Who Knows Where the Time Goes

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go
But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone while my love is near me
I know it will be so until it's time to go
So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?
And who knows where the time goes

- by Sandy Denny

This Little Light of Mine...

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not be be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Marianne Williamson (Sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela as he quoted Marianne Williamson in one of his speeches.)

A friend sent me this graphic, an alteration of my photo.

Fortunate Girl

I got this cookie three years ago - it looks like an expectant clam, a gaping smile, a pocketbook, it tells me all I need to know

More Evidence That I Am Not Really a Nice Person

Today I received a message on my Neither Me Nor My Friendsters Can Quite Grow Up Yet Space.

It was from Henry. More evidence to support my suspicions that his re-inveiglement program is underway:

"Lovely picture...

That is a lovely picture of you.
It captures a look in your eyes that isn't captured in most of your photographs... "

I want to write back, "Is the look saying, 'Feed me a damned cheeseburger'?"

Pet Tricks

My friends are fabulous, how did I get so lucky? Check out this video by an old friend and erstwhile roommate. How can those animal masks be so expressive in their stasis? Click on the title, people.

getawayfrommecloseryou'renearmetoofar*

Here's the trouble with the push-pull of romantic, what shall we call it, inquiry. You boys are either so careless or get so worried about showing us you don't want serious attachment, that you douse the fire before it's even warming.

What to do with a fumbled first date, as experienced by a good friend of mine this weekend? Meets a guy through a good friend at a dinner. Guy is handsome, well-spoken, has an interesting career he's excited about, but most of all, his interest is visible. He is very attentive, pursuing. He lights up when she addresses him, but he never intrudes - I saw it in action. Still, she's a little skeptical, as she is with all men (and women), who like her too much right away. With guys it most often seems to mean that they are stressing about undressing. Sometimes it's a genuine smittenness, but in LA that's a rarity. That, and he's a little too pretty to be a safe bet.

Anyway, she doesn't balk when he asks for her digits, though she does back away when she senses a goodnight kiss looming. Not a puritanical impulse, she's just showing good self-preservation. She feels a little guilty about having lied that she wasn't available for the weekend (untrue), but next week was open (true). So she sends him a quick email the next day (Lovely to meet you, a succinct joke referring to something they'd discussed, then have a great day), in case she seemed too standoffish.

He responds right away, wants to know about her availability, a few emails are exchanged. One message he allegedly didn't receive, that being the one where she invites him to a Sunday afternoon cultural event (safe), or she's available Friday. Bad one to miss/leave unanswered, but what choice but to believe the first time? By Tuesday they establish Friday as the best possibility. He says they should speak in the next couple days to confirm it. No call. She feels that burden is his as he suggested the date, and the date of the date. Plus he 'missed' that email.

No call Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday, when an email is sent in the evening:

Hey _______,

Work has been crazy...I'm now in Dallas area for a few days shooting a
show about __________....
I'll be back towards the end of the week, I'd still love to get
together, maybe we can plan some time for this weekend, or early next
week... :)

Hope all is well,
(Guy)

She phones me. What should she do?

I think this guy is either a "nice" player, careless cause he can be; completely overwhelmed with work and socially retarded; or he's being a little gamey. He probably gets away with a lot with women, because he's too pretty, successful and charming. In person, he comes across as sincere. His "niceness" has been well demonstrated by his consistent use of smiley faces in each and every email. Irrefutable iconography. Smiley-ness is his logo.

I do not like the fact that there is not so much as an acknowledgement that he's blown it off, save his drive-by quasi-explanation, "work crazy." How about an apology, Jackass? Do I seem angry for her? I'm not, but it's just all so ridiculous in this era of cell phones, wireless computers and blackberries. There's NO EXCUSE for no preemptive contact. To do anything less is just poor manners. Plus, you're activating all sorts of anxieties in people before any of it is really at a critical romantic stage. Totally unnecessary. If you wanted to keep things casual, you just raised the stakes on yourself, dum-dum.

She points out that sometimes one wants to take the strong approach with these oafs and say, "You know, I'm not angry. You're a nice guy, but Honey, you blew it." This is hard for us, because you know, we're compassionate, we want to understand. We're raised to be compliant, but come on, people. Weren't you trying to woo? Why would a guy blow the very first date if he really liked a woman? My best guess is that he wouldn't. He would never let it happen.

My curt suggestions for her reply:

1. I'm sorry, what?
2. You didn't confirm, you didn't cancel. Still, I'm not a hotel.
3. I don't like emoticons.
4.

That's right, the sounds of silence. Do jackass maneuvers warrant a response?

What choo think? Really, vote for one, write in a candidate, give us your thoughts.

(*the title of this post is a saying invented by a friend's seventy-ish mother, in regards to the ambivalence of the generations of men following her own. it's total genius. thank you, Phyllis.)

The Darling Buds of May

Happy Beltane!

Tomorrow's May Day, Di Maggio, when Maya of Maj, the Virgin Goddess of Spring, comes "wearing the green." A new garment for the new season, and the "honey-moon," or lune de miel, a time of sexual freedom. In 16th-C rural Europe, marriage bonds were temporarily in abeyance, and new ones deferred to June by taboo. Only 'bad women' married during the month of license, when all the flora and fauna couple madly, all around the potently symbolic Maypole. "If you will patiently dance in our round/And see our moonlight revels, go with us." (Titania, Midsummer Night's Dream, II,1, 140-1) Because, as Edmund Spenser wrote, "Make hast, therefore, sweet love, whilest it is prime; For none can call againe the passèd time."

Still, a "divine marriage" ritual was enacted. The Queen of the May: Queen or Lady Mab, "she is the fairies' midwife," Queen Maeve (which means "mead"), equivalent to the Roman goddess, Flora "a Lady of Pleasure," led knights and ladies on horseback through the woods, as they impersonated Frey and Freya, "whose union made fertility magic each spring."

"THESE, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers,
For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy?"
-Walt Whitman



But what of Faeries? Known to the Irish as The Mothers, or The Mother's Blessing, fairyland was the Land of Women. This realm, according to the fairy queen in Book of the Dun Cow, a "land of the ever-living, a place where there is never death, nor sin, nor transgression. We have continual feasts: we practice every benevolent work without contention." The Fairy queen/fertility goddess had many faces: Titantia, Bean-Sidhe (later corrupted to banshee), Diana, Venus, Abundia, Morgan le Fay, Morrigan, among others, one of them was death. Fairies represented Fate or Fata, from medieval Latin fatare "to enchant," which became French faer or féer. Fairy fortune was fortune, fate and fear.

Fairy worship was a clandestine affair, under Catholicism. Joan of Arc was sent to the stake, in part, because she 'adored the Fairies and did them reverence.' " In Brittany, fairies were man-devant, "Moon-goddesses"; in Romania Fata Padourii, Girl of the Woods, like the Irish banshee. Old women taught maidens the rites of Venus and "fairy feats, shape-shifting and raising storms. They were known as fatuae or fatidicae, "seeresses" or bonnes filles. The Norse, Scots and Irish believed the fairies were progeny of the fallen angels.

In the Middle East, they were peris, "Persian spirits of great beauty who guide mortals on their way to the Land of the Blessed," like Valkyries and Hindu apsaras, celestial nymphs.


As the old Irish woman responded when asked by William Butler Yeats, "No, of course I don't believe in fairies, but they exist nonetheless!"

O, then, let me see Queen Mab hath been with you!


(sorry I'm too lazy to cite all the references, but I did sack the Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and without mercy.)

Les Fleurs du mal

I've been intending to post an excerpt from my friend's memoir, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky (see April 4th post), a work which really impresses me in so many ways, but specifically for our purposes, in its many illustrations of "meaningful coincidence." Late last night I started to build the post, but demurred, as I couldn't quite find the thread that would weave it into my experience. That's not to say that everything in the blog has been or must be tied in this way, I just happen to find things more interesting when they bear multiple meanings.

So, here is the passage I wanted to share. (For new readers, the following refers to a friend's brother lost on the PanAm Lockerbie crash in 1988. And to pre-clarify, Ella Ramsden was the name of an unfortunate lady whose house was littered with bodies, on the rooftop and in the yard. David was found under her collapsed stone wall, and his book was retrieved from her yard)-

"I dug through my plastic bags of Lockerbie relics, looking for David's copy of Baudelaire's, 'The Flowers of Evil.' Judging by the mud on its cover, and the lack of mud on the covers of the other books returned from Lockerbie, I decided that David might have been reading 'The Flowers of Evil' at the time of the explosion. I used to rub at the mud and try to picture where the book could have fallen to have gotten so dirty. Now I knew that this was mud from Ella Ramsden's backyard, but this did not much diminish my preoccupation with the last things of David's life.

For all the time I'd looked at the Baudelaire book over the years, I'd never bothered to read any of the poems. The corner was turned down at "The Voyage," so I decided to start there. The poem begins with an image of "children crazed with maps and prints and stamps," their "brains on fire" with all they don't know about a vast world they've never seen. The children, it becomes clear, are really the living, and what they can't comprehend is the experience of the dead. The children cry out: "Amazing travellers.../ what have you seen?" And the dead reply: "We have seen stars and waves/We have seen sands and shores and oceans too/In spite of shocks and unexpected graves/We have been bored, at times, the same as you." Then the dead explain how their journey began:

The solar glories on the violet ocean
And those of spires that in the sunset rise,
Lit, in our hearts, a yearning, fierce emotion
To plunge into those ever-luring skies."
_____________________________________________

The definition of "synchronicity," a term coined by C.G. Jung, he described as, "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." This elaboration comes from Wikipedia: "Having two (or more) things happen coincidentally in a manner that is meaningful to the person or persons experiencing them, where that meaning suggests an underlying pattern. It differs from coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic that is being expressed through meaningful relationships or events."

Or as someone smart wrote me recently, "Ever hear someone refer to 'God winking'? It's one of those coincidental moments that just blows your mind and reminds you that you're somehow connected to something bigger."

So Friday night I shrugged off the notion to write this down. I simply thought it best to wait.

Saturday morning I met my roommate at the local auto repair place, so I could drive her home after we had breakfast at the 101 Cafe. I could find a spot in neither of the adjacent parking lots, nor on the sidestreets. This is notable as it has never been the case, and I was forced to park what in LA is considered an arduous walking distance of four blocks. I was nonetheless pleased to see a quaint strip of twenties-era apartment buildings, and as I passed behind the Franklin commercial strip which houses my favorite cheap Thai restaurant, I passed a dilapidated couch, upon which was a rent and dirty book.

Though torn in half, with the front cover faced down and three clumped pages ripped out entirely, I could still discern from the back cover that it was some sort of academic grade publication. With a bit of trepidation, owing to the squalid state of the couch, I reached for the three pieces and reassembled them. The tome was Baudelaire, The Complete Verse.


I wrangled with my conscience for a few moments. I clearly wanted the book, but what if it were a source of pleasure for some indigent soul who spent his moments of repose at this same spot? The works were entirely in French, so it seemed unlikely, though I hated to presume it. It appeared unlikely to be a prize possession, as it was neither kept close to its owner, nor treated with care. Someone intentionally ripped it. The book was a disaster; it was mine.

As I sat with my roommate in the diner, I tried to explain to her the words in Ken's account. Finding my memory of the verse wholly insufficient to express the poetical tragedy of it all, I opened the paperback to the index and located "The Voyage" on page 240, in the section of 'The Flowers of Evil' known as "Death." Opening to that page, I found it was dog-eared, one of three pages in the four hundred page text. Three poems were found notable enough for this mark, in order, Le Vampire, Tout Entiere, and finally, Le Voyage.

What to make of this, then? The same book, of all the books there are, dirty, wrecked and prompting attention to the same poem, ten hours after I'd last thought on it. For me, the best coincidences in life have the strange beauty of poetic logic and meaning, but they also retain their mystery. That gives them the brushtroke of the sublime; that is how you know you have grazed up against the unknowable. I optimistically read these moments like signposts telling me I am on the right path. Reminded of a dream recently shared here, about a man and a girl on a raft, I hope my own voyage is on its rightful course.

So I'll end with two more passages, in translation, from this eight part poem. I'll leave it up to the reader to assign the meaning.

"But the true travellers are those, and those alone, who set out
only for the journey's sake; with light balloon-like hearts
they never swerve from their destiny,
but, without knowing why, keep saying, 'Let us fare forward!'

Those whose desires are shaped like clouds,
and who, like the conscript dreaming of his cannon,
have visions of boundless, ever-changing, unexplored ecstasies
which the human mind has never been able to name!"

In the end, death, 'O Death!' is called, and -

"Though sea and sky be black as ink,
Our hearts which you know so well are full of shafts of light!

Pour us hemlock, for our comfort:
Its fire so burns our brains that we long
to dive into the gulf's depths, and - what matters if it is heaven, or hell?
Into the depths of the Unknown, in quest of something new."

Penny Candy Update

New pictures up on Penny Candy.

sassmouth.blogspot.com

Death Takes No Holidays

This writing's a mess, but I'm tired of working on it.

There are certain themes to a person's life - tendencies, patterns, inclinations. Some of them are self-created and some regularly delivered, like the newspaper, or the mice your cat brings as affectionate offerings. Sometimes the events in your life form in unfortunate clusters - like jury duty three times in five years, or a string of mechanical failures. First the dryer goes, then the engine block cracks, computer crashes, and every time you turn the toggle on a lamp, the light bulb burns out.

I have an inexplicable history with Death and Loss. These are facts about which I have no difficulty speaking, and yet the prospect of a written record is a cumbersome task. I neither feel victimized, nor am I cut off from my feelings. Emotion is not a discrete world for me. It's not a question of residual emotion or sorrow, necessarily. It might be that growing up in a largely secular culture, and one lacking helpful grief rituals in place, one is left largely alone to deal with loss. Suffer and be still. People just don't know how to help you. Everyone wishes the problem away. So how to tell it?

My inability to write well about it may be sourced in this, too - perhaps it's simply that it revives a long period of chaos and calamity; a period when I glazed over a bit. So, even though my memory of it is clear, I can't formulate the idea of what it means. Not really. It was all too big.

For a long time, the statistics of my loss were overwhelming to me. There are plenty of people who have suffered more, but odds are against one person nearly losing nearly everyone. I have in the past felt rather paralyzed with fear, and as a child I literally felt I might be cursed. Someone recently personified Death as a robber to me, I think rightly so. Death is a thief for those left behind.

I've covered my grandmother's suicide attempt, the disappearance of my siblings, the two divorces, a boy I had just started dating in college who died in a car crash, and the death of one of my closest friends just five years ago. What I haven't discussed, and I wonder at the wisdom of saying anything at all, is the period of my adolescence. Maybe this is something to be laid out like a timeline, we'll call it "Major Disruptions in the Life of an American Teenager." Any conclusions or interpretations about what this means for me will probably have to be left for a different time.

Seventh grade, Spring. My step-father takes all of my school savings, landing himself in divorce court. The consequence to me is the loss of place at my private school for the Freshman year of high school. That is huge, as it was my place of refuge.

While in eighth grade, living with my mother and her temporarily lesbian sister (the lover of whom is terminal with cancer, and spends some weeks with us as she ails), my father gets it in his fool DT-lusional head that he should somehow legally bar contact between my aunt and myself. This comes as a major threat, for I think she is the person I love the most in all the world. I don't know if he had a leg to stand on, but it puts the big fear into our household, and disturbs me enough that I refuse to speak to him anymore.

Holiday Season, Freshman year of high school - My aunt has abandoned her relationship with the woman to remarry her second husband. It's not really working out so well, and a week before Christmas, she OD's on prescription drugs, while his three children are in the house, putting her in a coma for at least a week. I am devastated by her cruel and selfish disregard for the kids, this woman who force fed me morality. Our relationship is shattered; I feel personally abandoned by her decision to give up on her life. Later in life I will develop some compassion for the kind of suffering that leads to such choices, but I am fourteen at the time, and that is no time at all.

Summer, post-Freshman year - Two days before my 15th birthday, my father lapses into a coma, brought on by cirrhosis of the liver and kidneys. I go the hospital, our first reunion since I exiled him, and it will only be to say 'goodbye.' His body is badly bloated and jaundiced, yellowed like the acid of cheap paper. My birthday comes, and two days later he passes. The funeral at the Vet graveyard is the first time I see my sisters in years; they refuse to come to the memorial service or to our house after for "refreshments." My mother picks Pachelbel's cannon for the service, a mundane choice really, as evidenced by the fact that I will have to hear that tune perpetually afterwards. There is an insurance policy pay out, which puts me back in my private school for the rest of high school. This is a major blessing.

Six Months Later, Sophomore Year - It concerns my uncle, Brian, first husband to my aunt, a lively and brilliant psychiatric doctor, who was a concert level pianist, lively wit, and genuinely sweet man. In 1974, Milos Forman and crew went on location at the Oregon State Hospital, a mental asylum, to shoot One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Brian, a staff doctor, befriends Jack, and they get to carousing and, no doubt, skirt-chasing in and about Salem and Portland. Jack gets him a bit part in the film as one of his own shrinks. His one line is, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Many years later, when I am fifteen, Brian meets his end at the hands of one of his patients, left waiting and unattended in his office. The ill man wrenches a leg off a chair, which he uses to bludgeon my uncle to death. It is all over the local and national news, and they show his cameo each time the story is aired. I refuse to go to the funeral, a fact which enrages my aunt. I can't articulate the why not of my decision, but I am completely numb to it by this time.

Summer, Post Sophomore Year - My ass gets sent to therapy, by some very good friends of the family. Within a couple of months, my therapist will determine that my mother is unfit, and suggests that, if I've some place safe to go, I should leave home. I "run away" to live with my emotional benefactors, right as my Junior years begins. While my mother is at work, I pack my things and leave. I cannot recall if I left her a note or a phone message, but it will be awhile before we speak, and nine months before I return. My aunt is consistently unsupportive of my decision, as she will be throughout my young life. Her disapproval is rooted in her belief that "family is the most important thing."

November, Junior Year - My mother's father, after drunkenly running his propane delivery truck up through a fence and up on some lady's lawn, takes his life in the family camper with a shotgun, Ernest Hemingway style. Despite the estrangement with my mother, I agree to travel with her and my aunt to Wichita, to help clean out the house of personal effects. We work for several days. I am angered by the fact that my mother will really give me nothing of his as a keepsake, except for a silver bolla pin of a bronze bas relief cowboy, breaking in a pony. It is mine because nobody really wanted it. My aunt and I go into the chapel to see his body laid out, a fact which greatly distresses my mother. His head is wrapped entirely in gauze, making it twice as large as normal. Covered this way, he is impossible to discover; the body could be anyone's. I can't see why everybody in my family gives up. I don't understand why they don't love me enough to stick around.

Spring, Junior year - My art teacher, she and her commonlaw husband are favorite instructors of mine, falls ill with cancer. She will die within a year, and I will remain close to him for years after.

On May 12th, several kids from our rival school go up to Mt. Hood for a traditional school trip. The mountain climbers are lost in an unexpected storm, and three days pass before all the students are found; we spent many evenings waiting with groups of students from OES, hoping for good news. Ultimately, nine students and the Reverend who leads them, freeze to death. One of them is the brother of a childhood friend. When the rescue crews finally find and are able to get into the snow cave, eight remain inside the cave, barely alive, so frozen the paramedics can't get intravenous lines under their skin. Ultimately, two are found alive, probably because they laid one atop the other. One of them is a girl I've known since grade school. Then there are weeks of waiting to see if they will pull through. There is a large memorial service at the Episcopalian church that the student bodies of both schools attend. We invite them to all our parties, we share with them our prom. It is an intense time of taking care of other people in their grief. Eventually, after six weeks Brinton pulls through with some nerve damage, Giles loses both his legs. We remain tied to them throughout the coming Senior year.

Senior year - Fairly uneventful for my family, a welcome respite. I have returned home. One day I catch my mother in something I won't talk about here. Though I say nothing, she won't speak to me for a week. Then we go to therapy together, where I confront her. She denies everything, and won't talk to me for two more. Overall, I'm doing well. My grades are good, I win some writing awards, I get into a great school with a great big financial aid package. All I can think of is that I'm about to escape. To honor my achievements, I am given an hours long intervention with my aunt and the woman who recently housed me for almost a year, both of whom are high school teacher. They tell me I am being terribly unfair to my mother, to ask for help paying an Ivy League education. I wonder what all the years of intensive education were for, exactly. Perhaps I should go enroll at the Junior College? On the bright side, boys who aren't at least five years older are finally starting to pay attention, though I don't really have a first boyfriend until Spring.

Summer, post Senior year - My mother accidentally electrocutes herself. I am afternoon napping in my attic room, my friend Charlie does the same on our living room sofa. I am awakened to the sounds a dog makes after being hit - it's a gruesome moan. I worry for a second, that it might be human. What if someone's been attacked? What can I do about it? I snap out of my debate and run downstairs past Charlie, who is still sipping the waters of Lethe, and out the front door. My mother is clutching an electrical cord in one hand and pliers in the other, flattened out on the grass. She is flopping about, there is no delicate way to put this, so I'll put it as my aunt did, "not unlike a carp on the lawn." I run to her, then back inside to unplug her. She says that by the time I reached her, she was losing consciousness.

Freshman year, First Semester - I break up with my high school boyfriend. We are fully in love, but he is a year younger, and left behind in Portland. He is torturing me for it. I don't know how to handle my immense fear of all the changes happening in my life and take care of him. In a couple of months, he will send me a letter, a "suicide note." About how he wants to die so much he has been going through the motions of it. His sister had tried and failed a year or so before. It's a thing the family has kept from him, but that he already knew. This is a source of his despair. I left him, this is another. I call his father, the Rabbi, something I am utterly terrified to do. I felt he should know.

Two weeks before finals, my mother phones and tells me she wants to put my dog to sleep. I've had this dog since I was five and a half. When I was fourteen, we moved to a new house, and my mother decides that after nine years, Amber will now be an outdoor dog. She is not allowed in the house. The damp winters are hard on her, and are making her arthritis worse. My mother thinks she must be put down. I argue with her with a force I rarely exhibit, and buy just enough time to get home for winter break. Just to see my dog one last time. My mother will have a new indoor Golden Retriever within the year.

I am coming unglued. I cannot study, I cannot concentrate. I go to Psych Services, tell them about my suicidal ex-boyfriend, tell them about this particular history in my family. At the end of the session, the counselor says to me, "Well you seem to be handling this all very well, what do you hope to get out of this? I mean, I can give you a referral, if you want." I stare at her in stunned silence, then excuse myself. I take incompletes I will never amend; I ditch a final.

Christmas Break, Freshman year - I am back home. My mother kills my dog. I resume therapy with my God-given psychologist of two and half years. She tells me that this will be our final session, she is terminally ill, this woman who has been like a mother to me. She asks me not to let the occasion of her death, which comes the following September, be an excuse to give up on my own life. I cannot help but think that my world has been reduced to a joke in a Woody Allen movie. Whose therapist dies?

I had another therapist, after college, who urged me to write my memoirs. I guess it was because she couldn't quite account for why I wasn't crazy. Actually, what she said was, she didn't know why I wasn't "locked-up somewhere." But she assured me repeatedly that I was not, in fact crazy, just grief-stricken. "You have an extraordinary constitution, you are well socialized, you try as hard as you can to do the right thing, but you are depressed." She convinces me to take medication for two years, an idea to which I am strongly opposed, because I don't want to rely on substances to fix my problems. Her rationale is that I have spent a lifetime in pain, I am conscientious and good-natured, but there is no value now to my suffering. I am not learning anything new, I simply suffer. Under her guidance, I get well again. Later on, a regular yoga practice smoothes the residual rough edges, and leaves me brighter and happier than ever. As for the memoirs, I thought it ludicrous on three primary counts - 1) I felt absurdly young to presume such a venture. 2) No matter how "deserved," I didn't want to publicly skewer my mother (a bit guilty of that already, although what I've said is mild compared to the actual history). 3) I wanted first to be able to write a happy ending. Nobody really needs stories without some kind of redemption.

So why write it now? I'm not sure, except that it is making me write. I am finally gravitating back towards the things I love with discipline and commitment. I don't have so much trouble committing myself to others so much as I do to me. Maybe it's because I'm no longer sad. Maybe it's just time. If there is someone, somewhere, that it will help, that would be reason enough. Whatever the reason, I'm tired of justifying my every move. It wants out, perhaps to clear the way for other stories, better stories to tell. They need the room.

Bed Bug and Beyond

While painting his bed and bathroom today, I had this conversation with my friend Joe:

Joe - I want to have a new romance.

Me - Well why don't you go back online and dig one up for tonight?

(He's uber handsome, and could accomplish this easily, but it's funny advice coming from someone who has sworn on her life she'll never internet date.)

Joe - No! I want butterflies, not crabs.

April the 24th

Today as my friend Joe and I drove from the Hollywood Home Depot back to our little canyon, we saw swarms of cars bearing those flags along Sunset Blvd. At first I thought they might be celebrating our reader, Huckleberry's, birthday, but then I remembered I was in Little Armenia.

I reminded Joe of a rather hideously funny memory I had of the equal opportunity bigot, Jesus (the unmistakably gay Mexican friend, and when I say he's predjudiced, that includes his ilk), calling me on the same spring day, a couple years ago. Responding to the chafing tone in his voice, I asked him what the matter could be.

"Well, Blanche..."

I must interrupt the progress of this story to inform you that Jesus is primarily obsessed with five particular movies, all of which he likes to (mis)quote with an alarming frequency -

Vanilla Sky - "When you sleep with someone, your body makes a (promise), whether you do or not, David."
Mommie Dearest - "Christina! Bring me the axe!"
Fatal Attraction - "You won't answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan!"
Reform School Girls - "Keep your fingers above the sheets girls, we only change the beds once a week!
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis)

"Blanche: "You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I wasn't in this chair."

Jane: "But ya-aahr Blanche, ya-aahr in that chair!"

Any noticeable recurrent themes you can discern therein, are quite recurrent with the lad, I assure you. Anyway, he calls me, among others, "Blanche." Or rather, "Blan-shh, " and as sibilantly as one can with that "ch." And, if something is making you unhappy, he will needle, "Why are you being so tragic, Blanche?" This is a good friend.

So, I asked him what the matter could be.

"Well, Blanche, it just took me an hour and a half to get across Hollywood back home. The traffic was crazy. All those Armenians and their so-called Genocide Parade."

I was confused, "Why 'so-called' ?"

"Well, they're still around, aren't they?"

Wow.

I just wanted you all to know that, as Joe put it, "Archie Bunker is alive and well," and he's even more vitriolic, probably because he's trapped inside a gay Mexican.

Anyway, as bitterly comedic as that was to me, it was as much the laughter of nervous fear as anything. I am always amazed at the way suffering people lash out against others bearing hurt. Maybe sympathy or even empathy, if you can bear it, comes only when you have cleaned out your own wounds.

I have to remember this too, when I'm angry at Jesus for his negativity.

Bless the Armenians. And may God bless you too, Jesus-Blanche.

Many Happy Returns of the Day, Huckleberry!

from Chapter 6 ...in which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents (with apologies to A.A. Milne for the severe abridgement and wobbly edit)

"Many happy returns of the day," said Piglet again.

"Meaning me?"

"Of course, Eeyore."

"My birthday?"

"Yes."

"Me having a real birthday?"

"Yes, Eeyore, and I've brought you a present."

Eeyore took down his right hoof from his right ear, turned round, and with great difficulty put up his left hoof.

"I must have that in the other ear," he said. "Now then."

"A present," said Piglet very loudly.

"Meaning me again?"

"Yes."

"My birthday still?"

"Of course, Eeyore."

"Me going on having a real birthday?"

"Yes, Eeyore, and I brought you a balloon."

"Balloon?" said Eeyore. "You did say balloon? One of those big coloured things you blow up? Gaiety, song-and-dance,
here we are and there we are?"
-----------------------------------------------------------------

So there we are, Happy Birthday! May it be full of "Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry
bush..."

Loving Someone After Death...

"And this is the Comfort of the Good,
that the grave cannot hold them,
and that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
Death, then, being the way and condition of Life,
we cannot love to live,
if we cannot bear to die.

They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided
that love and live in the same Divine Principle,
the Root and Record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not death, neither is theirs.

Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas ..."

-William Penn, 1693

Rainbow Sleeves

You used to dream yourself away each night
To places that you'd never been
On wings made of wishes
That you whispered to yourself
Back when every night the moon and you
Would sweep away to places
That you knew
Where you would never get the blues




Well now, whiskey gives you wings
To carry each one of your dreams
And the moon does not belong to you
But I believe that your heart
Keeps young dreams
Well, I've been told
To keep from ever growing old
And a heart that has been broken
Will be stronger when it mends

Don't let the blues stop you singing
Darlin', you've only got a broken wing
Hey, you just hang on to my rainbow
Hang on to my rainbow
Hang on to my rainbow sleeves

- written by Tom Waits, recorded by Rickie Lee Jones on Girl at Her Volcano




Tom Waits (1979): "The first time I saw Rickie Lee she reminded me of Jayne Mansfield. I thought she was extremely attractive, which is to say that my first reactions were rather primitive - primeval even. Her style onstage was appealing and arousing, sorta like that of a sexy white spade. She was drinking a lot then [1977] and I was too, so we drank together. You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her. I remember her getting her first pair of high heels, at least since I knew her, and coming by one night to holler in my window to take her out celebrating. There she was, walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, drunk and falling off her shoes. 'I love her madly in my own way - you'll gather that our relationship wasn't exactly like Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor - but she scares me to death. She is much older than I am in terms of street wisdom; sometimes she seems as ancient as dirt, and yet other times she's so like a little girl."



Chuck E. Weiss (1979): "She's all woman, and seems tough - I remember when she was broke and used to sleep under the Hollywood sign. But she's also real soft and playful. She and Waits and I used to steal the black lawn jockeys from homes in Beverly Hills and hop freight trains together. Once we three were at an exclusive party in the Hollywood Hills, invited there by Tom's lawyer, and Rickie went right in, sat down, and put an avocado between her legs. Tom was embarrassed but got a great kick out of it. Nobody would talk to us after that, so we spent the evening going up to people with cocktail dip hidden in our palms and shaking hands with them."

Spiritual Growing Pains

Kirk Cameron has found God and would like you to join him.

Now, I am not a Christian basher, so please don't misunderstand, but poor reasoning and absurd illustration is just plain funny. In this video, you will learn:

- That studying Evolution in school made Kirk an Atheist

- Despite the common belief that Atheism = Intellectualism, it really is the exact opposite

- The Origin of the Soda Can (1:36 ish)

- Why the Banana is The Atheist's Nightmare. (3:34)

- The Intelligent design of the banana, which was intentionally built to fit the ridges of your hand (LOVING the demo on that one).

(Recommended viewing time on this one is 1:36 > 4:40 - click on the post title)

What I can never quite understand is how the ideas of Creationism and Evolution are mutually exclusive. I guess you have to throw out the Garden story, for one, unless you're willing to retain your faith and yet still read the Bible as metaphor. But seriously, could there really not be a creative deity who set a grand equation/master plan/formula in motion, and let it unfold? And why is anyone so arrogant as to think that a ubiquitous and omnipotent being didn't cook up a recipe that exceeds our current powers of comprehension? I'm sure our current understanding of Evolutionary Theory is faulty and, well, is still 'evolving,' but the creationist model seems awfully elementary to me. Sorry guys.

And by the way, Rev. Comfort, I read in that some primates peel the banana from the end opposite of the stem, because it is easier to pull open.

I Love You to Death

I hate that phrase.

Someone said it tonight to me on the phone, though no one I'm still with, thank you very much. I've asked that person please never to use those words with me, but apparently he can't help himself. That's right, keep drinking while you're on the anti-seizure medication. What a waste.

I first recognized my abhorrence for the phrase when it came from another quondam boyfriend as he was giving me the old heave-ho. Chris used it as a sort of assurance of my intrinsic value. Some consolation. "I love you to DEATH!" he said nervously, and protesting I don't know what. I should simply have replied, "Don't waste your energy."

What does this mean, really? In his case he was saying, "I like you a lot as a PERSON, but I'm not IN LOVE with you. Don't be angry!"

I object to this phrase because it has so many possible interpretations, its ambiguity is dangerous, but mostly because it's always masking something:

Masochistic- I love you so much it will kill me.

Sadistic - My love is going to kill you.

False and frightening - I don't really love you, so I overcompensate with mock passion to the point of ferocity. Yet, I kind of wish you'd just go away. That's like death, isn't it?

Passive Agressive - I might actually love you, but with a chip on the shoulder.

Glib - Similar to F & F, minus the second F. Reserved for hairdressers, sales people, and casting agents.

Hypermanic - I sincerely need my Ritalin, Lithium, or Thyroid medication.

There is one positive take I can think of. It requires the assumption that it has its origins (those being something I could not discover online), in something older, quainter.

Such as, "I'll love you 'till Death do us part."

I can guarantee you they don't mean it that way. People who love you say, "I love you."

Gay Ghost Dad - It's Never Too Late to Come Out!

About two years ago my mother staged a posthumous "outing" of her first husband, my father. I was an audience of one. What occasioned this revelation escapes my memory. I believe there was little connection to anything in our telephone conversation, and so the news was rather jarring. Let me be clear that I was never upset by the notion that my father was potentially a big queen. Even if I saw that quality as a failing, which I don't, it would fall so far down his list of poor qualities as to seem insignificant.

What does upset me is that he was an equal opportunity cheater - she caught him with both men and women (not at the same time, so far as I know, but it WAS the 70s). Let's just say that he was, well, experimental. About everything, really. My father wanted to try it, what ever it was, at least once. And that was genuinely a part of his rakish charm.

That and his perpetual boyishness, puer eternis. Successful and commanding as he once was, he was also endowed with a playful, impish quality. Impossibly funny, jaunty, dashing even. Despite all the sadness I've written of, I really remember him nearly always wearing that cocky grin on his face. My dad was just plain fun, and despite his choice of profession, I believe he lived to break rules. It was his revelry.

Except that he inherited a crushing historical and cultural weight, and yoked himself to it. Sad to think of him living inauthentically, but it was a different time, though not quite different enough. I've wondered if he had remained in the city of his birth, Los Angeles, if he might eventually have discovered some acceptance. As it was, the family moved to Mormonville Central, while he was still in grade school. Given his generation and his "upbringing" (a curious word given the way many of us are raised), he probably could not have gracefully escaped the mandate of shame in our culture. My brother thinks he was doomed to play that out. He wrote this to me recently (it's so good to have him back in my life, he's funny):

" If Dad had lived, I really doubt he would have come to grips with his
sexuality. As with numerous examples from his generation (Roy Cohn, etc.),
once you have incorporated repression into your everyday life, you build
everything else around it and it becomes impossible to extricate,
especially if your peer group still thinks that being gay is evil or
bad. Look at Ken Mehlman. In fact, Dad was worried that I was gay.
He was always saying things like "B____, you should be more interested in
women." Another time he refused to take me to see Scarecrow, about a
deep friendship between Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, because "it'll just
make you like men more." So he was also deeply ashamed of his
attraction to men, and I doubt that would have changed. However, he
could have become a bigwig in the Republican party, it's chock full of
closeted gays. "

We really have got sexuality all bound up, haven't we? When I try to resolve this question in my head, "was he really gay, my father?" Gay gay? Or simply bisexual? My mother claims he was passionate with her. Did he really need two full beards - two wives and children from each one? Why leave the first family for my mother (I grant you she had her charms), if what he really wanted were men? I have no answer for this question, and I doubt that even he could answer it, were he alive. And that's what I object to so strenuously, a world that requires people to live against their very beingness. We constrain sexual expression to the point that one can't so much as explore safely to discover what the true nature really is. The unexamined life is not worth living, and as it turned out, for my father it wasn't even possible to continue. I'm sure it's what ultimately killed him.

Do you think there is a God who creates such a torment in a man, such that it destroys him, and then punishes him for it on the other side of his demise? I don't believe that, and I will never bow before such a God. I've been bent down, I have knelt, I've been forced to the ground by the circumstances of my life more times than I can recount or even recall. Times when I thought I might expire just from the sheer pain of it. I will accept trials and tests and the strength that is built, but you will never get me to believe that God hates a grown human being who reaches for another in a moment of loneliness, or desire, or just plain love. And it does exist outside of hetero relationships. I have seen it.

My father was quite a fellow, in many ways. He came from a very large and quite poor family in Salt Lake City, but he was unreasonably bright and equally ambitious. At least three people have told me he was the smartest man they ever met, or maybe they didn't get around too much. After a short time at the U. of Utah, he enlisted in the Korean war, but was stationed in Germany for having flat feet or something. He studied at the University of Heidelberg, and owing to a famously photographic memory, he learned German in a heartbeat. Then off to Harvard for law school, where he graduated magna cum laude, while he and his first wife raised their three children. Once transplanted to Portland, Oregon, he co-founded his own flourishing corporate securities practice and was making money hand over fist by his early thirties. I'm told that back then, he was one of the most prominent attorneys in the Pacific Northwest. This is something I care little about, the wealth he accrued, then lost. I will admit to an occasional pang over a woebegone inheritance, but my father was unhappy, and all his land and capital didn't change that fact while he had it.

Sometime in 1965, and smack in the middle of his career, he took off to Mississippi with a group of Oregon attorneys. They were among the first in the country to volunteer through the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (which was established in conjunction with Kennedy's Civil Rights Act of 1964). This was a dangerous time. This was the Mississippi that had taken Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman just a year before. People died for helping Black People. It has always struck me ironically that my father, outspoken against practices of homosexuality to the extent that he tried to separate me as a child from a beloved aunt, would risk his neck for the color line. If he were still alive, and if I had known about all this before he died, I would have told him so.

Writing that last line I realized something intrinsic to our relationship. What I wrote is absolutely true, I argued with him quite a bit, and I was free to do so. My father encouraged me to know my mind by allowing me to exercise it. We had long telephone conversations when I was small that were about ideas. I know he found me funny, and often he would say with an amused laugh, "You're too logical." That, of course, is highly debatable, but notable in that to the rest of my family I was always "too sensitive." In the good and private hemisphere of a world I shared with my father, he indulged me. I was free to be as I wanted, say what I wanted, even if he couldn't in his own adult life. I am eternally grateful to him for that. As much as my father is mysterious to me, there is little doubt I am more like him than I am my mother. I really loved him, all the way along the rough road he drove us down.

It is a real pity I never learned of his time in the South until later. Without any knowledge of it, I naturally gravitated towards a course of study in high school and college that linked directly into his work. I wish I knew what he experienced there. For me, his pro bono civil rights work is the greatest mark of his life. About seven years ago, he and the other attorneys were honored by the ACLU. I accepted a posthumous award on his behalf; Myrlie Evers gave the keynote address. It gave me so much that night to know that he had done at least one great thing.

Anyway, the night my mother dropped the G-bomb, after I got off the phone and tried to process it all, I was suddenly struck with an idea for a movie. "Gay Ghost Dad," haunting his family. Rearranging furniture in the middle of the night, because the placement of the divan was just all wrong! The stereo mysteriously plays an old Bette Midler LP. The distant cackle of Paul Lynde echoes down the long hallway. Last season's clothing mysteriously disappears from wardrobes and laundry hampers, like stray socks, never to be found again. It's never too late to come out of the closet, and now the household's in an uproar.

But that's just like me, spreading love and acceptance, and busting up stereotypes when and where I can.

Ce Petit Hardy

L'amitie -

Beaucoup de mes amis sont venus des nuages
avec soleil et pluie comme simples bagages
ils ont fait la saison des amitiés sincères
la plus belle saison des quatres de la terre


ils ont cette douceur des plus beaux paysages
et la fidélité des oiseaux de passage
dans leur coeur est gravée une infinie tendresse
mais parfois dans leurs yeux se glisse la tristesse

alors ils viennent se chauffer, chez moi
et toi, aussi, tu viendras



tu pourras repartir au fin fond des nuages
et de nouveau sourire à bien d'autres visages
donner autour de toi un peu de ta tendresse
lorsqu'un autre voudra te cacher sa tristesse


comme l'on ne sait pas ce que la vie nous donne
il se peut qu'à mon tour je ne sois plus personne
s'il me reste un ami qui vraiment me comprenne
j'oublierai à la fois mes larmes et mes peines

alors, peut-être, je viendrai, chez toi
chauffer mon coeur à ton bois

-recorded by Françoise Hardy, 1965
(Riviere/Bourgeois)

The Wind

(this is what I'm listening to right at this moment. The rest of the time, Miranda Lee Richards is in heavy rotation.
Blowing you a kiss, Miranda!)

I listen to the wind
To the wind of my soul
Where I’ll end up well I think,
Only God really knows
I’ve sat upon the setting sun
But never, never never never
I never wanted water once
No, never, never, never

I listen to my words but
They fall far below
I let my music take me where
My heart wants to go
I swam upon the devil’s lake
But never, never never never
I’ll never make the same mistake
No, never, never, never

-Cat Stevens, when he wrote it. Now Yusuf Islam. née Stephen Demetre Georgiou.