Sometimes the images just leap out at you as you’re strolling down the street…

This was taken by a Blockbuster Video store that’s downsizing.  They used to put current release posters up in the windows on that side of the store.  Now they’ve vacated that side and the posters are in tatters. 

Another dream I had just now.  I want to say it’s another odd one, but to tell the truth this is pretty typical.  Not so much because it was unpleasent…most of my dreams are actually quite nice…but because it was so vivid, and yet so damn weird in places.  I’ve had dreams like this all my life. 

It starts with me mowing the lawn…something I was doing late yesterday because I’d let my tiny back yard go to seed again.  So getting it back under control was a lot of work for a back yard so tiny.  In this dream, I’m living in some suburb somewhere, in a somewhat larger detached house with a nice lawn all around it.  There’s a bug infestation that’s killing my grass, and I go get some lawn and garden pesticide to put down.

The next thing I know is I’m under arrest.  They tell me that a cloud of gas rose up from my lawn after I laid down the pesticide, and drifted over to a neighbor’s house and killed him while He was mowing His lawn.

I don’t remember the trial at all.  Just…next thing I know I’ve been convicted and given a sentance of death, and I’m being led to the death chamber.

Here’s where the dream takes on a Twilight Zone-ish quality.  They sit me down in a comfortable, somewhat overstuffed chair in what looks more like a doctor’s waiting room then an execution chamber.  I’m given a single shot of poison.  Then I’m free to go.  Somehow I know that the way execution works in this particular dream world, is the condemned are given a shot of some sort of slow acting poison that takes something more then a day to kill you, and when it does it happens all at once, not slowly and painfully.  You’re then allowed to leave the prison, go settle your affairs, and basically spend your one last day however you wish.

Next thing I know I’m in the parking lot of some large, but not mega-large, Baptist church with mom and a few other people I don’t recognize.  This was not how I wanted to spend my last moments on earth, being emotionally suffocated among people who couldn’t care less about me, so much as using my life as their own stepping stone to heaven.

Mom, as always, excepted.  She’s the only person there I know.  Everyone else is a complete stranger, which is odd in retrospect because the dream could have easily populated that church parking lot with people I knew from my church days, or other family members on mom’s side who go to church…er…religiously.  Instead they’re all stereotypical Southern Baptist church droids, and I feel oddly, like a missionary surrounded by cannibals.  They’re all giving me, the condemned man, these sickly sweet fundamentalist smiles that barely hide the emotional hunger behind them.

Mom’s the only person there who I know loves me, and I’m distraught at having to put her through all this.  That’s the other wierd thing about how executions are done in this dream world.  The trials are secret and nobody knows when you’ve been released from prison that you’ve been given The Shot unless you tell them.  I figure that’s so you can go on about your last day as close to normal as you might want.  Somehow I’ve ended up here in this church parking lot with mom and she’s making another attempt to get me back in church again.  She doesn’t seem very upset though.  In fact, she’s her usual cheerful self.  So I figure, releaved, that she doesn’t know I’ve just been executed.  But she’s the only one there who doesn’t know.  All the church droids know, and they’re all giving me that concern troll look I came to know and despise when I was a kid.

Like everyone else there except me, mom’s in her Sunday best.  I’m dressed as I always am, in blue jeans and sneakers and a light short sleeved shirt.  And as is typical in my dreams whenever I’m self-aware I seem to be, at various points during the dream, the age I am now and a teenager again.  When I tell her I’m not interested in going inside the church she smiles and says that’s okay, and gives me a little hug.  Once I got old enough to make my own decisions, she never tried to force me into going to church.  She walks inside, leaving me out in the parking lot.  The church droids follow her in.  Irritatingly though, not all of them.

One church droid stays behind with me…some middle age man I’ve never met before, wearing a dazzlingly tacky polyester suit, is looking at me with that expression I know all too well as a prelude, not to making a pass at me, but worse, to a proselytize.  Incoming…!

I sit down and lean up against a car in the parking lot.  I have my laptop with me and I open it up and decide to blog.  Somehow when I open up the laptop I have an internet connection and I can post to my blog.  Maybe there’s a wireless portal somewhere nearby…I don’t know.  But I can sign into my blog.  I want to write one last post.  I want to apologize for killing someone…whoever that someone was.  I want to write some last essay about how I found life to be, now that I know how it ends.  But I can’t write.  This is a dream and deciphering written words has always been a major struggle for me in dreams.  It’s like the part of my brain that decodes words on a page just isn’t online when I’m asleep.

So instead I decide to draw something.  Somehow, my blog software has a Photoshop plug-in and I can start drawing right into the blog.  And here the dream gets a tad science-fictioney.  My laptop all of a sudden has a drawer in it that I can pull out, and in it I have my drawing tools…the traditional one’s I’ve always used: technical pencil, ink pens, kneeded rubber eraser, charcoal sticks…  I don’t need the Wacom tablet…a thing I’ve never really mastered the knack of drawing with anyway…I can draw with all my traditional art tools right on the screen of my laptop, and it all just goes into Photoshop as though I was doing it on art paper.

(Can I get a patent on this idea?  Probably not…)

So I start drawing something.  I start drawing a landscape.  It’s the field behind one of the apartment complexes I grew up in.  There was a place there where I used to watch the sunsets when I was a kid.  That’s what I start drawing.  The church droid starts asking me the usual leading questions about what I’m drawing.  I say nothing to him.  After a while, he just shuts up.  Good!  Leave me alone!

I really start getting into my drawing.  It feels good…real good…because I haven’t been able to draw now for so long in real life.  I’ve been so heartached I can’t even go near my drawing table.  Now here, in the dream, I can draw again.  It feels wonderful.  The drawing trance is so much better then the coding trance, when I can get it.

I’ve almost got my drawing finished when suddenly I start feeling the poison begin to work.  My hands and the rest of my body start going numb.  I loose fine control of my fingers and it’s hard to manipulate the keyboard.  It feels like a really severe fevor is sweeping through my veins.  I realize I don’t have much longer and I need to tell everyone this is the last message.  I try to find a clear spot on the artwork where I can write something out but I can’t.  The view is magnified and I can’t scale it back.  All I can do is drag the viewport around and try to find some open spot on the artwork where I can enter some text.  But it’s all varying textures of charcoal and ink everywhere I look.  For a moment I’m afraid I won’t be able to get my last words out there.  But then I find a spot, and…somehow…I manage to enter a few brief final words to…well…to everybody:

I am about to be executed.  This is my last post.  Goodbye.

I hit "Publish" and close the laptop.  Then I get up and start walking out of the parking lot.  I’m feeling feverish, very feverish.  Suddenly I’m not in the parking lot of the church, but of Congressional Plaza…a large strip shopping center near where I grew up way back when.  It’s odd…once again I’m a teenager, yet I’m carrying my silver Mac PowerBook and I’m walking to a spot behind the little Hot Shoppes Cafateria that stood by itself in the front of the Plaza parking lot.  And I’m going there because I know that’s where I’ve parked my car.  The Mercedes.  Yet in my dream I’m a kid again and I sure didn’t have the kind of money back then for the laptop, let alone the Mercedes.  But when I get to the Hot Shoppes, I decide instead of getting into my car I would go sit by the small green dumpster out back and die there.  Somehow I find that fitting.

As I walk back to the corner where the dumpster is, I meet a homeless man heading for the same place.  He grins at me and asks me if I’m looking for a place to rest for the night too, and I tell him he might not want to spend it with me because I’ve been given The Shot and I’m about to die.  Well don’t die in front of me, he tells me, but not unkindly; more like he’s sharing a friendly joke with me.  But he knows I’m serious.  He’s a middle age black man, with a touch of grey in his hair and beard.  But for a homeless man he’s dressed pretty well…casually, clean slacks…pressed no less…sneakers and a sport shirt.  His hair is neatly trimmed and he looks clean as a whistle.  Yet, somehow, I know he’s homeless.  I notice then that he’s with a young teenaged white girl, who looks more the part of a homeless person.  Her clothes are worn and dirty and she looks like she’s slept for the past several days in them.  She has long stringy blond hair and looks like she hasn’t bathed in weeks.  They don’t seem to be companions though…more like two people who just happened to be in the same place at the same time with me, looking for a spot to spend the night.  The man seems decent and very friendly.  The girl lonely, tired and very sad.

The three of us walk together toward the dumpster, looking for a place to rest.  They for the night.  Me for…well…for forever.  

The two of them sit down on one side of the dumpster and I go around to the other side and rest with my back to it.  I am miserable, and I want to be alone.  The sun is getting low in the sky now, but it’s not near twilight yet.  It’s still bright out, but the angle of light is low and the shadows are getting long.  My body is getting really, really numb now.  I start bawling.  I’m really, really sorry I killed that guy…whoever he was.  I just start crying my heart out over it…

…and then, I wake up.

As always when I wake up from a crying dream, I’m a bit surprised to find my face is perfectly dry.  But I’m not fully awake either.  It’s still early in the night and I can tell I haven’t had a good deep sleep yet because of the way my body feels.  Whenever I wake up before I’ve had a deep sleep my body feels a tad like it’s in a fever.  So I just lay there for a while and think about trying to get back to sleep. 

The dream is lingering oddly…I can still hear the other two people by the dumpster talking softly, distantly.  I can’t make out the words.  Then I distinctly hear the sound of the dumpster’s hinged lid being opened.  Then I hear something, like a sigh.  I’m still half asleep in this lingering dream and I know what I just heard was the sound of my last breath.  I just died.

I lay in bed turning it all over.  I think I’ve died about a zillion times in my dreams over the course of my life.  But now I feel like the fates have given me a gift of some sort.  You never know when your last breath is, it just happens and you’re dead so you never know that was the last one.  But I heard it.  I heard my last breath.

I’ve said it before.   Over and over.  The shit doesn’t really start hitting the fan, until the republicans start loosing power…

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Some of the anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is mostly letting it flare. A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Barack Obama. They’re making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

Everyone is starting to notice now, the frenzy of hate the republicans are whipping themselves into.  From Sullivan:

The Dangerous Panic On The Far Right

To some, a president Obama is simply unimaginable. From a McCain supporter in Wisconsin yesterday:

"We’re all wondering why Obama is where he’s at. How he got here. Everybody in this room is stunned we’re in this position."

There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannot be president – because he’s black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O’Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies – not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

But Garrison Keillor was right…they’re republicans first, and Americans second.  And they have a history of this, which goes right back to Kennedy.  When King was assassinated in Memphis, they were calling him a traitor too…

The Unthinkable

And really the unsayable. But I’ve been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn’t just that they disagree with liberals on race–it’s they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King’s murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King’s murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.

This was not some notion bandied about by conspiracy theorist, but an accusation proffered by men who were the pillars of the modern Republican Party:

As late as 1964, Falwell was attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs" legislation. He questioned "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations." Falwell charged, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

Falwell was not alone. These men didn’t kill Martin Luther King, but they contributed to an atmosphere of nationalism, white supremacy and cheap unreflective patriotism that ultimately got a lot of people killed. Confronted with Aparthied South Africa, men like Helms and Falwell used the same "communist" defense. While Mandella wasted away in prison, they dismissed the whole thing as a communist plot.

Let me be clear–This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield.  The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today’s red-baiting, and it is what it was then–a cover for racists. You may say I’m overreacting, and I really hope you’re right. 999,000 out 1 million times we’ll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.

Let me smack the subtext here out into the open: they’re trying to get him killed.  As recently as a few days ago I was content to believe they just wanted to lay the groundwork for the scorched earth campaign against President Obama and a democratic congress.  But that’s naive and anyone of my generation should know better…really…

I still remember vividly the day president Kennedy was assassinated.   I was home from school, very very sick with a flu and a high fever.  I was drifting in and out of sleep with the bed stand radio on, playing soft music.  I woke up, to the sound of a man’s voice saying over and over again, "The president has been shot…The president has been shot…The president has been shot…"..

Two days before President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, right-wingers began circulating around the city some 5,000 anti-Kennedy handbills.  Entitled “Wanted for Treason,” these leaflets were designed to look like a police “wanted” poster, with front and profile photographs of Kennedy’s head.

The handbills shrieked:
    “This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
    1.  Betraying the Constitution (which he is sworn to uphold):
         He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.
         He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
    2.  He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations-Berlin wall-Missile removal-Cuba-Wheat deals-Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
    3.  He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
    4.  He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
    5.  He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
    6.  He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office:
         Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings.
         Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
    7.  He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”

On the very day JFK visited Dallas and died, the local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, featured a full page, black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement prepared and paid for by persons affiliated with the John Birch Society, one of the most infamous right-wing extremist organizations of the 1960’s.  The ad claimed to be the work of “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” in reality a nonexistent organization.  Bernard Weissman, listed on the ad as the chairman of the Committee, however, did exist; he was the person who actually placed the ad.  Weissman later testified before the Warren Commission.  He was one of the few witnesses before that body who deemed it prudent to appear accompanied by an attorney.

The ad began with a sarcastic “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” a city which had been the victim of “a recent Liberal smear attempt” and which had prospered “despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for non-conformity to ‘New Frontierism’.”  The ad then posed a series of belligerent, insulting loaded questions, including:

• “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced that his party will endorse and support your re-election bid?”
• “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
• “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?”

Later that morning there were disparaging protests by right-wingers against JFK along the route of the presidential motorcade as it traveled from the airport to downtown Dallas.  As the motorcade drove through the suburbs, with President Kennedy only minutes from death, an unfriendly-looking man in a business suit stood on a sidewalk in an aggressive posture holding a protest sign which screamed: “Because of high regard for the presidency I hold you JFK and your blind socialism in complete contempt.”  (A photograph of this right-wing protester with his sign, taken by Dallas newspaper photographer Tom Dillard, is reproduced on p. 438 of Richard B. Trask’s Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (1994).)

In Dealey Plaza, at the time of the actual assassination, there was at least one right-winger present publicly expressing his scorn for the president.  On the sidewalk near the Stemmons Freeway traffic sign, only a few feet from the slow-moving presidential limousine during the very moments rifle bullets were slamming into JFK’s body, a mysterious man stood wearing a suit and, unlike anyone else there, holding up an open, black umbrella on this warm, sunshiny day.  (The “Umbrella Man,” as this enigmatic character soon was dubbed, is visible in the Zapruder film.  He also can be seen in a famous still color photograph of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Phil Willis.  The Willis photo is reproduced on p. 190 of Robert J. Groden’s The Killing of a President (1993).)

The identity of the Umbrella Man remained a secret for 15 years.  Then, in September 1978, a man named Louie Steven Witt appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and admitted that he was the Umbrella Man.  He told the Committee that he been there in Dealey Plaza to heckle JFK, and that he displayed the umbrella because he was under the impression that brandishing an umbrella would irritate JFK.  He testified: “I was going to use this umbrella to heckle the President’s motorcade. … Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him [JFK] in the liberal camp, and I was just sort of going to kind of do a little heckling. … I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys. … I was carrying that stupid umbrella, intent [on] heckling the President.” Witt denied that the umbrella he had in Dealey Plaza symbolized the appeasement practices of English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who often sported a black umbrella), or that the umbrella was intended to suggest that JFK was appeasing Communism the way Chamberlain had appeased Hitler.  This denial is not credible.  Among right-wingers, it was an article of faith that JFK’s supposedly soft, weak-kneed policies against the threat of Communism were the equivalent of Chamberlain’s futile attempts to appease Adolf Hitler.

Not even Kennedy’s death at 1 p.m. at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas stopped right-wingers from publicly displaying their loathing of JFK.  As William Manchester notes in his classic The Death of a President (1967): “At 3:05 p.m., when 80 percent of the American People were in deep grief, an NBC camera panned toward a group of spectators outside Parkland’s emergency entrance and picked up a young man with a placard that read, ‘Yankee, Go Home.’”   (In a wealthy Dallas suburb, Manchester reminds us, “pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.”)
-JFK Blown Away-Hooray! – D. Wilkes, University of Georgia

If you think the McCain campaign is playing with fire you are sadly mistaken.  They Are of the fire.  America, and the American Dream, lives or dies depending on how many of us are left, who still believe in it, and will defend it against the mob.  Democracies don’t die at the hands of foreign enemies.  They die when the mob overwhelms the dream of freedom and liberty and justice for all.  The gutter cannot tolerate and will not willingly endure a world, where they have to witness what free men and women are capable of when the chains are cast off, and their dreams take wing.  They will burn it all down if they have to, so they don’t have to know what humanity is capable of, that they might have been…

Well after all, California isn’t the only state fighting an anti-gay same sex marriage amendment.  Florida and Arizona are also fighting.  So in the spirit of we’re all in this together, if you donate to the fight in any one of those states too (any amount), and email me the acknowledgment of your contribution (sans any personal info like SSN or credit card numbers…of course) I will honor the offer I made below to No On 8 in California. 

…or photograph.  To repeat from the previous post…here’s the deal:

Donate Here to the fight against Proposition 8…the California referendum that would take away the right of same sex couples to marry.   You must be a U.S. citizen to contribute.  If you donate between now and election day to No On 8 online (for any amount), send me your confirmation email, and I will draw an editorial cartoon on the topic of your choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice.

Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…I’ll gladly mail you a signed 11 by 19 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.

In a world that can’t seem to hate enough, please do what you can to help same sex couples keep their marriages secure.  This poor angry world needs a lot more of this…

And a lot less of this…

Here’s a handy database form you can query to see who is donating to the fight over California proposition 8 (for and against).  It’s probably incomplete though, as it says it was updated on the 7th and my donation of $500 dollars (to the folks fighting against of course) doesn’t show up…

You can donate Here to the fight against Prop 8.   You must be a U.S. citizen to contribute.  Between now and election day, anyone who donates to No On 8 online (any amount) and sends me their confirmation email, can commission from me an editorial cartoon on the topic of their choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice.

Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…I’ll gladly mail you a signed 11 by 19 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.

Via Benz Insider… Yes. I know. Mercedes sedans are owned by senile old rich guys. With trophy wives no less…

I’m really not sure who Audi is trying to sell their cars to here, but I’m guessing it’s people who don’t already own a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus. I have to say though…the two girls in the back of that Lexus SUV do the best Wednesday Adams since Christina Ricci in the Adams Family movie. That Lexus family should get its own show. The Adams Family, only instead of everyone being disturbed the same way, everyone is disturbed in their own special way.

As for the old guy in the Mercedes…look…I’ll gladly endure senility, if the ‘S’ class, the mansion, a hot young guy and a good cigar go with it. Was all that supposed to be a disincentive?

I can tell how unsettled my head is, by how odd my dreams get. 

Last night I was in a large vacation home with other random friends from various parts of my life.  We’d all gathered there for some reason I couldn’t remember.  You were there too, but in an upstairs room all by yourself.  Of course after yesterday I had to be having a dream about you last night.  I didn’t want to disturb you.

My friends are all stringing Christmas lights around the door frames to their rooms…it seems like some sort of project we’d all gotten ourselves into…everyone is decorating their doors with Christmas trimmings.  I am trying to untangle a favorite set of Christmas lights from my school days to put it up around the door to my room.  But the others all keep telling me to just grab a new set from the stack of unopened ones in the corner.  I am wasting time trying to untangle mine they all say, and they probably don’t even work.  But I know my old set still works because it is lit up…even though it isn’t plugged in yet.  Which is strange but sometimes you just accept strange things in your dreams as though they’re perfectly normal.  And the new lights are that style I just hate…all transparent wiring and no colors.  My old set has all the colors in it.  But try as I might I can’t get it untangled from the knot it’s in.

Then I notice my old collection of 45rpm records was scattered all over the place and I start gathering them up off the tables and chairs and off the floor and putting them back in their carrying case.  A friend walks over and asks me if I want to take them back home with me now and I tell him not yet, because you hadn’t heard them yet.  I tell the friend they can listen to my 45s too…all they wanted…but they needed to take a little better care of them because they could get scratched up and broken laying around like this.  That earns me a shrug.

Then I start hearing footsteps from the floor above us.  Another one of my friends tells me that it’s probably one of my co-workers at the Institute getting up for a meeting later.  My co-workers are here at the house too…some of them…and we all have a conference to go to later that day.  I can hear them walking around upstairs now, getting ready to go.

Suddenly I’m worried you’ve left the house and I didn’t see you go.  I walk upstairs and I’m relieved to see the door to your room is still closed, which means you’re still here.  But I don’t knock.  I don’t want to disturb you.  I just want to see you before you go.  I’m waiting for you to walk out of your room, so I can talk to you before you leave.  You’re still here, but the door is still closed.  I notice there are no Christmas lights strung around your door.

I see some more of my friends milling around in another room and more of my 45 collection scattered all over the place.  So I start gathering it back up and stacking them neatly.  A friend walks over and asks why I’m doing that and I tell him they need to be more careful with my records.  Then I notice some of them laying by a window in the sunlight and I move them away and tell my friend not to do that because they’ll warp if they’re left laying in the sunlight.  I’m starting to get a little pissed off at the careless way my friends are treating my 45s.

And then…I wake up…

Sometimes, you just have to figure a dream is your mind’s way of sorting out the clutter of your day.  Of course you were there…after yesterday’s conversation you pretty much had to be…and I get the closed door and the fear that you were already gone, and the relief that you weren’t…yet.  I think I get the Christmas lights.  But laying in bed this morning I couldn’t figure out where my 45rpm colleciton fit into it. 

Then I remembered…

I look at my record collection from back then…mostly the 45rpm singles I bought in my middle teen years because back then I wouldn’t spend the price of a whole album unless it was a band I really liked a lot, and I see almost nothing but love songs among them.  Granted, that’s mostly what rock has always been.  But there was a lot of it back then about life and politics, the war and the struggles our generation was going through.  Songs I loved like For What It’s Worth, and Incense and Peppermint…and interestingly enough in retrospect, Hold Your Head Up.  

And if it’s bad
Don’t let it get you down, you can take it
And if it hurts
Don’t let them see you cry, you can take it

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don’t let them change a thing what you’re doing

Hold your head up, hold your head up
Hold your head up, hold your head high

I don’t think I need to analyze very much why I liked that one.  But the songs I turned to again and again alone in my bedroom were the love songs, and what is amazing to me about that in retrospect is that at that age I really didn’t care much for all that gushy love stuff.  I was going through my stacks of 45 rpms  the other day and it just floored me how much of it was surgery sweet love songs.  As I remember that part of my life, I didn’t have much interest in all that love stuff.  But then, nobody told me I could fall in love with a guy either.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the lyrics in those songs, but something in the music itself spoke to me, in a way that the lyrics, speaking only to the straight boys in the audience, never could.  I would connect with it instantly when I heard it on the radio, and like a flash I was down to the record store to by the single.  It would be years before I would find myself listening to the lyrics.  I had to grow into myself as a gay man first, and then learn the trick a lot of gay guys have to learn in this world, of mentally changing a pronoun as I listen…

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
[Girl], we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire

I never really paid much attention to those lyrics at first.  Just the music, and the sultry sound of Morrison’s voice.

You are all the [woman] I need, and baby you know it,
You can make this beggar a king, a clown or a poet.
I’ll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it’s all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.

Something in the music spoke to me, in a way the lyrics just didn’t.  My record collection is full of these kinds of songs.  Bubblegum pop mostly, as they called it back then.  In another world, there would have been some that spoke directly to gay guys, or at least was gender neutral enough that I could have taken the lyrics to heart as much as I did the music.  But even back then, well before I came out to myself as a gay man, I had a soul for sweet love songs.  Perhaps…a tad too sweet. 

Okay…now the 45s make sense.  Especially the part about my friends (the ones that were there in the house anyway…they weren’t all there…), treating them so carelessly.  That was my heart they were treating so carelessly.  And of course, what I was trying to save for you.

You said over and over to me yesterday that a relationship between us would happen someday.  "It’ll happen", you said.  "It’ll happen."  Over and over you said that.  But "now isn’t a good time".  It was more then I’d ever expected to hear from you in my wildest dreams.  Okay.  Fine.  I can wait, if that’s what you want.  Whenever you are ready, I’ll be here.  But I think something else needs to happen too.  You need to love yourself.  There’s nothing wrong with you.  There was never anything wrong with you.  "Maybe after we’re retired", you said.  Waiting for age to take desires you’ve always hated having away isn’t a plan. 

Okay…I had a crush once upon a time.  Okay…I guess I still do.  Back then you knew how to push my buttons.  And you did.  And I loved it.  Even if I didn’t have the words to say so back then.  Life was sweet…so very very sweet.  But we went our separate ways, time passes, the universe expands, and now our lives are what they are.  I understand this.  I don’t want to complicate the life you have now and I’m not a home wrecker.  But I guess coming back into your life has complicated it after all and I’m sorry.  I just had to find you. 

All I wanted now after all these years was to just be friends, at a distance, since you have your life where you are and I have mine here in Baltimore and nothing can change now without causing a lot of problems for both of us and the last thing on earth I’d ever want is to cause you hurt in any way.  But I figured maybe I could come see you and chat over lunch or dinner or something every now and then.  But you’re afraid of what might happen.  And I was afraid that might be the case.  But…as it turns out…you’re not afraid of what I might do, so much as what you might do.  Let me guess…you don’t want to turn a friendship into something dirty.  Where have I heard that before?

I’m a grown man now and so are you and we both understand the risks here.  That’s why I’ve never suggested anything more happens then we just remain friends at a distance.  There are perfectly good reasons for me to stay away.  I know this.  I accept it.  But there is nothing wrong with you.  Or me.  There are plenty of very good reasons why I should keep my distance now, and maybe even forever…but that isn’t one of them. 

I should note this day for posterity on my calendars from now on.  It’s been the bitterest day of my life, for a reason I won’t go into here.  I mean…I’d actually Love to go into it…the blog has been a kind of therapy for me ever since I started it, since I live alone here in Baltimore and don’t have a companion I can actually…you know…talk to.  But there are certain someones out there I just don’t want to let see that particular small corner of my heart anymore.  I feel abused.  So I can’t really talk about what happened today, even here.  Much as I’d like to really get it out.  I’ve been wandering around in an all too familiar daze all day since it happened. 

It’s almost exactly like it was back in the late 1980s, when I fled every creative outlet I had because I just didn’t want to look to closely into my heart anymore, and I started plinking around with computers because I could be creative writing code and I discovered that code could be beautiful and elegant and crafting these beautiful and elegant algorithms didn’t involve my heart but only my brain.  All afternoon I was just completely zoned out and yet I was coding like mad.  Like the only existence I had was in the code.  The code was a safe place.  I didn’t have to have a life there, didn’t need a heart, just a brain capable of parsing structured syntax and thinking logically, and some problems to solve.

No I didn’t get laid off…although I’m always expecting that will happen eventually.  With the coming post-Bush budget woes NASA certainly will be facing heavy cutbacks, probably of the sort it felt in the 1970s and 80s after Apollo ended.  I have no idea what I might do with myself after Space Telescope, when and if that ever happens.  But for now I’ll be slightly amazed if I even survive the coming winter.

If only I had companionship…

Be careful what you search for…you might find it.

Be careful what questions you ask…they might be answered.

Be careful what you dream…it might come true.

Be careful most of all, of your heart’s dream…

Be careful of every new threshold you find yourself standing upon.  It may be you are standing on the edge of forever…

The wind never seems to stop here on the plains.  It is October in Wyoming, and the wind carries with it a chill now.  The first tentative breath of winter dances restlessly over rolling hills of sage.  The days have grown short, the nights cold.  And long.  Very long.  And quiet, save only for the sound of the wind. 

Take a walk tonight across the rolling hills of Wyoming sage.  Leave the town lights twinkling in the distance behind you.  Walk toward the mountains in the darkness ahead.  There is only you here tonight.  You, and the wind, and the stars in the sky, so far away.  So very far away.  Around you are only rolling hills of grass and sage, fading into the night.  There are remnants of what looks like a small wooden fence here, that was torn down some time ago. 

Listen to the wind.  Listen carefully.  There are ghosts here on the plains.  Hear them talk tonight among themselves…

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. "When he was depressed," she says, "he would just grab a handful." Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew "would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man…. He had no discrimination in his person."
-Vanity Fair

Shortly after midnight on October 7, 1998, 20-year-old Shepard met McKinney and Henderson in a bar. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride in their car. Subsequently, Shepard was robbed, pistol whipped, tortured, tied to a fence in a remote, rural area, and left to die. McKinney and Henderson also found out his address and intended to rob his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered eighteen hours later by a cyclist, who at first thought that Shepard was a scarecrow. At the time of discovery, Shepard was still alive, but in a coma.
-Wikipedia

Aaron Kreifels first met Matthew Shepard in a dream last Thursday night, the night after he discovered his fellow University of Wyoming student badly beaten, barely alive and tied up to a fence outside of Laramie.

Although Shepard was in Fort Collins by then, kept alive by an array of life-support machines in Poudre Valley Hospital’s intensive-care unit, Kreifels said the gay student, who was beaten beyond recognition, allegedly by two young Laramie roofers, perhaps because he was gay, came to visit his rescuer in a dream that night. Kreifels doesn’t remember much of the dream, but he said Wednesday that he awoke the next morning comforted by the vague sensation of having met the person he found in such bad shape two days before.

Although early reports indicated that two mountain bikers had discovered Shepard on the crude fence on an old, double-rutted road, Kreifels was alone that evening, struggling on his mountain bike through deep sand and for some reason ignoring a desire to turn back and find another, easier way back to town. Before he knew it, he had fallen. He was on the ground, his front wheel broken beyond repair. He was unhurt, but what he saw as he got up struck him cold.

"I got up and noticed something out of the corner of my eye,” he said from his room in a freshman dorm at the University of Wyoming on Wednesday. "At first I thought it was a scarecrow, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I went around and noticed it was a real person. I checked to see if he was conscious or not, and when I found out he wasn’t, I ran and got help as fast as I could.”

As the former high school crosscountry runner traversed the quarter- to half-mile of scrub prairie between him and the nearest house in the nearby Sherman Hills subdivision, his thoughts froze before quickly accelerating.

"It was distressing. I was panicked for a couple minutes, because I wanted to make sure I could do all I could do to help save him,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Officer Reggie Fluty: When I got there, the first – at first the only thing I could see was partially somebody’s feet and I got out of my vehicle and raced over – I seen what appeared to be a young man, thirteen, fourteen years old, because he was so tiny, laying on his back and he was tied to the bottome of the end of a pole.

I did the best I could.  The gentleman that was laying on the ground, Matthew Shepard, he was covered in dry blood all over his head.  There was dry blood underneath him and he was barely breathing…he was doing the best he could.

I was going to breath for him and I couldn’t get his mouth open – his mouth wouldn’t open for me.

He was covered in, like I said, partially dry blood and blood all over his head – the only place that he did not have any blood on him, on his face, was what appeared to be where he had been crying down his face.
-The Laramie Project

 

Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate.
-Wikipedia

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions – was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin. 
-Vanity Fair

Dr. Cantway:  I was working the emergency room the night Matthew Shepard was brought in.  I don’t think, that any of us, ah, can remember seeing a patient in that condition for a long time – those of us who’ve worked in big city hospitals have seen this.  Ah, but it’s not something you expect here.

Ah, you expect it, you expect this kind of injuries to come from a car going down a hill at eighty miles an hour.  You expect to see gross injuries from something like that – this horrendous, terrible thing.  Ah, but you don’t expect to see that from someone doing this to another person.

The ambulance report said it was a beating so we knew.
-The Laramie Project

Exactly a week after his tragic discovery, Kreifels, 18, an architectural engineering major from Grand Island, Neb., said he tries not to think about the condition in which he found the classmate he had never seen before. Authorities say Shepard’s assailants repeatedly beat him with the butt of a .357 Magnum, fracturing his skull. Kreifels doesn’t talk about it.

"I don’t really want to go into details about that,” he said.
-The Denver Post

Aaron Kreifels:  I keep seeing that picture in my head when I found him…and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. I don’t want it to be there. I wanna like get it out. That’s the biggest part for me is seeing that picture in my head. And it’s kind of unbelievable to me, you know, that – I happened to be the person who found him – because the big question with me, like with my religion, is like, Why did God want ME to find him?
-The Laramie Project

[Edited a tad…]

Your sermon for Sunday, October 5, 2008…

Potential Saint, Cardinal John Henry Newman, was probably gay

”They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife. There were repeated allegations during [Newman’s] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.”

Peter Tatchell, a British gay rights activist, remarking on the life of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, an influential Catholic thinker, who may be granted full Sainthood by the Catholic Church despite the probability of a homo-relational life spent with his male companion, Ambrose Saint John.

At his own request, Newman was buried in the same grave as Ambrose St John. He had stated on three occasions his desire to be buried with his friend, including shortly before his death in 1890: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will", he wrote, later adding: "This I confirm and insist on."
–Wikipedia Entry on John Henry Newman

Was a Would-Be Saint Gay?

The long-running battle between gay rights activists and the Vatican has moved into the realm of the dead. With 19th century Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker from the English-speaking world, moving ever closer to sainthood, trouble is brewing over where his final resting place should be. The London-born historian and theologian died in 1890 and, following the instructions in his will, was buried beside his lifelong friend and fellow convert Ambrose St. John, who had died 15 years earlier. Newman’s deep expressions of grief after St. John’s death, along with other writings, have led some historians to ask whether the two men, who lived together for many years, lived much like common-law spouses.

Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican’s recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man’s cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman’s spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman’s remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.

-Time Magazine

Although the passionate love between them was entirely chaste, the campaigners were seeking to claim — extravagantly — that Newman’s was a "same-sex relationship" which the Catholic Church was trying to suppress, an accusation Rome felt the need to scotch. But even those who did not believe Newman was a "closet homosexual" were still concerned that Newman’s body was going to be dismembered to extract relics. For such an English saint — the first non-martyr since the Reformation to be raised to the altars – it all seemed a little, well, Mediterranean.

(It has also been a running joke for religious correspondents, who have been proposing a "graveside webcam" to cover the disinternment, and speculating at the embarrassment that would follow from the discovery that the body of St John, not Newman’s, had been preserved.) 

–Austen Ivereigh, Writing For The National Catholic Weekly

No body in exhumed Newman’s grave

The grave of the 19th Century Cardinal John Henry Newman did not contain his body, the Catholic Church has revealed.

The plot, at the Oratory House, Rednal, near Birmingham, was excavated on Thursday at the Vatican’s instruction.

His remains were to have been moved to the Birmingham Oratory, in preparation for Newman’s anticipated beatification.

Newman’s body may have decomposed, as his coffin was not lead-lined. Its absence will not affect the progress of his cause in Rome, a spokesman said.

In a statement released on Saturday, Peter Jennings from the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, said: "Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts from Cardinal Newman’s coffin were found.

Newman was actually laid to rest, per his wishes, in St. John’s tomb.  That’s what makes the joke Ivereigh mentions of particular interest.   Regardless of whether their relationship ever became a physical one, Newman clearly and deeply loved St. John.  That’s why his body had to be removed from St. John’s tomb before he could be canonized.  The dehumanization of homosexual people proceeds not from a denial that sex between same sex lovers is natural, but from a denial that we love.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  It isn’t the suggestion that Newman ever had sex with the man he loved that outrages the likes of Ratzinger.  It’s the fact that he loved another man, and was loved by him, and that their love was vital to both of them.  That is what simply cannot be.  Not that they had sex, but that they loved each other.  That is why Newman’s body had to be dug up, and separated from St. John’s.  In his jihad on gay people, Pope Ratzinger isn’t one to let mere death prevent him from separating same sex lovers.

But when the tomb was opened they found no remains.  Both men were gone.  No Newman, No St. John.  The tomb was empty. 

From Pam’s House Blend…

Pizza To Go at the North Carolina 2008 Pride parade.  Well that sure makes me want to start going to church again…

Reader Chris left a comment to This Post the other day, about his own experiences making friends of German visitors.  I can relate.  The landscape is full of landmines…but its rewarding.

I made friends, briefly, with a British kid some years back.  We were both working in a custom plastic shop, and he knew a family in the apartment complex I lived in, so we had some points of contact between us.  The kid, Paul, who was so goddamned cute, first told me the joke about how England and America were two nations separated by a common language.  And it’s true.  You really couldn’t assume that even words we both shared in our language meant the same things.  Once, when he cut himself at the shop, and asked for a ‘patch’, all the good old boys at the shop laughed their butts off.  ‘Patch’ is the word they use for what we referred to as a ‘bandage’ over on this side of the Big Pond.  And ‘torch’ for ‘flashlight’.  And so on.  But beyond the meaning of words, there were dozens of little cultural differences all the good old boys could not have cared less about, when they weren’t laughing at them, but which I tried hard to pay attention to, because he was cute, and because he was decent and good-hearted, and I really wanted to be his friend.

You have to work at it.  But it’s worthwhile.  There are landmines and you have to be careful.  Even if you speak the same language.  Especially if.  Where the language barrier exists you kind of know you they’re there.  But even where you’re both speaking the same tongue you have to take care to reach across the fence.  The key is trust.  You have to hold it like a precious thing, and always take the extra step to keep it.  Paul and I lost touch after he went back to England.  But I hope he still thinks of me from time to time.  He opened my eyes a tad to some of the British stereotypes I grew up with.  Swear to God I can’t even watch Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins anymore since I knew Paul.  It’s so…embarrassing. 

I so very much want to be the friend to my crush from my high school days that I was too shy to be back then.  I think its coming along.  I hope it is.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to see him later next month.  Maybe not.  But I’ll keep trying.  He means a lot to me.  So I try to learn this and that of his culture and background.  It’s worthwhile, even if we remain mostly apart.  It’s opened my eyes to a bit more of the world, and that’s always a good thing.

I ordered some books on German history and culture from Amazon.  I’m going to read through them when they come.  Even if it doesn’t bring us closer together, it’s having a broadening effect on me.  This poor angry world could use more of that in all of us.  If I could change one thing about the American educational system it would be this: every kid would have to spend a year abroad…somewhere…before graduating.  My countrymen are a bit too insular.  We need to see more of the world first hand while we’re still young.  Maybe we’d be better neighbors if we did.

Actually…I tried mayonnaise on my fries just the other day.  They were…delicious.

A friend calls…and during the conversation we discuss our working lives, and how it is good to have a job that engages you completely…thoroughly.  A couple friends of mine are taking the Big Detour off their career paths after years, because they aren’t sure they want to spend the rest of their lives in them.  Some friends have been laid off.  Some don’t know what they are going to do with their lives.

Fine.  But that’s not my issue.  Career isn’t crap.  It isn’t.  Neither is money.  Some time ago I did one of those cute little MySpace surveys…and one of the questions was…

28. Would you rather be rich and smart or young and beautiful?
(sigh) Whatever comes with smart. Stupid is not worth being beautiful for. Or rich either.

Okay…  I have another question.  Would you rather have the job of your dreams and be single, or wash dishes at some cheap dive and have your soulmate.

But it’s not rocket science.  Not at all.  Whatever comes with the soulmate, that’s what I want.  That’s all that matters.  That’s it.   That’s everything.  Everything.   I work on the Hubble Space Telescope project.  I make good money.  I own my own house now…and a Mercedes-Benz.  I get five weeks of paid vacation every year.  I make really good money.  I should be counting my blessings.  I should be relishing the good life fate has given me.  And I am miserable.  I’d trade it all…in a heartbeat…for the minimum wage dishwasher job and the soulmate.  In a heartbeat.   In a heartbeat.  And think myself so goddamned lucky.  So very very goddamned lucky…  But life hasn’t given me that choice.  I don’t think it ever will.

I feel like a failure.  I feel like a leftover part.  My friends…they just don’t understand that.  They think I’m making a big deal over nothing.  Some of them have found their other half.  Others have loved and lost, and loved again, and maybe lost again, and are bored with the whole dating and mating thing.  They think I should be so glad to have a good job, and be making good money, and be able to do whatever I want with my free time…because I’m single…

And it’s all the worse when you begin to realize that your friends are telling you all this, because they figure you’re really not boyfriend material, and so they’re trying to be kind to the love cripple.  Just accept being single Bruce…it’s for the best…  You’re not really all that good looking…and let’s face it…you’re getting old…

I hate my life.  I just…hate it.  Thank you god for Tequila..