April 1979

There's a difference

between wanting to leave this world and wanting to climb secret stairs between the clouds to a place where the world looks quiet and serene, like a lake, or a loved one fast asleep.

After another night of sleeping poorly,

I struggle to relax in the warm sun out back. One of my favorite things, right? The reading in the sun part, not the struggling to relax.

What a peculiar mess of a mood, to be restless and lazy, body at rest but heart beating too fast.

Oddly enough, doing some chores helps - cleaning the pantry and kitchen, watering the back garden - and what helps the most right now - not for the first time - is catching that sharp light just right:

God, Judgment Day, and questions aplenty

Let me start by saying that I was never bullied or coerced, physically or psychologically, into attending any regular religious gatherings or chanting any sort of creation story. My father and mother were lapsed Catholic and non-observant Jew, respectively, and the closest my sister and I got to being members of a religion was attending Unitarian Sunday School and the occasional service - usually at Christmas and Easter - and the topics that were addressed were typically those of social responsibility and activism - integration good, Vietnam War bad (this is shorthand, not flippancy).

But this all served as a good basis for my contemplation of religion as a cultural and historical phenomenon. I had no axe to grind. Seriously.

So now as yet one more person decides to proclaim the coming Doomsday - tomorrow, in fact - I return to some of my earlier thoughts about religion, and about fundamentalist Christianity in particular. Which have not changed a lot over the years, frankly, since these folks have been singing the same song for a LONG time now.

And once again, I wonder: what would make a human being want to believe that there was a Supreme Being, with absolute power over all Time and Space, who would be capable of torturing and murdering every single living thing on this planet aside from a tiny percentage who agreed to swear to their belief in a specific, narrow interpretation of a huge, cryptic, poorly transcribed and translated text?

Doesn't that seem, well, insane?

As I think I've mentioned before, assuming there IS a Supreme Being, I would prefer to believe she looks and sounds just like Dolly Parton, and when we meet, she will ask if I'd like something to eat.

"and because of all their tears

their eyes can't hope to see
the beauty that surrounds them
Isn't it a pity?"

Still miss you, George. And I'm still working on my sight.

The cold rain begins to affect me

    

in unpredictable ways

Another question:

Do young people still decorate their walls with giant posters? This was pretty commonplace when I was in high school, less so in college; I myself went through a phase where I had huge prints of Humphrey Bogart and Allen Ginsberg staring back at me enigmatically. (Eventually the images were etched so deeply in my brain that I no longer needed the actual posters).

One thing I never had or wanted - intellectual snob that I was - was any sort of inspirational poster. But I wasn't an asshole about it if a friend had one. (Since the friends that seemed to like these kinds of posters were mostly young women, I had reasons for keeping my thoughts to myself that went beyond simple tolerance).

A big, big favorite was a well-known poem by the therapist Fritz Perls, sometimes referred to as "The Gestalt Prayer". This is how it was transcribed on most posters (along with some pastel swirls or a soulful photo of hands touching):

"I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful."


And I thought, OK, a little mushy, but hey, also kind of liberating and hopeful, right?

Till one day I read the full text of the poem. And the last line - omitted on every poster I ever saw - is

"If not, it can't be helped."


Wha? Isn't that last line, like, THE MOST IMPORTANT LINE? Doesn't leaving it out turn a really complete, interesting statement about the nature of human relationships into a fucking greeting card?
Needless to say, my rants on this topic probably cost me at least a few intimate encounters back then.

But I guess it couldn't be helped, eh?

The Roses

- as in, "Take time to smell the..." -

It's lamentable but true that I can't always do this. Not from any lack of desire, but because I just don't have a very keen sense of smell anymore. Or more precisely, it comes and goes - sometimes I smell almost nothing for days but then suddenly I can pick up on odors like a goddam bloodhound. Like, being able to smell someone smoking a cigarette three blocks away. Or the perfume someone in a passing car is wearing.

Then back to zero. Or stranger - I sometimes experience olfactory hallucinations. (I am NOT making this up.) Like smelling kerosene in a mostly odorless office. For an hour.

But even if I can't smell the roses today, I can damn well see them. And for a few minutes, nothing else matters.

Mid-October 1977

Peacetime

I know we are at war, that American men and women are getting killed and wounded, in towns and villages they hadn't even heard of a few months ago.

But back here in America, you'd never know, at a glance. There are no craters, no rubble, no counties with no electricity or running water for years at a time.

This is the problem. Or one of them. Up till the "Korean Conflict", wars changed the way civilian Americans lived, day to day. Then there came the distancing. "We" killed and were killed. But it wasn't "we". It was the people who we sent. And that "we" were the ones we elected, who we trusted to do right.

And it turns out, they didn't always do that great. Some of the decisions they made were, let's face it, flawed. They -we - supported dictators, with money and troops, in the name of anti-communism. And Act Two was anti-terrorism.

We funded Sadaam. We funded and trained Osama Bin Laden. I'm not making this up. I wish to God I was.

And we've paid a price for our mistakes. For some, that price has been crushingly terrible.

But for most of us, our day-to-day lives have been completely untouched, seemingly. I don't want more suffering in the world, with all my heart, no, but what if the consequences of our nation's wrongs actually did touch us all, directly? What would that be like? And would it change how we chose and watched our leaders?