Aimless Discontent

I've been in recovery for seventeen and a half years and I can say that it is like nothing I ever imaged.  Looking back I'm not sure I ever thought about what it would look like in the first place.  In the early days of therapy and then being in the rooms I just did what I was told.  I showed up each week, occupied my seat, whether that was on my therapists couch or elsewhere.  It wasn't until well into it that things started to change, and not for the better.  No one tells you during those first months that physical and/or emotional sobriety strips away the protective coatings that one has adapted to survive.  Mine where honed when I was a young child; expertly so.  Simply put, during my childhood it was develop the skills or die.  The insanity was that real.  There's a saying in the rooms, one peels away the layers like an onion working towards finding the core, those hidden things that drive us into creating our own adult insanity.  My insanity predisposed me to drink, to muck into other peoples lives, sex addiction, and having an obsession with myself.  There were a lot of layers, still are.  Within my experience of recovery there has never been an end point, just a continual journey towards health and light.  I suspect I will be on this road until I take my last breath and beyond into my next life and the one after that as I laughingly like to say.  My baggage is that potent.
When I was nearing the end of my time in therapy in 2015 I started experiencing feelings of aimless discontent.  I said that to my therapist one day, that I didn't see what good was coming of me occupying my seat each week.  He looked upon that as a good thing.  I did not.  Aimless discontent can be an uncomfortable place to be.  One looks around for inspiration or just for having a purpose to move from one day to the next and finds none.  I didn't realize at the time that in actuality aimless discontent is, as my therapist had said, a good thing.  Within it there is peace.  For too many years I lived with anxiety driven angst that colored every moment of my existence.  That is no longer the case.  Within the discontent there is clarity.  Within it there is love.  Love of oneself; and respect, particularly for the demons that once drove me to near insanity.  I told a friend recently that before recovery and for some time after I was the guy clinging, sometimes just by my fingertips, to the roof rack of an out of control bus careening on and off road.  At any given moment I did not know whether I was going to be thrown or not.  It was that bizarre.  Only I didn't even know the bus existed.  It was, simply put , my everyday reality, one borne out of my childhood experiences and the skill sets that I had honed in order to survive.
You hear in the rooms that we use the steps to re-parent ourselves.  This is true in my case.  I have done this and continue to because in many ways the adults that were charged with my care as a child were children themselves, only ones in adult sized bodies.  This is not to say that all things were insane.  They were not.  We had the essentials, a well kept home, clean clothes, good food.  We had some moral guidance albeit borne out of a fundamentalist background.  The window dressings were all there, the substance was not.  Those things like meaningful expressions of love, emotional support, a sense of real safety, the kind that allows children to explore the world knowing that the adults in the rooms have their back.  That they can take risks, step outside the box, because they have been instilled with an sense of self and genuine authenticity.  It takes real skill to provide a home where these qualities exists, where the child can explore the wonders of the world around them and still feel safe.  This is what the core of my recovery has become as I peel away the layers; providing for my inner children what they never had when we were all young.
Being a man of a certain age also drives my aimless discontent.  I am looking at retiring and what my life will look like.  Work has never been my calling.  I enjoy it.  It can be challenging though, and frustrating, wildly so at times; but for me, work has always been just a means to an end, the vehicle to which I use to fund my real life.  Gardening has always been my calling.  More recently writing too.
I am looking forward to not having the constraints of time spent at work.  There are so many things I would love to do with my friends that I can not due to my work schedule.  Equally though, I would be perfectly content with puttering in the garden each day then relaxing in the evening with a cup of tea and a good book.   Or continuing the process of finishing my novel, well a trilogy as it now exists.  I am an Old Soul, An Old Soul in the City, and Within the Sunrise have been creating themselves within me for ten years and I'm looking forward to the day when they become fully themselves. There are other novels waiting to be written, The Gripman's Daughter and another about Harriet Beecher Stowe's son Freddie who disappeared after coming to San Francisco to escape his battle scarred demons borne of his Civil War experiences.  Retirement is an exciting prospect.
A friend asked me recently if I was happy.  I said no.  I told him I have many joyous moments but I am not happy.  I am content though.  Maybe the aimless discontent is, as I said earlier. me living with the absence of the drama and angst that drove me like a bullwhip for so much of my life.  Maybe aimless discontent is me existing with some degree of a sense of self and authenticity borne of love, peace, and of clarity.  Maybe I will name it Aimless Content instead, a Content that is the result of feeling relatively free of ones demons.  Whatever this is, it is my reality at the moment and I'm grateful for it and for the breath it provides.

Endings and Beginnings

It's Midnight and I can hear the fireworks going off.  Lars, surprisingly, is sleeping in the blue chair to my right, the one that sits by the south facing windows, his head and shoulder resting comfortably against the sage green throw pillow.  I'm sitting on the sofa with my laptop resting on my thighs.  When I look at Larry he is surrounded by an aura of such serenity and peace that it takes my breath away.  Such innocence and vulnerability.
Larry is a leaner, always has been.  I have a picture of him sleeping with his brother and sister when he was a kitten, maybe two months old.  His brother, mostly white with just a touch of gray at his forehead, is stretched out length ways on their parents sofa.  Sylvia is curled up in the corner, her feet and nose nestled into the back of her brothers hind legs.  Lars is curled up at the other end, his face tucked under his brother's chin, his arms and feet stretched along his brothers face, his right shoulder resting against his brothers chest.  Larry is the same way with me.  He has to be leaning on me if he can.  Whenever we snuggle he rests against some part of me; sleeping against my ankle, my thigh, or nestled in the the crook of my left arm, his arms stretched across my chest.  Whenever we lay on the floor together he leans his shoulder against my forearm resting his chin on the back of my hand.  The intimacies of moments much like now as I sit here looking at him.
I had such moments with Crook.  And with Sylvia before him.  I cherished those moments as much as I these now.  They are what feed my soul.  I cherish those shared intimacies I have with my friends and family too.  The quiet lunches and dinners.  The raucous parties of Lotteria or Poker with my friends dogs, Coco and Maggie May, running around and through our legs chasing each other and barking as they play with such wild abandon.   I cherish the Opera and the Symphony, phone calls with friends over my morning coffee, and the ones I use to have with my Dad.  Of me leaning on them, resting my spirit, being held or holding them as we engage.  I had that with my Dad, of me leaning on him or him on me, sharing our fears and joys or just aimlessly chatting about nothing for an hour.  I miss my Three PM calls with my Dad.  Even now I still have my eye on the dashboard clock whenever I am running errands, timing them so  I would get home before Three.  Then I remember Dad is gone just as my morning cuddles by the south facing window are with Crook.  Of us resting in the sun on those summer days, falling asleep albeit briefly.  Endings can be so brutal when we lose someone so quickly.  I was in shock for days, weeks, after losing Sylvia.  During her last morning she was chasing her brother around the living room only to be dead seven hours later, wrapped in a towel, laying on the examination table in that cold lifeless room.  So it seems with my Dad.  Living a vibrant and full life one day, gone three weeks later.
This year has been one of many endings; losing Dad and Crook only months apart, the changes to my health which ended the relative settledness of my physical landscape; of completing the fourth revision of my novel I Am an Old Soul, a deeply personal project of nine years.  In many ways I suppose I have been naive about some things.  I thought that if I continued to manage Crook's diabetes, something that I was told I was doing well, he would be with me until he was Twenty.  I thought during my calls to my Dad that he would always just be there with me, his timeless energy living on.  When I shared with him in April the changing landscape of my health he said, "you're not planning on leaving me are you?"  Neither of us could have known that it would be he that was to leave, in just four short months.  Being naive I guess is not an altogether bad thing.  Naivete can have its merits as well as its downside.  One brings with it a relative serenity of being rooted in the present while the other neither warns us nor prepares us for what is to come.  New Years Eve seems to bring us endings, the ending of another calendar year, the deaths of friends and love ones, of celebrating what has been while singing Auld Lang Syne, exchanging hugs at the stroke of Midnight.  We had a New Years Eve ritual in our house when I was young.  Dad always went to De Rango's in West Racine for pizza just before Midnight.  Then about two minutes til he would arrive home with two steaming thin crust pizzas, one cheese, one cheese and sausage, a style that I have yet to experience anywhere else.   While he was gone Mom would set out the root beers in iced glasses and my brother and I would get exited about the prospect of having pizza so late.  Then at the stroke of midnight Dad would flip open the lids and we would dig in.
The evening after my Dad passed I was waiting outside De Rango's to meet my maternal aunt and cousins for dinner, sitting on this large rock in the parking lot.  I was talking to my friend Paul, describing where I was and the memories that it held for me.  Riding my bike up to Nelson's Five and Dime down the street from De Rango's, entering through the back to sit at the counter of the fountain while I watched them ladle out that deep green opaque syrup out of a large ceramic lime for my Green River soda.  Memories of when they closed off the street in front for a evening of square dancing called by my Uncle Dan as he stood on a raised wooden stage in the center of the intersection.  Of the North Shore railroad, its station just down the street,  of us watching the daily runs stopping as they moved between Milwaukee and Chicago.  Of my friends and I going to De Rangos for pizza after school.  He said it sounded a lot like Mayberry, that infamous city from the Andy Griffith Show and in many ways I suppose it was; however, in many ways it also wasn't.  Whichever, that life I was remembering in that moment is also long gone.
This New Years also signifies new beginnings for me; the last full year I plan to be working, celebrating my Sixty-Second birthday; I still gasp at the thought of being that old.  The handing over of my novel to an editor, the new life that Larry and I will be creating as we continue to let go of all the structures that defined our lives while Crook was with us.  It will be another year of feeling into the powerlessness around my health issues and what that may or may not bring for me.  This new year also brings with it the beginnings of my second novel, The Gripman's Daughter, a story of little Anna Thoresen and her life here on this property prior to, during, and just after the great quake of Nineteen-O-Six.  She has been waiting for such a long time, revealing bits and pieces of her life to me as I finished the fourth revision of I Am an Old Soul.  I am excited for her, that she is finally finding her voice, and I am excited by the act of writing, an act that is nothing less than profound for me.  To get completely out of the way, letting the characters tell their stories, to be the passive typist as they reveal their intimate joys and struggles.   To be so present as to cede my body to them, trusting them with what is so precious to me.  Writing is such an extraordinarily freeing experience, much like gardening.  To lose myself in the soil, breathing in the sweet damp aroma of loam as I move my fingers through it.
December Thirty-First brings with it the duality of me mourning the losses of this year while looking forward in celebration towards what is coming just around the corner, this duality of spirit, of one foot in the here and and now and one firmly planted just across the new year.  Dare I mention what good this new year could bring for our collective lives too; the possible end of our current flirtations with the dark side, politically speaking; the inherent power of the MeToo movement and the profound cultural changes that I hope it will bring; a reawakening of our responsibilities toward the downtrodden and vulnerable; all of this embedded into the celebratory fireworks, cheers, and hugs we have just exchanged at Midnight.  Here's to an emboldened shift this new year towards what feeds our love, joy, and happiness and away from what triggers our fears, bias, and prejudices.  Happy New Years!!

Death and the Act of Grieving

Grief is defined by Webster's as deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.  It is a rather matter of fact statement, dry and to the point, with no hint of what to expect in reality.  Over the years I have bore witness to the act of grieving.  A mother standing on the beach in my birth town, wailing, her arms flailing towards God, pleading with him to save her son as his twelve year old lifeless body was being brought out of the waters of Lake Michigan.  I was not much older than her son at the time.  I stood helpless at the grave of a friend who had lost his life in a horrific car accident after leaving our flat, his twin sister weeping, on her knees, clawing at the casket as it was being lowered into the earth.  I carried my maternal grandfather's casket with five others as a young man praying that I would not trip and fall.  I sat on the edge of my maternal grandmothers bed as she laid dying.  I sat at the bedside of a dear friend as he literally and slowly drown from AIDS related lung ailment until the doctor sedated him so he wouldn't suffer anymore.  And after he took his last labored breath there was a silence in the room that defied reality.  I have lost count of all the funerals and memorial services I have been to since the Nineteen Eighties and before.  When I lost my first two partners to AIDS I was stunned more than anything.  Even though we were no longer together I still wept bitterly.  When I unexpectedly lost my animal companion Sylvia nine years ago I was the one on my knees weeping and wailing, crying out, not my baby girl.  And so it was this time with Crook.  I wept for days before his vet assisted passing knowing that I was about to lose him.  No one ever prepares you for someones death.  No one explains to you what it will feel like when you lose someone so close, when you can't catch your breath, when your body feels as if someone sucker punched you in the gut so many times that your internal organs are little more that mush.  No one prepares you for the act of grieving.  I wasn't prepared for Crook's death.  Nor my father's for that matter.  Both came out of nowhere.  Dad's, three weeks to the day he entered the hospital with pain in his gut.  Crook, albeit his pancreatitis had gone into the chronic stage during the summer and I did have "that" conversation with his vet; however, I had expected him to last for a quite a while longer.  I didn't expect to come home from my father's memorial service to immediately start working on stabilizing Crook's emotional life, one that unbeknownst to me had taken a huge hit while I was gone.  It was the coming and going so many times that triggered it, his family of origin stuff, those things that most rescue animal companions bring to the table.
Grieving has never been a healthy act of self care for me.  Make no mistake, it has gotten better over the years but it is still not as healthy as I would like.  Grieving has always been a messy and difficult process fraught with my demons speaking their truths, saying things like you're a horrible father, you should have known better, you are the reasons they are suffering, you were the cause of their death.  That was particularly acute with Sylvia and I still believe nine years on that I have some culpability.  It has taken many years though for that to wane, to see past my demons and more to what was fact at the time.  That is why this time with Crook was so intensely hard for me even though I had made so much progress.  This was essentially the first time I had to make the decision to end a life; something I wish upon no one.  To know when is the right time.  How does one know when it is the right time?  Animal companions lack the one thing that us two legged person's have; a voice.  We can say when we are in pain.  We can describe the issue at hand, ask for guidance, listen to advice from professionals.  Crook was not able to speak his truth.  Cats by nature are resilient beings and very adept at hiding their distress; however I knew Crook's body well and I generally knew when he was in pain, at times a lot of pain; but when is it that the line is crossed, the one that they can no longer return over.
In the days since his death I have come to realize just how ordered our daily lives had become around his diabetes, how everything was planned around the timing of his shots, how they occurred, and where in our home they happened.  How the before and after rituals came to be, how foods were introduced and discarded, supplements shifted.  Looking back I have begun to see now that they just started of their own accord, in the moment, as we all struggled to deal with the immediacy of his new diagnosis in December of 2012.  How, out of the chaos, came the rituals that defined our days and nights up to and including the morning of Crook's death.
Lars and I are lost, literally and figuratively.  The structures that were so ingrained into our existence are gone, never to return.  Gone too are almost all of the rituals that Crook brought with him from his family of origin, the ones that he had held dear with his former family; coming under the covers to sleep against the inside of my left leg as my right leg was bent up to create a tent in which he would crawl into.  Of us laying in the sun as I sung to him.  Him meeting me at the door when I cam home from work, of me carrying him around with me as I put my things away.  Him talking during the night.  I swore when I first adopted him from the rescue shelter he was able to speak a few words.  He would say or I thought he would say after eating his dinner, I Love You.  These rituals are only a few of what we had together.  He came to us with so many, all of which he lovingly taught us over the years.  Without them, we are trying to find our way forward, trying to reinvent our daily lives, trying to recapture many of the rituals Lars and I had before Crook came to us.  They were never lost.  They had just palled in comparison to what Crook brought to the table.
Crook had his rituals with Lars too, ones that were unique to them.  Most were endearing to watch, wonderful really, but others not so much.  Crook was traumatized by his time at Animal Care and Control.  He had lost his family of origin who he had been with for the first ten years of his life, a family that he absolutely adored.  He had lost his bonded mate of ten years when Shadow was euthanized a month into their stay at ACC.  After their surrender to ACC and especially after Shadow's death Crook transformed from being a loving, vulnerable, and open human to being untouchable.  Losing Shadow was the last straw it seemed.  As I was attempting to adopt him Crook savagely attacked a worker and was also slated for euthanasia.  Thankfully, they gave him to a rescue group who then contacted me to finalize his adoption.  And when I got him he was still untouchable.  However, it only took three weeks for him to start becoming his loving self again albeit as I said before with deep memories of his trauma, trauma that did complicate our lives from time to time, especially as he became more ill.  Still, we are lost without his loving personality, his open and vulnerable eyes.  I know that a few of his rituals will live on with us, the ones that Lars has made his own over the six years Crook was with us.  And in time the pain of his loss will lessen.  However, what I have also learned from death and the act of grieving over my lifetime is that each loss I experience becomes a part of who I am, as embedded into my DNA as the color of my eyes or the amount of hair on my head, or in my case, the lack of it.  Whether I was ever prepared for it or not, grief and loss have become my intimate friends, ones that bring both pain and pleasant memories and it will be both that I will rely on to help me find my and Lars way to whatever new life we are meant to have.

Rituals of Life

I found myself reaching for my journal after I came home from swimming this evening.  Writing is such a integral part of my life.  I have a novel that is ready for the editors.  I have two more in the wings, the characters patiently waiting for their day in the sun.  I have a number of short stories in various forms, all waiting for me too.  I haven't though written in my journal since the Ghostship fire last December.  I'm not sure why.  I'm not even sure I need to question why;  the act of writing is organic for me, happening in its own way and on it own time.  I have learned over the years that it is never subject to the ticking of a clock or the changing of the seasons.  It just exists, fully and authentically, in the way I wish I could exist.
Before I started writing in my journal this evening I reread that Ghostship entry.  It was all about loss, of me grieving the lives of those who died so tragically that cold December evening in Oakland.  Those mostly young lives never to be lived into their natural ends; their lives stopped in a brief second of time, swallowed up by the intense smoke and flame; the very things that we interpret as symbols of cleansing and of rebirth, of the Phoenix rising.   Dad's death seems to have brought me back to this place of deep grieving again, of me questioning my life's purpose, of whether I'm happy or just contented to show up each day for the rituals of my life.
As I have said many times before I have a very complicated relationship to loss, one that was created when I was a small child, then reformed again and again through the loss during the height of the AIDS Pandemic, from the loss of partners, of friends, and later of family, both chosen and blood.  I also have said that no one should be forced to have such an intimate relationship with death at such an early age.  We were in our twenties, thirties, and some older.  Most of us were new and fresh to the world, intent on claiming our rightful place as queer men and women, as transgendered, standing together against a hostile world that was intent on slamming the closet door closed again.  We, as those who came before us, created rituals that connected and grounded us to each other.  We created community with our rituals,  ones that sustained and fed us in our youth.  Through these rituals we celebrated life, and love.  We celebrated anniversaries, both personal and collective.  Of uprisings, and street battles, and protests; of weddings, of our love, for each other, of the birth of our children and in some cases, their deaths.  Rituals were and continue to be at the core of our personal and collective lives.  They are tied intrinsically to our identities, they inform how we view the world around us and how the world views us.  We have ethnic rituals, ones that bind us to each other, we have religious and spiritual ones that are marked by their calendars.  We have rituals marking the personal, the collective, ones that mark the passing of the seasons, ones that are millennia old and deeply connected to the core of who we are.  So why is it when I claim my seat again at the table of grief I begin to question the very core of my being?  Of whether I am happy or not?  Of whether my lifetime of rituals that I have established that bind me to myself and the world around me are still valid?  The key seems to be in that Ghostship entry and my deep seated feelings of Otherness.
Those young men and women at Ghostship were living their Otherness, creating rituals with their art and music.  They found joy in embracing it, they found community, and love however much their celebrations and their rituals were looked upon as less then, as an affront to society.  They refused to conform to the "accepted" definitions of wider society and were chastised for it; however, they did it and with an eagerness and zeal that most could only wish for.
I seem to not want to embrace my Otherness; still; even when it is mirrored so beautifully in the lives of those who died that night and in the lives of my many of my friends.   It is a frightening place for me.  It reminds me too much of my childhood, of those years of fear and degradation.  I jettisoned so much of myself during those years.  I suspect but I am not sure that my Otherness is about those jettisoned pieces of myself that still orbit just beyond my consciousness, the ones I still struggle to reincorporate; or better said, the ones that I till the soil for, preparing for their return when they are ready.  So much of my spiritual life is about that preparation, no wonder I am so deeply connected to the act of gardening; besides the genetic predisposition that is.  I do know that my authenticity is to be found in my Otherness, that I will find great joy there.  I just fear that Otherness and joy that it will bring.  It creates that well oiled dynamic of waiting for the other shoe to drop; don't be too joyous, that part of me likes to say, because it will be all taken away from you in an instant.  Better to be content than joyful.  It's that fight or flight thing within me; as always.
I was speaking to a close friend of mine last night and I realized that I still hold onto that understanding that my authenticity is a goal that I am working towards instead of a state of being in the now, one that is perpetually organic.   I suspect if I sit quietly for long enough I will find that I am already deeply grounded into my Otherness and that my life reflects that fact.  And that I am joyous more often that not.  How does that old saying go; I am already at where I think I am going.

Through rose tinted glasses

I am a sentimentalist at heart.  One only has to stroll through my home to see the little things I have placed in every room; a tiny glass vial that holds water from the Ganges, the amethyst crystal on my the bedside table, a photo of my friends and I from our trip to Italy, the ashes of my sweet baby girl Sylvia.  These and others that I have about, or are stored in memory boxes, hold deep meaning for me.  This is not to say that they are who I am; they are not.  They are though a representation of who I am much like the colors, form, and fabric I have chosen.  They are all, in a sense, an emotional and physical road map of my being, my history, and that of my family, both biological and chosen.  They tell the story of the friends that I have loved and lost, of parents and grandparents, of partners who are no longer in this world.  The other day I took out one of my memory boxes as I am in the midst of a deep spring clean the reasons of which I will explain later.  It was filled with letters and cards from my late teens and early twenties, letters from my first lover, ones filled with his professions of eternal love, of building a life together, and later of the frustrations of living separate lives in different states.  Birthday cards from my Gram and a favorite aunt.  Letters from dear friends all of who are lost to me now.  It’s interesting to me how in the first blush of adulthood we see things through rose tinted glasses.  Those honeyed phrases like, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.  We pledge eternal love and friendship to those in our lives never presupposing that anything could change, that we could fail out of love, or lose contact, or that they would leave this earth before us.  I experienced a great deal of loss after moving to San Francisco in those heady days of the late Seventies.  Who amongst us could have foreseen  what level of loss we would experience in just ten short years, what it would be like to have such an intimate relationship with death forced upon us at such an early age.  I am grateful to Goddess that I have survived when almost all of my friends of that time did not.  Many of the sentimental things in my home were given to me by those very friends that passed so early in their lives.  One memory box held gifts from my former long term partner’s brother, from close friends, and lovers, mementos that I still find impossible to let go of.  Sitting on the floor in my bedroom, these mementos scattered about me, I cried as I read the letters from my first lover, as I held long faded pictures of Tyler when we first met, the both of us in the full blush of youthfulness, of pictures of my Gram surrounded by my aunts and I on her Ninety birthday.  This is not to say that I regularly wallow in this kind of dripping sentimentality, I do not, as a rule.  As I said before this adventure into my past was in part due to an ongoing deep spring clean that I am presently engaged in and why I have chosen to write again.   It is not easy for me to share intimate details regarding my health in general.  I have for many years shared about my emotional struggles with my childhood memories.  In fact that was the reason I started this blog in 2009 during the tumult of those years of my recovery.  It was a way for me to speak my truth in the face of the denial of my family and of society.  In those blogs I rarely if ever share about my physical struggles or not that I remember.  (Now I have the urge to reread every one to see if I have indeed written about it before.  Ahhh, the mind does play tricks.)   To say what I came here to say:  I have been struggling with breathing issues for some time now.  It’s been a progressive issue over the last few years that prompted a recent visit to a lung specialist.  A CT Scan later and the doctor has found that I have asthma.  Not an insurmountable problem for me.  In actuality there was a relatively easy fix.  I now use a powdered steroid inhaler in addition to my old inhaler.  The problem that I am now struggling with and that I am now willing to share outside my close circle of friends is that they also found two small growths in my upper right lung, growths that bear watching.  To that end I will have to have repeated scans in the coming months to monitor the size and to check for any additional ones that may appear.  The other significant issue they found was that I have a heart abnormality, one that my primary care doctor said is evidence of an old heart attack.  In retrospect I suspect that is possibly related to when my body crashed in 2006 but I am not sure.  It would certainly make sense of the non-sensical as no medical professional has ever been able to pinpoint the cause of that crash, the results of which I still deal with.   I am hoping that my new cardo doc will be able to confirm when I see them.  It is these last two issues that have forced me to inhabit emotional territory to which I have not had to do before, that of questions relating to my mortality.  Nothing like a couple of shots across the bow of my mortality to get me motived to do a deep spring clean.  I’ve seen what others had to go through when attending to the estates of their dearly departed, what I had to look through when I did it for my friends.  There are always those questions like, why and the hell would he keep a picture of a rock in the middle of a forest, or a piece of the rock itself.  What is this?  A half of broken heart on a chain.  Where’s the other half and did he even remember who had it?  I couldn’t by the way, remember who had the other half.  I did try.  I seem to remember it being a girl.  Or was that a boy dressed as a girl.  Either way it ended up in the trash with many other things that I could also not identify.  Did I say I’m having memory problems too.  I am also not sharing this information because I expect to die soon, quite the contrary.  I suspect I’ll live well into my Nineties like my paternal Gram did and like my father has now, a guy who on some days is more busy then I am.  He leaves me check-in messages almost every day about driving around visiting friends, going out to dinner, and the like.  About leaving his apartment at noon and not returning until past eight in the evening.  No, I’m not writing this because I have any concerns regarding my imminent demise.  My reasonings for this blog and the deep clean is, I suppose, because I am searching for a way to access that emotional territory of powerlessness, the one that I haven’t yet had to do.  This is not to say that my health has been extraordinary.  Quite the opposite.  I have and have had challenges with my physical health for eleven years or more, things that I have had to find a way to coexist with and still have a quality life.  I have, at the best of times, ongoing issues with fatigue, ones that stem from 2006, and alignment issues with my hips and sacrum as well.  Prior to this latest diagnosis I also use to get up in the morning wondering what truck had hit me during the night that I didn’t remember.  My dad and I had that conversation once about a year ago.  We both shared that we are about thirty three on the inside and think we can still do the things we did when we were, that is until we stand too quickly, or turn and find that the left side of our body’s seem to be going in the opposite direction of that of the right, or when we trip over imaginary things laying on the carpet while we feel our way to the bath in the middle of the night; multiple times thank you very much.  Or when we swing our body’s over the side of the bed in the morning and hear the sounds of crunching bone fragments readjusting themselves in our knees, or elbows, or backs, or all three.  Aging is such an undignified process.  We laugh at the stories that our elder relatives or friends tell us recounting how they laughed just a little too hard at a joke, or pulled a chair just a little too aggressively, until those very things happens to us.  Then we are horrified at the thought that someone may have witnessed our distress all the while laughing on the inside on how undignified the process really is and what else may the future hold for us.  And that is the territory of powerlessness that I am now charged with navigating, what does the future hold for me.  I can only hope that my recovery will guide me in living that question until someday I may live into the answer if I am to have the answer at all.  Until then I will be swinging from the trees and dancing in the streets until that is my cardiologist tells me to stop.  And I may not even then.

Populism and Politics in a changing World

I like to unwind from my day when I get home from work.  It's quiet time for me after a hectic day of running around followed by work.  Generally I end up on the sofa with some small snack, the boys having been fed, watered, and cuddled.  They lay contented, purring their siren song, sometimes on my lap or next to me though more often than not in the favorite places.  Tonight I happened upon an episode of Charlie Rose.  His guest, Zanny Minton Beddoes, was speaking about Trump, Brexit, and the rise of Populism.  I listened intently to her take on things.  Most of what she said I agreed with but some things I did not. Being the Editor in Chief of The Economist, she was of course all in on free trade acknowledging though that it does has knock-off effects.  I am not in favor of free trade but I'll save that for later.
I'm very interested in Europe and its history, have been for a long time even before I went to college. That was my main reason for choosing a Minor in European Area Studies.  What I learned is that in many ways the U.S. is such a young country where the Old World is not; however, even at our young age we share many of the ideological struggles that they have had over the centuries.  This current resurgence of Populism and the rise of Trump is not an isolated incident.  It is the logical end in a long line of connected events that can be traced back to the creation of our country.  History tells us that many of the immigrants that arrived here were economically disadvantaged and religiously oppressed, that they came here to be free from tyranny, to live the life they chose, one that they felt was divined by God.  What we are not readily taught is that within their respective colonies these colonists formed their own version of tyranny and oppression based on their religious and social beliefs.  Routinely people were banished, left to survive in the wilderness, more often left for dead. And after the formulation of our country there were routine, almost like clockwork, religious re-awakenings that were rooted in these early definitions of traditional values.  Preacher's would hold tent revivals whipping up religious and social hatred with their fire and brimstone stump speeches. What also came with this was anti-immigrant uprisings, the earliest aimed at the Irish Catholic laborers who migrated in the early 1800's.  There is a well documented account of a massacre in Philadelphia of Irish laborers in 1832.  Draft riots during the Civil War where Protestants attacked Irish and German Catholic neighborhoods, burning houses, and murdering their inhabitants.  Populism is not new here.  It has a very long and storied history.  Two names come to mind, that of Charles Coughlin, a priest who was in Detroit and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana both active during the 1930's.  Father Coughlin initially supported F.D.R. and the New Deal but soon turned populist and antisemitic.  Senator Huey Long also took the populist road and was a well known demagogue in the South.  One could categorize Nixon as a demagogue too for using the anti-democratic post civil rights fervor in the New South as a politic tool to gain and hold the presidency.  Reagan can be defined as a populist as well.  His well worn generalizations tapped into that yearning for a less complicated time when things were predictable.  This long history of populism seems always to happen during or after a time when there is great change or fear of change.  Trump is just another in a long line that can be traced back for centuries here and beyond in Europe.  It's fear of change and the loss that accompanies it that drives populism.  Europe is in the gripe of that now.  In almost every country in Europe populism is on the rise and taking political control.   In many places these far right parties are in government or rule in partnership with other right wing groups.  Fear is the driver.  Loss too.  And abandonment.  The Tea Party here is the current driver of populism coming out of the fear that whites are losing power.  Their anti immigrant platform is filled with the vitriol that would make any demagogue proud.  Trump's crime, if it can be called that, is his predatory use of that existing fear and loss his for own personal power.  It doesn't help that our political system has been shown to be wildly corrupt and at the beck and call of the moneyed oligarchs who pick and chose their candidates as if they were shopping for loaves of bread.
Our world is changing and we are powerless to stop it.  Globalization and the free trade that it needs is a fact of life if the current form of capitalism is to survive.  Moderating it is problematic at best because the vested interests are not able nor willing to let go.  Investment follows where profits lay. Profits are made by producing things better and for less with innovation at the root of it all.  We are told that we must innovate, that new is necessary, that change is good, that old is bad.  We are conditioned to want these new things faster and cheaper while being told that with one click we can have almost anything delivered to our door within days, sometimes within hours.  On a grander scale we are sold into the idea that the latest gadget, a better car, a bigger house can be ours, all while our desires are satiated by corporations who blind us with a constant stream of slick ads.   It's a vicious circle that we willingly buy into.  Who doesn't like new things?  Or something better for less?  But what that chase leaves us with is a sense of insecurity, that we are never enough, that our happiness is just beyond our fingertips.  It also tells us that things mean more than our authenticity, that our self worth is what we own instead of who we are.  And that is what this is all about; it's powerlessness with a capital P.  Powerlessness is a very heady emotion rooted in our insecurities.  Powerlessness warps our perceptions to a point where we can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion.  It taps into all the baggage we carry from our life experiences exponentially growing that baggage into the monsters that haunt us both during our waking and sleeping hours.  And we are angry because of it!  Couple  all of this with fear, loss, and abandonment, and we are all ripe for a demagogues picking, like low hanging fruit on a tree.   Populism is not the purview of the unintelligent or the uneducated either.  That's too easy of a definition.  We all are subject to these powerful raw emotions.  It's just that some of us seem more inclined to navigating them better.  So what can we do?  How do we address the Trump's of the world and the populism that reappears as regularly as clockwork?  Good question.  I want to say I do not know.  And I don't.  Maybe though, we can decouple from the vicious circle of our current form of capitalism and come to the understanding that a kinder and gentler form of it can retain good jobs locally and still thrive but it will mean that we will pay more and have less.  That free trade is not the be all end all. That innovation and profits have less value than attaining a quality life.  That maybe we don't need the latest gadget or the latest fashion to feel whole; that connection, self worth, and authenticity does have more value than the products we buy.  Whatever the answers may be, we must continue to fight the demagoguery and the political, social, and economic corruption that it feeds off of because the alternative is just too horrifying to imagine.

The Nature of Racism

I was speaking to my ninety-two year old father yesterday.  I could hear him flipping the pages of his local paper while we were talking about family.  Finally, after the sound of paper rustling had ended dad said what he was meaning to saying;
"Pastor Dave was in the local paper speaking about Racism a few days ago."
I was understandably apprehensive being that Pastor Dave is the minister at my fathers church, a church that is rooted in a peculiar brand of christian fundamentalism.   For a few moments after my dad stopped I had visions of Pastor Dave waving his bible in the air from the pulpit saying the kind of things my mom use to say about gay people; about me really.  After I collected myself, we went on to talk about other things, the weather there,  how Lars was doing in his post surgery recovery, my niece and her health.  We never did discuss what Pastor Dave had said in his sermon.
I got up early this morning.  Sleep has always been elusive for me, more so now that I am trying to keep an eye on Lars.  Since I was up I decided to go online and balance my checkbook and look at the local news.  One item caught my eye immediately.  The KKK has been recruiting in San Francisco.  I read the article with fascination as the regional leader described the recruiting as a response to increased calls for information, that people are scared, and that, incredulously, the "new Klan is not interested in fomenting violence, does not support it, that their efforts are only about information sharing.  That got me thinking again about Pastor Dave's sermon so searched and found his sermon on a podcast.  I have to say he is not the best public speaker I've ever heard.  In fact I found it was a bit difficult to follow his sermon.  I suppose that is why he hands out notes for the congregation to follow along with him as he preaches.  I also suspect that some of my difficulty was trepidation, that I was expecting the kind of preaching I had heard at my mom's funeral service; a mix of Sunday sermonizing about God, salvation, and the glory's of life everlasting in heaven served up with a benediction at the end.  What I heard though was a rambling quoting of scripture, one that was rooted in not only respect for authority but also of a plea against racism, that no one should be judged by the color of their skin or by their gender.  Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised.  He also talked about how he had never had a black friend until his early adulthood and how that had shaped his perceptions.  He talked about the idea of the United States being a melting pot but that now it seems more of a cauldron then anything.  He talked about the loss of black lives and of police.  That we can not discount the fact that racism is very real in our society and we have a responsibility to fight it.  All in all not a bad sermon. It got me thinking too about my experience with how systemic racism has influenced my life and my perceptions.
I grew up during a time of turmoil in the middle to late Nineteen-Sixties when race riots and protests were commonplace and where dusk to dawn curfews existed during hot summer nights.  (Why is it that no one protests during the dead of winter?  Just wondering.)  I did not grow up in the South.  I grew up in southern Wisconsin in a medium sized city on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Racism in my birth town was systemic.  My dad used to say these about how neighborhoods came to be; the Danes founded the city, when the Armenians moved in the Danes left, when the Mexicans moved in the Armenians left, when the blacks move in the Mexicans left.  There was no mixing, no shared spaces, the racial lines were distinct even when I grew up.  Our neighborhood was white, across the river from us it was black.  My junior high was mixed but not as much as my high school which was located across the river.  I had a few black friends, a few of mixed race; they were called Mulattos at that time.  My parents never said I couldn't hang out with my friends, there was just a sense of wrong to it.  The best way to explain it is like this; for a time in high school I succumbed to the hate filled presence in my home and church about being gay.  I knew I was gay for most of my childhood but for appearances I chose to act straight starting in the tenth grade.  I met and dated a hispanic girl named Rose Hernandez just after I started the tenth grade.  My parents suggested I take her to church as she was Catholic and that was just wrong in their eyes.  They didn't see her necessarily as Mexican but more as lost soul that needed converting.  So off to church we all went, me in my sunday best and Rose in a beautiful blue dress that fell just about the knees, a impeccably ironed white blouse, and knee high white leather boots.  The looks that she got when we walked in said it all.  It was one of utter revulsion, mind you no one was outwardly mean to her, they just made it clear with their frosty looks that she was not welcome, that their church was intended to be white only.  Systemic racism works that way.  It is the unspoken but clearly present things that lie just under the surface that speak volumes, the kind of things that predispose us to not be intentionally racist but to be racist non the less.
My experience with systemic racism works like this: when I hear the words drug dealer, I immediately have a visual of a young black man pop up in my mind's eye.  It is not a conscience choice on my part, it just happens. That's how being conditioned works over time.  Over and over again we are exposed to a daily diet of news reports that say young black men are drug dealers, that they are a threat to law and order. that we should always be on guard especially when we are in "their territory".  My personal baggage plays a part as well.  When I use to see a police car pass by or a policeman walk by my body would tense automatically, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end, and my breath would become animated coming in short bursts instead of deeper more slower ones.  For years I despised the police.  As a young gay man I was harassed by them, subjected to taunts by them, and generally disliked by them because of my sexual orientation.  My response though was outsized to my experience.  I didn't realize this until I started recovering memories of being sexually tortured in group settings by off duty police and sheriff deputies between the ages of eight and twelve.  That anger and angst fed into my adult experiences with police and in some minor ways it still does.  It took an altercation with one cop some years ago on a Sunday afternoon downtown that finally shifted my understanding.  I was coming back to work after lunch and wanted to regain access to the lot behind the building but the street was closed due to filming.  I was bristling with anger and the cop picked up on that and we nearly came to blows when he threatened to drag me out my car and taser me.  I backed off only because I needed to get back to work.  These two things among others I feel are at the root of systemic racism.  That for most of our lives were are conditioned by outward stimuli and inwardly by our personal baggage in how we respond in certain situations.  I feel that this auto conditioning is the hardest type of racism to fight too.  We recoil at our auto responses, feel shame for having them in the first place, and then try to do whatever is possible to change those internal things that make our personal and collective lives unmanageable. Outward racism, the kind that is pedaled by the KKK is easy to point at, its message is clear and unequivocal, white supremacy is the rule of the day.  However, the internal stuff of what I have talked about is much more pervasive and controlling.  I feel that it is these auto responses that the police act upon more than anything, that when a black person is stopped they too have auto responses and that nothing good can come from this.  It is appalling, however necessary it is, that black kids are being taught to be fearful of the police, that one wrong move on their part could result in their death.  Bill Maher said something profound last night while talking to Stephen Colbert.  He said that some police join the force in response to their junior or high school experiences of being less than or being on the outside, that having or gaining authority as a cop feeds that lack of self worth.  Plainly put Bill Maher said that no person should join the force in an attempt to work out their childhood angst.  I heartily agree.
I feel that we need to continue our deep and abiding personal and collective ongoing dialogue about the nature of systemic racism so that we can find ways to reconcile ourselves and our country to how these pervasive things predispose our experiences.  Until then I fear that this endless cycle of violence will just continue to take innocence lives and that family's will continue to be torn apart.