January 02, 2004

Nunc hoc in marmore non est incisum ...

2 January 2003

Whomever said that “it is better to have loved and lost” obviously never lost at love...

My parents have been together over fifty years – that’s half a century folks! I am 46 years old. If we count adulthood from age 18, then I have been an “adult” for 28 years. Of these 28 years, I have been married – twice – for a total of 13 years. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that I have been single longer than I have been married.

My standing joke is that I make a great boyfriend and a lousy husband. I think that S. and L. could attest to that one, much to my shame. I have to wonder why these marriages, and every other significant relationship in my life, went belly up. I know now, looking back, that it was my temper. I could lose it and break into loud shouting tirades at a moment’s notice. My therapist told me that it was post-traumatic stress syndrome from my childhood (how convenient is that?). Whatever the reason, the result was a semi-conscious state of fear, anxiety, adrenalin (oh that bitter taste in my mouth and the feeling of my gut tightening up for battle…) and a sharpening of an already acute tongue led to disastrous consequences for anybody within earshot. The irony is that anger sickens me. I don’t mean that metaphorically: I get physically ill when I hear an argument.

The good news is that I’ve gone now for three years without any real anger issues… but I have also avoided a serious romantic relationship for that time. I’ve found myself in a curious place in matters of the heart. I’ve had more than ample opportunity to hook up with women, but have not been able to take the risk involved with intimacy. It seems that the closer you were to me the higher the risk of anger. You get the picture.

I’ve wondered if this is simply the price of admission, like a drunk that can’t take a drink if he is to remain sober. I hope not. There is a part of me that craves a relationship. I miss being with somebody and have, for the past three years, grown weary of waking up alone. I want cook for somebody, to hear another person in the house, and – more than anything – to love and be loved again. I’ve only partly joked that I have dated psycho-chicks of late. Much of that is bad luck (and I do have some stories… that is another posting) but some of it seems to be having chosen women that cannot commit. Pretty clever, huh? My particular favorite was the divorcee that continued to cohabitate with her estranged husband. That pretty much made any commitment impossible.

Let’s do some arithmetic… so, 15 years of single life, three years without incident. That means that I have the equivalent of one in five years without incident. I’m not certain what that really means… it’s not like I was angry for the other four years. I wasn’t. I had some really moments, though. Three years without incident… I think that it may be time to test the waters?

There is more to my fear of testing the waters, though. I tend to love very deeply (I fall hard, fast, and deep… a bit impulsive, am I?) and it takes a long time to get over love lost. My first love, a girl named K. who was 18 when I was 20, took nearly ten years to get over (encroaching on much of my first marriage, I might add; I never said anything, but I think that L. knew). The first marriage took years to get past. My daughter once asked me if I still love S. (my second ex-wife). I had to be honest and say yes. She shook her head, as if to say, “Daddy, I love you but you’re pathetic…” I understand. I don’t know how to get over love. I do know that in order to love completely that I need to let the past be in the past and live in the now. This is not to say that I cannot be friends or even intimate, but it does cast a shadow on the big “L.”

Better to have loved and lost? I have a nearly perfect record of losses in love. Let me tell you, it sucks big time…

Ah, but I am just a fool…

Resolutions and other acts of self-deception

2 January 2004

I’ve always resisted the idea of making resolutions for the New Year, partially out of sloth – I know that I’ll not keep them – and partially out of resistance to the idea of doing something that aligned with bourgeois values: work harder to garner greater material wealth and prestige. I think that the dawning of middle age – perhaps it is a late morning? – has forced me to revisit this resistance to planning. I’ve always been a “rise with the tide, go with the flow” type of guy. It has served me well, to a point at least. My definition of “well” perhaps being somewhat different than most of my fellows would have it.

I am breaking with my tradition; here are my resolutions – in no particular order – for the next twelve months:

1. Employment: Locate a suitable job teaching special education
2. Music: Record my CD (vanity, vanity…)
3. Music: Formal studies! Theory and counterpoint?
4. Music: Resume gigging in Ventura, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Counties
5. Financial: Debt free and living on a budget (How bourgeois can it get!!!!)
6. Spiritual/Emotional: Spend disciplined time in meditation/prayer, find a community of faith
7. Spiritual/Emotional: Do works of charity and peace that cannot be paid back (all anonymous)
8. Physical Health: Eat well and exercise

I am listening to Jaco Pastorius playing Continuum… the man is truly the god of the electric bass. But I digress.

I suppose that I have come to a point in life where I want to make changes. This is not so much a referendum on how I have lived (boring, says I) as much as it is a course correction that is aligned with my values. What are these values?

Peace and Harmony – I gave up trying to save the world years ago. Now I just want my corner to be tidy and a haven for peace and beauty. If I do this maybe somebody else will, and then somebody else, and so on until the world is saved by stages.

Do no harm – If I can’t help you , I certainly won’t hurt you. That is much harder than it sounds. This has been the great challenge of my life and continues to be the central motivation in all that I have done. I have failed miserably at times. Other times I have had modest success. There is much that I have done of which I am rightly proud. I want to continue doing what is good and learn to leave behind what is not.

Live, laugh, love – In one-hundred years all of us will be gone and nothing will be left but the sound of our laughter and the salt of our tears… enough said on that one.

Honest and meaningful work – I do like to work. But I cannot work for something that I do not believe in . I won’t whore myself out for material gain. Unlike some of my leftist friends, I do not see corporations or wealth as evil. I see them as areas that have been easily corrupted, however. Greed is the enemy, not wealth.

Speaking of my core values… Here is a poem by D.H. Lawrence. Extra points if you can name the band that used it in their eponymous album!

A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!


Ah, but I am just a fool...

It is the last day of 2003...

31 December 2003


Time continues its inexorable march forward. We each grow older, another day closer to death. Time continues and we are afforded a moment to take stock of our lives and consider the choices that we have made and the legacy that we will leave behind as we, too, fade into the collective memory of our children. I am acutely aware of the artifice of this whole endeavor: indeed it is nothing but the caprice of consensus that has declared that 1 January 2004 begins a New Year. Still, the consensus is powerful insofar as it represents a perception of newness, a perception of a time to take stock and look forward in hope and back with – hopefully – an honest eye and not too much nostalgia.

Over twenty years ago, I stood in the common room at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and overheard a conversation between a professor and an older student. The professor asked “How many summers” my friend had seen. He responded forty-five. At the time that seemed to be such a long time. I’ve now seen that many plus one; it is not that long at all, more a heart-beat than an eternity. Time passes. So shall we.

Yet it is not with a sense of melancholy that I write, though those that know me also are aware of the dark and shadowy outline that embraces my aura. Time passes and we change while remaining quite the same as we ever were. There are things that are part of my essential being. I still wake in wonder of this life. I still don’t understand. I still secretly yearn for the approval of my father, while distancing myself from all that he valued. Maybe this is part of being a man in mid-life. I never believed that the mid-life crisis had to do with sports cars and younger women (the latter being a favorite passion of mine!) as much as a realization that one’s father sets the tone for one’s life.

My father and I have “enjoyed” a strange relationship, I suppose. Neither one of us quite knows what to do with the other: we are more cordial than warm. Neither one will risk a step forward to embrace the other because, I believe, to do so both would have to embrace ourselves. We are cut from the same cloth in many ways: stubborn, opinionated, head-strong, passionate, self-doubting, and – dare I say? – wary of the other. Perhaps we just have become comfortable with our détente?

My father is a man of action, a doer more than a dreamer. He is a healer; and a damn good one, at that. There is much in him that I admire. He is kind, generous, loving. He has garnered the respect and admiration of his fellows. He can also be petty and mean-spirited (traits that when I look in an honest mirror held by a steady hand I see in myself). His passion – medicine – was always his first love. I suppose that this was part of the reason that I refused to be a healer; a sense of puerile jealously at that which vitalized the man and created a distance between us. More than anything – like most sons I suppose – I craved words of approval from this man whose disapproving glance could devastate me. But despite that I regard him as a man among men, one of the old gods, one for whom respect and perhaps begrudged admiration is due.

I am a dreamer. Happy in my non-conformity and disregard for material wealth. Also a man of passion, I have loved music, the arts, and – more than anything else – words. All of my choices revolved around the power of spoken language and the urge to perform words in front of an audience. I became a preacher to that end, having been seduced by the incarnation of the Word. The Word became my means to sculpt the souls of those who would listen. Their power to inculcate a sense of wonder and possibility remains a potent drug for me. I still am driven by the beauty of the Word and am enraptured by its power to create perceptions that dance in harmony with the ultimate reality, with the ideal realm of being.

And so it is that I stand at the dawn of yet another year, the man of action and the dreamer must somehow find peace with one another; actions without dreams are drudgery and dreams without action are delusions. Perhaps the words of Wordsworth are apt for consideration on this dawn of yet another year:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So it was when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old;
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.


I smile as I write these words and can hear an old argument, with perhaps a bit of nostalgia and affection: “What does it mean?” the doer demands, the dreamer responds, “Just as it says…”

And so I sit at my father’s desk – a gift from his father – soon to be a gift to my daughter, wearing his ring – again a gift from his father, soon to be one to my daughter – and am aware that time passes and all that really matters is that we love each other, even if we don’t understand each other or share each other’s values.

Another year has come, yet another summer on my back. The time is fleeting and only appears to quicken as I realize that each day represents less and less of my total span of life and still remains the totality of my hope. I don’t know what dreams may come in this year, but still I dare to dream…

Ah, but I am only a fool...