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May 23, 2012

White Bird

My Mom died last Sunday at home. It was not an easy transition but I was there with my sisters and brother, a niece and a nephew and PLC.
It was very hard on us all and tragic to us as well because, though we all die, she was so vital and spirited and loving and, I think, important to so many people she knew and met in her life. She was also young in some essential way that makes death all that harder.

We are all still in shock even though the fact of her death seemed set as a fact for some days before.

My Mom was a beautiful woman and I say that with all humility and she lived with a unique combination of vivacity and pride, yet with self-containment and humility as well.

I will have more to say about my mother who had a love for animals and many, many of those young people who struggled in this world finding their feet in it, their own way.
Within moments when we all realized she had let go of her last struggling breath I walked outside of my parents modest house in Hayward - the town where my siblings still live and I did for several decades- and saw that the light was different than I'd ever seen it. It was the eclipse, of course. I knew it was coming but it was somehow stunning to see as the light was darkened in a manner I may have seen once before in my life but I do not remember it if so. My Mom's father was from Swedish and Norweigian ancestry and I wondered if this was like the dark twilight light of the northernmost realms of the world.

As I wrestled with the timing of my mother's fate from pneumonia and lung cancer I remembered that when my father died Elizabeth Taylor had died a couple of days before and that Geraldine Ferraro- America's first woman vice-Presidential candidate- died the same day. A lot of people had thought my Mom had more than a passing resemblance to Miss Taylor, at least one friend said she'd reminded him of Jean Seaberg. My Mom liked Elizabeth Taylor and so there was a sort of backhanded "appropriateness" that my Dad and Liz should be booked on similar flight schedules as it were.

My mother was preceded and accompanied by two icons now most associated with "disco"- and that is, in it's most essential meaning, simply a style, an idiom for, more generally, "dance". The first was Donna Summer and on the same day my Mom died, so had Robin Gibb I later learned. My Mom's musical taste ran more to Barbra Streisand and her dance appreciation more to Rudolf Nureyev but there still was a synchronistic tip of the hat from the seeming heavens in all that.
My Mom loved dancing and to dance. It was a lifelong passion and something she and her sisters had learned from an early age. She and my father were very good dancers together in social settings. Once in Mexico a bandleader had asked them if they could come back every night of their stay on vacation because the crowd loved to watch them so much.
Both of my sisters took dance as young teenagers as well.

We loved my Dad dearly but this was and is something even more. I will have more to say- just not today.

May 4, 2012

Whimpering Bangs, et al

Not much here. I just wanted to update anyone who's perusing through my sparsely, but invaluably, populated neck of the woods.
PLC and I went up to see my Mom. She was very weak and easily tired out but hanging in there. She's exhausted and it was dicey going up and then once there measuring the minutes when it was appropriate to say, "Okay Mom, I feel bad keeping you up, you should rest".

She does have a debilitating type of pneumonia- well, that's dumb since none of them are exactly invigorating.
The fact is I HAD to see her just so she knows I intend to be a loving pest- er, I mean presence in her life. But I've had some form of pneumonia at least four times in my life and outside of a 1972 bout with Hepatitus B it was the most depleted and miserable I've been. I think. My Mom has now also had it four times. When you factor in that my Father died of emphysema I think you can see a familial pattern regarding the lungs. Fortunately we've got heart problems to balance everything out. So except for our lungs and our hearts- it's all good! Of course I had to show off with HIV and Hep B and cancer and HPV- but then I prided myself as a kind of individualist- and you have to explore around to be that, ya know? But those were obviously self-inflicted- I just didn't know it at the time. Oh I left out polio and a heart murmur when I was a child and an infant, respectively. I survived those too. Just lucky I guess. Other than those we're healthier than most people. Aren't we?

With all of that I've already been around a number of people who had less checkered health histories than us who aren't around anymore.
Our "breed" is surprisingly sturdy given our history. Knick-knack paddy-whack give this dog a bone. Well that may be an unfortunate choice of words but you get the drift. Before AIDS you woulda got the drift and possibly had a good shot at the drifter as well-" hey, 'knick-knack' my ass kiddo, I got yer bone right here" - but that's a story for a future blog.

********************

When last we hunkered down around the disintegrating cobweb of a shaky tribute to literacy that was my last blog and now even more so with this thoughtless morsel of moroseful musings and mutterings that have gotta be hurting your ability to remain respectfully hunkered as I squeak I gave praise to few heroes in the realm of the popular culture. Well I want to mention a couple more- one of whom I've mentioned before, Naomi Klein. Ms. Klein has written persuasively about the limits of the kind of economic ideal the American nation has been supposedly dedicated to these last couple of centuries. She has also delineated a kind of absurd "endgame" consequence of this type of thinking that appears to be directly seen on the horizon to those who are prayerful that a new beginning- however like a painful birth it may be- may be about to commence. One can only hope. I got into a gentle disagreement with a wonderful gentleman who I have the greatest respect and appreciation for- an economics professor- who feels that Ms. Klein was not accurate and even disingenuously unkind about one of the current icons of Capitalism, Milton Friedman. Well, as much as I respect and even love this individual I am not buying this argument at all. Fortunately we were able to find agreement in Paul Krugman's analysis of our current American and Western dilemmas regarding the direction our economies are headed.

Another person I have the highest regard for is the actor John Cusak who speaks his opinion forthrightly about the misery that is the current American political scene. Like me Cusak is a liberal who is appalled at what the Obama administration is doing after getting the go-ahead to be politically active on the "bully pulpit" to return the USA to something like the country that attempts to epitomize what a morally inclined, humane person would do IN this world as opposed to what we actually are doing TO this world.

Stephen Colbert is another artist who has shone brightly the last number of years in an almost unrivaled ability to satirize what has become of our political process. I would put Colbert's brilliance and bravery and astuteness right next to Twain, Will Rogers or any other satirist or humorist America can lay claim to. His evisceration of the Bush administration to their faces at the Annual Correspondents Dinner is a fact he cheerfully denies but the truth couldn't be plainer. It's obvious to me that he's a genius and precisely the kind of person this nation should feel immensely grateful to even be able to produce.

Well, boys and girls, that's all I have- it's past my bedtime right now.
I'll have more to say. And say. And say- as time goes on or permits as the case may be.
Oodles of toodles till then me dears.

May 3, 2012

Mom, Muses on the Web and May Day

So this just in:

My Mom was in the hospital. They're calling it necrotizing pneumonia. I talked to her a couple of days ago by phone- I'm the only one of her four children and three grandchildren who doesn't live in the same town she does. She sounded pretty good- but then I'm used to my Mom trying to sound "good" about everything where her kids are concerned. I was encouraged despite this learned wisdom. Then I talked to about a day later- and this time she didn't sound good. She said she was going to let me go but sounded like she was fighting off the urge to cry.
Mom has since been allowed to go back home where she appears to be responding to antibiotics but there are unpredictable elements. I am going with PLC to see her Thursday May3rd.

I want her on steroids and food supplements and any happy pills she can have to enhance what's left of her sentence on this earth- which I hope is a lot. She's earned it. My mother remains the beating, vital, impassioned "heart" of my family. I have nieces, nephews, many, many friends- some here and some gone- and others who make that simple fact obvious to me and who have made that obvious to me over the last several decades. Not that they've needed to since it has been obvious to me for a long time. Whatever her sins or deficiencies- and we all have them- she has more than earned a pass on them while she has been engaged in picking up some of the slack our race of American "slackers" have collectively gathered lo these last few snapshots of the sad eras of which we have inherited.

I'm reasonably sure that the "sadness" of these eras will only increase in the days and years ahead as we try to collectively and individually to pull our heads out of our asses in time to look up into what we have called down upon ourselves by our neglect as an experiment in freedom that's foundered and now threatens all the remaining world around us because of our negligence and our insistence on easy answers in the face of situations we used to realize were complicated specifically by our collective inattention to them.

I think we have become inured to the truly dead and lifespirit-defeating weight of rhetorical dross conjured by and deposited over the collective "us" by our nation's most fearful, faithless and reactionary movers and shakers. This involves certainly the Repukeclican party but also the Dumbocrats who have ears but do not hear. The essential notion of asking a question and then playing both the pro and con position to derive something akin to an honest reckoning of that question is facing a defining challenge right now. And right now looks like a time and place where a majority still have something to cling to but I strongly suspect that many of them sense a fuzzy vibration in their peripheral vision. The fuzziness and shakiness is the rest of us pounding on the door of our national discourse trying to get in.
If an "Occupier" or two break a door lintel or window in forcing the issue from time to time to get this party started it's a wake-up call not a crime.
If only we knew the difference.

"Interesting" times are ahead for us. But interesting times will be the rule only if some of us are resisting the status quo of our dumbass "givens" otherwise what is most interesting about our times will simply be the randomness of how life is nothing more than "one damn thing after another" in an increasingly cataclysmic denouement.
*********

I think now of my father who died in a well-known HMO hospital in the town I grew up in. I have an abiding hatred of this HMO but especially of this particular hospital. The room my father was in, finally, was busy and somehow matter-of-fact and banal in it's essential ambience. I can only hope he had enough morphine in him to not notice the surroundings around him when he transitioned to the next world. If there IS a next world.
As I was the last one- his first born - leaving the room I couldn't help but notice a doctor in the middle of the "work" area of this station giggling about something. It's hard to describe what it feels like to walk by someone doing that when you've just lost one of the original pillars of your world. I guess it's hard to know what anyone is going through at any given moment. No doubt I was in a sensitive moment to read meanings into how or what other people were reacting to but I couldn't help as I was walking out of that room to feel and anger and revulsion at where and how my father died. He never had any luck with, in fact seemed often left with no sense of dignity by the medical people he'd dealt with in his life.
Some last straws in this world, this life, are indelible.

**********

Lately I’ve been extolling the virtues of the “Salon” site’s columnist Glenn Greenwald. (Why do I feel archaic calling them “sites” anymore? Did I miss an updated buzzword with more currency?)

I think of “Truthdig’s” essayist and journalist Chris Hedges as perhaps the preeminent moral presence speaking to those Americans who feel the fundamental idealism they grew up with has been completely undermined by both major parties and betrayed.

But Glenn Greenwald impresses me as the most persuasive as well as one of the most prolifically active writers on the net in service to those who think civil liberties are worth having- or rather reclaiming- in our current world of the physical, psychic panorama of American Imperial hegemony and the official language triply-dipped, it would seem, in George Orwellian "doublespeak" by those in charge of a multitude of institutions but especially that of the sad Not So United States government controlled by a skittish and barely Democratic majority Senate, the Neo-Nihilistic budgeteers of the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and a considerably less than "Supreme" Court whose only service to the nation they sit in truly legislative judgement of might be a plane crash involving about five of the members thereof.

I know.
I know.
The Secret Service will be knocking at my door.
Or perhaps I will simply be whisked away by a brown-shirted private security firm contracted by our benighted American guv-mint as a secretly charged coconspirator to the forces of something or other and I shall thusly be consigned to the proverbial dust bin of the eventual past in an unmarked building, in an unmarked land by unmarked guys in what may become an increasingly and unremarkable and unmarkable turn of events in a land whose motto of "E. Pluribus Unum" has morphed into whatever the Latin equiv of "Nothing to see here folks- if you've got homes still- go back to them and no one else gets hurt. After all, you're either for us or against us."
Okay, that may be a bit long to fit on a coin- even of this realm- but you get the point- if not the specific charges leveled ag'in me in a court of what we might laughingly call the "law".
The worst of it is that as fucked up as this is, a sitch like this would be IS, in fact, the Law.
Currently.

Both Greenwald and Hedges are invaluable to me personally as the best representatives of what I care about most in the times I live in. I've previously mentioned the New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman as another force/source exploding the lazy assumptions this particular era seems meant to gloss over. And I am abashed at invoking the Prize Nobel seeing as how Obama was inexplicably and, perhaps, naively and embarrassingly prematurely, labeled a "peace" activist in a maneuver that can only further erode any meaning in an award like this as the days of our lives go on.

Glenn Greenwald has the ability to cut through the froth where perhaps others are inclined to “moderate” or proceed with caution. But Greenwald's style - essence, even- in doing so is rigorously researched and well-documented.

One of the more remarkable facts of our daily lives is that many people in administrative, political or public positions simply announce horrifying contradictions to logic and lapses in moral judgement that have a direct effect upon peoples' lives and livelihoods, contradictions and lapses that may well have caused them, in certain days now long past, to become nervous in proceeding to the parking lot or the bus stop (fat chance that!) without 24-hour security from those they have denigrated and minimalized in their pronouncements. And I say that as one who generally has viewed "today" superior to "the good old days" of contemporary mythos.

Most political decisions from both parties and most of the government institutions are mediocre-to-heinous the last number of years. And it’s not as though the bar had been set that high for the last 30 to start with.

***********
Finally, May Day came and went. I got an email from a friend who- somewhat surprisingly I thought- was advocating to his friends that they not show up to work or shop on that day. Ironically, I only saw the email on May 2nd. So much for timing. Our friend did not copy my partner who if anything is even more involved in the world of political reality than I am. They had a falling out a few weeks back and while there was some basis for both their points of view his, perhaps unintended, exclusion of my partner seemed unfortunate and sort of sad.
Some of us barely know who's on our side- assuming we can ascertain which side that is.

I leave you now with a picture of a young man who was part of the "Occupy San Francisco's" activities on May Day. The Occupy movement in it's elemental basic presence is the only actual political action recognized by many on either side of the political arena as having an impact that matters. This despite the supposed lack or organization; wasn't an essential idea of the 60's that movements should be without- rather than with- "charismatic" leaders? The better to move an idea forward without getting hung up in a personality.
Of course today's joke of a political landscape is endlessly about personalities. But the point of personality politics is that it's a mask to any meaningful understanding of issues. That's it's point entirely.

Here is one of the protestors a cameraman got an iconic image of. He's really beautiful I think.

April 10, 2012

hypnotized

alternative-indie-country singer/songwriter
Justin Townes Earle

Just thought it was time to move along in imagery. Every time I see this guy I just end up staring for a very long time.
I'll get to writin' somethin' about somethin' soon. PLC is having his first photo show in over a decade at a local coffee shop. We're excited but it's still in progress and therefore artistic tension and anxiety are our buddies. Damn buddies!

February 25, 2012

Three gatherings

Blue Christmas in Las Vegas...

Bellagio Water Show

...Sounds fun and it had it's moments but the first day was muted and uncomfortable. PLC had incapacitating abdominal pain and was bedridden from the time we got to the Mirage- the hotel we were staying overnight at. The Mirage was where Siegfried and Roy performed for many years before Roy got mauled and seriously hurt ending their show. It was also the venue for the Cirque Du Soleil's Beatles music show, "Love". The Cirque has five different shows going on in Vegas and while I would've loved to see this show we were destined not to be able to. I've never seen Cirque so it's still on my "to do" list. My younger sister had a bad migraine- which she is prone to and her son was under the weather as well. So that constituted 3 of 7 of us who were out of commission from the word go the first, Christmas Eve, day we were there. I went out somewhat reluctantly to have dinner with my older sister, Mom, my brother, a niece and a nephew after check with PLC to the point that I was more annoying than considerate. But I was frankly disappointed we couldn't have both gone and felt badly leaving him alone in our room.

The Mirage Las Vegas

We ended up having a few laughs this evening but it was not without effort. The ostensible rationale behind spending Christmas incongruously in the town that the rather prescient and natty mobster Bugsy Siegal built was that my parents on their 50th wedding anniversary had gone to Reno and there determined that if they made to their 60th they would invite their kids and grandkids with them next time. Well my Dad didn't make it but my Mom decided this was a the way to honor that notion.

My Mom, it might seem to some, also rather incongruously, gave us each a small ziplock baggie of our Dad's ashes. I hadn't really seen them before as they've been lying in state on his dresser in my parents' room. They are in a large plastic bag with a tie-wrap, courtesy of the Neptune Society - which both my parents have signed up with. The plastic bag is, in turn, resting snugly in a beautiful wood box of a reddish-bronze hue.
I was surprised at how heavy the box and bag of ashes was. I’m also surprised at how like coarse white sand it seems. I guess I’d expected something more “ash”-like with the odd fragment not totally digested by the fire.
Cremations are an odd thing – though hardly a new method- for many Americans. It’s as though we now strive to make our final carbon footprint more quickly in order to make room for the next of us than we used to. Even I feel the tug at heart for a plot of land to go to knowing that someone I love is “there” rather than as a scattering to the air, water and earth undifferentiated from so much else. Of course if there’s any meaning to any of this I suppose the manner of decomposition is hardly a matter compared to a life that exists only in memory or through a glass darkly that separates our realms into “here” and “there”.
Burning a person's body has much of the same primordial fear for me as deep water does even at my relatively current advanced years: with fire I have the sense of pain and that something might be destroyed that would've otherwise utilized its own time-frame to manifest into the next reality. Of course what if you are eaten by an animal? I suppose that I think there is still a linkage between two sentient beings, a flesh to flesh transaction, whereas fire is an undifferentiated force of nature that "devours" one into a less imaginable plane of existence or nonexistence.
My childlike fear of water has come to the surface almost anytime I'm in a lake, the sea or a bay as well as when I was on the toilet as a child. Visions of monsters of the deep, the tenacles of a giant squid taking it's revenge on me- a scared, ill-placed creature relatively awkward in floating or propelling himself in this medium that was a natural habitat to it several thousand millennia ago.
Childish nightmares built into a bodily incarnation of fear, lurking in the dark to be loosed in the odd moment.

The terrors of the vast primordial liquid medium that birthed us all and even freaky moments in potty training notwithstanding I proceeded with my dad’s ashes in my coat pocket at first and then transferred them to my shirt pocket after realizing I couldn't’t watch the 49ers play against their opponents from Seattle because the Las Vegas stations weren’t broadcasting it on our room television. I was going to stay with PLC and watch with him as he’s accepted the “entertainment” of watching “my” team at least when they are playing well. Instead I begged off to go downstairs and watched the game in a “sports bar” with a lot of empty seats waiting for the cocktail waitress to bring me an occasional drink. I ended up getting two beers myself and finally a gal came by to take my other order. They’ve obviously cut back a lot from the days when cocktail gals came by multiple times in a few minutes to make sure everyone that wanted one got their drink and thereby probably added to the “house” odds in so doing.

As the game went on I kept putting my hand over the pocket my Dad's ashes were to give the 49ers "luck". A part of me felt right in doing so and another part of me felt absurd and could clearly picture my Dad all but rolling his eyes and saying with a laugh, "well your Mom put you up to this Bob, you can pat me all you want - but they are going to have to win it with or without me." But then as though it were genetically ordained I thought he'd add, "they better win it, dammit!" and then laugh.
Well, they won it, Dad.

About the telly in the room both PLC and I noticed that for a famous hotel in Vegas the options were more limited than a lot of cheaper alternatives, there was not mini-refrigerator, microwave or coffee maker. We decided the emphasis was pretty clear, that we were 'sposed to be spending our moolah gambling rather than checking to see if the room had Showtime. The real "Showtime" was everywhere outside of the hotel room after all. Thus the hotels did pretty much all they could to get you out of your room in order to stimulate this very artificial economy somewhat magically thriving amidst a desert that would normally be home to the heartiest of hearty native tribes, flora and fauna adapted to survive in the hard-packed earth where water doesn't readily flow.

My poor dad made it through the football game downstairs but when I returned to our room to check in with PLC I noticed the baggie had sprung a leak and some of the grains of my Dad had dripped out into my pocket. I ended up finding another baggie and along with some cloth tape we use for medicinal purposes I rebound my father's remains with the resulting repackaging looking like a white tape Cross of St George (my Dad's namesake) in white rather than red banding the silvery plastic horizontally and vertically. As I'm typing these words the baggie is sitting before me under the computer screen on top of a slice of agate given to me by PLC as a birthday gift a few years ago.

Cross of St. George

Birthday Time

Went up to the East Bay with PLC to celebrate the birthday of my niece. She's the one who organized our Xmas in Vegas outing.
We had a very pleasant time once we got there. Even the ride up was smooth and featured no major headaches in traffic or any particular tensions between myself and PLC. Those tensions are usually momentary because , I think, we both see the advantage of sharing time as enjoyably as we can.

And this day also seemed shorn of some of the grumblings and harried tone that sometimes dips it's metaphorical head into these familial and extended-family goings-on. Lots of cross-talking frequently without an always coherent flow of narrative is to be expected when my siblings are together at what was formerly my folks' house and which now is my mom's.

I do have a nephew with a drinking problem but he was almost entirely absent from the proceedings this day and, sad to say, while he has charm he also has a narcissistic tendency to hog the discourse in a manner that incurs resentment and annoyance for some of us and an air of resignation for others who seem to tolerate his antics more readily. My celebrated niece, in fact, saved us from missing our flight back from Vegas when my aforementioned nephew had a hissy fit of undefined explanation and caused all of the rest of us to anxiously wait out till the last minute to finally get to the airport. He had been drinking and my niece found him at the tavern of his whim and intercepted a stronger drink meant for him and was able to persuade him to accompany her down to meet us. She was worse for the wear but oddly amused about the incident, once again revealing a wisdom and patience that appears to be singular to her in our family- extended or otherwise.

Actually the day was also a celebration to a lesser degree for her stepfather and her Mom, the slightly older of my two sisters, all of who have birthdays around this time of the year. Along with an uncle and a cousin's niece, also dear to our family, we appear to have a cluster of our very own Age of Aquarius delegates, astrologically speaking. Aquarius is my moon sign so in theory I should have a natural communication ease with all of these folks and it more or less seems to ring true I find.

My niece works at an animal shelter and has a deep love for animals it's a love that she shares with my Mom though all our fam, including my late Dad have a soft spot for our fellow critters. I've thought about a pet mostly as a companion to cheer PLC. PLC, like my niece, did not eat meat when I first met him. Again, my corrosive influence at work fixed that. No I won't actually take the blame for that.
Still a pet makes me feel that I cannot be there enough to take care of it because of my job and just the general thought that I don't like leaving a pet to be alone for long periods of the day. Even with PLC there he still has to do medical appointments and there are times when I'm not sure, though loving he is, that he'd be up to the task that accompanies the reward.

Dinner in Winter and a Toast to the Irish

I'd been planning a few weeks ago to drag PLC up with me to see my family and visit a cousin of mine who was diagnosed with a very serious form of cancer. It was at her request, in fact, that we were going to visit. We were invited by my cousin's father, my lone surviving Irish uncle, to a dinner of abalone. My uncle has long been a fisherman as an enjoyment but also commercially for salmon, abalone and tuna. He abhors net fishing. Net fishing is largely the province of Asian immigrants to the waters here and tends to trap a lot of fish not the main target of their endeavor and so their technique- which is common in much of the world- is not appreciated by other fishermen and sportsmen in the San Francisco regions.
And trust me, just as I understand that getting the most (fish) the quickest, most efficient way one can- even with unintended "collateral" damage to non-targeted species is the way of the world, it is also the province of the societies that have some material advantages over so many others (think here "America from 1946 -2001" and likely some years, even decades, past that approximate date) to fight the "good fight" to do what our heretofore relatively privileged lives have allowed us the space and time to recognize is the "sustainable" way/wave of the future.

This same uncle, I should add- to give some additional perspective to my longsuffering readers-, just saw his wife pass away a couple of years ago from cancer after desperately trying for several grueling years to find any treatments to beat the disease.
And now he is trying to aid his oldest daughter in a similar effort.
This same family also had one of their sons severely paralyzed in a truck wreck about six years ago in which he was not the driver- his girlfriend was. His girlfriend and another friend died in the crash. So it's been a rough time for this family of blood relations.

Simply put, I am at an age where longetivity, for many reasons, is in the nascent beginnings of it's most severe tests.
Lately anytime I/we spend with my mother, siblings, niece and nephews lately is accompanied by the still near presence of my late father. So even when we tell each other we want 2012 to be better than 2011 it's a gamble as to what that may possibly mean. For those closest to me it's either verging into the autumn of our time here on earth or steadily plodding through the winter which challenges the ego to remain intact along with the body.
People have to varying degrees to have "managed" with these or similar challenges somehow throughout the millennia so I don't want to unduly claim any particular hardship. In fact I still feel pretty lucky all things considered. I especially feel that way when I consider those I know and have known who have not had the pleasure of sharing the amount of time I can claim for many I have loved as well as many I have loved and lost in whatever manner that has happened.

Rose

When we arrive at my uncle's house we see a small table set with a beautiful, framed photo of my late aunt next to a small single flower crystal vase with a deep red rose in water. We greet my uncle who tells us that our cousin's downstairs and when we go down the spiral iron stairs a floor there she is laying on a couch with a blanket over her lower body skinny and frail, wan looking and her top two front teeth are missing. My sister asks her how she's doing, "Well, I'm dying." she responds with an edge of irony.
I ask her if I can give her a kiss but she doesn't seem to hear me, or, I imagine, figures, "well Bob that's up to you." But I am feeling skittish and the fact is I've seen her only once before over the last 30 years and she was healthy at the time. I pretend I hadn't asked and move around the room after standing indecisively for a moment.
She's nauseated and mentions that she is also waiting at that particular moment for a hospice nurse to arrive and tells us we'll need to clear out so she can have some privacy for the maintenance procedures the nurse will be performing.
One thing about people who are in a dire circumstance is that there ought not to be and often isn't a lot of ceremony to stand on. My cousin has always been sharp. She's a person who wouldn't seem to suffer fools gladly. I am feeling foolish enough to imagine I may be causing suffering but mostly as a gnat does to a tiger, that is, I'm almost certainly not very much a factor in the overall scheme of things as the situation is bigger than what I seem able to speak to.

I make my rounds in the room and then see her talking to someone and eventually after some moments find it in myself to come by the sofa she's laying on. I ask her if she's taking any Chinese herbs and she says, "Should I be?". Of course I don't have anything specific to suggest and mention that I had a friend who they helped enormously. I curse myself silently for not having phoned my friend and then wonder, once again, if I did in fact phone him and talk to him. If I did- it was now some months ago and it seems unlikely that even a Chinese herbal advocate would have spit out specific remedies and I suspect that I wrote the name down of a clinic or doctor and it washed away over the intervening months of distracting other activities and daily priorities that seems to be the mode of my life these days. These years.

As the evening moves on my Mom seems at times frail herself- especially after she sees the shape my cousin is in, then feisty and as though she may have had enough wine to help her be so. She's brought a bottle of wine I brought to her house at the birthday of my niece. She insisted I get some more bottles so I obliged her by bringing two. I'd actually bought three and another- another "cheapie" but a brilliantly flavored Petite Sirah from a California vinter, McManis. But I downed one of the "Bitches" and the McManis by myself in a day and a half of getting them. Now the "Bitch" is a Spanish import, a Grenache actually, that's being marketed by two California guys according to the proprietor who runs one of the two liquor stores closest to me. It's in a bottle with pink labels with black graphics but as loudly as it announces its rather silly, irreverent presence its also a reasonably mellow, fruity red wine that's pretty easy to drink with (to me) no real ill effects. When I'd brought a bottle up to my Mom she couldn't resist bandying in front of the unsuspecting and laughing with a few choice comments.

My uncle- who has always had a great way about him tells a corny joke before the dinner about a delicious bowl of nuts these rambunctious young boys at their grandparents are eating. They keep finishing them off and so their grandfather keeps bringing them a new bowl. Finally one of the boys says that would love another bowl at which point their grandmother comes out of the kitchen and informs them that she's too tired to suck the chocolate off any more of them. At this my uncle says "bon appetit!" and laughs.

Wine

My uncle, in his grief and loneliness, has also met a woman who has become his companion. She is a widow who was there applying herself to cooking and helping out in this evening. I came to like, in the few hours I was there, that she seemed "centered" with a fair confidence in her bearing. My uncle's late wife, that is, my Mom's "big sister" was also very much like that. It also hasn't escaped me that men, more than women seem to need companionship when the love of their life has passed. Toward the end of the evening my Mom was teasing my uncle's companion with the bottle of "Bitch". My uncle's "girlfriend" took the silly encounter that felt a bit rude to me with aplomb. I think it was a test passed. I got a bit embarrassed, truth be told at that little scene. My Mom was not making a serious point or being mean and did seem a bit overlubricated but I thought briefly of the joke about Jesus speaking to the townspeople who were converging on the prostitute to stone her. Jesus says to them "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." There is a pause and then suddenly a rock comes flying though the air and hits the prostitute in the head. Jesus turns to look deep into the crowd and says, "Mom, sometimes you really piss me off."

Throughout much of the evening I ended up chatting one of my uncle's sons who's tall, darkly handsome and has a very wry soft-spoken sense of humor that seems as amused in a kindly way as he is, in fact, amusing. I always get the impression he's been intoning barely audible wisecracks about his family and the situation at hand for a number of years. Turns out that he seems to be my family's favorite. That's easy to understand. Another son did all of the fishing for the abalone which he said he loves doing and he also said we had to come by more so he could cook for us. He's quite a cook apparently. This wing of my family was very much an outdoors type and still look very fit and trim. The boys look a bit like my father's side of the family with bronze-toned to darker shades of brunette hair and pretty hazel, green and brown eyes. They take a bit after their Dad's Irish genes as my Dad's side seem to take after the Welsh. Of course in my family it's a mixture and my cooking, abalone-diving cousin actually looks a bit Italian or maybe even Basque rather like a friend of mine from high school.

My sick cousin's son was there- another very handsome young man who I'd heard disturbing stories of estrangement form his mother about. But he was there and evidently living with my uncle at my uncle's insistence. He seemed to be okay though obviously a bit depressed about his mom's state and I'm not sure if any of my side of the family had met him before or at least in recent years. I hope things go okay for him- he's certainly got good looks- seems like someone should be appreciating them for him, poor guy.

Bridge

At leaving time I tried to remember the turns in the road that at least two cousins and my uncle gave me but like a novice dancer who steps out to the floor only to realize one of his shoe laces had come undone but that it would look bad to have to bend down and tie them I gamely but a bit shakily ended up leading my brother's car down the hill where my uncle's house is and into the flatland of the Marin county locale we were in. We both hit the freeway south, my brother and other family to go east back to their side of the bay and me to go south over the Golden Gate Bridge with no stops along the way in San Francisco till I get back to PLC in Santa Cruz.
I realized I hadn't been over the Golden Gate much in years and couldn't remember traveling at night from the north to south before. The bridge was softly illuminated and very spectacular, even a bit surreal looking with it's big elegant Art Deco towers. The exit road into San Francisco was a bit sharp and I remembered that this was the famous Doyle Drive which was considered one of the riskier roads around a high volumn traffic area in the entire Bay Area. It does seem like someone should have rerouted that road to a more mild transition from an iconic bridge to a great city but I guess it's a job for the future.
I made it back to Santa Cruz to find PLC'd had a miserable day with neurological symptoms spiking in my absence. Maybe a pet needs to be reconsidered. I know someone who works at an animal shelter.

January 25, 2012

Hi Sports Fans

Okay this isn't a blog or even a post - it's a "place saver".

While I haven't been around lately..well, actually, that's not true. I've been around a lot! Er, I mean at this site!!!!- and several others. But I've found it hard to stitch together enough meager minutes to type anything I want to subject anyone unfortunate enough to be led to check out the ravings, of yours truly, to.

I figure 5 minutes of semi-concentrated thought is the least of prerequisites.
And I've been failing that test/criterion.
This post is the exception to that rule.
But I'm going to try to post a bit of sumpin' by this weekend or late Friday night about how it's going around me.
First- nothing dire- but I miss you guys and my work (I mean to say my "job" by which I mean that mechanism by which I am allowed to spend money toward things that make my partner's and my life less short and brutish) seems surreal and as though it's being directed by a demented auteur of the film world who prefers folks under him to suffer for their daily bread and not necessarily for any "good" reasons that I can figure out.
But, I digress, the point being:

I. Biggles is back in Cali! I'm pretty sure that should take about 15 electoral votes from Texas and deposit them in sad, benighted California's electoral "stash".

II. "My" 49ers have lost a chance, and a football game, to titilate their fans (including me) with the appropriate "bread and circuses" I'd like to figure myself deserving to be accustomed to.

III. We're watching Tee Vee and I think our current fave is a Yankee adaptation of a BBC show called "Shameless" which is now showing on, appropriately enough, "Showtime".

But more on these, the weather, sports and the worlds of finance and politics when I return in a couple 'la days.
On Saturday we're (PLC and me) going up through the frozen tundra to Hayward to help celebrate my niece's birthday.
Okay the temp will be in the 40s to 70s so it's not a "frozen tundra" but football season's ended for us San Franciscans so it's time to make fun of the pre-eminent football cliches of our current era (Wisconsin- and Green Bay, Wisconsin'S "Packers" to be specific). That's what losing fans do in these sit-chee-ay-shuns.
By the way my niece is the person who organized my fam's and PLC's and my own journey to Vegas this last Christmas.
I deem her the "gem" of my family. And I'm partial to gems as well as to members of my surviving family.
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QUIZ BEFORE NEXT (theoretical) POST:
Who is this man- has he stolen something and is he trying to run away before anyone catches him?

Who are these guys and which one is gay?
And do I have the "hots" for him? For them? (I know I'm "too 'olde'": I can only say unto you, "shuddup!")

Here's a sport I don't care about but I found the guys' contact in it eloquent: do you know (or care) about the sports teams these guys represent? Hint: I know who they are and from whence/where they play- but, honestly, I don't care either.
I just thought it was kinda purty.
The above photo is actually the visual answer to my first question. He has been villified by fans in that way that tells the world that most of us have no power or love for what we do and thereby take it out on guys like this who've inherited a situation as murky, poorly organized and difficult as our own. We want heroes- and this poor (actually monetarily rich as it turns out) guy gets the brunt of it because OUR bosses are assholes! But this year he's done about everything he can to do and everything he can do he's done almost perfectly.
I also think Ryan Gosling might play him in the movie.
He's cute!
And nice- from all I can see.
And rich.
Damn- those 15 extra electoral votes can't come soon enough:
A Newt can regenerate chopped off legs and arms- is this fair?

CALIFORNIA UBER ALLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

((I'll try my best to make Nigeria a Cali-subsidery----inside joke. I've got two new readers. At least until today.....we'll see.
They are both splendid, worthy fellows whose life experiences have been totally different.
"Jamie" and "Chuckles"- I promise I'll never mention your names!
:
Deal?)

(???????????????)

December 13, 2011

Pearls of Thisdom

Style and Culture
The "style" part
Lately- well, okay, actually for the last several years- I can’t seem to find a pair of pants in any store that reliably fit my inseam. As a result I end up rolling up- as neatly as I can, mind you- the bottoms to make a kind of cuff thus resulting in me looking as though I’m going to a casting call for a remake of a Bowery Boys movie only these Bowery Boys have already mostly had their prostate surgeries and colonoscopies, hunt the shopping news for cut-out coupons and, thanks to the internet, have "dates" for Saturday night.
In the increasingly "good" old days I used to complain that my body size was equivalent to the average in-shape but stocky Chicano or Asian guy so most of the clothes that fit me were sold out unless I got there early in the season to throw an elbow into the chops of theses guys’ wives (or in the cuff-attired Bowery Boys' cases, Moms) to get "first dibs". Now I’m perilously close to having to settle for getting my current clothing needs by mail order from "Bert’s House of Circus People".
Recently on several of these cold early mornings of late Fall I have been reminded of this fact while squishing myself downward on one of my unfortunate knees to do my cuff routine. It's become my wake-up excercise routine to put on my socks and try not to pass out.

We both are on the verge- and as you get older these "verges" have a longer and longer cusp till any actual action transpires- of joining a gym. It's been a 10-year hiatus for me after a fairly avid 6 years of gym -going before that. Before that I was younger and a hell of a lot more active.
If we get past the cusp of gymphobia- which we both have; PLC's due most to pain, mine due mostly to not wanting to go it alone and both of us because of our respective wounded vanities- you'll get a full report of today's trends in modern gym-rattery.

I wouldn't advise holding your breath just yet but we're getting closer to allowing you to inhale about it sooner rather than later.
　
The "culture" part: films
At the last several months of dusky, nighty-night end of the days PLC and I have been improvising with our entertainment options- I mean besides watching me try to fold my cuffs for a few yuks.
We've brooked the slightly lean time right before the tee vee media has to give up the ghost due to the World Series (now long concluded) as none dare challenge its perceived hegemony on the ratings front. But even after that there are also the interest-repelling lacunas during the preamble and post-partum depressions of the Christmas season when we celebrate that the mega-corporate-world-economy of foreign-made crap at slave wages still endures and, of course, before we get to that- "Turkey Day".
"Turkey Day", also known as American Thanksgiving, is a holiday that seemingly demonstrates that we as a nation of idealists have the American Native Indians to "thank" for teaching us how not to starve to death during our initial winters even though we infamously slaughtered them out of our righteous Puritan instincts a few years later because we seemed to have noticed after we were better fed that they hadn't really ever worn enough clothes for our sensibilities and thereby enhanced the Devil's own bidding.
I guess a modern equivalent might be bombing the crap out of Iraqi and Afghanistani civilians as "collateral damage" to "free" them and then leaving behind unexploded cluster bombs to blow up their children and divvying up the available resource and oil reserves with our cronies as our reminder that "freedom isn't free".
No sirree, Bob- unless you've already secured your own nuclear arsenal freedom's really, really terribly expensive.
But back to the truly important cultural realities : we've been slogging through lotsa reruns we may have missed and when that’s not enough we're reduced to sifting through Netflix's typically second- and third-tiered offerings (oh, how the mighty and once-innovative have fallen) or a bit of Amazon Instant Video for our few surviving faves in the realm of televised twaddle that for piggy-spirited contractual reasons aren’t available to us folks through our ridiculously overpriced cable provider.
We’ve actually managed to slip a few movies in at this time when the Summer blockbusters have abated but the late year Oscar fodder has yet to be overstuffed into a two week window or whatever it is in order to qualify for the resultant awards.
You know the period of the year- it comes down to a choice between the fifth movie sequel of something for the kiddies as they drag their glazed-eyed ‘rent-al units to something starring the voice or actual corporeal presence of Tim Allen versus, perhaps, Tyler Perry's latest - "Medea Annexes Poland".
Yet we have still been able to eke out a run or two to the local thee-a-tuhs to see "The Ides of March"- with which we were both a bit underwhelmed even with Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman notwithstanding and then "Moneyball" with Brad Pitt and, once again, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and that film we both thought was great. It’s the best I’ve seen Mr. Brad Pitt in- he really fits the role and is superb in it and while it’s ostensibly about the subject of a particular year in baseball it absolutely does not require a love for that particular sport to enjoy at other levels.
Later on we watched Mr. Pitt again in Terrence Malick's love-it-or-hate-it "Tree of Life". We were both fascinated and a bit unsettled by it's structure as it weaves the creation as well as the lava-spitting, star-bursting continuity of the very universe itself within the mortal and often frayed threads of a young Texas family coming of age in the 1950s. "The Tree of Life" is certainly an experience worth trying out and visually it is stunning.
Whatever else one may conclude about "Tree" I suspect it's safe to say most people will at least say, "There's something you don't see every day." BTW, PLC and I decided we liked it a lot.
And as long as I'm luxuriating in the realm of male star turns we also saw yet another Ryan Gosling flick, "Drive". We both adored "Drive". It's a bit violent at times but much more Euro-stylish and sexy than any descendants of Indian-killers deserve. Mr. Gosling is some sort of classic hero/anti-hero in this one. A man of mystery with hints of horrifying evil and incredible compassion and tenderness as well. I haven't seen everything Mr. Gosling is in but I'm fairly certain PLC and I must now both administer psychic BJs to his aura on his demand. As if.........
Ryan Gosling
I think for pure bang-for-the-buck "Drive" is my favorite film of the year. This may not be the same as the "greatest" or "best" of the year but it left me and PLC in a rarefied atmosphere of its own and we both grooved on it's impact on us. Albert Brooks- a comedian's comedian as well as an accomplished film actor is outstanding as the bad guy- and there's a fair amount of competition amongst the film's bad guys for that honor.
　
　
The "culture" part: the music goes round and round
Fallin’ for any straight guys lately?
It's not that I don't realize that's sort of a cruel question- after all don't ALL of us already have enough on our plates without courting gratuitous frustration?
Well for me the latest incarnation of that issue came to fruition several weeks ago when I stumbled upon a couple of music sites as a result of some bored web surfing during lunch at work. In my meanderings I noticed a site based on a bokk called "1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die" .
This in turn led me to this Romanian Online Radio Music site which featured those 1001 albums. The first thing I discovered is that some of them were jumpy and distorted sounding on this site while others were almost pristine.
Faced with the prospect of listening to something "new", that is, something older and considered classic or important but which I had never gotten around to checking out for whatever reason I ended up checking out the tried and true as I so typically do and earplugged myself in for several hours at work while listening to T.Rex’s "Electric Warrior" and "The Slider" reconfirming my feeling that both are brilliant albums by a gifted poet/singer/musician and daring to read the odd review in between songs from the odd- or perhaps all-too-ordinary in this case- reviewer several of whom can’t seem to stop damning Marc Bolan’s creations with faint – or at least overly qualified and therefore compromised praise.
Marc Bolan
Oh well, no matter. When I got home I shared this discovery with PLC who then suggested "Spotify" – the new music site I’d heard about but never sampled. Turns out it’s free if you can tolerate the occasional commercial and a bit of hype about "upgrading" where, no doubt, the site hopes to make any actual income from.
The next day I'd gotten a whim to serenade myself with the very young, and very late Jeff Buckley’s dad, better known to me as Tim Buckley.
Jeff's dad, Tim, was also, sadly, very late and up to the time he died, very young and very hot and very talented as well. Taking a leaf from my book of whims the week before when I decided I had to hear what Oasis was all about -I listened to one website's verdict of their 10 greatest songs and liked what I heard quite a bit- I decided to wander into one of the Tim Buckley albums I had not heard much of before, "Star Sailor".
"Star Sailor" I had been warned by one online site fan was "not for everyone" but the vocal pyrotechnics and extremes were- in one sense - exactly what I wanted to hear.
On "Star Sailor" Tim Buckley sounded at times like everything from Tarzan yodelling his classic jungle call to Yoko Ono in full keen mode and all points in between with his amazing and unique Irish jazzy yet psychedelic tenor. Following the squiggly and acrobatically startling path of his voice is like riding a horse you dared yourself to hop on knowing that you will be thrown off exhilarated rather than worse for the wear.
Tim Buckley
What else is art for?
This Buckley was a master working with imperfect accompaniments- not that the musicians around him weren't excellent- they were- but he was working in a road even by standards of the 1960s were hardly trodden down with use.
At some point I WILL hear everything this man did on record I imagine.
And it comes out here
Later that day I was reminded of another fascinating tenor at the beginning of the 60s- Gene Pitney. But I remembered Pitney for even more than his songs.
When I was on the cusp of puberty Gene Pitney's voice was embarrassingly erotic to me. It was deeply affective in a manner similar to what a glimpse of Alain Delon or James Dean in a movie was. Pitney sang with an almost adenoidal tone that was open and vulnerable but beautifully modulated.
I'd seen his image on albums or maybe a magazine cover and he had a dark-haired, cleft-chinned, black-eyed good looks that I wasn't sure was as handsome if just seen apart from his voice. Together his looks and voice made him beautiful.
It seems like light years ago that a love that dared not speak it's name had to make do with the odd, accidental purchase on any twig or branch of support on the way down the canyon wall free-falling to the thin sliver of a river that was the future of whatever my life would be.
But here and there I was caught and exposed to my desires that I suspected and finally realized would not fade away or be grown out of. Those handfuls of images of Gene Pitney revealed a slim, gently elegant frame and look even in those days of the faux-spontaneous publicity shots used for album covers or magazine stories. Candid was as remote as "coming out" back then in the decade that ended up changing everything.
Hearing Gene Pitney singing "Town Without Pity" on the radio was riveting to me, the voice and the sentiment of the song ensured all buttons were pushed and held down till the last note reverberated.
In a slightly earlier era perhaps I would've been held still by the voices of Johnny Mathis or Johnny Rae but for me it was Gene Pitney- the first and most romantic figure in music of my youth.
Gene Pitney
A few years ago I remember reading that Gene Pitney had suddenly died. He had been in the middle of a concert tour in Wales and had gone to bed and had been found there by someone checking up on him the next morning. In the UK and Europe Pitney had a more durable fanbase who seem to have stayed with him through several musical eras. He'd died of heart failure after that last concert in which he received his last, loving standing ovation from his fans. I remember reading that and feeling a twinge for this man I never met. Simply put I was gratified that an old love of mine had still reached into others' hearts and been loved in return right up till the end.
Afterwards I scoured the net to find out any details about him I hadn't known. All these years later I had wondered if, in the confessional style that was so popular lately, anyone had ever intimated that Pitney was bi- or even gay. I'd read a couple of accounts that mentioned he'd had gay fans toward whom he expressed a simple acceptance and gratitude toward. It had been mentioned over the years that his voice had a quality that was almost feminine- though as one writer put it, "not to his face.".
He'd also somewhat famously reprised one of his 1967 hits "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" on a 1989 British television appearance duetting with openly gay singer and musician Marc Almond.
Asked after the show as to whether Pitney was making some kind of a statement singing that song with Almond, Pitney responded, "Well Marc is gay and I'm straight." And there the matter, for all public interest, stayed.
(-A little linkage here with my earlier mention of T.Rex's Marc Bolan; Bolan's common law wife, and mother of his child, Gloria Jones, had been the original performer to record "Tainted Love" in 1965 which became Almond's best known song as a megahit in 1981 which was also rather ironically at the start of the AIDs crisis.-)
Pitney sounds to have been regarded by peers and friends as musically adept and versatile (he had hits in Italian on the Continent and did duet albums with Country and Western legend George Jones, among others), intelligent as well as naturally gracious to others including those he worked with professionally and who returned the sentiment in kind. He was happily married with children and had lived a scandal-free life by today's microscopically neurotic standards that perhaps allowed him to respond to others from a place of confidence. Even though he'd had a few flings with women- including a rather well known one with Marianne Faithful when he worked with the Rolling Stones on one of their first albums in the 60s- he seemed like the good Catholic boy in most respects he was reputed to be. He wrote a lot of his own songs and wrote for others as well. Among those songs were "He's A Rebel" for the Crystals, "Hello Mary Lou" for Ricky Nelson and "(Like a) Rubber Ball" for Bobby Vee.
The only gay "fact" I could find about Gene Pitney is that other gay men, such as myself, evidently instinctually responded to his siren song of doomed, turbulent and unrequited love, whether we were the intended "targets" of it or not.
　
and then here, too...
Another voice from the early and middle 1960s emerged for me within a couple of weeks of my initial recent musical sojourn through the past. The voice was that of Phil Ochs.
PLC and I had watched a 2010 documentary, "There But For Fortune" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbS4ruKw2OQ I had picked out of the Netflix instant video but which had laid dormant for a while. It was revelatory for both of us as I'd known Ochs as perhaps the other great American male folksinger who had vied as the influential voice of that generation in the 1960s along with Bob Dylan.
I best remembered Ochs for two of his best known songs the haunting and poignant "There But For Fortune" and the acidly cynical, comic and challenging "(Outside of a) Small Circle of Friends".
The documentary conveys a young man with an almost sweet version of ambition who would seem to sing directly to the hearts of all of those who are now participating as the non-violent warriors of the "Occupy" movement.
His sense of egalatarian virtue would ring as true today as it did then. He was also whip smart and befriended a marvelous array of people on the left- which for me is the "right" direction in that other meaning. Among these was the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara who Chilean Military Junta leader Augusto Pinochet's military goons broke the hands of and demanded he play a song on guitar in front of an audience of other rounded up leftists who were all murdered along with Victor Jara after he led them in a rendition of "Venceremos" (We Will Win) at Chile Stadium a couple of days after the SEPTEMBER 11th, 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende- who was also murdered in the coup.
Back then we had a secretary of state, Nixon's Henry Kissinger, who said in public, "I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people" .
Ochs had been shaken and tearful after JFK's murder and was deeply shattered after the US-backed coup in Chile.
Phil Ochs

Morrissey ...... Morose-ey
　Well, we love Morrissey. PLC and I came up 80 miles to the Fox Oakland to see him. PLC had cancelled a medical appointment and rescheduled another to do so (not ideal but not critical). I took two vacation days from the crappy job I'm otherwise clinging to by my bloody fingernails to keep a day after hearing that keeping it is a shakier and shakier proposition even through December (essentially I'm in the "beatings will continue till morale improves" work mode- that is if Captain Bligh had been on the Titanic).
We're on a bare bones budget though I got the tickets before that became apparent and I splurged on an interesting place to eat, "Flora", and lodging for the night. I actually could see the Fox while we were having our meal and found it curious that the significant lights remained off and the crowd seemed rather non-chalant about standing in line. Finally right before 8pm I asked our waitress if she'd heard anything about the show and she gave me a sympathetic look and she told us it had been cancelled.
On the way back to our motel I decided we should go off certain dietary protocols so we tried to pull into a 7-Eleven near the motel for some ice cream and I hit a curb that extended out farther than it should have and it killed my front passenger tire. I was trying to put one of those damn "donut" thingies on when I realized the jack I'd put up high to keep protected had rusted anyway and while this was transpiring a drunk guy who said he could help us was, uh, distracting me. Another guy pulled up and almost wordlessly after saying he could help brought his own jack and put the faux-spare on for us. We were so grateful we gave him what cash we had in our pockets which he said he didn't need but after we gave him the money we both thought he was grateful and probably needed it (about 40 bucks) even though it seemed clear to us he was just a genuinely good guy.
Earlier in the night the cd player that's been hanging in for about 5 years in my car died.
On the other hand we "stimulated" sections of the economy, lucked into a Good Samaritan and had a good meal right before it congealed in our disappointed bellies.
And on yet the other hand (there's two of us so that's a total of 4 - but I don't wanna brag or anything) we're a few hundred in the hole but at least we weren't pepper sprayed so there's always that we can look back on. Gotta admit Morrissey is such a superb songwriter and from what we've seen on the telly a great performer but we're nervous about going up to the rescheduled concert whenever that is.
Until we can work through alla this and see the show everyday is like Sunday.
Better luck to us next time but I'm seriously thinking of trying to hit my brother up to stay at his house for a night and save on the hotel expense we shoulda saved this last time. We'll just have to clear a space in his "Hoarders"-like abode to be able to lie down. Kind of like a dog travelling in a small circle to smooth his spot for the night. I love my brother so much but I'd love to be able to help him organize his place a bit- I think he would find it cheering- I really do. But I might have to take a week off work to make a dent in the task. For all I know the Powers That Be at my job may already be arranging this possibility for me.　
　Oakland's Fox Theater
Morrissey

November 27, 2011

All Hail the Emerald City

Yes, folks, it's been a spell since I published anything. I have a couple more in the wings but I wanted to share with you some highlights of PLC's and my most recent big adventure.
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OUR TRIP TO SEATTLE
........the way up
We went up to Seattle on Alaska Airlines. The flight was pretty nice. I had seen the Cascades in Oregon and Washington several years before and a couple of decades before that but invariably they were mostly shrouded in foggy haze. That hazy view is a characteristic of water vapor from the Columbia River gorge and Puget Sound when I had visited in the Summer months. I saw the southern Oregon Cascades in 2001 fairly well and that was impressive.
You should know that as a little boy I'd always been fascinated by mountains and volcanoes. The volcanic Cascade range that spans the distance from Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta at the southern terminus' in northern Califronia to the great Mts. Ranier and Baker in Washington state up to the border with Canada was the range that most fascinated me followed in rough order by the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, the also volcanic big island of Hawaii with both Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea and the Alps with the Matterhorn and Mount Blanc and the Andes which were also dotted with volcanoes.
But Mt. Shasta, Oregon's apex peak of Mt. Hood and Washington's giant summit, Mt. Rainier, all had appeal to me above and beyond the other peaks.
I don't know if it was Chevron or Shell gasoline but one of the petroleum giants had a yearly calender of the Cascades. One year in particular there were scenes from nearby alpine lakes toward all three peaks that thrilled me.
I must've held onto that calender throughout my teen years until, like the Beatles' Candlestick Park concert tickets I foolishly sold to get cigarette money many years later it, too, finally fell non-retrievably into the dust bin of my personal history.
So with that as an underpinning of this trip I wasn't prepared for the clear view of the Cascades from the air we were able to see on the afternoon of September 19th, Monday, which would've been my late father's 82nd birthday. I actually had PLC change seats with me so he could see the mountains and I contented myself with admiring the sea touching the landmass over Oregon a hundred miles or so away with an occassional leaning over his shoulder to get the glimpse here and there.
One of the first sights that struck me was what turned out to be Mt. Shasta. Much of it's glacial snow had been melted away to the point that I wondered if I was in fact seeing Black Butte- a lower elevation volcanic outcropping of about 8000 feet. Black Butte is largely snowless much of the year but I finally realized I was seeing the summit of Shasta and the smaller cone to the western side, Shastina. More stunning than this though were the checkerboard patches of evergreen trees alternating with clear cut patches of bare earth. It was depressing frankly. The land up in northern California and southern Oregon has long been largely underemployed and in a state of ongoing depression due to the cut backs in the logging industry. Sadly, while these are good for the earth they come at a local cost to people who have lived in the region for several generations many of whom are not so sangiune about their largely involuntary contribution to a more lasting ecological environment for planetary health.
And the checkerboard below looked like a very poor comprimise to do something for everyone concerned.
We continued to get breathtaking views of Crater Lake- though I was a bit late in getting PLC to come over to take a look at that particular sight before we switched seats for the rest of the flight. The peaks in central Oregon known as the Three Sisters, Mts. Jefferson, Hood and in Washington Mts. St. Helens and finally Rainier were very evident and exciting to see more clearly from above than I ever had from ground level.
About the flight - this was the first time I'd flown in probably about 35 years - so the entire rigamarole (complicated process) of arriving early and going through the security procedures intimidated me before we left for the airport. Once there, in San Jose, I found I'd forgotten PLC's clothes. At this point I have to admit that the entire enterprise came to an abrupt, despairing halt in my mind and I was instantly hateful of my own fallibility. In one of the few times I can ever remember me doing this I actually was gnashing my teeth and actually beating my head several times on the roof of my car in frustration. We would now likely miss our flight or have to outfit PLC in Seattle which would ruin the amount of time we'd have for other things. Fortunately PLC suggested calling one of our in-home support guys and he came to our rescue with the missing clothes. Thank God, too! I was about as beside myself, as the saying goes, as I'm capable of getting.
One of the key matters of our lives together is that if I get frustrated and stressed I may as well be multiplying it tenfold and injecting it directly into PLC's bloodstream. Stress is a killer for people with chronic and/or neurological Lyme symptoms. Of course being "stressed" is about half of what I'd laughingly call my very "nature" so you can draw your own conclusions about all the exciting diversions in our daily routines this provides.
Another compounding factor is that we have to travel with multiple medicines including antibiotics that need refrigeration and some additional health-related technology- such as a bi-pap machine for central nervous system sleep apnea (another Lyme souvenier), our newish HP laptop (which we both love) and PLC's Nikon camera and a lens or two...and of course our toiletries and clothes. It's quite a maneuver no matter how ahead of schedule I try to gather everything together it remains an ongoing, open invitation to forget something. One of the last short distance trips to SF for a couple of days I'd forgotten the antibiotics. This time it was the suitcase of clothes- fortunately we were able to solve that one this time. But it is always an anxiety.
At our initial screening through the airport we simply gave our main luggage- now replete with PLC's wardrobe for the trip- to the friendly Alasaka Airline worker at the check-in. At this point I thought "wow all this talk about how arduous and oppressive the post-9-11 airport security was is really overrated."
Unfortunately we hadn't gotten to the carry-on baggage- and THAT is where all the real fun happens. Removing all metal, belts, shoes and opening our two carry-on bags, both loaded to the gills with stuff including our laptop , we had to stash them hastily in large plastic bins which now would scatter what we'd tried to neatly organize. And we had to do this -as everyone else has to- in front of a group of impatient travellers many of whom had no doubt already mastered what to take and not take to avoid this confusing phase of air travel.
The trip up, I would later realize, was a breeze compared to the much more crowded trip back in which I really did have an impatient jerk behind me who kept suggesting what I should do so HE wouldn't have to wait so long for me to get it all together. I felt like punching that asshole.
Finally, onboard the plane the stewardesses- oops! should they be flight attendants?. I guess so. Well, in any event, those attending me asked me about our trip as I was ordering a beer. When I told them it had been 30-35 years since my last flight they insisted I get the beer for free. It's the little things- I know it's kind of silly but my basic good faith in stewardi was affirmed- I mean attendents. Actually they used to be airline stewardesses and stewards. Maybe I'll get a cute steward next trip. I used to know one back in the 70s.
　
..........being there
Once we landed smoothly at Sea-Tac, Seattle's main airport, we found it to be a confusing mess of a place. Escalators and elevators and walkways, oh my! Seemingly we had to wrap ourselves around and under and over the routes we had just taken to get from one part of the airport to the next. Was Madame Winchester in charge of architectural design for this place? I often hear that many airports are a logistical nightmare. I can only assume that things start out smaller then expand and pretty soon it becomes a many-layered series of compromises to move folks around to get them to their ever-expanding series of destinations.
We finally made it after a series of counter-intuitive paths were taken to the extremely unfriendly gal at the Alamo car rental agency. She was really a pill. Not helpful at all. Nevertheless we were able to finally get into our car after turning down the add-ons that seemed simply exploitative and settling for the bare necessities of a reasonably insured (I hoped) vehicle. Like I said- she was the very opposite of a helpful person. Maybe it was just the orders of her manager but somehow I doubt it. Maybe her last boyfriend turned out unexpectedly gay and she perceived PLC and me as the generic culprits of his and therefore her downfall - who knows what assumptions this young woman was under? But I doubt any of that- she was just having a bitchy day I 'spose.
We , that is, I, drove to the Maxwell Hotel which is located a few blocks north of the heart of downton Seattle. The Maxwell is a pretty groovy hotel with nice artwork and design elements. At the front desk was a helpful young guy named Aaron. I said we were tired from the trip wondering if he could suggest a nice place to eat. He asked what kind of food we were interested in and I said "Italian". He recommended one in the nearby Queen Anne neighborhood called "Enza". Aaron called ahead for us and told us to mention his name as he was familiar with the restaurant and the owner.
When we went out to eat that night his recommendation turned out to be an early highlight of our trip. "Enza" had very nice decor, high ceilings and good window tables looking out on the street which was a view of a neighborhood with a lot of local charm and looked to be a major destination for a lot of college-aged and early 30-something's. Along with the Capitol Hill neighborhood that boasts Seattle's best known gay community these two neighborhoods became quick favorites of ours in the short time we spent here.
"Enza" is run by the woman who created all the menu items. A native of Sicily she had a classic accent and was really sweet to both PLC and me. We loved the food and said so and so further enhanced an already pleasant experience into one of our favorites in recent memory. Adding to the flavor of the place was a musical soundtrack with popular songs in Italian by a series of mostly male singers which was a refreshing change of pace for us both. The place was also immaculate and I was surprised it wasn't more crowded. We later heard that we probably went a bit early for it's peak time and that was alright with us anyway. PLC's Pasta Forno was magnificent and I had a filet mignon dish that was also excellent. I had my usual glass of wine- or two- with my meal a very nice Montepulciano d'Abruzzo that agreed with me and my meal.
The two other features of our trip that probably stood out in high relief were the fine restaurants we ate at for breakfast, lunch and dinner and the number of times I got us lost trying to follow my own written driving directions through the Seattle area after consulting the Internets and maps. It was like wearing both suspenders and a belt and having your pants fa;ll down anyway.
Maybe it's just me but Seattle seemed to be about the most difficult place I've ever driven due to streets that are one way, discontinued or that morph into another name. I had a comically bad time negotiating and I hate to admit we spent more time than I would've liked getting lost and worried about getting lost. One of the ironies about this was that our hotel was in direct view of the Space Needle. We were less than a half mile away and yet I seemed to have had to endure the travails of Ulysses to navigate our way back to our hotel with even that rather obvious landmark as a guide.
In our better moments we joked with each other about my getting lost but in our less comfortable times it was not pleasant and I had both anxiety about my ineptitude and frustration about the dilemmas that we kept encountering as a result. I still think that starting off having checked and rechecked our bags numerous times before we left Santa Cruz and yet still finding a way to have forgotten PLC's suitcase full of clothes was an omen of things to come. I usually pride myself in being resourceful and also in having a very precise geographical sense but I was no match for lovely Seattle.
The fact above and permeating through this entire experience was that PLC and I were both coming off a very rough week and we were both tired and in need of new scenery and diversion. We did manage to have those as well but it was not easy. No question to either of us that even so it was a trip we'd take again.
A beach at Vashon Island ; the water meeting the land is a dead giveaway.
One especially illustrative trip detail happened on our second full day in town on Wednesday after we'd taken the ferry across Puget Sound over to Vashon Island. I used to have an old high school aquaintance who'd lived there for years. I never visited him- we weren't really "buddies" in any sense. Anyway , this island was another example of a charming community, clothed in forests, harbors and interesting shops along the main island road. At one point we'd taken a side route to get a closer look at one of the harbors. Well we finally figured that there was no easy route out so I turned around on the road we were on whereupon we travelled far and long enough that both of us thought it seemed a bit weird. We actually passed the same groups of people going in the same direction it seemed even though we'd reversed course a couple of times. Like a recurring social tableau on an old "Twilight Zone" we seemed stuck in a kind of loop where logic need not apply for any open position. We asked a couple of women we'd both noticed about 3 or 4 times in trying to get our bearing for directions and finally found our way back to the main town where we'd had breakfast at a famous foodery called "The Hardware Store" - a meal which would've been very good except that we'd both failed to realize we'd ordered eggs with a heavy jalapeno presence.
Once we'd made it back to the island's main town we were able to drive easily (finally!) back to the ferry terminal after we'd satisfied our curiosity looking around a little more at the some of the local art galleries and shops.
We made "Twilight Zone" jokes during our Vashon Island lost moments and then after the fact. PLC also mentioned folklore about people becoming lost beyond reason when trying to make their way around an island. Like the mountains and forests do in Germany and many other places I'm sure islands have their own mythology spanning various cultures. There's something about the more or less "circular" fact of all islands as they are surrounded by water that has its own branch of the mystical.
Come to think of it the main section of downtown Seattle is also an island. A friend of ours says we got lost because Seattle and California have differing tectonic plates affecting them and it throws off the radar of those not familiar with it. Who knows? Not me. At least we have few theories to rationalize with.
I made a point for us to eat well in Seattle. The first night was exemplary and so was the next morning when we went to the Capitol Hill district to have breakfast at the "Coastal Kitchen". I can't remember exactly but at least one of us got the smoked King salmon with eggs and hash browns and I think I may have gotten the Farmer's Omelette with ham. We almost always exchange a sample of each of our plates so we have an idea what's being served. I know at least one of you guys reading out there doesn't touch meat so you'll have to forgive all the carnage in the repastes of our choices. BTW when I first met PLC he was a vegetarian- obviously my ability to be a bad influence on others paid off in time. The food was expertly seasoned and truly tasty for that morning's breakfast.
That evening, our second in Seattle, we wanted to eat at a new dinner establishment so we phoned a Santa Cruz friend who we'd understood to have recently moved to the greater Seattle area. As it turned out our friend was in fact only staying for periods of time up there and so didn't have any suggestions and said maybe we could eat again at the restaurant we'd enjoyed the night before. Neither I or PLC was that thrilled to go back the very next day as we had planned on going back to eat there for our final dinner of the trip on Thursday. But we opted to take our friend there anyway who'd told us he would meet us at the restaurant. Our second eating experience there was not quite as enjoyable as the first and perhaps our friend had a bit to do with that. He's taken to wearing a bone in his nose as jewelry and as he got out of his car in the parking lot we saw that he now had decided to wear a fox tail as an enhancement to his attire. He wore it right where a fox would as a matter of fact. Our friend is a bright guy who teaches photography and is a proud member of a Radical Faeries group, or two, as well.
Mama Enza didn't bat an eye but I guiltily felt a bit sheepish and later found that PLC had felt similarly. In any event we had a somewhat self-conscious but friendly din-din and then parted company after the meal. Our friend was doing a study of a community south of Seattle that is considered the most ethnically diverse in the United States. He is a good guy with alert instincts and certainly not fearful about expressing himself and I admire that he seeks to transform the world around him starting with himself as an example. I resisted the notion to tease him about "getting a little tail myself"- even though I was sure he would've laughed. I figured he may had already heard that one by now.
Orchid (l) and another flowering plant (r) in Volunteer Park Arboretum.
In between our breaky-poo and our din-din we had managed to get up to Volunteer Park that first full day in town and ended up checking out their arboretum- it's a wonderful one with a nice vareity of flora. PLC took a number of photos in the late afternoon as a result of our traditionally late mornings but he had to do it with a dwindling battery capacity which put a slight damper on it. Our morning rising to meet the day is typical when I don't work and he doesn't have medical appointments or other tasks to handle. We keep saying we're going to get up earlier "the next day" but maybe a half an hour earlier is a major achievement. That was a bit frustrating here in Seattle but we were here to relax- at least when I wasn't behind the wheel of our rent-a-car and suspecting that we were on the verge of being lost.
The Asian Museum, here , pictured conveniantly closed- I guess someone told them we were coming.
Volunteer Park also houses the Asian museum which was closed unfortunately that day. It looks intriguing from the outside architecture but as with so many other attractions and neighborhoods it will have to wait for a return trip someday we both hope will be sooner rather than later. The park also houses some of the more notorius gay cruising grounds around dusk and at night but that's not really on the agenda for us for several reasons. And at this point in my life being a needy, pudgy, older 'ho just doesn't feel like the best career move : in an alternate universe- sure, "last one into the bushes is a rotten egg!" But here on Earth-- not so much.
After the Park we retreated to the hotel and rested just a bit before having to gather ourselves up for dinner.
The next day was our ferry boat ride to Vashon Island and we'd decided to eat a late breakfast or lunch there. The trip over was beautiful and very fast- about 20 minutes. The last time I was on a ferry boat was about a zillion years ago sitting behind a group of nuns going to Catalina Island off the Los Angeles coast. The nuns were laughing and having a great time as I sat behind them feeling green in the gills with a medium-grade level of sea queasiness. That trip took a bit longer than 20 minutes though and the seas were probably less sheltered. As a child I still remember my folks driving our car onto the ferry and going across the bay to the East Bay and back to San Francisco. It seemed very exotic and exciting back then to me and still always has a tinge of that aura.
Both to and from Vashon the view of an incredibly large looking Mt. Ranier and the sea air of Puget Sound and both the quaint looks of a ferry boat for the first time in a while as well as the several very good looking young men who were among our co-passengers and commuters kept us entertained. I have to mention that one thing that seemed almost odd to me was the preponderance of young white males I saw around the Seattle area. Not a lot of children and not a lot of elderly- though that can't actually be true. There's never a shortage of either in Santa Cruz or almost anywhere else I've been in California. Seattle has a large Asian and Pacific Islander community too but it still seemed to me to be a locale with more homogeneity than I'm used to. Details like that are a pretty good indication that you are experiencing a cross section of people limited by certain chosen activities and times I think. There was so much more I wanted to explore the last time I was here by myself. I'd hoped to drag PLC to all the sights I'd enjoyed previously as well as trail-blaze the ones that would be new for both of us but time simply didn't allow it. Again, maybe the next time.
Also while on the island PLC and I went into an art gallery with high end jewelry and I flirted with the notion of getting us both stylish gold rings but the price was prohibitive and the fact is, now almost two months later, I am still paying off the expenses and will continue to catch up for a few months more. We had a nice conversation with the proprietor and he was originally from the northern Great Lakes area and made a joke about the locals in Seattle complaining about the cold rainy, weather, intoning , "wimps!", with a laugh. As I always do when leaving a high end joint after just being a lookey-loo (sort of like a "window shopper" but never buying anything) I tell myself, "well dear you couldn't have possibly bought anything there until you have the Bank of America president as a hostage so just chillax, bee-yotch!"
Uh, actually, I never tell myself that- I just figure someday I might do a better job of saving.
Hey!- It could happen.....maybe. Well, prolly not - no matter, really.
As I said already we made our way back from Vashon Island after one of us channelled Rod Serling's mom and asked some ladies for directions.
On the way back to the hotel after our excursion I tried to skirt near the Pike Place Market a Seattle landmark that claims it's 1907 birth makes it the longest continuing market place in America. I got derailed and I annoyed my partner by, once again, insisting I was pretty sure I knew how to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the dockside railroad tracks and back alleys that were indeed near to but not precisely at Pike Place Market.
Pike Place Market- this is apparently a neon sign signifying it's whereabouts to those benighted souls without GPS.
Ahem, in time I finally found the Northwest Passage back to the Maxwell Hotel (actually it was northeast....I think). Once there I again threw myself on the mercy of the ever-helpful young concierge, Aaron, as to where we might eat dinner tonight and he gave me several suggestions and then got us reservations at the "Six Seven" after I had settled on it. The "Six Seven" is actually the restaurant inside the Edgewater Hotel which is right on the waterfront of Puget Sound on or near (let's not get fussy now about exactitude) Pier 67 a few blocks north of Pike Place Market.
By the time we had figured out where to park and that the address WAS where the restaurant was supposed to be I still felt that we were walking into a gigantic and extemely upscale Senior Prom we would appear to be crashing as a pair of defrocked chaperones on hard times at a fancy hotel with still no actual sighting of our restaurant. PLC assured me this had to be the place and so it was.
The food was very good though for the life of me I cannot remember what we ate except I think we may have had oysters as an appetizer but when I looked at their current online menu I couldn't quite decide if that were true. What is true is that we were in an aquatic wonderland of seafood,and for the most part our menu reflected it.
　
Our waitress at the Six Seven was very engaging and bright and we both liked her a lot. Later we remarked to each other that she really reminded us of an actress but we couldn't quite put a name to it. Perhaps we were thinking of performers because we had originally discussed going to a theater to see a movie- even though PLC would've preferred to see live music. I think the movie was gonna be "Drive" with Ryan Gosling. But time and logistics seemed not to be in our favor and by the second day I desperately wanted to hone us down to maybe a couple of essential activities for each day and leave it at that.
I know- I'm no fun.

Also there was a very young looking, slightly nervous young man who was attending to water and bread and the like. He was cute in a sort of "Awww- how sweet he is!" kind of way. There was also a young man about the same age with elegant Japanese features- he was beautiful- and he was attending the wine and salad duties. PLC had to use the restroom and as he was gone I'd noticed the first young boy and the second Japanese featured cutie walking together back to the kitchen all but attached at the hips in a manner I took to be affection beyond merely professional protocol. It charmed me again when I mentioned it to PLC. There really is an abundance of so much beauty in this world whatever your sex, preference or any combination thereof. And we use to be and at times are definitely- almost all of us- still "that way" at least from time to time. Hey, look, you can believe what you want but I have noticed that when the moon and Venus, for example, are in a certain relationship to each other that those of us favored by those rays appear more prominent and at our esthetic best in those times as judged by the reactions of others. Oh, we may transmorgify back into something less highly-priced on the menu once the aspect passes but hey, whadda ya want fer free?
And so the night concluded with me firmly watching my street signs and even with an improvised modification on-the-fly to my meticulous directions we found our way back to the arty, elegantly arrayed Maxwell for our surrender to that night's rest.
The next day we decided to go to Pike Place Market and got there with less event than we'd been experiencing. At least that's the best I can do, now two months later, in my recollection. We walked around the upper alley level which really was bustling with a wide array of shops catering to those who wanted souveneirs as well as fish markets where some youngish guys were doing a routine of throwing and catching large salmon and the like to set them into a bed of ice all the while yelling out the particulars merits of each specimen like carnival barkers for the crowd's interest and amusement. Lots of small and larger cafes and dessert shops, bakeries, clothes stores, galleries, craft shops and other odds and ends filled three stories of a few blocks of buildings and then even more across the alley on the next block which descended to the water. It was a carnival of cheer and distraction with a decidedly older feel from any modern counterparts such as a typical mall or megamall.
PLC and I looked around, he'd brought his camera and took some shots of the scene. We finally decided today would be a lunch day after looking at a few restaurants in the complex. Though we weren't sure what exactly to expect we ended up at "Matt's" as we came to remember it (actually called "Matt's in the Market") in the top, or third, story with a nice window view of the street below and out toward the sound.
Pictured above is a strange squat, little man in a hat who kept following us around. We simply couldn't seem to shake him despite our best efforts- he's pictured here at "Matt's in the Market".
I ordered the barbeque pulled pork sandwich and PLC got the grilled albacore sandwich. I think we might have also gotten a beet salad and some fried oysters for starters. I also had a beer- it was a European amber or lager- sorry I can no longer remember.
The food at "Matt's" was absolutely superb. As per our usual practice we each sampled the other's food. PLC's tuna was very good but I thought my pork sandwich was exquisite and PLC raved about it. I think it was a culinary revelation to him. I don't think he'd ever heard of it and I only had because I've been using a pressure cooker to make quick meals and pulled meats is a big fave (insert your own joke here, girlfriends!).
Everything was great about our succulent, wonderfully flavored food there and the place itself. I think it was either the owner or the manager who attended to us and now that I've read a couple of reviews in "Yelp" I realize we lucked out to get seated as readily as we did. I guess it was early. Thoroughly enjoyable and professional was "Matt's".
And wonder of wonders- as though that weren't enough- I looked up at one of the guys tending the tables and then brought him to the attention of PLC: there was a young early 20-something or somewhat younger man who was, we both agreed, one of the most beautiful young men either of us had ever seen in our lives. I made sure PLC saw it the same way I did. He was tallish but not skinny, rather he was elegantly slim but wiry, with brown hair with an absolutely beautiful face -profile, eyes, mouth, what I can only describe with that fashionista cliche "great bone structure", smooth , glowing skin and an unaffected manner. I couldn't help but think that he was either straight or if bi- or gay- so inured to being ogled that he'd developed a subtle ignoring of such phenomena in order to simply do his job without undue distraction.
There are times in this world when I would simply rather tell someone of their virtues than say, have sex with them, simply because they ARE a gift to others who see them. The whole notion of "possessing" or even "having" for a moment someone that looks like this seems insufficient and even petty.
Yes, he was that beautiful.
And we're speaking strictly in the realm of imagination here- just so there's no misunderstanding.
If you somehow, dear reader, get to "Matt's" I find it hard to believe that he would still be there. Surely some mad queen has offered to house him in a museum where, as the Beatles sang it, "all the lonely people" could worship at the shrine of this kid's presence. A sincere smile from this guy would light your days for months. Probably years. Maybe it would simply constitute a lifetime guarantee: yes, you had been to the mountaintop------ and gawwdamm it if some friggin' cougar didn't snatch him up and proceed to keep him isolated in her evil mountaintop domain before you could save him.
Oh well.
On the other hand he may still be there and suffering in the odd doublebind of being a victim to folks deciding he's too out of their league to approach and therefore leaving any place he may have gone to for companionship alone a lot more frequently than the more ordinary of us. I'm pretty sure I've seen that phenomenon before.
　
I know I'm repeating myself, but, oh well.
Let me shake my tail feathers here of the especially heavy drenching of the water of "love" a bit- or at least the tangy "chicken" broth of lust- and resume my travelogue.

Above is another strange man painted gold and in costume. He (?) was evidently paid as a professional by someone affiliated with "Pike Place Market" and he is pictured enchanting a gullible young lady with an activity related to the market in some arcane sense.
Our plan after we looked around a bit more at Pike Place was to go to Volunteer Park in order for PLC to get some more photos of the arboretum. Then we were finally going to check out the EMP Museum which I kept thinking of as the Jimi Hendrix Museum. Lastly we wanted to eat at another interesting place and we seemed to be leaning toward French food.
Actually, it was a bit later in the day than we'd hoped after we stopped at the hotel and finally made our way to the arboretum. PLC still got some nice shots but the lighting had been better the first time. The array of shapes and colors in flowers and leaves was breathtaking. At first I thought the cacti and succulent section was my favorite but the plants in the more tropical temperatures were really amazing. It seemed that I kept seeing one after another with every corner I turned and I ended up dragging PLC to about 20 plants I felt he "needed" to get a shot of.
Above is an exterior view of EMP Museum's rather dazzling Frank Gehry metallic wall.
Since the Seattle Center was literally a matter of yards away from us with the Space Needle and the EMP museum we decided to next try to see the EMP museum first which was created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000 and then go up to the Space Needle- where we'd already tried to get dinner reservations but finally had to give up on- we were too late and it was too booked.
The EMP was actually reknown as the museum with most of Jimi Hendrix's artifacts. I'd heard of it informally as "The Jimi Hendrix Museum". It is now home to exhibitions which change but we sat mesmerized by a giant screen presentation of a film of Hendrix in concert. I laughed a few times and nudged PLC at how funny and sly Hendrix was on stage as well as being the ultimate master of rock guitar. We had to drag ourselves away to check out the other exhibits about the film "Avatar" and the rock group "Nirvana" as well as costumes and photos from Hendrix's career. The areas of most interest for me were the Hendrix and Nirvana exhibits but PLC agreed with me after we left, all in all the museum was a disappointment. With all the interactive features, such as motion capturing technology that allowed visitors to manipulate the projected screen images of Avatar and Star Wars characters after being hooked up and all the i-Pod audio aids I still missed the old tech simplicity of fixed exhibits and lots of them with written texts or the occasional audio speil in a push button format. I had an overall sense that this fabulously eccentric metallic sheeted Frank Gehry building seeming somewhat devoid of involving content once inside.
I just didn't care about the sci-fi stuff but did enjoy looking at some of Hendrix's stage costumes behind glass. One green one featured prominently- or was it orange or red? Duh! Can't remember but whatever color it was it looked surprisingly smallish- almost elfin. Maybe there's natural tendency to see anything that doesn't match the image of the person in question as "bigger than life" somehow "wrong". My guess that is it being a specially stitched, even slightly homemade-looking velvet suit it had simply shrunk with lack of usage or from Seattle's moist climate. It's been over 40 years now since Hendrix died. Heck, I was still in college back then a few months before I dropped out.
As we were leaving the EMP we'd talked about paying $18.00 each just to go up to the top of the Space Needle for the view. At this point I didn't personally care but I wanted PLC to see the view on a less cloudy day than the one I was last there over 30 years ago.
But as we got to the ticket booth the guy there told us that the Space Needle would only be open for 15 minutes and then would close for about 15 hours for a private party and I guess clean up time for the staff. We figured $36.00 for a peek only to be herded out after 3 minutes or whatever we had left was a pain so we decided to put it off for the next time we were up in Seattle. We'd certainly had no luck with seeing it except from the outside this time.
We went back to the hotel and after a few minutes of rest I got onto the laptop and tried to figure where to go eat. After some input from PLC we decided on Place Pigalle - a French restaurant (the original namesake of which was a famous Parisian neighborhood named after a sculptor and famous for it's cafes) back in Pike Place Market that also had a seafood emphasis.
We did get there even after I was sweating the details I had written down for directions and encountered the fact that after dusk the elevators don't work at Pike Place Market. This was inconvenient because stairs are painful and depending on how many and how steep both exhausting and painful for PLC- good ole Lyme neuro-symptoms again being the reason.
On the way there- and perhaps I should give the gentle reader an image of me trying to negotiate the streets in Seattle with my computer generated pen-written list in one hand, the other on the steering wheel all while wearing my safety-glasses bifocals from work with the safety shields broken off because I haven't needed them for work and they looked dorkier than they already do with them on. And while I'm doing this I'm looking up from the bifocals to the plain glass part of the glasses to see where I'm driving. I'm also trying to (unsuccessfully) control my swearing and avoid potholes I'm not familiar with- which is all of them up here.
PLC kept reminding me that a rental car with GPS would've been helpful. I've never had GPS in a car but next time- fer sure, dude: it's GPS or Bust!
Looking back on all this I'm conflicted whether a film of our Seattle adventure should have Buster Keaton, Vince Vaughn or Daffy Duck playing my part. Most of the time I felt much more like Inspector Clouseau trying to navigate the roadways and make other decisions.
However, we finally made it down to the restaurant and then up afterwards via a couple of short stair flights- but PLC had been having other symptoms reemerge which I suspected and which he told me about after we eaten our meal and left. Unfortunately they were very much like the symptoms he'd been diverted from during most of our Seattle stay but had been worrisome just the week before. This was depressing to both of us.
But as to the meal and the restaurant Place Pigalle was a fairly formal establishment but the food and service were both excellent. We had oysters for the appetizers which we both thought were extremely tasty and interesting. I had duck with peas and rhubarb gastrique for my main course . I'd only had rabbit once before in my life so long ago I have no clear recollection of where or when. I wasn't crazy about it then but it was wonderful this night. I'd have to ask PLC what he had I'd guess it was a fish dish but I'm not sure (there- more shoddy "journalism" on my part- but what can you expect from a dropout?).
We made it back to the comforting Maxwell Hotel in one piece and bedded down early in order to get up early to pack and figure out a place for a breakfast before we had to rush off to the airport for our noon flight home.
I tried to prepack earlier than PLC got up so I could make the baggage lighter and more efficient for our carry-on luggage and save ourselves some of the hassle of the Homeland Security form of travel we are attempting to become inured to as a culture in rather obvious decline. I succeeded at the prepacking but the final result- if anything- was even more hectic and confusing and unpleasant anyway at the airport. Oh well, I really did try.
But before we got into the last stretch drive the next day to Sea-Tac rt I decided to go to a breakfast place that was said to be a fave of the locals called the "The 5-Point Cafe" .

In the picture above the statue of Chief Seattle, directly outside the "5-Points Cafe", guest hosts for a yellow traffic light that called in sick that day.
I'm not sure I've ever had breakfast in a place, they refer to themselves as a "family dive bar", with a better sense of humor and lack of hubris about itself than this "joint". It was absolutely wonderful and gave all the places we'd eaten a run for their money in the satisfaction of the experience in it's own funky way. I think PLC and I both had the Eggs Benedict. PLC might have gotten the Eggs Florentine- again, I really can no longer recall. But what I can recall is that these people make the best hash brown potatoes I/we had ever had in our lives. I think if there is a God he cut the potatoes and Moses, Jesus or Mohamed seasoned them with butter and they tasted like the most elegantly buttery sumptuous clouds of tastebud ecstacy with both a richness as well as a lightness competing for which particular element of those two hadpushed them over into the category of "absolutely perfect". If I was facing my last meal on Death Row I might only succeed in torturing myself to request these because I knew they would be the very embodiment of all the physical pleasure one would have to leave behind and so add to my suffering.
Amen.
About twenty yards or so outside the "5-Point's" front window on a very old traffic island there is a statue of Chief Seattle with raised right hand and humble , even- shame on me- amusing, wrap-around blanket in eternal greeting. On the "5-Point Cafe" walls there are numerous images of Chief Seattle and other arcane images from the past. "5-Point" was born the same year as my Dad- another presence who was hilarious and lacking in hubris and who I can only feel love for. I remember more contemporary restaurants/places/extended-family-dives , if you will, like "Hamburger Mary's" on Folsom Street in ravishing, ravingly GAY Olde San Francisco in the very, very early 70s' with it's funky, crazy collection of decor and kitschy artifacts. I remember working in my first Santa Cruz restaurant after my heart was cracked in half from my first boyfriend and our rocky parting- that place also was a crazy quilt of knick-knacks. That theme has become a more common element in many places since but at this Seattle establishment it's a palpable presence that has, almost miraculously to me, gone on continuing- with all the other people and places delegated to the past. The "past" that is except in my heart- where my Dad and even those dudes and dudettes at that first crazy Santa Cruz refuge and livelihood I merged with will always live on.
Seattle calls itself "The Emerald City". Well on the flight home and in the weeks after PLC and I realized and discussed that, in Santa Cruz, we already lived in a truly heavenly place many would envy. But after visiting "The Emerald City" together, in spite of the difficulties that kept insisting upon their own frustrating and banally prosaic realities from time to time, I'm fairly certain we are tempted to click our heels and intone "there's no place like home" and it might be a flip of the coin as to where we would imagine that to be.

October 19, 2011

We Went North

It's been almost a month ago but PLC and I went up on the spur of the moment to Seattle last month. There were many frustrations but there was a lot of beauty and I think we both are sure it was worth it. I keep trying to get some time to write about it- and I will. But work and our personal issues have been arduous before and after the trip, hence the gap in my posting. Well, at least that's a viable excuse for now.
More soon.

August 30, 2011

This Ain't No Fight Club

Around early June 2007 I wrote this in response to a online thread about fistfights. The thread originator is and was a very nice guy who stood up for the bullied guys against bullies. But among his more confident peer group he had a couple of fistfights and commented that occassionally he missed them.
Well that wasn't my experience but this guy was an athelete and routinely had to tussle and block and most likely lose his temper with the guys he was playing against.
Anyway the thread became kind of busy and this was my main contribution to it:

I used to get beat up almost every day of my elementary school life. It was almost always "gangs" or groups of guys but once in a while it would be a sole Alpha leader- I remember a red-headed kid named Davey Bombden- I swear that's how I remember his name though I can't vouch the spelling isn't Freudian rather than accurate.
I never learned to fight "properly". I can't tell you the number of times I had my nose punched- it always felt like I was taking water from a swimming pool- don't know why. Also I couldn't duck a punch to save my soul. I think I never got over the shock of being singled out from all of the other "shorties" and "shrimps" in my classes. I became good at running and hopping over people's backyard fences in search of short cuts to my home but I was also a nervous wreck. A really, really nervous wreck. I always knew exactly where the hands of the classroom clock were and obssesively pictured who of the gangs might be planning their after-school - or recess- recreation at my expense.
My single worst memory was of a day my little brother and I were walking home from school- we didn't usually do this together. A couple of blocks toward home and a dark cloud of my unfriendly peers suddenly appeared round the corner we turned onto. As they started to surround us I got my brother to jump with me into someone's front yard- I guess I hoped someone's mom would see us and come to our aid. But no luck - as these guys were verbally taunting me- and now my brother- they were starting to close in. I had been through this so many times but now my brother was involved. I'd like to tell you I stood up for my brother but instead I decided I was going to run back to school- a couple of blocks- and get the principle to come to our rescue. I basically knew I was leaving my brother to probably be terrified on his own but I "convinced" myself that enlisting some nearby authority would have a chance of preventing this from happening again. The principle did follow me back to the scene but the guys had all taken off and my poor brother's face was bloody and he was terrified and crying. I never forgave myself for that and my poor baby brother, I'm sure, never trusted my instincts again.
Both of my parents worked and they were, I think, panicked about what they could do. They tried to remedy the situation by enlisting me in a Judo class.
I was so militantly freaked out by the looks and smell of the class I practically flipped right there. They decided to drop that approach.
Somehow, by the time I had reached the last year of elementary school and then junior high- my family had also moved from the San Francisco peninsula to the "sunny" East Bay by this time- the physical bullying had stopped. The kids swore like sailors and were still verbally abusive on the East Bay but I didn't get ganged up on and punched. The damage had been done though and I had so much social anxiety that I would actually walk to school and I imagine that I was in a movie and somehow not merely in a "real" life alone. I would actually picture the film companies' logos as I was approaching school. One of my favorites was the 20th Century Fox intro with the drums (I could make the sounds of these by some eardrum trick I had discovered) and the trumpets. I also liked the "American International" Capitol building in sort of a swath of heavenly clouds (they made a lot of cheap, shlocky horror films of that era which I loved) and the Paramount mountain- kind of a Matterhorn-McKinley knockoff.
Fantasy and show-biz were my friends. I used my fantasies about them to distract me from a reality I never felt completely a part of.
The point of all this rambling pre-amble is to establish my credentials as a guy who was never "one of the guys" and who knew first hand about being the object of unwanted attention and the target of fists.
I guess I can say that I found that the male identity that eluded me became increasingly easier to understand the older I became. Much later in life I started to get a clue of how guys who really were friends and truly peers could get into tempermental tussles because they shared a lot of the same experiences. Obviously there's a world of difference between taking on someone who knows the score and someone who's shuddering behind the door of social acceptance. I have no doubt of that. I also suspect that my childhood tormentors were tortured in their own lives - probably by abusive parents and destructive family "legacies". Some of them probably felt something very opposite from "hate" for me and didn't know how to deal with it- wipe it out, maybe??
Still, if there's any doubt what "side" of this issue I am on I would say that the people I most admire are those who defuse a situation with the power of their mind and the honesty of their convictions. People like that can usually talk their way to a peaceful resolution- and often shame those who would provoke brutality by holding up a mirror they cannot turn from that reflects how they are betraying themselves as well as those around them.
I had to stand up to folks who seemed intent on causing trouble in the cafe I used to run back in the late 1980s. The simple fact is we occupied a building that had been a site the cops had had trouble with before. We were not that group - but some dumb habits die hard. We found it better and quicker to try to deal with and defuse situations ourselves. Falling short of presenting a good "Jesus" face to some of these tormentors I did end up wrassling around with a few guys. But even then I'd usually absorb a punch or several before I'd react with hands applied to the circumstance. Nothing serious or lasting ever happened so I was lucky. My partner, Dennis, was a much more Jesus-like guy and started to laugh and call me "Bruno" when someone would regale him with accounts from some of the more turbulent night shifts I was captain of.
But I beware of the "little" guy who has something to prove and believe me I know it's a slippery slope when one starts thinking of oneself in a way that pumps that - obviously compensating - self-image up for what seems like ones own benefit. No one truly wants to be what one hated.

May 23, 2012

White Bird

May 4, 2012

Whimpering Bangs, et al

May 3, 2012

Mom, Muses on the Web and May Day

April 10, 2012

hypnotized

February 25, 2012

Three gatherings

January 25, 2012

Hi Sports Fans

December 13, 2011

Pearls of Thisdom

November 27, 2011

All Hail the Emerald City

October 19, 2011

We Went North

August 30, 2011

This Ain't No Fight Club

bobcatg

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