Small Towns, Small Minds

I grew up in cities where intellectual stimulation was something normal and highly sought after. Most of my friends were solidly working class who worked their way through college as I did. Rich people were something we made fun of and spit in their water glasses when they ate at restaurants where we worked. I never met one person who didn't have to worry about finances who wasn't also a real asshole. I grew up knowing there were two kinds of people in the world-- those with money, and those without. One had power, the other did not. One was loyal and kind and compassionate, the other would sell his or her own offspring for a few dollars.

The list goes on and on, and over the years the stereotype held true as I began to follow politics, the arts, and the world of power and intrigue. People like George Bush were the ultimate proof that money made people mean, cruel, inept, and encased in a bubble that was filled only with their own kind--unless they needed a photo op and then they'd hold the nasty little poor kids and try not to look too disgusted. Or they'd invite some leader of an advocacy group for the poor to their home or event or fund raiser to show their civic responsibility. But if these photo ops tried to date their sons and daughters, or goddess forbid, tried to become their friend! well...let's just say they learned really quickly there was a difference between public and private realities.

Given my feelings about rich people, it was a simple mistake to think the utter selfishness, the total cruelty, the malicious and destructive lies and gossip, the scapegoating, the appalling shifting of blame and responsibility for their own mistakes to someone, anyone less powerful, less part of the group was easily explained as traits of the rich and entitled.

For some cruel reason, I ended up having as acquaintances far too many children of the wealthy and upper middle classes. Maybe because in the community where I lived the only other choices were religious crazies, high school drop-outs, or meth losers. I've written often enough how these rich people's brats were the first to stick me with unpaid bills and borrow money they never repaid, and how they made selfish choices rather than practical real world decisions about everything they did and thought.

Given these experiences and how I felt about rich people, it was an easy mistake to make that they were shallow, small-minded, cruel, selfish, and well-versed in the art of scapegoating just because they were children of the rich and had been pampered all their lives and felt they were entitled to something just because they wanted it. It was an easy explanation, and in many cases, there was some honest truth behind it.

But lately I'm beginning to understand what was really wrong with these people and it had nothing to do with money. While only one or two actually knew what it meant to be poor, most grew up comfortably if not wealthy. They grew up believing they were special. They grew up believing their world was so perfect that nothing else dare intrude upon its perfection.

But it had nothing to do with money. It had to do with the fact that many of them lived for decades in a small town and chose not to let anything else into that sheltered little world that could disturb the fantasy--like the Internet for example.

Instead they chose to live in these tiny little incestuous groups where gossip fueled everything. Even though many of them were now in their 40's, 50's and even 60's, they never really mentally graduated from High School. Their world continually recycled from nonsense decades old. They slept with and married each other and then had affairs and broke up over each other. They passed the same ideas around like a dirty pair of socks. And they grew smug and intolerant of anyone but their own little groups.

I understand now that people like me terrified them. I didn't have children. I didn't go to their hippie churches and pretend it was somehow different from the religious crap they were raised with. I didn't automatically take the side of someone who was wrong just because they were married or fucking someone from "the community." And horror of horrors, I wanted more than their shallow friendships and mean-spirited gossip.

The breaking point for us came when I met and related to fascinating people I met through online connections. To them the Internet, the world wide web, even email was something for sex predators or at the most, to make airline reservations for those trust funded treks around the world.

The social aspect of it did not exist for them. They couldn't allow it to exist because it meant they would have to change how they viewed the world and each other. They would have to wake up and see they became the dinosaurs of the modern world. They would have to see that the same thoughts kept getting recycled in their community over and over again without ever picking up anything new. "New" was not allowed because it challenged their positions in the pecking order they worked so hard to build. They may have been losers in High School but their cliques were now solidly and firmly in place, just like a nice solid tomb.

What finally drove me away was a divorce between two people who were married for twenty years. Within days it was no longer about the divorce. It became High School all over again with sides being drawn up, dirty tricks being plotted, lies being spread, trash being scattered and every one's personal issues fighting for the lead dog position.

I walked away and my life immediately began to improve. The quality of my friends improved. I more more money. I found a way to make a living doing something I love. And when I look toward my future I see many wonderful paths left to explore, many wonderful people to meet, many new ideas to share.

And the amazing thing? I never left town. I just left them. And last I heard, they are still involved in the daily destructive rituals of feeding on each other instead of looking to see what else is in the world besides their small little lives.

Small Towns, Small Minds

Flies On The Wall #6

Flies On The Wall #6

War And Peace, Truth And Lies

There really isn't that much difference with a war between countries based on lies and a relationship between people based on lies. The common ground seems to be a hefty dose of self-interest rules above everything else and fairness be damned.

Yes, any of us that could read beyond the second grade and ventured beyond the "programming" of the mainstream state-run media, knew that Iraq had no WMDs and Bush/Neoconmen didn't care if we did or not. They had an agenda and it was going to run, truth be damned. It was easy to get the mandatory bleating chorus to be both cannon fodder and war drum beaters.

It was surprisingly easy. All it took in far too many cases was free hot dogs, some brown corn syrup, and a racist CW pawn to sing them to sleep. The rest of us could only protest in our wire cages called "Free Speech Zones" and keep writing the truth until people got tired of losing their children and other loved ones to a phony war.

Before conquering other countries, they practiced on us first. A dishonorable group of liars studied the tyrants of history for ways to subdue its people. They found the time-honored method of divide and conquer. They divided and then conquered us one newspaper, one TV station, one radio station at a time. They fed us crap in a repetitive and disrespectful way all day long. Missing blonds. Murderous Moms. Scary dark people. They made Peace a four letter word and they made war the will of a god who hadn't demanded so many sacrifices since the dark ages.

And the ugliness spread to the relationships between people. Previously normal people began to fear each other. The stench of mistrust permeated everything, even love. Nothing was true anymore. Nothing was meant to last. It was all a tower built on the unstable sand of lies and fear. Arguments became petty bickering over stupid shit in order to create a reason for a larger confrontation. It was all around. How could people not embrace this stench into their own lives? How could they be satisfied with each other when the world was going mad and a group of madmen were plotting to destroy the very earth?

Most of my friends split up in the last year. They took on everything around them and became personal little war zones fed by lies, mistrust, fear and the sheer terror that love would never be enough and Peace was a dream for fools.

I stood back from most of it for the same reason I avoided most of the people in High School. Just as petty little men bent on power formed groups to abuse and mislead and lie, so too did my circle of friends and acquaintances revert to their High school years to do the same. Just as it repulsed me to watch grown men throw innocent people to their deaths for oil, money, land grabs and power, so too did it repulse me to watch people I previously cared about turn into petty little tyrants forming sides intent on making war on each other for things, for property, for the right to say I own this corner of the world and I took it from you.

This is how the rot from the top down infects everything. This is how the world becomes when we become a nation of Lawyers instead of a nations of laws and honor and justice. What happens between countries has always happened between people. For that reason alone, things have to change or relationships between people will be fleeting encounters of meaningless mating. If you don't care about someone, it's easy to make them the enemy. If we don't change, we condemn ourselves to a destiny of being nothing more than cannon fodder for wars of all kinds.

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Image available on t-shirt and other gifts at: Peace Spirit

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War And Peace, Truth And Lies

More Thoughts On Where I live

There's nothing uglier than watching someones relationship implode, except maybe watching the community around them strip away all the pretenses and expose themselves as the ugly people they really are. I've had my eyes opened once again by the incestuous community I've called my home for the last couple decades. It's not the first crumbling marriage among my friends but it is the one that will finally drive me away from this place. It's the one that exposed the really ugly side of many of my acquaintances that I just didn't want to look at too closely because I wasn't ready to leave here yet. I only knew something smelled very bad and often I would get dragged into whatever caused that stench.

When I first moved here I was a young graduate student who came from a small group of solid friendships formed from long weekends camped out together in nature. We may have disagreed about many things, but those disagreements served as the glue that strengthened our bonds. We are all still friends, still close, still in touch even though time has scattered us all over the world. We trust each other. We would never betray each other, never talk crap behind our backs, never disrespect each other so much that we would use one of us to punish another. We are firm believers in the theory that once you share a campfire with someone they become part of your soul forever. We are decent, ethical human beings every one of us or we would not be friends.

The mistake I made in this community I immigrated to was in letting my new world become overly populated with the pampered and selfish children of the rich and upper middle class--people with no real goals, no ambitions beyond ego gratification, no skills that contribute to survival. Far too many of them do little but wait for rich relatives to die and leave them varying fortunes so they can continue their parasitical existence. This abomination called "community" is the outer skin that will never learn what was formed around campfires shared with the handful of friends I've made in this part of the world.

My campfire friends are the ones I am close to, the friends I trust with my life. They are the balance that keeps me sane in a community of really mean crazy people. They are people like me who grew up believing what really mattered in life are things like honor and ethics and loyalty. Most of us didn't even have a credit card until we were adults on our own. We worked our way through school and life. Most of us grew up with friendship having a value beyond anything that could be bought. Most of us inherited or will inherit only debts when our relatives die so we had to make our own way in life, we had to make our own dreams come true.

I've never had a roommate from a poor family run out on a bill, but I've had every single child of the rich stick me with unpaid phone and power bills and their share of the rent. The burden it placed on me was invisible to them just as their lack of purpose in life is invisible to them. And the problem many of them have is that their purposeless existence makes them bored and bored people do a lot of damage in order to entertain themselves.

Usually this damage is directed at those they perceive as being different than them, people like me who came from dirt poor parents, who is solidly Atheist and who won't go to church no matter what frou frou new age crap they call it these days. And let's not forget the most important difference--a loyalty to my friends that grew from not having anything to rely on but another human being. They can't relate to any of that so they attack it all, and they attack me without even thinking about why they do it. It's small town, small minds crap and it stinks.

Most of the time I'm quite skilled at staying out of the way. My small circle of campfire friends and I move back and forth between the other circles with a skater's ease. We are very much the same, this small handful of us within the larger hand of community. We are the children of their parent's servants. We are the children of the people who waited on them in fancy restaurants, who picked up the clothes they left on the floor of the dressing rooms, who picked up the garbage they couldn't be bothered to put in the trash, who fed their pets when they got bored with them. We are the children of those who taught them the piano, the violin, the guitar, the painter's easel, the stage, the dance, the words that would go in books. We are the ones who gave them all we had to give--our art, our talents, our services. And we are the ones they turned on first because to turn on each other would be a violation of some unwritten rule that elitism does not attack elitism.

So we became to them people they could use when they needed someone to complain about each other to, when they needed numbers in their side of the wars, when they needed someone to use who wasn't already used up by them. We became the ones they blamed when they couldn't take responsibility for their own actions. We are the ones they gossiped about and made up lies about just to entertain and fill their tedious little boring lives. We are the ones they hurt because they envied our ability to love and live without a price tag on everything we did and felt. They quite simply hate us for being something they can never be but in a strange sad way recognize as having a value beyond anything they can buy.

In so many ways they are the children of the Reagan years, children of the Bush years, children who were born too late to live through times when you had to take to the streets to get heard, when you had to put yourself out to make things happen, when you had to care enough about people to make sure the laws were changed to make us all equal and subject to the same laws. They came of age believing they deserved it all and so they took whatever their greedy little hands could grab...clothes, cars, homes, the best looking lovers, the most prestigious vacation trips, the highest credit limits. They took and took and took and continued to take because giving was not something they ever learned.

But life has a way of turning on you to keep the sense of balance even, and the way life has turned on them is simply by making them look in the mirror and seeing the awful truth they just can't escape: old age is the great equalizer and boy does it creep up on you fast. My friends who grew up like me and who weren't the prettiest, the most accomplished, the most privileged learned to rely on something inside ourselves. It is what made us strong enough to take on injustice. It's what made us able to create jobs for ourselves in dismal economies. It's what made us able to provide for ourselves without having to depend on anyone.

I now see these privileged acquaintances starting to panic when they realize the relatives they've been waiting on to die are healthier than ever, no matter how much they run up their credit cards, no matter how much in debt they get trying to spend their way to happiness, no matter how much they deny they are setting themselves up for a lonely, dismal and poor existence while we, the children of the poor will have a much happier and complete life. And the final insult is that their own children, the ultimate status symbols they gave birth to are very much like me and my campfire friends. I see in their children the ultimate fuck you and rejection of the shallowness they grew up with.

It's the way life balances out. It's the way the circle connects and reconnects over and over again. It's what makes me have hope that our planet will survive the utter and complete selfishness of people I made the mistake of thinking were good human beings instead of selfish mean petty tyrants who just can't wait to hurt another human being with gossip, with lies, with confessions of transgressions and other stupid shit. I never understood someone who would call up another human being only to tell them the sordid details of their spouse's affair, and I don't ever want to understand that, I never want to get close enough to that kind of mean-spirited shit to ever understand it. I only know that I live in a community of awful people who think such things are okay, and for someone like me who can't even hurt a fly without suffering massive guilt and anguish, well...let's just say we've come to the end of my time in this part of the world. I can't live around people like that when I have a choice to live somewhere else.

So, in the next year I will leave here as most of my campfire friends have left here, as most of the selfish people's children have left here. I don't know yet where I'm going, just that I am going. For now that is enough to keep me halfway sane and functioning and still believing in the awesome power of love and compassion in the people who truly are my friends and always will be. They are my wealth, my stability, and my future. They are solid and true. They are real. They care about the world. They care about each other. They are mine and everyones hope and always will be, long after the selfish and cruel assholes in this community are long forgotten and have only each other left to abuse.

Image of Mt. Shuksan available at Ursine Logic Photography section.

More Thoughts On Where I live

War, Our Disposal Society, and Love

Upon first glance it seems ridiculous to link together the Iraq war, our disposable society, and the failure of so many of my friends' marriages. But each of those is a thread in what is rapidly becoming a self-woven funeral shroud for the majority of Americans. The loom this tapestry weaves itself from with our help is the idea that nothing lasts, that everything can be replaced, that a newer model is an upgrade rather than a lie we choose to believe with all the fervor that comes from seeing Napoleon in the mirror.

The temporal nature of our society is at its best a place where newness can flourish, where cultures can evolve, and where change is a good thing. At its worst, change becomes an object of fear and scorn. It becomes the hermetically sealed culture that half my family immigrated to get away from. If I went back there and stayed within my proper "station" in life, the only people I could have as friends without being ostracized and considered an outcast would be mostly in their 80's and 90's because they are the ones who stayed the same by resisting change.

Here in America the underpinnings of that are already in place, but with a certain depravity that raises uncultured, poorly educated, and boorish clans likes the Bushes into a form of demented monarchy. This elevation of pigs into pigs with diamond pinky rings is so typically American that most would consider me snobbish and nationalistic upon hearing it, unless they also understood that these pigs are the ones who send their sons and daughter, the true diversity that is America , the true change that created the dream of America, off to fight their wars for them.

They do this easily because such people are as meaningless to them as plastic cigarette lighters. The horribly inbred monarchies of other countries pass on their cruelty genes by getting more and more out of touch with what ordinary people want and need. This aberration of generational distance is starting to take root here where money and power keeps these families isolated from the rabble that would gladly kill them with their bare hands if given half a chance. Just as some people fear cigarette lighters because they also have the potential to fry their asses, so do these inbred culture less monarch-wannabes fear the incendiary temper of the population who are ready to drag them to the first handy stake--or considering that this is America and with the consciousness so focused on Texas and its version of "cuisine," the stake would no doubt be exchanged for a big-ass barbecue grill.

Because these families don't rise to power by work, intellect, or talent, they are forced to make their money through drugs, prostitution, hired killings, and war. Politics is simply the means by which they are able to practice their trades outside the rule of law. This is why they need war, why they demand war, why every politician who has pounded his fist on the table for war, stood to profit obscenely from it one way or another.

And to fight these wars for them, to die in these wars for them, they need expendable people. They need to make immigrants bad and corrupt and scary because how else are we the people going to allow our government to use them as cannon fodder? Although official figures from anyone in this corrupt administration are suspect, I'm willing to bet an astonishing number of our troops in Iraq are "Green Card Soldiers"--immigrants, legal and otherwise, who are promised an expedited path to citizenship if they live long enough to collect.

The other expendables are poor, uneducated savages that political parties absolutely love because they can do double duty for them; they can serve as cannon fodder AND propaganda tools. Our state-run media like Faux News does not target the educated. It targets the crackers, the bigots, the fundie loonies and uses them as a sort of easily manipulated robot to do their bidding for them. All it takes is some free hot dogs, the mandatory corn syrup laden beverage of choice, and a few tunes from a hate mongering racist and they'll support their grandmother dying in some country they can't find on a map if their lives depended upon it.

Finally, what does this have to do with all my friends seeming to go ape shit at once and wanting divorces, lovers, a new life under a different name, dream, or car color? A lot. We've all been so completely programmed to believe that if something doesn't work perfectly you take it back for a refund or an exchange. We don't even question it anymore. It doesn't work. Take it back.

Keep it around when everyone has a new one? You've got to be kidding! Everyone knows an upgrade is good. Just ask anyone who installed Vista or the latest Internet Explorer on their computers if upgrades are good. I recommend doing this only if you can run really really fast and don't mind having a string of curses unleashed on you.

Grow old together? Why? We're all going to die in some horrible terrorist attack or get drafted and die in some politician's personal piggy bank anyway. The world's going to end and when that day comes, do you really want to turn to the person you've spent most of your life with and regret everyone you've let slip away? Fuck commitment! Grab that girl or boy toy before the last sands run out of the damned hourglass. There's no time for anything else! We're all going to die, a sad bundle of regrets and wasted dreams, so why not have it all now? We're all expendable. They all have trophy wives, boy toys, gas-guzzling piggie cars. Who cares about the environment when the first gray hairs stare back at us from the mirror? Who cares about people, about the planet, about each other? We're all going to die anyway. Horribly. Sadly. And far too soon.

So you see, they are all sadly related and maybe, just maybe if we started putting an end to war it could end up saving our relationships. It's worth a try.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

War, Our Disposal Society, and Love

I have to cut the ropes and fly free

A couple decades ago I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I went through all the rites of passage, got the pieces of paper, got the job, and after nine months realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. I was young then. It was easy to walk into the office and say I've changed my mind. I want to do something else with my life.

I count it as one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Recently I've made a decision that is about on the same level as that one for the potential to change my life. I have days when I shake in fear and others when I can't wait to get out of bed to begin my day. The deciding factor for me was realizing that if I want to do certain things with my life, now is the time to do them. I'm not a kid anymore. I don't recover as easily anymore. But the tradeoff is that the decisions I make now are based on so much more than I WANT. They are based on what happened in the past, what I know and don't know, and my ability to learn. I have a lot more confidence in myself at the age of 56 than I did at 30. It comes from knowing I can pick myself up from the ground, dust myself off, and move forward in any direction I choose.

I've shaken some people up with my decisions lately. They don't understand why I have to cut the ropes and fly free with no real destination in mind other than the desire to fly. Sometimes that just has to be enough. :-)

One of the people I shook up dug up this story I wrote the week I quit teaching. He or she chose to send it to me anonymously, using an old email address I long ago let go. They went through the trouble of re-opening it in my old pseudonym and becoming me and sending it to my current email. I cannot let such efforts go unrewarded. Therefore, I share the story they sent me that I wrote all those years ago. I was about the same age as many of you when I wrote it. Maybe it has something for you. Consider it a true gift from me on a date when people are less than serious as a reminder that those who fail to laugh at themselves never really learn what it means to be alive.

Peace! COL of Peace
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RITES OF SPRING


Today my Zebra finches gave birth--round, pink, hairless bodies echoing the spring births outside my own nest.

“Rites of passage, rites of self."

I think how strange that your words should return now, weeks later, to blend with the sound of those new-born voices, the sound of the wind rising off the bay. I feel a quiet sadness as I watch the wind claim the last of the clinging blossoms from the small apple tree outside my window. As the fragile petals float past my window, my sadness brings back the memory of you sitting at the kitchen table that last evening we spent together, that last meal we shared with each other.

"We’ve grown apart," you said, refusing to look at me, refusing to touch me.

"I love you," I said. "Isn’t that enough? Isn’t love enough?"

Your answer was to go out in the garden and pick a branch of apple blossoms from the small tree. As you set the branch on my kitchen table you said: "You have shown me I will never understand writers."

I touched the frail blossoms and said softly: “Never is a long time. “

It is such a small tree, such a shadow of the larger one growing beside it. The large tree will one day give so much fruit; the small one will remain a memory of blossoms following the wind. For weeks, I watched that branch of apple blossoms go through the process of dying. Each day, as I watched that branch wither and die a little at a time, I knew something else was dying. Yet after all these weeks, the scent still remains, the memory of fruit is still so strong.

“Words...goddamn words," you said to me as you were leaving. I gave you a poem written on delicate tissue paper. “Leave before they steal your soul,” you said to me, crying, afraid to touch me because then you would no longer have a reason for leaving.


”I love you,” I said instead of goodbye.


“I love you,” I now say to the wind, to the finches, to the memory of you. Today is a reminder of passing time, a reminder that with the birth of my finches, I have been set free--from you, from my job, from my students, from my absurd life. If only I could somehow let you know. But, I could only do it with more words, and there are too many of those separating us as it is. If only you could have seen me today when I decided to celebrate birth by resigning from teaching. I did it so gracefully, with my first genuine smile of spring.


“I’m not coming back,” I said. It was so easy, so quick, so anti-climatic. Such a painless birth. I should have done it sooner; perhaps the day before, the day one of my students leaned in the open doorway of my office.


He stood there for several minutes, afraid to come in, afraid to reveal the words so painfully written on the pile of papers he clutched to his chest. His smooth face was too young for the despair in his eyes, the despair I recognized as coming from trying to re-create life, from trying to isolate feeling into lines of black ink on white pages.


”I want to be a writer,” he said as I pushed aside my pile of half-written stories, hunted for my overflowing ashtray underneath the pages of empty poetry--nine months of words which never came close to what I really felt.


“What on earth for?” I said with too much dismay in my voice, too much kinship with his pain. “It’s such an absurd thing to be.”


But, he came in, sat across from me, looked me honestly in the eyes--and I listened to his poetry, shared my scraps of thoughts with him. When we finally parted, it was as co-conspirators, loving the illusion, loving the role of fool, magician, spinner of dreams. That would have been the day to quit.


With the birth of my finches, I knew I could not return, could not face another pile of freshman essays filled with the agony of quickly spun lies, spinning wheels of thoughts. So often these last few months, I saw myself as the keeper of the zoo, the curtailer of free, unstructured thought. Who am I, I questioned myself daily, to tell my students their words failed to communicate their thoughts. As their essays waited on my desk to be graded, to be judged, their words mixed with my own discarded attempts at making life rhyme. After a time, I came to know their struggles too intimately--we came to know each other as fellow fools. We fell in love with each other because of our shared agony.


No, I cannot return, not since my finches gave birth, and my world grew to accommodate the span of their naked wings--tiny strands of flailing flesh fluttering in synchronized time. Parted beaks so small, like a lover’s kiss from a distant world. I thought of you. I thought of what I could say to you that I have not already said with a touch, a smile, a caressing of the eyes.


The other night, I awoke in the middle of a dream, a dream which carried off the last of my illusions. I dreamed of a woman in a red satin dress who said she was your lover as she lifted yards of material and exposed long, graceful legs. I could feel your hands lifting the dress from her body, touching her smooth, young skin, kissing her easy, accepting smile. She revealed her secret to me, the sacrifice she had made for you, as the material floated upwards, wing-like-- she had shaved off all her pubic hair. I cried, astonished at such easy innocence, such honest love, and I knew I could never be that young again--not even for you.


We all love someone else, I wrote in a story once. That story was a moment of honest illusion, a misguided message to a friend many years in the past, when I was too young to understand that love is not a limit, not a fence, but the open space between the clouds, the dreams we forgot, the people we once were.


Sometimes, now, I see you as another story in my life, one I have yet to write; or perhaps you are the poem I wrote at the age of twelve-- a poem that began with the words: "When I was a child..." I remember myself writing that poem, a child writing about being a child, and yet, when I needed to be a child, needed to become innocent and vulnerable in order to get lost in the depths of your smile without fear, I couldn’t bring any of it back.


“You are so serious about life,” you said to me one night as you watched me methodically reading.


“There is so much to learn,” I said, looking up from the pages of words.
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“Don’t you realize life is not contained in those damn books,” you said angrily, grabbing the book from my hands, and throwing it against the wall.


Perhaps it was fortunate for us both to meet at a time in my life when the future had too much significance. Everything I did, I explained to you, was a preparation for something else.


“Someday,” I said to you, “my writing will not cause me such pain. Someday I will find the words I need.”


“I can’t believe you,” you said, refusing to understand. “Your eyes tell me your pain comes from deeper places--places you refuse to look at honestly. What is the true origin of your pain?”


At that moment, I quit trying to explain my life to you. It became so easy to lie to you, so easy to lead you to believe in my happiness. I began to wear a smile for you--a smile of lies.


“See how quickly I have recovered,” I said, laughing, hiding the torn up pages of words I had written the day before. “See how easily the words now come,” I said, typing lines and lines of words I did not believe.


If my finches had not given birth, if you had not failed to understand me, I might have gone on in this crazy world, might have worn that smile forever, that bizarre mask of lies. One night I decided I could not lie anymore, could not disguise my pain any longer.


I walked down to the water, waded out to a large rock, and sat on it, looking out over the dark bay reflecting lines of moon. My breath steamed in the cold, night air, and I started to sing: “Merrily, merrily, merrily...life is but a dream." I felt my words echo in the darkness, and then, return in the voice of a stranger. His hand touched my shoulder very gently, and. I quietly motioned for him to
join me on the rock.


“Are you trying to drown yourself,” he asked me in a voice which sounded like the gentle waves brushing against the rock we both shared.


I turned to look at him, and he smiled cautiously, the tenderness in his eyes reflecting moon. “No, I assured him, “I’m just being born.”


He smiled, hugged me softly, and asked if I was lonely. I told him, yes. “We all need love,” he said, looking at me, understanding the origins of my pain.


“Then...make love to me, I said, “because I need to feel.” So we made love, on that rock, in the water, our bodies alive with moonlight. Even now, I think I imagined his gentle spirit, his pale, lean body touching mine. So much of him listened, so much of him understood.


“You gave your pain to a stranger," he said to me as we walked back to the shore, "because it was too awesome a burden to give to a friend."


I touched his hand softly goodbye, and thought of you again, thought of how amazed you would be at my freedom at that moment. I became a bird that night, rising towards the sky.


And, today I resigned, and my finches gave birth, and I called you on the telephone to celebrate birth--mine and the finches. But there was no answer, and I was relieved because the ringing of the telephone echoed the words coming from my heart: we all love someone else. And I knew those words would mean nothing to you, would never explain my freedom. So, I hung up the phone, and yelled the words loudly across the open space where my backyard meets the water in the bay, and I was struck by the peculiarity of that landscape, that Northwest landscape--beaches with no sand, just rocks, just happy survivors. As I looked out over the water, I thought that I, too, am a rock. I, too, sit in the water and let the waves brush against me, feeling their movement, but not their chill.


“We can never blend because our worlds are so different, our internal landscapes so much ourselves,” I explained to you the night you said the connection between us had ceased to grow.


You looked into my eyes, trying to find an answer in their reflected image of you. I looked away, broke the thread between us. You cried softly as I retreated further into my silent world, my inner world of miles and miles of silent desert.


You always brought me flowers, flowers to remind me that I came from a lifeless place--a place where nothing grew easily except the voices of spirits in the night bouncing off the moon, and the distant wailing of coyotes echoing thoughts.


“But, I too had flowers,” I said to you the day you gave me the apple blossoms, “only I had to crawl on my hands and knees to see them.“


I tried to explain to you how most were not to be picked as they were protected by thorny, impenetrable barriers. In my world, in that silent desert filled with the music of mirages, things remain forever in their place.


In your world, I wanted to say to you, things are too easy; everywhere you sit, your senses are overwhelmed by color, by beauty, by the ease of reaching out and plucking a flower with no thorns. I wanted to give you roses filled with thorns so you could understand, but the rose bush outside my door had not yet bloomed.


“Be careful,” you said to me the night you watched me rewrite a line of poetry over and over again. “This world will steal your soul because of its obsession with words, with meaning, with the need to define life too clearly.”


"But, I love teaching,” I said to you, knowing how much your own students loved you.


“I teach magic,” you answered and smiled, waiting for me to compare my rigid world with yours.


I looked away from you, annoyed that once again, you had pulled me towards you with your eyes.
“I used to be like you,” you continued. “But one day I quit. An institution is no place to practice art. One day you will understand.”


I listened to your words quietly, trying to understand and yet remembering the student who came to my office a few days before with a beautiful paper which had no conclusion--at least, not in the Standard English sense of the word. He had ended his essay with a riddle: “What did they see?”


The words stood out, blatantly, dreadfully wrong--yet so right. “This is not a conclusion,” I said in my best teacher voice, my voice of respectability. Please, I thought to myself, let him believe I know what I’m talking about. “You must tell the reader what he sees.”


“But, why?” he asked me. “Don’t they have eyes of their own?”


This student, who was from a tiny island in the South Pacific, told me his language had no adjectives. “When we say flower, all the flowers of the world are within our hands, not just the red and yellow ones.”


He was my first moment of rebellion. “You’re right, of course, I said to him. “Leave the ending as it is...just don’t tell anyone." I gave him an "A" simply because he came from a place with no adjectives.


“And, what will you do?” you asked me that last day, that day I told you I wanted to quit teaching, that day I imagined what it would be like to bask in a goal-less state of mind.


I laughed and said: “I’m going to visit my friend in Hawaii who wanted to be a Philosopher, but ended up teaching Remedial Religion instead. I’m going to live on a goat farm in Northern Arizona, and learn about living through my body instead of my mind. I’m going to love a beautiful man for no reason other than his beauty. I’m going to India to search for my friend who disappeared three years ago looking for enlightenment. I’m going to make complex sculptures out of clay which will have no meaning. I’m going to eat pounds and pounds of fresh salmon. I’m going to write another novel. I’m going to write poetry again. I’m going to complete the circle, make it come back around to where it all began. I'm going to dance, and love, and feel, and walk upside down, inside out. I'm going to touch everyone I know, and everyone I have yet to know. I’m going to love my illusions, my mind, my life, my madness--I’m going to do anything but think. I’m going to leave the business of making sense out of nonsense to the Philosophers, and I’m going to dwell in the beauty of insignificance.”


Very quietly, you got up from the couch we had been sharing, kissed me lightly on the forehead, and walked out my door. I wanted you to look back, wanted you to see my tears--the tears I could finally cry--but it was too late. Instead, I sat alone on my couch, my hand over the warm spot where your body had rested, feeling it grow colder and colder, like a corpse, like a dying storm. I watched the sun set over the bay through the window, through the branches of the bare apple tree. As the room grew dark, the silence grew louder, and all my memories became one feeling. I began to mourn the death of apple blossoms, the passing of time, the futility of words explaining feelings.


“We are parting from each other with a sense of relief, a sense of having escaped from each other,” you said to me over dinner.


“But, such feelings are meant for those unable to love, those unable to look into the eyes of others and see themselves,” I answered, trying to make you understand. “Don’t you see that in this running from each other is the illusion of freedom,” I continued, reaching for your hand, and finding it cool to the touch, cool as indifference. I let you go. In that moment, I let you go in order to free myself.


And today my finches gave birth. Their tiny, trembling chorus fills my room, and from their vulnerability, their need to be fed, I find my own strength. I feel my own frail wings grow strong, feel my heart fill with new freedom. I sing softly to myself: “Merrily, merrily, merrily...life is but a dream.”

---

Earth Day is coming. Will you be ready? Ursine Logic

I have to cut the ropes and fly free

The Seeds of Self

Today is the anniversary of when my life changed. I mark it each
year as if it were a grave tended by my careful hands. I remove the
weeds lovingly, one small blade of grass at a time and relive a
quiet moment in a time I thought I'd never leave behind.

But leave it behind I did. I call that period of my life "The Cruel
Time." Everything about it was a stripping of my soul in order to
bind new wounds that grew daily from loving a real bastard. He
almost destroyed me. He almost took away everything that made me who
I am. He almost made me scratch my own eyes out so I would never
have to look at him again. He almost made me throw myself from the
highest building I could find so I could die screaming his name on
the way to my death with only the wind to hear. He almost made me
leave everyone and everything just to escape ever hearing his name
again. He almost destroyed my belief in the power of love, in the
eternity of friendship, in the unbreakable bond of my word. Almost,
but not quite, because in the end I was simply the stronger force.

The reason for this is simple. I value people and he never did. He
would be surprised and even insulted to know this about himself and
appalled that I would think of him in such a way. It was the worst
curse you could place on him, on me, on others like ourselves who
grew up believing everyone was bad and the only people you could
trust were the ones in your small circle of confidants. Everyone
else was dangerous.

He was dangerous. It's what drew me to him. He had that dark soul of
a man who'd destroyed so many lives that he no longer wore the guilt
of that destruction anywhere on him. He would swear he never
intended to hurt people, he never intended to lie to people, he
never intended to cheat people. He was just incapable of living any
other way. His way was the only way he knew.

I'm a stubborn woman and I also have this questionable ability of
being able to see past the outer crap and cut straight to the inner
meat. This has caused more trouble for me in my life than any other
thing because as I've learned, that outer crap is supposed to keep
people like me out. It both disturbed him and intrigued him that I
found a way in.

I saw in him what I see in everyone who becomes my friend: deep
wounds, excuses, rationalizations, fear, and a restlessness that
remains a lifelong unfulfilled hunger. Where he differed was his
inability to see human beings as anything other than objects to fill
whatever needs were the most predominant. He didn't discriminate. No
need was better or worse than any other. They were just needs.

It gave him an aura of being a free spirit who was tied to no one
and no thing. We spent a lot of time outdoors among the trees and
rivers and mountains because it was his natural element, the one
place where his animal nature found a comfortable home. This was the
man I came to love and cherish and need with all the depths of my
soul. But the moment the stink of city assaulted our lungs he became
a sort of urban werewolf, a blood-sucking creature who drained
everyone until they shriveled up and disappeared.

I didn't disappear. I have an overdeveloped loyalty gene. Once I
give my friendship, it is for life because whomever wins it fought
for it with honor and sincerity. And once I love, nothing the person
does can kill that love in me. Once given is forever beholden.

But he didn't deserve this kind of devotion. He treated me badly. He
treated the women he dated and married badly. I befriended them,
picked up the broken pieces and he hated me for this. He hated that
I took home and healed that which he discarded. He told me once it
was embarrassing, almost as if he caught me rummaging through his
trash for bread scraps.

And he loved me. He loved me with a passion and sincerity and depth
that surprised both of us. It was the secret I carried with me, that
he was capable of deep and overwhelming emotion, that he felt to the
point of madness, that his skin was sometimes a barrier that he
wanted to rip away so he could feel more.

But it wasn't enough to have this with me. It wasn't enough to heal
him, to show him a better way of being. He saw it as an anomaly, an
aberration that he grew to hate me for bringing out in him.He began
to try and prove it to me that he really was the bastard everyone
thought he was. He insulted me. He challenged my ethics, my honor.
And he questioned my love, my friendship, my devotion.

That is when I left him to fester in his own world. I learned that
moment that I had limits, that I had self-respect, that I had honor,
and integrity, and a healthy sense of self that I refused to turn
over to someone who didn't deserve it. I walked away.

Five years went by before we saw each other again. He was dying. He
had stomach cancer. All those cigarettes, all that vodka, all that
rage, and anger, and hostility, and most importantly lack of love
for himself and others, was killing him. Cancer was just the
convenient name for it.

I still loved him and told him. He was astonished. He was
incredulous. And finally, he believed me. In that moment he learned
what it meant to love.

He died six months later. It's been seven years now and I still
grieve for him, for the life he could have lived but didn't. I
grieve for the person I knew that no one else could see. I grieve
for him as as anyone would grieve for a precious friendship.

But I also mark this day as the day I learned that you can still
love someone and not let them abuse you. You can still love someone
and walk away and not look back because my love and anyone who knows
what it means to truly love, understands it lives on its own. Love
is its own entity. If it depended on a person, if it depended on
being valued, if it depended on being received, then it would be
called something else.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit
Ursine Logic for
more designs.

The Seeds of Self

Crazy Men in their 40's...

I'm very selective about the people I let into my life. I know what kind of friend I am, how seriously I take the word and the obligation of friendship. I also know this is what attracts people to me who want only to feed off that which I am. I know the world is full of people who have issues, who have dramas, who are on paths that will eventually grow them into actualized human beings. I also know that I've put in my time helping some of those people walk that path at the expense of my own sanity at times, and that I will continue to do so.


But the years have also taught me to be selective as I told a new acquaintance. We were sharing a cup of tea on a cold rainy day. The conversation was wonderful with just that touch of danger an underlying attraction can take on. We agreed politically, mentally, about love and friendship and all the cornerstones that form a solid connection. When he left to go home I experienced a momentary sense of sadness that so much potential wouldn't be developed further.


He left angry. I won't see him again. It's a conscious choice I made the minute he started to talk about his marriage, his kids, his frustration with his job, the gray that was taking over his hair, his fantasy of just bagging it all and buying a motorcycle and traveling the world before it was too late.


In other words, he just told me that he was offering me the typical friendship a woman has with a man in his mid to late 40's...months of dependence on me every time something went bad at home or work, gratitude for listening without ever saying much in return, an intertwining of his life with mine so complete that all that was missing from a total bonding was the sex that would never be. (The reason for that is simple. I don't mess with married men. It's disrespectful to the women and there's always complications.)


Nothing is simple with a man, especially friendship. They are either actively hunting a mate, in the throes of raising children and therefore not available unless it involves "the children." Or they are about to go bat shit crazy starting in their early to mid-40's when the children become teenagers and their marriages start to tighten around their necks.


In the last few years I've let myself get caught, for the sake and honor of friendship, in the whirlpool that was created by these men experiencing all the typical symptoms of a full-blown mid-life crisis. It always starts the same way. The woman they've been with for a decade and more is suddenly dragging him down, making too many demands, stopped loving him, is gaining weight, and becoming boring. If it wasn't for her, there's so much he could do, but now it's too late and it's all her fault because SHE makes him unhappy. And the children hate him, want him only for money and expensive presents, and as a chauffeur if they aren't old enough to drive themselves.


Think I just know some strange people? Well, I do. But I'm not the only one. Many women have been stunned to hear out of nowhere that their husband of many years suddenly wants a divorce.


I've been on the other end of hysterical phone calls at least twice a year now for the last few years as I tried to explain to my distraught women friends that it wasn't all their fault, that maybe it wasn't even the man's fault, that they were just caught up in a psychological whirlpool so intense they couldn't fight their way out and survive.


Sadly, it usually does end in divorce and even though the men always swear the girlfriend came later, she was usually in the picture when things started to go crazy. She became a symbol of all that was wrong in their lives. She became the unattainable Goddess they could have if only if only if only. And worst of all, these men often do end up with the Goddess who ends up becoming their new wife. It takes about 18 months for love and lust to become ordinary. This is after maybe another child has been conceived or since she is always younger than him, she often brings young children into the new relationship.


And the man finds himself in the exact same situation he escaped from. But instead of the bliss, he often has less money because now he is supporting two families on the income that was barely enough for one family. He often goes from having teenagers to having infants and young children in the home. Instead of more freedom he suddenly has less. Most of these new relationships end within two years and the man is left with nothing. Two of my friends became suicidal. One ended up killing himself for, as he put it in his suicide note, "Throwing away a beautiful family and a wife who loved me."


So what has this to do with me and friendship with a man in his 40's? Actually, quite a bit. You see, as the Patron Saint of difficult people, I draw these fools to me like bear to honey. I start out with friends who are couples and end up with two friends who won't be in the same room with each other and who spend most of their time trying to make me take sides. If the friendship is solid enough, I'll risk it.


Why risk? Because in the end, I'll still have the woman as a friend. We'll still stay in touch frequently. We'll call each other all the time and share emails. At first I have this with the men too...until one day the calls stop coming, the emails go unanswered, the voicemail doesn't get returned. Then I know he has begun the next relationship and I cease to exist. I become insignificant, an annoyance, that friend who becomes an obligation whose call he must answer as he and his new love giggle privately as he rolls his eyes to take my call. I become part of his past, the friend of his ex, the one who knows how low he went and the throes of his despair. I know too much about him. It doesn't matter squat that I gave him the depths of my friendship, that I cancelled appointments because he needed to talk, that I listened to him for hours on end go on and on about stuff that was essentially boring and tedious and annoying because I'd heard it so often from men before him. My friendship didn't matter anymore than it matters to him that his wife gave him her life, her youth, love and support for all those years.


And that is why I am acquaintances with men in their 40's and save my deep heart connections for men who are at least in their 50's and have already gone through all that nonsense. I'm a good friend. I have a lot to give. And I don't believe in wasting anything, especially my time, my love, and especially my friendship.


So, he left mad. He'll probably call me in a few years and say, hey you know what? You were right. Let's meet for tea, and I'll happily agree. Maybe I'll even invite his ex to join us.

---

Design from Ursinelogic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Crazy Men in their 40's...