August 27, 2007

Finding Time to Write

I love to write. I may not be a great writer, but I love the process of seeing thoughts take on some discernable form and being made available to anybody who cares to read them. I love writing. There is something about picking up a text and knowing that the moment of its creation is being shared across time with somebody who cared enough to read what was written that I find intoxicating. I am not a profound thinker. Nor am I a great poet – I do struggle to find the right word – that warrants publication for the ages. No, I am common. But I love to write.

The problem is that I have a very full schedule. I also love to play music. Music takes work. Wood-shedding is a lonely process of repetition until the riff sounds like music. It is painful. It is hard. But it is the price of making music. I can’t play an instrument if I don’t practice until the riff is under my fingers without the need to think. It has to be as fluid as speech.

And there is the irony.

Speech is not easy, either. It is not enough to have something to say. We all have something to say. It has to be said in a way that warrants the attention and honors the gift of the reader’s time. Writing requires practice. Writing requires wood-shedding, as well. There is a rhythm to good writing, a flow that feeds the imagination of the reading, using words like strings and drums, leading the reader into the mind and heart of the writer. This is where poetry and music coalesce into song. By song, I don’t mean the majority of the crap that passes for music on the pop charts. I am looking for something that is more beautiful, more honest, more passionate still.

Art is not easy. It is a harsh and demanding mistress that requires time, effort, pain and ultimately the soul of the artist. It is a bargain with a devil that tempts like fire tempted Prometheus asking if you are willing to allow the eagle eternally to peck at your liver so your sister and brother may take fire for granted. And so it is that some of us are seduced by the siren sound of the call to be an artist.

I have to practice. I am driven, compelled, to make my music better still. And I love to write.

July 24, 2007

Sex Offenders?

Let’s be honest: I am a leftist, a true liberal to my core. But there are some things that must be enforced: the right to one’s person is part of a free society. We are our own property; our bodies are not the property of the State, the Church, or God or the Devil. I believe that laws regarding the violation of a person’s sexual boundaries are well placed and deserve to be fairly enforced. I am the father of daughters: God help anybody that hurts them. I may be a leftist, but I would become the very hammer of God where their welfare is involved.

An item on the news today: a middle-school boy was charged with a felony – yes a felony – for having playfully smacked a girl on her bottom. Was this appropriate behavior? No and Yes. Preadolescence is where we learn about our bodies and sexuality; should a person be touching another person’s “intimate body parts”? That is a matter of consent. Kids do dumb things. They touch each other and begin to learn what is appropriate and in what context. Context and relationship make all the difference.

To have charged this child with felony sexual battery is the triumph of the absurd. I’ve watched kids this age. Both sexes do things that they would be less apt to do later in life unless they understood that there was consent. A boy smacks a girl on the butt and he is a rapist? Pardon my Y-chromosome, but doesn’t this trivialize rape?

I had a friend who was raped. She was a friend; trust was part of our platonic relationship. There was nothing trivial about the pain or the humiliation that she felt. It took her at least a year to be able to think about sex without violence being attached to it. This was terror and theft of that which was most intimate and personal. We trivialize the most revolting acts by lowering the bar that defines what is truly horrid and what is merely in bad taste.

We have to get past our cultural pre-pubescence and see that sex is natural and good. The natural process of development is not a bad thing. We all have done some dumb things. I smacked a girl on her bottom, made jokes about tits, talked about what I wanted to do in the locker-room like all boys that age did. But that does not make me a sexual predator; it made me a thirteen year old boy that was curious about girls, who were curious about boys.

If there was a rape with that incarceration it was a rape of justice and a slap in the face of people that have suffered sexual violence.

Ah, but I am only a fool…

July 22, 2007

Loyal Opposition?

I heard on the news that the President recently had a colonoscopy: I wonder if they found his head? OK, that was terribly obvious. I have never been a fan of our current president; mission accomplished, the “surge” (a nice euphemism for what people of my generation called “escalation of the war”), and – of course – a declaration of war on an idea. My sarcastic comment about having located Mr. Bush’s so-called and somewhat addled brain stands in the mainstream of the most American of virtues: the right of dissent.

Applied Dialectic
The object of a rational dialog is to resolve a disagreement through a logical proposition of thesis and antithesis to reach a synthesis: that is some resolution that is both reasonable and regards the original proponent’s viewpoints. This seems to be central to the ideals of our constitutional republic: we have a system that is filled with checks and balances. This is not terribly effective if measured in terms of hasty completion of tasks, but does tend to create points of dialog where truth may be discovered. Any dialectic method has, as its aim, the discovery of a common truth that may not be self-evident and requires a good deal of parsing to discover.

The fact that dialectic supposes opposition suggests that the confrontation is not a bad thing; quite to the contrary, it warns against the presumption of absolute knowledge of truth by requiring that any supposition of justice be subject to the test of loyal opposition. For any dialectical method to function there must be an advocate of the antithesis, that is to say an opposing viewpoint.

Accountability: Checks and Balances
Since when is calling our leaders to account for actions taken on our behalf – Do you recall the creation of a government by and for the people? – an unpatriotic act? Apparently this is the position of our current administration. Senator Hillary Clinton was rebuked by the Under Secretary of Defense, Eric Edelman, for asking questions deemed to be inappropriate: "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda." Is the issue that a free exchange of ideas is a reinforcement of enemy propaganda? And just who is the enemy, terror? It would seem to this fool that when one is terrified that one cannot dare to speak the truth that is on one’s mind. Who is the terrorist in this exchange? The one that seeks to diminish the dialog that leads to truth.

In a free and democratic society public servants are free to speak their minds. This means that a spirited public debate is necessary to hear all points of view. It would seem that if there is any image to bring to the so-called enemies of freedom it is this: a great nation is open to dialog. I wish that I recalled who said it: In a war, the first casualty is the truth.

Beware of Absolute Loyalty
I fear for the welfare of my children when I hear our government demanding absolute and unquestioning loyalty to an ideal proposed by those in power. How dare they make this demand? And why are we not demanding their removal when it is made? This is not an issue of left and right, conservative and liberal: it is an issue of truth. Anybody that dares to question one’s loyalty because the veracity of our leaders has been called to account is a dangerous fellow that needs to be brought out of the shadows and into the light to be seen for what he or she is. The way that this is done is to dare to ask the questions and question the answers.

Dissent is the most American of virtues. I prove my loyalty by my dissent. I prove my patriotism by demanding accountability. Democracy is difficult. It presumes that we cherish the freedoms that define us as a nation. It presumes that we will work to make our legacy to our children this great democratic experiment that we call America. To do this we cannot fall into an ideological absolutism that precludes dialog and forbids the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer to speak the truth as he or she hears it. Indeed, we welcome dissent because the dialog makes us stronger. Away with the terror that requires blind faith in leaders that have been proven as liars.

Who knows, maybe they found Bush’s brain right next to the WMDs that were the reason for the war. They were right next to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout deep in the imagination of those who feel that mere bluster is an argument that will persuade. Ask the question. Question the answers.

Ah, but I am only a fool…

July 05, 2007

A rumination at my desk

OK… Fair enough: Six months is a long time to go without writing. I have been on a hiatus from daily ruminations. Life is good, but I’ve been busy getting my feet back under me. I realized that it has been this long when I tried to make a post on YouTube only to learn that my ‘blog had fallen into the nether world of ignored internet sites. Even now I am certain that I am the only person reading these words. Still, it was once well read and it began with one person reading it. So what can happen once can happen again…
***** ***** *****

The United States has won the world’s record for speed eating. This is a competition that can only be waged by a nation or nations that are not only consumerist in their orientation, but have enough food to waste in such trivial pursuits. I kept wondering about people starving in this country. I’ve seen enough overweight homeless people to know that not all that lack shelter lack food; but there is extreme poverty in this country and poverty that goes to the point of being obscene in the world. Are there not famines enough to make one take a moment’s pause and wonder about the sheer decadent excess of such a thing?

***** ***** *****
Scooter Libby has had a commutation of his sentence. Bushy-boy apparently thought that his family had suffered enough and that it was an excessive sentence for having participated in the lies and prevarications that led to the Iraq war. Out an operative of our intelligence community for political aims and look forward to a commutation and a potential pardon. What about all of the people that were executed under Bush’s administration when he was the Governor of Texas? I suppose that their pain was not really the point. They might have killed one or two people. Kill the fuckers…. To hell with the pain their families feel. If you are to be pardoned you have to contribute to the terror that is war waged on the basis of a lie: make no mistake, our President bears responsibility for the deaths of over 3,000 American soldiers, to say nothing of soldiers from the “coalition of the willing” and those Iraqis that have lost their lives. But Lewis Libby has a cool nickname that makes him sound like a kid with freckles, a missing front tooth, in a baseball cap, riding a skateboard… There is Americana in that name. So what the hell… (read these last few lines with a voice dripping with sarcasm).
***** ***** *****
I’ve been playing the acoustic bass lately. I got an upright and am relearning my instrument. All of those low rumbles in Ventura are probably me making horrid noises with an instrument that is as tall as I am and equally wide. My cat loves to come in when I practice: he meows in Bb and has perfect pitch.

More later, and sooner…

January 04, 2007

Relationships, the Past, and a Course for the Now

I’ve Been Thinking About My past: a bit of historical reflection allows course correction for the future. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my past relationships. I am aware that the one constant in all of the failures and successes that I’ve had has been me. There are things that I do very well in relationships and things that I have not done as well.

Six Feet Under
Lately, I’ve found myself hooked on Six Feet Under. There was a scene when Ruth and her new husband are making love. They are celebrating their union with carnal bliss, lust that filled their cups and overflowed down the halls into the rooms where their adult children were sleeping to be disturbed by the sounds of geriatric orgasms. That began my thinking: there were relationships that I had where the sex was the stuff that gods only dreamed of, carnality elevated to a point where flesh and spirit merged into something well beyond either. SL and I enjoyed this sort of lusty life. So did LA and I, though less frequently, so did DP and I. But the problem with all three of these relationships was that the passion was explosive and also spilt over into other parts of our lives that could have benefited from a more prosaic and detached relating that would have been a bit more boring, but certainly more peaceful.

I am a passionate person: not simply a sexual person, but a person that is full of emotional dynamite that is easily set off. The emotional connection that translated into free and experimental sexual expression wanted also to be translated into paying the bills or taking out the trash. It was the living together that I found so hard, the daily minutiae that needs must be attended to in order to have a stable and orderly household. Emotional dynamite is not stable; by its very nature, it is explosive and highly unstable. And that instability became the undoing of several of my relationships.

Hear me well: I am a committed person that is hardwired for monogamy. I will quickly plead guilty to a period of prodigal excess, but in my defense would note that this was an aberration, a deviation from the self in an attempt to numb a pain that was too deep to bear. I am responsible for the choices that I made. I did them – no pun intended – and nobody forced me; I masked my own wounds from the explosives that I handled by fucking any woman that would have me. Monogamy: my dream was to find one woman and live with only her, to have been only with her, to have known only her flesh, to have given myself totally to her and to be totally hers.

Needless to say, my wires got crossed: I short-circuited and would burn with dark oily smoke that concealed the searing heat that consumed and destroyed what I cherished and wanted to be. Having been married three times and having had more partners than I can number I know what a joke that became. My history betrays the intrinsic conflict that I have lived, an existential inconsistency that leaves me here, looking at the past and hoping for a future.

The First Day
We live, we do our best. We do our worst and spend a life recovering from the harm that we have caused and hoping to be as good as the best of what we are most deeply within that cries for the light of day. From the very moment of our birth, when we draw our first breath, we are pushing free from another person and laboring to be. I am a child of the seventies: I came of age in the halcyon days of guitar rock and narcissism. We were aware that “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.” I was never sure what that meant. I assumed that it was an excuse for more excess. While I was decidedly out of step with the cultural memes and mores of my time of coming of age, I still maintain an imprint of that time. Today is a new beginning, but it is never divorced from the course of my personal history.

The irony is that every beginning brings an ending, every birth brings a death. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Endings do not require beginnings. Death does not require birth. Some things simply become extinct; they fade away and fall into oblivion. Some things should become extinct. We all will. Our time is only a moment, one of an unknown quantity of moments that stand in connection each to the others, all that push into the light and fall back into the darkness.

Rage Against the Dying of the Light
We will all burn out. It is our choice to burn brightly and to bring light to others or to dwell in darkness, either of our own device or our being eclipsed by something else. Like a child pushing out of its mother’s womb, we gasp for our first breath and our fist fleeting glimpse of the light. So, what does all of this hyperbole have to do with relationships?

I look back at my history and see a dance of darkness and light, great good and deep darkness locked in struggle each with the other. For me it is learning balance, to be passionate and yet to find peace within that allows me to be the best that is within me, to be a midwife to my own birth, to my being me. And not going gently into that good night…

Ah, but I am only a fool.

January 01, 2007

New Year - 2007

I can’t avoid the reality that I am going to be fifty this year. There are birthdays that have some culturally ascribed weight; fifty is one of these. Half a century old – who would have thought that I would be so old; yet, I see grey in my hair. I shaved my goatee because of the grey. I still feel young. But my body is beginning to belie my deception of youth. Aches and pains greet me in the morning; it is my back that is stiff in the morning now.

Time Passes
I remember how horrible it was when my father turned fifty. He cried out against the injustice of the gods and threatened to take us all down with him. He was always given to violent outbursts and his aging has done little to curb this tendency toward hyperbole. I’ve decided to walk more gently toward that good night. A favorite poem by Dylan Thomas comes to mind:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might
have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they
grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.


Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse,bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


It is the dying of the light that is the object and the occasion of rage, not the son or family. So how shall I rage against the dying of the light except to live in the face of death?

MS and AIDS
I’ve given serious thought to doing the MS Tour or the AIDS ride to celebrate my birthday. I would have to raise at least $2,500 dollars in donations to do the ride, but what the hell? I can do this. It is just a matter of planning and making it happen. I would rather raise money to spit in the eye of death than go down in a whimper or worse a misdirected bang. I have lost several friends to AIDS and had a serious scare with MS several years ago (I had symptoms that looked like the onset of MS, turned out to be anxiety).

I believe in living in this moment and not worrying about an afterlife. I am dubious about afterlife and wonder if this is not simply a means to soften the blow of our own mortality. Religious claims about heaven and hell all seem to be ways of justifying our own prejudices and softening our fears: we are small in this world, but will be great in the next. Best not to worry about that, just to live in the now.

New Year Resolves
I have made several resolutions in the past. I am not doing that this year; for me resolutions seem to be exercises in futility. I have goals and lifestyle changes that are more important than my so-called “resolves” for the New Year. Most pressing is my weight (I’ve made mention of that in the past, enough said).

I think that if I have any resolutions for this year it is this: I will turn fifty gracefully and enjoy the new chapter in my life. Enough for now.

Happy New Year.
- tDF