May 2008 Archives

Yesterday was a rich and varied day.  It would be very easy to discuss it in terms of things that "happened," which is the way, as humans, we tend to relate to reality.  But on a good day, I manage to think in terms of how I happen to reality.  And I don't mean crashing into people and situations like an Upper East Side N.Y. construction roof crane. I mean using the tools of recovery to process and react to the occurences that populate the day.

Honesty, compassion, calm, humor and openness--they work on everything.  I would add to that: willingness. I saw someone from a meeting waiting for a bus. I offerred him a ride and we're gonna write a song together. I spoke to another friend about a third friend and her husband, and I was able to apply some insights from Alanon--judgement is more about the judger than the judgee; give people the benefit of the doubt, keep the focus on yourself.   I tried to go to the top of Runyon Canyon with my friend Michael and discovered that a steep incline does something bad to my back, probably because I walk funny from my foot. So turn around, go back down, and remember to make an appointment with the chiropractor. Move along people, there's nothing to look at here.

I saw two movies yesterday, one, a favorite called "Sliding Doors," which is like taking a refresher course in elegant screenplay structure;  and one written by a friend, which I had followed from first draft to shooting script.  It was one of those screenplays that lost much of its verve and originality with each iteration, as my friend, a first-timer with little clout, was forced to make  alterations that flattened much of what made the script interesting in the first place.  But much of what didn't work hadn't worked even when I first read it.  I was  reminded of how important it is to expose yourself in a screenplay, to allow the characters to be as conflicted and ambivalent as you are, as we all are, as people. But comparing the two movies, I learned much more, as a writer, from the flawed movie than the flawless one.

Whatever the political intrigues he's navigating, this cardinal depicted by Raphael is managing to stay serene by keeping his head in Sisley's bucolic rural landscape. I identify with the serene part, but I don't have to take refuge from reality as it is. I love things as they are.

MCO 2008

When I was a kid, one of my fantasy inventions was a machine you could hook up to while you slept that would play back your dreams in the morning. Who knew that I would come up with the next best thing?

No, I did not dream this Honthorst/Freundschaft/Nash Hy-Art, but I would bet someone did, even centuries ago.  "I had this weird dream last night. I was playing a guitar, and there was someone trapped in it. Like I could see an eye staring out when I changed chords. She was inside the guitar. Oh, and I was at the edge of a forest, but I wasn't unhappy, because it was behind me."  And then her husband says: "Pass the oatmeal." Unless they're just married, in which he asks for details. Let's face it though, unless you're in love, other people's dreams are usually boring.

In AA, people will just say "I had a using dream," and everyone understands. There is no relief quite like the one is which you wake up realizing you are, in fact, still sober. I think that's what the purpose of such dreams are, at least for me. To give you an opportunity to slip without slipping, to remind you that, in fact, you aren't missing anything, A lot of people have to find that out the hard way.

I am fascinated by the Scott McClellan saga.  Of course, it also is painful, as he confirms so completely everything "left-wing bloggers" like me knew all along and couldn't bear seeing how long it took so much of the country to see as well.  This lag was so painful that I couldn't watch "Recount" on HBO for more than 1/2 hour. It is superbly written and acted, and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris is an instant classic, but knowing the utter disaster of Bush in office that it led to made it simply too hard to watch.

Rather than sit in my smug superiority, I've spent some time thinking of how deeply I have believed in some fundamentally flawed megalomaniacs myself.  I can think of two without even trying. There are also those who believed in me when I was at my worst, when I was Idiot-in-Chief of my own life.  I can understand how McClellan could become invested in a narrative and have to see it come to a bad end before he could understand it differently.  I look back at some of my narratives and they read in retrospect quite differently than they felt to me at the time.

I think those of us who are dying to wake up from the one long using dream that is Bush and Co. would do well to make sure we keep our side of the street clean.  There is so much litter on their side of the street it's very easy to keep our focus there. But ultimately, it always begins and ends with the man in the mirror.

MCO 2008

An AOL commenter, Bob wondered what I might do with Manet's Olympia, and since I'm always open to suggestion, I came up with this.  The twist? The painting I put her in is also a Manet.

Well, yesterday was a hoot.  First, little Maya got fed, as her Mom told me about the harrowing night before, when the poor little angel had aspirated some mucus due to a bad cough and

had to be rushed to the emergency room.  She was much better, but she was very tired, and I was relieved that she would probably nap while her Mom was in the meeting.

Helas, her little cough succeeded in waking her up, and she wanted comforting. I staved off upset for about 30 minutes, playing with this toy and that, walking around, singing silly songs in gibberish--which, thank God, I speak fluently.  And then she came down with a case of "You're not my Mommy," even if she could only articulate it as "WAAAAAHH"

I tried everything. Singing to her, different positions, let's try this ball, bottle? No? Okay, no bottle.  I couldn't smell any poop, but I thought she might be wet, and so changed her diaper. Wouldn't you know you started peeing the second I put on new one on, soaking it, me, and her little outfit? Being a panicking newbie, I scooped her up and decided the priority was to calm her down before rediapering her yet again, as I was afraid her crying would bring on a coughing fit.

And, of course,  I just wanted to be successful as the loving, reassuring caregiver with a magic touch. I walked her around, stroking her and talking to her in a calm, reassuring voice, imagining what it would be like if I had a 2, 3, and 4 year old afoot at the same time, like my mother had back in 1961. And she had no help, not a grandmother, aunt, sister, babysitter, no one except my Dad when he came home from work.

Eventually Mommy came out of the meeting and of course did everything Moms do because they're Moms.  Here I was, feeling inadequate, while, she of course, was  apologetic and explanatory,  nervous that I wouldn't want to come back. Are you kidding?  I'm signed up again for next Wednesday.

I admit I'm relieved not to have my own full-time baby. But the chance to have a part-time one, who is just on the cusp of her first words? How cool is that?

I may have a chance to do it with some flesh and blood in just a few years. My nephew and her girlfriend got engaged. He called to tell me--which I thought was very sweet and old world. Their's is going to be a stupedous marriage. (They were the one's tromping around India last year.)

MCO 2008

You'll recognize, perhaps, Raeburn's skater, livened up by the colors of Redon, and made positively surreal by Rembrandt lurking under the ice. (The best friend of the Hy-Artist straining to come up with something turns out to be Adobe Photosphop's "Fade Layer" tool.)

So a few weeks ago, when I went to MCCLA again at their new location rather close by, I told Reverend Pat that I would be delighted to babysit her little 8-month old, Maya, that she had with her lover Stephanie.  Children of gay parents tend to have tons of volunteer aunts and uncles and godparents, so I didn't think Pat would take me up on it, but the fact that I'm local and available in a pinch turned out to nudge me up on the list. So today I'm watching over the little bundle of joy for three hours at noon, as Pat has meetings at the church that require her full attention.

I can't tell you how thrilled I am.  Wanting kids is the last closet. First we came out as gay, of course, then many of us had to come out as HIV+ and then as being in recovery, and finally, when all these secrets are out comes the most banal of them all.

You see, we don't, in fact, want to spend our nights in bars or on line, looking for or having sex.  Okay, some of us do/did, but we finally get it out of our system. Ultimately we ache for white picket fences far more than white parties, and eventually, we even want white diapers too.  It may take a while, but we discover what makes us different as gays doesn't even begin to compare to what make us similar as humans. 

Humans are hardwired to make sure the next generation has at least some idea how to operate in the world.  That impulse exists whether or not one is related by blood, at least it does with me.  And babies, babies! You need to see the world fresh? Babies see all God, all the time! Look, Ma, it's my hand! Look what it can do!

And, as you can imagine, no one was asking me to babysit a few years ago. I feel like I've been asked to speak at a graduation, or write a monologue for an HBO special, except it's a lot more important.

MCO 2008

The woman reading on the couch is from Liotard, and I love how one can't help but wonder if Tissot's lady looking through the eyeglass is what she's reading about. 

I also like how cinematic it feels, particular as I am genuinely saddened by the death of  producer, director and actor, Sydney Pollack.  Out of Africa is one of my favorite movies, even if Robert Redford can't do a British accent to save his waspy California ass. (Stick to directing, Bob.)  But Sydney also acted and produced all over the place, in fact, one of the facts I learned from reading his obituary was that he had a production company with Anthony Minghella,  one of my other favorite director/writers and who also died a month ago.

I can't bear when people think they're close to a celebrity because they've seen them on the big or small screen, and I don't pretend the loss of Sydney Pollack or Anthony Minghella grieves me as if I'd lost a friend or family member. But I do know the emotional experience I have felt seeing their work, and that was something real, is something real every time I watch Tootsie, or Breaking and Entering, or Truly, Madly, Deeply. (I'm mixing up the work of both men, but some of them were collaborations.) Just two months ago I was very moved by Michael Clayton, which Sydney produced and acted in, and a week ago he made me laugh out loud playing a pretentious American director in Avenue Montaigne. It is a genuine regret that I will never meet or work with them, even if the hope that I might have might not been very grounded in realism.

Both men were inspirations for me, and I feel a genuine sense of loss at their passing.  I don't imagine I'm read by anyone who knew them, but, just in case,  I extend my heartfelt condolescences to their families and friends.

MCO 2008

This is an "old" Hy-Art, Bougereau's mythical figures plunging into Hockney's pool, but so as not to repeat myself entirely, I threw in a modified Michelangelo, and made the water rather psychedelic.  I'm enjoying this Hy-Art 2.0, as it were.  I never know what's going to come out anymore when I sit down, but I do have the feeling the more artists I put in a rendition, and the more I throw in various twists, the less I have to worry about copywright infringment.

I thought of the Hockney/Bougereau because it evoked my participation yesterday in AALA's carnival, where I got dunked three times! (Those lesbians throw a mean softball.) Even though it was unseasonably cold, I had a blast. It's rare thing to be the complete center of attention anywhere for 15 minutes. What's not to love? (I 'm also glad I went first.  I'm not bad for 49, but some of those young 'uns who got dunked after me spend  lifetimes in the gym, and it showed.)

I also spoke to Garris three times yesterday, as he was docked in Juneau. SO MUCH FUN, THAT BOY.

Someone please tell me that roaming charges are a thing of the past.

MCO 2008

The initial Vuillard/Titian combo was kind of boring, so I livened it up with some Max Ernst on the curtains, and a Madonna (in the circle) from a religious tract I found on the street.  It still wasn't enough, so I threw in some Bette Davis eyes (thanks Yasmin-I told you I'd use her one day.) I rather feel I improved on the originals.

My mother's been having an interesting week. I blogged about the hug she got from a stranger when she was down a few days ago, and now it seems the universe wanted the same of her.

When  was got on the train going several towns south to visit friends, as she often does on Saturdays, there was only one other man in the car. She imagines that this sense they were alone together created a certain intimacy, which was not necessarily the dynamic one might expect because my mother is an 82-year old white French woman and the man was a 30-year old young black man. My mother is not one for small talk with strangers, she's rather the type to do the crossword puzzle on the train. But something evidentally told her to make an exception. What started the conversation my mother can't remember, but they started talking.

In the next 20 minutes, the young man had told her he had just had a fight with a latin guy who looked at him the wrong way, and felt bad about it. He'd gone to the same high school my mother taught at, but had been expelled. From there, from BOCES, from the vocational school he's ended up in--always expelled. He was angry he said, and it always turned into violence. He had screwed up everything he tried. He lived on a couch at his mother's, and sold salvaged secondhand clothes at flea markets. I would bet he had some issues with substances, even if my mother and he didn't discuss them.

Perhaps because she grew up in France, perhaps because she taught a lot of kids from tough backgrounds as a teacher, but perhaps just because she is who she is, my mother managed to see only that this young man was hurting. She said that they ended up hand in hand on the train, talking quietly, as she offerred the best advice she could muster.  "The next time you are angry, take a breath, and think to yourself: 'Kindness...Kindness...'"

She can't remember if they hugged when she got off the train--she told me what she did remember as soon as she got home for fear of forgetting any of it.  They didn't exchange numbers or even names, but what they did exchange is certainly much more substantial if impossible to measure.  It certainly was a creater tonic on my mother's spirit than any anti-depressant (though she's back on them.)

MCO 2008

 

Note: This entry intentionally covers some familiar territory, because on my parallel AOL journal, I have been spotlighted by a Guest Journals Editor there, and I'm introducting myself to a bunch of new readers.

This is a self-portrait by Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, and of course the fun twist is that I have her painting one of my original Hy-Arts, a Dali-Van Gogh (available for a very modest $8.50 at www.makemarc.etsy.com, just in case anyone forgot!)

Last night I saw a great movie ("Un Hero Tres Discret") on my French TV channel about a Walter Mitty type who is so ashamed of his complete passivity during WWII that he leaves his wife and reinvents himself as a Resistance hero in Paris through a series of artful and extremely ingenious lies.  It resonated with me on many levels. Before I got sober, I was a prodigious liar, and my lies were very, very big, and for quite some time, successful. I understood both the rush he got from getting away with the lies and the dread that filled him at the prospect of getting caught.  My thinking was so distorted from the meth that I wasn't even sure whether I thought dying from AIDS was worse than getting caught.  When it all blew up, the shame was intense, but now I wouldn't trade finding out that my family was willing to love me through all of it for anything. I've said it before but it's worth repeating: Often in life, the worst things that ever happen to you are also the best.

I also grew up on stories of France during the occupation and liberation, as my mother was a young student in Avignon during the war. Her mother had tuberculosis, and was sent to a sanitarium, so my mother  ran the house and cooked and cleaned, taking care of her father, brother and little sister in their apartment above her father's shirt store.  They had a basement carved out of limestone (nothing like an American basement, it was more like a cave), and it was the refuge for the entire neighborhood during the American bombings of 43-44, when we were trying to disrupt German supply lines. There she huddled as the earth shook, and wondered such things as she how she could possibly make two potatoes, a few radishes and some leeks into a filling soup for four.

I drank up these stories  as a kid, and my first short story, written when I was 10, was called "The Black-Framed Letter."  It was about a 14-year old in Paris smuggling a message to his father in the "Underground" ---which of course, I thought was literally underground. The title was inspired by the envelopes framed in black my mother would receive whenever there was a death in her family back in France--a custom that made sense back in the day when such news was revealed by mail and you needed a chance to prepare yourself before you opened it.

As you can see, this Memorial Day, I'm taking the remembering part quite literally. The more recovered I get, the more I evolve and attempt to live in the now, the more I feel my conciousness can expand to absorb the past as something that exists concurrently in the present.  I do believe that our memory keeps the dead alive in the most crucial of ways. I haven't lost anyone in Iraq, but I've lost scores to AIDS and drug addiction--the two wars I'm a veteran of. No matter what the war, loss is loss, grief is grief, and honor is honor.

This weekend  I'm also editing  the English subtitles to a Russian Film made in the 50s about the "Glorious Battles of the Ukraine in the Great Patriotic War 1943-44." I definitely need to do some past life regression, because I am absolutely certain I lived some sort of life in Europe in World War II. It just resonates will me in a way that is very, very deep.

MCO 2008

Yes, you will recognize the John Martin seascape from a week or so ago, but when I came across this Eakins diva, the similarity in color scheme jumped out at me. I swear, after a year or so of this, I think I'm going to have the equivalent of a Master's in Comparative Art History, which I'm not even sure exists as a discipline.  But with my capacity to think on my feet and use big words, I could deliver a mean lecture on similarities in artists across centuries and disciplines. and sound like I actually know what I'm talking about.

My mother had been going through a tough time, feeling, to use her words: "disintegrated."  I know how my mother uses English, and she meant it in the sense of fragmented within, which is slightly different from how the word is traditionally used. I think quick access to information via the memory most of us enjoy and take for granted serves as an armor against the world, or at least a navigational tool.  If it starts to go, I think the feeling is akin to switching from power steering to none.  It takes so much more effort to take a left or a right, and you veer into things or constantly brake. Finally, you stop driving. You isolate, disengage, become fearful of too much stimuli.  Old age is a bitch.

My Mom also suffers from depression anyway, and a spiritual malaise that gives her little sense of relationship with a higher power, even though she wants for nothing and has very little fodder for the argument that the universe hasn't been taking care of her. The twin senses of disorientation and sadness overhwhelmed her two days ago in the lobby of her retirement living complex (as deluxe as they come, believe me).  She told me she just started crying, and as a friend came to comfort her, a young man who was repairing upholstery in the community room noticed.  He stopped what he was doing, and walked up to her. "Looks like you need a good hug" he said.  For a moment he encircled her, and yes, she felt much better.

"Don't you see Mom? That's GOD!" I told her, upon hearing the story.  We get so lost in this idea that a spiritual experience is supposed to look like Morgan Freeman in a white suit, or be somehow otherworldly, but it's no more complicated than a hug from a stranger, in my book.

I'm glad I'm going back in June, and I'm feeling a terrific pull back East going above and beyond Garris. Kind strangers are great, but kind sons are better.

MCO 2008

P.S.  I spoke to my Mom this morning and discovered she's stopped taking her Lexapro for no reason she can remember a week ago, hence the sharp drop in a sense of well-being. She's back on it, having learned the hard way why you don't self-unmedicate.

Behold a newly discovered Dutch painter, De Hooch, along with those Frederic Church falls again, and a gorgeously gowned Manet.  I just love turning these anything-but painters into surrealists.  I think I may make this one into a new offering at the Etsy store. (Do me a favor,  readers.  If you particularly like a Hy-Art,  leave me a comment saying so. It costs me to list, so I have to pick and choose among the standouts.)

Yesterday morning I went on a Google binge. What can I say, everything fascinates me.  I read about Gone With the Wind (I'm rereading the book itself), then about the artificial language Interlingua, and actually posted on a website about Koumpounophobia, which is a fear of buttons.

Like everyone on the site, I thought I was the only one. It's a relief to find out not only am I not alone, but I don't even have a severe case.  The only buttons I can't abide are on button-down collars.  They make me absolutely cringe.  It's my biggest fear when I meet someone new, that this will be their favorite garb, and I will suffer through the whole relationship.

Isn't this one of the weirdest things you've ever heard? I mean, I can tell you which friends I have who wear them, and how often; which anchormen and politicians wear them, which characters wear them in which TV shows, and which dates have been ruined because they showed up in one.

Wouldn't you know my first therapist wore them? When I finally told him, he'd wear sweaters during our session, covering the buttons, but I was still aware of their creepy presence. He never cured my phobia--obviously--but he was a good enough therapist because he fired me for my resistance to taking a look at my drinking.  

I knew damn well I drank too much, and knew if I was completely honest about how much, there was no way any professional wouldn't point me to AA.  But back then, I could always depend on feeling good after two cocktails, and feeling better after more. Nothing really bad happened beyond hangovers. In fact, I met thousands of men--about as nourishing as donuts, but tasty nonetheless. Good luck getting an alcoholic to stop when it's still "working."

So, there you have it. I have officially come out as a koumpounophobe. Could they have come up with a harder term to pronounce and spell?

MCO 2008

This portrait is via Egon Schiele (I think it's a self-portrait) and I've gone back to the well of Frederic Church for my take on the figure's inner self. Sometimes appearances deceive. Tough guys will have hearts of gold, and those outwardly okay are camouflaging oceans of pain. I made his inner self seem a little more serene than his outer appearance, though still keeping in the spirit of dark Teutonic tormentedness.

I was watching a movie on my French TV channel called La Petite Chartreuse, and there's a moment where one character says to the other: "I knew you that you'd come. It's a sign," and the other answers: "There are thousands of signs falling from the sky at any moment." 

I quite agree.  Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a million one-act plays just walking the dog.  And then someone comes along that you feel you can point out all those plays to, and he sees them as well.  It's a very heady experience.

I think I should name him, like an African child at 5, who you finally think is going to live.  I tend to be superstitious about reporting budding relationships on the blog, but saying the other Tennessee paramour is wordy and not very romantic. So, Garris is his name, There, I said it.  And there is something very sweet and intense going on between us, at long last.  (It turns out we've been in each other's heads from the get go)  He writes a mean email--in a good way--funny, insightful, open, reponsive and playful  I feel like this is the guy eharmony would have matched me up with had I ever signed up.

I think that's plenty enough for now, I do think it's mostly best to keep affairs of the heart offscreen out of respect for the privacy of the object of one's affection, but to not talk about it at all feels equally inauthentic.  Like most bloggers, I try to give a flavor of my life, and that includes when it gets spicy.

We will be seeing each other in New York in June, after I visit my Mom and he, a best friend in New Jersey, We're trying not to think past that for now, but all doors are open.

MCO 2008

This playful--if slightly apocalyptic--Hy-Art consists of a Matador and horse from Manet, a train from Dali, and a sailboat from Maureau, all going over waterfalls by Church.  This is a little bit like the process of getting sober, if, when you hit the river below, you bounced back up and then continued onto a much more placid river than the rapid-strewn one you left above. 

That plunge is pretty scary.  It's pretty much your first leap of faith in years, maybe ever. You've been thinking for years that another drink, another puff, another [insert substance or behavior] is the leap of faith, because who knows what you'll do when you're high, what exciting thing might happen?  Eventually, what happens is extremely predictable. Some of us isolate, some of us foist ourselves on others, some of us hunt for sex until we find it, (and then start hunting for something better as soon as we do), even the chaos some of us create can end up feeling very repetitive. There is no routine so dismal as an arrest and processing, I can reassure you.

The real adventure is the one in which you stay 100% present to your experience, taking the next indicated step and embracing the fact that you if do A,B, and C; the D you envisage is not always the result.  Let's say D, instead, is the decision of a boss, and then E is an unexpected illness, and F is that argument with a loved one.  Suddenly you're at G.

When you live your life as trying to control and strangle the desired results out of your choices, then you are disoriented and pissed.  You didn't want G, you wanted D, and the D you wanted look very diffferent from the D that occured and definitely different from the G you're experiencing.  Sometimes you'll do all sorts of stupid things to get back to the D that you insist should have happened. 

When you live along spiritual lines, (for which sobriety is a requirement if you're an addict, but is a life available to anyone), you live life as one big alphabet, God being the fact that the direction goes from A to Z.  If you were aiming at D, when you get to F, you realize instinctively that you're closer to Z. (And when you get there, you start over.  Did I mention the alphabet's in a circle?)

I'm perpetually and pleasantly surprised by how much farther I progress on the alphabet when I accept everything exactly the way it is.  Wherever I am is the right place to be.  Sometimes there are rapids, often even waterfalls, but I just keep rowing in the direction of the river. I know what it's like to paddle upstream--it's exhausting.

Oh dear, I've switched metaphors mid-blog.  I think that would be my cue to post and walk the dog.

MCO 2008

P.S. I got a new subtitling editing gig. HOORAY!  

This Hy-Art consists of two Gauguins and a Waterhouse (the Narcissus.) I don't know how happy I am with it, but if I'm to get anything else done (like a long, wonderful conversation with the new paramour this morning, as he docked in San Francisco!) I have to put a limit on how much time I spend on each rendition.  Certainly, if you search out the orginals, they're stunning, There's a blue to the Gauguin lady in the tree that reminds me of what you hear at wine-tastings: fruity, with an oaky bouquet, and the Waterhouse is clear, luscious, with no aftertaste.

I had a funny encounter this morning picking up trash. I'm walking up the street and I see a white pickup truck stop abruptly. I live in the Land of the Double Parked Cars, so the fact that he didn't stop at a sign isn't odd, plus it was one of those less-than-deluxe vehicles the Mexican garderners tool around in, held together by spit and wire. 

The truck jerks forward and then stops again, and I hear a female voice in the passenger seat sounding very emphatic, to put it nicely. As the couple argues, I work my way up the street. I definitely hear the woman say: "9-1-1",  at the end of a sentence that sounded like it went along the lines of: "That's right, you go ahead and call 9-1-1!"  Then suddenly out from the passenger window flies a handful of business cards.

How appropriate, because as the Trash Whisperer, suddenly it is my business. I approach the car. The woman in the passenger seat turns to me, and I have to tell you, I immediately think: "Oh my God, it's Flip Wilson" as she looks so very much like Geraldine, with a wig that flips just so, and pursed lips that say: "Do NOT mess with me, SHUGAH."

I say, "Please don't do this" and scoop up the cards. They hadn't been torn in two, and I surmise they had been grabbed and tossed out of the car for dramatic effect by Miss Geraldine. The driver is on a cellphone, a hispanic man we'll call Hector, in painter's pants and a white tee-shirt.  He leans over and I ask "do you need these?" He nods yes, and I hand them back to Geraldine who gives me fakey smile #1, and hands them backs to Hector, as he asks "Do you espeak eSpanish?' to me. Before I can answer "si," Geraldine  demonstrates her disinterest in allowing any communication between us, laying down the law: "The man's only bid-ness is keeping his street clean." She acknowledges my service to the community--kindred spirits, we--with fakey smile #2 and an equally inauthentic "God Bless You."  I don't know whether she does something with her left hand, but the truck lurches forward several feet and stops again.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb surmising that Geraldine felt she was owed some money and Hector disagreed, wanting her out of his truck. Whether the services had been rendered or this was a case of breach of promise, I know not. I got the distinct impression that Hector knew damn well he could press "2" for Spanish if he dialed the police, and was stalling by asking if I spoke it in hopes that the threat of his call with my translation would get her out of his truck. His eyes seem to be saying: "please I have to get to work, help me get this puta out of my car, I don't know what I was thinking when I picked her up!"

I  ponder my moral dilemma as I continue up the street, and wouldn't you know as I reach them again, he repeats his question: "Do you espeak espanish?"  Geraldine reasserts: "This is none of his bid-ness!" and in that moment, I agree with her. I shrug to Hector: "You're a big boy, you need to figure this out!" to which Geraldine chimes in: "He's got that right!"

I keep walking, and they eventually speed off.  Anyone want to finish this story?

MCO 2008 

I opened The Art Book this morning to a painter I hadn't seen, Gabriel Metsu, and after perusing some of his paintings, thought surely he created them in the same drawing room where so many of Vermeer's famous works were rendered.  This doesn't seem to be the case, according to Wikipedia, even though they were Dutch contemporaries.  Certainly, the way two of their works meld fairly seamlessly into each other here speaks to the peculiar alignment of creative energy that characterized the Netherlands in the 17th century. I wonder if  they'll look back at our time and feel that some artistic movement stood out in that same way. I suspect it will be something none of us imagine now.

Hey, maybe it'll be considered the Golden Age of Blogging! (Acronym: GAB)  Maybe there will be a blogthology that survives the coming End of Days, and in a thousand years it'll be considered as sacred as the Bible is now. Just in case that happens, and I'm in it, I suppose it can't hurt to address the denizens of 3008:

Okay, people, here's the deal.  You are not reading the Word of God, so lighten up. But those paintings you see I call "Hy-Art?"  They are indeed masterpieces that should be duplicated by your very best artists, and hung in your museums. Don't worry about my references to the "orginals." I just tend to name my muses, it's a quirky little habit of mine.  All of the works should be labeled "by the Great Master, Marco the Magnificent," and once a day, I want all the schools closed so students can get a day off to see my rich and varied oeuvre.  It you guys really, really want to start a cult, I can't stop you. My only request is that when you get that time machine working, please send several tons of gold into the past. May 2008, to my Hollywood apartment  Make that diamonds, just a bag or two is plenty. 

If I don't blog for a few weeks, it means it worked. You can find me in Biarritz.

MCO 2008

The royalty is from Ramsay, the beautful woman is Leighton.  To be more specfic, Sir Allan depicted King George III, who hopefully most people remember ruled England during the Amercian revolution, and is still referred to as the monarch who "lost the colonies."

Chris Matthews had a fascinating exchange with a right-wing talk show host whom he challenged to tell him what exactly Neville Chamberlain did in 1938 to be forever associated with the word appeasement. This blowhard very clearly hadn't a clue about the ceding of the Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for Hitler's "guarantee" that would be the end of his territorial claims in Europe. If his sense of history didn't begin with the election of Reagan in 1980 (and ancient history being Goldwater's run in '64) this clown might have also known that in 1938, Hitler was still gearing up his war machine, at least a year away from being able to invade Poland, his non-Agression pact with Russia still unsigned. If he'd studied the period he might have also uncovered a little known fact. The Czech army wasn't half bad.  Had France and Britain refused Hitler's demands, the three armies might have successfully confronted Hitler. Certainly had they confronted Hitler when he reoccupied the Ruhr in 1936, they could have toppled him and prevented the entire war.

Appeasement is not talking to the enemy. It's giving in to the enemy.  Bush's reduction of history to buzzwords with zero context cuts both ways. Most Americans, certainly those under 50, are so history-stupid that he can get away with a lot of crap unchallenged. At the same time, someone like Barack Obama is so smart and so articulate that he can puncture their balloons rather easily. If people are only going to remember what has happened since they hit 25 and started to wake from up from their prolonged American adolescences, then all Obama has to do is point to what Bush's supposed refusal to appease has wrought.  Even the most self-involved, xenophopic, frat boy--as Bush himself was until Condoleeza Rice explained to him in other countries they speak other languages than English--can't escape the obviousness of the Iraqi disaster. 

I've never understood how people cannot find absolutely fascinating the world we came from, certainly, at the very least what life was like for their own parents and grandparents.  I get that you may not be enthralled by the machinations of the Hapsburgs in pre-World War I Europe, but what happened the year your favorite Great Aunt was born? How could that be a matter you can't relate to?

Perhaps 20 years of the History Channel is making a difference.

MCO 2008

If you take the almost full glass on the top left, and hold it just so, right next to your eye, it will seem to you indistinguishable from a glass half-full. (Try this at home.) This is to say that  if you look at a situation too closely, obsessively, focusing on what you don't have yet, you can easily be forget to see how much you do have.

 

See what those Chinese soldiers have in their hands?  That's right, monks' robes.  How easy it has been for the Chinese population to believe unquestioningly the endlessly relooped scenes of monks violently ramapaging in Tibet.  Isn't it interesting that cameras were so well positioned to capture it?  Doesn't it seem eminently logical that China would foment unrest as an excuse to make sure the real monks would be incarcerated during the Olympics?  (It's already been forgotten in the news cycle.) Yellow robes do not a monk make.  Question what you see.

 

Finally, I pass a parking sign every day, and yesterday, for the first time, I noticed that grass was growing all the way up inside the pole.  It's not very pretty grass, but it is amazingly tall.  With very little light, it has managed to work its way 10 feet or so toward the sky. I can either see it as ugly overgrowth, or a will to survive in extremely inhospitable circumstances.

 

Take a good look at what you see today. Be willing to see things differently, to question, to alter your perspective. Everything can be interesting, and nothing is always just only as it appears.

 

MCO 2008

 

I created this last night, with no conscious thought of the impending court decision on the rights of gays to marry in California that just came down in our favor an hour ago. ( The French woman bathing is a famour Renoir, the Japanese woman is via Utamaro. )  I hadn't thought of them as a couple, but why not? I'm sure there's a least one Franco-Japanese lesbian duo celebrating the decision somewhere.

As I've said before, I'm ambivalent about some aspects of this whole gay marriage thing. On the one hand, I think it's an absolute no-brainer that gays should be able to marry if straights can.  I'm not even going to argue with anyone who doesn't agree  I don''t have the time or energy to try to dislodge fears people are intent on holding onto.  If someone thinks  my getting married is somehow harmful to them or their children, they obviously need to find a scapegoat for their own sense of  inadequacy as parents or spouses. I can do nothing about that.

On the other hand, I also think that as a society we should be redefining marriage, period. I think you should be able to have whatever kind of celebration you want, but at City Hall, I believe there should be a range of contracts of differing lengths that you sign up for, the standard being 7 years.  I think they should be renewed, and if not renewed, allowed to lapse.  Divorce should be replaced by unmarriage.  I also think many couples going through hard times would wait until their contract lapsed rather than getting a divorce, and in that time, might reconcile.

All that said, I am personally feeling very romantic at the moment. That little email correspondence I referred to a few blogs back, the one with the guy I sublet the house from in Tennessee when I visited Tony, has taken a turn for the very interesting.  He is at present working on a cruise ship, so it's all online, but for a writer, that's about the best way to get to know someone. He's pretty darn adorable.  I'm particularly proud of myself for telling him our correspondence was about more than Pine Valley, Llanview and Port Charles for me. (Those are the town of the ABC soaps we started out writing to each other about.)  To which he basically responded, for him as well, and from the moment he met me.

So today, I'm singing a happy tune and truth be told, can't resist a fantasy or two of marching down the aisle myself.

MCO 2008

I think I'm loving the more surrealistic Hy-Arts.  The woman on the couch in via Boucher, the woman on her backside is a very famous Wyeth, and the sailboats are from Feininger.

Thank you Denys, for addressing my insecurity about overlong entries (see yesterdays comments)  You see, someone for whom blogging lies at the center of their creative expression, something done on a daily basis come rain, sleet, snow or fog of night, tends to imagine all sort of things. Brian over at Acidreflux actually asked "who do I have to suck to get a comment around here?"   I think the reason I am so assiduous about posting the Hy-Arts is that anyone who finds me overly verbose or is challenged for time can at least check in just to see the visuals. I have no problem with someone saying: "Oh Marc's blog! I read it for the pictures!"

Last night my sister called to recount her comment on The Fate of Ping--the piece about my Mom-- over the phone, because for some reason it hadn't stuck when she tried to leave it on the blog. It turns out that her daughter has two pet boy rats, and she woke up one morning to find another third rat, a female, had appeared in the cage.  She was very small and had managed to squeeze through the bars.  I immediately labeled her a golddigger, tired of life on the streets, working hard for the money, if you catch my drift.  She must have been observing the cage for a while, this utopia where food and water appeared magically, trying to figure out which man-rat she wanted to be her new sugardaddy and possibly father of her children.

Watch what you pray for. Her presence created some major  problems in the cage. (In fact, these is a pretty interesting science experiment. Erica, make a note if it for Natalie when she hits the eighth grade in 5 years.)  My niece noted the boy rats were fighting, and then woke up to discover they turned on the female and pummeled her mercilessly. She was near death when my niece pulled her from the cage, and nursed her back to health. The poor little rodentette now walks with the gait of a boxer who's been hit once too many times, listing to the left.

Let this be a lesson to us all. A gilded cage is still a cage. I daresay this very thought might be on the mind of Boucher's lady on a sofa. She poses in the nude eating grapes, but her inner self stares into the distance, dreaming of racing sailboats into the wind.

MCO 2008

Sometimes I actually think I've found a mix the original painters might approve of.  The seascape is via John Martin, the John the Baptist is from Anton Mengs. When I hunt for works to Hy-Art, I often read the biographies of the painters, and can't help wondering what my life would have been like if I'd been born in an equivalent social stratum to my own, with similar talents, in 1721, or 1862, or 1909 and so on.  It's a dangerous game. If you know even a little about history, you can get very lost in your head.

This morning I heard a report on NPR on how France is looking back at the tumultous times of May 1968.  It wan't just a banner year for upheaval in the United States, you see. But differing from us, the Frency condensed and distilled much of what we think of as the entire 60s in one month. As someone on the report said: "we joined the barricades in suits and ties, and a month later, were in t-shirts and jeans."

I spent the summer of 1969 in France, with my mother and four siblings.  My mother had been there alone the year before, in June, so hyperaware kid that I was, I had some idea that the adults were talking about it alot, even if I couldn't really grasp the nature of French grievances. Vietnam, I understood quite well. '69 was also the  summer of Chappaquidick and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and of course, the moon landing, which happened when I was at French boy scout camp. We were allowed to watch it at the priest's house in this adorable little village because, after, all, there was an American there and he needed to see this historic moment. I was very proud.

Unbeknownst to me, while I was in France, there were also the Stonewall riots that began the era of gay liberation.  I was thinking this morning, when I went into my first gay bar in 1975, at the tender age of 16 (I was still in high school), it was only 6 years after police stopped routinely busting gay men for just being gay.  In the heady years of college in the late 70s, I indulged in the first blush of post-Stonewall hedonism without apology, AIDS still unimagined and unimaginable. Even though it probably ingrained some fairly bad habits in me at a tender age, I don't regret it. I really had fun on a grand scale. There are documentaries about that time, I just saw one on LOGO.

Then came the wonderful/horrible eighties. I lived in an East Village tenement next to the Hell's Angels and tore up the town as I wrote cabaret for my ultra-talented black female roommate, Cheri, living on vodka and spaghetti for a decade, as the friends started to die.  They teach a course now at NYU about that time in NYC, because the downtown performance art scene was so legendary. Maplethorpe and Keith Haring and Basquiat and Warhol and I could go on and on. I lived right smack dab in the middle of it.

Everybody reading this has a good enough memory of the 90s and this decade for me not to need to remind you of the current events of the time. For me personally it was marked by AIDS and drug addiction and prison, but I had a helluva time getting there, and if I hadn't gotten here, I would have never started the blog or made it to into the rooms of various 12-step programs, without which I cannot begin to imagine my life.

Well, it looks like you're reading my 50th birthday entry 5 months ahead of time. As you can imagine, the  prospect of moving out of that 18-49 demographic is none too appetizing. You really do think you're never going to get here when you're in your 20s or 30s, surely you'll be the exception.  But today I take great comfort in the history I have had exactly as I have had it, in the times I have lived, in the great impact I've witnessed of technology and this mind-bending Internet. I can even accept AIDS, which reminded me at a very early age never to take life for granted.

It turns out I was born at exactly the right time.

MCO 2008

The woman is Wyeth, the figures floating by are Chagall--modified via Photoshop. I like the sense that she is dreaming them.

This morning I read an article in the New York Times about the rules of courtship in Saudi Arabia,  For all of their wealth, I know of no Westerners who would envy their way of doing things. Romance, in our sense of the word is impossible.  Yet these young men are as driven and sexual as any man is in his 20s. They think all day of what they cannot have until they are married.

The irony, of course, is that they are the rabid enforcers of the very rules that make them miserable. They zealously defend the honor of their female relatives, alternately lust after or berate woman who are seen in public.  They don't know whether to ask for her number or flog her--the contradictions are hallucinatory. It makes for some very unhappy, frustrated men--I think it has everything to do with their fervor for jihad and the like. They don't know what to do with all that energy.

I remember something I heard from a Turkish film director in an interview along time ago. He said the Islamic fundamentalist men were both the guards and prisoners of their own concentration camp.  And just as I was feeling so Western and superior to what I think of as a backward and soul-killing approach to the relationship between the sexes, I stepped back and realized that I too was once the guard and the inmate in a prison of my own making.

I'm not talking about my incarceration. I'm talking about my life prior to my arrest, when I made myself absolutely miserable by the addiction that isolated and defined me like four walls of a very small cell. Everytime I tried to imagine a way out, I came up with unrealistic scenarios that never included sobriety, therefore dooming them to failure. And so I would pick up the phone and get more, sell more, do more, adding to the thickness of those walls. I needed, ironically enough, a real prison to free me from my self-created one.

If I look at the outsides, it would be hard to find a link between my experience and that of the Saudi men. But if I look at the insides, there is in fact a tremendous commonality between us.

No matter how much separates us, as human beings we always have more in common than we don't.  We often don't question, and sometimes propagate the very cultural tenets that do not serve our happiness. We all experience a longing for connection, to not be alone, a willingness to find enormous succor and joy in friendship--these impulses permeate almost all of our experiences, whatever our nationality, sex, gender, or creed.

MCO 2008

This is a Tri-Art, a combination or Richter (the woman), Rembrandt (St, George) and Delvaux, (the train.). Whether I am setting a precedent and my renditions are going to get more complicated, I know not. But this speaks to me of memory, of the past coming at you, and on that count is fitting for what follows below.

I'm reposting a piece I wrote about my mother, called "The Fate of Ping."  Of course, I had to do a quick readthough first, and I ended up rewriting a lot of it. I'm thinking that perhaps it reads almost as an excerpt of a longer memoir, and that's okay. That's probably exactly where it'll end up eventually.

Happy Mother's Day, and if you read all the way until the end, you'll see just how much I cherish them.

The Fate of Ping

My mother is terribly afraid of heights, but as children we never knew it. She would grit her teeth and wave as her brood madly ascended trees and climbed to other death-defying heights. One such occurrence was captured by a photograph taken at the very top of a French aqueduct--Le Pont du Gard. In the photo there is no evidence that we children are supported by any structure whatsoever. All that can be seen behind us is the sky and in the distance, the Valley of the Gardon , stretching vertiginously behind us.

 

From below on terra firma, my mother watched, her heart in her mouth and her arms full of sweaters we plied onto her while we raced to touch the summer sky. I imagine she must have hugged tightly to those sweaters that she had knitted herself, relieved to have something to hold onto as she closed her eyes and counted to 10, praying that when she opened them again we would be back to earth swarming around her. Then she could count to a mere 5, one for each of us, and breathe again.

Another fear my mother divulged when it was too late in life to pass on to us was an intense phobia of having her head below water.  My father put an above-ground 3-foot pool in our backyard in 1964, where it stood for three summers, and we were all soon inebriated for life with the joys of swimming--the only sport which came easily to my otherwise unathletic father. My mother took the occasional careful dip, but was mostly consigned to making sure we didn't swim until ½ hour after eating. (This has since been reported as a myth, but I will believe it on my deathbed.)

Then there were the dogs. The French are, in general, fairly dog-friendly, but my mother's father was not among them. He owned a shirt-store in Avignon, a small southern French city known for its ramparts and Pope's Palace, and had the mindset of a provincial merchant. Life was full of duties and responsibilities, a dog would have made the world heavier for him, not lighter. My mother didn't exactly fear dogs, but neither had she any experience of the boundless affection and unconditional love they bring. Her acquiescence to our having them was purely an act of maternal love for us.

In 1962, friends of my parents went to spend a year in Europe and let us housesit for the year, rent-free. It was a dramatic house that aspired to a Frank Lloyd Wright look and succeeded admirably. It was at the edge of a forest remnant in the hills of Montgomery County, not far from Washington D.C., amidst the kind of semi-rural sprawl where puppies were born at neighbors' houses and brought home by kids before Mom and Dad could say no. From somewhere or another we adopted a pair of beagle/basset mixes, who we named Ruffy and Tuffy--or perhaps they adopted us.  They were emotionally promiscuous dogs who may have been pretending to belong as well to other families that occupied homes at the other side of the woods. At least that seemed the least painful explanation for their disappearance soon before we were due to move.

A few miles away, at our new house at West Ritchie Parkway, we came into a black cocker spaniel mix named Zorro, no doubt named by my brother Luke, who loved the character and was starting to discover he could be quite bossy and get away with it.  No one can recollect the reason or manner of  Zorro's death, but I am sure we were upset about it. When we met the Sagans, we kids were pining for a new dog.

The Sagans were like us, in that the mother was a European who came here after the war and definitely wore the pants in the family. Ginetta Sagan was short and fiery, an Italian Edith Piaf with a story as dramatic as one would imagine for a woman who would later co-found the Calfornia chapter of Amnesty International. My mother may have been the first kindred spirit Ginetta met in American Suburbia, someone for whom occupation, torture and collaboration were not just abstract concepts but things that had happened to people they knew, and in Ginetta's case, to her.

I have a visual in my head that may be a genuine memory, or may be the product of my imagination, implanted retroactively after hearing my mother tell me Ginetta's story. Whichever its provenance, it resides now in my cerebral cortex. My mother and Ginetta had just finished an outdoor summer lunch from which the kids were excused after the introduction of salad and cheese and adult conversation. I suppose I played with the other kids for a while, then drifted back to the screen door in the kitchen, and watched the two mothers without being noticed.

When I was a child, I wanted terribly to understand what adults were talking about. Or maybe it was more that I thought there would be some sort of test when I hit twelve or so, and if I didn't study I would be doomed to a life of confusion and failure. I remember at 6 or 7, when I was still small enough to fit in the little basin behind the front seat, where those in the back usually put their feet... For some reason, I loved to ride there, being an inordinately small child who loved the cozyness of tight spaces.  I distinctly remember listening to my parents discuss the "mortgage."  I was both fascinated and filled with trepidation. How was I ever going to understand such things?

 

So there, through the screen door, I watched my mother with Ginetta, and even though they would probably have been speaking French, I truly thought if I listened hard enough, well enough, with enough willingness and concentration, I would understand. 

But in this case, I think the emotional understanding I derived from what I saw counted for far more. The image that I return to, again and again, is that of Ginetta crying, her arms splayed on the table, her head pitched forward on her hands. My mother told me later she had just recounted the story of her harrowing  capture by the Nazis, her torture, her escape, the murder of her parents.  And seated across from her, my mother, tears in her eyes, saying nothing because she knew that at that very moment, Ginetta needed most simply to be heard. I suspect as well that their acquaintance was still too new for my mother to console her physically, though unquestionably, they would be forever close thereafter.

And then, suddenly, plop! into Ginetta's lap jumped her Pekinese dog, which she'd brought over along with her children. The dog instinctively knew to console her mistress, and in that way that dogs do because they are dogs, broke the tension. I think at the moment, my mother understood them in a new way.

Soon after we got a Pekinese from the Sagans. I remember Dr. Sagan, Ginetta's husband, telling me that Pekinese once had very long noses, but had been made to compete in a great race by a Chinese Emperor. According to Leonard, one of them was so fast he could not stop at the finish line and rammed into the Great Wall of China, smushing his long nose into the form we knew ever since and after, and in doing so becoming the procreator of all future Pekinese.

The story delighted me as I could easily repeat it. Leonard knew how to talk to kids, he had three great boys upon whom I had huge crushes. I thought they were so much cooler than we would ever be. They lived in a huge old Victorian in the center of Rockville that I would check at great length for secret panels when we visited. When that was finished we'd watch Mission Impossible. What could be cooler than that theme music and the tape self-destructing? Leonard was not a practicing medical doctor, but he had an M.D. and he agreed to see me at my mother's request when I complained of severe headaches.

 

The headaches were quite real, I still remember them. But true as well was that they did seemed to occur exclusively on Sundays. It didn't take long for Leonard to figure out I had a case of the Catholic Church.  I don't think I objected to the theology, but I was hopelessly bored. I tried so hard to understand the sermons, as I did all things adult, but it was as impenetrable as my parents' discussion of the mortgage. I was allowed to stop going to church, and the headaches went away.  This must have been when I started perusing the Sunday New York Times along with my father.

 

Perhaps because my parents had papered the walls lining the stairs with maps, I was enthralled with geography. If I couldn't grasp the politics of Vietnam I could at least find it in the atlas, which I would pore over, imagining what life in Botswana or Bogota was like. From the map I'd go to the World Book, and just start reading.  My father would patiently answer my questions, even though I had invaded the only private time he had all week.  Sometimes he'd grab the globe and give me a place to find, and while I searched he could finish The Week in Review.

 

We named our new Pekinese Puff, and fell madly in love with her. Puff, like most small dogs, thought she was huge, in fact Puff thought she was the Empress Dowager of our household--her kingdom. For the first time, our canine companion was not an all-purpose mutt. Puff had papers, she was a handsome and stately purebred. Our neighbor Mrs. Timmons, who bred championship pugs for competition, even said so. I don't know if she was the one who encouraged us to breed Puff, but perhaps the fact that she was across the street gave us the courage to try.

Somehow a stud was found, and a date set in our cellar. Being small of course, Pekinese tend toward small litters, and the agreement was we'd keep one puppy, they'd keep one, and I have no idea what we agreed on for any improbable third. In any event, coitus was so successful my mother had to call Mrs. Timmons and ask how to get them apart. I don't know if it was a suction thing or what, but my poor mother spent a good hour massaging the pair till they unstuck. (The two Pekinese were rather Siamese for a while there.) For someone who had no background with dogs or dogbreeding, it was rather an intense baptism of fire for her.

We still have the super-8 films we took of the birth of Puff's three offspring.  I think we filmed it so my parents could put to bed any lingering fears that we didn't fully understand how reproduction worked.  (Was that ever wishful thinking.  As if what a kid wanted to know is what ends the process instead of what begins it.) . But it occurs to me now that the birth may have had more impact on my mother because she was so very present at the conception.  If she couldn't relate to Puff as a dog, she could relate to her as a mother.

 

We named to the two males Ming and Ling, and the third, a female, Ping. Immediately we noticed that the boys were suckling, and Ling was trying, but was being pushed away by Puff, who knew before we did that something was wrong with her. Mrs. Timmons was summoned, she called her vet, the vet made a quick diagnosis that there was an obstruction in Ping's throat, or the muscles were not well enough developed, or something like that.

 

The doctor held out a small hope that hand-feeding might work; probably more to placate us than because he believed it. My mother tried for two days, watching poor Ping suckle desperately, but nothing seemed to be going down.  There was nothing else to do but let her die.

 

The entire situation was unacceptable to me. Lapsed Catholic that I was, God was already on thin ice with me. I decided then and there that if there was a God, he was either too cruel or too powerless to be worthy of worship. How could he possibly allow a puppy to be born just to starve to death?

Two days later, I came home from school to find my mother with tears streaming down her face. Ping had died.  My mother was not crying because of that. She was crying, she told me, because she hadn't been brave enough to drown Ping first, and put her out of her misery. I don't know whether this had to do with her own phobia of having her head below water, but I doubt I could do it either.

 

On a recent visit to my Mother where she now lives in upstate New York, she asked me to go through her papers.  On the form given out in a packet provided by her assisted living center about end-of-life plans, memorials, and the like, there is a question that reads: "Is there something about you that you'd like to be most remembered for?"

 

And in the space below, my mother had written: "That I was a kind person."

 

That day back in 1966, when I was in class with all my siblings, my mother had wrestled with one of the most fundamental human paradoxes. Sometimes kindness does not look or feel like kindness at all.  Sometimes kindness can feel a lot like cruelty.

 

I never quite made it back to the Catholic Church, but I retain a belief in at least one scriptural teaching: "Bless the Beast and the Children." But to it I would add: "the Mothers."

 

MCO 2008 

 

This summer reverie is brought to you by Winslow Homer and Max Pechstein.  It's not very representative of the uncharisteristic gloomy weather that we've been having over here of late, or maybe it is. I guess the brightness of the houses says sunny to me, even if the skies says tornado watch. That's German expressionism for you.

Wouldn't it be great if the Earth reversed global warming all on her own? If the Gaia Goddess turned out to have been seeing this coming for years, and by melting the glaciers and flooding the sea, increased evaporation and rains enough that deserts bloomed, and the new jungles ate up all the carbon?  

I know. Talk about a summer reverie.

Sometimes you hear something over and over again and you don't question it, and then someone points out that what you've been understanding is a little bit different than what is actually said. Theres a phrase in a AA's Big Book that reads: "...developing a manner of living that demands rigorous honesty."  Someone pointed out that the manner of living precedes the rigorous honesty.  What they explained was that if you had to be rigorously honest first, most of us would fail to stay sober. Instead you construct a manner of living that requires it.  You make yourself so accountable to those you love, to your work, to your God and conscience, that a lack of integrity becomes unsustainable. It embodies the principle that you can't think your way into right acting, you must act your way into right thinking. You do honest things, and you become honest.  This is why service is so emphasized in AA, when you do for others, there is little room for manipulation, deceit, etc.

Yesterday afternoon I spent hauling the last of what was left in the old MCC Church space into a huge dumpster with three other men.  My heel was not happy by the end of the two hours, and my right arm is aching today. But we did it. It was a huge job, and by volunteering we saved the church some real money. For me, what was important was that I say yes, yes, I'll do it, even though I didn't want to and I could have easily used my foot as an excuse.

And interestingly enough, yesterday was the first morning I pulled out the screenplay and started working on the second draft, even if I only had an hour to spare before going to help out. I can't understand why I put it off so much, I so enjoy it when I do it.

I have to remember when managing my time that reading that article on Huffpost can wait, I can write shorter emails and some of my friends and I wll manage quite well, thank you, without discussing Star Jones' tragicomic career and marriage (my bad, I started it). My life is not diminished because I missed the last half of One Life to Live, and I don't really have to poke back on Facebook.

So here's to an overcast Summer Saturday where I get from point X to point Y in the screenplay. What have I been waiting for?

MCO 2008