Defending the (Vacillating) Martial Flux in the United States
Over three billion years ago viable life on planet earth underwent a dynamic cataclysmic shift from previous sociological norms—it began to reproduce sexually. Long before bridal veils and bachelor parties, genetic DNA was bartered in lieu of nuptial bands in order to ensure the propagation of life on this planet. In his splendiferous essay "Same Sex Marriage—Should Gays Marry?" Marc Perkel, the self-confessed "most dangerous mind on the Internet" maps out the trajectory of human reproduction and evolution, the foundational genetics under which all human beings are currently governed. "An individual needed not only to be born, but also to survive to the reproductive age and reproduce before dying" (www.perkel.com). The axis of human evolution and the future history of mankind rested solely on the fact that our ancestors sexually reproduced.
In the same article Perkel further asserts that, "Marriage was born from primitive cultures that recognized that males and females mated and as a result produced children that needed to be cared for." Marriage was not an ordained function of the Church nor was it a concern of the state. Marriage was simply a buttress between two human beings to help further augment the survival and continuity of our current civilization.
Under the dogmatic aegis of Christian and Islamic law, marriage evolved into something of a commodity. Wives were submissive to their philandering spouses and donned the occasional veil to keep their demeanor in check. The marriage of church and state would later lead to laws that, in almost every Westernized culture, placed a greater emphatic interest on the Waspish male over his subservient conjugal.
The United States as a nation was christened under this biased perspective. It's almost gospel that when the third person pronoun was historically inked into the first sentence of the Constitution, the "We" did not refer to all people currently inhabiting the states, but conversely referred to a select group of elitist patriotic fops, who donned wigs and tights, harvested fields of marijuana, kept scores of slaves, enjoyed the occasional syphilitic bout and murdered the original inhabitants of the land they appropriated rationalizing much of their uncouth actions under the name of a deity whose opinion apparently mirrored their own misguided jingoism.
Marriage in the United States was fastened under this jurisdiction. The website ReligiousTolerance.org stresses that throughout the history of the United States, marriage and civil rights have always adhered to a somewhat malleable definition. In a recent diagnosis, Newsweek magazine states that the evolution of marriage has been vacillating for centuries. "The institution of marriage has been in a state of flux, always responding to the particular needs of that era"(Kantrowitz 40). African American's were not allowed to legally marry in all areas of the United States until after the Civil War. It was only in 1967, less than forty years ago, that the Supreme Court officially recognized interracial marriage. Until 1970, there was no such notion as martial rape because it was judicially inferred that a husband owned his wife's sexuality.
The greatest sociological slap to the purported sacrosanct union of matrimony in recent years has undoubtedly been the alarming rise in divorce. Over the last twenty years, the onset of the Nuclear family prematurely fostered a generation of overtly-cynical, politically despondent Gen-X siblings; the bastards of the baby-boomers growing up in an technology-laced society where parental marriage holds both the tenuous shelf life and fleeced superficiality comparable to a stale televised sitcom. According to a recent report released by the center of disease control and prevention and estimated forty-three percent of all first marriages will end in separation or divorce within 15 years, and all first or second marriages are more likely to end in divorce today than two decades ago (www.divorceform.org). The reason so many young adults seem dubious about their society, lackluster in their jobs, incredulous towards their governmental policies is because the first civil union they ever witnessed, the union of mother and father, was a failed campaign.
Viewed from this facet, marriage has sadly transitioned to the tune of the latest zero financed marketable asset. Even mega-conservative mongrel Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family states that, “If marriage means everything, it means nothing” (Religioustolerance.org).
But in the past three months, marriage has meant something; it has meant everything for citizens previously banned from the lawful hassle of declaring public declaration their love in the confines of a courtroom or comfort of a cathedral. In February rainbow flags were simultaneously raised all over the country in support of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to declare proposition 22—the 2000 California ballot that defined marriage as between a man and a woman—unconstitutional in terms of discrimination.
“I don’t agree with separate but unequal,” stated Mayor Newsom is a press release following his mandate. “Civil Unions are not good enough” ( Taylor, 40).
The results were astounding. In the first week alone over 6,000 couples were granted the legalities of a valid marriage. Six thousand couples whom, in their own lifetime, faced serious struggles in terms of sexual-identification and familial consent while battling “secular” inequity and political partiality brimming with bigotry. In one-weeks time, centuries of misunderstanding and malice were supplanted by bells and bouquets as over six thousand civil unions were cemented and declared lawful by a gracious government that has gradually taken its time inserting the universal ‘We’ back into the first sentence of the Constitution.
As was expected, the political right contorted from wing to fist, lambasting Mayor Newsom’s mayoral perspicacity. “It’s time for San Francisco to stop traveling down this dangerous path of ignoring the rule of law.” California Governor Schwarzenegger said. President Bush publicly admitted that he was seriously “troubled” by the recent support in minority rights. Even Dr. James Dobson postulated that the current pervasive trend of Gay marriage will inevitably mar marriages presupposed holiness. “Marriage will mean nothing to same-sex as well as to opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated (Taylor 40).
The trend towards universal marriage mirrors mankind’s immortal quest of self-realization in relationship towards another human being. While discussing the elusive nature of love and mysticism, poet and translator Coleman Barks commented to Bill Moyers that, “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
Barks was referring to an ancient poem by the Persian mystic Shams of Tabriz in which one-third of the poem consisted entirely of pronouns. “I you he she we/ In the garden of mystic lovers/ These are not true distinctions.”
William Shakespeare also seemed keenly aware of the hearts dilemma. In his widely anthologized Sonnet 114, Shakespeare urges his readers to, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments Love is not love/ Which alters when its alteration finds/not bends with the remover to remove/ O no, it is an ever fixed mark” (Cohen 1962).
Unbridled love is indeed an indelible nagging urge. I myself feel blessed to have witness the event that transpired in San Francisco and anticipate the pending cultivation of acceptance of universal matrimony within the United States. In an age where even Christian conservatism remains skeptical over the future of marriage, I myself remain optimistic, acknowledging that nothing is perhaps more sacred than the marriage of true minds in an age where coifed conservative naiveté has reluctantly become fashionable. Even over the discourse of 300 billion years, sociological norms will continue to radically shift, thus allowing future evolution into the creature called man.
Quotations:
"Each individual's journey through life is unique. Some will make this journey alone, others in loving relationships - maybe in marriage or other forms of commitment. We need to ponder our own choices and try to understand the choices of others. Love has many shapes and colors and is not finite. It can not be measured or defined in terms of sexual orientation." From the Statement of Affirmation and Reconciliation by the Quaker meeting in Aotearoa.
"Because marriage is a basic human right and an individual personal choice, RESOLVED, the State should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully an equally in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage." The Marriage Resolution, by the Marriage Project of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. 3
"If marriage means everything, it means absolutely nothing. It will mean nothing to same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated. Increasing numbers of couples will elect to simply 'live together'." Dr. James C. Dobson, of Focus on the Family.
Because the errant button of yer reality is so much more than just a simple stage curtain, it is a passionate pergola of corporeal longing, a recital for every botched blessing that somehow, like your body creatively configured in hard-right geometrical angles of grace, is still to come.....
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Sometimes the wayward hippie still hatches out from my side...
Being Young and financially depleted In Bush’s America,
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
Friday, April 08, 2005
A Golden Feather for Sister Arya (Very Old, unfinished, but oh well)...
-Here's an unfinished entry from exactly seven months ago that I half- wrote and then forgot about until today. Since Lady D and Mara-Arya are meeting each other for the first time tonight, I thought I'd splatter some memories from the first day I "met" Mara-arya.....sorry it's unfinished and wordy (when they do our blogging troika "blography" I pinkie-swear I'll have the entry buffed to perfection)....
Have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
At the end of the day there were finally feathers. I'd been looking for feathers all day. Looking for feathers all my life it seemed--as I stumbled out at bed at three a.m. that morning and arrived at the bus station. Looking for feathers when I arrived at Midway four hours later and shuffled my thoughts past the baggage carousel to the Orange line. Looking for feathers as I zipped into the hard vertical rectangular shape of the city, flanked by fellow commuters toating briefcases with blank- copier paper expressions plastered on their morning faces. Looking for feathers as I scrambled off the Orange line and arrived at the Library stop. Looking for feathers as I strutted my dreams beneath the thick shadowy film blanketing the lively morning bustle of Chicago traffic in a thick silhouette veil. Looking for feathers as I entered a Starbucks (no feather), poured copious amounts of caffeine down the oral chute, ruffled the Sport section of the Trib and inwardly bitched over another inexplicable Cubs lost! ( How come they always need wings in September to float into the post season?)
I ambled down Adams, early September, looking for feathers, arriving at the Steps of the Art Institute at 9:30 still trying to rouse my way into consciousness. The gray, damp used-tea-bag flavored clouds had gradually begun to drift, revealing a golden pond of sleek autumnal sky perfectly placed above my forehead like a halo. A group of Senior Citizens, some with cardboard faces and bolled cotton hairstyles, had begun to form a line outside the Art Institute in the crooked shape of a Question mark. I sip my coffee, anxiously strutting between the two Chrome Lions that guard the entrance of the building like sentinels, waiting for my freind to arrive.
My friend Arya uses feathers in her lectures. When I trek around my hometown of Peoria and see an errant feather bristling across a spare patch of earth, I sometimes think of her. I seem to somehow have this weird correlation towards strewn objects. I think of Uncle Mike when I see loose change scattered on the sidewalk like petrified confetti. I think of my Dad when I see surrendered ponytail holders lying listlessly on the ground. It seems like certain abandoned articles connote a deeper, almost mystical significance.
"It's spiritual litter," I tell my friend, later in the day, tossing out the dregs of a cigarette.
"I have this problem with littering," She'll tell me later, picking up the pinched filter and depositing the butt into an empty coffee cup.
*
Wearing my favorite pin stripe blue blazor that once belonged to my father, I squatted on the cement lips leading up to the Art Institute and waited, my elbows resting on my thighs for support. There was no feathers visible. There were only crones hackeling stale rhetoric behind me and the thick stream whorl of traffic blurring my vision. Each vehicle ferrying different lives, different stories; each vehicle dashing off to a different port, a different destination.
Each car flying down Michigan avenue without the assitance of wings.
Forgoing the quest for feathers while waiting for my friend, I begin to see myself. There was a young artist with a thick-leashed brown ponytail sipping his coffee next to one of the Lions. There was an old man dressed in a derby cap and wry smile, heavily puffing on a cigar. There was the man in the bussiness shirt and even shorter haircut, sitting on the same ledge of stairs where I sat, in the same posture that I was seated. His bussiness pants were the same exact pattern as my father's coat. We exchanged glances several times and volleyed coy remarks. It was as if we were both waiting for the same person to arrive. Fifteen minutes later, a female arrived and squatted next to him and kissed him. He looked at me as if he had just won something we were both competeing for before escorting his prize into the annexed mouth of the building.
I still waited void of feathers. I have seen my friend only once and was afraid that i might not recognize her. "Of course I would!" I thought. "How could I not? We're 'blogging-buddies.' We know everything about each other. It's like we're inside each other's body and thoughts every day, only instead of cells and blood vessels, everything is composed and connected with words and images and something called 'Mara.'"
Arya has long black hair (nostalgia button). A woman walks up next to me with long black hair and an upside down boomerang smile. She has a sheet of black hair that sway's like how I imagine Arya's hair would sway, but she also has a huge ass. Huge ass. It's ten-thrity and I'm starting to worry and I hate staring at the fat ass because I think she feels that I'm checking her out. She inches closer. "Arya?" I think to myself. The closer I inch the weirder I feel. I approach her and her face swivels the opposite direction. No. Thank God. Definetly not the soul I'm waiting for.
"Perhaps Arya won't come." I think to myself. Outside of blogger our g-mails are quick raindrops of exchanged rhetoric. Perhaps she came and I missed her. Perhaps she's busy. Perhaps she forgot. I envision taking the early bus home and finding a wicked e-mail stashed in the empty space of my g-mail: "This is what happens when you chase your Mara." It would say. "You wind-up feeling completely empty on the inside and utterly alone on the out."
*
But, no. She shows up! Fashionably stepping out of the wing of a taxi in stylish four-inch heels as if chicly jutting out from the side of a limousine. I recognize her immediately. I recognize her hair and her forehead and her cheekbones. She's dressed like a rockstar on the way to a fashion show. Black top, cool jeans with a swirled dragon embroidered on the thigh, earrings the size of planetary loops, sunglasses. Streaks of blonde shoot her through black hair. For a moment I think about nonchalantly milling around the front steps and waiting for her to notice and approach me. But I can't. Next thing I realize is that I'm in front of her. Helping her assemble her child's stroller.
"Been a long time my friend!" I think I said first, or maybe I said "'Bout time your wayfarer ass showed up!" or maybe I said something else. I can't remember verbatim what my first non-typed out words to Arya were, but I remember watching her smile and apologize inceassantly for being late before we quickly hugged and then tucked her six-month old daughter into the pouch of the stroller, entering the Art Institute via the side ramp. The weather is now completely golden and a feeling of pending seasonal transition lingers heavenly in the air. I still have yet to spot a feather, but I have finally found an angel of a friend pushing her newbron child by my side. Entering the building I feel very happy.
*
"I was thinking that maybe we both should've brought our laptops so that way we could blogg our conversations out to each other so we'd be more comfortable. People would think that we were playing battleship or something."
She laughs. We enter the building. Typical of spiritual siblings who can't take a compliment from each other "Mara-Arya" and "Captain Universe" are bickering within the first five minutes. They are in front of the cash register. Captain Universe insists on paying, handing the cashier a wad of bills. Mara-Arya jostles her elbows and guts Captain Universe in the stomach.
"No way." Mara-Arya says.
"My friend, my pleasure. Put your money away." I halt out my arm over her limbs. She has a credit card thrust into the cashier's face.
"Put your money away." I tell her. "It's on me."
"No," She says. She's much more adamant in person than she is in her blogg. It's almost like we're jockeying for position at the start of a race. The cashier has my wad of bills in his hand and then Arya literally reaches her hand across the counter and forcefully removes the bills from his grasp shoving her plastic card into his face.
"This ones on me." she says, smiling handing me the crumpled bills and the next thing I know we're inside the museum next to each other not knowing exactly what to say.
*
Arya's noticeably nervous. I'm cracking too many witticims and lame jokes hoping that our social icebreakers will melt and cool off the initial nerves. I'm whording the conversation. Arya's voice is benevolent and chimes. I like the way her voice sounds in person. I'm talking about myself too much. We're looking at art. Gazing at Matisse and Braque and Picasso. We both say the word "Titian" at the same time and smile and look at each other. It's old lady day at the museum and all these crones are stationed like Mannequins in front of timeless works of antiquity. We keep getting 'stuck' in front of these crones who won't shut up talking about neo-classicism. Periodically Arya scoops up her six-month old, a fragrant rose bud named Jada May and coddles her, leaving me to push the plastic stroller.
"I've never done this." I tell her.
"Nothing like bring your newbron up on Boucher."
**************
End of story--when I arrived back at Midway there were feathers everywhere. It looked like an angel sorority had just had a pillow fight. So many feathers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*****
I made a big nest of feathers and planted the gift my friend gave me in the center so that it looked like an egg
I've been seeing feathers for weeks. Long, narrow swift-shaped plumes flopped in front of my tattered Doc Martens as I would trek to and from classes--as I exhaustively
Have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
At the end of the day there were finally feathers. I'd been looking for feathers all day. Looking for feathers all my life it seemed--as I stumbled out at bed at three a.m. that morning and arrived at the bus station. Looking for feathers when I arrived at Midway four hours later and shuffled my thoughts past the baggage carousel to the Orange line. Looking for feathers as I zipped into the hard vertical rectangular shape of the city, flanked by fellow commuters toating briefcases with blank- copier paper expressions plastered on their morning faces. Looking for feathers as I scrambled off the Orange line and arrived at the Library stop. Looking for feathers as I strutted my dreams beneath the thick shadowy film blanketing the lively morning bustle of Chicago traffic in a thick silhouette veil. Looking for feathers as I entered a Starbucks (no feather), poured copious amounts of caffeine down the oral chute, ruffled the Sport section of the Trib and inwardly bitched over another inexplicable Cubs lost! ( How come they always need wings in September to float into the post season?)
I ambled down Adams, early September, looking for feathers, arriving at the Steps of the Art Institute at 9:30 still trying to rouse my way into consciousness. The gray, damp used-tea-bag flavored clouds had gradually begun to drift, revealing a golden pond of sleek autumnal sky perfectly placed above my forehead like a halo. A group of Senior Citizens, some with cardboard faces and bolled cotton hairstyles, had begun to form a line outside the Art Institute in the crooked shape of a Question mark. I sip my coffee, anxiously strutting between the two Chrome Lions that guard the entrance of the building like sentinels, waiting for my freind to arrive.
My friend Arya uses feathers in her lectures. When I trek around my hometown of Peoria and see an errant feather bristling across a spare patch of earth, I sometimes think of her. I seem to somehow have this weird correlation towards strewn objects. I think of Uncle Mike when I see loose change scattered on the sidewalk like petrified confetti. I think of my Dad when I see surrendered ponytail holders lying listlessly on the ground. It seems like certain abandoned articles connote a deeper, almost mystical significance.
"It's spiritual litter," I tell my friend, later in the day, tossing out the dregs of a cigarette.
"I have this problem with littering," She'll tell me later, picking up the pinched filter and depositing the butt into an empty coffee cup.
*
Wearing my favorite pin stripe blue blazor that once belonged to my father, I squatted on the cement lips leading up to the Art Institute and waited, my elbows resting on my thighs for support. There was no feathers visible. There were only crones hackeling stale rhetoric behind me and the thick stream whorl of traffic blurring my vision. Each vehicle ferrying different lives, different stories; each vehicle dashing off to a different port, a different destination.
Each car flying down Michigan avenue without the assitance of wings.
Forgoing the quest for feathers while waiting for my friend, I begin to see myself. There was a young artist with a thick-leashed brown ponytail sipping his coffee next to one of the Lions. There was an old man dressed in a derby cap and wry smile, heavily puffing on a cigar. There was the man in the bussiness shirt and even shorter haircut, sitting on the same ledge of stairs where I sat, in the same posture that I was seated. His bussiness pants were the same exact pattern as my father's coat. We exchanged glances several times and volleyed coy remarks. It was as if we were both waiting for the same person to arrive. Fifteen minutes later, a female arrived and squatted next to him and kissed him. He looked at me as if he had just won something we were both competeing for before escorting his prize into the annexed mouth of the building.
I still waited void of feathers. I have seen my friend only once and was afraid that i might not recognize her. "Of course I would!" I thought. "How could I not? We're 'blogging-buddies.' We know everything about each other. It's like we're inside each other's body and thoughts every day, only instead of cells and blood vessels, everything is composed and connected with words and images and something called 'Mara.'"
Arya has long black hair (nostalgia button). A woman walks up next to me with long black hair and an upside down boomerang smile. She has a sheet of black hair that sway's like how I imagine Arya's hair would sway, but she also has a huge ass. Huge ass. It's ten-thrity and I'm starting to worry and I hate staring at the fat ass because I think she feels that I'm checking her out. She inches closer. "Arya?" I think to myself. The closer I inch the weirder I feel. I approach her and her face swivels the opposite direction. No. Thank God. Definetly not the soul I'm waiting for.
"Perhaps Arya won't come." I think to myself. Outside of blogger our g-mails are quick raindrops of exchanged rhetoric. Perhaps she came and I missed her. Perhaps she's busy. Perhaps she forgot. I envision taking the early bus home and finding a wicked e-mail stashed in the empty space of my g-mail: "This is what happens when you chase your Mara." It would say. "You wind-up feeling completely empty on the inside and utterly alone on the out."
*
But, no. She shows up! Fashionably stepping out of the wing of a taxi in stylish four-inch heels as if chicly jutting out from the side of a limousine. I recognize her immediately. I recognize her hair and her forehead and her cheekbones. She's dressed like a rockstar on the way to a fashion show. Black top, cool jeans with a swirled dragon embroidered on the thigh, earrings the size of planetary loops, sunglasses. Streaks of blonde shoot her through black hair. For a moment I think about nonchalantly milling around the front steps and waiting for her to notice and approach me. But I can't. Next thing I realize is that I'm in front of her. Helping her assemble her child's stroller.
"Been a long time my friend!" I think I said first, or maybe I said "'Bout time your wayfarer ass showed up!" or maybe I said something else. I can't remember verbatim what my first non-typed out words to Arya were, but I remember watching her smile and apologize inceassantly for being late before we quickly hugged and then tucked her six-month old daughter into the pouch of the stroller, entering the Art Institute via the side ramp. The weather is now completely golden and a feeling of pending seasonal transition lingers heavenly in the air. I still have yet to spot a feather, but I have finally found an angel of a friend pushing her newbron child by my side. Entering the building I feel very happy.
*
"I was thinking that maybe we both should've brought our laptops so that way we could blogg our conversations out to each other so we'd be more comfortable. People would think that we were playing battleship or something."
She laughs. We enter the building. Typical of spiritual siblings who can't take a compliment from each other "Mara-Arya" and "Captain Universe" are bickering within the first five minutes. They are in front of the cash register. Captain Universe insists on paying, handing the cashier a wad of bills. Mara-Arya jostles her elbows and guts Captain Universe in the stomach.
"No way." Mara-Arya says.
"My friend, my pleasure. Put your money away." I halt out my arm over her limbs. She has a credit card thrust into the cashier's face.
"Put your money away." I tell her. "It's on me."
"No," She says. She's much more adamant in person than she is in her blogg. It's almost like we're jockeying for position at the start of a race. The cashier has my wad of bills in his hand and then Arya literally reaches her hand across the counter and forcefully removes the bills from his grasp shoving her plastic card into his face.
"This ones on me." she says, smiling handing me the crumpled bills and the next thing I know we're inside the museum next to each other not knowing exactly what to say.
*
Arya's noticeably nervous. I'm cracking too many witticims and lame jokes hoping that our social icebreakers will melt and cool off the initial nerves. I'm whording the conversation. Arya's voice is benevolent and chimes. I like the way her voice sounds in person. I'm talking about myself too much. We're looking at art. Gazing at Matisse and Braque and Picasso. We both say the word "Titian" at the same time and smile and look at each other. It's old lady day at the museum and all these crones are stationed like Mannequins in front of timeless works of antiquity. We keep getting 'stuck' in front of these crones who won't shut up talking about neo-classicism. Periodically Arya scoops up her six-month old, a fragrant rose bud named Jada May and coddles her, leaving me to push the plastic stroller.
"I've never done this." I tell her.
"Nothing like bring your newbron up on Boucher."
**************
End of story--when I arrived back at Midway there were feathers everywhere. It looked like an angel sorority had just had a pillow fight. So many feathers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*****
I made a big nest of feathers and planted the gift my friend gave me in the center so that it looked like an egg
I've been seeing feathers for weeks. Long, narrow swift-shaped plumes flopped in front of my tattered Doc Martens as I would trek to and from classes--as I exhaustively
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Poems for Mara-Arya and Lady Benzedrine
Mara-Arya and Lady Benz are finally going to meet each other in a couple of weeks at Bosch!!!!!!! I'll be absent (you know, whole nobel conference for burgeoning geniuses in Paris and all that.....) but I thought I'd share a couple of poems inspired by the yin-yang of my poetic heart. In the past year, M.A. and L.B. have more or less ben the feminine essnece in my life, and for that, I'm eternally grateful.........
Have a great conference, oh, and arya, try not to fall on your ass this time!
Love ya's.....
Have a great conference, oh, and arya, try not to fall on your ass this time!
Love ya's.....
PALMS
My wife reads palms.
She holds them up in front of her face like a child’s
first Christmas ornament her eyes
tracing ridged constellations across invisible
boundaries planted in the recipients palm.
“Think of it as a photo album of everything
you have ever felt, a biography of touch.”
She says smoothing my fingers into a placid
oath pledging allegiance to latitudinal
skids fenced across the limp fruit of my wrist—
a dashed horizontal trench, calculus of light
skin blushed into the coral pulp of thumb.
My wife blinks into a pond of fingers
Smiles across the peeled callous shell
drip of wood, the season a father
instructs his six year old how to clutch the winged
timber of Louisville slugger.
The glimpse of chin hushed over a bubble of small
knuckles chanting rote bedroom introits
visualizing the cumulus squeeze, the electric
nighttime bolt of deity.
Or the scratchy anxiety of Homecoming autumn
errant scabs nervous balm
oyster hands oblivious how to navigate
the edifices of the female body.
My sins, of course, she can see those too.
A fish line casting ripples
below the surface of pigment cropped
lid—toolbox of lies
She espies the denim rags of my vocation
greasy dead-end splats daubed
fingertips waist slumped over a rusty
hood like a question mark all
day tinkering with oily machine innards all
my life—a failure.
My wife tells me not to worry. That the curved
crescent bow swerved
cul-de-sac assures me covenants of laughter
the quiet hush of spring,
the secret hymn of a husband still getting-off
while he observes his lover
draped in the calm still morning quietude of winter
when gruff moisture abandons his
sentences in alphabetical buds, licking the salt
white from her thighs.
My wife reads palms.
She holds them up in front of her face like a child’s
first Christmas ornament her eyes
tracing ridged constellations across invisible
boundaries planted in the recipients palm.
“Think of it as a photo album of everything
you have ever felt, a biography of touch.”
She says smoothing my fingers into a placid
oath pledging allegiance to latitudinal
skids fenced across the limp fruit of my wrist—
a dashed horizontal trench, calculus of light
skin blushed into the coral pulp of thumb.
My wife blinks into a pond of fingers
Smiles across the peeled callous shell
drip of wood, the season a father
instructs his six year old how to clutch the winged
timber of Louisville slugger.
The glimpse of chin hushed over a bubble of small
knuckles chanting rote bedroom introits
visualizing the cumulus squeeze, the electric
nighttime bolt of deity.
Or the scratchy anxiety of Homecoming autumn
errant scabs nervous balm
oyster hands oblivious how to navigate
the edifices of the female body.
My sins, of course, she can see those too.
A fish line casting ripples
below the surface of pigment cropped
lid—toolbox of lies
She espies the denim rags of my vocation
greasy dead-end splats daubed
fingertips waist slumped over a rusty
hood like a question mark all
day tinkering with oily machine innards all
my life—a failure.
My wife tells me not to worry. That the curved
crescent bow swerved
cul-de-sac assures me covenants of laughter
the quiet hush of spring,
the secret hymn of a husband still getting-off
while he observes his lover
draped in the calm still morning quietude of winter
when gruff moisture abandons his
sentences in alphabetical buds, licking the salt
white from her thighs.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
I'm such a romantic sop at times it's not even funny.....
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," by Christopher Marlowe.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.
The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Stuck up ShitCreek without a paddle (ii)
.....Things do get better. Mom loaned me the two hundred bucks I needed to splurge on books. I sit in front of GORGEOUS Niki LaMontagne in Seth Katz zany Grammar for verbal masochists--Niki (not Hippie-Nikki, for those keeping tabs of my tottering love life) is studying to be an elementary school teacher, hails from Minnesota, has shoulder length chestnut hair and a face that looks like an unblemished snowfield on Christmas Eve. I could feel her breath clouding up the back of my neck all during Katz' introduction to preopositions and pronouns.
Awwwwwwww!!!!!!!!
Wittle-Davey-has-a-whittle-cwush.........
I also have Prof. Chambers for Fiction class. There was a mix up in directions and half the class met half a mile away in the GCC. After fifteen minutes of menial patter I volunteered to hoof (more like sprint) the distance to Bradley Hall where I discerned that class was already in progress.
Chambers is an old school Harvard graduate and a distnguished Veteran of the literary scene, and when I arrived to class, out of breath, Chambers asked me simply, "Where the fuck have you been?" (Those were his exacts words).....followed by,"Well delegate, run back over there and round up your truant friends."
Awwwwwwww!!!!!!!!
Wittle-Davey-has-a-whittle-cwush.........
I also have Prof. Chambers for Fiction class. There was a mix up in directions and half the class met half a mile away in the GCC. After fifteen minutes of menial patter I volunteered to hoof (more like sprint) the distance to Bradley Hall where I discerned that class was already in progress.
Chambers is an old school Harvard graduate and a distnguished Veteran of the literary scene, and when I arrived to class, out of breath, Chambers asked me simply, "Where the fuck have you been?" (Those were his exacts words).....followed by,"Well delegate, run back over there and round up your truant friends."
Monday, January 10, 2005
Live, Damnit!!!!!!
Uncle Jack's i.e., J-London's Birthday is WED!!!
Jack London said, "The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
Also, I need to send a shot out to my brother Joe. Joe has long red hair, wears thick glasses, smokes cigarettes, drinks like he lives inside a fish bowl....Joe always has a smile plastered into the freckled dents of his face. He is the first to crack jokes in public--he is a perennial college student, writer, guitarist, dilletante poet....Joe received a full-college scholarship in gymnastic and Diving and ( oh, yeah) Joe scraps around campus on crutches. Joe lost his right leg to bone cancer when he was nine....all this and he still can do a back flip off a hi-dive with one foot or "his tail" as he calls it....
Joe's making plans to go down to Tennesse. His ambition is to be the first ambutee to traverse the Appalatian trail. Try telling me that he won't succeed.
ATTA boy Joe!!! Maybe its just the girls I date, but I'm tired of always hearing people bitch about petty material driven commodities. Never once have I heard Joe grouse about his leg--not once in the two years I have known him have I ever seen anything less than a smile and a stately nod.
Thanks JOE!!!!!
Your antics inspire me to, in the words of the late Amanda Davis, "Write like my life depended on it!!!!!"
Jack London said, "The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
Also, I need to send a shot out to my brother Joe. Joe has long red hair, wears thick glasses, smokes cigarettes, drinks like he lives inside a fish bowl....Joe always has a smile plastered into the freckled dents of his face. He is the first to crack jokes in public--he is a perennial college student, writer, guitarist, dilletante poet....Joe received a full-college scholarship in gymnastic and Diving and ( oh, yeah) Joe scraps around campus on crutches. Joe lost his right leg to bone cancer when he was nine....all this and he still can do a back flip off a hi-dive with one foot or "his tail" as he calls it....
Joe's making plans to go down to Tennesse. His ambition is to be the first ambutee to traverse the Appalatian trail. Try telling me that he won't succeed.
ATTA boy Joe!!! Maybe its just the girls I date, but I'm tired of always hearing people bitch about petty material driven commodities. Never once have I heard Joe grouse about his leg--not once in the two years I have known him have I ever seen anything less than a smile and a stately nod.
Thanks JOE!!!!!
Your antics inspire me to, in the words of the late Amanda Davis, "Write like my life depended on it!!!!!"
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