At the Gravesite
The hole they dug
Is the mouth that swallows me
Earth piled on
Initiates the vermin’s feast
That will end before eternity
I know the ones
Standing by the grave
But not their thoughts
God will reassemble
The bits and molecules of me
And random other dead
Into, I hope, a bird
That gives my soul a home
My soul that seemed
Uncertain when I was alive
God is never what we think they are
But always there
In between the lines
Of the contract we sign
When we affirm that we are human
Where do my thoughts come from? Why do I have them? What makes my thoughts mine? Why do they sometimes slip away and sometimes persist? Why are they sometimes destructive, sometimes comforting, sometimes disturbing? Why are my thoughts sometimes shared by others? Why do my thoughts come in the forms and images that they do? Why do my thoughts come without my desire to have them? Why should I be afraid of some of my thoughts? Am I responsible for my thoughts? Do all the world’s thoughts eventually accumulate in one place? Are all the world’s thoughts already thought and just pop into particular minds? How can thoughts rattle the world?
Why am I even thinking this now?
I recently watched a movie in which a woman was experiencing a weeks-long, bed-ridden depression while her cute teenage son was in the next room having noisy sex with his new girlfriend. (Don’t ask me why I even watched this movie, but I stuck it out.) As a person who suffered many years with depression and mental illness, the misrepresentation in this movie of depression, its effects and the family responses were troubling and distasteful.
Of course, this was one silly romantic comedy, but it’s one more reminder of the difficulties people with mental illness have in being understood and their pain appreciated. We have empathy for victims of physical illnesses—we can see their pain. But for victims of mental illness, their pain and their scars are not always so visible.
It’s about time. For too long, we have been fed a steady diet on talk shows and latenight TV of celebrity entertainers and sports figures. We delight in their self-promotion, life dramas and wealth and buy into their sales pitches and product sponsorship.
One consequence of America’s recent problems has been our increased exposure to ordinary citizens who have done extraordinary things. The search and recovery teams in the Surfside disaster are now real people to us. The firefighters in the American West are real people to us. The Capitol and DC police officers are real people to us.
Unlike what we hear from celebrities, they speak genuinely about dangerous, challenging and selfless work. I believe that, unlike celebrities, these are the folks who evidence the essential American values, the values that remind us that America is us and not me.
To see Rep. Adam Kinzinger tear up in the Insurrection hearings and to listen to the officers like Michael Fanone describe their experiences of the insurrection call us all to ask ourselves what we can and must do to heal America.
Children don’t understand the concept of love, but they understand hugs, time, attention and listening.
Children don’t understand the importance of play, but given a chance to play freely they will experience creativity and social engagement.
Children don’t understand what freedom really means, but appropriate discipline and limits will eventually teach them that.
Children have a voice, but support, understanding and education help them make it their own.
Children don’t understand God, but they recognize godliness if it is acted out around them.
Children are taught first by their families, and this will determine how easy or difficult it is for them to become decent human beings.
My body
I don’t know about you, but I try not to waste my testosterone.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll keep my wrinkles because I earned them.
I don’t know about you, but a little fat can soften my curves.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think my eyelids need rejuvenating.
I don’t know about you, but my body hair can stay just where it landed until it decides to fall out.
I don’t know about you, but there’s already enough of my butt to act as a cushion and to grab onto easily.
I don’t know about you, but I feed my neurons regularly and healthily.
I don’t know about you, but I use my body for intimacy .
I don’t know about you, but I really like dopamine.
I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll opt my body out of botox and silicon.
I don’t know about you, but I think I look pretty damn good in the mirror.
I need some answers ASAP to some crucial questions.
1. Does Vladimir Putin suffer from hemohhroids?
2. How many new outfits has Melania bought since January 20?
3. With covid, as average lifespan has gone down, has average intelligence gone up?
4. Do porn stars use coupons when they shop at the grocery?
5. With social distancing at the Olympics will they still distribute condoms to the athletes?
6. Will firefighters fighting the wildfires be celebrated at the White House like pro athletes are?
7. What percentage of female news anchors are blonde?
8. What percentage of American teenagers would say they love their parents?
9. How many packages did Amazon employees deliver to get Jeff Bezos into space?
10. What percentage of professional artists sold more works while they were alive than after they were dead?
The Buffoon’s Creed
1. Humor is serious business.
2. Though you may not always be right, always be wise.
3. Don’t respect any boundaries or limits but do it respectfully.
4. Be relentless, but not mean.
5. Make fun of yourself as much as you make fun of others.
6. Never let power off the hook.
7. Believe in your importance.
8. Be honest with the king.
9. Keep your jester’s cap handy.
10. It’s never about you.
We are not innately good or evil. We are innately possibility. And this possibility emerges in the way we are parented and educated. In the way navigate our life experiences. In the ways we form the values we live by. We are each a bit--a living, conscious bit—of the random flowering possibility of nature.
Many have asked my secrets to staying so young and healthy. So here they are.
A glass of orange juice every morning, kelp, Tantric massages, chocolate, art, fried bologna, mint tea, walks on the beach at sunset, one alcoholic beverage a day, macaroni and cheese, dirty jokes, growing peonies, tasteful porn, fried chicken livers, shrimp poboys, grandchildren, independent films, making stuff, writing a good sentence, Vaughn Williams’ Serenade to Music, 2 inch eyebrow hairs, rejuvenating moisturizers, French onion soup, a week in Barcelona, a sauna, a hot shower every day, good friends, a dream in which I was flying, the decision to not get pectoral implants, tonic water, no more cavities, conversations with my son, love in all its forms, the color of life in New Orleans, surreal moments, a cup of robust coffee, observing an act of human decency, low salt wrinkle potato chips, Latin American fiction, sex, mentoring, riding trains in Europe, newborns, Jacob Bronowski, Joseph Campbell, Pierre Alechinsky, key lime pie, Art Academy of Cincinnati, cranberry juice, good drawings, Jacomo Pontormo, waiting for a streetcar, a kiss on the nose, nipples, men’s group, grits, laughing at myself, marriage most of the time, Dutch metal, a bicycle built for two, cleaning toilets, sweating heavily, fruit, being honest about myself, IPAs, symmetry, NASA, the philanthropy of people who can’t afford it, homemade soup, sleeping naked, not having to worry about my hair, homemade sun-dried tomatoes, walking places, leisurely swims, surprise tulips planted by squirrels, dancing, Boy Scout values…
When the news reports statistics on crime and policing, it invariably quotes numbers that demonstrate that arrests of black Americans are proportionally much higher than their percentage in the population. The conclusion always implies that this is the result of problems in white law enforcement, and that reform there is the solution.
This may or may not be the case. But I think this kind of reporting does not get at the real core of the problem. The real problems are poverty, inequality, poor educational opportunities and the breakup of the family. Policing crime is not the real solution. It’s working to eliminate the root causes of crime. This is the real work, and it’s not easy. But it must be done.
The hare was a braggart. He’d brag about all his race victories to anyone who would listen. Over and over and over. The tortoise had enough and challenged him to a race to be held the next day. The festive crowd gathered, and the race began.
At a turn in the road, the speeding hare ran smack dab into the Chrysler driven by an old lady on her way to purchase a box of Depends. The ambulance came and whisked the hare to Mammal General Hospital, where the doctors declared he would be back to 100% after some recuperative therapy.
By the time the tortoise passed by, the accident scene has been cleared completely. He had no idea of what had happened and plodded on to victory, collecting his silver loving cup. It now sits by itself on his mantel.
Braggart that he is, the hare was magnanimous. He congratulated the tortoise in a lovely note. Besides, his mantel was crammed with trophies. The two of them had tea in the hare’s hospital room and have since enjoyed a lasting friendship.
We are capable of such magnificence and such brutality. We’ve unlocked the deepest secrets of the universe but can’t unlock love from our hearts. We’ve discovered the basis that unifies all life on earth but can find the most trivial reasons to hate one another. We worship loving Gods but kill one another in their names. We need one another to survive and destroy one another out of fear. We reproduce to maintain ourselves then let our children starve. We hope for saviors, then crucify them.
Dolled up and ready to go by her fairy godfather, Cinderella looked gorgeous. Her nails were manicured, her mascara tastefully done, her hair streaked with blue and green and her cheeks blushing with rouge. Her dress was sparkling pink and emphasized her tiny waist and youthful bosom.
The stepsisters were beautifully dressed as well, but nothing could hide their ugly features. They rode together to the ball, exchanging sneers but anxious to meet the Prince. To Cinderella’s surprise, Prince Charming was as ugly as her stepsisters. He had accumulated all the grotesqueries of royal inbreeding.
For the stepsisters, this was a magical revelation, and they were a magical revelation to His Royal Highness. He married the older one and kept the younger one as his mistress. Cinderella met a minor duke at the ball, married him and settled for a small castle in the suburbs. She had two ordinary children, but in a twist of genetic fate, the children of the Prince and the stepsisters were girls more beautiful even than Cinderella.
Sports is big business in America, and Americans are fanatical about it from kids leagues to professional sports. Legislatures pass laws protecting athletes, ensuring their safety and even guaranteeing them control over their names, images and likenesses. When high school, college or professional athletes are injured they are guaranteed excellent care. And when one dies on the field, this is big news. I suppose this is all as it should be.
But I know the plight of young artists, who put in long hours at their craft, which can be both intellectually and physically demanding. They often don’t have mental and emotional support or recognition for the value of their work. They suffer anxiety and depression which sometimes leads to death, death that can go almost unnoticed. This is not as it should be.
Many stories on the news detail the struggles of single mothers to raise their children in families of two or three or six. The stories describe their difficulty paying rent, putting food on the table, making ends meet on minimum wage, finding childcare and navigating government regulations.
What these stories never reveal, and what I want to know is: Where are the fathers? How are the men who created these families helping support these families? Why are there so many absent fathers? Why has the nuclear family failed to widely in our society?
In and of itself, fantasy is not a bad thing, It’s just the way it’s packaged and delivered to us in such abundance that seems troubling to me. The happy family in the spacious, airy white kitchen, sparkling clean from the magic cleaning product. The afflicted, but smiling seniors reveling in their new medications, oblivious to the side effects that will kill them. The raft of procedures, creams and ointments that will bring back youth and self-fulfillment. The commercials with cars on mountaintops and drivers driving like cool maniacs. The endless romantic comedies where beautiful people turn sex into love. The entertainment spectacles. Social media is filled with fantasy, and pornography is more of the same.
In entertainment, marketing and advertisement, we are fed a steady diet of escapist fantasy. We crave it without always realizing what it is. Meanwhile, we miss the pleasures and challenges of real life.
Am I supposed to like art?
Am I supposed to wait for someone to tell me what art to like?
Should art be a good investment?
Should art be easy to love?
Should art make me uncomfortable?
Does art have to be made by an artist to be art?
Should I have high expectations of art?
Should art be where I expect to find it?
Is there anything art shouldn’t be?
Should be hard to understand art?
How big a bite of the world should art take?
Hey, you. I’m not just any picture on the wall. I’m a work of art, and I refuse to be locked away here. I’m going to escape, tackle you and hold on to you. I’m going to make you listen to me because that’s why I was created. I’m full of ideas I want to share. So let’s have a conversation.
Another bedtime story
Numby was a dwarf, but a dwarf of singular character and uncommon ability. In fact, Numby was the CEO of his own company, Small Stuff, which made home furnishings for dwarfs. Numby lived with a set of septuplets, all named Snow White. Conveniently, he could tell them apart because each had hair the color of one of the hues in the rainbow.
The Snow Whites were glad to cook and clean house for Numby because he loved them, and they loved him. But now in their late teens they began to have romantic notions, a circumstance which quite confused Numby.
One day, after Numby had gone to work, a computer salesman knocked at the door. “If you purchase a computer, you get free access to all the dating apps.” A little further explanation and he had sold them and the computer.
By the time Numby got home, all the Snow Whites had dates and were soon after married, to men of seven different ethnicities. Numby soon had little ones galore to brighten his life. And everyone short, tall and everywhere in between lived happily ever after.
A free, short bedtime story.
Obviously, I’m a frog. Green, speckled, slimy. But in my defense, I have gorgeous eyes, I like to sing at night and I can jump like an Olympic high jumper.
I’m on a mission. I want to kiss a princess and turn her into a frog. It’s not what you think. Not revenge for my species. I just think I deserve a little princessness in my life.
I know where the castle is. And certainly the moat is not a problem for me. But how to get in? Luckily (?) the King loves frog legs. I nestled myself among my unfortunate mates in the Bernaise sauce. At the perfect moment, I flung out my ample tongue, and kissed the lips of the surprised Princess.
In a poof, she turned into the loveliest of frogs, and joined me in the sauce. To the horror of the court, we hopped hurriedly away and croaked happily after.
The 5 categories of beauty:
Cheap beauty
Pretty beauty
Good beauty
Deep beauty
Sublime beauty
You provide the examples.
Puberty rituals recognize the transition of young boys to young men. They happen under the supervision of adult men in a way that creates trust and passes on life knowledge. In American society the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts have been institutions in which elements of a “puberty ritual” could exist. But we’ve seen how this potentially healthy transition to adulthood became destructive.
The New York Times reports that the average age for young boys’ first experience with pornography is just below 14 years. This when education for a healthy sexual life is spotty at best.
Teens who want them have access to guns. They become killers. Crime becomes a habit. Hazing and drunken parties become rites of passage. Alcohol, smoking and drugs become the signs of manhood chosen by too many young men. Parents are no longer trusted guides to adulthood but rather obstructions to personal freedom.
This is the way contemporary America manages a boyhood-to-manhood transition that fails so many young men.
Life. Out of the chute and into a soap opera, a soap opera where you had no role in writing the script. Then how much love and how much play? And some beauty? Did your education teach you how to be human?
You reproduce and the one exam question is: How do you make a decent human being? At best you get a B+ but that’s okay. Then you pile up accomplishments. Then you die.
Life. It plods along. And then you turn your back and realize that it’s moved like a bullet train. Sometimes you float along. Sometimes you stop and make a decision. A loving act and you feel like a true human being. A bad choice and you remind yourself of what a dumbass you can be. You wrap yourself around another person like the strands of DNA and wait for those sweet mutations.
That’s life. All of it piles up. No, all of it infects all of it in a crazy viral mess. It can be sorted out though with a little self-delusion, a little truth and a good, long look in the mirror. Of course,
life will end at some point, maybe sneaking up on you or maybe giving you enough notice to make sense of it.
It’s probably a good idea to stop periodically along the way, look around and check the connections. How’s the balance coming between the angel and the dumbass?
The Black Lives Matter movement has called attention to white privilege. But “privilege” doesn’t stop there. There’s…
male privilege
wealth privilege
good looks privilege
education privilege
celebrity privilege
political privilege
athlete privilege
abled privilege
Culture rewards all kinds of advantages that can bring financial reward, fame, publicity, sponsorships and lucrative endorsement contracts.
Privilege.
Creative people understand creative people. They understand the work, the energy, the skill, the drive and even the exhaustion that come with the creative life. The general population understands a slam dunk or a header, but not an image that rethinks the world. The general population understands a spectacle, but not an idea that explodes into new visions of the world.
Commission a monumental, commerative statue of yourself. You can be riding a horse if you like. Put it on your front lawn. Wait a week, then go outside and determine why it needs to be removed and placed in storage.
There’s Women’s History Month and Black History Month. This month and that month. What we need now is Love Month. What would that look like?
Dialogue would be encouraged on what all religions teach about love. What is mature love? How do we get beyond superficial notions of love? What is a loving person? Who are the models of love we choose? How do we teach love? How do we live love?
Love is not a human instinct. It’s an invention that took humans a long time to figure out. We’re still trying to figure it out. It was a foundation of the teaching of Jesus and other spiritual leaders.
If every child experienced genuine love, we would live in a different and kinder world.
We’ve all heard the expression, “Ignorance is bliss.” No. Ignorance is self-destructive delusion. Bliss takes attention, thought, self-awareness and discipline. Bliss is an intensification and affirmation of life; ignorance is the numbing of life.
A guide to writing poetry by someone who is not a poet.
1. Begin to nurture a voice the poetry can inhabit.
2. Just like fiction, write what you know.
3. Just as anyone can make art, anyone can write poetry.
But not everybody can make good art, nor can everybody write good poetry.
4. Every good poem has its own noise, maybe music, maybe not. Read your poem out loud.
5. It helps to get dirt under your nails if you want to write nature poetry.
6. You can learn something from listening to poetry in a foreign language, even if you don’t understand the language.
7. If you’re serious about poetry, you’ll realize that the poems are already inside you.
8. Not that many people read poetry. Even fewer would read poems about. If your poetry is autobiographical, it needs to also be a biography of the human experience as well.
9. Writing good stuff requires acknowledging the bad stuff.
10. Don’t pay attention to me.
Let’s see if I can figure out the gender spectrum. There’s…
Bi-sexual
Cry-sexual
Chai-sexual
Dry-sexual
Fly-sexual
Guy-sexual
High-sexual
My-sexual
American pie-sexual
2-ply-sexual
Pry-sexual
Sigh-sexual
Shy-sexual
Spy-sexual
Tri-sexual
Try-sexual
Thai-sexual
Thigh-sexual
Why-sexual
Did I miss any?
Death is death. It may come wrapped in an aging body or in violence or disease or in suffering or in tragedy or in quiet acceptance. But death is death. We can worry about death to the point of killing life. We can ignore death to the point of treading at death’s door.
We often put more time and resources into ceremonializing death than we do into ceremonializing life. We know we will die, but we don’t live our lives with the intensity of that realization. When we come to recognize that it’s time for us to die, our loved ones resist letting us go.
The eulogies are of no use to us when we’re in the casket or the urn. They are often more reverent than honest. It’s the honest conversations we have with the people we love and respect that allow us to rest peacefully in the casket or believe in the resurrection of our dust.
Hmmm. I’d like to learn how to live a good life. How to build a set of values to guide me. How to find what is sacred in life. But, hell, that would be way too much work. Besides, I can get all I need listening to celebrity chit-chat on late night TV.
Anyway, how could I ever find a poet, philosopher or artist to guide me. They’re never on TV.
The US Supreme Court, the NCAA and many states have agreed that college athletes should be compensated for use of their images and their names. High school athletes in the major sports will be recruited extensively by big universities, wined and dined on big budgets and in ways most other college freshmen never will experience. They will have great facilities to train and play in. They will be trained by coaches who will make more than any professor or even the president of the university. They will be fed, housed and given top notch medical care as well as scholarships and tutoring. They will get free media coverage on a regular basis, national attention, profiles and performance awards. They can hire agents and create clothing lines. They will get adulation for what has little to do with the academic mission of the universities.
True, these athletes perform in front of large audiences and generate large amounts of money for their universities. But they are not victims. And it often seems they are really more entertainers/performers than they are students. The star players will, get the financial rewards even though they could not perform as they do without their team.
Many students, especially in the performing arts and the sciences, put in as much work and as many hours in pursuit of their dreams as athletes do. But with much less recognition. This is the reality we have to accept in a system in which money rules and subverts academic values.
