him.
There's a point at which an ugly on-going, ever-going present stops. The flow of time is stanched, the trailing end annealed and you call it an era. An era has ended and a new one has yet to begin. In-between times, I've called it, and in those previous times it has been a source of headache, heartache and lack of direction, as if Time Itself went into too steep a climb and Its Engine stalled out. I'm at that tipping point where acceleration up and down match and there's a net zero gravity.
But that net-zero is just a moment, if I am to be completely candid. And moments pass into the past, pass into other moments, forming into threads into strings into ropes into cables into immutability.
This time I have decided for myself to pause time itself, extending the moment into something else. We all have such trickery and power in our fingertips...to stop time, to start it again, to accelerate it and to install torpor. We all have it, but often we are able to affect others' Time more than our own. Causing anguish in another, for example, can make the passage of time interminable for her or him. Love can stop time and often does. Conviviality, joy, wonderment can speed time to the point of dissatisfaction.
So I pause, and in pausing, I do. And do nothing. It's quite a lot of effort in doing nothing about what it's all about: the heart still beats and metaphorically bleeds, but I remain standing outside the House of Time peering in the front window, a window kept clean and open in the finest of Dutch traditions.
I see and hear what moves, feel and sense what doesn't move and soon I will stop standing beside Time and jump back in. I'm eager for it, in fact!
And friends are always there, and for all the passed past, I am hoping he and I will be there in the same rooms of the heart and home once again.
Caution never felt so invigorating.
As many of you know, I possess a capacity for positivity that may sometimes be mistaken for something unhealthy. But that would imply that I do not possess in equal measure a capacity to immerse myself in negativity as well, to live in and with it. But with negativity, I do my thing while in there and I get the hell out of dodge after I've learned the thing(s) I needed to learn.
There is a trick, of course, to recognizing those things which are lessons, and also to recognizing that point of diminishing returns. End-game is all important when dealing with negativity, and for me, positivity requires an infinite-play strategy.
It's strange to invoke game theory in the matters that matter in my life right now, but here I am anyway. Tit for tat can be a good strategy. Hawks and doves populations vary wildly and unpredictably. Spannungsbogen is selfish behavior, but the delayed gratification can give birth to altruism.
And sometimes a dip into the arcane can be freeing in the more mundane world and that's the lesson and so I'll stop.
Bottom line is that it's often the most selfish thing in the world to be selfless, optimizing for general good will instead of personal payoff and trusting in the future.
There are so few unnuanced days, at least those that don't come with a body count. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that. So too, there are very few unnuanced situations, or those that aren't best described by the apportionment of responsibility to all parties at least in part.
There are very few virginal pollyannas in the world, and most certainly I don't even come close to one.
That said, sometimes the responsibility is so clear cut as to point the finger of blame not with rancor but with simple truth. Sometimes one of the actors in a given drama is so over-the-top that sometimes the antagonist becomes The Antagonist, and “Pure Evil” isn't such a difficult, distant concept at least for a little while.
I don't mean to be abstract, much less abstruse, obtuse or any other -use, but there are things I must keep to myself even if right now all I want to do is shout the name of the Antagonist at the top of my lungs if for no other reason that to warn the rest of San Francisco's pup-ulation that there's a predator in the doghouse.
Everyone takes the blame for primary and secondary things when the world goes pear-shaped—everyone involved. Be sure of that. Comeuppance is a bitch and the universe finds ways of setting things aright.
I love my family.
I love my friends.
If I believed in a Blesser, I'd say I was blessed. Since I don't, really, I'll just say how spectacular it is that the world is peopled with folks like my family and my friends.
Too much activity in my life right now, and too much of that is not good at all.
I have no doubt at this point that it all will fly apart. I have no reason to believe that anyone will be there to help sift through the wreckage.
I had every intention of sitting down at the Starbucks in the Castro to do some work. Core Image, a new technology in Mac OS X Tiger was the topic at hand. By “intending”, I mean to say that on the way to the Castro with Sam, Justin and Nathan I fully expected to work while Sam and Justin got haircuts at Joe's Barbershop. By the time we got out of the car to head to The Welcome Home for breakfast, as we walked past the Sit n Spin Laundromat & Coffeehouse, as we sat down at The Welcome Home and were served by a waiter who once gave Allen and me a meal discount because he noticed that Allen had “a touch of the flu”—The Welcome Home gave discounts to all Persons With AIDS if you asked for it, and, obviously, even when you didn't—I knew it was one of those mornings where my head would be filled with my own history and tradition. I knew I'd be lost in the memories of home turf.
I thought of Michael, specifically, when we passed the laundromat: he and I had spent the better part of an afternoon there one day last summer, not long before he headed off to New York. I wondered how he was doing, but then again, except for the day or two after I hear from him, that's always true. I don't worry about him, but at times I'm reminded of his being positive and I send good thoughts his way. I'll never stop caring about those people with HIV, about their health, just about them in general. Maybe that's just trauma from Allen dying almost ten years ago. Maybe it's just a sensitivity borne out of my biogeekness and having been surrounded by the spectre of HIV for so long. Who cares, though, really, about why? The thoughts are there, a part of me as much as any thing else is.
I thought of Allen, as I said, when we walked into The Welcome Home. He and I would go there often. He was a man of simple tastes in food and so that place suited him.
By the time that the Posse had headed up the street to Joe's and I made a left down 18th Street to “go work”, I knew already I would be writing instead of learning how to fake a motion blur in Core Image. I had hoped to flesh out a scene from a longer fictional work that I've been neglecting for far, far too long. And it was in this place where I wrote the original 550 pages of my first novel.
As I sat at a cafe table at the front windows, I looked outside and noticed the man pushing another man in a wheelchair, the ones I'd walked around in order to get down the sidewalk faster.
My heart sank, my jaw dropped, and I was right back there in that place that Allen's death had created. The man in the wheelchair was gaunt and not well. He was wearing shorts that I knew he'd worn even when his legs were enormous—the biggest thighs I think I'll ever see. Only now the shorts drooped like a sheet around thighs not even as big as my arms. I would not have recognized the man in the chair except for the man pushing him: his partner.
So many men have disappeared slowly and not slowly enough, quickly and not quickly enough. And here was another who was trapped by a pathology out of control. Here was a another whom HIV- people look at and think “That could be me” and whom HIV+ people look at and think “That will be me”.
For my part, I looked at his partner, someone with whom I have a very passing acquaintance, but with whom I suddenly felt a horrifying kinship. You want to protect him, you want to entertain him, you want to distract him. You want others to not look at him in that way even though you look at him that way all the time at home when you think he doesn't notice. You want to believe that he looks good today. You wish that today was all the time there ever was and ever will be. You are desperate and tentative, like chasing after an infant whose motor skills and capacity don't even increase and in fact diminish before your eyes.
I don't ever want to be in that place ever again, but there's nowhere else I'd be if I ended up there. I don't want anyone else to be in that place either, but I'm glad they stick around to see life through.
I deny no one frippery and shallowness since everyone should be so blessed and fortunate to be able to afford those luxuries.
I can see why people turn back to god, even though I didn't. I can see why people curse god or even the universe, but I only cursed those whose dogma and politics overrode their compassion.
I can see all the people whose sense of gravitas and respect for the seriousness of HIV remain compassionate and strong, those people, like me, who learned that strength sometimes requires a complete and utter emotional breakdown in order to dispatch grief far enough away and for long enough a time so that you can get to the business at hand: keeping yourself and others alive for as long as possible.
I could see all the people I've known and still know whose lives were inhabited by HIV in first person singular, second person singular or third person plural. I could see all of those whose chosen form of prevention of and protection against HIV is braggadocio or bluster.
Not that I'm criticizing the power of the mind. In fact, the subjective universe shows up far more often in San Francisco than anywhere else I know. I have written many times about the seeming ability for so many of us to conjure up the material from the ethereal. And today, in the bright sunny noon trying its contrarian best to dispense with my personal gloom-doom, it happened again: I picked up my head from my new little dream-catcher and there was Michael! I beamed, then wavered. He seemed to know what was going on with me.
It's not easy to live in these interesting times. It's not easy to live outside the consuming comfort of a smothering theology. It's not easy to live and see death. It's not easy to live with the dying. It's not easy to chart one's own path through the universe.
Not easy at all, but so worth it.
Wow.
When I get sick, I feel capital-C Crappy. Sam started to get sick on Tuesday morning. It kicked in for me Tuesday afternoon while I was at work.
Bleah.
I ended up sleeping all day. Well, most of it. Having slept at least 6 hours overnight, I woke up and found Sam out watching TV. I laid down on the sofa there and fell asleep for another five hours. Yikes. Then awake for two hours, then asleep again for another two or three. Off and on. On and off. And last night I got a full night's sleep. Yikes again.
Still sick today. Low-grade fever. Headache. Body aches. Head's a bit clearer, however. It's good that I have the kind of job where I can work at home.
I'm watching:
 “The Witches of Eastwick” (George Miller (II))
It's an almost-forgotten favorite of mine, and not because it's my friend Dave's hand that crashes through the kitchen window near the end of the movie. It was way ahead of its time. New England, as time goes on, reminds me more and more of Europe. And Magic. And Dark and Unscientific Things the world has Almost-Forgotten.
Ahh, the Things you Remember when you're sick, when your schedule is off-kilter and your brain and body gets what sleep they need.
So apparently it took me six days to add a counter to my blog when it first started two years ago.
Yes, I started counting on June 12, 2003 and as of today, June 12, 2005, my lil ol' blog has logged 82,312 as of right now (14:19).
That number, insofar as its magnitude, is something graspable only in terms of, say, annual-salary-in-1999-dollars or even very-nice-sportscar-in-2005-dollars, but nothing else that I can think of. It's too high for any-car-I-might-buy-in-any-year-dollars and too low for any-home-in-San-Francisco-dollars. Too low by six-fold the number of days I've been alive so far. Too high, following logically, for the number of days I might expect to live.
Too low for the number of years planet earth has been around. Too high the number of same years for the Fundies (they estimate we've been around about 6,000-8,000 years).
The average number of visitors per day works out to about 112, ranging from the early days (10-30 per day) to these days (130-180 per day). Maybe I'll live to 112. $112 gets me a 1GB iPod shuffle with my discount. 112 days is a summertime. 112 miles is a round trip to San Jose. 112 is 100 more than the number of years I've lived in this beautiful place. 112 minutes (times 2) is time of my life watching the latest Star Wars movie that I'll never get back.
I don't want the time back that I've spent on writing this blog, however. I also don't want the time back I spent writing that novel. Or being with Sam. Or having been with Allen. Or time spent living in San Francisco.
Maybe I should have been a numerologist. Naaah, not enough time for that.
Someone stop me from taking quizzes! Actually I hate these things, usually, but there were two interesting ones in a row. Here's the second one.
You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
Postmodernist | | 94% | Existentialist | | 88% | Cultural Creative | | 75% | Idealist | | 69% | Modernist | | 50% | Fundamentalist | | 25% | Materialist | | 25% | Romanticist | | 25% |
What is Your World View? (updated)
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This time, nods to Messenger Puppet.
Jim Wallis is a pastor who has run The Sojourners, a deeply Christian organization that is involved in politics.
While they're considered a “progressive” group, Jim Wallis was one of the people George W. Bush, back in 2000 as President-elect, brought in with lots of other evangelicals to talk about how he might address the “soul of the nation”. As I said, they are progressives, I can honestly say there's not much I have in common with their motives for doing what they do.
That said, Rev. Wallis has a lot of interesting things to say, in an already interesting article from the New York Times and truthout.org. It's an article written before the last election, but strangely—and unfortunately—it rings that much truer because what was prediction and trend in October 2004 is merely, spookily, reality today.
Rev. Wallis was asked by our faith-based-president, “I've never lived around poor people. I don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?” That's a shockingly (today) humble admission. How did Rev. Wallis reply? “You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people.”
Later, after the inauguration, Bush told Wallis and other pastors that America needed their leadership. Rev. Wallis replied, “No, Mr. President, we need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism.”
Wow. That's powerful imagery for a powerful concept that many of us have believed for a long time.
But that's not the only thing in which I find fellowship with the good Reverend. From the selfsame article:
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance - sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion - deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God - a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.
“Faith can cut in so many ways,” he said. “If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.
”Where people often get lost is on this very point,“ he said after a moment of thought. ”Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not - not ever - to the thing we as humans so very much want.“
And what is that?
”Easy certainty.“
I am not a person of long-throw, Capital-F Faith. There are a bazillion more concrete, more localized things that I have a lower-case faith in—friends, family, my brain, the compassion of others, the family of humanity, eventual equal rights for all, the natural trend in the world towards Better. Not Good, not Evil. Just Better Than It Used To Be.
If I were certain of that last thing, it wouldn't require faith—or Faith. I'd just be certain. It's faith that carries one over doubts to get to the good stuff.
And, Ever Optimistic God of the Chocky Biscuits always has faith—not Faith—that there's always Good Stuff ahead.
You are 'French'. In the nineteenth century, it
was the international language of diplomacy.
It is a 'beautiful' language, meaning that it
is really just a low-fidelity copy of Latin.
You know the importance of communicating
'diplomatically', which for you means both
being polite and friendly when necessary and
using sophisticated, vicious sarcasm when
appropriate. Your life is guided by either
existentialism or nihilism, depending on the
weather. You have a certain appreciation for
the finer things in life, which is a diplomatic
way of saying that you are a disgusting
hedonist. Your problem is that French has been
obsolete for a long time.
What obsolete skill are you?
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Nods to Mzouiser for the quiz.
It was two years ago today that I started this little blog o' mine. It feels like it, too. By that I mean that my internal tick-tock seems to agree with the calendar on the wall, for a change.
However, it doesn't seem like a year since the last anniversary, if that makes any sense. Having Sam here with me instead of down in Arizona. Being employed at Apple Computer as a Software Architect after so many years as a Mac user and a Mac developer. Losing some friends and gaining quite a few others. Moving closer to the kept friends, moving closer to myself. Watching Sam become what he must and what he will, in order to be himself, after being freed from the soul-deadening strictures of the military.
I know that my timesense often bears the stamp of strangeness, of non-linearity. It makes no sense and I'm usually reduced to acknowledging that I Am Who Am and little more, that Time Happens and Time Is When Is, but just today in the car on the drive home I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter. Love is “That Place Where Time Stands Still”, she tells me in her sweet and accessible voice.
It's no place you can get to by yourself
You've got to love someone and they love you
Time will stop for nothing else
Though so much has happened, good and bad, in the last year and in my life, I am still surprised occasionally by being forty-one years old, still surprised by the silver in the beard and the gray on the head. Still surprised that I love this City so dearly, so much, so constantly. Still surprised that I can be surprised.
My ability to be surprised is perhaps my most cherished trait. One might think it would be the ability to love, given how spectacularly fulfilled I am with Sam, but I think that being surprisable keeps you open to being lovable, to being able to love.
So here's to me, to us and to the future. To the unknown. May all our futures continue to be full of possibility.
It's the first time that you held my hand
It's the smell and the taste and the fear and the thrill
It's everything I understand
And all the things I never will
Blasts from the Past:
June 6, 2004 • Year++
June 6, 2003 • Latter-day Me
This year's spelling-bee champ spelled the word appoggiatura as the winning word. The word is a music term, denoting a grace note that appears before a melodic note, usually at half the time value of the melodic note it “leans on”.
Most of the world no longer places any value on grace notes. Grab at the hard, spare melody, quarter notes in quarter tones and don't deviate. C Major is the only acceptable scale. White hands on white keys, anything else are 'accidentals'. Never have to even call a note a 'natural' because nothing is sharp, nothing is flat.
Poetic and literary licenses have been revoked; literalism and the least common denominator—and the most common denomination, turns out—are the only approved forms; grammar trumps style; even simple declaratives give way to peremptory imperatives.
Stick to primary colors—red, blue, yellow–mix to secondaries if you must—yellow + red = orange; blue + yellow = green; blue + red = purple—but don't dare go further! Keep the pigments separate on the palette! Medium brushes and thin it out with turpentine or kerosene: texture is not allowed! Stay inside the lines! Draw the turkey with your hand!
No interpretation, only faithful reproduction—and reproductivity of the Faithful. Every sperm is sacred; every ovum hallowed. Every reconstituted nucleus more important that the vessel who carries it.
Soul isn't music, it's the Coin of the New Realm! Spirituality is dead; rite is Right; doubt is sin.
Music dies.
Words don't escape.
Art fails.
All this blathering and bluster from the crazies who see progress and see only the death of their own stasis. All this sinister intent tacked on to human rights advocacy in favor of their own Special Rights as Heterosexual Christian Men and Women. All this fear-peddling just to return to the good old days that never really were.
Time to end that. Or at least try to: I'm here to offer to all the Regressives out there the Sinister Plot of the Gay Agenda. It's time to come clean and just show it all.
Only I'm not going to be the one to do it, because it's already been done. And in the New York Times! And by a high school senior called Frank Paiva.
An excerpt from the New York Times article (free registration required to read it):
[...] I've got prom dreams of my own.
They involve buying expensive ingredients at the gourmet food store and spending the entire day making dinner with my date. We would enjoy the food even more knowing we put all the effort into making it ourselves.
When we walked into the dance, the two of us would initially stun people, not because we were two guys but just because we looked great. I wouldn't care if I had to learn to make clothes myself if it meant avoiding that awkward “I rented this, and it doesn't quite fit” look. I would be able to hold his hand all night without feeling weird or attracting attention. By the time it was over, we would be so tired we wouldn't even care.
So there it is: I would be able to hold his hand all night without feeling weird or attracting attention. Sixteen small words; one giant sentence.
That's really all it's about.
This young man is already a gifted writer and obviously beyond his years in observational skills and apparent wisdom. Gifted and open and honest human beings like this make me proud on every level. Proud to know there are others who remain accessible and vulnerable to life's rich pageant; proud to know that the world moves in generally the right direction even though there are so many who wish to stop it spinning absolutely; proud that I'm open and honest about who I am; proud that there are so many people who are proud of themselves.
Sam and I went to see Revenge of the Sith tonight. It was the first movie we'd been out to in a very long time. Probably we could have picked a better re-introduction than to spend $23.00 on something like this.
I've seen postings where they claim that George Lucas was making social commentary, political current-events commentary, or even playing out a morality tale. I'd also heard that the Sith represented the godless fucks (read: people like me) out there.
Now that I've seen it, I can only ask: are you fucking kidding me with this???
<warning, it's about to get super-geeky in here. put on your propeller beanies...I've got mine on!>
The willful suspension of disbelief is always a requirement when you're about to have a sit-down and watch a scifi movie, but one also expects that the parts of said movie which are not fantastical or science-fictiony to be plausible. Take lava, for instance. Still hot enough to melt rock. Hot enough to cause woods & fabrics to burst into flame. One would think also hot enough that standing a foot away from it might make things a little toasty.
Anyway, to his credit, George Lucas does a far, far better job of meshing the “past” up with an already-known present than the Rick Berman of the Star Trek franchise ever managed. Precursors to imperial cruisers looked “the part”. The build-up to the Absolutely Sinister Vader was reasonable, if bumpy and stilted in places.
As I said, there are contingents on both sides that want to parlay this admittedly powerful cultural phenomenon into a propaganda film for their own ideologies and will stoop to new lows to retrofit their backward-ass mentalities into the film's larger statement. For instance, there's a small fraction of a human being, who goes by 'hoody', who haunts here with his comments while simultaneously banning me from commenting on his pages, who contends:
...In fact, for Sidious, there IS NO EVIL, only power to be used as the power owner sees fit, to use to accomplish his own vision of goodness.
The Jedi focus only on following the good, the truth. For them, the ends never justify the use of evil means. Sidious instead says, in short, that there either is no evil, or evil in the pursuit of what one feels is good is an OK thing. Evil means in pursuit of even a nominal good is fine. Skywalker then gets seduced (as do so many of us) by this simple yet sinister philosophy.
Darth Sidious is an MRT. For him, there are no absolute truths. Relativism is all.
For those of you not tuned in to right wing talk radio, an “MRT” is a “Moral Relativist Tyrant”, so far as I can tell. Our absolutist friend, Hoody, claims the Jedi for Jesus and Pope Panzer, while handing us liberals, us weaklings, us Sithy-boys, the Sith and the Dark Side Entire.
Really, there's better material for making the point he's clearly trying to make, but as far as I recall, there was only one line of dialog dedicated to absolutism/relativism. It was when Vader says, “If you're not my friend, you're my enemy.” To which Kenobi replies: “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”
Really, what kind of muscle-pulls and whiplash does one get when they bend and twist as much as one must in order to make such ideological claims?
And c'mon folks. It's a crap movie, as movies go.
If you're going to claim motherhood, baseball and apple pie down from their semiotical space, honestly, pick a better movie. This one serves only itself, and does so with appropriate aplomb.
Which is to say, not very much.
Being 41 years old presents a bounteous set of advantages, if you choose to look at them that way.
For instance, I am old enough to remember when MTV went on the air, even though our shitty cable company didn't carry it then. I'm also old enough to remember when NIN started up.
Both had a certain mystique to them, both raising a counter-cultural middle-finger to Middle America. MTV had bumpers featuring Cyndi Lauper and her multivariate hair, Billy Idol bumpers and quick-cuts and special effects and the little moon man logo. Nothing quite like the feel of something new!
Trent Reznor and NIN kicked America in the nuts with its album, Pretty Hate Machine, and his version of a love song, “The Only Time”, which contained the !@#$!@# awesome lyrics: “Lay my hands on heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars, while the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car.” Nothing quite like the feel of something new.
Today? What's left of videos on MTV? What's left of MTV itself? Apparently not much: over the weekend, NIN withdrew from the MTV Movie Awards Show because MTV wouldn't allow an image of George W. Bush (which was unaltered and “straightforward”), so NIN withdrew.
MTV says: “[We were] uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement”
Trent says: “Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me.”
I suppose these days, MTV's lack of interest in free speech is a better match for the American public than Trent's.
And sometimes, I suppose, having to remember when youth railed against authority instead of embracing the braces on their brains instead of just seeing it everywhere today is one of the disadvantages to being 41.
Who watches the watchdogs, if the youth won't do it?
This is one of those question-and-answer memes, the kind that I used to do, occasionally, but stopped somewhere along the way. Maybe it was when the Q & A moved into those silly “What type of git Hello Kitty Character X-Man Faerie Mary quite contrary are you?” quizzes.
Or maybe fads come and go.
But books aren't fads. Books mostly come into the house and never leave. Love of reading never fades, even though the practice of reading often must give way to more pressing things, like earning a paycheck, or turning your brain off to go blow up some Zerg.
But it's Walt, and who can say no to a sexy Cuban pressing [into] you? So, here goes...
1. Estimate the total number of books you've owned in your life. Like Walt, has to be over 2000.
2. What's the last book you bought?
“A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love” (Richard Dawkins)
3. What's the last book you read?
“Blackbird House” (ALICE HOFFMAN)
4. List 5 books that mean a lot to you.
5. Tag 5 people
[All graphics from Amazon.com, thanks to the awesome Amazon tool in ecto, the best blogging client/editor in the world]
The Pup and I went and did some very much needed grocery shopping today. It's funny—in a not at all funny kind of funny way—that one can fill a grocery cart and spend over $300 doing so.
We saved the produce section for last this time, because we always end up grabbing too much stuff there first, then get it home and a good portion of it rots before we have a chance to eat it.
One of the last thing I spied with my blue eyes was a pile of beautifully orangey-red, clearly naturally ripened tomatoes. I nearly wept. Haven't seen them for so long out here. I blame our ghetto-ass Safeway (today we went to the Big Gay Safeway on Market St for a change).
I'm sitting here eating a tomato sandwich: white bread, Hellman's (well, Best Foods here in the West) mayonnaise, thick slices of tomato, and lots of salt and pepper.
Mmmmm...perfect. Ghetto-ass meatless sammich, but hey, I'm just a big Polack from Pennsylvania and I loves me my carbs.
Tomato sammich, gorgeous day in San Francisco, good times with my Fred (the plumber and my Donovan and the boy last night, and more good times later today with them and with others. Amazing weekend. Blame the tomatoes.
Even at 5pm, the sun still flags high in the sky and I fear that the top of my big round head will be burnt even in the few minutes I have before my ride home shows up. The fountain splashes behind me, the comforting (yes, comforting) faint chlorine smell barks out Summer! in a way no sound or spectacle ever could. A Cupertino afternoon is different than a City afternoon.: when it's warm in the City during the day, by now the fog winds have decimated the temperature as the fog itself begins to finger-climb its way over Twin Peaks.
Maybe I'll ask Frank to put the top down for the drive home.
Sam got a job today and I'm so very happy for him. The whole situation smacks of the legend and lore that San Francisco is so good at: well-peopled with odd circumstances, oddly-peopled with glorious circumstances. In short, the kinds of whacky wonderful things that the square-states never get to see, the kind that perhaps the literalist-absolutists of the world can't possibly appreciate. He's nervous about it all, because that's just him, but I know he'll do well.
Have I mentioned how happy I am that he showed up, interviewed and was offered the job in 90 minutes' time? Not surprised, of course, but damn happy.
Sometimes I do have use for the sunshine.
I love my mom very much. That's easy, though, not because I'm her offspring, not because it's what's your supposed to do, not because god tells you to honor your parents. It's easy because Marie is simply the best mom there ever was.
Now, I know there will be people out there disagreeing, claiming the title for their own moms, but I must respectfully disagree. It's your right to be wrong, and I don't respect you any less, but wrong you are nonetheless.
So, a very Happy Mother's Day to Marie, and a big thanks to all she's done for me my entire life. She and my dad raised three of us boys and, I must say, went 3 for 3 in producing terrific people.
I gave my mom a Mother's Day card when I was in the first grade. Our teacher told us what to write:
My aim in life will always be
to make my mother proud of me
Still holds true today.
Prezzie Bush isn't having a very good time of it, lately. The numbers can lie, of course, but generally speaking they can't lie very big. Some of the interesting numbers so far:
- 66% of the public opposes the Republican attempt to change fundamental Senate rules just to suit their agenda...
- ...only 22% support it. That's a three-fold difference.
- 48% (vs 36%) think the Democrats are right to block some of the nominations
- 70% of all Americans think that judges are either too conservative or are just about right...
- ...while only 26% say that judges are too liberal. Is W. inhaling again?
- for privatization of Social Security, in mid-March, the numbers were 56-44 in favor of W's plan. A month later? 51-46 opposed. That's a 15-point loss, chil'ren.
There are a couple of spots where W. is still doing well-ish. The public still thinks he's doing a good job on terror (well, a against terror), but then again, terrorism is no longer the public's number-1 concern. So is it any surprise that there's a giant suckin'-sound with W.'s numbers?
There is one number, however, that's held steady as a rock so far: the number of WMDs found is still a big fat zero. And, apparently, will remain that way because they've finally decided to stop looking.
This morning I got up a bit early and went to the gym. After being cowed by Louk, a friend and trainer there, and by Frank and others for showing up at the gym every morning to hitch a ride to Apple but not working out, I did it this morning. Just cardio, but I've learned to ramp up when re-starting at the gym.
When I first got there, I saw our friend, James (as in, Sweet Baby James, the beautimous one) he said he'd hug me but he was all sweaty. Where is the downside, I ask you? Anyhow, when I was done with the cardio and got nekkid in the lockerroom with the other minz, there was a line for the shower.
“Guess we'll have to all double up,” I said, smiling.
Before James or any other other guys waiting could speak up—though they were all smiling as well—two shower stalls opened up. James took one, I took the other. Right away, he presses his considerably hot butt against the frosted glass partition and says, “Does this make my ass look fat?”
It was a beautiful moment.
As I was drying off, I looked over at the steam room door and thought, “It'd be nice to take a steam, but there's no time for makin' luuuv” (that was a little joke, friends).
I left the lockeroom, but not before giving James a big hug and smooch. Frank was standing next to Chip, who was on a stationary bike. Chip looked at my t-shirt and said, “'Muir Woods'? Look, Frank, he's the mascot: Stump.”
I love my friends.
No, I really do. And it won't be the promise of better health, a better body, that will get me back to the gym on a regular basis: it's the conviviality of happenstance and good folks.
We were sitting at Cafe Commons yesterday having lunch. We both were reading the SF Bay Guardian. I was looking over the voting form for their Best of the Bay annual thing, and Sam was looking over the ads on the backpage. I usually don't look there because it's all just stuff for mixology schools (those ads will lead with “BLOW JOBS”) and sperm banks.
Sam sees one entitled: “Gay sperm donors wanted by lesbians.” In response, he shapes his hand like a phone handset, puts it to his ear:
“Yo. Can I bust it up in ya, or you gonna make me use a cup?”
That's my boy.
When I was a kid, I remember my mother being a fan of the books of Taylor Caldwell. I can't speak for her in her particular reasons for loving Ms. Caldwell's bible-character-based books, like Great Lion of God and Dear and Glorious Physician, but I can speak for myself: I read them.
I tackled each of these for the first time when I was probably twelve or thirteen. Having been firmly ensconced in the co-optive, enclasping Roman Catholi-cosm at that age, it was a natural choice. I was reading material well beyond my chronological age, and my mom was ok with me reading these books because Ms. Caldwell had set out to prop up the images of Saints Paul & Luke, respectively.
So I was happy because I got to read grown-up fiction without having to hide the fact. Mom was happy that I was investing my already-considerable brainpower in the Catholic Pantheon. Oh, and it satisfied that adolescent hubris of mine, the one that told me that I had the might of god behind my moralizing, that I had the rich history of an enduring institution to add weight to my judgments.
It was not until much later that I realized that the pressure on never wandering outside the intellectual/mystical ken of the Catholi-cosm was so great. Never dissent. Never truly question—oh, go as far as the “proofs” of Aquinas in your critical thinking, but never ask the truly meaty questions. Not until much later did it occur to me to see if there were some other opinions—based on more than just the Bible and the specific Catholic Tradition we were all spoonfed—of Paul, of Luke and of any of the other lesser gods in the Catholic Canon of Saints, that I might avail myself of.
Keep in mind that this happened fairly late in the game...I was already an adult, well past the age where most kids abandon religion as a reaction to their parents and to the establishment. I was, however, newly free in my own mind to explore dissenting opinions. And in my zeal, I learned that the zeal still had me. That's when the real sobering experience happened—not in finding that most people outside of organized christian (and catholic) religions think that Paulus of Tarsus was a complete asshole, but in discovering that only the object of zealotry had changed in myself.
To that end, I reread the two books I've already mentioned. And I remembered two other Caldwell books that I had read along the way but had forgotten about: The Listener and No One Hears But Him. In fact, it was these newly-remembered books that provided, ironically, the balance and cool distance required of me to move on past my history with the Catholi-cosm. Though both were specifically about the Crucified Savior, it came to me that all the hard work in revelation, in understanding, in forgiveness, in tolerance came from within each of the supplicating characters and the “graven image” forbidden in 2of10 [Commandments] was just a point of external focus and not magical of itself.
Today, right now, at 41 years old, I still think the historical figure of Saint Paul is an asshole. Luke has held up far better, partly because he has avoided history's glaring eye for the most part, but mainly, I would contend, because he embodied the nature of the christian ethic and not the moralizing pedantry of Paul. Luke was a healer and a demonstration of the goodness that the historical Jesus put forth. Paul was a heavy club, wielded in the name of a rather Romanesque version of God as Punisher (Paul was a Roman citizen, did you know that?)
I don't remember any of the Lectionary Selections mentioning Jesus as a militant anything, except for the money-changers in the Church...but that reads more like a bad hair day than an Eternal Damnation thing like Paul would have done. Luke would have stuck around to treat any injuries that results from the tables being flipped over the by Savior of Mankind.
Today, most would say that Luke was just weak. History has continually shown us otherwise.
Today was a very good day. It started off with getting busy, then getting up. Then getting out to eat. Then out with friends. Mid-afternoon, we met up with my friend Buck, with whom I used to work at that great photo place in the sky (where sky == East Bay) and his partner. And then a cavalcade of folks landed at the Lone Star: Gary, Eric, the ever-beautiful James, the ever-patient and hot Nick, Noelie and almost everyone else I happen to know in this great burg of ours.
After a few Hefeweisens, we headed to Daddys' Bar, where Donovan's softball team was having a benefit. Fred was there, of course, my bestest friend in San Francisco. And Mike and Alberto, the two most affectionate buggers (literally) we know. And David. Don't get me started on that one.
The entire afternoon was one long moment...one of those moments where more things make sense. Things from the past, the presence of the present....where the bad stuff and bad people of the past weren't so bad, just wrong for me. Where the present is the only place I would want to be (and, by fiat and by definition, the only place I could be), and the future opens up to include a revisited past, a more promising present, and a more pleasantly anticipated future.
I know that some people uneasy with the unknown. I should know, because I live with one of them. For some of those, this unease or even fear results in an attempt to know (and therefore control) their immediate surroundings or to redefine their surroundings as something so small and immediate that the Big Bad Out There virtually disappears—even for a little while.
Then there are others who set out to remake the world into something eternally known, eternally there, eternally bounded on all sides. Have an answer for everything, question nothing, except to question the sanity/morality/decency of those who do question, perhaps for no other reason than to shut down the questions.
It's quite seductive, if you think about it: never worry about the future, never worry about death because you've obviated it. Never worry about anyone other than those who are not martinets already marching beside you. Never worry about why you're here, never worry about how you got here. Never worry other than that you and your kind have escaped your biology to become the most sublime creations ever to populate the earth. Never worry about science intruding with 'fact' because you've already questioned and subsequently confuted them (probably because they dared attempt to confound you and otherwise disrupt your soul-soothed and psyche-somnambulated existence). Never permit dissension because it perturbs the perfection. And God is perfection, so what you're really doing is running counter to God. And that's a sin.
Everything except abject obeisance is, and it interferes, and thou shalt not interfere.
Living with the Unknown and living with the Possible are not easy. Again, it's seductive, addicting, bewitching to find a good vein in your soul and mainline the infinite or at least the case-complete, taking it into yourself the accelerated antidote to Time: God as NP-Completeness Made Manifest (On the upside, the needle-exchange programs offered are top-notch).
Nuance, complexity, subtlety, relativism, self-determination are where confusion, perturbation and therefore sin reside. And those who make their homes in those outer regions must commit the ultimate sin simply to survive: they question.
And so we go away from Now,
Not fixed: betwixt what is allowed.
To Future’s End, a toast to Time
Unstuck abstract, adrift sublime!
“Authentic people,” he said. “That's what they are.”
I smiled, nodded. Not out of politeness or decorum or even mild disagreement, but as a cover for a vague jealousy that the doctor across the table from me had just uttered the single finest description of my parents I had ever heard. I was jealous that I wasn't the one—wordsmith that I fancy myself to be at times—who had devised it.
Cafe Puccini in San Francisco's North Beach is a bright place, almost too bright for comfortable conversation. Walls cross into strange corners, at angles that don't make immediate sense. Or later sense, for that matter. A large and vaguely threatening portrait of Giacomo, the Maestro looms on the only wall big enough to accommodate it. Too-happy Max's Diner-style tables and chairs crowd the floor uncomfortably, but they are plentiful.
We arrived there after a visit to Caffé Sport, my single favorite restaurant on Planet Earth—so far—for a meal of garlicky prawn scampi and even more garlicky pesto. Eduardo was there, as always, grousing that it's been too long since he's seen me. He always does that, whether I'm there 3 times a week or 3 times in a year. No matter the frequency, he feels more like family than most of my cousins—or even nephews, at this point.
Doctor H. has never been to San Francisco before; I had never met Doctor H. until this very evening. It was obvious quickly that he is an impressively kind man, generous of spirit. It was also obvious that he was expecting quite a lot from me, that my parents had boasted generously (too generously?) of their middle son. He came into their lives not very long after I had moved away from my parents' home, so he's known them for a very long time.
Like my parents, he's very Catholic. Like my parents, his faith is important to him. Like my parents, he lives his faith instead of merely preaching its conscious and more contentious elements. He asked about the Catholic Church here in San Francisco, and how the Catholic Church fit or didn't fit into such a lively and progressive and decidedly not-necessarily-Christian place like San Francisco.
“Pragmatism,” I answered. “The Church seems to remain unyielding,” I told him. “A while back, the City required that all organizations that did business with the City—such as Catholic Charities and other social services—provide domestic partner benefits for their employees. The Catholics balked, refused. Eventually, though, they decided to offer benefits to each employee plus one 'dependent', and completely sidestepped the issue altogether. The City got compliance, and the Catholics didn't have to recognize that gay people formed real relationships.”
“Same in Boston,” Doctor H. replied.
“The priests here, however...I expect that because of exposure to gay people day in and day out, in social service to people with AIDS, in just plain being alive in San Francisco, I expect that individual priests are less able to speak in broad condemnations of homosexuality, because they see that it's not so easily pigeonholed.
He nodded, and asked about Sam. And he asked about me, about my job at Apple, then about Sam's school again. I asked him how many kids he had, how long he had known my parents. I let him know how highly they spoke of him. He smiled and suddenly looked 20 years younger.
”It's different here in San Francisco,“ I added. ”Different from, you know, out there. When it comes to same-sex marriages, I see gay people who don't give a damn about ever getting married. I see gay couples who worry that they'll be kept apart if one gets sick or hurt. But mostly I see gay people who just expect to be seen as equal to everyone else in this country. Then I see people out there—Right-wingers—who say we're trying to destroy marriage, that we have some sinister agenda, or that we think we're better than the rest of you and we're trying to co-opt society. How the hell does that happen? I mean, where you live [Boston], has same-sex marriage destroyed anything?“
”The Catholic Church will never get to certain points, you know?“
Not an answer, but also none of the awkward discomfort of an impasse. And it was just about time to call it an evening anyhow.
As I walked him to the corner of Columbus and Green and got him a taxi, Moon River was blaring from overworked speakers outside a different coffeehouse and I remembered how he had described my parents and I smiled again.
”'Authentic people',“ I muttered as I kickstarted the Vespa, and I smiled again. This time because it was just true, no matter who said it.
Thanks to not being in the habit of going to see movies in theaters, I didn't see the remake of The Manchurian Candidate when it came out, but thanks to Netflix, we did see it tonight.
Not as good as the original, but pretty good. The new one wasn't about Communists, it was about a world-wide mega-corp. The new one unfortunately downplayed the incest angle. The new one didn't have Angela Lansbury in it, but it did have Meryl Streep.
The new one, however, had an optimism that the old one didn't. That was a surprise to me. It seems that every time someone tries for optimism and the future these days, it gets shot down by the conservatives...you know, those people who believe the past is better than any present (and certainly any future).
The new one showed that the marriage of strong belief and power never goes well, while at the same time showing that the marriage of strong ideal and power can accomplish the thought-to-be-impossible.
Things were more black and white in 1962. People are more savvy in 2005. I can see the desire to want things to be more cut and dried; after all, it takes a lot more effort to navigate the world when you have to consider pesky things like nuance and subtlety and complexity. Good, Evil and other Captialized Bugaboos find no purchase in complexity. This is the core of the tactic taken by the conservatives these days. Most of what they do can be captured in simple (read: simplistic) syllogisms:
Liberals appreciate nuance and complexity
Good can't exist in such a world.
Therefore, Liberals must hate Good and so must be Evil.
As I navigate through the nuances of relationship as well as the flat-out goodness and badnesses of our current situation—which, in turn, makes for complex dynamics—I remind myself that dogma is bravura, a haughty pose by those unsure or unable to navigate the changing seas of being alive. In other words, it's bullshit.
So I applaud Jonathan Demme in his remake, even as I miss the simpler, spookier, nastier, more incestuous story-telling of the past. And with clearer understanding of these interesting times of mine, with reminders that even the bad parts of my past (recent and distant)—while easier to remember as black and white—were just as nuanced as everything else in my life, it's quicker to recognize and reject the dogma-junkies.
And that makes life a little easier.
Sam and I were at Guitar Center on Van Ness the other day—on my birthday, to be exact—after we went over to Point Bonita Lighthouse just to hang and swang and check out the views. This was only the second time ever I was to the Lighthouse and was Sam's first time. I hadn't been in a long while and thought it would be a nice thing to do as a special occasion.
Anyhow, we were back in the DJ section of the Guitar Center and there was a couple there also checking things out. Two men. Both gym-goers. One was more plain and handsome than the other, and more muscly.
And as they say, when he opened his mouth, his purse fell out. In other words, a bit on the nelly side. Which doesn't work for Sam, but is ok-dandy-fine by me. So long as it's not an affectation.
I'm sure I'll catch flack for that one more from the normal-gay crowd than I would even from the one-man-one-woman-gender-roles-go-with-biological-sex crowd, but who cares. Individuals in both crowds behave kind of stiltedly, possessed of that nervousness that suggests that their reach has exceeded their grasp. You know how it goes...anger at anything deviating from tradition because traditional gets confused with “natural” in their heads.
But me? I love 'em. Be you, gorl. Or Man. Or somewhere in between. Or whatever. Don't be a sister if you aren't a sister, but if you are....grrrrrrl, you're ok-fine by me. To say nothing of the odd at-odds pairing of 200 pounds of muscle and shoulders for days and a sssssssserioussss frequency of Ssssssss's emanating therefrom.
Hot.
An odd pairing of traits in a big man-girl? I'll call it syssygy.
It's Happy Camping Week in America, folks! Have you noticed?
Schiavo: dead. Pope JP2: dead. The Christian Right's very last shred of humility: dead.
Intendedly self-effacing displays of grief come across as rather self-abasing: the Abnegated rise and deliver Epitaphs from the Bully Pulpit.
The myopically self-appointed “Culture of Life” blesses a Pope whose passing he chose himself—to die in peace and dignity at home rather than be rushed to a hospital to be kept alive beyond his own time even as they stomped all over Terri Schiavo's right to the same.
I didn't know Terri Schiavo, but I feel for her husband. I even empathize with him, having had to give up on a partner. I once adored the Pope as every Good Young Calvinist-leaning Catholic boy does, but got over that when I emerged into the real world. I am neither sad nor happy that JP2 is dead. I would be sad if he were beloved to me. I would be happy if I didn't have every expectation that some other draconian bastard isn't going to rise and take his place.
The Worm turns and turns. One day, the Worms will have us all. For now, we just have to contend with these Weasels.
Promise me a Parade, Promise Me Today - B. Circone, R. Silk, G. Bartram, B. Mayo
I sit here at Golds Gym, my Big Gay Gym here in SOMA in San Francisco, waiting for Frank so that we can head down to the Mothership. Another day, another drive (well, another ride), another day of brilliant minds solving interesting problems, another day of a sometimes brilliant mind unable to solve his own problems.
Occasionally I consider that life would be simpler if I were strident and unyielding—what passes for “decisive” these days—barking orders instead of arriving at conclusions while disguising insecurity as dominant-pose. But there are so many of those people around already, leading lives of anything-but-quiet desperation, spilling dysfunction overboard in attempts to keep themselves afloat on ever-lowering surfaces.
They say that a rising tide raises all boats, but an ebbing tide grounds some boats before others. Those too close to the shore, too timid to venture into deeper waters go aground first. Those with too deep a hull scrape the bottom next, tipping much more quickly than others. Some survive, but everyone suffers when too much of the general good is wicked away from the sea of humanity.
So no, I won't be one of those people (if I can help it) who trusses up his insecurities in black attire and lashing hurtfulness in order to keep the bright light of vulnerability off myself. In my forty-one years of being alive, I've discovered only one way to not succumb to my own vulnerabilities: admit them.
The title, the tag-line and the first line of this entry are from a song called Promise Me a Parade by my good friends Brad, Rick, Greg and Brett, also known to most of the midwest years ago as The Toll. They appeared in our lives at the time when I needed them the most, although I don't think I ever told them that. I learned from Brad that being exposed isn't the same as being at a disadvantage, that friendship is more valuable than showmanship (no matter how spectacular) and that faith and grace are not solely the purview of religion.
Faith is small or large and you can never measure it truly. Grace is the only good answer to Greed. And it's only the small-souled that steal your energy and use it as a cheap substitute for either.
I know a person—ok, a lot of people—who seemingly have lost the ability to confess or admit an “I don't know”. You know the type...they always have done a thing you've done and done it better, or they know someone (a very close and dear friend, to be sure!) who is better than you at it. They own every conversation that comes up, or, actually lacking the background to own the topic, will disrupt the entire proceeding and steer the whole mess into Known Territory.
Often the rigidly contrarian and pointedly doctrinaire adopt this pose, keeping the world for Jesus, or the American Right, or whatever....interrupting all else and steering every conversation, every dialog, every public effort, back into the Bosom of Jesus or George.
Many have accused me of being one of those knows a lot, who thinks he knows more than he does. What I have not been accused of, so far at least, is avoiding topics for which I don't have significant experience or knowledge. Still, those who don't know me—who, ironically, are out of their depths—seem to take it upon themselves to call me a know-it-all.
Well, I don't. I never claimed so. Here's a few, just for the record:
- I don't know if there is a god or not.
- I don't know what it's like to have sex with a woman.
- I don't know what it's like to be a woman (tho I do know what it's like to wear a dress).
- I don't know what I'd do if I were a woman who had to Choose.
- I don't know what it's like to suffer anything but sunburn because of my skin color.
- I don't know enough about String Theory to hold a meaningful conversation
- I don't know what my immediate future holds.
- I don't understand how other people's definition of friendship can be so different from mine.
- I don't know why people so often decide not to decide or otherwise prefer to follow.
What I do know: I know enough to know that I can't ever know enough.
I don't know how I could have been so trite right then.
Last year I started what I had hoped would become a tradition. As I'm not one of those people to throw a birthday party for myself, but because Sam was coming up last year for my birthday and I wanted to have a big event anyhow, I finessed a group birthday party. My birthday (which is today) last year was on a Saturday, so off we went and had a big party. I think there were about a dozen guys who were Aries and so it worked out well.
Last night's party at English John's house was for four of us in particular: Me (4/3), Fred the Plumber (4/12), English John (4/19) and Donovan (3/22). There were several others there whose birthdays were in the vicinity, so we celebrated those, too.
No presents were supposed to be given, but Mike & Alberto showed up with a little somethin'-somethin' (which they usually do, but this time their somethin'-somethin' didn't involve the need for condoms :). I ended up with a double shot-glass with the word “DIVA” on it. People seemed to think it apropos. Well, screw them, I'm better than that shit. Ooops.......
I like this idea of groups of birthdays celebrated in one sitting. At 41 years old, I suppose it's just a little too much to have all the attention heaped on me. Or, there's just so much loving attention to go around in my group of friends that sharing the wealth doesn't cost a thing.
There's an expression, “Past as Prologue”, which I never really liked. It seems a bit, I don't know, trite and smarmy. It's yet another silly aphoristic bit of nonsense. Many people nonetheless glom on to because it's simple (actually, simplistic), easy to remember and it gives one the appearance of depth.
Ahh, so gratifying! Then you have it all! A clear and direct and simple statement that smoothes over all those nuances and complexities, and you appear wise and with an old-growth intellect.
Only it's not real. You can't have a simplistic world view and then claim profundity and wisdom at the same time. Wisdom requires accepting subtlety and the existence of paradox—raw, unvarnished paradox that remains orthogonal to sense and immune to the ministrations of magicals Threes. Wisdom requires abiding the unprovability of some truths and unassailability of some falsehoods. Tough luck if you were expecting to be wise and rational at the same time.
That said, I find myself cozying up to the more cautionary aphorisms. Maybe because they're the ones that are just plain simple, not overstepping into simplistic. Maybe it's because they're so innocently brave. Or maybe, just maybe, they're the ones that tend to leave interpretation up to the reader/listener, instead of laying out rigid, concrete advice.
Anyhoo. “Past as Prologue”. Those who repeat the past are doomed...Nothing new under the sun...seen it all before... Booooring.
Present as Epilogue. Same flavor, same balance. But instead of boosting the past, it boosts the future. Instead of dissing the future, it reality-checks the present. The Dutch have a similar saying: “Tomorrow always comes back; yesterday never does.” Same thing. And if you look closely, you can see that being displaced from the immediate present over and over again—continuously, if you will, along the continuity of Time—creates motion. The direction of the motion is arbitrary and void of meaning or intent, but there's momentum! Blessed momentum.
When Now is the End, Now is also the Beginning. Fickle Present. Codependent Past. Devoted Future.
Which one would you rather spend the rest of your life with?
Birthday arrived early, or at least some birthday presents did. Not my doing. Sam hates surprises—I only hate them lately—and so I ended up opening a big pile of lavender and pink packages (with pink and lavender frilly bows and ribbons, no less!) last night instead of next Saturday.
So I'll be a prime number year again. Well, spin the propeller on my cap and call me geeky. Oooh, and my unlucky 13th prime age. Yeah, ew.
It turned out that across all those packages, I ended up with a Playstation 2 with a couple of games: The Incredibles and Katamari Damacy. I seem to recall mentioning to Sam a few weeks ago that I was thinking about the game and how weird and gay and druggy it was, and how interesting the play of it was....and now I have it. Hurrah! (Click on the image below if you have trouble reading the text)
It's all about rolling, and one's big gay kingly/queenly Father, who wears a bellyshirt, has a massive bulge in his royal tights, and whose mouth issues big spreading rainbows in order to transport his tiny, tiny princely son (you, the player) from one place to another.
So get thee to a Sony store and pick up a copy of Katamari Damacy, especially if you're the type who doesn't like the typical shoot 'em up. That's me, by the way, and the single biggest reason I'm not typically a game player. There may be a bazillion games for Windows PCs compared to the Mac, but most of them all look the same to me...same action with different graphics and different (but still thin) storyline.
Katamari Damacy, though...it's so weird, it's queer. And it's so queer, it's fabulous. And it's so fabulous, it's trippy. And so trippy, it's just plain fucking weird. I love it.
Last night I had a profound experience: a whole evening spent with one of my oldest, dearest friends who created a space that was entirely about me and about what I was feeling.
Chalk it up to the one-off trauma or the emotional-aftermath abnegation thereof or both, but it seems like forever since my own well-being came first in my own mind and heart. My friend did that for me: he let me let myself off the hook, let me put myself on the front burner.
Accepting that I have friends who are there when I may need them is quite different from availing myself of their help and their wisdom when I do need them.
The complete man takes wisdom where he can get it, decides whenever he has opportunity and leans when his own strength runs out. Here's to a wisdom-seeking, decision-making, leaning, more complete me.
Stasis is not a natural condition. The stand-still does not appear in nature, except as attitude. Absolute Zero is only theoretical.
Such goes life, where it moves and moves. It turns and turns, both world and worm. And so it comes down to a choice: not whether or not to move, but in which direction you're going to go.
Time, tide and winds often dictate our fates, but there are those times when we allow them to. And in allowing, we make a choice: to do nothing. Back in the day when I handed my fate over to a god my heart didn't really believe in, I was a fan of the pray-and-wait. And that may seem strange to others, for how do you rely on something you don't have faith in? Well, setting aside the fact that this very thing is done all the time—reliance on drugs, alcohol, people who are undeserving, Republicans, government—I may not have had faith in a god's own presence, but I had faith in a large group of well-meaning people who all believed in the same thing. That was very powerful, and very comforting. Humankind's perfect soporific.
Last week, I chose. Several times, in fact. But first and foremost, I chose to decide for myself. I chose to stay put. I chose to stay true to myself as well. I chose to work hard for the things I want and need. I chose a nuanced path over a tradition, over bravura, over ego.
And Sam and I chose together. Yesterday I began the day with a first, professionally. Last evening, we found our way to engaging our lives back into gear. Only first gear, mind you...engines still rev high and hot and there's not so much motion, but there is motion. Forward motion.
And forward is my favorite direction of all, my chosen direction.
I've got this 1970s crap pop psych going on in my head and I can't make it stop:
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Except that I've got it in reverse. In a sense, for all the years I considered going to work at the Mothership—even before there was a building called the Mothership—for all the times I looked for my place there, for all the times I'd decided I'd fare better on my own or at least at some distance from there, for all the weighing of the Pros (near infinite) and Con's (just a couple), in about an hour from the time I'm writing this, I'll officially be an employee of the Mothership.
So today doesn't so much feel like the 'first day of the rest of my life' (how goddamn trite were the 1970s anyway?) as it feels like the last day of The Long Flirtation.
Maybe there have been too many First Days for me, or maybe I'm one of those that believes we really only get one beginning and one end. Or maybe, just maybe, I'm one of those earthy-nutty-crunchy-Northern-Californians who doesn't like to rubberstamp things and call them absolutes.
No destinies. No ordained passages.
Or maybe I just have butterflies.
Culminate. That's the verb for my life right now. Lots of, well, stuff building and building and building.
Still so much to be sorted through, so much history to get past, so much time I don't have—and yet still so much hope that the healthy resolution to it all is also a happy one.
Approximately five hours and 36 minutes from now, the Spring Equinox occurs, where Winter pointedly gives way to Spring, where an apocryphal egg can be balanced on end. I find myself wondering if the pending celestial transition may turn out to be allegorical as well: is this finally the time when I/we can start to shed the burdensome aspects of our lives and start to build some happy, lilting ones?
Winter's got to end sometime, right?
Right?
Via him.
My japanese name is 藤原 Fujiwara (wisteria fields) 拓海 Takumi (open sea).
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Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.
Yesterday was my “Uncle” Bill's birthday. Since he was born the same year as my father, he's just turned 67. He's not really my uncle, in the blood sense, but he's honest-to-god family, someone there like a gifting angel who was always just there. As I said, family.
I was to find out at a very late date that he's gay. When I was growing up, he was a bachelor who never had a girlfriend, just friends. It never occurred to me that anything was something to think about, but I do recall remembering that he was an example of the only alternative lifestyle that Northeastern Pennsylvania could or would understand: he was single.
And I suppose that was enough for me, as I came to discover that my sexuality wasn't just a phase, wasn't an auxiliary aspect of my life. It was enough to know that there were other options in life that made a person happy.
That said, I can't say how happy Uncle Bill has been in his life, except that he always seemed to be enjoying himself, was always the life of the party, was always that one person in every crowd that seemed almost magnetic. The guy that everyone wanted to be in orbit of.
Except in my life there were two men like that: Uncle Bill, as I said; and my father.
Quite a sight, seeing my father and Uncle Bill and all their friends that they stayed so close to from their High School days. I think it ended up serving as some connection between childhood and adulthood for me. Otherwise, “being an adult” in NE PA meant things so horribly foreign to a gay boy that adulthood itself was a far-off, far-flung thing that involved black-and-white TV families and twin beds. Crazy.
When I came to find out that Uncle Bill was gay—it was Marie that told me so, in somewhat cautious and doleful terms—I found myself outwardly comforting her that it was not disruptive news to me, and inwardly rejoicing that not only did I know a well-respected and much-loved gay man, but that I could be one day a well-respected and potentially much-loved gay man myself!
Life shifted gears as that news settled into me. I hesistate to use terms like “soul-soothing”, but that's exactly what it was: a cool salve across a scorched and wind-blown surface.
Hopefully, I've done Uncle Bill proud in how I've lived my life so far. I know I've done proud by my parents, my brothers and my friends and myself.
Happy Belated Birthday, Uncle Bill.
I must be getting old[er]. Or there's just been too much “interesting times” nonsense going on over the past two weeks. Or both. Yeah, let's go with both.
I forget that I've told people about my good news, remembered that I'd forgotten to remember to tell other people, and still others, I just don't remember and end up telling them stuff all over again.
My life is about to get a whole lot more structured, a whole lot busier, a whole lot more interesting. Twice as interesting.
Interesting times...2.
I want to have better relationships with my friends. I rely too much on serendipity and the limits of combinatorics to spend time with my friends. A 'beer bust' here or a specialty-night there, or just showin' up where people show up.
Friday night, Fred & Donovan came over to have a meal with Sam and me and my folks. Marie (Mom) cooked. It was spectacular in its unspectacularness. By that I mean that people were just people together. No beer to trade off alteration for lubriciousness. Just my lovely Fred and his (and my) lovely Donovan. My loving parents. My LOML.
Emerging from the horrors of last weekend, still numb, still tentative, still not there yet. Torn between wanting to get back to how we were and never wanting to go back to anything of it.
The bright spot of my future is a Tempting Fruit with a Bite taken out of it, fallen into my lap out of the Knowledge Tree.
Circumspection and abstraction are tedious, I know, but I've learned a lot in my years and I've learned not to let any situation precipitate into concreteness too soon. Please bear with me [woof, grrrr].
There is one room in all of San Francisco that is my own cathedral. It's a room with rounded bay windows and a western exposure. I am there once a month, typically. There are no priests, nor even priestesses because this room is no god box.
The place is a sanctuary, but not a refuge. No praying occurs and no penance is ever paid, but understanding comes, always comes. Sometimes it takes some time. Other times the onset of instant recognition hits you in the tummy as you plunge from a precarious height down the rail to a more amenable level. Near to the ground, to fortitude, to firmament.
Away from Sam, away from parents and brothers and sisters. Away from friends and other loved ones. Away from the flickering tableau of that city of lights that is the sum total of the people in my life. Sometimes the light hurts your eyes. Sometimes the paparazzi lay in wait. Sometimes it's simply that it's the Dark that you want or need to see, or the dim twinkle of a Big Sky, and the homespun magical lights interfere.
Sometimes, solitude. Sometimes, aloneness.
But a guide is different than a priest or a judge or a diagnostician of any stripe, and a guide is always welcome, even in the solitude: he doesn't interfere, but merely enables.
And after the Cathedral, and after the tears and the bottomless weeping and the restorative hand on the shoulder, the world is too small. The house is too small and too many things happen in 900+ square feet of Home.
To sit atop my City, just for a while. To look at there and there and there. There's the house; 50¢ gets you a closer look. There's the POX's house, just a nudge of binocs and you're there, one street down and two blocks over. San Francisco General. The Transamerica Pyramid. The Castro. The International Orange of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Panhandle. Angel Island. The Bay Bridge. Emeryville.
Down just below, the pink cube of a building where Bob Matgen used to live. He's dead now, these five or six years now. Back to Bernal Hill. To the Bay. To Candlestick Park. All the way down the Bay as it fades into a brown-yellow smudge of haze across the horizon.
Back to the Vespa, sky blue with my red helmet strapped to it. Back to self. Back down the hill. Back home.
Home. Feeling placid now, with my thoughts spread out over area measured in square miles instead of square feet.
Sam. Mom. Dad. Spruced up house. Clean.
Sprucing up Home will take a little longer—a lot longer.
Hope is there, but Hope is just the quiver of opportunities that Tomorrow arrives with.
Tonight is for smiles and conviviality. Tonight is for me.
Hope can wait; Now is Here.
This week has brought some of the worst events to befall me—ever. This week has also brought the single best offer I've gotten—ever.
The two are not at all related.
How to reconcile, how to reconcile? I have no idea. I'm to exhausted too celebrate anything at all; I get excited about the good stuff but then some small thing flashes white-hot misery into my vision like a matchbook set aflame.
Maybe I shouldn't be operating heavy machinery, but my brain won't stop operating all on its own. Sometimes I want to make it stop, but I'm afraid that stopping won't stop anything at all. Or it will stop too much.
I'm whistling past my own graveyard.
There's a certain fuckwit who's taking it upon himself to be the biggest of attention whores in commenting—anonymously, of course...hiding his true IP address, of course—here with some of the most vulgarly hateful crap I think I've ever seen.
So maybe I'm way over-sensitive, but fuck him, you know? I am over-sensitive because my family here is falling apart because I almost lost my partner to a 30-second episode of ultimate stupidity.
Regardless: post something stupid and hateful that adds to my own burdens and you get deleted. You get banned. You keep getting deleted and banned as you slither from one anonymous address and fronted IP address to another, you fucking coward.
Look at that, I've moved onto Anger.
I'm just about exhausted. Running on fumes.
Sleep comes, but isn't a very good restorative.
Too much world and too much all-at-once in this tiny house on the side of a hill in the middle of my City.
I'm one of those progressive types, one of those bleeding-heart types who prefers to bet on the natural tendency for a human society to generate more good will than its individuals consume. Or at least I bet on that with friends, know the true of it in family, and hope for it in the at-large.
If I have dissembled to my friends over details or small realities, I apologize for not giving them enough credit. As I have let more and more people in on the abject dreadfulness of what has been going on, about what happened in Saturday's early hours, and the details leading up to the horrifying event, the understanding shown towards us has overwhelmed me. Even moreso, my friends' willingness to admit they don't understand, that they don't know what to say, that they are at a loss to help me but are nonetheless willing to help in however each of us—or both together—might need it is touching beyond any reckoning.
There are good people in the world, some vastly unable to comprehend the nature of male relationships, some far too acquainted with the nuanced complexity of them, all willing to offer support as they are able.
I've been crying over the almost-loss, crying over emotional distances, crying over the reprieves, crying over the anger, crying over the gratitude for Sam still being with me and all of us, crying over the humble honesty of human beings I don't even know, crying over the joy of family and most-loved friends, and just plain crying because of too much of everything.
I'm a mess, but you're all there for me. I don't know what I'd be if I were alone through all of this. I'm glad I haven't had to find out.
It's odd to have had a good night's sleep. It's odder still that the sun shines again, like it did yesterday when I emerged from SF General. Sunshine in San Francisco shows up at the odd times—some might say the wrong times, but that's not for me—and it's either a providential punchline or just a karmic counterweight. Either way, the initial inappropriateness of Gaia's gesture gives way to sunny smile—something that may also seem inappropriate—but I guess I've learned to take the smiles where I can get them in more tenebrous times.
Reprieve or happy ending, though, there are two people in this house still breathing, still talking, and trying to look forward again.
And I'm smiling about that.
I'm not going to say anything beyond what he has said, for obvious reasons, but after 12 hours at San Francisco General, in a couple of ERs with at least 3 shift-changes, with no sleep since 7am Friday morning and nothing to eat for over 28 hours, I still must give my heartfelt thanks to the tremendous job the healthcare workers—especially Jennifer in Zone 3 in the standard ER and Greg in PES—did for him last night and throughout this afternoon.
In the last 12 hours, have never felt so consuming a panic, so morose and sullen and angry a mood and so deep a gratitude, than I ever have in my life.
Send some good thoughts Sam's way, will ya?
There's always a certain little thrill to putting on a coat that you haven't worn in a very long time. I'm not talking metaphors here, I mean a real coat.
Yesterday, I had need to dress up somewhat—I clean up pretty good, if I do say so myself—and so I retrieved my gray peacoat from the back of the closet.
It's a bulky, kind of stiff coat, so it wasn't noticeable right away that the pockets contained anything at all. It wasn't until I was waiting for a cab at one point that I remembered to check the pockets. What fun!
In the inside left breast pocket I found a cheap Bic pen...and a partially used stick of Maybelline 10 • 60 “Sandy Rose” Wear-n-Go lipstick! Oy. All I can remember about it is that I'd noticed it in there last time I wore the coat, but couldn't remember where it first came from. That's what happened again this time.
Since I can't fathom what it was there for in the first place, I thought I'd ask around: what might I be doing with a lipstick in a dress-clothes kind of coat?
I look forward to your help in solving this mystery—or at least providing an entertaining fictional cover for my memory-loss.
Tonight, we cooked.
We rarely cook together. Sam usually does the cooking when he's not in school, or I do the cooking, or more likely, it's pizza or Indian food from a take-out menu or a website.
But we planned this. Recipes from that crazy bitch faaaaabulous creature, Rachel Ray. We watch her religiously, though rarely try out the recipes. Tonight, though, we did:
So picture it: risotto with peas & parmigiano reggiano cheese, chicken breaded in pine nuts & cheese and breadcrumbs, and asparagus tips roasted with olive oil (E-V-O-O!), lemon, taragon and shallots.
From US.
I know!
So a few weeks ago Sam and I stopped at the Potrero Safeway to get, I don't know, milk and avocados and emery boards, and on a lark, I ran into the Radio Shack next door figuring I'd spend $50 on an HDTV antenna because it seemed a rather cheap way to try to get a few HD signals into the house.
Of course, as we walked in the door, I remembered that one needs an HD tuner and not just an antenna. So the antenna sat in its box until a couple of weeks ago, when I ordered—also on a lark—the eyeTV 500. I did this because a) we already had the necessary TV & Dual G5 PowerMac and b) after July of this year, you won't be able to buy ATSC-to-FireWire converter without draconian “copy protection” hardware in it.
 I also did all this because months ago, my constant tinkering with our DirectTiVo ended up in a working box that could “dial out” over a network, could be programmed via webpage and was expanded in capacity and speed—except that we could no longer get local channels.
And it's Oscar night!!!!
So I got the antenna, the eyeTV 500 and the PowerMac G5 set up next to our TV, and now we're watching the Gay Super Bowl in glorious, glorious HD.
Beyoncé looks even more impossibly beautiful, Robin Williams more cuddly and grizzly, and Annette Benning substantially more elegant as she continues to both glow and resist plastic surgery (you GO, girl!).
I think this HD thing is actually going to catch on! Next up, we're going to try out the TiVo-like features of the eyeTV 500 and its accompanying software.
 Knowing that this is going on, Sam and I are hoping to get our asses back to NYC to visit our most beloved friends, especially Jennie, Michael, Crash and Walt, my former next door neighbors Bill & Edgar, and a whole bunch of others.
And linking of Homer, by the way, and thinking of late about Richard, I have to say that I miss being in Tucson every now and again. Last time for me was when we moved Sam here back in June. Homer had posted a picture of the Catalina Mountains and it made me nostalgic for the area's particular majesty. Maybe we'll make it back to AZ before my brother and his betrothed move back East from Phoenix.
We're also talking about going to LA for a party, and several other travel destinations. But hell, if my professional situation changes in ways I'm hoping for, I think most of our plans are kaput.
Oh, well. Here's to hoping. Maybe Crash, et al will keep a couple of seats warm for us at GB:NY2 just in case?
Update: for those non-Safari folks, here's what this entry is supposed to look like
When I'm feeling miserable, especially emotionally, I tend to become circumspect. And abstract. (noticed that, have ya?)
This week, up until Thursday around noon, was the most miserable for me in a very long time, perhaps ever. Then, even though the fog of mind had yet to lift, my spirits did. Intellectually, from the long set of talks I had with incredibly smart and creative people, and emotionally, from the long, slow talk with TOH yesterday, followed by getting home and getting there (hi Jason!), followed by a night out with some friends whose company I don't seem to value enough.
I'm a tired dog today—we didn't get to sleep til almost six this morning. But I feel so much better than I have in quite some time.
So to all of you who lobbed emails to me offering support, an ear, a shoulder or other body parts, I thank you so very much.
These have been some of the worst few days of my life...and that's something coming from a man who watched his own lover die. I'm feverish, serotonin-depleted and emotionally exhausted.
Here's hoping the reversals can be reversed.
Northern California is a strange place. Speech is slower, at least a bit, than in other urban areas. The rate of social change is significantly higher in our more rural areas than in other urban areas. Voices are softer, burnished. Talk goes to areas most would deem 'radical' with ease, but the gift of directness is an elusive thing.
I have talked often—at at length—about how I'd taken to San Francisco like a fish to water, but there are, of course, aspects of it that elude me. I'm too trenchant, even too brusque, for many here. My expectations, even insistences sometimes, that others cast aside the politesse and just be honest and be candid are serous.
That's gotten me into big trouble, as one might expect. Gravitas is not always welcomed: I come across as blunt, not direct. I come across as churlish, not candid. I guess too much of my developmental years were spent not in San Francisco, specifically in a more East Coast/Midwest setting.
That's not an entirely satisfying explanation, either. Perhaps it's one of those “Is Life too short to put up with shit, or is Life too short to care?” scenarios. I generally come down on the side of not wanting to be the source of that kind of shit, and of generally wanting to keep at a safe distance those who do generate that kind of shit. Maybe it's an avoidance tactic, but I'm not so sure it is.
I think it's more of a preventative. It's about taking care to be a good social citizen, and gathering together with others to provide a sort of nucleation site for good will. And along those lines, it turns out that it's a pretty good litmus test for gauging friendships. I mean to say, friendships vs. those you just happen to see out and about.
It may seem like a no-brainer, calling this one a friend, and that one merely an acquaintance, but the lines are forcibly smudged here in San Francisco. You meet people you've happened to see around a few times at the same times in the same places and a dialog is struck. Pleasantries are exchanged, topics are shallow—it is just at a bar, after all—and a nice time is had by all.
But before you know it, these people are calling you their friend; people are speaking about you in glowingly praising profundities, calling you one of their favorite people.
Uhhhh, what?
Sometimes it feels merely weird; other times it feels forced; still other times it feels like a setup. A setup, as if they're wrapping up an alterior motive in warm-fuzzies, in wait of some future payoff.
It's all so tedious, having to set aside the incongruous overtures, having to set aside the quest to uncover the real motives (if any), feeling somewhat a lonely despair that you're the only one who still remembers the difference between wheat and chaff, between pleasantness and pleasantry, between friendship and base familiarity.
Maybe there's a quiet desperation that personal worth can only be calculated by external metrics: how many friends do I have, how many people know my name, how many people have I fucked, and so on and so on. Maybe people really are that shallow, or at least only truly comfortable at that lack of depth, that acquaintance and friendship are actually one and the same.
No one is immune from wanting external corroboration at least, most especially myself—I mean, I do have a blog and I am writing here. Different people do have different depths, however, different comfort levels at different depths—and even different comfort zones on the geography of each level. Some of us can resolve the differences, some of us cannot. Some of us choose not to notice the differences.
The vigilance to keep a watch out for the differences isn't something that can be done fulltime...otherwise, you'd have no time for anything else. So sometimes mistakes are made and the declarations of 'friendship' are taken to heart, taken as real. But this comes back, always bites back. That's an eventuality, a certainty, if friendships (acquaintances?) last for time intervals considered by mammmals to be signficant.
But then again, I suppose, not all mammals are created equal.
There's a positivity to it all, too: those people who never plant a flag to declare a friendship, whose first utterance of friendship is one of cognizant of an existing truth instead of predictive. Those are the people who value what they already have instead of—or yes, in addition to—despairing over what they may not yet have. Those are the people who make sure you know you can count on them, instead of just assuming they can count on you. Those are the people who are there for you and not just there around you.
Those are the people who talk less and say far, far more.
Those are the only people who I call Friend.
 Today was fucking cool. Started off not so great, arguments—old ones—and sullen moments and silent moments, but a nice day and our natural affinity for one another won out. We spent the whole day together, starting off with walking around Golden Gate Park, through the Fern Tree Grove, through the AIDS Memorial Grove. Allen's tree is there. Back in July of 1996, a year after Allen died, I sponsored a Workday in his name. I was one of two people who had sponsored the day, and after several hours of uprooting cyprus seedlings and blackberry brambles around what is now the western end of the Grove's Meadow, there was a little ceremony where we planted a seven-foot redwood tree in Allen's name. I was still in a funk during that Workday, and come to think of it, it was a day much like today. Though since it was July, it was much colder than our February spectacle today. His tree now stands three times taller.
There was a Parks maintenance vehicle right near the Grove's Circle of Friends monument, and Sam suggested playfully that we steal it. I laughed, said no, then went quiet again. I commented to Sam that this grove was the only real church for which I still had any natural or instinctive sense of the sacred.
 “So I guess I shouldn't talk about us going into the bushes to do it, huh?” Sam asked.
I laughed again, told him that I thought the place wasn't so much about being quiet and solemn as it was about still being alive to enjoy it, “so, it's ok to talk about that kind of stuff.”
Sam wrapped his arms around me and we kissed. Ok, ok, we made out.
We did that a lot today...in the Fern Tree Grove, near a pond. Near the Conservatory. On JFK Drive. Later on top of Tank Hill.
We drove around Golden Gate Park for a while, then headed over towards Parnassus Heights, because it snows there every year, around this time of year, for a couple of days. We were a few days early, though.
I wanted Sam to see a few different houses that I've always loved, and we ended up above Cole Valley at the end of Belgrave Street. That's when we discovered Tankhill Park. Who knew it was even there?
It was good to have found it together; together is good, whether in the park this afternoon, or greased up like pigs going at it in the shower this evening.
When I was a kid, Ash Wednesday was one of those extra-props observances, like Palm Sunday. You walked away with face-painting and a few palm leaves, respectively.
Catholic rites are typically more ornate, more involved, higher-production-value productions than their spare Protestant analogs. Beyond the stand-sit-kneel calisthenics, I mean. A wooden, ritualistic pass-it-on handshake, hymns sung at specific times—generally doing double-duty as a backdrop for the less interesting parts of the service. The Transubstantiation: Catholics believe that the wafer of bread actually becomes flesh and blood; this is no mere symbolism, but the very core of what makes Catholics Catholics, and what the Protestants (well, most of them) gave up when they separated from Holy Mother Church. And there's Holy Communion, of course, the eating of the bread-made-flesh.
When I say that Ash Wednesday was and extra-props day, I must point out that it's also a very spare ceremony. There doesn't have to be a full Mass, just a distribution. You queue up just like for Communion, but instead you're getting marked with ashes from the prior year's Palm Sunday palms:
“Man, you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”
That's what the priest says when he smudges on your forehead a cross with ashy thumb.
I remember walking around all day with that smudge, and feeling a sense of belonging when I'd see strangers with a like smudge. Think of it as sort of a Hanky Code for practicing Catholics, or like seeing the white headphones and wires of an iPod used to identify a Mac user before hell froze over and Apple let Windows people in on the iPod party.
Inwardly, there was a sense of pride, I suppose, or rather a sense of impending martyrdom—or the histrionic hope for such!—while wearing the fetish of Ash Wednesday. I thought people would pick a fight, or make fun. I'd hoped with swollen and prideful ego that I would be challenged so! That I'd defend my faith and my heritage and my choice, and maybe someone else would learn something. It's entirely possible, little martinet that I was, that I also believed there might be a Conversion or two.
But now, when I look back at it, I guess it was that one outlet a year to be badged as a Catholic without having to explicitly tell people I was—sort of like wearing a rainbow flag or necklace in the 1990s to signify that you were gay. Same kinda thing.
Now that I've not been a Catholic for a long time, there still is nostalgia when I see smudges. Oh, the Catholics have found plenty of other ways these days—largely through the mainstream Christian political process—to be out and proud Catholics, but back then. Back then it was the day you were given to be explicit about your faith. Those days of moderation are over, though, replaced with days of whine and rouses.
Maybe be it's a sign of age that I long for simply, more gracious times, and it's certainly age that lets me remember days long enough ago that I can be wistful and oversimplifying about the past.
So when you see the smudge today, also hear the words Man, you are dust and unto dust you will return. and note that this is supposed to be a reminder of the humility of the human individual and nothing more.
A little while ago, I decided it was time, again, to read Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. My friend Rex pointed me to them long before I moved to San Francisco. In fact, I bought the first book when I was living in Chicago[land] and was back visiting friends in Pittsburgh. It was a good beginning, starting off in my first adopted home reading a book about the magic of my future adopted home.
I can't say how many times I've read through the six volumes (they're a rather quick read, full of bursty descriptive passages and a whole lot of snappy dialog), but it has been a long time since the last time.
For how much a constant denim jacket served to measure the changes in me, Tales of the City only reinforced that which endures: my love of San Francisco.
I'm on the third volume, Further Tales of the City, just having finished More Tales of the City, where Mouse writes a coming-out letter to his parents who live in Orlando, FL, and were, at the time, praising that bitch Anita Bryant for her misguided (and misnamed) “Save Our Children” campaign against the perversion of us homosexuals. There's a siege mentality I seem to have had to adopt lately, when the world, most especially a handful of crazy christians—I'm sure that most of you christians out there are perfectly loving and decent and kind people—set out to tell you they don't judge you but that your relationships just aren't as good and natural as theirs; who “love the sinner, hate the sin” and then set out to force you into accepting their perverse notion of “sin”; and who promise eternity and trivialize this earthly existence while simultaneously throwing away their own ethics just to remake the world in their own image.
But reading Michael Mouse's letter to his parents reminded me that positivity works better than finger-pointing, works better than a defensive posture, and just plain works better for me, I decided that I would include that letter here (without permission from Mr. Maupin):
Dear Mama,
I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I'm not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.
I have friends who think I'm foolish to write this letter. I hope they're wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you'll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you.
I wouldn't have written, I guess, if you hadn't told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.
I'm sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.
No, Mama, I wasn't “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in orlando had taken me aside and said, “You're all right, kid. YOu can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You're not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends—all kinds of friends—who don't give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.”
But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don't consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being.
These aren't radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me, too.
I know what you must be thinking now. You're asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?
I can't answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don't care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it's the light and the joy of my life.
I know I can't tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not.
It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It's not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It's not judging your neighbor, except when he's crass or unkind.
Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. I has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength.
It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here, I like it.
There's not much else I can say, except that I'm the same Michael you've always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will.
Please don't feel you have to answer this right away. It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth.
Mary Ann sends her love.
Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.
Your loving son,
Michael
•••
By the way, the bold-face emphasis is mine.
From my point of view, as a gay man, as a San Franciscan, as an observer of the world, this 'Letter to Mama' is about the most profoundly and simply honest and accurate representation of what it's like to be a gay man in San Francisco, watching the rest of the world get its collective panties in a twist.
It does sadden me that 'family' and 'decency' and 'Christianity' are still words that the cruelly pious hide behind, that there are now legions of Anita Bryants out there, and that twenty-five years have passed since this 'letter' was first written.
I guess that some bad things endure as well.
Michael Mouse never let it get him down for too long; I shouldn't, either.
Through some rather twisted websurfing path (thanks, hoody!), I arrive at Capitalism Magazine. Some Danish guy wrote a rather unscientific, rather unsupportable book about the purported lies and exaggerations among current “radical” environmentalist thought. I was accused of ignoring questions about this guy, questions that were never asked in the first place.
Long, perverse story. Anyhoo, check out the link to Capital Magazine, the magazine “in defense of individual rights”, go to the right side bar, to the last paragraph there:
Capitalism Magazine survives on donations.
Set 'em up, knock 'em down, George.
You simply lied. We still don't know the real State of the Union, we just know what you told us. Which isn't much.
“Federal spending should not rise any faster than the paychecks of American families”
Beg pardon? How much has spending risen under your watch? How much has my paycheck risen?
“Tonight, let us bring to all Americans who struggle with drug addiction this message of hope: The miracle of recovery is possible, and it could be you.”
Recovery is not a miracle; it's hard work by a person to recover. Don't trivialize the efforts of those who worked so hard to get better.
“Tonight I'm proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.”
I know you, like, own the entire government, George, but I don't think that endows you with the powers to change the laws of physics. Producing hydrogen fuel is costly and does produce pollution. And why hydrogen? There are other cleaner solutions. Hmmmm, do you have friends who stand to make a ton of cash if hydrogen is the fuel of choice? Where is your $1.2B going?
[15 lines on AIDS]
Apparently, gays aren't a high-risk group anymore, George? Gee, thanks! Condoms be gone!
•••
Quite a speech last night, huh? Except the above quotes weren't from it. They were from 2003. How's he done in 2 years?
This year was SOOO much better:
“My budget substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fulfill essential priorities. The principle here is clear: A taxpayer dollar must be spent wisely, or not at all.”
Is this the end of No Straight Child Left Behind, then?
“It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take, that rejects amnesty, that tells us who is entering and leaving our country, and that closes the border to drug dealers and terrorists.”
In other words, come and do our shit jobs, pay taxes, but don't expect to be represented or protected in any way at all.
“During the 1990s, my predecessor, President Clinton, spoke of increasing the retirement age. Former Senator John Breaux suggested discouraging early collection of Social Security benefits. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended changing the way benefits are calculated.
All these ideas are on the table. I know that none of these reforms would be easy. But we have to move ahead with courage and honesty, because our children's retirement security is more important than partisan politics. I will work with members of Congress to find the most effective combination of reforms.
In other words, let's assign Democratic names to the hard choices, and then offer nothing of our own.
”Here is why personal accounts are a better deal. Your money will grow, over time, at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver and your account will provide money for retirement over and above the check you will receive from Social Security.“
Will you provide a guarantee that the money will not dwindle, George? If so, will you cover my investments in Enron and Worldcom, too? I mean, like, your Daddy did for S&Ls...
”Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be redefined by activist judges. For the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage.“
Coward. Say it. C'mon, say it! As Martin Luther once said, ”Sin bravely.“ C'mon, George. You're stuck, aren't you? Hate to say the word 'gay' because it gives the reality airtime, but then again, how can you really hate something unless you slap a label on it first? At least the crazy crackers of the religio-republican blogosphere boldly state their hate. Can you do any less?
”The Constitution also gives the Senate a responsibility: Every judicial nominee deserves an up or down vote. Because one of the deepest values of our country is compassion, we must never turn away from any citizen who feels isolated from the opportunities of America.“
Oh, Pinocchio...
”Because HIV/AIDS brings suffering and fear into so many lives, I ask you to reauthorize the Ryan White Act to encourage prevention, and provide care and treatment to the victims of that disease.
And as we update this important law, we must focus our efforts on fellow citizens with the highest rates of new cases, African-American men and women.“
Again, no gays? What are you really saying, George? That only white people deserve the luxury of the occasional D.L.?
”In America we must make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit, so we are dramatically expanding the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful conviction.“
Translation: we kill people in TX and boy is there egg on our faces when we're wrong!
”The United States has no right, no desire and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else. That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies. They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression, in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life.“
Say it with me: Democracy for Islam!
”Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.“
...and democracies that are placed instead of gradually grown are so much easier to attach marionette strings to...
”Today, Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.“
I always wondered what sound was made by that first shoe dropping.
”And the whole world now knows that a small group of extremists will not overturn the will of the Iraqi people.“
This one may come back to bite you on the ass, George.
”The attack on freedom in our world has reaffirmed our confidence in freedom's power to change the world. We are all part of a great venture: to extend the promise of freedom in our country, to renew the values that sustain our liberty, and to spread the peace that freedom brings.“
Extending the promise of freedom, not freedom itself. And the check's in the mail. And I promise I won't come in your mouth.
•••
I grew up never understanding that saying what was on your mind was anything other than the default. I never really knew what it meant to be materially injured for having one belief or another (well, except for how the Catholics in my church and the Protestants elsewhere treated Madeleine Murray O'Hare). I credit the ideals of the United States for that. But in reality, it was a straight white suburban cocoon, sequestered away from the reality of living.
Being a gay white male gives one an interesting and rare perspective: the personal experience of having been on both sides of the straight-white-male privilege. Credible discrimination is something that straight white men have never understood, and virtual freedom from discrimination is something that the vast majority non-white and/or non-male persons cannot claim.
It's exactly why so many gays take so long to come out of the closet; it's exactly why virulently christian gay men will turn to snake oil for lube salvation.
That straight-white-male privilege knows no class or economic boundaries. Bubbamerica and Pacific Heights both enjoy it. Still-closeted gay men can see how gays are discriminated against through natural empathy and who the hell would want that?
George is one of those straight-white-men who will do as he pleases, not because he doesn't care that he's hurting so many of us, but because he can't possibly understand the kinds of hurt he dishes out.
He'll never know those who are not like him. He's a hunter. Other-than-hunter is just prey.
When I was a wee boy back in college, at the beginning of my Sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, I had just sold the TRS-80 computer, printer and floppy disk drives I had bought over the years prior. My computer buying had begun at the tender age of fourteen, when I got my mom to co-sign a bank loan for $600 so that I could buy a computer. I suppose that was also be beginning of my debt.
Money well-spent/well-borrowed, I say! After upgrading the BASIC ROMs on the computer, upgrading the memory—$99 for 16K of RAM—buying an “expansion interface”, an Epson Printer and 2 floppy disk drives to replace the already-past-its-limits cassette drive, and after acquiring several hundred dollars worth of software, I sold the whole mess in 1983 for about $2000.
 One day, when CMU had just opened their campus computer store—an unheard-of thing in those days—a few of us decided to check it out. Not much to see, just an office in the “new” office building on campus, painted cinder-block walls stock office desks. We looked at the price list and I had almost immediately decided on an IBM PC with 2 floppy drives and 16K of memory. Oh, and with the IBM display (monochrome, green characters on a black screen). This was going to clock in at around $1600. Fair enough, I figured. I was getting a 6MHz machine for less than I'd sold my 1.77MHz TRS-80.
As we turned to walk back out of the store/office, there on a desk sat a little beige machine with a mostly-white display. With one of those mouse-things attached to it (now, mice I had seen before, down in one of the quasi-subterranean floors of Warner/Science Hall....I wasn't sure what they were for, but a small box with buttons attached to a strange-shaped computer workstation made quite an impression).
A paint program was running. I moved the mouse around and watched the cursor on the little screen follow. I clicked the button; it made a dot on the screen. I held the button down and moved the mouse, and an oval grew from the starting point!
I got the whole catastrophic beauty of this machine in less than a couple of minutes. And on February 7, 1984, just two weeks after the official introduction, I had one in my dorm room.
To this day, I have never regularly used a PC, never bought a PC for myself. I have, however, had upwards of a dozen different Macs.
Apple & the Mac have been significant yardsticks in how I measure the progress of my life, important memory-prods into very specific times in my past and quite a fine ongoing example of majority-minority patterns. In other words, I've learned a lot.
So, Happy 21st Birthday (January 24) to the Macintosh. Click on the young Steve Jobs above to watch a streaming video of the original introduction. You, of course, must have QuickTime installed on your machine—and shame on you if you don't already.
I'm going to go spin the propeller on the little cap on my big head, and try like hell not to shudder when I think of what might not have been...
Now, I'm no stranger to defending myself and my ideologies from the continued incursions of the faithful staging their little—and not so little—Crusades against us Infidels, but even I often make the mistake of giving the marching-ever-onward Christian Soldiers too much credit.
I give them credit for at least being true to their own sacredly-held Apothegms, even as I see these people.
But remember, while I was raised Catholic and I begrudge no one for that experience, I discovered a whole cosmos outside the Papal Walls of Truth at some point and life outside the VatiCan't suits me just fine. I know the truths held tight there, and I assume that most Christians hold those same values.
When you see Catholic boys, girls, men, women masquerading as calvinists, spouting things like “Feed a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”, I get palpably upset.
Is this what's become of the parable of Jesus with the Loaves and the Fishes? Do these people really believe that if Jesus came back today, he'd be a neocon?
Sure, it's great to teach a man to fish, but he won't hear the lesson over the rumblings of an empty stomach.
Teaching is a terrific thing; but learning is even better. But now I'm veering dangerously close to being one of those intellectual-elite snobs, huh? I can understand how people can feel threatened by those who can speak better, who can think more comprehensively...but there are also plenty of us who are eager to be around people who can speak better and especially think more comprehensively, because those are the learning moments.
There's nothing better to an old intellectual snob like me than to be around smart people who are open to change. Improvement doesn't come from stasis. Only decay does.
Too bad there seems to be so many more people out there content to rot in the stink of their own self-satisfied dogma.
Sam's off to visit his best friend, Vacabill, for the weekend; he's been gone for about three hours and already I'm reverting to bachelor-nerd. I'd found my BroodWar CD so that I could again play Starcraft. I've never been much of a games player; I've been a games buyer, purchaser of tons of shelfware but the only game that ever really stuck for me was Starcraft.
Maybe it's that I sit on front of a Mac all day long, doing development, keeping up with work email, personal email, blogging...you get the picture. I think I start out buying a game with good intentions, but I usually don't even seem to get them installed, much less played.
I did have Sam pick me up iLife '05 and iWork today from the Apple Store. Definitely some cool stuff, especially iPhoto 5. This kind of software I use all the time.
Continuing with the bachelor portion of my comment, I'm going to a Blue Party with FTP, Madonnavan and a few others. Theme: blue. Dress: blue fuzzy boa, blue false eyelashes, blue paintsticks. I've only done drag the one time—and trust, you don't wanna see that mess. This is sort of merely drag-flavored. Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue vest, blue tennies. All of it male clothing. I'm just accessorizing drag. Yeah, that's it.
If it's not too scary, and you're good little boys and girls (you know who you are), I may post some pictures.
Once upon a time in the Midwest, my friend Rex would often posit that we are all accidental beings in a meaningless universe. I remember not so much arguing with him as against what he said. I found it dreary; I found it pointless; I found it tedious.
But mostly, I found it depressing.
But this is the standard-issue miserable scenario that most fear-peddling theists trot out as the sole alternative to a life dedicated to god.
It's all about expectations: you run your own thoughts down a certain path, trundling headlong without a care for where you used to be because you're dead sure that you're on the One True Path. In the absence of perspective, in the face of the arduousness of finding your way back across the void, you instead opt to thinking of The Other, The Outside as the void and nothing more.
Understandable, in at least some way, because we San Franciscans experience that here. You're in the City, or you're not. The rest of the world takes on a dull patina of sameness, of mundanity, where the only color and contrast to be found is in the Interlucent City.
Of course, this is only a temporary modality of thought, a little kick in the ass to remind you of what's special, a mental CGI to visualize the love of home.
But I digress...
I'd call it a failure of the imagination—or at least an unwillingness to use one's imagination—when you're of the Theist mind. You've become so dependent on the light of god that you believe that the absence of god can only mean the dark void.
Not so! We are not accidental beings so much as the product of accumulated accidents; the universe is not meaningless because we impart to it all the meaning we'll ever need.
And that, boys and girls, theists and non, is how lives can be filled with wonderment and magic, science and reason, love and vitality.
And, ironically, it's also how some of us have conjured up a creator.
San Francisco is a spectularly diverse—and just plain spectacular—place to live. Your life is touched, or at least neared, by people, places and things, the breadth and depth of which leave you with this astonished feeling. And that's a feeling that too many people are afraid to experience. Fear of the unknown is perhaps, at least the Westerner's, most enduring bugaboo. Fear of the Other, which is different to fear of the unknown, is just as insidious. Fear of change, fear of death (which in itself is just another change from here to heaven or to oblivion or to the next incarnation). Fear of upset expectation. Fear of Being Wrong.
Astonishment, to my way of thinking (and feeling!), is a blood relation to wonderment. Socrates' flavor of wonderment: “Wisdom begins in wonder.” That sort of thing.
Who bothers with wonderment anymore? The Age of Reason seems to have all but killed the Eons of Wonder. More's the pity, I say, and this is quite something coming from one who escaped intellectualism only by embracing scientism, and escaped that only by being defeated and overwhelmed by the wonders of the world as they are diverted through the prism of San Francisco.
To me, San Francisco helped make a multiplicity of spirit and of mind possible. It's a staging area, a testbed, a control (we never do escape the teachings and teachers of our youth), and most importantly it's a home base from which to believe nothing and everything, to be yourself and countless others, to choose and be chosen for, to progress and reflect, to conserve and to spend, to hurry and to tarry.
It's not so much losing one's self in the flood or one's footing when the riverbank washes away, so much as it is discovering a 3rd dimension—up!—and exploiting one's newfound freedom of movement.
And it was with this light and fearless heart that I went with my good friend Dave to an event at Fort Mason here in the City. I have known Dave since before I even moved to San Francisco. He and his wife Lisa have been splendid friends and sherpas throughout my entire time here, inspiring, cajoling and sometimes even instructing me on the Rest of the World, that which I never even dreamed existed.
Also at the event was my rediscovered friend, Steve, quite the clever monkey in his own right, and less credulous in general than either Dave or myself. In other words, a terrific and valuable presence.
The man speaking at the event was James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games, giving a talk on the relationship between Religion and War.
A too-simple background: finite games are those which have solid boundaries/rules, with the goal of winning. Infinite games are those whose only goal is to continue the play, and have horizons instead of boundaries (look at a horizon line and imagine going to that spot, look off in the same direction: another horizon!).
An infinite game might be hitting a balloon around at a family picnic and trying to keep it from falling. A finite game? Chess. Another infinite game: survival, as in the survival of a religion across eras, across governments and across ethnicities. Another finite game: war.
Carse described war as the application of finite game rules to an infinite game. A big, broad statement with too many degrees of freedom, to be sure, but that was his point. He described religion as an infinite game, whose followers often—almost periodically—wish to grab worldly power and play out a finite game with it.
It's all too easy to find an example in the world out there.
When talking of religion, Carse pointed out that belief is different to religion. This is something I had already figured out for myself. He pointed out that thinking ends at belief, that point at which we accept something as true or even True and stop considering the veracity of it.
Aquinas had a big old brace on his brain, in my opinion, in that he accepted the Creeds of his religion much too early in his critical thinking. I have gone even further in this, here and on other blogs, insisting that Aquinas was just a bad thinker and that his works suffered from begging his own questions. In Carse's parlance, Aquinas set out to prove that his own boundaries were correct, instead of just expanding the known horizon and humbly accepting its infinitude.
I find it odd whenever people of faith (or merely religion) attempt to use critical thinking in order to prove the correctness of their position. Arguably, proof is nothing more than a true-statement derived from the rules/boundaries of the system. And why do believers play this Finite Game?
Probably because they're more about their religion than their beliefs.
Of course, there was plenty more to Carse, and to his lecture, and to the Long Now Foundation, but we have plenty of time.
Bless me, Father, for I have lived...
-ahem-
Sorry, old Catholic verse creeping in. I'll give them one thing, the Papists, they do have a knack for cadence—there's a catchy pop-hook in all the more popular bits of Lectionary. Anyhoo, today marks an anniversary that always leaves me feeling accelerated. Hyper, maybe, is a better word. But at the end of the day—at the end of every nostalgic and every immediate burst—it all balances out. For every high, there's a low, for every lofty abstraction there's a concrete anchor to the here-and-now.
Having sufficiently buried the lead in terms of copy and voice, I'll say that today would have been Allen's 47th birthday. Strange to think of him that old. Strange to think of him not here, as well. See what I mean? Antipodal emotions. I wrote about him last year, and it does not seem a year has passed since then. It does not seem that 9 1/2 years have passed since he died. It does not seem we only had a little over two years together in the same house.
It does not seem less than two years since I met Sam. It does not seem fewer than forever, either.
Which just goes to show that Time is best measured by the heart and not the calendar, relative to now, instead of relative to then or relative to the luxury known as “some day”.
Now is forever, and the past is mutable. The future is probably fixed, but unknown, which is tantamount to mutable.
Noodle on that one for a while, and give a nod towards Allen, if you would, and towards everyone you have lost, even towards those who may have lost you.
But, jesus-skateboarding-christ, don't let it disrupt your Now.
Sssssserioussssly.
Too many things going wrong. Too many wrong things said to me. Too many wrong things said, or wrong times mentioned. Too much work. Too much change.
A breaking point and a tipping point at the same wrong time and same wrong place.
They slice! They dice! They julienne! They blast the snot right out of your head!
Siiiiigh....I wish.
Sam and I have been talking about getting a dog for some time. This has escalated recently, mainly because we found a breed—and more importantly, a size—that we agree on. I've always loved schnauzers, and Sam, with his new haircut and facial hair style, came to love schnauzers as well. So we're talking about getting a Standard Schnauzer.
The pup wants a pup. And our friend, Bret, recommended we watch this show, The Dog Whisperer. Ironically, in the first episode we watch, in the first segment of the episode, there's a dog called...wait for it...“Boyfriend”.
It's a sign, I'm telling ya.
There are things that we surround ourselves with. Favorite, important or sentimental are the reasons we give for these things. Sometimes, though, they're just useful things that serve purposes which do not change, no matter the other changes in our lives.
A comfy chair, a favorite set of slippers. That cut-glass statuary in recognition of service or duty.
For me, it's a heavy denim jacket. Its history has made it a thing of sentimental value. Its comfort and protection have always been a thing of real value. It's the sum total of all of its separate values that makes it a favorite of mine.
Odd then, that it was not my jacket to begin with.
It was Allen's. He bought it for himself, brought it to San Francisco with him, like so many things that used to populate the house. Those things are fewer and fewer, of course, but the jacket remains. It has become mine, became mine a long time ago.
Plenty of history surrounds this jacket.
I was already wearing the jacket for myself while he was still alive. He had others, and I liked the vague smell of the unsmoked cigarettes he kept in the inside breast pocket and the scent of him on the worn ribbon around the jacket's leather collar.
The jacket is there in my memory for so many things:
- Once, in 1994, Allen was flying back to Holyoke, Colorado to visit his family. It was in January and I took him to SFO and walked to the gate with him—remember when you could go all the way to an airport gate without a ticket for yourself? We were about to walk into the smoking lounge when he remembered what he forgot: the jacket. And he was off to Colorado in January. He was already so thin, and I knew that even the walk to the rental car would devastate his already devastated body. So it was up to me: I made a mad dash back to the car, sped up Highway 101, in the door, grab the coat, out the door, back down 101, back to the parking lot, back down the concourse to hand him his coat. Total round trip: 28 minutes. And it felt awfully good to do that for him.
- only the edge of the left sleeve is worn, tattered, from often pulling on the second strap of my backpack before I'd climb on the Vespa.
- I'd wear the jacket often when I rode the Vespa. One Friday in the wintertime I went over to The Edge, a bar in the Castro, for a happy hour with friends. I wore the jacket into the bar and stuffed it into a corner where other jackets were. At the end of the evening when I was ready to leave, the jacket was gone. I had to ride home in a cold, misting rain wearing only a wife-beater all the way home. Resigned to having lost the jacket forever, two weeks past that I was at the Metro bar with many of the same friends; I was telling FTP that I'd lost the jacket forever, when Dominic pipes up from the next table down, saying that he took a jacket that wasn't his because he was too cold. He had returned it to the Edge the next day. That little bastard. Anyhow, I got it back.
- As I sit here in the Gay and Lesbian Center with a few tranny youth and tranny not-so-youth around the $3 bill cafe (as in, 'queer as a', get it?), I'm wearing the jacket as I wait for the man I love to join me here.
I'm not sure who's worse for the wear, it or me, or who's better for the wear. But the jacket's still here. I'm still here. And now Sam is here.
I woke up Monday morning with a fever. A doozy of a fever; not all that high, but one of those incapacitating dry-heat types of fever. The kind that leaves you torpid of thought but not of body.
Still, I slept all day, woke up late in the afternoon feeling not at all refreshed. The opposite, in fact: exhausted, stale, unguarded.
Not the best time to have a heavy and deep discussion with your partner about your relationship, and, at the same time probably the only time to have that kind of discussion.
It's been a rough day, but I'm not unraveled. I'm pretty sure that Sam is not unraveled. Our relationship is far from unraveled.
But we have the world. And time enough.
Adjustments are never easy, especially the ones that overlap into areas you've based parts of your identity on. My danglies are run-on, and my run-on dangles. No matter.
I've come to a rather sobering realization (ironic, after the way this weekend has played out so far) that I can carry an awful lot of stress and worry—and even anger—on my shoulders, between the blades and sometimes, even in the soles of my feet.
After how the election played out (and got played), and after stooping to the bread-and-circuses fuckwits out there, I came to favor those reactions which would pull the world and the world of responsiblity to myself.
Bad idea.
Not one to make New Years' Resolutions, I make one nonetheless. Let's call it a coincidence of timing.
I'm better equipped to help, better equipped to be there for Sam, for my family, for myself, if I take a few steps back.
I'm not leaving the blog; on the contrary I expect to be here even more. More humor, more enjoyment. More according to my own nature instead of the soldier nature I seem to have acquired. They say that you become the worst in those you oppose.
Why oppose when you can cajole? Why have an enemy when you can just walk away instead?
Why not be creative instead of en garde?
I've talked about my mother, Marie, any number of times in these pages. She's a remarkable person, a remarkable woman. This is what she said to me in IMs this morning:
Happy New Year to you, too. Hope it's a good one for all, but in case it isn't, we can all pool together and deal with it. Together we can do anything.
It was aimed at me and at our immediate family, but I can hear the echoes of it all around me in what's going on in the world today.
What a great sentiment to start a new year off with, huh?
Sam and I spent Xmas eve and Xmas day doing pretty much nothing. We watched a lot of TV, a lot of movies.
And we ate. Pizza last night. And sandwiches today. I made a pot of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee (at $60/lb). And then we made Mexican food tonight. ¡Feliz Navidad! indeed!
And one of the movies we watched was 'Ying xiong', or Hero. And we started to watch THX 1138. But we stopped that one less than an hour into it, because it was nothing but stark backgrounds, a lot of social restrictions and etiolated faces. Sam was bored, and I've had enough of the moral-values red-states crap to last a decade, so we stopped it. Maybe we'll pick it back up, but in 2004 (almost 2005!), its message is a bit belabored. Though only when it's not true. Which isn't often. [He said, morosely.]
No Santa in sight. No Jesus in sight. Only A Christmas Story, which isn't about Christmas so much as a wry judgement on the American Monoculture. So, apt.
I have wished family and friends, some of them, a Merry Christmas. To others, “Happy Holidays”. Be warned out there, chil'ren. The christians have their gatchies in a twist about this “happy holidays” business. It's “Merry Christmas” or nothing, dammit! Oy vey. What a tragic mess.
Any bets on when Theocratical Correctness moves from irony to reality?
Today I am missing my family back East. Christmas Eve was always the bigger night—well, after we became adults. Or after the notion of Santa Claus was exposed as a clever ruse. That's when we started opening presents on the Eve instead of the Morning, because sleeping-in was a better present after all, I suppose.
 Being from a mostly Polish family (technically, we're just a bunyak family, eastern-European mutts whose true nationalities are lost to border dynamics during the 1800s and 1900s), we naturally and unconsciously capitalized on the wiggle-room in all Catholic traditions by borrowing from the more orthodox (and Orthodox) elements of the old cultures by abstaining (from meat) from the morning of Christmas Eve until after we'd gone to a Christmas Mass (which, borrowing from American Expediency Culture and Vatican II, could come as early as 4:30pm Mass on Christmas Eve). This resulted in a tradition among us Polacks (bunyaks) of a meatless dinner for Christmas Eve. A dinner far separated from the bigger Christmas events, the bigger Christmas idiom. It was for family. Family is what permits it to exist and to continue. And it's solely about the core family, that part of the tree that starts at Jack and Marie, my parents, and includes progeny, their spouses, and further progeny.
I have had this dinner on my mind for some time now, knowing I would not be there. I suppose I had wished to keep it as abstract as possible in my head, as a way of not belaboring any anguish over my absence.
My Mother, setting aside the gifted thinker that she is in favor of the even more gifted Mother that she is, just posted pictures of the table setting. She set out pictures of Sam and me, of my brother Anthony and his fiancée, Jess, and a picture of the grandchildren, all of whom have become the most piteous of creatures, it seems, because of the most pitiful mothering I've ever seen.
It's a solemnity my mother is creating, a sense of occasion neither happy nor entirely sad, but serious. Important. Dignified. A profound gravitas. It's a rich life we've each and all led in my family. My younger brother Sam, myself, my older brother Anthony. We all had the most splendid environment to grow up in.
My nephews had mostly the same, up until their lives went pear-shaped a couple of years ago. It could have been mostly restored, but that wasn't allowed to happen and they're the ones to suffer the most.
Though I do not celebrate Christmas for its own sake, I do appreciate it for my own sake.
I'm privileged and honored that Sam is here with me each and every day for the rest of our lives, but I miss the rest of my family...parents, brothers (and sisters), nephews. I love them all so much.
 Not that I really buy the possibility of Microsoft Windows being finally ubiquitous, but as I sat here at home doing some work, connected remotely to my Windows XP machine as a full-screen session, I had to take a picture. Look closely (click on the thumbnail). A 17“ PowerBook G4 running Windows XP. Completely ass-backwards, if you ask me....Now...PCs running Mac OS X...that'd be something.
When I was a child and through my teens, there was one voice that was always there. Well, not always there, but always available when the thousand things I'm always thinking about would get thought out, when the hundreds of adjustments to be made were completed, when the tens of friends would be off friending with other people, when a handful of moments were there solemn and for the taking. The voice belonged to Karen Carpenter.
Her death made her a constant in the universe, never getting older, never doing anything newer. Never being anything that what she was at the moment I learned of her death. Always the same, always utterly knowable.
Even at Christmastime, Karen was there, whether singing cloying and cursed carols or more contemporary and nuanced personal statements about the supposedly most wonderful time of the year.
Over the years, I have outgrown the unnuanced hypocrisy of the holiday season in America, just as I have outgrown the need for the self- and soul-flagellation that attends Christianity. Jingle the Bells, Hark the Heralds, Fa the La-La-La's if you must—and plenty of us must—but please don't be offended by my utter neutrality towards the festivities that seem to just borrow against the next year's good will.
Nuanced moments, times, people, events are those that stay with me; complexities and subtleties abound to be savored, studied, analyzed, observed, enjoyed, revisited, reconsidered, re-dismissed. I learn so much about my own thoughts, about my own feelings, about my own age, about my own time, by playing myself against static pieces or by letting a song play me with a fine hand.
One of the songs that appeared on the Carpenters' Christmas album, that I still cannot forget, is called “Little Altar Boy”:
Little altar boy, I wonder could you pray for me?
Little altar boy, for I have gone astray
What must I do to be holy like you?
Little altar boy, oh, let me hear you pray
Little altar boy, I wonder could you ask your Lord
Ask him, altar boy, to take my sins away
What must I do to be holy like you?
Little altar boy, oh, let me hear you pray
Lift up your voice and send a prayer above
Help me rejoice and fill that prayer with love
Now I know my life has been all wrong
Lift my your voice and help a sinner be strong
Little altar boy, I wonder could you pray for me?
Could you tell our Lord I'm gonna change my ways today?
What must I do to be holy like you?
Little altar boy, oh, let me hear you pray
Little altar boy please let me hear you pray!
How can a man who has no need for a god-concept, no wont of cosmic cash-in at the end of life, no visceral attachment to the machinations of religious bureaucracies find anything of value in a song like this? I often ask myself that very same question. The question is yet another thing that I savor, study, analyze, observe...you get the picture. The revisitation serves to measure me. Serves to measure time. Tick! asks the question. Tock! waits for the arrival of an answer, or preferably, better questions.
This year, as my partner comes at me from the godless-left (as the Sacred States of America come at me from the moral-values-right), I ask myself again: what is it about the song—most specifically, Karen Carpenter's rendition of the song—that refuses to stop speaking to me?
The singer of the song is regretful, wishing to make a change, wishing to become better. And asking for help. Help is being asked of an innocent, who the singer believes has a better chance of being heard, and thus the singer has a better chance at getting what she needs.
Asking for forgiveness, while most often a selfish-demand to be relieved of a past burden, can sometimes be nothing more—and nothing less—than the natural outburst proceeding from a moment of clarity, a moment of realization, a moment of self-understanding. When you can hold your own past, your own present, your own self in the palm of your own hand for even an instant, you're floating free of everything that holds you back.
The song is a prayer, a supplication to the innocent to help them remember the realization and help them do something with the burst of insight after the moment has passed. And like any prayer, it's a request of someone else to keep despair at bay until the singer can do it for herself.
Most of the people I know are not christian. None of my friends here in San Francisco attend church services. None vote Republican. None attempts social engineering before first attempting to engineer themselves into better people. None of them want someone else to do all the work.
All take pride in their own accomplishments while also acknowledging where they got help. All appreciate love and care and decency. All are self-described progressives or liberals. All are happy to help when they can.
Even the godless used to admit to sin. Now sin has become Sin, and is defined by Holy Proscription by the christians. Even the godless used to ask the heavens, “why me?”. Even the godless would show gratitude in moments of fatalistic benevolence. Even the godless could be able to say they were “blessed”.
So this year, at least, for me the song is about humility. The humility to admit that you don't know something; the humility to own up to self-limiting behavior. It's about asking for help and doing your best whether you get the help or not.
And in becoming a better person, a more decent human being, a more respecting and respectable individual, a more nuanced and fully realized soul in our ever-more-caricaturish society, share what you gained with others. Let them stand on your shoulders, because no matter what you've accomplished, you've been helped along the way as well.
Today Sam found out he was accepted at the university for the Fall of 2005. You just had to see the smile on his face when he found out, and that smile is still across his handsome face.
I'm so happy for him I can't even describe it.
I love the shit out of that little man.
Of course Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned: it was A.D. 64 and the violin didn't show up until about 1500 years later.
No, it's said he sang. Or played the lyre. No matter how he celebrated, he had his jubilee as he looked on at the destruction. I'm sure he had his reasons; maybe it was a nihil obstat preparing the way for his construction plans. Maybe he needed a 'fund raiser' for his campaign against the Christians. Or in a more philosophical mindset, he pondered that perhaps Rome was so far-gone that it needed a reboot.
For my part, in times like these, I think that if humans are involved, things always end in fire. And that they don't end.
One of the strengths of the human soul (I'm using the term as a generic collective term, you rascally theists out there) is its ability to abide and otherwise countenance internal inconsistency and even paradox. If humanity lived on logic and reason alone, they'd have foundered on the rocks of realism a long time ago and never bothered to reach for anything at all. As I said, this is a strength—up to a point.
Before it reaches said point, the human soul can ponder existence, ponder death, ponder beginnings without endings, and endings without beginnings. It can ponder that which lies beyond reach, beyond touch, beyond reason and still make its way back to a quotidian world where there must be bread on the table, a roof over one's head and money in one's account.
But that's a difficult thing to live with for some of us. For most of us, I might even say. How to reconcile an expansive, ultimately ununderstandable universe with hand-to-mouth biological need? For many, it seems they choose to forget—ahh, another of those strange paradoxes—the other while they're living inside the current one. A mental setting-aside of the infinite, or a physical setting-aside of the mundane in order to soar amongst finespun thoughts, depending.
Depending. Interesting term for a fundamental orthogonality. Yet another paradox. We do rack them up rather quickly, don't we?
Anyhow, it's all quite difficult when that threshold of irreconcilability is crossed—in either direction. Quite often we have—at least I do—a nasty crash into a bad spell of Existentialism. Why bother with the two? And if I am capable of holding both in my head, why bother with anything at all? Why bother?
That which had a beginning must suffer an inevitable end, right?
These plummets into existentialism (capitalize the 'e' if you choose) can bring abject disconsolateness that one may never return from—resulting from fear.
Ironically, it's a fear of never recovering that keeps most people from recovering from such a fall.
The natural response to fear is avoidance. The old fight or flight instinct. And after you've decided you can't win, flight is the only option. Like I said: avoidance.
Avoid the context switch from the ethereal (spirit) to the concrete (letter) or vice versa because that's where you get into trouble. Stay in one and never consider both. That's the safe course.
If you've chosen the spirit world, like the moralists in this country have, you avoid the context switch by remaking the concrete world in the image of your own god; if you're a letter-of-the-law kind of person, you wave Thor's hammer at heaven in an attempt to dissipate the godly fog.
If you choose the dominance of neither spirit nor letter, you must cope with the mind-body, wave-particle duality as a full-time gig. And as if life inside a brain so active isn't bad enough, the spiritists and the letterists, properly suspicious of you, add to the difficulty of your choice.
Moralists in aphorist clothing want to kick your legs out from under you and them blame you for not growing an angel's wings. Spoilers and other naysayers will clip your wings and claim you never had them in the first place.
Interestingly, however, there is a shortcut for a stalwart dualist, if you're willing to be clever about it. The key is labels.
Labels. Or rather, avoiding labels. The spiritists will want to pigeonhole you—the theists among them shove a square god into a round world with abandon all the time, and if they're willing to pigeonhole the infinite, why not do it to you, too? The letterists believe in nothing new under the sun, so how could you have a new point of view?
Fingers point, tendrils tangle, they line up on either side of you with weapons until they form a circle. Oh, they'll miss the mark, because you're simultaneously there and not there. You refuse to accept the bullets of realism and the raygun blasts of Jesus. The doggerel and obsequiousness set the world ablaze and there's nothing to stop it.
Weapons are discharged and the circle of fools will fall in fire. But if you realize that the fire is just part of the cycle of human affairs and not a punctuated ending, you can stand back and smile at the naturalness of it all.
And why the hell not pick up a fiddle to pass the time until the fire burns itself out?
We watched The Chronicles of Riddick (beefcake), A Home at the End of the World (quite good), and then, Jackass: The Movie.
The first one was just stupid, even though Vin Diesel's deltoids are fun to look at. The second, well, wow...Colin Farrell actually can act. Seriously. And Robin Wright Penn, as always spectacular.
The third one was the gayest of all. Seriously folks. It's all about Chris Pontius' Badonka Butt. And his penis. Picture a bunch of guys who seem to need to have their shirts off at every opportunity, who are fixated on their own asses. And each other's: one guy shoved a Matchbox Car up his ass, another guy let them shoot bottlerockets out of his ass. Chris' penis makes yet another appearance in this scene: they tape up his penis with a string attached to it and shoot a tethered bottlerocket off of it. They then tie another bottlerocket to Pontius' Penis (doesn't that sound like a biblical porn character?) and shoot it out of the first guy's ass. Yes, you heard it right: fireworks attached to Pontius' Penis and shoved in the other guy's butt.
Seriously, why don't they just get it over with and have sex with each other? This is what comes of repressing natural sexuality.
Chris Pontius, are ya feelin' me?
 9 years, 4 months, 16 days, 8 hours and about 15 minutes ago, Allen E. Howland, formerly of San Francisco, CA; Midland, TX; Ft Lauderdale, FL and Holyoke, CO, died.
Approximately 12 hours ago I got to hear Jerry Falwell offer his expertise on the quality and value of same-sex relationships.
You'd think after all the politicizing in the intervening years, I'd become somewhat inured to egregious selfishness and egomania of the Christian Extremists, Right-Wing fuckwits and small-potatoes, petty apers, who offer their “opinions” about the abstractions of homosexuality, marriage and moral values as if—well, I was going to say as if they were academic considerations, but most of those people couldn't find academia or gravitas with both hands and a flashlight—as if they were talking points and nothing more.
But no. It never gets easier.
With Sam, well, he's here to fight that insensitive, rather un-Christian crap, and we're both here for each other, a warm, safe haven against the storms of hypocrisy, crass judgment and hypocritical harangues. With Allen, though, as well as with George (his partner before me who also died of HIV-related causes), I am at once thankful that he doesn't have to endure the ongoing imprecations, the hate disguised as “Christian love”, the vitriol of the desperate egomania of the after-lifers, judgmental idiots who pass the judgy buck to Jesus.
Though I was oblivious in the early years to AIDS (née GRID)—I mean, if the President of the United States didn't bother with it and I wasn't even close to being out of the closet yet, how bad can it be, right?—I learned quickly. I was horrified at the world, horrified with myself, for not being more aware. There was no World AIDS day back then. Back then, the Federal government under Reagan couldn't say the word, much less fund an effort to stop it. Back then, the City of San Francisco under then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, spent over three times the amount that the Federal Government did on AIDS-related programs, including basic and clinical research.
I could rail on all day and be consumed by the ignorance of the past and the unconscionable stupidity of the present, but to me, that's not what World AIDS Day is about. It's about the future. It's about remembering the mistakes and misery of the past so that we never have a past like this again. It's about thinking and doing now, not wallowing.
Allen Howland, George Grable and far too many others are gone from us. The world is less because of their absence. But I'm still here; you're still here. Politics, religion, ego aside, people are still dying. People are still seroconverting. People are still getting sick.
Remember this. Especially today. And do you part, even if that part is nothing more than making sure you don't seroconvert or if you have already, making sure that HIV stops with you.
Was here. Saw him, who appeared in such faves as The Perfect Weapon (mmmmm, Jeff Speakman) and Campus Man (ewww, lame-ass attempt to capitalize on the 'beefcake' fad).
Turns out, John Dye was also inTouched by an Angel, which I didn't know. I mean, why would I? I think I did see the porn, “Touched by an Uncle”, though.
 There's always been gaydar. I think the straight folks who either can't learn it (Christian Extremism and voting Republican are in that same locus) or won't learn it (irony-impairment travels on the same gene) treat gaydar with the same kind of paranoia that makes people go to Epcot instead of going to the real countries.
It used to be that you could get around this ghastly lack by singing “Clang! Clang! Clang!” to a potential Matachine and if they respond with “Went the Trolley”, well, you have a bonafide (hehe, I said 'bone') homosexual on your hands (so to speak). But that's an old song that most people probably don't even know anymore.
There is a new hope, however: The KitchenAid Stand Mixer.
Got one? Then you're a Big Ol' 'Mo. Sorry, you just are.
The turkey is in an electric oven at 350° after brining overnight and after spending 30 minutes in the real oven at 500°. We're well ahead of the game (barring issues with the roasting), ready to make mashed potatoes and homemade stuffing (well, dressing, since the bird is filled only with herbs, apples and onions) and candied yams and some vegetables.
In the midst of all this, it's odd to trot out a single day out of the year for the sole purpose of giving thanks; I find myself generally grateful and generally willing to express such whenever I have cause to.
Which is quite often—because of the love of my life, Sam, my amazing family back in Pennsylvania and in Arizona, and a very large number of very good people who are my friends.
Except it's not just gratitude or thankfulness, two sentiments which are often aimed at a deity, but not always (obviously), it's also a reminder.
A reminder that I should also give some credit to myself for whatever part I've played in being surrounded by such astounding happiness. I know that I am one of the things that Sam, family and friends are grateful for, and I must remind myself to keep earning that place in their lives.
Holding in high value the qualities of decency, trust, mercy, compassion, vigilance and empathy got me here, to my place in the world, full of love and laughter and caring-for. And though the rest of the world may rail and rage contrarily at me, at my family, at my friends, even at my kind, that is but flotsam in the deluge of Good Things that is my life.
It starts with a choice. It starts with choosing to be entertained at the expense of being informed. It starts with appealing to the basest nature, because you're too lazy to create something, too frightened to act individually outside a crowd of the like-minded, too insecure to hold and defend an opinion that is your own.
It ends with lies.
Stolen identities; misrepresentation of others; shouting untruths long enough and loud enough to drown out other voices; hypocrisy; fraud; editorial abuse.
It all becomes a jumble, it seems. Honesty and truth—and, dare I offer, fact—are jokes, laughable anachronisms or elitist liberal heart-bleeding.
Gordon, one of the Dog's Knot Boys, won't address me directly, in email or otherwise, but he happily emails my boyfriend just to claim what a scum I am for 'stirring the pot' and making trouble for him. You'd think that lying was enough for Gordon, but no, he guns for hypocrisy and props to him for making that work. Where I was attempting to get this 'nunya' commenter to email me so that I was sure he wasn't just some random fuck posing as someone else—y'know, like Geoff and Gordon would do, where I was doing nothing but asking someone to own up to his own statements. Gordon tries like the dickens to make it appear like I was "bitchslapping" this person. Uhh, no Gordon.
On another website, when I stated to someone that since they weren't gay or weren't male (or either) they really didn't have solid ground on which to stand in judgment of my relationship, I get this:
Go ahead and call your lifetime fundamental relationship with another man anything you like. Martha wasn't JUDGING YOU, nor am I. She was merely INFORMING you that a "sexual" intimacy between two men (or two women) is immoral, and that it ISN'T really marriage. If the shoe fits…. That's not a personal judgment of you, merely an observation about a specific behavior. There IS a difference, whether you see it or not.
(The reason I put "sexual" in quote marks is that sex isn't just use (or abuse) of one's sexual organs. Sex, properly speaking, involves a man and a woman conjoining their respective and complementary sexual organs. But between two men…or two women…well, what can I say? Something just isn't quite…right. Something seems to be…missing. I expect you'll disagree vehemently. That's your right. Scream all you like. But it doesn't change anything.)
Whew! I'm glad I wasn't being judged or anything, Green Flash. Perhaps instead I should thank you (and Martha! Hi Martha!) for conveying a Sublime Truth to me that I failed to divine.
What comes of a world where self-responsibility is considered weakness and toeing the christian-company-line is 'strength'? What comes of a place where informing someone of fraud is called 'whining'?
I'm sure that Sam will end up getting email from Gordon, because he'll never contact me directly....no audience, no reason to speak, right? I'm sure that he'll photoshop some pictures again, call me any number of names. Hell, you might even end up seeing some of the obtuse apers of the Dog's Knot Mob clogging up the comments sections here, but hell, it was only a matter of time anyway.
Am I goading them? Yeah. Does it matter? No, because people like that find a way to stage a nutty in the presence or absence of reason.
Absence of Reason. Yeah, that has a ring to it.
These people are so close to the dangerous cliff, playing tug of war with the rest of us.
I swear to god[dess] I'm ready to just let go of the rope just to see if they scream as they fall.
It's amazing to me the lengths that Christians (well, Catholics, insofar as they are still Christians) go in order to tell you that science doesn't matter and that it doesn't come close to capturing the essence of human (and divine) existence.
I agree! But the point at which they make a statement like this is the point that they also start trotting out so-called science to back up their belief constructs. Unfortunate. This is what happens when the Little Church in the Dell comes to the Big City and tries an extreme makeover on society by attempting to harness political machinery.
What ever happened to the Substance of things Hoped For and the Evidence of Things Not Seen? I, for one, think that there's always room for a little (or a lot) of faith. It's dogma that wears me down. Think they're the same thing? Think again. Faith only becomes dogma when someone else tries to tell you the color and timbre and texture your faith is supposed to be. And where it's supposed to be aimed.
And how you're supposed to get out in the world and make more of the Faithful, either through procreation or through propagation of that Faith. Either way, they want missionary positions filled (groan, sorry, I know).
I have faith in my family. Faith that they are there for me when I need them. Faith that I will set aside whatever occupies the fore if my family needs me. Faith that my love for my partner is for life. Faith that he loves me in kind. Faith that I am capable of trust. Trust in things like love and life and Good Will.
I also have a certitude that there really is no such thing as Altruism, but that broad-enough and indirect-enough and long-term-enough self-interest is indistinguishable from altruism.
Frank Herbert once wrote: "'What do you despise?' By this are you truly known."
So what do I despise? I despise closed minds. I despise liars and those who take pleasure in the misfortune of others. I despise the self-imposed ignorance of those who short their own brainpower in favor of their religion. I despise xenophobia, especially the kind that masquerades as love.
Most of all, I despise hypocrisy and duplicity, and the ignorance that seems to generate both.
Well, that was fun, but I never fully agreed with Frank Herbert on that. It never allowed for creative acts, for things beyond just neutral.
I might suggest that for the lion's share of Christians (no pun intended), grasping at Jesus Christ is a desperate attempt to equalize all the individuals in a given society so that all the bonafide special and talented individuals are lost in that old "we're all special in God's eyes" bromide. We continue to increasingly celebrate the mediocre while becoming increasingly paranoid about those with wild talents.
I abide the ideal of freedom of religion, so long as the set of religions also includes the empty set (i.e., freedom to practice no religion or faith). It's a natural tendency for the dogmatic to frame and label the world according to their own carefully constructed belief systems. Their identities, individual and collective, are tied up in requiring boundaries around things, including their own god.
Well, my identity is tied up in other things. You won't find a satisfactory theism-relative label for me.
Forgive the crass dipping into boolean logic, but here's where I stand:
- If there is a god, she's outside of our closed system and cannot be knowable by any measure.
- If there is not a god, I still cannot escape our closed system and, like any closed system according to Gödel, there are unreachable truths AND unreachable falsehoods.
Kinda boring, I know. But this is where good old Occam comes in with his Famous Razor: the world around us—if you avoid the overweening assumption that the universe is just God's Terrarium—becomes a magical place.
With Theism, you get "god did it". Without assuming Theism, you get a wonderment that's good for the soul.
Here it is, y'all.
- Make shit up.
- Get your toadies to repeat it without question.
- Declare it a 'story'.
- If dissenters get in on the game, alter their statements without notice.
- Get your toadies' toadies to chime in with "it's everywhere, so it must be true!"
- Force enemy to expend energy fending off mindless toadies and toadies' toadies.
- Sit back and enjoy the mayhem, taking all credit and no blame.
- Before mayhem is over, lather-rinse-repeat before people have time to notice what you've done. Again.
Republicans, FoxNews or Blogging Nematodes? You decide.
There was only one time when Allen had to go to the hospital. It was a day in May. It was in 1995. I remember such mundane details now only because it was in the middle of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference that year.
Allen had become increasingly annoyed with my increasing mother-henning, as he'd put it. Which of course was, not insignificantly, an outlet for my increasing worry over his health.
It was two mornings after the first night that there was ever a problem with his overnight IV of TPN, no coincidence. A night of no nutrition and more importantly, of no hydration, had taken its toll. Only I didn't know that before I left that morning to drive 50 miles to San Jose to the conference. I just knew that he was annoyed with me still, and that I, in turn, was pissed at him and then appalled at my 'selfishness' at being pissed off at such a sick man.
I snapped at him and he stood there, silent, glaring.
Continue reading "Two Months and Three Days" »
Like a lot of things that the stolid, staid, "moral values" sheep voters find "icky", the concept of outing (as gay) has been taken from its original concept and perverted into something that serves both their xenophobia and their "compassionate" conservatism.
Michelangelo Signorile is largely—and rightly—credited with bringing the concept of outing into the mainstream. Since then, of course, the perception of what it is, what it was meant to be, has become something else. Something that has caused divisions even among gay people.
I think it's time again to remind people what outing is all about. In a world where we know too much about Britney's corroborative efforts towards straight marriage and see far too much of Tara Reid's plastic surgery scars and hear far too much of John Ashcroft's chanteusing, people still screed "respect their privacy!" when it comes to homosex.
And by 'people', I don't mean "also journalists", I mean especially journalists! This is exactly the beef that Mike Signorile had with the supposed objectivity of journalism and other news reporting: the double-standard when it came to homosexuality.
Anyone remember Malcolm Forbes? Anyone remember his place in the History of Outing? I'm not going to launch into an entire history here, because you can check that out in the bio at Mike's site. And while I have every confidence that Mike's take is accurate, go google it and read more. Here's a relevant quote:
Signorile contended throughout that time that the homosexuality of public figures -- and only public figures - should be reported on when relevant to a larger story (and only when relevant).
That's it, folks. That's what outing is all about. It's a call for journalistic integrity. It's about ethics. Many might consider integrity and ethics dead concepts, especially in the media and even moreso in the proliferation of Bread and Circuses blogs, but I don't. Even though ethics rarely wins over making a buck and even though integrity never makes the headlines, what do we have if we don't have those?
So in any case where a public person's sexuality is relevant to a story, that person's sexuality, priorly openly stated or not, should be reported. And if I have anything to say about it (and I do, from this modest-sized podium, at least), it will.
So when you hear of Congress members talking about abridging my rights, implying that I am less and that people like me are less because we're gay, well, how much more relevant can you get?
I welcome the return of outing. Thank you, Mike, for drawing that line in the sand 14 years ago.
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My personal contribution was the idea that I could “be there” by putting together the technology they, for the most part, had around them. My brother Sam has a new iBook. Marie and Jack have an iSight camera and a broadband connection. I had Brother Sam go out and pick up an Airport Express
to complete the project. So: Mac OS X Tiger + iChat + iSight + iBook + Airport Express = Family Teletogetherness®! Sam sat his iBook on the Dinner table at the far end of the table from my Dad's seat, set my own video feed (I have an iSight camera, too) to the full screen of the iBook and aimed the camera at Dad. So at 15 fps, there was my father, saying grace right in front of me. I dare say it was one of the better ideas I've ever had.
This is the life you choose when you choose, the one you lead when you lead. And in an acute sense, sometimes the way to lead your own life is to let Pan lead you along his path. I know, it makes no sense in the telling of it. But that's alright. Life, dear friends, is in the living.
Our manager sent us all home early, and off I went, having to take a $20 cab ride from Apple to the Caltrain station. I got back to the City mid-afternoon, expecting to just chill for a while. Not to be. I had to drop off a package at a friend's and decided to stay out and drop off David B.'s gifts as well.
Hope is a tricky thing. When there's a lot of hopefulness (quantity), it lacks specificity (quality), and when it's quite specific, it is small and personal in its solicitude. I don't like to think that this is simply the nature of Hope itself, but instead some too-obvious pattern of human economy, where one thing always has to take from another, when jealousy or morality steps in to question the value of certain kinds of Hope when those things Wished For cast too long a shadow on other forms.
I haven't been writing here much lately. That is not to say I haven't been writing. But that, in turn, is not to say I have been prolific. But a 
