Mind over Matter

I am firmly convinced that, on certain warm nights when I of necessity have to sleep with my windows open, and the atmospheric conditions are just right, the Chicago Transit Authority re-routes its elevated tracks, normally less than 1,000 feet from my apartment, directly through my living room. The result is that as the Red Line roars past my bedroom door, I sometimes wake up...at least partially.

What time is it? My mind inevitably asks.

I have no idea, I reply without actually speaking.

Well, look.

I don’t want to look.

Yes, you do.

No, I don’t. I just want to go back to sleep.

A brief moment of silence follows, then: What time is it?

I don’t know and I don’t care!

Well, look at the clock and find out.

I don’t want to look at the clock. I want to go back to sleep.

Not until you look at the clock.

This goes on for what seems like an eternity until inevitably, I look at the clock, seething with resentment and anger over my giving in yet again to my mind’s niggling.

But finally, I am allowed to go back to sleep, until:

You have to go to the bathroom.

No, I don’t.

Yes, you do.

I don’t want to go to the bathroom.

Well, you’d better.

I’ll go later.

You’ll be sorry.

And of course, even though I may really not have needed to go to the bathroom, just thinking about it makes it so, and I get up and go to the bathroom.

In my new Elliott Smith Mystery series, Elliott has nightly conversations with a non-corporeal being named John. Guess where I got the idea?

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Macaroni

It is, as I write, 5:45 a.m. I have no idea what I or anyone with a firm grip on their sanity, would be doing up at this hour if it weren’t absolutely necessary. But I’ve been doing it frequently of late and as a result walk around for the first two or three hours as though I had a 50-pound block of concrete on the top of my head. When I get up this early, I always tell myself I can take a nap during the day, but I never do. I dislike naps, and always have. Naps take precious minutes from a finite supply of minutes, and I resent losing any of them.

So I thought I would spend the time until I could go do laundry without fear of the machines’ noise disturbing anyone with writing a blog or two. (I like to have a small backlog to avoid the panic of arriving at a blog day and realizing I don’t have a blog to post.)

People have asked me where I come up with enough things to talk about three times a week. The question always interests me, since as a rule I have absolutely no idea. It’s like standing at a stove watching a boiling pot of elbow macaroni and randomly dipping a spoon into it to pick out one piece. (In case you were wondering where that analogy came from, it’s because all the pieces of macaroni in the pot are the same length, and all my blogs tend to turn out the same length. Not all analogies are good ones.)

There is a certain presumption in writing blogs, primarily the blogger’s somewhat arrogant assumption that anyone really cares what he/she has to say. That, of course, makes absolutely no difference to the blogger: it’s the assumption that counts.

I have often found throughout life that what I am often not aware of how strongly I feel about something until I suddenly see it written down. Occasionally I’ll find beliefs and opinions I was not aware that I had, or at least not to the degree indicated by the words. It truly disturbs me, and we’ve talked before about this, that while I consider myself a generally happy (or at least contented) person, my blogs, especially, too often reveal a bitter, cynical curmudgeon. I don’t like bitter, cynical curmudgeons, and I certainly don’t want to be one. And I’m always trying to explain where this hopefully false impression comes from: the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is. It ain’t easy being a romantic in the real world.

I lack discipline, a fact that is all too apparent, and when it comes to writing blogs, I am quite sure I have a form of mental Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: I seem unable to pick up a string of thought at one end and follow it to the other. There are far too many distractions along the way. The world is a beach filled with shiny pebbles begging to be picked up and examined and wondered over. And I am always, always aware of a voice calling: “Hurry up, Roger, it’s getting late. We have to be going soon.” I’ve heard that same voice saying the same thing since I was a kid.

So I’ll get an idea for a blog and sit down at the computer and start off, and something I say relating to the topic at hand will remind me of something else that I really don’t want to ignore, or which strikes me as more important or interesting than the subject I started off with, and I’ll wander off in pursuit of it, only to come across yet another thought or idea I really should mention. And that leads to another, and another....

And here I stand, over that boiling pot of macaroni, spoon raised in anticipation.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Harvey Milk

They’re making a big-budget, big-star major motion picture on the life and death of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, who was in some ways to the gay community what Martin Luther King is to African-Americans. It’s taken them thirty years to do it, but far better late than never.

Some years ago, an excellent and moving documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk won an academy award, and plans for a full length, mainstream movie have been on various burners and back burners for years. It finally took producer Gus Van Sant to bring it off. Starring Sean Penn as Harvey, it has an A-list cast. A trailer for the movie, which will be released in November, can be seen on YouTube (just go to YouTube and type in “Harvey Milk Movie”). It’s well worth watching.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (or, I think, to any elected office in the United States), and he became a symbol of pride and a rallying point for 20,000,000 gay and lesbian Americans. If Harvey could do it, other gays could do it...and subsequently did.

I’ve said often before that people who are not a member of a minority—and particularly of an historically persecuted and harassed minority—simply cannot comprehend the power and importance of a sense of validation and pride: the feeling that you have dignity as a human being and, together, can accomplish seemingly impossible goals. And Harvey Milk engendered these feelings within the gay community

Harvey was an unlikely hero. He was just an average guy running a small camera shop on Castro Street when he decided to take on the city’s political establishment and run for Supervisor. And at a time of the rampant bigotry of people like Anita Bryant and attempts to pass laws banning gays from teaching in California schools, he rallied not only the gays of his district in San Francisco, but of the entire city and the entire country.

And when he was assassinated, with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, on November 27, 1978, by former Supervisor Dan White, the shock and grief felt by every gay and lesbian was no less strong than African Americans’ reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Harvey was one of us. He gave us a great sense of pride, and to lose him was devastating. And then, when White was sentenced to only two years for the double murder, based on an incredible “defense” of having been on a sugar high from eating too many Twinkies (!!), the shock erupted into rage which led to the worst riots in San Francisco’s history.

But as so often happens as a result of the assassination of leaders, from Harvey Milk’s life and the reaction to his death came the iron-clad resolve for change, and gays began a march for equality which, though not yet over, has changed the nation.

Harvey would have been proud.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

The Boggled Mind, Part 2

The other day my friend Gary received an email from the head of the FBI, assuring him that the offer of $8,000,000 he had previously received from the widow of the finance minister of Nigeria was perfectly legitimate, and that he should hasten to claim his windfall. Gary was, of course, terribly impressed and eager to send in his “earnest money”, and the only thing that gave him the slightest pause was the fact that from reading the letter it appeared the head of the FBI had never gone beyond the third grade.

Why does this sort of thing continue to drive me into paroxysms of fury? Because I have no doubt whatsoever that out there in the big world, somewhere, someone is falling for this bullshit.

On returning from work Saturday afternoon, I found no fewer than 27 spam messages waiting for me and, mental masochist that I am, I scanned quickly through them before hitting the “Condemn to the eternal fires of hell” button. I have noted that I am for some reason not getting quite as many “Make her scream with pleasure!” notes. I’d like to say I missed them, but neither you nor I would believe that. There were a couple “Actors/Models/Movie Extras Wanted” offers, and “I Guarantee You $25,000 a month”’s, and I’ve expressed my feelings on those before, many times.

The recent trend seems to be “news” headlines (“Brittany Spears having Obama’s baby”) to lure you into opening the message, which would of course unleash more demons upon you than 10,000 Pandora’s Boxes.

I must confess that I have on occasion been curious as to what does lie beyond the “come-on, open me up....please? Pretty please?” opening words, just to see what the sender is shilling, but I never have and never would.

What lies at the base of my anger with these…I cannot come up with an appropriate word…who perpetrate the billions and billions of spam messages clogging the internet like a backed-up sewer…is the knowledge that these things are not harmless; that there are real human beings, naive, gullible, downright stupid, or mentally impaired though they may be, who believe what these messages tell them. How this can happen, I have no idea. But I am infinitely sad for them. And to realize that the spammers know full well what they are doing…that they are like hyenas at the watering hole hoping to pounce upon the weakest members of the herd…is what drives me to such frenzy.

And the knowledge that there is absolutely nothing I can do, personally, to stop them or even slow them down compounds my frustration. There is nothing worse than the feeling of being utterly helpless to change what so desperately needs to be changed.

So I run around, pointing fingers and trying to get others to see what I see in the way that I see it and hoping against hope that maybe if enough people felt the same way, something positive might happen. I’m not sure what, but anything is better than nothing..

And as for the spammers…we could all get together, round them all up, and offer them the choice between life in solitary confinement and a frontal lobotomy.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Of a Groggy Morning

Trying an experiment here. It is 5:41 a.m. and I got out of bed at 5 in response to an itching foot. I am groggy, and feel it—it’s one of those “looking out through someone else’s eyes” feelings of which I am not particularly fond. I have the distinct impression that my mind has been replaced by an oversized lump of Play-Doh,

So I thought I’d just sit down at the computer and see what came out on the screen. (It’s quite likely, given my normal “drunk leaving the bar” staggering from place to place, that you may not even have noticed had I not told you.

And I just received a sharp rebuke from Dorien, who demands (rightly) to know by just what right I am wasting your precious time with all this nonsense. Paraphrasing Thumper’s mom, he points out that “If ‘ya can’t say somethin’ intelligent, don’t say nothin’ at all.” To which Roger replies: “In that case I would become mute.”

I have always been at war with myself, and it was only since Dorien’s emergence as my creative half that it’s been somewhat easier—and considerably less confusing—to separate the wheat from the chaff. Each half of me now has someone specific to blame for whatever mistakes the other half makes.

Roger acknowledges that he is jealous, not of Dorien’s creativity, for we are both the same person after all, but for the fact that Dorien is not bound by the laws of physics. Dorien, therefore a much happier and more content soul, nonetheless is aware that he is inextricably linked to Roger by the bonds of mortality. Neither Dorien nor Roger is very big on the idea of mortality.

When I am at the computer, I have a “streaming” link to a couple of classical music stations, and one is always on. And just this minute, they are playing the Eric Coate’s Knightsbridge March, and Dorien is instantly in the rehearsal hall at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, practicing that very piece with the Naval Aviation Cadet band for an upcoming concert in Terrytown, New York. We’re going up there as part of some official Navy event, and doing a concert at Mr. Barnes’s—he’s our director and I have something of a crush on him—prep school. Dorien is filled with wonder: Roger with sadness because he can’t be there, too.

I’ll probably never understand, either in the grogginess of not enough sleep or in whatever stage of alertness I may reach fully rested, why I feel not merely obligated but driven to lay out as many bits and pieces and details of myself and my life as I can. How can I expect anyone to care? You have your own life, every bit as full and interesting and challenging and frustrating and happy and sad as my own.

Which brings me yet again to my standard answer to the question of “why.” Because I believe that whoever/whatever designed the jigsaw puzzle which is our life, while the picture on the box may be slightly different for each of us, the pieces are largely interchangeable

I take great comfort in that.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Of Dreams and Hearing

I dreamt about Louise Hirsheiser last night. A lot: her name kept recurring throughout the entire course of the night, over and over again: Louise Hirsheiser. Louise Hirsheiser. Why I should be dreaming of Louise Hirsheiser may have been more clear had I the slightest idea of who Louise Hirsheiser might be. But I don’t. I’d never heard of her before. And she never physically appeared in any of the dreams, though one about halfway through the night tried to solve the mystery. It appears she was responsible somehow for the death of my mother, and was willing to pay me $2 million for my loss. However, I had to write the check myself. My father, played with the brilliant logic of dreams by actor Sam Waterston, gave me the check, which was under a sheet of glass, and a pen. Naturally, the pen wouldn’t write on the glass, and Sam was angry with me for not being able to do so. In an odd mixture of frustration and sadness, I started to cry (so real a cry I woke myself up).

Not having Siggy Freud’s Big Book of Dreams at hand, I was only able to guess at what any of it meant, if it meant anything at all. They do say that dreams are the mind’s housekeeper, sweeping up the dust-bunnies of the previous day’s thoughts and sorting out and filing recent experiences and our inner reactions to them. But for me, dreams underscore my utter fascination with life and the importance of being aware of and enjoying every aspect of it, whether it makes sense or not.

I think part of my ability to ramble endlessly, and my problem with being able to stick to one subject or idea for very long is a subconscious reaction to just how much is going on in and around me, and how very little time there is to even attempt to process it all.

And so in my fine tradition of mixing apples and walnuts, I find myself doing it again with this blog. Start out with dreams, move on to ears. Perfectly logical segue…to me, anyway (dreams are formed in the space between the ears, after all).

And, of course, as the years pass more and more quickly, I become more focused on the physical changes that take place as part of the aging process and the reluctant realization that denial and railing against the inevitable aren’t going to change things. But that doesn’t…and I hope never will…stop me from making it clear I have no intention of going gentle into that good night.

Physical changes are generally gradual, and I have noted that I frequently have trouble understanding what people are saying. It isn’t a matter of not being able to hear them speaking: it isn’t the volume that’s the problem. It’s the fact of intelligibility. I watch TV and am aware that I haven’t any idea of what in the hell these people are saying. And turning up the volume does not help: I’m simply and inexplicably finding it harder to distinguish words. “This is what I am saying” too often comes across as “Tmbr eh jllwe I’b plebus”. Frustrating. And being assured that this is perfectly normal for “someone my age” drives me up the wall. It may be perfectly normal for everyone else, but it is NOT “perfectly normal” for me and I’ll be damned if I’ll accept it.

My vanity aside, I would not be averse to looking into getting a hearing aid, were they more affordable, but I can put up with a lot of mumbling for the $3,000-up I understand hearing aids cost. Besides, I live mostly inside myself anyway. What do I need to know what other people are saying for, anyway?

Have I mentioned that reality and I don’t get along very well?

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Hubris, Sheep, and Salmon

hubris > Origin Greek, denoting presumption towards or defiance of the gods

A friend recently pointed out that I demonstrate this quality in abundance. I was flattered that he would think so.

Hubris was not smiled upon by the gods of mythology. Those mere mortals who displayed it— Prometheus, Naiobi, Arachnae, Oedipus, Cassandra, among others—suffered mightily for doing so. I’m sure I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with the gods.

Our God isn’t wild about hubris, either, which is why He and I long ago reached what I hope is an amicable parting of the ways. I never presumed to be godlike, other than in the creation of the worlds and characters within my books, but I most certainly do defy the right of anyone to tell me how to live my life.

Our government, which too often looks upon itself as godlike, definitely does not like hubris. When it comes right down to it, I cannot think of any form of authority who/which does not consider any questioning of its authority to be hubris. To question is to challenge, to challenge is to be in effect a traitor. You’re with us or you’re against us. Period. There is no middle ground. It is the ultimate irony that mankind has never made a single inch of progress without questioning some authority or other, and yet those who initially ask the questions generally do so at their peril.

Actually, I look on hubris as something of a badge of honor. Anyone who presumes to tell me what I should do, or how I should do it, or attempts to make my decisions for me had damned well better have a good reason for it..

Life is filled with choices, and hubris divides the world into salmon and sheep. To display hubris is to be a salmon swimming upstream, and fighting the currents is never easy. To never defy anything is to be a sheep, and there are far too many sheep in the world. Sheep, without a moment’s thought or question, go in whatever direction they are pointed…which is all too frequently to the slaughterhouse. Being a sheep is fine, if it is a conscious choice. But most sheep are sheep by default, simply because it never occurs to them to be anything else.

Hubris stems from independent thought, and independent thought is admittedly inconvenient. It often calls unwanted attention to the thinker, rather like watching the Rockettes and seeing one dancer not in sync with the others. It is axiomatic that most people assume that if someone says something must be done a certain way, or must be believed unquestioningly, they have a very good reason for it, and it is far safer not to make waves than to be swamped by them.

Children personify hubris. To them, the world is one vast “Why?” To answer a child’s question with “Because”, as is so often the case, does them a great disservice and merely serves, over time, to erode any desire to question. Still, many children refuse to accept “Because” as a logical answer, and it is they who continue to question and defy authority. It is they who go on to become salmon. I’m happy to say I was one of them.

It’s never too late to become a salmon.

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Silly

Dear Lord, but we are a silly lot. Each of us apparently considers the others to be dumb as a pile of rocks. That belief is the foundation of corporate America, and I am truly amazed at not only how stupid they think we are, but by the fact that too often that belief is justified.

They stroke our egos with one hand and rifle through our wallets with the other. And they have reached the conclusion that we’ll fall for anything if it sounds good enough. Banks, without our permission, take money from our checking accounts, switch it to our savings account, and proudly crow about how they are saving us money. The word “bullshit” leaps readily to mind.

We’re told we can get a Free Credit Report, without mentioning that it isn’t “Free” until we shell out our good money to become a “member” of something or other.

Cars used to be “used.” Now they are “pre-owned.” All the difference in the world! And we can get astonishing savings on the purchase of a new car if we are a “well-qualified buyer.” We are told that “No loan application is refused!” without mentioning that there is no guarantee that the application once accepted will be approved.

We can buy almost anything with “No Payments or Interest Until 2755!” Uh.....I’ve never quite figured that one out, but if it means I’ll still be paying for it in 2755, I don’t think I’m interested.

If I’m told I can get $300 off on the purchase of a new gadget, I wonder if I’m the only one curious about what the cost must normally be if they can lower it by $300 and still make a profit. (And have no doubt…no company is in business to lose money.)

Fast food restaurants lure us in with commercials showing at a “typical” one of their franchises in which at least fifteen people are simultaneously jumping up and down and sloshing Cokes all over each other in the excitement of having won tons of money.

Billboards and TV ads show us mouth-watering, 10-inch high sandwiches, open buckets of chicken with pieces piled high (a favorite phrase) above the rim. They apparently assume no one is going to be smart enough to wonder how they manage to put the lid on the bucket. Or, more importantly, they don’t care.

People who attend sporting events are obviously hard of hearing, which is why, I am sure, all commercials pertaining to them are screamed at the top of the announcer’s lungs. In print media, Second-Coming type is required for “special” sales (ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME ANNUAL PRE-GROUNDHOG DAY SAVINGS!!!) to alert the brain-dead to the spectacular values being offered.

Organizations like Publisher’s Clearing House show delirious winners (all, coincidentally, standing in front of well kept, upper-class homes...it’s probably too difficult for the cameras to walk up to a fifth-floor tenement) shouting and screaming in disbelief at their good fortune. At least I can appreciate their disbelief, since I share it wholeheartedly. Have you ever entered a Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstake? Have you ever won a Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstake? The prosecution rests.

As I say, we are a silly lot, and no one is more so than I, for letting this sort of nonsense get to me.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Stereotyping Cockroaches

I killed a cockroach the other day. In a large apartment building in Chicago, that’s hardly a newsworthy event. Actually, there has been a marked drop-off in the cockroach population of my building of late, for reasons known only to the cockroaches.

But the point in reporting the fact that I’d killed a cockroach is that I sincerely felt guilty about it the instant I did it. What right did I have to take its life? It was just strolling across the bathroom wall, minding its own business and had made no aggressive or threatening gestures toward me. In fact, I can’t even be sure he knew I was there. But I killed him anyway.

The justification/rationalization is the usual yattata-yattata “carrier of germs/spreader of disease” stereotyping that’s been drilled into our heads since we were kids. And in theory, it makes sense. But in practice, when it was just one cockroach going about his business, what real justification could I offer for killing it?

I read somewhere that when presented with a number of similar items—marbles, say, or cockroaches—people tend to overestimate numbers up to 100, and underestimate numbers over 100. I’m not sure why this should be, just as I am not sure why a great number of things should be, but it is a proven fact. And it is also far easier to hate a group than it is to hate a specific individual from that group.

Stereotyping is a most convenient way to eliminate the necessity for independent questioning and thought. The world has always relied on stereotypes to tell it how to react to the unfamiliar. Jews are sneaky. Ok. Blacks are lazy. Ok. The Irish are the scum of the earth. (This was very popular at the time the Irish began their mass immigration to our larger cities, but faded rather rapidly.) But Ok, if you say so. Gay men lust after and prey upon young boys. Ok. (Booooo, Gays!)

Societal changes occur when it slowly dawns on people that they can no longer buy into the stereotypes they’ve been force-fed (granted, often with little or no resistence). Racial stereotyping began to fade as individuals in the majority began to be exposed to actual Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans and to realize that people are simply people. It’s frustrating and utterly illogical that this same process has to be repeated with every minority that comes along. But eventually, after untold thousands or millions have suffered unconscionable hardship, things do change. Interracial couples on TV and in the movies? So? What’s the big deal? Asking that same question 50 years ago would have gotten a rather sharply different answer.

The same thing is happening, albeit far too slowly, with gays. As more “average” people realize that they personally know a real, live homosexual who does not fit the “faggot” or “bull dyke” stereotypes they’ve cherished all these years, the harder it is to lump together all gays into one stereotypical clump.

The very word “stereotypes” is almost always synonymous with “negative”. Stereotypes are the lumps in the gravy of humanity and have to be smoothed out.

And while the mention of “gravy” and “cockroaches” in succeeding sentences is not ideal, I guess the purpose of this entire blog is that I was stereotyping that poor creature strolling across the wall, and as so often happens with those targeted by stereotyping, he paid dearly for that prejudice.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Insanity

There are times when I quite seriously fear for my sanity and question whether, in fact, these blogs may be little more than a chronicling of my descent into madness. And immediately, upon having typed that sentence, my guardian angel (or, more precisely, because I am Agnostic, my mental better half Dorien) reminded me of my penchant for melodrama. However.....

Because I am less and less willing to put up with trying to eat foods that require a lot of saliva to chew and process, I’ve increasingly turned to high-calorie liquid food supplements of the Boost/Ensure variety. At 350 calories a can, I can get most of my nutritional needs that way and save myself one heck of a lot of hassle.

I buy Walgreens’ generic version, which costs considerably less than Boost or Ensure, and it comes in three flavors: Chocolate, Strawberry and so-called Vanilla. I prefer the Vanilla, to which I add yogurt (sometimes Kefir, which is a very odd foodstuff vaguely related to yogurt) or fresh fruit and a quarter to half cup of ½ and ½, and put it in the blender. (Digression, anyone?)

For the past week, all three of my nearest Walgreens have been out of the Vanilla, so the other day, while in the Loop, I found a Walgreens that had it. I bought two six-packs for $12.00, and brought them home. Because I was taking my car to the supermarket before returning to my apartment, I put my Walgreens purchase in my trunk with several other plastic bags filled with things I’d put in earlier, intending to give to a food bank supporting AIDS patients. Their hours are sporadic, however, and often when I go, I find them closed.

I finished my grocery shopping and noticed on the way out that the store had a large bin for accepting food donations for another charity. I figured as long as I was there, I’d give them what I had in my trunk, which I did.

It was not until I got home and looked for the Whatever that I realized I did not have it. And I did not have it because I had put it in the food donation bin with the other items. How could I have been so astoundingly stupid? Easily, obviously. Why am I totally incapable of thinking before I act?

Were this an isolated incident, it might be overlooked, or chalked up to experience. But I do not learn from experience. I am capable of an infinite variety of stupidity. I do not think. Ever. Oh, I think ten seconds after I’ve done some dumbfoundingly idiotic thing and feel totally like a fool. You would think…I would think…that after doing excruciatingly embarrassing things time after time after time without thinking first that I would learn. We would both be wrong.

Yesterday I lost my cell phone…not easy to do in a tiny, tiny apartment, but I managed. I spent an hour searching for it and finally e-mailed my friend Gary to ask him to call me and let the phone ring until I found it. He did, and I did.

It was in the linen closet.

To the best of my recollection (sic) I had not been near the linen closet in days. It is to weep.

There is that wonderful old saying: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and prove it.” But I insist upon not only doing such humiliating things, but compounding them by detailing them in this blog for all the world (oh, I wish!) to see.

I am hopeless, yet even in my hopelessness my ego shows through and the paraphrased words of Percy Bysshe Shelley shimmer through the darkness: “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” And round that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’”

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

King Canut

Oh, my. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I spend an inordinate amount of time…and the bulk of these blogs…in ranting and raving and waving my arms, and shouting and cursing and oozing bile from every pore. And every now and then I step back and wonder: why? Much as I would like to be appointed He Who Must Be Obeyed, it’s not very likely that’s going to happen.

And just because I rail against all the astonishing stupidity, bigotry, hatred, and intolerance that continuously wash over us all in mountainous waves doesn’t mean I have the slightest control over, let alone effect on, any of them. I’m like King Canut, standing on the shore, commanding the waves to cease. Maybe I hope that by eliciting your empathy, all of us lined up together on the shore might intimidate the tides. Or maybe not.

I am quite good at self-delusion (though I’m sure you’ve never noticed). Being the ultimate egoist, I tend to talk about things which are closest to my core being and insist on trying to foist them off on you on the unproven and unprovable grounds that you might realize that we occasionally have the same thoughts or reactions, though they are not the kind of things one talks much about to others.

I sometimes feel a bit like one of those small crabs which live inside an empty sea shell, which in this case is my mind, coming out timidly only occasionally to bitch about something, then darting back in again.

I spend almost all my waking time writing, either books or blogs or emails. About the only time I have to read for pleasure is while I’m “working” part-time at the information desk of a nearby shopping center, and yesterday I took with me a little book called Another Cat at the Door by C.W. Gusewelle. It’s a collection of totally charming short essays about the author and his family’s inability to turn away stray cats showing up at their door. (I assume they originally appeared either as a blog or in a weekly newspaper column.)

Each self-contained piece is tells a complete little story with grace, humor (and sometimes sorrow), insight, and compassion. Reading them, I wondered once again why it seems to be that my blogs are too often little more than grumpy muttered oaths and complaints. I fear you may…if you have not already…grow tired of being exposed to unrelenting negativity, and wander off in search of happier thoughts.

Mr. Gusewell is not a curmudgeon, and he does not live in a seashell. He spends his time outside, observing the world and others around him, not immersed in himself to the exclusion of the rest of the world. There is little nourishment to be found in feeding entirely on one’s self, but it is exactly what I do.

So I’ve resolved to try to get outside of myself a little more in future blogs: God knows there really is enough good and pleasant things to talk about. And I hope you understand that my apparent unhappiness stems from my soul-deep belief and expectation that people can be so very much better than they are, and my deep disappointment when constantly proven wrong.

So I talk about myself in hopes that I am also talking about you. Maybe enough of us, standing on the seashore, can make a difference. I’d like to think so.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.

Society, Kicking and Screaming

I talked a bit about the rapid changes technology has made and continues to make…mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse. But it is the societal changes which have a far longer and darker history. Nearly every significant major change in our society has been forged in anger, denial, and occasional warfare.

It is of course impossible to separate technological and societal change, since it is the former which often brings on the latter. The difference between technological and social changes is that technology provides things which we did not miss before they existed. Societal changes are based more on the human mind and our perception of the world around us.

The rapid evolution of technology in electronics has produced societal sea changes. Until the middle of the last century, no one had ever heard of television, or of computers, or cell phones, or microwaves or dishwashers. With no television or video games, kids actually played outdoors and exercised their imaginations. Their days were not crammed with soccer practice and cheerleading squads and other orchestrated activities which have all but eliminated the need for the imagination or creativity. Obesity in children was not a major issue.

So many of the devices without which we cannot imagine our living today simply did not exist, and we got along perfectly well without them all. You cannot miss what you have never had and never heard of. I wonder what “wonders” the next 20 years hold in store.

Yet it is television and the internet and other technological devices which pushes and promotes societal change. Being exposed to people different from ourselves had done an admirable job in breaking down prejudices and homogenizing our world.

I’m not the first to observe that humans are an often maddening species, vehemently and violently resistant to change until that change inevitably occurs, and the exact same people who marched and screamed and ranted against it suddenly act as if it had been their idea in the first place. Segregation, ethnic and national stereotyping, women’s lib and gay rights all…every social battle that begins with a “NEVER!!!!” seems to end in a “Yeah, so what else is new?”

On the forefront of social change right now is the issue of gay marriage and gays in the military. On the issue of gay marriage, I personally don’t care how it’s done or what it’s called, so long as the end result is the same: identical rights for everyone.

I look at the smug, self-righteous political and military bigots who pontificate their objections to the right of gay and lesbian Americans to serve their country openly on the most absurdly specious of grounds and logic, and know full well that it is only a matter of time until these neanderthals will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century. And once that goal has been achieved, I will be willing to wager my soul that there will not be so much as a ripple upon the waters, and the only question will be “what in the HELL took you so long?”

Dr. Pangloss was wrong: there is no “best of all possible worlds.” There never has been, and never will be. When it comes to social progress, mankind resembles an amoeba, which can only move when one small part extends itself out from the mass and the rest of the body gradually flows into it. We just all have to do our best to move as quickly into the arm of the amoeba as we can.

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A Pile of Rocks

Well, what do you know? Here I am heading off on another rant-and-rave on one of my favorite topics: email spam. I’d really like to know how this spam thing works. Obviously it is something of a franchise program, for if you’ll note, you’ll get five or ten with exactly the same heading (usually with two or three egregious misspellings).

I swear, these idiots truly must think everyone is dumber than a pile of rocks. Unfortunately, since they wouldn’t keep doing it if it weren’t paying off for them, they may be right.

My current favorite is “Earn $5,000 to $10,000 at home every month. GUARANTEED!” Well, I admit I was just the teeniest bit skeptical until I saw the word GUARANTEED which, of course, like mommy kissing a boo-boo, removed all my doubts and made it all better. How can I possibly doubt the veracity of anyone willing to GUARANTEE me $5,000 to $10,000 a month? I do tend to find my eyes misting over a bit, though, thinking of the nobility of these wonderfully generous people.

I am also impressed by the recent, though now largely vanished, announcement that major motion picture companies are offering top dollar (I like that phrase almost as much as “big money” or “piled high”) looking for movie extras in my area. Of course they are. I can imagine how very very difficult it must be to find someone willing to be paid money to stand around in a crowd scene for a movie, and they are shooting movies in my neighborhood nearly every day. (Well, they did do the latest Batman in Chicago, and I missed my chance on that one, but I suspect several people in Pence, Wisconsin, might possibly have gotten the same offer. Pence is obviously the new Hollywood.)

You have no idea how very, very much I want to respond to these ads with the same positive, evangelical-fervor as they were sent. (Oh, yes! Please!! Please tell me how I can earn $5,000 to $10,000 every month from my own home! I am sure I am the only person in the whole world who realizes the wonderousness and sincerity of such a wonderful offer. And that you GUARANTEE it makes it even more precious to me. In anticipation of my first monthly check, I have placed an order for a new Cadillac. My second check will go toward the downpayment on a new condo. Please send me my money right away.)

One I just got rather frightens me, though. It tells me I can lose 20 pounds overnight. At that rate, I would totally disappear in a week!

The problem with responding to any of these offers with a suggestion that they wrap their offer around a stick of dynamite and put it in any one of their choice of bodily orifices will only result in your finding yourself with 189,999 brand new and equally fascinating offers. I one time made the mistake of requesting mortgage loan information from an on-line pop-up ad (far, far higher class than mere spam, and therefore to be trusted implicitly). By the next day I had received 273 similar offers from 273 different companies. How ever they knew I’d responded to that one, I have no idea. Really. I don’t. No. Do you?

But I do fondly remember a product from the years before spam was king. It was an ad ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to kill any bug or insect. It cost $20.00 but it lived up to its promise. When you sent in your $20.00 you received a small box which proved to contain two small blocks of wood, labeled “A” and “B”, and an instruction sheet which said: “Place insect on block A. Strike with block B. Repeat if necessary.” I love truth in advertising.

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Pond Scum

I am often bemused by the fact that for all my Pollyannish attitudes and gushing pronouncements on just how wonderful people are, I in fact very often consider vast numbers of people pond scum, whose membership in the human race should be terminated.

A week or so ago, I watched the questionably-titled "America's Got Talent"—an indication of both the sorry state of television and my desperation to watch it regardless. The audience had obviously been transported bodily from a “bread and circuses” event in 1st century Rome, glorying in their negative power. They hated everyone, talented or not. The last contestant (for some very strange reason I do not understand, the last contestant is always by far the most talented. Sheer coincidence, I'm sure) was a singer whose vocal cords had been smashed in an accident eleven years ago, and who had been unable to even speak for several years.

Granted, the quality of the “talent” that preceded him had set the mob in a justifiably foul mood, but they took it several steps beyond foul. The minute he walked on stage, the boos started, and drowned him out as he started to sing. He has a great voice, but they didn't give a shit: they wanted blood. And then, probably on cue from some unseen prompter, the boos turned to cheers and at the end of this number everyone was standing and cheering and doing that uniquely human "What? Us? No! We always thought he was great" turnaround that always follows the success of something everyone was sure would fail. Pond scum, every one of them.

E-mail spammers are pond scum, pure and simple. Those who prey on the trusting, the naive, and the elderly, are so far beneath contempt that applying the term “pond scum” to them could be considered a compliment.

TV evangelists who shamelessly bilk those desperate for reassurance and something to believe in by pleading for money to do “God’s work”—which somehow always coincidentally seems to include making the preacher very, very rich—are pond scum.

Politicians and talk show pundits who ruthlessly use bigotry, intolerance, and the boundless ignorance of those who never take the time to think for themselves to promote their own ends are pond scum.

People so pathetically insecure that the only way they can feel superior to others is through cruelty, embarrassment, and insensitivity are pond scum.

And thee and me, my friends, ride pristine in our neat little boats upon a vast, smooth, and algae-green sea.

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The Demons Within

I try not to think of it, but there are times when I frighten myself realizing how precariously I can balance between my self delusion of being St. Francis of Assisi and the awareness of my potential to be Vlad the Impaler. I abhor violence in all forms, especially that performed on one living creature by another. I am vehemently, rabidly against the death penalty. Yet even as I rale against it, I know full well that, were someone to harm someone I love, and I had a gun in my hand, I would not hesitate for the blinking of an eye to use it. Not just use it, but do so with icy deliberation, starting with both knees, working up to the groin, then, when I am quite sure the perpetrator fully appreciates the fact that he probably should not have done what he did, one between the eyes. And I would still have a couple bullets left just in case the first four hadn’t done the job.

Man is, after all, a predatory animal. He could not have survived without using violence to get what he wanted. But it seems that 5,000 years of painful struggle to become something better than what we are has, regrettably, done little or nothing to tame our violent instincts.

I am unalterably opposed to the death sentence…not only because far too many innocent people have been put to death by our overly zealous criminal “justice” system, especially in enlightened states like Texas. Once having executed someone, a state’s “Ooops, sorry about that” doesn’t quite cut it. Even for the guilty, being put to death does little. Other than the momentary terror of receiving a fatal injection, once they are dead, their punishment is over. Far, far better…and in the long run, much more fitting…to lock the criminal away for the rest of his life, so that every morning he may wake with the memory of what he has done and the knowledge of where he is, how he got there, and what his future holds.

I tend to be a believer in the old “an eye for an eye” principle when it comes to violence. One of my first acts when I am declared emperor will be to order that any act of deliberate violence performed by one person on another (or on a helpless animal—and no, we will not get into the subject of vegetarianism just now) will have the exact same violence performed on him/her. A slap in the face will get you a slap on the face; shoot someone between the eyes so you can steal their new pair of tennis shoes and you will be shot between the eyes. Simple.

As to my own tendency to violence, I am always aware that it is there, lurking somewhere in the dark corners of my mind. I am prone to being plunged into a fury when things do not go the way I have every reason to suspect that they should. I usually manage to turn the fury inward, but I have been known to throw, smash, and jump up and down on things. The one time I directed my anger and frustration at another human being was when I first lived in Chicago and was involved in an absolutely disastrous relationship. At one point, I threw him into a wall and broke his arm. Not my proudest moment.

That our culture, sadly, is increasingly enured to violence should not come as any great surprise to anyone who has read a newspaper or watched a television news program. It’s hardly surprising that children assume, from everything they see and hear, that violence is a perfectly logical way to settle any dispute or conflict. The concept of the consequences of violence is totally ignored.
So that’s what I think about violence. And you damned well better agree with me, if you know what’s good for you.

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Why? (Part MLX)

I know, I’ve asked this question before…several times, but why are there so many things in life that I simply cannot understand? It’s not as though I don’t try. I really, really do. But when I heard the news…and the very fact that it was “news” utterly dumbfounded me…that Brad and Angelina (no last names needed, we ALL know who Brad and Angelina are. We worship them. Their every move is followed with gape-jawed awe) had had twins, and that the first photos of the babies are expected to fetch $11 million, my tenuous attachment to reality was tested yet again.

Please, please, someone, explain to me why I…why anyone not a personal friend or family member of these people… should care? Please tell me how, in a world with 6-plus billion people, the arrival of two more should send so many people into paroxysms of awe, wonder, joy, delight, and enthusiasm. Mary Jackson, of Tupelo, Mississippi, gave birth to twins at exactly the same time as Angelina. If pictures of Angelina’s kids are worth $11 million, shouldn’t Mary be able to expect, say, $6 million for hers? Where are the Second Coming, stop-the-presses headlines on little Oscar and Suzanne Jackson, or any of the other 600,000 children born within 25 minutes of Brad and Angelina’s latest ode to heterosexuality?

I like Brad. I do. I think he is extremely sexy. So is Matt Damon. And Ben Afflek. And several dozen other male movie stars. But then, so are about 200 guys I pass on the street every day, and I haven’t a clue as to who they are.

I find it truly sad that our culture is so absorbed in the trivial, the superficial, and the meaninglessness, and the inordinate amount of time we spend in things which have no real impact on our lives. Are our own lives so utterly devoid of purpose, meaning, and pleasure that we must spend millions of dollars stripping the newsstands of “Celebrity” publications (printed, I suspect, on recycled toilet paper) to try to squeeze a drop of vicarious…whatever…from the belches, \burps and insipid romances of people we have never met and will never meet? It is, truly, to weep.

Somehow, I place the fact that Mario Lopez (hot as he is) has broken up with his latest girlfriend somewhat below the fact that wars rage across the globe; disease and starvation are rampant, and natural disasters claim millions of lives each year. Call me silly, but it’s just the way I am.

I constantly talk about my refusal to face reality. That doesn’t mean I don’t know it’s there. But I substitute my ego for reality. I turn everything toward myself and my personal existence in an effort to improve myself. There are so very many things to do, so many serious real personal issues to consider, and so very little time in which to do it, that if something does not directly involve my day-to-day existence, my health, my income, my own friends and family, or my future, I simply don’t have the time to bother with it.

Living vicariously through total strangers who are prettier or richer or more successful than we—have you noticed that superior intelligence so seldom enters into these pantings-after?—as so frighteningly many people appear to do, does keep them from facing reality, but to what positive end? Do they channel their incomprehensible and totally pointless envy and adulation into making their own lives, or those of people around them, better? Need I even have asked the question?

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Minds and Computers

I’ve long ago given up trying to figure out either my mind or the computer. People seem to be comparing them all the time, and I guess I have to agree. Both seem to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, both can deny you access to information you know you have and want and need at any time, and my wanting them to do anything else is like opening the door to a jetliner at 40,000 feet and stepping out without a parachute.

My computer, which I really do work to extremes, will frequently, suddenly, and for absolutely no reason I can see, decide to slow down. I will try to go from one place to another on the net (or even within the computer itself) and the screen I want to leave will just sit there, staring back at me, expressionless but obviously uncomprehending or uncaring—or, as I strongly suspect, a combination of both. Very infrequently, it will simply lock up tighter than a drum, making it impossible for me to do anything at all, other than manually turn the tower off and switch it back on again.

The other day, I clicked on a photo to move it from one part of the page to the other, dragged it halfway to where I wanted it, let my finger off the mouse for an instant, and it disappeared. Vanished, never to be seen again. It did not go back to where it was in the first place, it did not go into my overflowing “Wastebasket”, though that particular feature of my computer is so full of assorted junk I probably wouldn’t be able to find the photo even if it was there. And my mind works exactly the same way: I have an idea that I wish to make use of in another context, and somewhere in between, the idea vanishes, as does, usually, the thought I was trying to relate it to.

Though I must say, in defense of the computer, that were it as completely as unpredictable as my mind, it would be totally unuseable. You’re familiar with those annoying Pop-Up ads that just appear when you’re doing something and you have to take the time and effort to click on the little “x” in the pop-up window to get rid of them? Well, my mind is one continual pop-up window. I’m trying to think of how to describe, let’s say, a piece of furniture (don’t ask me why I might want to be describing a piece of furniture…just go with me here, okay?). The instant I start I think of a chair my mom hat that her cat totally destroyed by peeing in it. Or I am writing a note to a friend telling him/her about something that happened today while I was walking to the grocery store and here comes a pop-up alerting me to the fact that the parking garage behind the store used to be a tennis court when I first lived in Chicago. A fascinating bit of trivia, but having nothing whatever to do with the grocery store or my walking to it today.

That I am able to fan and swat my way through these swarms of mental pop-ups is, I’m sure, admirable, but it is also infinitely frustrating.

Obviously, the makers of computers had to have designed them using the brain as some sort of model, and increasingly obvious, too, is the fact that more and more people rely more heavily on the computer for things the brain should do for itself. I refer you once again to E.M. Forster’s classic 1909 short (12,000 word) story, “The Machine Stops”, which you can find on Google. (That was a classic example of one of my mental pop-ups, and only goes to prove I am not only not the first person in the world to relate computers and the mind, but I’m 99 years behind E.M. Forster.)

Better late than never, I guess.

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Little Things

I’m pretty good at dealing with the big things in life: cancer, the death of loved ones (though not quite so well with aging), but it is the little things…the endless, niggling minor frustrations and irritations which mean absolutely nothing in the overall scheme of things…which drive me to utter distraction. The big things I understand I have no control over, but the little things, the things that can happen to anyone but seem only to happen to me; the things that, if they do happen to other people are dispatched with casual ease, are what get to me and infuriate me with my inability or incompetence to deal with.

It was very hot last night. I have been sleeping on my sleeper sofa for the past week due to my bed being overrun by the bedbugs which have been infesting my building. The exterminators have been in no fewer than six times. Count ‘em…six. And each time they come, I am required to remove all the pictures from my walls (still not sure why, but mine is not to reason why), empty out all my drawers, remove everything from night stands, bookshelves, closets, etc. Where I am to put these mountains of materials in a very very small apartment is not their concern. Every single item of clothing, every piece of bedding must be laundered. And so I do.

And they come. And they spray, and then I replace all the pictures on the walls, put everything back in the drawers and on the shelves and in the closets and remake the bed (including replacing the full-mattress, zippered antimicrobial and antibacterial mattress cover (ever tried to do that by yourself? Pure joy, I can assure you.). And then two weeks later they come back, and I must remove all the pictures from the walls, empty out all my drawers, remove everything from night stands,…get the idea? And then two weeks later they come back.

Oh, and then they tell me I am “not prepared.” Jeesus!!

On their last visit, I asked the man doing the spraying if I had it all right this time and he said yes. I then left the apartment (a requirement) for four hours, taking my cat down to my friend Gary’s apartment for safekeeping. When I returned, I noticed that the only thing in the entire apartment the exterminators had touched was the bed.

That night, confident that all was finally over, I juggled and struggled to get the zippered full-mattress cover back on, made the bed with freshly laundered sheets, and went to bed. I awoke two hours later with itching, and got up to find three bedbugs strolling casually over my sheets.

I am told the problem lies with my wooden captain’s bed, which I purchased (around $500 without mattress) shortly before I moved to Chicago. Because it is wood and has lots of detail work which afford lots of joints for bedbugs to crawl between and breed, no matter how thoroughly or how often they spray, the eggs survive to hatch anew.I have been told I will probably have to get rid of the bed. Oh, sure. No problem at all. What’s $500. And of course the mattress will have to go, too. Another, what?, $300 or so? And then because bedbugs can get in carpets, I’ll have to throw out my living room rug, also new when I moved in.

Okay, I know full well that all this is hardly on the level of genocide in Darfur, or global warming, or the oil crisis or the delightful Whitman’s sampler of new wars our beloved leaders are eager to open up. My bitching and moaning and feeling terribly put upon is laughable. Unfortunately, I”m not laughing.

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Bubbly Creek

Where Michigan Avenue crosses the Chicago River stand four large, regal-looking towers, two on each bank, flanking the lift bridge. Only one or two of them houses the mechanism that raises and lowers the bridge, but the builders thought four would look better and more impressive. So there are four. The bridge is so delicately balanced that it only takes the equivalent of a 1950s Volkswagon engine to lift and lower it.

One of them is now the Chicago Bridge Museum, which I had never even known existed, and to which, had it not been for my friend Gary, I would probably never have given a second thought.

Chicago has more lift bridges than any city in the country, and the Chicago River is, I believe, the only river in the world that flows backward. How it came to do so is a fascinating (to me) story.

Chicago was born where two slow-moving streams, the North Branch and the South Branch joined to form the Main Stem, linking the branches to Lake Michigan. The surrounding territory was largely inhospitable marshland and bogs which the city’s growth slowly consumed. The Chicago River served as the city’s sewer and until only recently was one of the most polluted bodies of water in America if not the world. Because the sewage flowed down the North Branch and up the South Branch and into the Main Stem, all the sewage, garbage, and general debris of the city flowed freely into Lake Michigan, which was and is the city’s main source of drinking water. A water pump station was built out in the lake beyond the area of main pollution, but the pollution produced by the city’s growth soon overtook it and another station was built further out, which in turn was soon overtaken.

It was decided to dig a canal connecting the South Branch to the Des Plaines river, therefore routing the growing city’s garbage and sewage from Lake Michigan and sending it down stream to the Mississippi, St. Louis and beyond. Only because the land sloped to the west was this possible, but once the canal was opened, the river reversed its flow.

All the growing city’s industrial waste and garbage could then happily be tossed into the Chicago River and let the people downstream on the Mississippi worry about it.

As the city continued to grow, the gigantic Chicago Stockyards were constructed along another stream feeding into the South Branch, called “Bubbly Creek”…a lovely name conjuring up images of forest and glens and clear artesian water bubbling up from the earth. Unfortunately, that image would be wrong. Bubbly Creek received its name from the fact that the tens of thousands of cattle carcasses and general offal from the slaughter houses were dumped into it, and their rotting at the bottom of the creek created methane gas which bubbled to the surface.

During the great Chicago fire, a large stretch of the South Branch, including Bubbly Creek, actually caught fire.

Throughout most of its history, Chicago was known not for its beauty but for its stench. One prominent New York businessman arrived in Chicago by train, stepped onto the platform, took one whiff of the air, got back on the train and never returned. And even today, after years of devoted and concentrated effort to restore the river’s purity, swimming in and fishing from the river are discouraged.

And there you have it. As I said, fascinating. You must come and visit some day, and take a boat cruise up the river. It’s a really beautiful way to see the city. And you don’t have to hold your nose anymore.

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Pride

There are two basic types of pride: the pride of being a part of something much larger than one’s self, and the stuff that we are cautioned “goeth before a fall,”which is largely of our own making.

Yesterday, June 29, 2008, was a perfect example of the former. It was Gay Pride day in Chicago and many other cities across the nation. Attendance in Chicago was estimated at over 450,000, and it was not only promoted by all the local TV stations and other media, but most—including the major networks—had floats. Before leaving for the parade, I stood at my window and looked down at the Diversey el station half a block from my apartment, watching train after train disgorging platform-filling crowds of people, which then poured out onto the street and flowed eastward, like a river, toward the parade route.

Participation or at least representation in the parade has become all but mandatory for any elected official in the state (especially in election years). Great gleaming red-and-white trucks of the Chicago Fire Department, horns blaring, lights flashing, move down the street as part of the parade, and the Chicago Police Department sponsors a float with dozens of uniformed gay and lesbian police riding on it, led by a convertible carrying the Police Commissioner. This was the 39th Chicago Gay Pride parade and it, for the gay community, truly epitomizes the word “Pride.”

After hundreds of years of persecution and being told we were unworthy, unwelcome, and beneath contempt, we are entitled, I think, to a taking a little pride in how far we’ve come. When I left Chicago to move to L.A. in 1966, the first gay pride event was four years away. When I first lived here, I could have lost my job for being gay, or been evicted from my apartment with absolutely no recourse. Being gay was reason enough.. Our old slogan”“We’re Here, We’re Queer; Get Used to It” finally seems to be paying off. The world is getting used to us.

As I have said so often before, no one who is not a member of an historically persecuted minority can be expected to understand how much that means to us.

For me, the second form of pride…pride in one’s self…has not come without conflict. It is not by accident, I think, that Pride is considered one of the seven deadly sins. My pride forbids me to do many things that I really, really would love to do for fear of standing out from all those who do something well and naturally and appearing foolish. As a result, I stand out and appear foolish by not doing what others do. My pride will not allow me to dance for fear of making a fool of myself. And so I refuse any offer to do so and stand on the sidelines while everyone else is out there dancing. I’ve reported several times how my friends would tell me: “No one will notice you!” and I would reply: “I will notice me.”

My pride has, all my life, set up arbitrary rules and limitations which it demands I must follow. At the parade, I bought a rainbow flag and, while I would not allow myself to cheer and whistle (which I couldn’t have done anyway, since I lost the ability to whistle after my Mayo stay). However, in defiance, I did force myself to raise the flag over my head and wave it as my people marched by. That’s progress.

Maybe there is hope for me yet.

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"Cute"

Though I couldn’t immediately find it, I’m pretty sure I’ve already done a blog on this topic, talking about how warm and cuddly I always feel when beat over the head with the “cute” stick. It is apparently a given in the advertising world and on TV in general that I am incapable of recognizing “cute” when I see it unless my jaws are forced open and a gallon of the stuff is poured down my throat.

I know I have talked probably several times about weekend-morning kiddie programs hosted by absolutely adorable “little girls” who will never see 25 again, but seem convinced that by wearing their hair in pigtails or in those cute little side-buns and dressing like six-year-olds, no one will know the difference. (When I worked for the porn mill in Los Angeles, such attire was regularly featured in magazines appealing to men who I sincerely doubt watched weekend kiddie shows.)

And I know I have raled against those legions of recording “artists” who firmly believe wearing a baseball cap at any angle but straight ahead is the height of both “cute” and “cool.” Obviously they are correct, since I have not seen more than three baseball caps worn correctly in several years. Probably it’s just me.

There is an ad running currently on Chicago television for some phone company whose name I have blocked out of my head in rebellion. It features a guy who looks like he’s wearing a body-sized bowling ball. And he says he represents the “dot” in”dot com”. (“I used to be a period” he says, thus doubling me over with laughter.) But in case I don’t get it, a young woman passes by wearing…now get this…a polka dot dress, and he says (please keep up with me here, because the zingers just keep coming): “Hi, Dorothy.” Dorothy, get it? (Okay, okay, obviously you’re too dumb to figure it out: let me get out my blackboard and chalk. Follow along now: people named Dorothy are often nicknaked “Dot.” Get it now? No? Oh, forget the whole thing!)

The general assumption of our stupidity goes back to the days of radio when laugh tracks were invented. They are omnipresent today and an absolutely invaluable tool to the industry. They let you know when something is funny (“Those pants make you look fat!” .....Uproarious, prolonged laughter. “Yeah, well you ain’t so skinny youself!” Absolute pandemonium, screams and shouts and applause and guffaws that go on endlessly and reduce the amount of time and effort the writers would otherwise need to try to write something that is even vaguely amusing.)

TV programs like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (the show’s title itself an oxymoron) often feature hilariously funny clips which are so obviously set up and staged you can see them coming a mile away…often enhanced by the cause of the cuteness glancing at the camera just prior to stepping on the rake or tripping into the swimming pool as if to assure the cameraman doesn’t miss it.

Ya’ can’t fake “cute.” Those velvet paintings of the little kids with the enormous eyes (usually with a tear at the corner), or those of the dogs playing poker, or those little “I wuv you” statuettes tend to induce projectile vomiting in me.

A puppy being a puppy, a kitten being a kitten, or a baby being a baby. Now those are the real thing, and you don’t have to grab me in a choke hold for me to recognize it. “Cute”, like any form of “beauty” is in the eye of the beholder, and I’ll decide for myself, thank you.

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Life

Yeah, like you saw the subject line and thought I was going to cram all of life into a one page blog. I’m good (he says modestly), but I ain’t that good. So I’ll just do my usual hop-skip-and-jump routine on some random observations on the subject.

I’ve always liked the quote: “When people say ‘life is hard,’ I’m always tempted to ask: ‘Compared to what?’”

Perhaps the biggest difference between Man and all other animals is that ours is the only species who is aware of the future, and which expects. The problem with expectations is that they are seldom met to the degree we want them to be. (Another favorite expression, which I’ve quoted before, is a line from the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown…or, as I insist upon calling it, The Unbrownable Molly Sink: “You say your prayers weren’t answered? That’s just not so! Your prayers were answered: The answer was ‘No.’”)

There are at least two sides to everything in life. Stoicism…simple acceptance of whatever happens…is an admirable and comforting attitude, but stoicism stifles the human urge to make things better. I read a fascinating study that points out that Western cultures are as a rule more technologically advanced than many isolated Eastern societies primarily because we do not accept things the way they are.

There is no statement that can be made that cannot be countered and disputed, often with great vehemence and a good deal of justification. “Life is good” is a truth which can be countered by just reading a newspaper or watching a TV program, or walking down the street with your eyes open. “Life sucks” is also a truth, but is countered by the same methods as in the previous sentence.

Life is a game we all play, but in which the rules are both unclear and constantly changing. It’s a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. It is a map drawn on a weather vane. It is confusing to the point of being maddening; sad and discouraging to the point of despair; joyous as ten thousand brightly colored balloons released to soar into the sky. It is all these things and infinitely more. But what it is, above all else, is a gift…an all-to-brief nanosecond of existence in the nothingness of eternity from which we somehow emerge and into which we too-quickly return.

Within the gift of life are innumerable other gifts which we too seldom recognize or appreciate. Principle among these is the gift of choice. Circumstances may limit us, but even within those limits we have the ability to make choices which allow us to change, to grow, and to seek happiness…or at the very least, contentment.

Life is also blank canvas presented to us at birth. The tools provided with which to create something on it vary from person to person. Some are given dozens of brushes and a full palette of colors, some a handful or less of crayons or pastels, some merely a single pencil. What we do with what we are given is up to us.

Robert Merrick, the “elephant man” whose life had meaning far beyond the incomprehensibly difficult circumstances he endured with amazing dignity, summed up the point of this entry. “I think my head is so large,” he said, “because it is so full of dreams.” And what more can be said of life than that?

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Love

Love is one of the most basic, powerful, and admirable traits of our species…though humans cannot claim exclusivity on it, as anyone who has ever had a dog or a cat can attest. Like so many things in life, love has an infinite number of shadings and varieties and intensities, as does its balance between the two individuals involved..

The love between parents and children is quite different than the love between friends, and that indescribably unique love between two people which includes and transcends the others.

Love feeds us and sustains us, and without it we wither and die. It is essential for our survival and our emotional development, and we seem able to store it up, like some animals store up body fat for use during periods of deprivation. Science has shown babies need to be touched and held and fondled as much as they need physical nourishment. Deprivation of love and attention warps the individual forever. (I have seen experiments conducted on baby monkeys denied of any contact with their mothers, and it horrified and devastated me. Such experiments may further science, but their effect on the individual monkeys is unconscionable.

As we grow older, our sources of love grow fewer. Our parents die as do, over the years, our partners and our friends, until we find ourselves like newborns once again, desperately needing love and attention and touch, and receiving less and less of it.

I am comfortable in my life. I am blessed with supportive, caring friends who provide emotional nourishment the human soul requires, and I try to reciprocate it, though I am far less adept at it than they. I still have some family left, and they remain my anchors to the past. I am fortunate, too, to have friends I’ve never met but who know and seem to appreciate me through my writing..

But what I do not have, and miss with a true sense of longing, is a romantic-love partner with whom to share my life. I used to joke that the one thing that separates friend from lovers is sex and, at the risk of eliciting a scrinched-face “eeeeee-eeewwww!!” from those under 40, I can assure you that probably most people, sex remains a strong factor even after one’s sexual appeal is totally lost on others.

For the most part, people tend to be pretty selfish when it comes to any form of love. They want it, need it, and even expect it as their due, though they are…like me…somewhat loath to express it as frequently as they should.

I have never met or even heard of a single person who, claiming with or without justification, that they are unloved, ever claims they are happy. It is a tragic fact that far, far too many people in our increasingly self-isolated world, are deprived of love, of affection, of kindness, of the even casual genuine touch on the arm from someone who cares about them.

Our society, unfortunately, even the most innocent and casual physical contact with anyone other than one’s own immediate family is discouraged, and we are rapidly becoming a nation of paranoids. That teachers are forbidden to hug a troubled student for fear of official reprimand or dismissal is a sign of just how far down the path of dehumanization we have traveled. That a kind, well-intentioned stranger cannot reach out and casually touch a child without being suspected of being a child molester is disgusting.

As elemental as it sounds, the fact remains: the best way to get positive attention is to give it without really expecting it to be returned; the best way to make a friend is to be a friend. The best way to be loved is to love unconditionally.

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Ophelia

As I was sitting here trying to think of a topic for this blog, my mind…I suspect with some ulterior motive of its own…presented me with the picture of Jean Simmons as Ophelia in the 1948 movie of Hamlet (Laurence Olivier played Hamlet). Gone utterly mad, she wanders beside a stream, idly picking flowers, her eyes indicating that no one is home.Singing little snatches of song, she makes a garland of flowers for her hair, then, totally unaware, she falls into the water and floats gently downstream on her back, oblivious to her fate. But she’s happy.

Knowing my mind as I do, I took the scene as a clear metaphor for my blog-writing. There are as many topics for a blog as there were flowers along Ohpelia's stream, and I pick them as randomly as she did.

I seem at the moment to be in a small patch of lovely little 1940s (they come in a variety of shades). I don’t even have to bend over to pick one. It is of our tiny house on Blackhawk Avenue on Rockford’s far-from-fashionable south side. (Of course it was my parents’, but I always thought of everything they had as mine, and they never dissuaded me from that belief.) The front door of the house led into a small, narrow living room, painted green as I recall, with only one window, other than the one in the door. On the right-side wall of the room, about three-quarters of the way down….maybe eight feet…were two doors; the first to my parents’ bedroom, the other to mine.

My room was only large enough for a single bed and a dresser. I don’t think there was a closet. Across from my room, in the living room, was a large brown metal oil heater with a stove pipe running from the back to close to the ceiling, where it bent and vented to the outside. This was the primary source of heat for the house. The oil was kept in two large drums behind the garage, and I assume there were pipes which ran between them and the house to supply fuel to the heater. Between the oil heater and my room was a large opening into the kitchen. We got our water from a well equipped with an electric pump which, when it elected to go out, necessitated my dad crawling down into a wood-covered pit outside the living room’s only window. This usually happened in winter, of course.

For the first couple of years we lived there, we had no bathroom. There was an outhouse in the back yard. It simply never occurred to me that we might be considered either deprived or poor. It is simply the way things were, and much of the nation lived as we did.

When my folks could afford it, they built a room off the side of the kitchen which became my bedroom. My former bedroom became a bathroom.

I remember lying in my bedroom with my comic books when my folks weren’t home, tracing pictures of Superman and Captain Marvel and Batman and Robin, only I would trace them as being naked (easy enough to do, since they always wore skin-tight uniforms anyway), which provided an early-teen boy with far more heat than the living room oil burner could ever have produced. To avoid being caught, when I finished with them, I would slide them into a crack under my window sill, where they would usually fall between the walls. I often wondered what might have happened if, in the course of the house’s eventually being demolished, someone had found them all. Unfortunately, that speculation was never realized, since the house burned several years later.

We lived there from the time I entered third grade through seventh or eighth grade. I learned to ride a bike there, and we planted a tree which is still, to the best of my knowledge there though the house is gone and only an empty lot remains.

And you see? I’ve picked only one flower! There are fields and fields of them, just waiting to be picked. If I can only avoid falling into that stream…

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Who IS that man?

As you undoubtedly have noticed, I often share the average two-year-old child’s firm conviction that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around me—which is hardly an attitude conducive to a writer expecting to attract or hold readers. However, I suspect, since you have been so loyal in following these blogs, that while observing me rummaging through the dusty corners of my psyche, you have caught occasional glimpses of yourself. The major difference between me and you might be that while we share probably more things than either of us realizes, I tend to think and talk more about things you may be too polite to mention, or (rightly) consider to be nobody else’s business..

Human beings are, by nature and necessity, a complacent lot. We accept things without much thought, which is logical, for if we gave thought to our every action, we wouldn’t be able to do much else. We are assumptive. When we walk, we give not an instant’s thought to what we’re doing…of the infinitely complex coordination between our mind and our body. We operate on the unspoken but totally accepted assumption that what is, is, and what is will always be.

I spend an inordinate amount of time and space, I know, in reflecting on my physical and social shortcomings, real and imagined, and the horrified fascination with which I view the effects of the rapidly accelerating passage of time. I look in the mirror (but only when absolutely necessary) and the right half of my brain turns to the left half and asks, quite sincerely: “Who is that man? Surely it is not me! It can’t be me!” I use self-delusion as a cloak of invisibility that everyone but myself can readily see through.

And I’m fully aware that my constant bewailing of my physical limitations and the utter unfairness of it all is shameful in light of how many people with problems far more serious than my own maintain their silence with grace and dignity. I have never suffered in silence. When I outline in far greater detail than probably is necessary the perceived indignities fate inflicts on me, I know that small boy within me is, in effect, running up to my mother displaying a tiny scratch or cut on my finger, hoping she’ll praise me for being so very brave, and then kiss it and make it all better.

But I like to think that the reason I parade my losses in front of you is primarily as a cautionary tale: to encourage you to be aware of exactly how much you have and take for granted that other people would give anything to have. When is the last time you thought for an instant of how wonderful it is to eat a hot dog on a bun; to be able to open your mouth wide enough to get it all in and once having taken a bite, to be able to chew and savor and swallow it without a thought, and without having to accompany every swallow with some artificial liquid to allow the food to go down? Just stop for a brief second, the next time you are doing so, and consider just how very lucky you are.

My greatest problem, other than the realization that I always took everything I can no longer do totally for granted, is that I still cannot fully comprehend that I will not somehow wake up tomorrow and be able to do everything I could do ten years ago. I consider myself to be like someone who sees a roadside sign that says: “Caution: Bridge Out Ahead” but barrels straight ahead, sure the sign was not meant for me.

People with physical disabilities, or who are suffering or have recovered from serious illness and physical trauma of one sort or another can understand these things, in their own terms and as their traumas affected them. But there are so very many people out there…and I hope you are one of them…who, in their youth and/or perfect health are oblivious to their good fortune.

Just as you should never pass up the opportunity to let those you love know that you love them, you should never pass up the opportunity to stop to think just how very lucky you are. Now go have a hot dog for me.

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Idiots

I know full well that I frequently think of myself, and present myself to others, as an idiot. But I can do it; it’s my right. I don’t like it, but I can live with it. What I cannot tolerate is other people—total strangers who have never even heard of me and have no interest in doing so except as the signature on a check or a credit card number—automatically making that assumption. Their numbers are, unfortunately, legion. The assumption that everyone is an idiot seems, in fact, to be a fundamental tenet of nearly everyone with a product to sell or a cause to promote.

Probably 95 percent of all advertisers and 99.6 percent of all politicians consider the American public to be severely mentally retarded. Either they treat us with infuriating condescension (“See the pretty new car? Wouldn’t you like to have it? It’s got a horn and it goes really, really fast, and everything!....No, no, don’t bother looking at the price tag or reading the teensy-weensy print at the bottom of the screen/page. It’s nothing important.”), or believe that figuratively grabbing us by the shoulders, screaming at the top of their lungs and speaking as fast as they possibly can we will be convinced and become a bobble-head doll ("Oh, yeah! Sounds wonderful! A limited time offer, you say? Wow! I don't want to lose out on such a great opportunity. I'll take it!"). And, sadly, it works far more often than it fails.

I love glancing quickly through the subject lines in my Spam folder before I hit “Delete.” My current favorite is “Update your Penis.” I assume this involved downloading an attachment. But sometimes I merely stare at the subject lines in total awe. “Film Extras Wanted!” “Make $20,000 a month!” “Cure all Diseases”! Please! How can anyone… anyone …possibly, possibly be so stupid or gullible to fall for these scams? What do people use for brains? Have they never heard of logic? Have they never asked a question?

But the tragic, infinitely sad fact is that people DO believe this crap. Sweet little old ladies sign their life savings away eagerly at the promise of getting something for nothing, then look tearfully into the camera of the newscast telling their story and say: “How could they have done this to me?” Well, dear, sweet lady, they did it to you because, sweet and good and kind as you are, you let them do it to you. You are, sad to say, an idiot. Harsh, I know, but true.

If people stopped falling for these scams, the scammers would eventually go away. But I’m not holding my breath.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who frequently send me political and religious diatribes, usually filled with such odiferously unbelievable garbage I grow ill from the stench. But it is a proven fact that Barak Obama is Osama ben Ladin’s third cousin twice removed, and that he plans to strap dynamite to his wife and small daughters and detonate them during his inaugural speech to congress, thus destroying our entire government. Either that or his first act as President will be to make Islam the official and only religion of the country. Who… who …in their right mind could conceivably in a million million years believe that crap? And I weep to think that so many actually do.

And I fall back yet again on one of my mantras: “If 50 million people believe a foolish thing (or an outright lie), it is still a foolish thing (or an outright lie).”

Which brings us back to my sense of anger, frustration and impending doom in expecting people to be what they so obviously are not. Please, feel free to prove me wrong.

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Domesticity Redux

I scrubbed my bathroom floor today. Really, really, on-my-hands-and-knees scrubbed. I used Pine-Sol. I used Mop & Glo. I slipped and slid across the wet floor with a knife trying to clear away whatever it is that accumulates along the baseboard.

I tell you this, because were you to walk in to my apartment and make the foolish mistake of asking if you could use my bathroom, you would think it had not been touched since the Wilson administration.

My bathroom is very small. It is, at night, my cat Crickett’s bedroom. She sleeps on a folded blanket atop the closed toilet lid. Her food and water are placed on the floor against the wall between the toilet and the door. Her cat litter box (I really must invest in Kitty-Litter stock, since I sometimes think I am keeping them in business) is beneath the sink. Since the room has no storage space whatsoever other than the small medicine cabinet, I bought one of those white-metal, over-the-toilet storage shelves, which I had to bend slightly to get to fit. It has four legs which are impossible to reach, let alone clean around.

Being unable to lift my head above chin level, or turn it more than 15 degrees in either direction makes trying to reach behind the toilet an exercise in fun and futility. But I try. I really do.

Crickett is not messy, but some cat litter does get out of the box, and some small bits of dry kibble food also find their way out of the bowl, so I am constantly sweeping it up. You would think that might help keep it clean. You would be wrong.

So, deducting floor room for toilet, under the sink, and storage stand leaves an area 2 ½ feet by 4 feet. I bought a throw rug measuring 2 feet by 3 feet, hoping this would help keep the floor clean. Needless to say, it did not.

I suspect that someone has (or a large number of people have) duplicated a key to my apartment, and when I go out for coffee, or am otherwise occupied, use it for mud wrestling championship matches in my bathroom. (I also would not be surprised to learn they sometimes use the rest of the apartment for similar activities, but that’s another story.)

Most of the people I know, my friends and my family, consider—with total justification—their bathrooms to be showplaces; all sparkle and neatness and crisp, neatly folded guest towels and little bowls of pot pourri, and not so much as a gnat’s eyebrow to be found. (And if there were a gnat’s eyebrow anywhere around, it would have been picked up with a few squares of toilet paper and promptly flushed down the sparkling water of the toilet.). Were there room, they could hold state dinners in there. I stand in awe of their ability, and I am truly envious.

I clean my bathroom sink at least four times a day. But I can clean it to a shine, and come back ten minutes later to find it looking as though someone had dumped a 55 gallon drum of toxic waste into it. And we will not even mention my toilet bowl. No, we won’t. Seriously.

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Press 1 for English

Not to worry: I’ll save my fury over being required to “Press 1" to hear my own language in my on country for another blog. This will be a kinder, gentler observation on my fascination with languages in general. I have always admired those who are multi-lingual. I have, at one time or another, studied Spanish (two years) and French (two years), with the result that I am fluent in neither but can begin a conversation in either. I know enough to get myself into a conversation, but not enough to get myself out, and I will happily begin speaking Spanish only to suddenly lapse into French. I generally realize this only when I see the look of utter confusion on the face of whomever I’m trying to talk to. Or, I will liberally sprinkle Spanish words into a conversation in French, or vice-versa. Worst…and most common of all, I will be talking along merrily and suddenly forget the next word. Its effect on the conversation is similar to driving a semi trailer into a concrete wall, and from that moment on, all is lost.

I began, after returning to college from the Navy, to audit a German course. I was fascinated by the instructor’s saying that German is the only language in which each word of a sentence can be written on block of wood, thrown on the floor in a jumble, and someone who’d not seen the original can pick up the blocks and put the sentence together perfectly. That certainly can’t be said for English. But I was too busy with other things like having a good time, and dropped out after about two weeks. I am, however, able to say, should a German tourist ask me a question:
Shadeh, aber ich spreche nicht Deutsch” (phonetic for “Sorry, but I don’t speak German.”)

While I was in the Navy I decided I wanted to learn Greek. I found, in the ship’s library, a book printed in English on the left-hand page, and Greek on the right . I worked at it diligently for some time trying to compare the two and make sense out of it, but didn’t get very far, and by the time the ship reached Athens, I had mastered two phrases…phonetics again…: “Poo-eenay gabinito?” (“Where is the bathroom?”) and “Efferisto” (“Please” I think…it’s been a while, after all.) Well, it was a start.

I did learn enough of both Spanish and French to realize that it is far easier to speak either one if you think in the language you’re trying to speak. That way you don’t have to fumble around doing mental translations before saying something.

I remember when I was a kid reading poetry which had been translated from another language, and being rather disgusted that it often didn’t rhyme. “It’s poetry,” I’d say with far more authority than I possessed. “It’s supposed to rhyme!” The fact that words which rhyme in one language do not rhyme in another escaped me for quite some time. But even with the translation of prose, there are inherent problems. The pacing and lilt of words selected to create an effect suffer seriously when dealing with another language in which a beautiful-sounding word in one sounds like someone coughing up phlegm in another (German has lots of phlegm words, I’ve noticed.) The poor translator has to struggle to find a way around the problem.

The difficulty of dealing with and making sense of languages is compounded when the alphabets of the two languages are totally different: Arabic, Cyrillic, English, Chinese, many others. And Armenia has an alphabet created by one monk, and therefore totally different from any other. I think I’ll study Armenian next.

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Movies

Ah, simple pleasures for simple minds. I went to a movie yesterday afternoon…the first in-a-theater film I’ve seen in quite some time, not because I don’t love movies, but because Chicago has relatively few, and the huge chain theaters have effectively driven out the smaller neighborhood houses. (The city of Chicago taxes a single-screen Mom-and-Pop-run theater at the same rate it taxes the 42-screen multiplexes. Hardly fair, of course, but who cares? Certainly neither the city nor the chains.)

At any rate, Gary and I took the bus to the Loop and finally found the multiplex, tucked on the upper floors of a building on Michigan Avenue’s Miracle Mile. We paid the low, low matinee rate of only $8.50. We eschewed the snack stand both because I can no longer eat popcorn and the fact that a small (and they do mean small) box of the stuff goes for $3.75.

As we sat in the 200-seat not-all-that-comfortable theater (the seats are all on one level, making it difficult to see if you’re behind someone tall), I reflected on the time when movie-going was a national pastime, and most people went at least once a week. Tickets cost a quarter for kids and, I think, eighty-five cents for adults. There were no such thing as a multiplex, and the “better” theaters were gigantic, ornate palaces, which gave people still reeling from the Depression the illusion that things were not quite so bad as they appeared.

I remember hearing, too, that at the height of the Depression, theaters were kept afloat not on ticket sales, but on the sales of popcorn. More than nine cents of every dime bag of popcorn was pure profit, as I suspect is $3.70 of every $3.75 box sold today.

At the time I was growing up in Rockford, Illinois (population then around 90,000—today probably near 200,000), there were nine theaters: the dowager empress of them all was the Coronado, a true “movie palace” with blue, starry-sky ceiling and an interior designed to look like a Moroccan village. Lots of gilt, and velvet curtains which pulled majestically back at the start of every show. Plush carpets throughout, and huge, sweeping stairways leading to the enormous balcony. All the best of the first-runs came to the Coronado. It’s still there, saved from the wrecking ball in the nick of time, and is now, I understand, used as a performing arts center.

The Midway, on the East side of downtown, was not quite as ornate, but still large, and also played first-runs. In the block south of the Coronado was the Times: a very nice but much smaller theatre that offered the lesser-grade first runs and a lot of second-runs. Directly beside it was a small shop selling Carmel Corn which you could smell half a block away.

The Palace, on the same street as the Coronado and Times, was a cavernous second-and-C-movie place that had seen better times and ran Vaudeville between movie showings on weekends. The bottom of the barrel in theaters were the Rialto and the Capitol, located within a block of one another on the grimy south side of town. The Rex, the Auburn, and the Park (basically a Quonset hut) rounded out the list.

Every one of them served fresh-popped Manley Popcorn in tall, cylindrical bags, which featured an elephant with one leg on a large red ball. Each bag cost ten cents, and I always got two bags. While waiting for the show to start, I would be careful to eat only one kernel at a time to make it last. I honestly don’t remember theaters serving soft drinks at the time: if you were thirsty, you went to the water coolers in the lobby.

So much more that could be said about those days, not to mention the films that fed the theaters’ tills and the dreams and imaginations of their patrons. I miss them all.

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